“Pooh!” said little Baudraye, “the Duke of Bracciano, whom his wife puts into a cage, and to whom she shows herself every night in the arms of her lover, will kill her—and do you call that revenge?—Our laws and our society are far more cruel.”
“Why, little La Baudraye is talking!” said Monsieur Boirouge to his wife.
“Why, the woman is left to live on a small allowance, the world turns its back on her, she has no more finery, and no respect paid her—the two things which, in my opinion, are the sum-total of woman,” said the little old man.
“But she has happiness!” said Madame de la Baudraye sententiously.
“No,” said the master of the house, lighting his candle to go to bed, “for she has a lover.”
“For a man who thinks of nothing but his vine-stocks and poles, he has some spunk,” said Lousteau.
“Well, he must have something!” replied Bianchon.
Madame de la Baudraye, the only person who could hear Bianchon’s remark, laughed so knowingly, and at the same time so bitterly, that the physician could guess the mystery of this woman’s life; her premature wrinkles had been puzzling him all day.
But Dinah did not guess, on her part, the ominous prophecy contained for her in her husband’s little speech, which her kind old Abbe Duret, if he had been alive, would not have failed to elucidate. Little La Baudraye had detected in Dinah’s eyes, when she glanced at the journalist returning the ball of his jests, that swift and luminous flash of tenderness which gilds the gleam of a woman’s eye when prudence is cast to the winds, and she is fairly carried away. Dinah paid no more heed to her husband’s hint to her to observe the proprieties than Lousteau had done to Dinah’s significant warnings on the day of his arrival.
Any other man than Bianchon would have been surprised at Lousteau’s immediate success; but he was so much the doctor, that he was not even nettled at Dinah’s marked preference for the newspaper-rather than the prescription-writer! In fact, Dinah, herself famous, was naturally more alive to wit than to fame. Love generally prefers contrast to similitude. Everything was against the physician—his frankness, his simplicity, and his profession. And this is why: Women who want to love—and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved—have an instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led the half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind—“The doctor is perhaps the better man, but I do not like him.”