"Will you give me the last volume of the 'History of the Peasant' by Albert Derize, if you please?"
"Albert Derize? Don't know him."
She, who had said these syllables with an effort, was irritated to hear them despised. She went out without thanking him, and hastened to the principal book-shop of the town on the Place Victor-Hugo, where, without dissembling, she bought the volume she coveted. As she was hurrying along with her treasure, she met Counselor Prémereux, who, always gallant to the ladies, came up to her. After the usual polite platitudes, he pointed to the parcel.
"I wager it is a novel," he said.
"Yes, it is a novel."
"But, no, it is not the shape...."
She blushed, and finding no ready lie, changed the conversation. As soon as she could get away, she ran home to hide herself. She had never read anything so eagerly. Disturbed by the children's questions, she waited for the evening to devote herself entirely to it.
It was, like the previous volumes, a very scholarly book, but so well constructed that it sustained itself, as it were, and rose page by page like a great building; and moreover, it seemed vibrant with light and filled with experience like one of those old stories of the past, which time cannot kill. Elizabeth imagined that the warmth and light, by which Albert's personality usually manifested itself, were particularly evident in this last volume, and she sought them in her eagerness with a new sensitiveness. She bore a grudge against the despised source of inspiration, and in consequence, her distress was increased. Panting, oppressed, tortured by the reading, and yet unable to put the book down, she reached, in the middle of the night, the last part, which dealt with the customs of the Basque country, and quoted them as examples of the strongest consolidation of a race, through the maintenance of a rural home and the family spirit. The author gave his own observations on the power of inheritance, on the active force of tradition. Following Le Play and Cheysson, he took up the history of the Melouga family, and passing into Spain, he quoted other examples of respect for the land joined with respect for the head of the family. The book finished with a sort of hymn in honor of the race and the soil.
No doubt such a conclusion did not lack irony. By what right was he, who thus exalted the family and the home, and in so solemn, exact and eloquent a style, qualified to speak of them? He showed the importance of unity in the family, of fixed inheritance, indissolubility of marriage; and he himself, voluntarily out of society, had left his wife and children, and visited the Basque countries to gather this sheaf of reflections there, in the company of his mistress. For a reader who knew the circumstances, this must be amusing. So many who lead regular lives, it is true, write anarchistic books, that one must expect by contrast, to receive lessons in conventionality from those who live irregularly, whose weakness in private life touches only the heart or the senses without corrupting the mind. It is so easy, so tempting, so flattering, to convert one's passions into theories, to transform one's own misfortunes into public calamities, to generalize one's mistakes, that it required a clear-sighted point of view to distinguish the lack of solidity in his power of resistance to his own experience, and to understand that this implied a rare force of thought in him.
Elizabeth, when she closed the volume, had not grasped the irony of the contrast. But the realization that Albert had not changed in his social analyses and remained resolutely faithful to his first theories on the subject, which she now remembered having heard him outline, seemed to indicate to her that in place of a lost heart, a mental link still connected him with those whom he had deserted, and that she had not been betrayed as thoroughly as she thought.