第13章
"'As to the drama--it is this.You imagine that I am occupied with the Council of State,the Chamber,the Courts,Politics.--Why,dear me,seven hours at night are enough for all that,so much are my faculties overwrought by the life I lead!Honorine is my real concern.
To recover my wife is my only study;to guard her in her cage,without her suspecting that she is in my power;to satisfy her needs,to supply the little pleasure she allows herself,to be always about her like a sylph without allowing her to see or to suspect me,for if she did,the future would be lost,--that is my life,my true life.--For seven years I have never gone to bed without going first to see the light of her night-lamp,or her shadow on the window curtains.
"'She left my house,choosing to take nothing but the dress she wore that day.The child carried her magnanimity to the point of folly!
Consequently,eighteen months after her flight she was deserted by her lover,who was appalled by the cold,cruel,sinister,and revolting aspect of poverty--the coward!The man had,no doubt,counted on the easy and luxurious life in Switzerland or Italy which fine ladies indulge in when they leave their husbands.Honorine has sixty thousand francs a year of her own.The wretch left the dear creature expecting an infant,and without a penny.In the month of November 1820I found means to persuade the best /accoucheur/in Paris to play the part of a humble suburban apothecary.I induced the priest of the parish in which the Countess was living to supply her needs as though he were performing an act of charity.Then to hide my wife,to secure her against discovery,to find her a housekeeper who would be devoted to me and be my intelligent confidante--it was a task worthy of Figaro!
You may suppose that to discover where my wife had taken refuge I had only to make up my mind to it.
"'After three months of desperation rather than despair,the idea of devoting myself to Honorine with God only in my secret,was one of those poems which occur only to the heart of a lover through life and death!Love must have its daily food.And ought I not to protect this child,whose guilt was the outcome of my imprudence,against fresh disaster--to fulfil my part,in short,as a guardian angel?--At the age of seven months her infant died,happily for her and for me.For nine months more my wife lay between life and death,deserted at the time when she most needed a manly arm;but this arm,'said he,holding out his own with a gesture of angelic dignity,'was extended over her head.Honorine was nursed as she would have been in her own home.
When,on her recovery,she asked how and by whom she had been assisted,she was told--"By the Sisters of Charity in the neighborhood --by the Maternity Society--by the parish priest,who took an interest in her.""'This woman,whose pride amounts to a vice,has shown a power of resistance in misfortune,which on some evenings I call the obstinacy of a mule.Honorine was bent on earning her living.My wife works!For five years past I have lodged her in the Rue Saint-Maur,in a charming little house,where she makes artificial flowers and articles of fashion.She believes that she sells the product of her elegant fancywork to a shop,where she is so well paid that she makes twenty francs a day,and in these six years she had never had a moment's suspicion.She pays for everything she needs at about the third of its value,so that on six thousand francs a year she lives as if she had fifteen thousand.She is devoted to flowers,and pays a hundred crowns to a gardener,who costs me twelve hundred in wages,and sends me in a bill for two thousand francs every three months.I have promised the man a market-garden with a house on it close to the porter's lodge in the Rue Saint-Maur.I hold this ground in the name of a clerk of the law courts.The smallest indiscretion would ruin the gardener's prospects.Honorine has her little house,a garden,and a splendid hothouse,for a rent of five hundred francs a year.There she lives under the name of her housekeeper,Madame Gobain,the old woman of impeccable discretion whom I was so lucky as to find,and whose affection Honorine has won.But her zeal,like that of the gardener,is kept hot by the promise of reward at the moment of success.The porter and his wife cost me dreadfully dear for the same reasons.
However,for three years Honorine has been happy,believing that she owes to her own toil all the luxury of flowers,dress,and comfort.
"'Oh!I know what you are about to say,'cried the Count,seeing a question in my eyes and on my lips.'Yes,yes;I have made the attempt.My wife was formerly living in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
One day when,from what Gobain told me,I believed in some chance of a reconciliation,I wrote by post a letter,in which I tried to propitiate my wife--a letter written and re-written twenty times!Iwill not describe my agonies.I went from the Rue Payenne to the Rue de Reuilly like a condemned wretch going from the Palais de Justice to his execution,but he goes on a cart,and I was on foot.It was dark--there was a fog;I went to meet Madame Gobain,who was to come and tell me what my wife had done.Honorine,on recognizing my writing,had thrown the letter into the fire without reading it.--"Madame Gobain,"she had exclaimed,"I leave this to-morrow.""'What a dagger-stroke was this to a man who found inexhaustible pleasure in the trickery by which he gets the finest Lyons velvet at twelve francs a yard,a pheasant,a fish,a dish of fruit,for a tenth of their value,for a woman so ignorant as to believe that she is paying ample wages with two hundred and fifty francs to Madame Gobain,a cook fit for a bishop.