Philibert’s family had shown up to this point, a remarkable restraint. As long as I went about as if nothing had happened, they left me alone, but after my scene with Fan I allowed myself a revulsion of feeling. I stopped going out. I shut myself up and sent for my lawyer. Philibert had been gone two months. I saw no reason to put off any longer, the action that I was determined on; I would start divorce proceedings, leave things in professional hands and go home. What else could I do?
July was drawing to a close. The season was ending in a languid dribble of belated garden parties. Fan, with a characteristic spurt of energy, had recovered and gone off to the Austrian Tyrol with the de Greux, leaving me with a last bit of reiterated advice about not being a fool. I observed that I had no place to go, and nothing to do. Biarritz, Trouville, Dinard, would mean carrying on the sickening pretence under an even closer scrutiny than in Paris. The Château de Ste. Clothilde had no charms for me now. I had liked the place, but Philibert had spoiled it with his endless improvements. It was now, his creation stamped with him. Sitting alone in my room at the top of the house with the shabby relics of the Grey House, I thought of him as he had been there in the country, strutting about directing his army of workmen, cutting down trees, pulling up whole lawns to replace them with gravelled terraces, and sinking into the reluctant earth marble basins for the lovely vagrant waters of the park. He had always professed to be the enemy of nature. It was true. What he called—“Les bêtises de la nature,” filled him with disgust. Spreading trees and green fields dotted with buttercups and bubbling streams tumbling through thickets got on his nerves. “Regardez donc le laissez-aller de tout cela,” he would cry. “How ugly it is. How stupid. It has no form, no design.” Clumps of trees in a meadow he would liken to pimples on hairy faces. He called grass the hair of the earth, and couldn’t endure it unless it was close cut. He never saw a stream of water without wanting to use it up in elaborate fountains. Gardens he regarded as “salons” in the open air. One should use the shrubs and trees and flowers as one used silks and brocades in an interior. Everything in a garden must be “voulu.” Nothing must be left to go its own way, not a vine, not a rosebush, not a tree should be allowed a movement of its own. Nature must be bound and twisted into a work of art. “Ah,” he would exclaim, “how it amuses me to torture nature.” You know what he did. The result was very fine of its kind, certainly very grandiose. He would lead people out on the terrace and, standing a minute, a shiny dapper little manikin, five foot four in high heels above that great design of gravel walks and fountains and squares of water, with their little parquets of green grass closed in by hedges, like a series of drawing-rooms, he would sparkle with enthusiasm. “You see,” he would say, “what I have done, you see how these gardens s’accrochent au château, how it is all a part of the house. The château could not exist without the garden, nor the garden without the château. One would have no sense without the other. Before I restored the grounds and elaborated on the old designs of Lenôtre, the house was horrible.” He had placed complicated machinery under his fountains that made the waters when they were in play take a dozen varied successive shapes. Nothing amused him more than watching all those waters playing, twisting, turning, tracing strange designs in the sunlight, designs that he himself had imagined. It gave him a peculiar joy to see his own idea produced in crystal drops of water. He had worked in sunlight and limpid flowing water as a painter works in colours, and had in a way produced for himself the illusion of the miraculous.
He couldn’t understand why I suffered when he had all those magnificent trees uprooted and when later on I complained that there was no shade anywhere and no place to lie down with a book: “But, my poor child, you’ve your bed for that, or your ‘chaise longue.’ This garden is neither a bedroom nor a boudoir, it is a ‘salle de fêtes’.”
I remembered all this. Certainly for many reasons Ste. Clothilde was out of the question. I would take Jinny home with me to St. Mary’s Plains. The moment had come. A strange excitement came over me as I at last wrote out the cablegram to Patience Forbes announcing our sailing on the first of August. On the same day I had a talk with my solicitor. Maître Baudoin was a jaded, dry man, I believe honest, and rather dull. He was eager for a holiday and very bored, I could see, at the idea of being kept in town. He gave me little sympathy.
I wished to divorce my husband. That might or might not be possible. It depended, of course, to a certain extent, to a limited extent, on whether I had sufficient grounds, and whether Monsieur le Marquis contested the suit. I intimated briefly that I believed I had sufficient grounds. He eyed me gravely through half-shut deferential and sleepy eyes. Did I think my husband would defend the suit, because if he did, no matter what my grounds were, the case might last five years. He told me this as a matter of conscience. Such a case would be lucrative to him, of course, but it might prove fatiguing to the parties more directly concerned. Five years? Yes, or even ten. That was the way in France. A divorce against a man who fought it was very difficult to obtain, and of course the Church did not recognize it. That was not his affair save in so far as if I had the intention of re-marrying, such a marriage would of necessity be considered bigamous by all good Catholics. I had, I said, no intention of marrying a second time. He seemed at that rather mystified. I desired, then, nothing more than legal separation? That was much simpler. It was all a question of property. Was there a settlement? He supposed I wished “séparation des biens.” I told him that I had no wish to leave Monsieur de Joigny in financial difficulties and that that question might be left until later, but he proved obstinate and kept on talking on the same subject till my head ached. Finally I gathered that he was suggesting as delicately as he could that Philibert might be bribed. “But I can’t settle on him a large sum,” I objected wearily, “the fortune is tied up for my daughter.”
“Ah, a trust?”
“Yes.”
“It all goes to your child on your death?”
“Yes, to my children or child, by my father’s will.”