“She sees him with her imagination, and especially in the light of your legends and inventions which she has not been able to put in the right focus. That is why this advertisement and grotesque coloring which enrage you fill me on the contrary with joy. I believe that her hero will appear so ridiculous to her that she will no longer dare to love him. If it were not for that, I hardly know what would become of us. Can you imagine the despair of my father; can you imagine yourself the brother-in-law of Valmajour?—oh, Numa, Numa! poor involuntary maker of dupes.”
He did not put up any defence, but indulged in anger against himself, against his “cussed Southernism” which he was not able to overcome.
“Look here, you ought to stay always just as you are, right up against my side as my beloved councillor and my holy protection. You alone are good and indulgent, you alone understand and love me.”
He held her little gloved hand to his lips and said this with such a firm conviction that tears, real tears, reddened his eyelids: then, warmed up and refreshed by this effusion, he felt better; and so, when they reached the Place Royale and with a thousand tender precautions he had helped his wife out of the carriage, it was with a joyous tone and one free of all remorse that he threw the address to his coachman: “London Street, hurry, quick!”
Moving slowly, Rosalie vaguely caught this address and it gave her pain. Not that she had the slightest suspicion; but he had just said that he was going to the Saint-Lazare station. Why was it that his acts were never in accordance with his words?
In her sister’s bedroom another cause for anxiety met her: she felt on entering that there had been a sudden stoppage of a discussion between Hortense and Audiberte, who still kept the traces of fury on her face while her peasant’s head-dress still quivered on her hair bristling with rage. Rosalie’s presence kept her in bounds, that was clear enough from her lips and eyebrows viciously drawn together. Still, as the young wife asked her how she did, she was forced to answer and so began to talk feverishly of the eskating, of the advantageous terms which were offered them, and then, surprised at Rosalie’s calm, demanded in an almost insolent tone:
“Aren’t you coming to hear my brother? It is something that is at least worth while, if for nothing more than to see him in his costume!”
This ridiculous costume as it was described by her in her peasant dialect, from the dents in the cap down to the high curving points of the shoes, put poor Hortense in a state of agony; she did not dare raise her eyes to her sister’s face. Rosalie asked to be excused from going; the state of her health did not permit her to visit the theatre. Besides, in Paris there were certain places of entertainment where all women could not go. The peasant woman stopped her short at the first suggestion.
“Beg your pardon, I go perfectly well and I hope I am as good as anybody else—I have never done any wrong, I have not; I have always fulfilled my religious duties.”
She raised her voice without a trace of her old bashfulness, just as if she had acquired rights in the house. But Rosalie was much too kind and far too superior to this poor ignorant thing to cause her humiliation, particularly as she was thinking about the responsibility that rested on Numa. So, with the entire intelligence of her heart and revealing as usual the uncommon delicacy of her mind, in those truthful words that heal although they may sting a little, she endeavored to make Audiberte understand that her brother had not succeeded and never would succeed in Paris, the implacable city, and that rather than obstinately continue a humiliating struggle, falling into the mire and mud of artistic existence, it would be far better for them to return to their Provence and buy their farm back again, the means to accomplish which would be furnished them, and so, in their laborious life surrounded by nature, forget the unhappy results of their trip to Paris.