“Certain obstacles!” said M. Daburon in a hollow voice. “You love a man, he knows it, and he is stopped by obstacles?”
“I am poor,” answered Mademoiselle d’Arlange, “and his family is immensely rich. His father is cruel, inexorable.”
“His father,” cried the magistrate, with a bitterness he did not dream of hiding, “his father, his family, and that withholds him! You are poor, he is rich, and that stops him! And yet he knows you love him! Ah! why am I not in his place? and why have I not the entire universe against me? What sacrifice can compare with love? such as I understand it. Nay, would it be a sacrifice? That which appears most so, is it not really an immense joy? To suffer, to struggle, to wait, to hope always, to devote oneself entirely to another; that is my idea of love.”
“It is thus I love,” said Claire with simplicity.
This answer crushed the magistrate. He could understand it. He knew that for him there was no hope; but he felt a terrible enjoyment in torturing himself, and proving his misfortune by intense suffering.
“But,” insisted he, “how have you known him, spoken to him? Where? When? Madame d’Arlange receives no one.”
“I ought now to tell you everything, sir,” answered Claire proudly. “I have known him for a long time. It was at the house of one of my grandmother’s friends, who is a cousin of his,—old Mademoiselle Goello, that I saw him for the first time. There we spoke to each other; there we meet each other now.”
“Ah!” exclaimed M. Daburon, whose eyes were suddenly opened, “I remember now. A few days before your visit to Mademoiselle Goello, you are gayer than usual; and, when you return, you are often sad.”
“That is because I see how much he is pained by the obstacles he cannot overcome.”
“Is his family, then, so illustrious,” asked the magistrate harshly, “that it disdains alliance with yours?”