Solution Manual for Principles of Foundation

Engineering 8th Edition Das 1305081552

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Chapter 5

1
5.1 Eq. (5.3): q = qN * F * + BN * F *
u q qs  s
2

H 0.9 m
= = 0.6;  = 40. Figures 5.4 and 5.5: N q*  380; N *  200
B 1.5

Eqs. (5.4) and (5.5) and Figure 5.6:

B  1.5 
F * = 1 − m   = 1 − (0.46)  = 0.724
qs 1
L  2.5 

B  1.5 
Fs* = 1 − m2   = 1 − (0.52)  = 0.688
L  2.5 

qu BL (1.5 2.5)  1 
Q = = (1.2 17)(380)(0.724) + (17)(1.5)(200)(0.688)
all
FS 3 2
= 9208.6 kN  9209 kN

H = 0.6 = 0.4;  = 35.

5.2 N q*  340; N *  100
B 1.5

37
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 Eqs. (5.4) and (5.5) and Figure 5.6:
F * = 1 − m  B  = 1 − (0.55) =  = 0.45
1 .5
1   
qs
L  1.5 

F * = 1 − m  B  = 1 − (0.58) =  = 0.42
1 .5
s 2   
L  1.5 

qu BL (1.5 1.5)  1 
Q = = (15 1)(340)(0.45) + (15)(1.5)(100)(0.42)
all
FS 3 2
= 2075.6 kN

38
© 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
Chapter 5

5.3 Eq. (5.6): q = qN * + 0.4BN *

u q 

H = 1.75 = 1.
 = 30;
B 1.75

From Figure 5.4, N q*  22 ; and, from Figure 5.7, N *  78 .

qu = (117)(22) + (0.4)(17)(1.75)(78) = 374 + 928.2 = 1302.2 kN/m 2

1302.2 = 325.55 kN/m2
qall =
4

Qall = qall (B  L) = (325.55)(1.75 1.75)  997 kN

5.4 Eq. (5.10):

 
0.5  − 0.707 
B

qu = 5.141 + H  cu +q
 5.14 
 
  1.5  − 0.707 
 0.5 
= 5.141 + 0.7  (115) + (18.5)(1)
 5.14 
 

= 651.5 kN/m2

 B  B  2c H 
5.5 Eq. (5.32): qu = 1 + 0.2 cu(2) Nc + 1 +  a  + 1 D f
 L  L  B 

B cu ( 2 ) 585
= 0; = = 0.585

L cu(1) 1000

ca
From Figure 5.11 and Eq. (5.34):  0.975; ca = (0.975)(1000) = 975 lb/ft 2
cu(1)
39
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 Chapter 5

(2)(975)(1.65)
qu = (585)(5.14) + + (121)(1.65) = 4279 lb/ft 2
3

CHECK ⎯ Eq. (5.33):

qu = qt = 1 + 0.2 cu(1) Nc + 1 Df = (1000)(5.14) + (121)(1.65) = 5339.7 lb/ft 2

B
L
 

So, qu = 4279 lb/ft2.

qu 4279
qall = = = 1426 lb/ft 2
FS 3

B 0.92 cu ( 2) 43
5.6 = = 0.754; = = 0.597

L 1.22 cu(1) 72

ca
From Figure 5.11:  0.975; ca = (0.975)(72) = 70.2 kN/m2
cu(1)

Eq. (5.32):
 B  B  2c H 
qu = 1 + 0.2 cu(2) Nc + 1 +  a  + 1 Df
 L  L  B 

 (2)(70.2)(0.76) 
= [1 + (0.2)(0.754)](43)(5.14) + (1 + 0.754) + (17)(0.92)
0.92

= 254.3 + 203.43 + 15.64 = 473.4 kN/m2

CHECK ⎯ Eq. (5.33):

 B
qu = qt = 1 + 0.2 cu(1) Nc + 1 Df = [1 + (0.2)(0.754)](72)(5.14) + (17)(0.92)
L
 
= 441.5 kN/m2 (USE)

Qu = (441.5)(0.92)(1.22) = 495.5 kN

40
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Chapter 5

5.7 Eq. (5.11): qu = cu(1) Nc Fcs Fcd + q

H 0.76 cu ( 2) 43
= = 0.826; = = 0.597

B 0.92 cu(1) 72

From Figure 5.8, Nc  5. From Table 4.3: ( = 0).

 B  N q   0.92 1 
Fcs = 1 +    = 1+    = 1.151

 L  N c   1.22  5 

 Df   
0.92
Fcd = 1 + 0.4  = 1 + 0.4  = 1.4

 B   0.92 

So,

qu = (72)(5)(1.151)(1.4) + (17)(0.92) = 597.74 kN/m2

Qu = (597.74)(0.92)(1.22) = 670.9 kN

5.8 Eq. (5.29):

=  ( 
1
+ ) + 
qu 1 Df H N q(2) Fqs(2) 2 BN (2) Fs(2)
2

 2 D f  K s t an 1
+1H 2 1 + B 1 +  −  1H
 L  H  B
 
2 = 32. Table 4.2: Nq(2) = 23.18; N(2) = 30.22

Table 4.3:
B  1.5 
F = 1 +   tan  = 1 +  (tan 32) = 1.625
L
qs(2)
 1.5 
2

 B  
1.5
F = 1 − 0.4  = 1 − 0.4  = 0.6
41
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Title: The weight of the name

Author: Paul Bourget

Translator: George Burnham Ives

Release date: August 29, 2022 [eBook #68859]

Language: English

Original publication: UK: Little, Brown, and Company, 1908

Credits: Dagny and Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made

available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WEIGHT

OF THE NAME ***
 THE WEIGHT OF
THE NAME

BY

PAUL BOURGET
Author of "A Divorce," "Pastels of Men," etc.

Translated from the French by

GEORGE BURNHAM IVES

Boston

Little, Brown, and Company

1908
 CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I. Landri
II. A Grand Seigneur
III. The Tragic Underside of a Grand
Existence
IV. The Tragic Underside of a Grand
Existence (Concluded)
V. In Uniform
VI. The Will
VII. All Save Honor
VIII. On a Scent
IX. Separation
X. Epilogue

