Some harvester at noontide rest
Had clasped her to his stalwart breast—
Ah! far less woe would she have known.)
The book slipped from her hands upon her knees, the last two lines re-echoing their mournful song to the very depths of her being, recalling to her the wretchedness which for one moment she had forgot. There lies the cruelty that poets exercise; they lull and appease you, but then with one word they envenom again the wound which they were by way of healing.
She saw herself as she was in that same place twelve years before when Numa paid his addresses to her with great big bouquets of roses; when, clothed with her twenty years and the wish to be beautiful for his sake, from that very window she watched him coming, just as one watches one’s own destiny. In every corner of the house there remained echoes of his warm and tender voice, so ready to lie. If one looked a moment among the music scattered about the piano one would find the duos which they sang together; everything which surrounded her seemed accomplices of the disaster in her failure of a life. She thought of what that life might have been by the side of an honest man and loyal comrade, not brilliant and ambitious, but enjoying a simple and hidden existence in which they would have courageously borne all bitternesses and all sorrow to the very end of their days.
“Elle aurait eu bien moins de peine.” (Ah, far less woe would she have known.)
She had plunged so deep into her dream that when the whist party ended and her parents’ old friends had left, almost without her remarking it, answering mechanically the friendly and pitying farewells that each one gave her, she failed to perceive that the President, instead of conducting his friends to the front door as had been his habit every evening, no matter what the time or season, was marching up and down the drawing-room. At last he stopped before her and put a question to her in a voice which caused her all of a sudden to tremble:
“Well, my child, where are you in this matter? have you made up your mind?”
“Why, dear father, I am exactly where I was before.”
He seated himself beside her, took her hand and attempted to do the persuasive: