As he was afraid of insomnia he took from the chest of drawers a bottle of orange-flower water which he frequently used. Ever careful to observe conjugal courtesy, he had taken the precaution of lowering the wick of the lamp, before placing it where it would be least likely to disturb the sleeper; but a slight tinkling of the glass as he put it down after he had finished drinking, reached Marguerite, where she lay plunged in unconsciousness; she gave an animal grunt and turned to the wall. Julius, glad of an excuse for considering her awake, drew near the bed and asked as he began to undress:
“Would you like to hear what my father says about my book?”
“Oh, my dear, your poor father has no feeling for literature. You’ve told me so a hundred times,” murmured Marguerite whose one desire was to go on sleeping. But Julius’s heart was too full.
“He says it’s unpardonable rubbish.”
There was a long silence, during which Marguerite sank once more into the depths of slumber. Julius was already resigning himself to uncompanioned solitude, when, making a desperate effort for his sake, she rose again to the surface:
“I hope you’re not going to be upset about it.”
“I am taking it with perfect calm, as you can see,” answered Julius at once. “But at the same time I really don’t think it’s my father’s place to speak so—especially not my father’s—and especially not about that book, which in reality is nothing from first to last but a monument in his honour.”
Had not Julius, indeed, retraced in this book the old diplomat’s truly representative career? As a companion picture to the turbulent follies of romanticism, had he not glorified the dignified, the ordered, the classic calm of Juste-Agénor’s existence in its twofold aspect, political and domestic?
“Fortunately, you didn’t write it to please him.”
“He insinuates that I wrote On the Heights in order to get into the Academy.”