"Show me that I am going to have a wife who is amenable to reason," said Frederick.
And he gently drew her towards the door.
The auctioneer proceeded:
"Come, come, messieurs; nine hundred and thirty. Is there any bidder at nine hundred and thirty?"
Madame Dambreuse, just as she had reached the door, stopped, and raising her voice to a high pitch:
"One thousand francs!"
There was a thrill of astonishment, and then a dead silence.
"A thousand francs, messieurs, a thousand francs! Is n.o.body advancing on this bid? Is that clear? Very well, then--one thousand francs!
going!--gone!"
And down came the ivory hammer. She pa.s.sed in her card, and the little chest was handed over to her. She thrust it into her m.u.f.f.
Frederick felt a great chill penetrating his heart.
Madame Dambreuse had not let go her hold of his arm; and she had not the courage to look up at his face in the street, where her carriage was awaiting her.
She flung herself into it, like a thief flying away after a robbery, and then turned towards Frederick. He had his hat in his hand.
"Are you not going to come in?"
"No, Madame!"
And, bowing to her frigidly, he shut the carriage-door, and then made a sign to the coachman to drive away.
The first feeling that he experienced was one of joy at having regained his independence. He was filled with pride at the thought that he had avenged Madame Arnoux by sacrificing a fortune to her; then, he was amazed at his own act, and he felt doubled up with extreme physical exhaustion.
Next morning his man-servant brought him the news.
The city had been declared to be in a state of siege; the a.s.sembly had been dissolved; and a number of the representatives of the people had been imprisoned at Mazas. Public affairs had a.s.sumed to his mind an utterly unimportant aspect, so deeply preoccupied was he by his private troubles.
He wrote to several tradesmen countermanding various orders which he had given for the purchase of articles in connection with his projected marriage, which now appeared to him in the light of a rather mean speculation; and he execrated Madame Dambreuse, because, owing to her, he had been very near perpetrating a vile action. He had forgotten the Marechale, and did not even bother himself about Madame Arnoux--absorbed only in one thought--lost amid the wreck of his dreams, sick at heart, full of grief and disappointment, and in his hatred of the artificial atmosphere wherein he had suffered so much, he longed for the freshness of green fields, the repose of provincial life, a sleeping existence spent beneath his natal roof in the midst of ingenuous hearts. At last, when Wednesday evening arrived, he made his way out into the open air.
On the boulevard numerous groups had taken up their stand. From time to time a patrol came and dispersed them; they gathered together again in regular order behind it. They talked freely and in loud tones, made chaffing remarks about the soldiers, without anything further happening.
"What! are they not going to fight?" said Frederick to a workman.
"They"re not such fools as to get themselves killed for the well-off people! Let them take care of themselves!"
And a gentleman muttered, as he glanced across at the inhabitants of the faubourgs:
"Socialist rascals! If it were only possible, this time, to exterminate them!"
Frederick could not, for the life of him, understand the necessity of so much rancour and vituperative language. His feeling of disgust against Paris was intensified by these occurrences, and two days later he set out for Nogent by the first train.
The houses soon became lost to view; the country stretched out before his gaze. Alone in his carriage, with his feet on the seat in front of him, he pondered over the events of the last few days, and then on his entire past. The recollection of Louise came back to his mind.
"She, indeed, loved me truly! I was wrong not to s.n.a.t.c.h at this chance of happiness. Pooh! let us not think any more about it!"
Then, five minutes afterwards: "Who knows, after all? Why not, later?"
His reverie, like his eyes, wandered afar towards vague horizons.
"She was artless, a peasant girl, almost a savage; but so good!"
In proportion as he drew nearer to Nogent, her image drew closer to him.
As they were pa.s.sing through the meadows of Sourdun, he saw her once more in imagination under the poplar-trees, as in the old days, cutting rushes on the edges of the pools. And now they had reached their destination; he stepped out of the train.
Then he leaned with his elbows on the bridge, to gaze again at the isle and the garden where they had walked together one sunshiny day, and the dizzy sensation caused by travelling, together with the weakness engendered by his recent emotions, arousing in his breast a sort of exaltation, he said to himself:
"She has gone out, perhaps; suppose I were to go and meet her!"
The bell of Saint-Laurent was ringing, and in the square in front of the church there was a crowd of poor people around an open carriage, the only one in the district--the one which was always hired for weddings.
And all of a sudden, under the church-gate, accompanied by a number of well-dressed persons in white cravats, a newly-married couple appeared.
He thought he must be labouring under some hallucination. But no! It was, indeed, Louise! covered with a white veil which flowed from her red hair down to her heels; and with her was no other than Deslauriers, attired in a blue coat embroidered with silver--the costume of a prefect.
How was this?
Frederick concealed himself at the corner of a house to let the procession pa.s.s.
Shamefaced, vanquished, crushed, he retraced his steps to the railway-station, and returned to Paris.
The cabman who drove him a.s.sured him that the barricades were erected from the Chateau d"Eau to the Gymnase, and turned down the Faubourg Saint-Martin. At the corner of the Rue de Provence, Frederick stepped out in order to reach the boulevards.
It was five o"clock. A thin shower was falling. A number of citizens blocked up the footpath close to the Opera House. The houses opposite were closed. No one at any of the windows. All along the boulevard, dragoons were galloping behind a row of wagons, leaning with drawn swords over their horses; and the plumes of their helmets, and their large white cloaks, rising up behind them, could be seen under the glare of the gas-lamps, which shook in the wind in the midst of a haze. The crowd gazed at them mute with fear.
In the intervals between the cavalry-charges, squads of policemen arrived on the scene to keep back the people in the streets.
But on the steps of Tortoni, a man--Dussardier--who could be distinguished at a distance by his great height, remained standing as motionless as a caryatide.
One of the police-officers, marching at the head of his men, with his three-cornered hat drawn over his eyes, threatened him with his sword.
The other thereupon took one step forward, and shouted:
"Long live the Republic!"
The next moment he fell on his back with his arms crossed.
A yell of horror arose from the crowd. The police-officer, with a look of command, made a circle around him; and Frederick, gazing at him in open-mouthed astonishment, recognised Senecal.
[Ill.u.s.tration]