THE WEIGHT OF
THE NAME

LANDRI

The automobile turned sharply about the chevet of Saint-François-

Xavier. With an instinctive movement, Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp
seized the megaphone. He called to the chauffeur to stop before one of
the side entrances. The powerful limousin was still in motion when he
jumped out upon the sidewalk and disappeared within the church, to
reappear a few seconds later, by way of the main portal, on Boulevard
des Invalides. With the elegant and self-assured bearing characteristic of
Landri, with his charming face, at once soldierly and thoughtful, which a
proud, almost haughty mouth, beneath the slightly tawny veil of the
mustache, would have made too stern had not the eyes, of a caressing
brown, softened its expression, that childlike stratagem could mean, but
one thing,—the desire, to guard from curiosity and comments a
clandestine rendezvous.
It was true, but—a circumstance which would have made the officers
of the dragoon regiment in which the young count was serving as a
lieutenant burst with laughter—he had this rendezvous with a woman
with whom he was madly in love without having ever obtained anything
from her. What do I say? He had not even ventured, except on one
occasion, to speak to her of his sentiments.
How many elements in his life had conspired to make him a fop and
blasé: that face and that profession, his fortune and his name—one of the
best in France, which had lacked nothing but the éclat of great offices at
court! But Landri was born romantic. He was still romantic at twenty-
nine. In him, as in the hearts of all genuinely tender-hearted men,
emotion neutralized vanity.
He had met Madame Olier in 1903. That was the name of the woman
in question, a widow to-day, then the wife of one of his comrades. It was
now 1906, so that he had loved her for three years. It had never entered
his head that such perseverance in a dumb and unselfish devotion was a
delusion. He thought so less than ever on this warm and, so to speak,
languid morning of late November, as he went his way, drawn on,
uplifted by a proximate hope.
Although he had reasons for very serious reflection, the air seemed
light to him, his step was buoyant on the sidewalks of that ancient
quarter, of which he recognized the most trivial features. Behind him the
dome of the Invalides stamped the gold of its cupola on a pallid, pearl-
gray mist. At his right the slender towers of Saint-François soared aloft
in a transparent vapor. At his left the trees of a large private garden
waved their almost leafless branches over the enclosing wall, and, as far
as one could see, the populous Boulevard de Montparnasse stretched
away, swarming with tramways and omnibuses, with cabs and drays.
In due time the young man turned into Rue Oudinot, then into Rue
Monsieur. There he paused before a porte-cochère, the door of which,
although it was ajar, he hesitated for some seconds to open. This door
gave access to a courtyard, at whose farther end was hidden one of those
dainty, oldish hôtels, pleasing to the eye, albeit out of style, of which that
street with its ancien-régime name contained some half-score or more a
quarter of a century since. Alas! they are vanishing one by one. As soon
as the owner of one of them dies, the crowbars of the demolishers set to
work. An aristocratic plaything of stone is razed to the ground. In its
place rises one of those vulgar income-producing houses, on whose
threshold one finds it difficult to imagine the lingering of such a lover as
this. To be sure, it is simply prejudice. In the eyes of a man in love, the
profile of his mistress, espied in the cage of an elevator, would bedeck
with poesy and fascination the staircase of one of those monstrosities in
brick and steel which the Americans brutally call "sky-scrapers." All the
same, there is a more intimate, a more penetrating sweetness in a perfect
accord between the setting in which a woman lives and the passion that
she inspires. This sweetness Landri de Claviers had ecstatically
intoxicated himself with in all his visits to that hermitage on Rue
Monsieur. Never had he savored it more deeply than at this moment,
when he was about to risk a step most important for the future of his
love.
He had come to Valentine Olier's house with the firm determination to
bring about a decisive interview between them, and to ask her for her
hand. If he had insisted that she should receive him at a most
unseasonable hour, he had had for that insistence imperative reasons
which excused him beforehand for his indiscretion. His timidity before
that day, and the rapid throbbing of his pulse as he finally crossed the
courtyard, did not come from an embarrassment of the sort that can be
explained. It was the sinking of the heart from excess of emotion, which
accompanies over-powerful desire in untried sensibilities. Naturally
refined, Landri had not aged himself prematurely by the abuse of
precocious experiments. To this young man, who was really entitled to
be so called, what awaited him behind the curtains of that ground floor
was the happiness or the misery of his whole life. But, we repeat, he
hoped.
His eyes feasted themselves, as their custom was, on the lines of that
façade, so closely associated with the image of his Valentine. Ah! would
she ever be his? A reflection of her person illuminated in his eyes that
two-story building, charming in very truth, whose light pilasters, modest
decorations, pediment with balustrades, and niches adorned with classic
busts, presented a perfect specimen of the architecture of the time of
Louis XVI,—a composite style, antique and pastoral, like that
extraordinary epoch itself, in which a moribund society played at idyls—
awaiting the tragedy—amid Pompeian architecture.
This hôtel had been the "folly" of one of the luxurious farmers-
general of that day. To-day the petite maison, divided bourgeois-fashion
into small apartments, numbered among its tenants, besides the officer's
widow, a retired magistrate on the first floor, and on the second the head
of a department in the ministry. Thus an elegant caprice, originally
designed for the suppers of a rival of Grimod de la Reynière, found itself
giving shelter to existences of quasi-cloistral regularity. How gratifying
to Landri was Madame Olier's choice of a habitation so retired!
Left free and alone, at twenty-seven years, with an infant son, with no
near relatives, having few kindred in the world and a modest fortune,
Valentine had valued in that apartment the very thing that would have
disgusted so many women,—the charm of oblivion, of silence and of
meditation. On the other side the ground floor looked upon a very small
garden, adjoining others much larger; and as the dividing wall was
concealed beneath a cloak of ivy, that enclosure of a few square yards
seemed like the corner of a park.
As he pressed the electric bell, Landri was sure that the only servant,
answering the ring, would conduct him through the narrow reception-
room and the salon with its covered furniture, to a tiny room, looking on
the garden at the rear, which Madame Olier used as a second salon. She
would be there, writing, at the little movable table which she placed by
the fire or by the door-window according to the season. Or else she
would be reading, seated on the bergère covered with an old striped stuff,
dead pink and faded green, always the same. Or else her slender fingers
would be busy with her embroidery needle. Correspondence, reading,
work or music,—a piano which she rarely opened except when alone,
told of that taste of hers,—her occupation would be constantly
interrupted by a glance at the path in the garden, where her son Ludovic
was playing. Landri found therein an image of what the whole life of that
widow and mother had been during the year since she had lost her
husband! Great God! how dearly he loved the young woman for having
thus proved to him how justly he had placed her so far apart from all
other women from the moment of their first meeting!
Valentine was there, in fact, in the small salon softly lighted by the
morning sun which was just making its way through a last film of mist.
She was apparently engrossed by an endless piece of embroidery. But the
music portfolio, still open on the piano, and the stool pushed back a little
way, might have betrayed to the young man how she had passed the time
while awaiting his coming. Still another sign betokened her agitation.
She had not her child with her. Contrary to her custom she had sent him
out to walk at ten o'clock. Why, if not that she might be alone with her
thoughts? Her self-control, however, enabled her to welcome her visitor
with the same inclination of the head as usual, friendly yet reserved, the
same smile of distant affability. At most the quivering of the eyelids
betrayed a nervousness which was contradicted by the even tones of her
voice and by the impenetrable glance of her limpid blue eyes.
Such women as she, with hair of a pale gold, almost wavy, with
slender hands and feet, with a tapering figure, and dainty gestures, seem
destined to allow their faintest impressions to appear on the surface, one
judges them to be so vibrant and quivering. On the contrary, it is
generally the case that no one can be more secretive than such creatures,
all delicacy and all emotion as they are. Their very excess of nervousness
becomes in them a source of strength. From their first experience of the
world they comprehend to what degree the acuteness of their sensations
renders them exceptional, solitary beings. By one of those instincts of
