It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman’s despair is so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of every lover’s heart—when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve.
“But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?” asked the Brazilian.
This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie’s waist.
“Why?” she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once by a look charged with passion, “why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.—My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty—nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?—he now abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor——”
“How much more will your husband get then?”
“A thousand crowns.”
“I will pay him as much in an annuity,” said Baron Montes. “We will leave Paris and go——”
“Where?” said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman makes fun of a man she is sure of. “Paris is the only place where we can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in a tete-a-tete in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger’s brain.”
For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.
“Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me—he is poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I—who have already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar—I swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require.”