“Yes, it is unfortunate—you don’t understand each other....” But in her own heart she agreed with the President.
When Roumestan arrived at a Minister’s portfolio the coolness between the two men only became greater. M. Le Quesnoy refused to show himself at his son-in-law’s receptions in the Rue de Grenelle and he explained the matter very precisely to his daughter.
“Now, please tell your husband this—let him continue to visit me here, and as often as possible; I shall be most delighted. But you must not expect ever to see me at the Ministry. I know well enough what those people are preparing for us: I don’t want to have the appearance of being an accomplice.”
After all, the situation between them was saved in the eyes of society by that heartfelt sorrow, that mourning of the heart, which had imprisoned the Le Quesnoys in their own home for so many years. Probably the Minister of Public Instruction would have been very much embarrassed to feel the presence in his drawing-room of that sturdy old contradictor, in whose presence he always remained a little boy. Still, he made believe to appear wounded by that decision; he struck an attitude on account of it, a thing which is very precious to an actor, and he found a pretext for not coming to the Sunday dinners except very irregularly, making as a plea one of those thousand excuses, engagements, meetings, political banquets, which offer so wide a liberty to husbands in politics.
Rosalie, on the contrary, never missed a Sunday, arriving early in the afternoon, delighted to find again in the home circle of her parents that taste of the family which her official life hardly permitted her the leisure to satisfy. Mme. Le Quesnoy being still at vespers and Hortense at church with her mother, or carried off to some musical matinée by friends, she was always certain to find her father in his library, a long room crammed from top to bottom with books. There he was, shut in with his silent friends, his intellectual intimates, the only ones with whom his sorrow had never found fault. The President did not seat himself to read; he passed the shelves in review, stopping in front of some finely bound books; standing there, unconscious what he did, he would read for an hour at a time without recognizing the passage of time or that he was weary. When he saw his eldest daughter enter, he would give a pale smile. After a few words were exchanged, because neither one nor the other was exactly garrulous, she also passed in review her beloved authors, choosing and turning over the leaves of some book in his immediate neighborhood in that somewhat dusky light of the big courtyard in the Marais, where the bells, sounding vespers near by, fell in heavy notes amidst the stillness that Sunday brings to the commercial quarters of a city. Sometimes he gave her an open book:
“Read that!” and put his finger under a passage; and when she had read it:
“That’s fine, is it not?”
There was no greater pleasure for that young woman, to whom life was offering whatever there was of brilliant and luxuriant things, than the hour passed beside that mournful and aged father in whom her daughterly adoration was raised to a double power by other and intimate bonds altogether intellectual.
It was to him she owed the uprightness of her thought and that feeling for justice which made her so courageous; to him also her taste for the fine arts, her love of painting and of fine poetry—because with Le Quesnoy the continuous pettifoggery of the law had not succeeded in ossifying the man in him.
Rosalie loved her mother and venerated her, not without some little revolt against a nature which was too simple, too gentle, annihilated as it were in her own home; a nature which sorrow, that elevates certain souls, had crushed to the earth and forced into the most ordinary feminine occupations—into practical piety, into housekeeping in its smallest details. Although she was younger than her husband, she appeared to be the elder of the two, judged by her old woman’s talk; she was like one rendered old and sorrowful, who searched all the warm corners of her memory and all the souvenirs of her infancy in a land hot with the sun of Provence. But above all things the church had taken possession of her; since the death of her son she was in the habit of going to church in order to put her sorrow to slumber in the silent freshness and half-light and half-noise of the lofty naves, as though it were in the peace of a cloister barred by heavy double gates against the roar of the outer life. This she did with that devout and cowardly egotism of sorrows which kneel upon a prie-Dieu and are released from all anxieties and duties.