But let him beware! After this pardon so generously accorded, she warned him, a repetition of such an outrage would not find the same clemency. Let him never try it again, or their lives would be separated cruelly and forever under the eyes of the whole world. There was a firmness in her tone and look as she said this, which showed her capable of revenging her wounded woman’s pride upon a society that held her imprisoned in its bonds.
Numa understood; he swore in perfect good faith that he would sin no more. He was still upset at the risk he had run of losing his happiness and that repose which was so necessary to him, all for an intrigue which had only appealed to his vanity. It was an immense relief to be rid of his great lady, his bony marquise, who but for her noble coat-of-arms was hardly more desirable than poor “every one’s old girl” at the Café Malmus; to have no more love-letters to write and rendezvous to make and keep. The knowledge that this silly sentimental nonsense which had so tried his ease-loving nature was over and done with enchanted him as much as his wife’s forgiveness and the restored peace of his household.
He was as happy as before all this had happened. No apparent change took place in their mode of life—the table always laid, the same crowd of guests, the same round of entertainments and receptions at which Numa sang and declaimed and strutted, unconscious that at his side sat one whose beautiful eyes were evermore open and aware of facts under their veil of actual tears. She understood her great man now: all words and gestures, kind-hearted and generous at times, but kind only a little while, made up of caprice, a love of showing off and a desire to please like a coquette. She realized the shallowness of such a nature, undecided in his beliefs as in his dislikes; above all she feared for both their sakes the weakness hidden under his swelling words and resounding voice, a weakness which angered and yet endeared him to her, because, now that her wifely love had vanished, she felt the yearning towards him that a mother feels to a wayward child. Always ready to sacrifice herself and to be devoted in spite of treachery, the secret fear haunted her still: “If only he does not wear out my patience!”
Clear-sighted as she was, Rosalie quickly observed a change in her husband’s political opinions. His relations with the Faubourg St. Germain had begun to cool. The nankin waistcoat and fleur-de-lis pin of old Sagnier no longer awed him. Sagnier’s mind, he said, was not what it had been. It was his shadow alone that presided at the Palace, a sleepy ghost that recalled far too well the epoch of the Legitimacy and its morbid inactivity, the next thing to death.
So it was that Numa slowly, gently developed towards the Empire, opening his doors to notable men among the Imperialists whom he had met at the house of Mme. d’Escarbès, whose influence had prepared him for this very change.
“Look out for your great man; I am afraid he is going to moult,” said the councillor to his daughter at dinner one day, when the lawyer had been letting his coarse satire loose regarding the affair of Froschdorf, which he compared to the wooden horse of Don Quixote, stationary and nailed down, while his rider with bandaged eyes believed he was careering far through heavenly space.
She did not have to ask many questions. Deceitful as he might be, his lies, which he scorned to cover with complications or with finesse, were so careless that they betrayed him at once.
Going into the library one morning she found him absorbed in writing a letter, and leaning over him with her head near his she inquired:
“To whom are you writing?”
He stammered, tried to invent something, but the clear eyes searched him through and through like a conscience; he had an impulse to be frank because he could not help it.