He was not even ambitious.
Those associated with him, witnessing his passionate struggle and his unceasing activity, thought him actuated by an insatiable thirst for power.
He cared little or nothing for it. He considered its burdens heavy; its compensations small. His pride was too lofty to feel any satisfaction in the applause that delights the vain, and flattery disgusted him. Often, in his princely drawing-rooms, during some brilliant fete, his acquaintances noticed a shade of gloom steal over his features, and seeing him thus thoughtful and preoccupied, they respectfully refrained from disturbing him.
“His mind is occupied with momentous questions,” they thought. “Who can tell what important decisions may result from this revery?”
They were mistaken.
At the very moment when his brilliant success made his rivals pale with envy—when it would seem that he had nothing left to wish for in this world, Martial was saying to himself:
“What an empty life! What weariness and vexation of spirit! To live for others—what a mockery!”
He looked at his wife, radiant in her beauty, worshipped like a queen, and he sighed.
He thought of her who was dead—Marie-Anne—the only woman whom he had ever loved.
She was never absent from his mind. After all these years he saw her yet, cold, rigid, lifeless, in that luxurious room at the Borderie; and time, far from effacing the image of the fair girl who had won his youthful heart, made it still more radiant and endowed his lost idol with almost superhuman grace of person and of character.