“I have been to see your husband ... he consents to everything ... you can live here with me the entire time that your mother and sister shall be away, and even afterwards if your anger against him still continues. But I tell you again, this suit for separation is impossible! I do hope that you will not insist upon it.”
Rosalie tossed her head.
“My dear father, you do not understand that man. He will employ all his cunning to surround me and get me back again, make me his dupe, a voluntary dupe, who has accepted an undignified and degraded existence. Your daughter is not a woman of that sort. I demand a complete and irreparable rupture, openly announced to all the world.”
From the card-table where she sat ranging the cards and markers Mme. Le Quesnoy, without turning round, gently interposed:
“Forgive, my child, forgive.”
“O yes, that is easy to say when one has a husband as upright and loyal as yours, when one never has known the suffocating effect of lies and treason, drawing their plots about one. He is a hypocrite, I tell you. He has his Chambéry morality and his morality of the Rue de Londres. His words and his acts are never in accord—two ways of speech, two faces—all the seductive and catlike nature of his race—in a word, the man of the South!”
And then, losing her head as her anger exploded, she said:
“Besides, I had already forgiven him once. Yes, two years after my marriage. I never told you about it, I have never spoken to a single person. I was very unhappy; and then we only remained together because of an oath he made me.—But he only lives on perjuries! And now it is completely at an end, completely at an end!”
The President did not insist further, but slowly rose and went over to his wife. There was a whispering together and something like a debate, surprising enough between that authoritative man and this humble, annihilated creature: “You must tell her.... Yes, yes, I want you to tell her....” Without adding another word M. Le Quesnoy left the room and his sonorous regular step, his step of every evening, could be heard mounting the solitary vaulted stairs, through all the solemn spaces of the grand drawing-room.
“Come here,” said her mother to the daughter with a tender gesture, “nearer to me, still nearer.”