self-defence which the moral nature possesses no less than the physical
nature, they manœuvre so as to conceal their hearts, in order that life
may not brutalize them. They become, as it were, ashamed of their
emotions. They hold their peace, at first concerning the most profound of
them, then concerning the most superficial. And thus they end by
developing a power of external impassiveness which adds to their charm
the attractive force of an enigma, especially as this intentional dualism,
this constant watch upon themselves, this prolonged contrast between
what they show and what they feel, between their real personality and
avowed personality, does not fail to exert some influence even on their
manner of feeling and thinking. They are capable of the nicest shades of
discrimination, even to subtlety, when they are pure; and, if they are not
pure, even to stratagem, for the fascination or the despair of the man who
falls in love with them, according as he, in his turn, is very complex or
very simple.
Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp was both, for reasons which were
connected with the peculiar features of his destiny. Thus he had already
suffered much through that woman, and still had owed to her the most
delicious hours that his youth, darkened by an inborn and acquired
melancholy, had ever known. The first words exchanged between him
and Madame Olier will enable us to understand why, and at the same
time what dangerous, almost unhuman, chimeras can suggest themselves
to a scrupulous sentimental woman like Valentine, who loves love and
fears it, who cannot determine either to deprive herself of an affection
that is dear to her, or to sacrifice her self-esteem by abandoning herself
to it, who becomes agitated without losing her head, and whose pulses
throb without causing her to abdicate her reason.
But the hour had come to have done with all equivocation. The young
man's mind was made up. The young woman had read it between the
enigmatical lines of his letter. She read it in those eyes, whose glances
she had so often dominated in the past three years, simply by her
attitude. No earthly power would prevent Landri from speaking to-day.
She knew it. She knew what words he would utter, and she was
preparing to listen to them, and then to reply, perturbed to the inmost
depths of her being, and outwardly so calm in her mourning garb. She
was dressed as if to go out, in order to have a pretext for breaking off the
visit at her pleasure. The black cloth and crêpe gave to her delicately
hollowed cheeks an ivory-like pallor which made her even lovelier.
After the first words of commonplace courtesy, amid which she found
a way to slip in an allusion to an errand to be done before luncheon, there
ensued one of those intervals of dumbness that occur between two
persons at the moment of uttering words which cannot be retracted, and
which they crave and fear in equal measure. The crackling of the fire on
the hearth, and the ticking of the clock, suddenly made themselves heard
in that silence, which the officer broke at last, in a tone in which his
emotion betrayed itself.
"Doubtless you understood, madame," he began, "that it was a very
serious matter which made me presume to ask you to receive me at this
hour. I had no other at my disposal. I must start for Saint-Mihiel to-
morrow evening. I was able to obtain only a very short leave of absence.
My father awaits me at Grandchamp, where he is hunting to-day, and
you know how much importance he attaches to his hunt. I must be there
before the end, or run the risk of disappointing him. I succeeded in
catching the train at Commercy last night. I was at the Gare de l'Est at
nine o'clock. In an hour and a half by automobile I shall be at
Grandchamp. I tell you all this because—"
"Because you do not think me your friend," she interrupted, shaking
her head. "But I am, and most cordially. You have nothing to apologize
for. You have accustomed me to a too loyal devotion, which I know to be
too loyal," she repeated, "for me not to divine that a very important
motive dictated your letter. Tell me what it is very simply, as a friend, I
say again, a true friend, who will answer in the same way."
She had assumed, as she said these few words, a very gentle but very
firm expression. Her voice had dwelt with especial force on the word
"friend," which she repeated thrice. It was a reminder of a very
hazardous and very fragile engagement. Thousands of such engagements
have been entered into, since passionate men, like Landri, are able to
respect those whom they love, and since women secretly enamored, like
Valentine, dream of reconciling the emotions of a forbidden affection
with the strict requirements of virtue. The rare thing is not that one
suggests and the other accepts the romantic compact of friendship
without other development, but that the compact is adhered to. Absolute,
almost naïve sincerity on the part of both contracting parties is essential,
a sincerity which excludes all trickery on his part, all coquetry on hers.
There must also be a voluntary separation of their lives, which does not
permit too frequent meetings. He who says sincerity does not always say
truth. One may maintain sincerely a radically false situation, may
obstinately abide by it through mute rebellions, through secret and long-
protracted suffering, through hidden anguish, like that the memory of
which quivered in the young man's reply:—
"A friend!" What bitterness those soft syllables assumed in passing
through those suddenly contracted lips! "I knew that, at the outset of our
conversation, you would shelter yourself behind my promise. I knew that
you would anticipate the sentences that I wish to say to you, and that you
would not allow me to say them. God is my witness, and you, too,
madame, are my witness, that I have done everything to maintain the
absolute reserve which you imposed as a condition upon the relations
between us.—Let me speak, I deserve that you should let me speak!" he
implored, at a gesture from Valentine, who had half risen. He put such
mournful ardor into that entreaty, that she resumed her seat, without
further attempt to arrest an avowal which her woman's tact had foreseen
only too plainly during these last days. Accustomed as she was to control
herself, her constantly increasing pallor, her more and more rapid
breathing, disclosed the agitation aroused in her by the voice of him
whom she had pretended to look upon only as a friend, and who
continued: "Yes, I deserve it. I have been so honest, so loyal in my
determination to obey you! Anything, even that silence, was less painful
to me than to lose you altogether. And then, I had given you such good
reason! I have reproached myself so bitterly for that madness of a few
minutes, three years ago! That I had confessed to you what I ought
always to have hidden from you, since you were not free, crushed me
with such profound remorse! Every day at Saint-Mihiel I pass the wall of
the garden where that scene took place. Never without seeing you again,
in my thoughts, as I saw you after that mad declaration, abruptly leaving
me and going back to the house, without looking back. And what weeks
those were that followed, when we met almost every day, and I did not
exist for your glance! 'She will never, never forgive me,' I said to myself,
and the thought tore my heart. I was sincere when I determined to
exchange into another regiment, to leave Saint-Mihiel; sincere when I
tried, before my departure, which I believed to be final, to speak with
you once more. I felt that I must explain my action to you, must make
you understand that no degrading thought of seduction had entered my
mind, that I must have been demented, that I had never for one second
ceased to have such unbounded esteem and respect for you! Ah! I shall
be very old, very cold-blooded, when I am able to recall without tears—
see, they are coming to my eyes now!—your face on that day, your eyes,
the tone in which you said to me: 'I have forgotten everything. Give me
your word that that moment of aberration shall never return, and I will
see you as before. I do not wish your life to be turned topsy-turvy
because of me.'—While you were speaking, I was saying to myself—that
hour is so vivid to me!—I was saying to myself: 'To breathe the air that
she breathes, to see her go to and fro, to continue to hear her voice, there
is no price I will not pay.' And you marked out the programme of our
relations in the future. You said that the world did not place much credit
in a disinterested friendship between a man and a woman, but that you
did believe in such a thing provided that both were really loyal. I could
repeat, syllable for syllable, every word that you said that afternoon. I
listened while you said them, with an utterly indescribable sensation, of
assuagement and exaltation as well, through my whole being. It was as if
I had seen your very soul think and feel. Yes, I solemnly promised you
then that, if you would admit me once more to your intimacy, I would be
that friend that you gave me leave to be, and nothing more. That promise
I have the right to say again that I have kept. I declare that I would
continue to keep it if the circumstances had remained the same. But they
have changed. Ah! madame, if one could read another's heart, I would
beseech you to look into mine. You would see there that at the news of
the misfortune which befell you, I had no selfish reflection concerning
that change. I thought only of your grief, your solitude, your orphan
child. So long as the catastrophe was recent, I was ashamed even to
glimpse a new horizon before me—before us. But I cannot prevent life
from being life. At twenty-seven a woman is entitled to reconstruct her
life without offending in any wise the memory of him who is no more.
On my part, I am not breaking my plighted word when I say: 'Madame,
the worship, the adoration that I had for you three years ago, and that you
justly forbade me to express to you then, I still entertain. My silence
regarding my sentiments since that time is a guarantee of their depth. I
break it to-day, when you can listen to me without having the
protestation of the most fervent, the most respectful, the most submissive
of passions cause you remorse. What I said to you in the garden I say
again to-day, adding to it an entreaty which you will not deny. I love you.
Let me devote to you what I have left of youth, my whole life. Allow me
to be a support in your solitude, a consolation in your melancholy, a
second father to your son. Be my wife and I will bless this long trial,
which justifies me in repeating to you what I felt on the first day that I
met you,—but how could you have failed to suspect it?—I love you, and
I never have loved, I never shall love, anybody but you.'"
This impassioned harangue, so insistent and so direct, bore little
resemblance to the one that Landri had prepared during the long waking
hours of the night and in the cold light of dawn, while the express train
of the Chemin de Fer de l'Est bore him away from the little garrison
town where his destiny had caused him to meet Captain Olier and his
charming wife. What diplomatic stages he had marked out for himself
beforehand! And he had hurried through them all to go straight to that
offer of marriage, put forth, abruptly, with the spontaneity that is more
adroit than all the prudence in the world with a woman who loves,—and
Valentine loved Landri. She loved him despite complexities upon which
we must insist once again in order to avoid the illogical aspects of that
woman's nature, loyal even in its subtleties, even to the slightest
appearance of coquetry. She loved him, but in a strange ignorance of the
elements of love, despite her marriage and maternity. Her union with a
man older than herself, arranged by her family, had not caused her to
know that total revolution of her existence, after which a woman is truly
woman. With her, affection had never been anything more than
imaginary. In the chaste and artless delights of this intimacy, without
caresses or definite words, with a young man by whom nevertheless she
knew that she was loved, and whom she loved, she had found the only
pleasure which her sensibility, still altogether mental, could conceive. To
tell the whole fact, she loved—and that friendship had sufficed for her! It
was inevitable, therefore, that at the first attempt of her alleged "friend"
to draw her into the ardent world of complete passion,—and this offer of
marriage, under such conditions, was such an attempt,—she should
throw herself almost violently back. She ought, however, to have
foreseen it, that step which would put an end to the paradoxical and
unreliable compromise of conscience devised by her between her
conjugal duties and her secret love. Yes, she had foreseen it, and on the
day after her husband's death. Her habit of reflection, intensified by the
monotony of her semi-recluse existence, had led her to take an almost
painful pleasure in a minute scrutiny of the reasons for and against a
decision, and she had ended, in the false perspective of solitary
meditation, by thinking solely in opposition to her heart. She had ceased
to see anything but the force of the objections, the insurmountable
difficulties, and she had taken her stand with the party most strongly
opposed to her passionate desire. With that she had soothed herself with
the chimerical hope of postponing from week to week the explanation
which had suddenly forced itself upon her so imperatively. She came to
it deeply moved and at the same time prepared, overwhelmed with
surprise and, as it were, armored rather than armed with arguments long
since thought out. She ran the risk thus of seeming very cold when she
was deeply moved, very self-controlled and conventional, when she was
all a-quiver. How near to weakness was her borrowed energy from the
moment that she began her reply!
"You have made me very unhappy, my friend,—for I shall continue to
give you in my heart that name which you no longer care for. I do not
reproach you. It was I who deceived myself, in thinking that your feeling
for me might change, that it had changed. Perhaps such a transformation
is not possible. I too have acted in good faith in wishing for it, in longing
for it, in hoping for it. You know it, do you not?—Now that dream is at
an end." She repeated, as if speaking to herself: "At an end, at an end."
And, turning toward Landri: "How do you expect me to permit you to
come here now, to indulge myself in those long conversations and that
correspondence which were so dear to me, after you have talked to me in
this way? One does not try such an experiment twice. Three years ago I
was able to believe in an unconscious outbreak of your youth, in an
exaltation which would soon subside. To-day, I am no longer able to
flatter myself with that illusion. But on one point you are right. The
circumstances are no longer the same. If at that time it was my right and
my duty to judge severely a declaration which I should have been as
culpable to listen to as you were to make it, how can I blame you now
for a step in which there is no other feeling for me than respect and
esteem? I have not lived much in the world,—enough, however, to
realize that the fidelity of a heart like yours, prolonged thus and under
such conditions, is no ordinary thing. It touches me far more than I can
tell you."—Despite herself, her voice trembled as she let fall those words
which signified too clearly: "And I, too, love you."—"But," she
continued, firmly, "this interview must be the last, since I cannot answer
you with the words that you ask, since in that hand which you offer me I
cannot place mine."
"Then," he faltered, "if I understand you, you refuse—"
"To be your wife. Yes," she said; and this time her blue eyes beneath
their half-closed lids gazed steadfastly at Landri. Her delicate mouth
closed in a fold of decision. Her whole fragile person was as if stiffened
in a tension which proved to the lover the force of the emotion that she
held in check. She repeated: "Yes, I refuse. I could find many pretexts to
give you which, to others, would be good reasons, and which should be
so to me. I have a child. I might say to you: 'I do not want him to have a
stepfather.' That would not be true. You would be to him, I am sure, as
you said, a second father. I might dwell upon my loss, which is so recent,
in order to postpone my reply until later. Later, the reason which makes
me decline the offer of your name would be the same, for it is just that
name, it is what it represents, which forbids me to abandon myself to a
liking of which you have had too many proofs. I shall soon be twenty-
eight, my friend. I am no longer exactly a young woman. I have reflected
much on marriage. I know that if people marry to love each other, they
marry also to live and remain together, to have a home, to be a family.
For that it is essential that there should not be, between the husband and
wife, one of those unalterable differences of birth and environment,
which make it impossible that her people should ever be really related to
his.—Your name? It is not only very old, it is illustrious. It is blended
with the whole history of France. There was a Maréchal de Claviers-
Grandchamp who was a comrade of Bayard, a Cardinal de Claviers-
Grandchamp who was a friend of Bossuet. Claviers-Grandchamps have
been ambassadors, governors of provinces, commanders of the Saint-
Esprit, peers of France. Your house has contracted alliances with ten
other houses of the French or European aristocracy. You are cousins of
English dukes, of German and Italian princes. You are a grand seigneur,
and I a bourgeoise, a very petty bourgeoise.—Do not you interrupt me,
either," she said, placing her slender hand on the young man's arm and
arresting thus his protest; "it is better that I should say it all at once. In all
this I am moved neither by humility nor by pride. I have never
understood either of those sentiments, when there is question of facts so
impossible to deny or to modify as our situation. I am a bourgeoise, I say
again. That means that my people lived in straitened circumstances at
first, then modestly. I consider myself rich with the thirty thousand
francs a year that they saved for me, in how many years! It is a fortune in
our world, in yours it would be ruin. When I walk in that quarter, before
those ancient hôtels which are still to be found there, on the afternoon of
a grand reception, I see their courtyards, the coupés and automobiles
waiting, the footmen in livery, all that luxury of existence which you no
longer notice, it is so natural to you,—and do you know what my feeling
always is? That if it were necessary for me to live there, and in such
fashion, I should be too much out of my element, too overpowered!
These are trifles. I mention them to you because they represent a whole
type of customs, an entire social code. Do not say that you will not
impose those customs on your wife, that you will liberate her from that
code. You could not do it. To-day, as a bachelor, and because you are an
officer, you have been able to simplify your life a great deal. But your
wife would not be merely the companion of Monsieur de Claviers-
