An hour later she was alone with her husband in the room she had so joyously arranged a few hours earlier. They had reached that fatal bed where, like a tomb, so many hopes are wrecked, where the waking to a happy life is all uncertain, where love is born or dies, according to the natures that are tried there. Marie looked at the clock. “Six hours to live,” she murmured.
“Can I have slept?” she cried toward morning, wakening with one of those sudden movements which rouse us when we have made ourselves a promise to wake at a certain hour. “Yes, I have slept,” she thought, seeing by the light of the candles that the hands of the clock were pointing to two in the morning. She turned and looked at the sleeping marquis, lying like a child with his head on one hand, the other clasping his wife’s hand, his lips half smiling as though he had fallen asleep while she kissed him.
“Ah!” she whispered to herself, “he sleeps like an infant; he does not distrust me—me, to whom he has given a happiness without a name.”
She touched him softly and he woke, continuing to smile. He kissed the hand he held and looked at the wretched woman with eyes so sparkling that she could not endure their light and slowly lowered her large eyelids. Her husband might justly have accused her of coquetry if she were not concealing the terrors of her soul by thus evading the fire of his looks. Together they raised their charming heads and made each other a sign of gratitude for the pleasures they had tasted; but after a rapid glance at the beautiful picture his wife presented, the marquis was struck with an expression on her face which seemed to him melancholy, and he said in a tender voice, “Why sad, dear love?”
“Poor Alphonse,” she answered, “do you know to what I have led you?”
“To happiness.”
“To death!”
Shuddering with horror she sprang from the bed; the marquis, astonished, followed her. His wife motioned him to a window and raised the curtain, pointing as she did so to a score of soldiers. The moon had scattered the fog and was now casting her white light on the muskets and the uniforms, on the impassible Corentin pacing up and down like a jackal waiting for his prey, on the commandant, standing still, his arms crossed, his nose in the air, his lips curling, watchful and displeased.
“Come, Marie, leave them and come back to me.”
“Why do you smile? I placed them there.”