The Complete Works: Short Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs and more. Guy de Maupassant
on horseback. I also had the pleasure the other day of a visit from madame, your mother, and the baron.”
She spoke with perfect ease, familiar but refined. Jeanne was charmed, and fell in love with her at once. “This is a friend,” she thought.
The Comte de Fourville, on the contrary, seemed like a bear in the drawingroom. As soon as he was seated, he placed his hat on the chair next him, did not know what to do with his hands, placed them on his knees, then on the arms of the chair, and finally crossed his fingers as if in prayer.
Suddenly Julien entered the room. Jeanne was amazed and did not recognize him. He was shaved. He looked handsome, elegant, and attractive as on the day of their betrothal. He shook the comte’s hairy paw, kissed the hand of the comtesse, whose ivory cheeks colored up slightly while her eyelids quivered.
He began to speak; he was charming as in former days. His large eyes, the mirrors of love, had become tender again. And his hair, lately so dull and unkempt, had regained its soft, glossy wave, with the use of a hairbrush and perfumed oil.
At the moment that the Fourvilles were taking their leave the comtesse, turning toward him, said: “Would you like to take a ride on Thursday, dear vicomte?”
As he bowed and murmured, “Why, certainly, madame,” she took Jeanne’s hand and said in a sympathetic and affectionate tone, with a cordial smile: “Oh! when you are well, we will all three gallop about the country. It will be delightful. What do you say?”
With an easy gesture she held up her riding skirt and then jumped into the saddle with the lightness of a bird, while her husband, after bowing awkwardly, mounted his big Norman steed. As they disappeared outside the gate, Julien, who seemed charmed, exclaimed: “What delightful people! those are friends who may be useful to us.”
Jeanne, pleased also without knowing why, replied: “The little comtesse is charming, I feel that I shall love her, but the husband looks like a brute. Where did you meet them?”
He rubbed his hands together good humoredly. “I met them by chance at the Brisevilles’. The husband seems a little rough. He cares for nothing but hunting, but he is a real noble for all that.”
The dinner was almost cheerful, as though some secret happiness had come into the house.
Nothing new happened until the latter days of July, when Jeanne was taken ill. As she seemed to grow worse, the doctor was sent for and at the first glance recognized the symptoms of a premature confinement.
Her sufferings presently abated a little, but she was filled with a terrible anguish, a despairing sinking, something like a presentiment, the mysterious touch of death. It is in these moments when it comes so near to us that its breath chills our hearts.
The room was full of people. Little mother, buried in an armchair, was choking with grief. The baron, his hands trembling, ran hither and thither, carrying things, consulting the doctor and losing his head. Julien paced up and down, looking concerned, but perfectly calm, and Widow Dentu stood at the foot of the bed with an appropriate expression, the expression of a woman of experience whom nothing astonishes. The cook, Ludivine, and Aunt Lison remained discreetly concealed behind the door of the lobby.
Toward morning Jeanne became worse, and as her involuntary screams escaped from between her closed teeth, she thought incessantly of Rosalie, who had not suffered, who had hardly moaned, who had borne her child without suffering and without difficulty, and in her wretched and troubled mind she continually compared their conditions and cursed God, whom she had formerly thought to be just. She rebelled at the wicked partiality of fate and at the wicked lies of those who preach justice and goodness.
At times her sufferings were so great that her mind was a blank. She had neither strength, life nor knowledge for anything but suffering.
All at once her sufferings ceased. The nurse and the doctor leaned over her and gave her all attention. Presently she heard a little cry and, in spite of her weakness, she unconsciously held out her arms. She was suddenly filled with joy, with a glimpse of a new-found happiness which had just unfolded. Her child was born, she was soothed, happy, happy as she never yet had been. Her heart and her body revived; she was now a mother. She felt that she was saved, secure from all despair, for she had here something to love.
From now on she had but one thought — her child. She was a fanatical mother, all the more intense because she had been deceived in her love, deceived in her hopes. She would sit whole days beside the window, rocking the little cradle.
The baron and little mother smiled at this excess of tenderness, but Julien, whose habitual routine had been interfered with and his overweening importance diminished by the arrival of this noisy and allpowerful tyrant, unconsciously jealous of this mite of a man who had usurped his place in the house, kept on saying angrily and impatiently: “How wearisome she is with her brat!”
She became so obsessed by this affection that she would pass the entire night beside the cradle, watching the child asleep. As she was becoming exhausted by this morbid life, taking no rest, growing weaker and thinner and beginning to cough, the doctor ordered the child to be taken from her. She got angry, wept, implored, but they were deaf to her entreaties. His nurse took him every evening, and each night his mother would rise, and in her bare feet go to the door, listen at the keyhole to see if he was sleeping quietly, did not wake up and wanted nothing.
Julien found her here one night when he came home late, after dining with the Fourvilles. After that they locked her in her room to oblige her to stay in bed.
The baptism took place at the end of August. The baron was godfather and Aunt Lison godmother. The child was named Pierre-Simon-Paul and called Paul for short.
At the beginning of September Aunt Lison left without any commotion. Her absence was as little felt as her presence.
One evening after dinner the priest appeared. He seemed embarrassed as if he were burdened by some mystery, and after some idle remarks, he asked the baroness and her husband to grant him a short interview in private.
They all three walked slowly down the long avenue, talking with animation, while Julien, who was alone with Jeanne, was astonished, disturbed and annoyed at this secret.
He accompanied the priest when he took his leave, and they went off together toward the church where the Angelus was ringing.
As it was cool, almost cold, the others went into the drawingroom. They were all dozing when Julien came in abruptly, his face red, looking very indignant.
From the door he called out to his parents-in-law, without remembering that Jeanne was there: “Are you crazy, for God’s sake! to go and throw away twenty thousand francs on that girl?”
No one replied, they were so astonished. He continued, bellowing with rage: “How can one be so stupid as that? Do you wish to leave us without a sou?”
The baron, who had recovered his composure, attempted to stop him: “Keep still! Remember that you are speaking before your wife.”
But Julien was trembling with excitement: “As if I cared; she knows all about it, anyway. It is robbing her.”
Jeanne, bewildered, looked at him without understanding. She faltered: “What in the world is the matter?”
Julien then turned toward her, to try and get her on his side as a partner who has been cheated out of an unexpected fortune. He hurriedly told her about the conspiracy to marry off Rosalie and about the gift of the Barville property, which was worth at least twenty thousand francs. He said: “Your parents are crazy, my dear, crazy enough to be shut up! Twenty thousand francs! twenty thousand francs! Why, they have lost their heads! Twenty thousand francs for a bastard!”
Jeanne listened without emotion and without anger, astonished at her own calmness, indifferent now to everything but her own child.
The baron was raging, but could find nothing to say. He finally burst forth and, stamping his foot, exclaimed: “Think of what you are saying; it is disgusting. Whose fault was it if we had to