Grandchamp, a simple lieutenant of dragoons, stationed at Saint-Mihiel,
she would be also the daughter-in-law of the Marquis de Claviers-
Grandchamp, who lives in a veritable palace in Paris, and who has a
historic château in the Oise. He is a widower. He would require, and he
would have a right to require, his daughter-in-law, with him and for him,
to do the honors of those princely residences. And besides, he would
begin by not accepting me. You have talked so much to me about him! I
know him so well, without having seen him. Not for nothing do you call
him the 'Émigré.' So many times you have exerted yourself to prove to
me that he is not a man of our time; that he has the pride, the religious
veneration of his race and of old France. And such a man would consent
that his heir, the only survivor of his four sons, should take for his wife
the widow of an officer who was the son of a physician, herself the
daughter of a provincial notary, who, before she became Madame Olier,
bore the name of Mademoiselle Barral? Never! To marry me, my friend,
would be first of all to quarrel with your father, and, more or less, with
all your relations and your whole social circle. What do you care? you
will say. When two people love, they suffice for each other. That is true
and it is not true. You would suffer death and torture that I should be
humiliated, even in trifles, that I should not have the rank due to your
wife, being your wife. I should suffer to see you suffer, and perhaps—I
do not make myself out any better than I am—on my own account.
People are so ingenious in all societies in wounding those whom they
look upon as intruders. If we should have children, would they feel that
they were really the brothers and sisters of my boy, of a poor little Olier,
they who would be Claviers-Grandchamps? And if—But what's the use
of enumerating the miseries comprised in that cruel, wise, profoundly
significant word—mésalliance. No. I will not be your wife, my friend,
and the day will come when you will thank me for having defended you
against yourself, for having defended us—dare I say it?—But not
effectively, for I could not prevent your saying words which are destined
to break off forever, for a long time at all events, relations so pleasant as
ours.—So pleasant!" she repeated. And then, with something very like a
sob: "Oh! why, why did you speak so to me again?"
"Because I love you," he replied, almost fiercely. "And you! But if
you loved me, you would bless them, these differences between our
environments, instead of fearing them! You would see in the hostility of
my circle—I admit that I had not thought of it!—a means of having me
entirely to yourself. I should have heard you simply discuss the matter
and hesitate. But the coldness of your reply, this keen analysis of our
respective social positions, this balance-sheet of our families spread out
before me, calmly, coldly, mathematically, when I had come here, mad
with emotion, and thinking only of the life of the heart!—I am more
deeply hurt by that than by your refusal. I might have discussed it and
argued against your reasons. One does not discuss, one does not combat
indifference. One submits to it, and it is horrible!"
"How unjust you are, Landri!" she exclaimed. It very rarely happened
that she addressed him so, by his first name. That caress of language, the
only kind that she had ever bestowed on him, and that so seldom, came
to her lips in face of the young man's evident despair. A woman who
loves can endure everything, conceal everything, except the compassion
aroused by a sorrow which she has inflicted upon the man she loves; and,
destroying, by that involuntary outburst of her passion, the whole effect
of her previous refusal, she added: "I! indifferent to you! Why, of whom
was I thinking when I spoke, if not of you, solely and only of you, of
your future and your happiness?"
 "How happy I should be," he interrupted, "if, on the other hand, you
would think only of yourself, if you would have the selfishness of love,
its exigences, its unreasonableness! And yet," he continued with the
asperity of a passion which feels that it is reciprocated, despite all
manner of resistance, and which is exasperated by that assurance, "it is
true. You have some feeling for me in your heart. You are not a coquette.
You would not make sport of a man who has shown you so plainly that
he loves you, and how dearly! I said just now that you didn't love me. At
certain times I believe it, and it tortures me. At other times I feel that you
are so moved, so trembling—see, now!—Oh! by everything on earth that
you hold sacred, Valentine,"—he had never before allowed himself that
familiarity, which made her start like a kiss,—"if you really regard me
with the feeling that I have for you, if my long fidelity has touched you,
answer me. Is it true, really true, that between me and my happiness,—
for you are my happiness, only you, I tell you,—between your heart and
my heart there is nothing but that single, wretched obstacle, my name?"
"There is nothing else," she replied, "I swear."
"And you expect me to bow before that, to give you up because I am
called Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp and you Madame Olier, and
because my social circle will frown upon the marriage!"
"It is not I who expect it," she replied, "it is life!"
"Life?" he repeated in a voice that had suddenly become dull and
harsh; "what do you mean by that? But what need have I to ask you? As
if, ever since my youth, I had not seen that same barrier always standing
in the path of all my impulses: my name, always my name, again my
name! I shall end by cursing it! I am a grand seigneur, you say. Say
rather a pariah, before whom so many avenues were closed, when he was
twenty years old, because he is called by that great name; and the woman
he loves won't have him because of it! Ah! how truly I shall have known
and lived the tragedy of the noble,—since my evil fate decrees that I am
a noble,—that paralysis of the youthful being, quivering with life,
hungry for action, because of a past which was not his own, suffocation
by prejudices which he does not even share.—Valentine, say that you do
not love me. I shall be terribly unhappy, but I shall not feel what I felt
just now, and with such violence,—a fresh outbreak of that old revolt
through which I have suffered so keenly, which I have always fought
within myself, and which goes so far, at times, as downright hatred of
my caste. Yes, I have been, I am now sometimes, very near hating it, and
that is so painful to me, for I belong to that caste, in spite of everything.
It holds me a prisoner. I know its good qualities. I have its pride at
certain moments, and at others, this one for instance, it is a perfect horror
to me!"
"Do not speak so, do not feel so," pleaded Madame Olier. "You
frighten me when I see you so unjust, not only to me,—I have forgiven
you,—but to your own destiny. It is tempting God. You speak of barriers,
of prison, of suffocation. For my part, I think of all the privileges you
received at your birth, and first of all, and greatest of all, that of being so
easily an example to others. If you could have heard the remarks that
were made about you when you came to Saint-Mihiel, you would
appreciate more justly the value of that name which you all but
blasphemed just now—and for what reason? I heard those remarks, and I
am still proud for you. 'He's the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, and he
works! He'll have three hundred thousand francs a year and he passed his
examinations brilliantly! He's a good fellow. He treats people well. He
has all the qualities of a leader of men.'—You call nobles pariahs,
because they arouse much envy. But when they are worthy of their rank,
what influence they can exert! And all this is no longer of any account,
because you can't bend to your will the will of a poor woman, who, in
ten years, will be passée! And you will say of her then, if you recognize
her: 'Where were my wits when I thought that I loved her so dearly?'"
"And if, ten years hence,—I still love her," said the young man, "and
if I have employed those ten years in regretting her! Suppose it should
happen that that woman's refusal were coincident with one of those
crises as a result of which one's whole life is transformed? Suppose I had
reached one of those times when a man has to make a decision of tragical
importance to himself, and when he needs to know upon what support he
can count?"
He seemed to hesitate, and then continued in the altered tone of one
who, having just abandoned himself to the tumult of his emotions, puts
constraint upon himself and resolves to confine himself to a formal
statement of facts: "You will understand me in a moment. I came here
with the idea of beginning with this. Your presence moved me too
deeply! I have told you that I was able to obtain only a very short leave
of absence, forty-eight hours, and that with difficulty. Our new colonel
does not agree with you about nobles. He is strict and harsh with them.
He made this remark about me the other day, because of my title and my
'de': 'I don't like names with currents of air.' Under the circumstances he
was not wrong in requiring me to return to-morrow night. Within a few
days, we know from official sources, there will be two church
inventories made in the district. And they anticipate resistance."
"Is it possible?" cried Valentine, clasping her hands. "Since the law of
separation was passed, I have never read about a scene like those at
Paramé and Saint-Servan without trembling lest you should be caught in
