The world with its demands, its subjugations, and its perpetual audience, was always there.
Que de fois fermente et gronde,
Sous un air de froid nonchaloir,
Un souriant désespoir
Sous la mascarade du monde!
He knew not whether he most loathed, or was most grateful to, this constant crowd and pressure of society which spared him thought, postponed decision, gave him no leisure to look into his own soul, and sent him to his joyless couch more tired out with the fatigue of so-called pleasure than the labourer in the vineyards or the forests by his day of toil.
The six days passed without any cloud upon their splendour or their gaiety, so far as the three hundred guests gathered there could see, or even dreamed. The sunshine of the early spring was poured on the glittering roofs, the stately terraces, the towers and fanes, the gardens and the waters, of this gracious place where the old French life of other days seemed to revive with all its wit, its elegance, and its good manners, as they had been before the shadow of the guillotine fell over a darkened land. With the eighth day the royal guests and most of the others took their leave. Some score of friends more intimate alone remained there.
A certain dread came upon him of the first hour on which he should find himself alone before his wife. He felt that it was the supreme crisis of his life with her; the frail cup of existence in which their happiness, such as it was, was placed, was set in the furnace of doubt to be graven and proved, or to be wrecked and burst into a thousand pieces.
'If only she would say to me that she believed me,' he thought, 'I would, I think, forgive the rest.'
But this she never said.