“Yes,” I answered, choking with sobs, “I am as unhappy as one can possibly be.”
My grandmother rose from her seat suddenly, but she was obliged to lean against a chair to keep from falling. She tottered like a tree that is being uprooted.
“But your promises?” she said to my husband.
“They were necessary, my dear madame,” he replied, “only until you had finished keeping yours integrally.”
My grandmother opened the dining-room door without saying a word, took her cloak from the hall, and left our house. I went up to my room to put on my bonnet, and followed her. I did not know where to look for her. A man had come to get her trunk, which I saw put on the diligence. I learned later that a lady had taken a place for herself in it; that she had left the village in a carriage and was to take the diligence outside of the town. She had done likewise when she carried me off from Verberie.
I could not leave my daughter, whom I was nursing. I returned, and implored my husband to take the diligence, to rejoin my grandmother, and bring her back to me.
“Ah! no, indeed!” he said to me; “it has gone off too well! No drama, no quarrel. I am delighted.”
I could do nothing but give the driver of the diligence a letter for my poor grandmother, in which I told her all my sorrow. I added: “I am ‘tied’ in my turn, and I ‘browse’; but I shall untie myself as soon as I possibly can.”
And so my grandmother’s last and dearest romance ended cruelly. On returning to Chauny she starved herself to death. Knowing she had but a few days more to live, she sent for my father and asked him to pardon her for the harm she had done to him and to me, in marrying me against his wishes and mine.
My father forgave her, and implored her to do all that she could to live (alas! had she wished it, there was no longer time!), saying that I had need of all those who loved me, more than ever now.