Her sensation was terrible, such as if her whole blood had suddenly escaped through her open arteries. She turned pale, her teeth chattered; and she seemed so near fainting, that the Signor Gismondo sprang to the door, crying, “Help, help! she is dying.”
Mme. Favoral, frightened, came running in. But already, thanks to an all-powerful projection of will, Mlle. Gilberte had recovered, and, smiling a pale smile,
“It’s nothing, mamma,” she said. “A sudden pain in the head; but it’s gone already.”
The worthy maestro was in perfect agony. Taking Mme. Favoral aside,
“It is my fault,” he said. “It is the story of my unheard-of misfortunes that has upset her thus. Monstrous egotist that I am! I should have been careful of her exquisite sensibility.”
She insisted, nevertheless, upon taking her lesson as usual, and recovered enough presence of mind to extract from the Signor Gismondo everything that his much-regretted pupil had confided to him.
That was not much. He knew that his pupil had gone, like anyone else, to Rue de Cherche Midi; that he had signed an engagement; and had been ordered to join a regiment in process of formation near Tours. And, as he went out,
“That is nothing,” said the kind maestro to Mme. Favoral. “The signora has quite recovered, and is as gay as a lark.”
The signora, shut up in her room, was shedding bitter tears. She tried to reason with herself, and could not succeed. Never had the strangeness of her situation so clearly appeared to her. She repeated to herself that she must be mad to have thus become attached to a stranger. She wondered how she could have allowed that love, which was now her very life, to take possession of her soul. But to what end? It no longer rested with her to undo what had been done.
When she thought that Marius de Tregars was about to leave Paris to become a soldier, to fight, to die perhaps, she felt her head whirl; she saw nothing around her but despair and chaos.