‘How have I interfered with you?’ returned the Languedocian. ‘I never knew you until we met at Versailles, when I first learned by whom Gaudin’s love—or rather the feeling which I took for love—had been estranged from me. I did not wish to cross your path again. Heaven knows it was not my own doing that I met you this evening.’
She spoke these words in a tone that the Marchioness had hardly looked for. But Louise, gentle and retiring as was her nature, felt in whose presence she now stood, and her spirit rose with the circumstances, until her eye kindled and her cheek flushed with the emotion of the interview. She was no longer the pale and trembling girl; she felt that Marie had crushed her, by weaning away Gaudin’s affections, and she replied accordingly.
Marie was astonished at the manner in which she spoke. She went on—
‘You appear to forget in whose presence you now are, or you would not so address me.’
‘It is from feeling too keenly whom I thus address that I do so,’ replied Louise. ‘What would you have me say?’
‘I would have you recollect the wide difference that exists between our positions,’ answered Marie. ‘I am the Marchioness of Brinvilliers.’
‘We ought to know no difference of rank,’ returned Louise; ‘a hapless attachment has placed us all on the same level. Whatever Gaudin’s station is, or may have been, his love raised me to his own position—one which the Marchioness of Brinvilliers did not think beneath her. I thought she would have been above so petty a cause for quarrel.’
‘And from these set speeches,’ rejoined Marie, ‘which, doubtless, have been conned over until you got them by heart, to make an effect when they might be called for, you have lowered yourself. Sainte-Croix has long since forgotten you. Have you no spirit, thus to pursue a bygone lover who has discarded you?’
‘Alas, madame! I have loved,’ said Louise, with a tone so tearful, so hopeless, but so firm, that the Marchioness paused, baffled in her plan of attack, but not knowing what new ground to take up. Louise continued, after a short silence—‘And if love with a great lady be what it is to me, a poor country girl, you would not ask me why, despite Gaudin’s neglect, I still hang upon the memory, not of him, but of the love he first taught me to feel.’
As she spoke she sunk her face in her hands, and her tears flowed fast and freely.