one of those cases of conscience of which so many gallant officers have
been the victims! I thought that at Saint-Mihiel everything had passed off
quietly and that the troops had not had to interfere. Besides, they so
rarely use in that business the arm of the service to which you belong."
"They will use it this time," Landri replied; "we have been warned. It
is logical. Either the chasseurs or we will have to serve. Those two
regiments contain a considerable number of people who bear names
'with currents of air,' one of whom is that same Comte de Claviers-
Grandchamp, who 'works,' who 'treats people well,' who 'has all the
qualities of a leader of men.' It is an excellent opportunity to break his
ribs and those of some others of his sort! The pretext is all ready: the two
churches to be inventoried are those of Hugueville-en-Plaine, and the
Sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Montmartin. In the former there is an old
priest, revered for fifty leagues around, who has declared from the pulpit
that he will not yield except to force. You know the devotion of the
department to the Madonna of Montmartin. It is essential to act quickly,
very quickly, so that the peasants may not have time to collect.
Hugueville and Montmartin are a long way from Saint-Mihiel. The
cavalry is already selected. If the dragoons march, as my term of duty
comes at the end of the week, I have an excellent chance of being in the
affair."
"My poor, poor friend!" said the young woman, enveloping the officer
in a glance eloquent with the affection which she had sworn so often to
conceal from him; "so you, too, are going to be forced to leave the army,
of which you are so fond, and in which so fine a place is in store for you
—"
"I shall not leave it," he interrupted; and his face was, as it were,
frozen in an expression so stern that Valentine was amazed by it.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"That I have questioned myself closely, and have not found in my
conscience what my comrades of whom you speak have found in theirs.
They were believers, and I—you know too well that I have doubts which
I do not parade. I shall have to execute certain orders with repugnance.
But repugnance is not scruple. I shall go ahead. I shall not leave the
army."
"Even if it is necessary to order your men to break down the door of a
church?"
"I shall give them that order."
"You!" she cried. "You—"
"Finish your sentence," he rejoined with a still more gloomy
expression. "'You, a Claviers-Grandchamp!' You dare not say the word.
You think it, you have it on the end of your lips. In another than myself,
you would consider it perfectly natural—you above all, who know our
profession—that he should execute, in my frame of mind, a military
order, and that he should see, in the taking possession of the church of
Hugueville or Montmartin, simply a matter of duty to be done. In me you
do not admit it. Why? Again, because of my name! And you are
surprised that I break out in explosions like that of a moment ago against
a servitude of which I alone know the weight!—Oh, well!" he continued,
with increasing wrath, "it is precisely because I am a Claviers-
Grandchamp that I don't propose to leave the army. I propose to do my
duty. You hear, to do my duty, not to be a useless idler, a rich man with a
most authentic coat-of-arms on his carriages. I do not propose, for the
purpose of handing down an example for which I am not responsible, to
undo the work of my whole youth, to become an 'Émigré' within the
country, like so many of my kinsmen, so many of my friends,—like my
father!"
"You are not going to deny him, him too!" she implored. "You loved
him, you admired him so much!"
"I love him and admire him still," replied the young man in a tone of
the utmost earnestness; "yes, I admire him. No one knows better than I
his great qualities and what he might have been. What a soldier! He
proved it during the war. What a diplomatist! What an administrator!
What a Councillor of State! And he is nothing. Nothing, nothing,
nothing! Why, it is the whole tragedy of my thoughts, the evidence of my
father's magnificent gifts, paralyzed by his name, solely by his name!
Since I have become observant, I have seen that he, intelligent, generous,
straightforward as he is, makes no use of his energies, takes part in none
of the activities of his time. And yet there is a contemporaneous France.
He is in it, but not of it. It will have none of him, who will have none of
it. He will have passed his youth, his maturity, his old age, in what? In
taking part in a pompous parade of the ancien régime, what with his
receptions at Paris and Grandchamp, his stag-hunting, and the playing
the patron to an enormous and utterly unprofitable clientage, of low and
high estate, who live on his luxury or his income. I felt the worthlessness
of all that too soon; he will never feel it. He is deceived by a mirage. He
is close to a time when the nobility was still an aristocracy. My
grandfather was twenty-six years old in 1827, when he succeeded to my
great-grandfather's peerage, and my great-grandfather was colonel of the
dragoons of Claviers before '89. For there were dragoons of Claviers-
Grandchamp as there were of Custine and Jarnac, Belzunce and Lanan.
They are far away. But in my father's eyes all those things so entirely
uprooted and done away with are still realities. He is in touch with them.
He has known those who saw them. As a little boy he played on the
knees of old ladies who had been at court at Versailles. One would say
that that past fascinates him more and more as it recedes. To me it is
death, and I desired to live. That was the motive that led me to enter the
army. Indeed, I had no choice. All other careers were closed to the future
Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp.—These are the privileges you spoke
of just now. I let you have your say.—Yes, closed. Foreign affairs?
Closed. My father would have been welcomed by the Empire at least.
To-day they no longer want us. The Council of State? Closed. The
government? Closed. Can you imagine a nobleman as a prefect? They
were under Napoleon and the Restoration. The liberal professions?
Closed. Though a noble had the genius of a Trosseau, a Berryer, or a
Séguin, no one would have him to treat a cold in the head, to try a case
about a division fence, or to build a foot-bridge. Commerce? Closed.
Manufacturing? Closed, or practically so. To succeed in it we nobles
must have a superior talent of which I, for my part, have never been
conscious. Politics? That is like all the rest. People blame nobles for not
taking up a profession! They forget that they are excluded from almost
all, and the others are made ten times more difficult by their birth. And
you would have me not call them pariahs! I say again, I resolved not to
be one. The army was left. I prepared at Saint-Cyr, not without a
struggle. There at least I knew the pleasure of not being a creature apart,
of feeling that I was a Frenchman like the others, of not being exiled
from my time, from my generation, from my fatherland; the delight of
the uniform, of touching elbows with comrades, of obeying my superiors
and of commanding my inferiors. That uniform no one shall tear from
me except with my life. In losing it I should lose all my reasons for
living.—All, no, since I love you. I wanted to speak to you to-day to
learn whether I shall keep you in the trial that is in store for me. It will
have its painful sides!—Now that you know what the crisis is that I am
on the point of passing through," he added, "will you still answer no as
you did a moment ago? I have no pride and I ask you again, will you be
my wife? Not the wife of the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, whose
father and whose environment you dread, but of a soldier with whom
that environment will have no more to do, whom his father will have
spurned? If I should ever have superintended the taking of a church
inventory, it will arouse in the mothers another sort of indignation than
for a mésalliance, as you call it, and as I do not call it. If I have you, the
wound will bleed, doubtless, but I shall have you. You and my
profession, my profession and you, those are enough to make me very
strong."
"You have disturbed me too profoundly," said Valentine. "I no longer
know anything. I do not see clear within myself. I have felt your
suffering too keenly. Mon Dieu! when I received your letter, I did guess
what you wanted to speak to me about. I did not guess everything. I had
taken a resolution. I believed that I was sure of keeping to it. In the face
of your trouble I can not.—Listen. Be generous Do not urge me any
further. Give me credit for the answer that you ask. I told you just now
that I could not receive you any more after this. I have no pride, either. I
withdraw that also. As you will pass through Paris again to-morrow,
returning to Saint-Mihiel, come again to see me. I shall have reflected
meanwhile. I shall be in a condition to answer otherwise than under the
impulse of an emotion which discomposes me. Oh! why, in all the talks
we have had together in these last three years, have you never told me so
much about all these intimate details of your life? I would have helped
you—I would have tried, at all events."
"That is another of the misfortunes of the noble," Landri replied.
"There is one subject that he can never broach first, the precise subject of
his nobility. But calm yourself, I implore you, as I do myself. See. It is
enough that you do not repeat the 'never' of a few moments ago, for me
to recover my self-control. I will be here to-morrow, and if you still
