The two women, pale as death, did not stir, and one could hear
distinctly the thumping of the baroness' heart.
At dinner Julien was more charming than usual, as though nothing had
occurred. Jeanne, her father, and Madame Adelaide, pleased to see him
so amiable, fell in with his mood, and when Jeanne mentioned the
Brisevilles, he laughed at them himself, adding, however: "All the
same, they have the grand air."
They made no more visits, each one fearing to revive the Marius
episode. They decided, to send New Year's cards, and to wait until the
first warm days of spring before paying any more calls.
At Christmas they invited the curé, the mayor and his wife to dinner,
and again on New Year's Day. These were the only events that varied
the monotony of their life. The baron and his wife were to leave "The
Poplars" on the ninth of January. Jeanne wanted to keep them, but
Julien did not acquiesce, and the baron sent for a post-chaise from
Rouen, seeing his son-in-law's coolness.
The day before their departure, as it was a clear frost, Jeanne and
her father decided to go to Yport, which they had not visited since
her return from Corsica. They crossed the wood where she had strolled
on her wedding-day, all wrapped up in the one whose lifelong companion
she had become; the wood where she had received her first kiss,
trembled at the first breath of love, had a presentiment of that
sensual love of which she did not become aware until she was in the
wild vale of Ota beside the spring where they mingled their kisses as
they drank of its waters. The trees were now leafless, the climbing
vines dead.
They entered the little village. The empty, silent streets smelled of
the sea, of wrack, of fish. Huge brown nets were still hanging up to
dry outside the houses, or stretched out on the shingle. The gray,
cold sea, with its eternal roaring foam, was going out, uncovering the
green rocks at the foot of the cliff toward Fécamp.
Jeanne and her father, motionless, watched the fishermen setting out
in their boats in the dusk, as they did every night, risking their
lives to keep from starving, and so poor, nevertheless, that they
never tasted meat.
The baron, inspired at the sight of the ocean, murmured: "It is
terrible, but it is beautiful. How magnificent this sea is on which
the darkness is falling, and on which so many lives are in peril, is
it not, Jeannette?"
She replied with a cold smile: "It is nothing to the Mediterranean."
Her father, indignant, exclaimed: "The Mediterranean! It is oil, sugar
water, bluing water in a washtub. Look at this sea, how terrible it is
with its crests of foam! And think of all those men who have set out
on it, and who are already out of sight."