"I thought that the grand duchess did not leave you any child?"
"She did not; but before my marriage with her I had a daughter, who died very young. Well! strange as it may appear to you, the loss of this child, whom I had hardly seen, is the sorrow of my life. The older I become, the more profound my regrets! Each year redoubles the bitterness. It seems to increase as her years would have increased. Now she would have been seventeen!"
"And does her mother still live?" asked Clemence.
"Oh! do not speak of her!" cried Rudolph. "Her mother is an unworthy creature, a being bronzed by egotism and ambition. Sometimes I ask myself if it were not better my child should be dead, than to have remained in the hands of her mother."
Clemence experienced a kind of satisfaction in hearing Rudolph express himself thus. "Oh! I conceive," cried she, "how you doubly regret your daughter!"
"I should have loved her so well! and, besides, it seems to me that among us princes there is always in our love for a son a kind of interest of race and name; but a daughter is loved for herself alone. And when one has seen, alas! humanity under the most sinister aspects, what delight to contemplate a pure and lovely being! to inhale her virgin purity, to watch over her with tender care! A mother the most fond and most proud of her daughter cannot experience this feeling; she is herself too similar to taste these ineffable delights; she will appreciate much more the manly qualities of a bold and noble boy. For, do you not find that that which renders, perhaps, still more touching the love of a mother for her son, a father for his daughter, is, that there is always in these affections a feeble being who has need of protection. The son protects the mother, the father protects the daughter."
"Oh, it is true."
"But, alas! why understand the ineffable joys, when one can never experience them?" said Rudolph, dejectedly. "But pardon me, madame; my regrets and my souvenirs have, in spite of myself, carried me away; you will excuse me?"
"Ah! believe I partake of your sorrows. Have I not the right? Have you not partaken of mine? Unfortunately, the consolations that I can offer you are in vain."
"No, no; the expression of your interest is sweet and salutary to me. It is weakness, but I cannot hear a young girl spoken of without thinking of her whom I have lost."