Elizabeth instantly recalled her own remarks to Albert, as he selected for her, in this same museum, the pictures which could mold her taste. She found the old man, by Fragonard, which was to be found beside the Largillière, and studied it attentively. She had no difficulty in interesting herself in this lined face, which sums up the whole life story of a hard-working peasant, a dreamer, and somewhat of a drunkard. How easy to understand these works of art, which one thinks are only admired by a select few! It was only necessary to compare them with reality, to consider them a more exact transposition in a better frame, of the too vast and complicated panorama of life. Albert's remarks, which she recalled, deepened her vision. She drew Marie Louise towards the old portrait.
"Leave that expressionless face. Look at this one. How much more it tells you! We had a neighbor at St. Martin who was like him. He was found drowned in a stream, one night, but nobody in church sang better than he did. He was not a bad man. He drank too much. He was well punished."
"Mamma," said the little girl, "I like it when you tell stories...."
Another time, resuming her piano study, which had been fairly far developed, but in rather a mechanical way, she took up Beethoven's sonata, so rightly named The Appassionata, and lived it so intensely that she forgot her sorrow, or rather, gave to it its pathetic interpretation. After the allegro, harassed, but lightened by the recurrence of a sadly ardent love motive, and the andante which lifts itself above human storms to perfect serenity, she began the third part, which is interrupted as if by despairing cries, when she heard Marie Louise, whose presence she had forgotten, weeping.
"What is the matter, dearest?"
"I don't know. Your playing is so sad."
"I should not have played that for you."
"Oh, yes; I love it when it is sad."
She had been able, then, to transmit her feeling, and to cultivate in her daughter that deep sensibility which the child inherited from her father, and which, developed, might become a source of noble joys and dignity to her. Albert, if he met her later, would be obliged to admit that, separated from him, his children had not deteriorated. That would be the revenge of the deserted woman.
In the spring, Elizabeth, who from time to time watched the book-store windows, saw a new book of her husband's advertised, the third volume of the "History of the Peasant." It was the first he had published since their separation. She had never desired so passionately to read a book. Fascinated, and yet not daring to buy a copy, she passed again and again. In Grenoble she was too well-known for this purchase not to be noticed and become the talk of the town. What was she to do? Her curiosity was so keen that it left her no peace. She discovered near her home in the Rue de Strasbourg, a little book-shop with a wretched window, where she certainly would not be known. At nightfall she slipped into the shop.