"Ah! mon Dieu! so madame knows? Poor Bastien! I can take my oath, madame, that he got tipsy from vexation because madame had taken a cab."
If this explanation made Julie smile, her own explanations seemed strange to the soubrette; but she suspected nothing wrong. Julie's life was so regular and so pure! Camille concluded simply that her financial position must be in great danger, since she passed the night talking with the solicitor; and she imparted her solicitude to the other servants, who were distressed by it, even while thinking that they must not allow their wages to go unpaid. The footman, who was a friend of Camille, and as such inclined to shield Bastien, went to the hôtel D'Ormonde, but did not find him there. Bastien had understood that his orders were to go back to the wineshop, and thither he had gone; he was sleeping the sleep of the angels, the only slumber supposed to be delicious enough to be compared with that of a drunken man. The carriage was waiting for him at the door, and the groom, his subordinate, had consented to watch the horses on condition that he was supplied with something to warm him on the box every fifteen minutes. The rascals did not reappear at the hôtel until daylight and did not recover their senses for twenty-four hours. Under other circumstances Julie would have dismissed them; but she foresaw that the bacchanalian episode would introduce confusion into the accounts of the romantic episode, in the gossip of the servants' hall and the porter's lodge. That is what actually happened, and as the people in Madame d'Estrelle's service were not ill-disposed toward her, it seemed that nothing was likely to transpire of her actions during that extraordinary night.
On the next night, as a matter of prudence the lovers held aloof from each other; but on the night following that, although they had made no appointment, they found themselves once more among the shrubbery in the garden, and repeated with renewed delight all that they had said two days before. They continued in this way, undisturbed and without apparent danger, nothing being easier than for Madame d'Estrelle to steal out of her apartments, even without very great precaution, her people being accustomed to see her go out alone for a breath of fresh air, at a late hour on summer nights.
What a delightful existence if it could have lasted! Those meetings had all the charm of mystery, with no remorse to disturb their joys. Both perfectly free, and aspiring only to the most sacred union, sustained by a love strong enough to be able to wait, they sat there in the darkness, amid bushes laden with flowers, in the splendor of the early summer which retains all the charm of spring; they were like two fiancés, who are permitted to love each other, and who, without abusing the permission, keep out of sight in order to arouse no jealousy. It was the honeymoon of sentiment preceding the honeymoon of passion. Passion was already awake, but they fought against it, or rather held it in reserve, by mutual consent, for the time when they would be forced to fight and display their courage; for well they knew what they would have to face, and Julien said to his friend:
"You will suffer terribly for my sake, I know; and I shall suffer to see you suffer; but then we shall belong to each other, and love will afford us ineffable joys which will make us invulnerable to assaults from outside. Even if you were not guarded here by your own modesty and my veneration, it seems to me that my selfish interests, rightly understood, would enjoin upon me not to exhaust all my happiness at once."
At other times Julien was more agitated and less resigned to wait. Then Julie would pacify him by imploring him to remember what he had said the day before.
"I have been so happy since we have loved each other thus!" she would say to him. "Let us not change this blissful condition of affairs. Remember that on the day when I shall say to you aloud that I have chosen you for my life companion, people will laugh and cry out and accuse me of a vulgar infatuation; and I know virtuous women who will say to me cynically: 'Keep him for a lover, since you must have a lover; but see him in secret and don't marry him!' With what sort of a countenance could I endure such impertinences, if my conscience were not clear, and if I no longer felt that I had the right to reply: 'No, he is not my lover! he is my fiancé, whom I love, and who has proved his respect for me as no other man could ever have proved it!' Let us keep all our weapons, Julien; truth is the most powerful of all weapons in the struggle against false ideas."
Julien submitted, because he was entirely devoted to her, and also because his spirit was loyal to that indefinable strain of heroism which had guided his life and restrained the first impulses of his youth. He was still able to conquer his passions, having never allowed them to dominate him entirely. Moreover, this romance of pure love, in the perfume-laden darkness, appealed to his imagination, and to the artist those poetic nights were intoxicating festivals. That garden had dark recesses and imposing masses of foliage, such as we see in Watteau's pictures. The appearance of Julie, charmingly dressed, not over tall, and of graceful outline in her simple gown, was in harmony with that distinctive savor which makes of Watteau a serious painter, a realistic and thoroughly alive Italian, amid conventional surroundings and in an age of affectation. There was a secluded nook where a tall white marble urn, standing high upon an ivy-wreathed pedestal, stood forth vaguely in the darkness, like a spectre, against the black background of the trees. Bluish, indistinguishable lights flitted over the foliage, and the shadows of the branches played about the marble, whose outlines constantly disappeared, although its shape was always graceful and majestic.
Thither Julien repaired to wait for Julie, as soon as his mother had gone to bed, and, when she approached, as smiling and tranquil as happiness itself, with her silk petticoats shimmering in the darkness and her lovely bare arms holding up her skirts, Julien fancied that he was looking upon some modern muse who ruled his destiny, bringing him promises of future bliss with all the charms and fascinations of present real life.
They must enjoy the present without giving too much thought to the morrow, for the uncertainty of future events made it impossible for them to form definite plans. They did not know yet whether they could live on thus, deserted by society, forgotten and at peace in that garden which had become an earthly paradise for love; or whether, ejected from the pavilion by inexorable creditors, they would go to seek an attic chamber in some suburb, with a garden on the window-sill. They proposed to face everything together; that was the only absolute certainty, the only irrevocable determination.