"Ah! diantre! do you propose to talk about that? What's the use? You know well that it's a painful subject to me!" said Monsieur Antoine, his good-humored face suddenly becoming clouded.
"You must talk about it, as it is for the last time," said Gilberte. "What I am going to say will pain you, and yet I am sure that it will take a great weight off your heart. Come, come, dear father, don't turn your head away, and don't put on that careworn expression that makes your Gilberte feel so pained. I know very well that you don't want me to mention the marquis's name before you; you say that it's none of my affair and that I can do nothing to bring you together. But it is too bad to treat me as a little girl, and I am quite old enough to know a little something of your sorrows so that I can help you to find consolation for them. Very good; I was making inquiries of Monsieur Cardonnet,—who sees Monsieur de Boisguilbault frequently, and to whom he has given his confidence on many important matters,—as to that gentleman's frame of mind toward us. I was saying to him that to relieve you from the regret which you still feel for having unintentionally wounded him, I would give my life—wasn't that what I was saying?"
"And then?" queried Monsieur de Châteaubrun, putting his daughter's pretty hand to his lips with a preoccupied air.
"And then," she continued, "Monsieur Emile had already told me what I wanted to know, namely, that Monsieur de Boisguilbault still nourishes an intense resentment, but that we need think no more about it, because it is founded upon nothing at all, and you have, thank God! nothing with which to reproach yourself! Indeed, I was sure of it, dearest father; I simply dreaded one of your fits of absent-mindedness. But now you can set your mind at rest, although you will be distressed, I am sure, at your old friend's deplorable condition. Monsieur de Boisguilbault really is what he is said to be, and you must recognize it as everybody else does—the poor man is mad."
"Mad!" cried Monsieur Antoine, terror-stricken and grief-stricken at once, "really mad? Have you heard him talk wildly, Emile? Does he suffer much? does he complain? has he been pronounced mad by the doctors? Oh! that is horrible news to me!"
And honest Antoine, sinking upon a bench, tried in vain to repress his sobs. His robust breast swelled as if it would burst.
"O mon Dieu! see how he loves him still!" cried Gilberte, throwing herself on her knees at her father's feet and covering him with kisses. "Oh! forgive me, forgive me, father dear! I spoke too hastily! I have pained you! Come and help me to console him, Emile."
Emile started when Gilberte, in her excitement, forgot for the first time to call him monsieur. It seemed that she looked upon him as a brother, and, in an outburst of emotion, he too knelt beside poor Antoine, who seemed to be threatened with an apoplectic stroke, he was so red and so oppressed.
"Never fear," said Emile, "matters have not reached that point and never will, I trust. Monsieur de Boisguilbault is not ill; he has the full enjoyment of all his faculties. His monomania, if we may so describe his professed repulsion for your family, is not a new disease; only, finding that strange freak in a man so tranquil and tolerant in all other respects, I believed for a long while that there must be some serious reasons for it, and I am forced to admit now that there are none; that it is a streak of temporary madness, which he will forget if it is not stirred up again, and that you are not the sole object of it, since other persons, of whom he has never had any reason to complain, and whom he does not know at all, inspire the same unhealthy feeling of horror and repulsion."
"Explain yourself," said Monsieur Antoine, beginning to breathe once more; "who are these other persons?"