cannot answer me, I will wait. I have seen that you pity me, understand
me. That is one piece of good fortune which wipes out many
disappointments! Am I as you would have me? Do I speak to you as you
wish?"
"Yes," she replied, more touched than she chose now to betray, by this
sudden softening, this return of submissive affection after his bursts of
passion. "But," she insinuated, "if you were really as I would have you,
you would let me give you some advice."
"What is it?" he inquired anxiously.
"To confide in your father. Yes, to talk with him of your plans,—of
me if you think best,—but first of all, and at any cost, of your
apprehension on the subject of these impending inventories. You owe it
to him," she insisted at a gesture from the young man. "I say nothing of
the bond that binds together the members of the same family, in order not
to return to that question of the name, although bourgeois and nobles are
equal when the common honor is involved. You owe it to him from
respect for his noble heart. He loves you. A determination so opposed to
his wishes is likely to cause him very deep sorrow. He must not learn it
first from another than you, so that he may not misconstrue your
motives. You must tell him what they are, and even if he blames them, at
all events he will know that you deserve his esteem. I know it well, I
who am a believer, and to whom that proceeding will be so grievous if
you carry it out. Ah! how earnestly I will pray God to spare us, your
father and me, that trial! But you must speak to Monsieur de Claviers.
You realize yourself that you must, don't you?"'
"I will try," replied the young man, whose eyes once more expressed
genuine distress. "You do not know him, and what an imposing effect he
has, even on me. I ought to say, especially on me, since I can read his
heart so well. But you are right, and I will obey you."
"Thanks," she said, rising. "And now think that you must not prepare
him to receive in bad part what you have to say, by displeasing him.
Since he was urgent that you should come to Grandchamp for this hunt,
you must go. You must do it for my sake, too, for I need a little rest and
solitude. Besides you still have to lunch, and it is quarter to twelve."—
The clock of a near-by convent struck three strokes, whose tinkling
cadence reached the little parlor over the trees of the garden. The clock
on the mantel-piece also emitted three shrill notes.—"You have just
time."
 "With the automobile I shall be at Grandchamp in an hour and a half,"
he replied. "But I mean to continue to be obedient, as obedient as I have
been rebellious." He had taken the young woman's hand and he pressed it
to his lips as he added: "I forgot. I have to stop on Rue de Solferino to
inquire for a friend of my father who is very ill. It won't take very long."
Valentine Olier withdrew her fingers with such a nervous movement
that Landri could not help exclaiming:—
"Why, what's the matter?"
"Nothing," said she. "Rue de Solferino? Then it's Monsieur Jaubourg,
this sick friend? it is to Monsieur Jaubourg's that you are going?"
"Yes. How do you know his name?" And then, answering his own
question, "To be sure, I have been to his house several times on leaving
you. I have talked about him to you, and rather unkindly. I am sorry now.
He has never shown much liking for me, and when I wanted to enter
Saint-Cyr, he did much to excite my father against me. I bore him a
grudge for it. But that was long ago, and he is mixed up in so many
memories of my childhood! The news of his illness touched me.
According to my father's despatch which I found at the house, asking me
to go to see him, he is dying."
"He is dying!" she echoed. "Mon Dieu! I hope you will not be
admitted. In your present state of wounded sensibility, that visit will be
too trying, and it's of no use. Promise me that you won't try to see him!"
"Dear, dear friend!" exclaimed Landri, bestowing a second kiss on
Valentine's clenched hand, "I tell you again that you do not know how
completely you have restored my tranquillity, nor how brave I should be
at this moment before the worst trials. And this visit would not be a trial
to me. But I will manage to do what you wish, even in so unimportant a
matter. I shall deserve no credit for it. I prefer not to place any too
painful image between what I feel here"—he pointed to his heart—"and
my return—to-morrow. How far away it is, and yet so near!"
"Until to-morrow, then," she rejoined with a half smile, as to which he
could not divine that it was forced. "Come at two o'clock as usual,—and
now, adieu."
"Adieu!" he said. Instinctively he drew near to her. In his eyes blazed
a gleam of passion instantly subdued by her eyes. He repeated "Adieu!"
in a voice stifled by the effort he made to control himself and not to give
way to his ardent longing to cover with kisses that fair hair, that pure
brow, that quivering mouth.
He rushed from the salon. She listened to the young man's step as he
passed through the adjoining room, then through the reception-room and
the street door, which opened and closed. When he had gone from the
house, and doubtless from the street, a long while, she was still on the
same spot and in the same attitude, steadfastly contemplating her
thoughts. What she saw was not the refined and soldierly profile of the
young man whom she loved, who loved her, and whose wife she knew
now that she would be. No, she saw herself at Saint-Mihiel, a very long
time before. She fancied that she was living through that hour again.
Landri had just joined the regiment. Valentine had a friend, one Madame
Privat, the wife of one of the officers of the garrison. On several
occasions she had fancied that that friend was extraordinarily cold to the
newcomer. Inconsiderately enough she had asked her—she could hear
herself putting the question: "Monsieur de Claviers-Grandchamp seems
so antipathetic to you. Why is it?" And she could hear Marguerite Privat
reply:—
"I admit it, but it's an old, a very old story. We have a distant cousin, a
Monsieur Jaubourg, of whom we used to see a great deal. I say we; I
should say my parents. They had a little plan for having him marry one
of my aunts. Suddenly the relations between us lost their warmth. The
marriage didn't take place. This coldness dates from the day that he
became intimate with the Claviers. He had, at all events my parents
thought so, a passion for Madame de Claviers. They even believed that
there was a liaison. In families many things are known that the public
doesn't understand. He seemed to avoid us. My parents did not seek a
reconciliation which would have seemed to be based on self-interest.
Monsieur Jaubourg is the son of a broker and very rich. I witnessed my
father's grief from this rupture, which was the cause of a very unhappy
union contracted by my aunt out of spite. I have always blamed Madame
de Claviers for it, perhaps unjustly. The sight of her son stirs those
memories and is painful to me."
Yes, that was long, long ago, and lo! Madame Olier found anew in her
heart the melancholy sensation with which Madame Privat's words had
suddenly oppressed her. Must it be that she loved Landri even then,
unconsciously? The truth of that confidence was guaranteed both by the
character of her who made it and by the chance that led to it. But perhaps
it was all a matter of chance. So that Madame Olier did not believe in it
altogether. However, she had retained an ineradicable doubt. How often
she had wondered whether the young man's mother had really made a
misstep, and whether he was in danger of ever hearing of it! She had had
a little shiver every time that he had mentioned the name of Jaubourg, by
chance, in their conversations; and deeply stirred as she was, all those
complex and confused sensations had suddenly reawakened when he had
spoken of his proposed visit to Rue de Solferino. She had fancied him at
the bedside of a sick man who, in his last moments, would perhaps let a
terrible secret escape his lips! Her apprehension had been so great that an
impulsive entreaty had followed, most imprudent if the relations between
Jaubourg and the late Marquise de Claviers-Grandchamp had really been
culpable!
"I am mad," she said, rousing herself from the sort of waking dream,
which had reproduced with the detail of an hallucination that brief scene,
her apartment at Saint-Mihiel, Madame Privat's face, her voice, her very
words. "If Monsieur Jaubourg had been Madame de Claviers' lover, he
would not have continued to be Monsieur de Claviers' friend after her
death. If only my movement and my exclamation did not arouse
suspicion in Landri's mind! I should never forgive myself. No. He is so
honest, so straightforward. He has too noble a heart to imagine in others
the evil that it would be a horror to him to commit. If he will only speak
to his father about that possibility of an expedition against a church! He
promised. He will speak to him. His father will prevent him from
following out that shocking purpose. For my part, I cannot. I love him
too well. Mon Dieu! how I love him! how I love him! I defended myself
too long. Ah! I feel that I am all his, now!"
And as, at that moment, she heard laughter through the partition,
announcing little Ludovic's return, she opened the door to call her child,
and, pressing him to her heart, she embraced him frantically, to prove to
herself that this love to which she was on the point of abandoning
herself, by promising to become the wife of a second husband, would
take nothing from the son of the first; and she said to him:—
"You know that your mother loves you, you know it, tell me that you
know it."
 II

