“No,” she said.
“Poor fellow!” she thought, brushing a tear from her eyes, “he guesses my feelings, servant though he is!”
She read: “My beloved, you are inventing idle terrors for yourself...” The Marquise gazed at the words, and a thick mist spread before her eyes. A voice in her heart cried, “He lies!”—Then she glanced down the page with the clairvoyant eagerness of passion, and read these words at the foot, “Nothing has been decided as yet...” Turning to the other side with convulsive quickness, she saw the mind of the writer distinctly through the intricacies of the wording; this was no spontaneous outburst of love. She crushed it in her fingers, twisted it, tore it with her teeth, flung it in the fire, and cried aloud, “Ah! base that he is! I was his, and he had ceased to love me!”
She sank half dead upon the couch.
M. de Nueil went out as soon as he had written his letter. When he came back, Jacques met him on the threshold with a note. “Madame la Marquise has left the chateau,” said the man.
M. de Nueil, in amazement, broke the seal and read:—
“MADAME,—If I could cease to love you, to take the chances of
becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you must admit
that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I shall not do as
you bid me; the oath of fidelity which I swear to you shall only
be absolved by death. Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not
fear to carry a remorse all through your own...”
It was his own letter, written to the Marquise as she set out for Geneva nine years before. At the foot of it Claire de Bourgogne had written, “Monsieur, you are free.”
M. de Nueil went to his mother at Manerville. In less than three weeks he married Mlle. Stephanie de la Rodiere.
If this commonplace story of real life ended here, it would be to some extent a sort of mystification. The first man you meet can tell you a better. But the widespread fame of the catastrophe (for, unhappily, this is a true tale), and all the memories which it may arouse in those who have known the divine delights of infinite passion, and lost them by their own deed, or through the cruelty of fate,—these things may perhaps shelter the story from criticism.