In a moment of violent anger, which my mother had finally succeeded in provoking, he signed a paper, which until then she had endeavoured in vain to make him sign.
I felt myself abandoned even by my aunts, who, at the idea of having me live for three years at Soissons, near to them, and then at Paris, whence I should be glad to come to pass some months in the country, told me that after having seen Monsieur Lamessine again, who had gone several times to make them a visit, they approved of the marriage.
“Besides,” said aunt Constance, with her customary banter, “if you should be unhappy and abandoned, my dear Juliette, Chivres is here to give you asylum. If you should have a numerous family, Roussot alone would become insufficient, and, to compensate you for your husband’s absence, we would buy another donkey!”
XLI
MY MARRIAGE AND ITS RESULTS
I MARRIED Monsieur Lamessine. My father was not present at my wedding. He confessed to me later that he was so unhappy on that day that he wished to blow out his brains; but he thought, perhaps, I might have need of his protection some day, and he resigned himself to living.
Alas! I ought to have claimed his protection from the very first hours of my marriage, but I felt that if I spoke a word it would be a new anguish for my father, whose fears it would have confirmed; to my grandmother, whose scaffoldings of dreams it would have cast down, and to my dear aunts, whose peace it would have disturbed. I did not say a word until after my confinement, for which I went to Blérancourt, and where I was, so to speak, forced to confidences by my father, who divined all that I must have suffered.
When she knew herself a great-grandmother and that she could embrace her granddaughter’s child, my grandmother hoped to extend the agreement of living with me every winter at Paris to the house at Soissons, which we were to inhabit for eighteen months longer.
One day, when she had come to see me, to complete the secret dowry, the last installment of which she had engaged herself to pay only so soon as we should be settled in Paris, but which she anticipated, she said to my husband when breakfast was over:
“Do you know why I have brought such a large trunk?”