"I love him and admire him still," replied the young man in a tone of the utmost earnestness; "yes, I admire him. No one knows better than I his great qualities and what he might have been. What a soldier! He proved it during the war. What a diplomatist! What an administrator! What a Councillor of State! And he is nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing! Why, it is the whole tragedy of my thoughts, the evidence of my father's magnificent gifts, paralyzed by his name, solely by his name! Since I have become observant, I have seen that he, intelligent, generous, straightforward as he is, makes no use of his energies, takes part in none of the activities of his time. And yet there is a contemporaneous France. He is in it, but not of it. It will have none of him, who will have none of it. He will have passed his youth, his maturity, his old age, in what? In taking part in a pompous parade of the ancien régime, what with his receptions at Paris and Grandchamp, his stag-hunting, and the playing the patron to an enormous and utterly unprofitable clientage, of low and high estate, who live on his luxury or his income. I felt the worthlessness of all that too soon; he will never feel it. He is deceived by a mirage. He is close to a time when the nobility was still an aristocracy. My grandfather was twenty-six years old in 1827, when he succeeded to my great-grandfather's peerage, and my great-grandfather was colonel of the dragoons of Claviers before '89. For there were dragoons of Claviers-Grandchamp as there were of Custine and Jarnac, Belzunce and Lanan. They are far away. But in my father's eyes all those things so entirely uprooted and done away with are still realities. He is in touch with them. He has known those who saw them. As a little boy he played on the knees of old ladies who had been at court at Versailles. One would say that that past fascinates him more and more as it recedes. To me it is death, and I desired to live. That was the motive that led me to enter the army. Indeed, I had no choice. All other careers were closed to the future Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp.—These are the privileges you spoke of just now. I let you have your say.—Yes, closed. Foreign affairs? Closed. My father would have been welcomed by the Empire at least. To-day they no longer want us. The Council of State? Closed. The government? Closed. Can you imagine a nobleman as a prefect? They were under Napoleon and the Restoration. The liberal professions? Closed. Though a noble had the genius of a Trosseau, a Berryer, or a Séguin, no one would have him to treat a cold in the head, to try a case about a division fence, or to build a foot-bridge. Commerce? Closed. Manufacturing? Closed, or practically so. To succeed in it we nobles must have a superior talent of which I, for my part, have never been conscious. Politics? That is like all the rest. People blame nobles for not taking up a profession! They forget that they are excluded from almost all, and the others are made ten times more difficult by their birth. And you would have me not call them pariahs! I say again, I resolved not to be one. The army was left. I prepared at Saint-Cyr, not without a struggle. There at least I knew the pleasure of not being a creature apart, of feeling that I was a Frenchman like the others, of not being exiled from my time, from my generation, from my fatherland; the delight of the uniform, of touching elbows with comrades, of obeying my superiors and of commanding my inferiors. That uniform no one shall tear from me except with my life. In losing it I should lose all my reasons for living.—All, no, since I love you. I wanted to speak to you to-day to learn whether I shall keep you in the trial that is in store for me. It will have its painful sides!—Now that you know what the crisis is that I am on the point of passing through," he added, "will you still answer no as you did a moment ago? I have no pride and I ask you again, will you be my wife? Not the wife of the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, whose father and whose environment you dread, but of a soldier with whom that environment will have no more to do, whom his father will have spurned? If I should ever have superintended the taking of a church inventory, it will arouse in the mothers another sort of indignation than for a mésalliance, as you call it, and as I do not call it. If I have you, the wound will bleed, doubtless, but I shall have you. You and my profession, my profession and you, those are enough to make me very strong."
"You have disturbed me too profoundly," said Valentine. "I no longer know anything. I do not see clear within myself. I have felt your suffering too keenly. Mon Dieu! when I received your letter, I did guess what you wanted to speak to me about. I did not guess everything. I had taken a resolution. I believed that I was sure of keeping to it. In the face of your trouble I can not.—Listen. Be generous Do not urge me any further. Give me credit for the answer that you ask. I told you just now that I could not receive you any more after this. I have no pride, either. I withdraw that also. As you will pass through Paris again to-morrow, returning to Saint-Mihiel, come again to see me. I shall have reflected meanwhile. I shall be in a condition to answer otherwise than under the impulse of an emotion which discomposes me. Oh! why, in all the talks we have had together in these last three years, have you never told me so much about all these intimate details of your life? I would have helped you—I would have tried, at all events."
"That is another of the misfortunes of the noble," Landri replied. "There is one subject that he can never broach first, the precise subject of his nobility. But calm yourself, I implore you, as I do myself. See. It is enough that you do not repeat the 'never' of a few moments ago, for me to recover my self-control. I will be here to-morrow, and if you still cannot answer me, I will wait. I have seen that you pity me, understand me. That is one piece of good fortune which wipes out many disappointments! Am I as you would have me? Do I speak to you as you wish?"
"Yes," she replied, more touched than she chose now to betray, by this sudden softening, this return of submissive affection after his bursts of passion. "But," she insinuated, "if you were really as I would have you, you would let me give you some advice."
"What is it?" he inquired anxiously.
"To confide in your father. Yes, to talk with him of your plans,—of me if you think best,—but first of all, and at any cost, of your apprehension on the subject of these impending inventories. You owe it to him," she insisted at a gesture from the young man. "I say nothing of the bond that binds together the members of the same family, in order not to return to that question of the name, although bourgeois and nobles are equal when the common honor is involved. You owe it to him from respect for his noble heart. He loves you. A determination so opposed to his wishes is likely to cause him very deep sorrow. He must not learn it first from another than you, so that he may not misconstrue your motives. You must tell him what they are, and even if he blames them, at all events he will know that you deserve his esteem. I know it well, I who am a believer, and to whom that proceeding will be so grievous if you carry it out. Ah! how earnestly I will pray God to spare us, your father and me, that trial! But you must speak to Monsieur de Claviers. You realize yourself that you must, don't you?"'
"I will try," replied the young man, whose eyes once more expressed genuine distress. "You do not know him, and what an imposing effect he has, even on me. I ought to say, especially on me, since I can read his heart so well. But you are right, and I will obey you."
"Thanks," she said, rising. "And now think that you must not prepare him to receive in bad part what you have to say, by displeasing him. Since he was urgent that you should come to Grandchamp for this hunt, you must go. You must do it for my sake, too, for I need a little rest and solitude. Besides you still have to lunch, and it is quarter to twelve."—The clock of a near-by convent struck three strokes, whose tinkling cadence reached the little parlor over the trees of the garden. The clock on the mantel-piece also emitted three shrill notes.—"You have just time."
"With the automobile I shall be at Grandchamp in an hour and a half," he replied. "But I mean to continue to be obedient, as obedient as I have been rebellious." He had taken the young woman's hand and he pressed it to his lips as he added: "I forgot. I have to stop on Rue de Solferino to inquire for a friend of my father who is very ill. It won't take very long."
Valentine Olier withdrew her fingers with such a nervous movement that Landri could not help exclaiming:—