‘What makes the world of men so fanatic about that woman?’ asked Friederich Othmar, exhaling all the unspoken grievances of his own soul in a rude grumble, as the sound of the whirling wheels of her carriage died away. ‘Why? Why? There are numbers more beautiful; few, perhaps, with so perfect a form, yet there are some who equal her even in that. She is as cruel as death, as cold as frost; no one ever saw a flush on her cheek or a tear in her eyes, and when she smiles it is like the sirocco and the north wind blent together; and yet there is no woman so blindly loved.’
‘Yet!’ echoed Prince Ezarhédine. ‘Surely, you should say “therefore.” The sirocco and the north wind blent together are electric shocks to the most sated senses.’
‘Yes,’ added the great statesman who was his guest, ‘and if it will not sound too pedantic, I will add also why it is. She is to her lovers very much what the worship of Isis became to the Latins. She blends an infinite subtlety of sentiment with an infinite potentiality of sensual delight.’
‘Sensual! She is as cold as snow——’
‘I know; she has that sobriquet. But every one feels what a paradise would lie within if the snow were melted. Every one hopes—more or less conscious or unconscious of his hope—to pass that frosty barrier. I think if Madame Napraxine ever loved any man, she would make such a heaven for him that he would be the most enviable of all human beings. But it would only last a month; perhaps six weeks. Although,’ he added, with a faint sigh, ‘it would be worth losing all the rest of life to be the companion of those six weeks.’
‘If I may differ with you, Prince, I would say that, on the contrary, if ever Madame Nadine can be touched to love she will be most tenacious and most constant,’ said Ezarhédine.
‘Perhaps too much so for the felicity of the person whom she might honour,’ added the Baron with a smile that was a little impertinent. He had always disliked and dreaded her; she had wasted two years of his nephew’s life, and he shrewdly suspected that she was the cause of Othmar’s too slight ardour towards his young wife.
Meanwhile, the subject of their meditations and desires was borne by her fleet horses over the sea-road homeward to La Jacquemerille. She felt astonished, irritated, offended at the idyl of Amyôt. To have loved herself, and then to be content shut up within the stone walls of a country-house with a girl taken from a convent!
‘He is like Gilles de Retz,’ she thought, with bitter disdain. ‘He takes the white flesh of a child to try and cure his malady.’
It seemed to her cowardly, sensual, contemptible.