France was ungrateful, France who had paid for her food and her follies for seventeen squandering years. And the journals were indiscriminating, to print such varying tales. And events were unkind, to give the poor later historian so embarrassing a choice between black and white and every colour between. But Fate was just, to turn his wheel abruptly against this over-fortunate woman; or unjust, maybe, to visit with spite so calamitous one who was no eviller or vainer than almost any other woman of us would have been in her place—no worse than you, Mary Lee.
No worse than me: granted. But in what way different from me, then, to have deserved those incomparable years? Ah, well, she would pay for them now: God gets even.
The place of pity is where Fate turns upon a nobler soul. I suffered with this gentle unscrupulous Man who had woo'd Ambition through the last dismal stages on the road where Ambition ends. A Bonaparte at the back of his armies, slinking from defeat to defeat. Bodily pain so monstrous that it could only be borne with the help of morphia injected every few hours by the sombre-faced young doctor who did duty for glittering aide-de-camp. A rudderless wretch, dragged at the heels of "his" army like so much tawdry baggage, a crowned camp-follower, a commander without a command; flaunted by his officers, mocked by his soldiers, cajoled, disowned and threatened by his wife; not daring to return to his capital, not daring to show himself to his troops: shrinking back in the gorgeous Imperial carriage from the hisses of the townspeople in the cities of France he was abandoning to the foe, and the lewd and horrible insults of the troops. A hunchback haggard doll.
For Sedan he rouged himself. Why not? The play had lasted for eighteen years, and the hollow cheeks needed new cosmetics for the final scene. He quitted the stage with excruciating agony of soul and body, with painted dignity, with eternal inseparable calm. Nothing in his reign became him like the leaving it.
Vanity seeks ambition, and the end of ambition is Vanity. There is only love.
CHAPTER XLI: END OF THREE VISIONS: MINE
Before writing to Aunt Martha I waited for the moment in my aged kinswomen's increasing weakness when Conscience told me it was for their sakes only I was summoning her, and not for my own.
It was the second night after she had come. The hour was late, as Grandmother and Aunt Jael had been long in getting to sleep. Aunt Martha and I were sitting down to a bite of supper in the lamp-lit dining-room. All day I had been praying for boldness of heart and steadiness of voice that I might ask her my question. I stared now at her listless faded face. I was already moistening my lips for my introductory "I say, Aunt Martha—" or "By the way—."