A GRAND SEIGNEUR

Madame Olier's prevision was just: that little unthinking gesture, as of

a hand extended to prevent a fall, was destined to be one of the signs
which should arouse in Landri the most painful of ideas, but not until
later. That youthful heart—Valentine had read it accurately in this
respect, as well—was too noble not to entertain an instinctive
repugnance for suspicion, that calumny of the mind. How could he have
made an exception in his mother's case? He had never ascribed a
criminal motive, even for a second, nor imagined that any one could
ascribe such a motive to the assiduities of one of the intimate friends of
their family. The tears that he had shed on Madame de Claviers-
Grandchamp's death had been the loving, sincere tears of a son, with no
alloy in his veneration. And so, while he returned from Rue Monsieur to
Place Saint-François, to get his automobile, no suspicion entered his
mind. The imprudent entreaty that his friend had addressed to him not to
see the invalid on Rue de Solferino was only a proof of an affection a
little too easily disturbed, and he was the more touched by it.
"How I love her!" he exclaimed, echoing, and conscious of it, the
passionate sigh which she, on her side, was breathing toward him. "And
she loves me, too. She fights against it still, but I understood it, I saw it, I
know it. I know that she will be my wife.—My wife!" he repeated, with
an intimate quiver of his whole being which made him close his eyes.
Suddenly Valentine's image brought before his eyes that of his father,
and the memory of the undertaking he had entered into abruptly crushed
that outburst of joy. "She is right," he said to himself, without transition,
mentally repeating the very words that she had used. "I owe it to him to
speak both of her and of all the rest. I owe it to him from respect for his
noble heart. I will do it."
The bare thought of that explanation oppressed the young man with
an agony of timidity. He had always suffered from it in the presence of
that man whose name he bore, whose heir he was, whom he loved, and
by whom he was loved, and he had never been able to open his heart to
him fully, to explain himself concerning his inmost thoughts. His
character, which was very manly in respect to important decisions, but
extremely sensitive, and consequently easily disconcerted in its outward
manifestations, had always been taken by surprise as it were by that of