She certainly has been most unfortunate,--poor Princess Sophie. When, three years ago, she returned from Petersburg a widow and possessed of a colossal fortune, she hoped to obliterate all memories of former irregularities by a marriage with Prince Zino Capito. But Zino did not second her views. Two months after the death of the Prince he scarcely spoke to her.
It was during the following winter that Sophie Oblonsky committed the serious 'imprudence' by which she lost forever her social position. At the roulette-table in San Carlo she made the acquaintance of a young Hungarian who was presented to her as a Comte de Bethenyi. He was young, ardent, wore picturesque fur collars and jackets which well became his handsome gypsy face, flung his money about everywhere, and played the piano. Sophie Oblonsky was always sensitive to music. The picturesque Hungarian inspired her with an interest such as none but a disappointed woman of forty can experience. In dread of compromising herself, she consented to marry him, and they were betrothed, whereupon suddenly various Esterhazys and Zichys of her acquaintance appeared at San Carlo, and in the casino of the place met the Princess upon her lover's arm, bowed to her, and honoured her companion with a very odd stare. After they had passed, Sophie heard them laugh.
In an hour all Monaco knew that the Princess Oblonsky had betrothed herself to a fencing-master from Klausenburg, who shortly before had won a prize of ten thousand marks in the Saxon lottery. That same evening Caspar Bethenyi risked his last thousand francs on number twenty-nine,--perhaps because the twenty-ninth of January was his birthday,--and lost. The following night he put a bullet through his brains.
The correspondent of 'Figaro' wrote an amusing article upon the episode, and the Princess Oblonsky was henceforth impossible: she had made herself ridiculous.
The world found the affair extremely comical,--so comical that there was a strong admixture of contempt even in the compassion accorded to the poor fencing-master, who had signed his name simply Caspar Bethenyi in the strangers' book, and who, it was afterwards discovered, had accepted rather unwillingly the rank bestowed upon him by waiters and journalists.
Since this had occurred, two years before, the Oblonsky had tried in vain to regain a footing in society. Considerable surprise was expressed that when thus exiled from the 'world' of western Europe she did not retire to Petersburg; but she probably had her own reasons for not doing so.
Another woman in her place, with her immense means, might have let go all she had lost and lived gaily from day to day. But she was naturally slow, and with the luxurious tendencies of her temperament were mingled sentimentality and a certain liability to sporadic attacks of a sense of propriety. She grasped at everything that could make her at one with the world.
She had set her heart upon a respectable marriage, becoming her rank. In the far distance Edgar von Rohritz hovered before her as the St. George who was destined to slay for her the dragon of prejudice.
Certain people, especially women, understand how to touch up their reminiscences with the same artistic skill that a photographer expends upon his pictures, so that very little remains of the fact as it was originally projected upon the memory.
Sophie Oblonsky erased, in this touching up of her reminiscences, everything that she disliked. She talked so much of her virtue that she finally came to believe in it.