And so murmuring he fell asleep. When he woke and found his head pillowed on his mother’s breast, it was much as a sensitive, delicate man may wake after having drunk too much the night before. Repentant, mournful, maudlin, he began to weep, and in the course of his weeping he confided to his mother the secret of his heart.
Isaura had refused him—that refusal had made him desperate.
“Ah! with Isaura how changed would be his habits! how pure! how healthful!” His mother listened fondly, and did her best to comfort him and cheer his drooping spirits.
She told him of Isaura’s messages of inquiry duly twice a day. Rameau, who knew more about women in general, and Isaura in particular, than his mother conjectured, shook his head mournfully. “She could not do less,” he said. “Has no one offered to do more?”—he thought of Julie when he asked that—Madame Rameau hesitated.
The poor Parisians! it is the mode to preach against them; and before my book closes, I shall have to preach—no, not to preach, but to imply—plenty of faults to consider and amend. Meanwhile I try my best to take them, as the philosophy of life tells us to take other people, for what they are.
I do not think the domestic relations of the Parisian bourgeoisie are as bad as they are said to be in French novels. Madame Rameau is not an uncommon type of her class. She had been when she first married singularly handsome. It was from her that Gustave inherited his beauty; and her husband was a very ordinary type of the French shopkeeper—very plain, by no means intellectual, but gay, good-humoured, devotedly attached to his wife, and with implicit trust in her conjugal virtue. Never was trust better placed. There was not a happier nor a more faithful couple in the quartier in which they resided. Madame Rameau hesitated when her boy, thinking of Julie, asked if no one had done more than send to inquire after him as Isaura had done.
After that hesitating pause she said, “Yes—a young lady calling herself Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin wished to instal herself here as your nurse. When I said, ‘But I am his mother—he needs no other nurses,’ she would have retreated, and looked ashamed—poor thing! I don’t blame her if she loved my son. But, my son, I say this,—if you love her, don’t talk to me about that Mademoiselle Cicogna; and if you love Mademoiselle Cicogna, why, then your father will take care that the poor girl who loved you not knowing that you loved another is not left to the temptation of penury.”
Rameau’s pale lips withered into a phantom-like sneer! Julie! the resplendent Julie!—true, only a ballet-dancer, but whose equipage in the Bois had once been the envy of duchesses—Julie! who had sacrificed fortune for his sake—who, freed from him, could have millionaires again at her feet!—Julie! to be saved from penury, as a shopkeeper would save an erring nursemaid—Julie! the irrepressible Julie! who had written to him, the day before his illness, in a pen dipped, not in ink, but in blood from a vein she had opened in her arm:
“Traitor!—I have not seen thee for three days. Dost thou dare to
love another? If so, I care not how thou attempt to conceal it—woe
to her! Ingrat! woe to thee! Love is not love, unless, when
betrayed by Love, it appeals to death. Answer me quick—quick.
JULIE.”
Poor Gustave thought of that letter and groaned. Certainly his mother was right—he ought to get rid of Julie; but he did not clearly see how Julie was to be got rid of. He replied to Madame Rameau peevishly, “Don’t trouble your head about Mademoiselle Caumartin; she is in no want of money. Of course, if I could hope for Isaura—but, alas! I dare not hope. Give me my tisane.”