Artist and Model (The Divorced Princess)

by René de Pont-Jest

Nor was Mme. Percier a very agreeable companion for her daughter. Being in poor health, she rarely left her home, and often several days would pass without Marthe seeing her. The widow, for that matter, would not have understood what there was for her daughter to complain of. She had led a very calm and passionless life. She would have laughed at, or perhaps sharply blamed, her daughter for not being perfectly happy.

It was inevitable that Mme. Daubrel should soon find the days long and the evenings endless. She took to reading, first the Parisian newspapers—echoes of the scandal of love affairs which up to now had been matters of indifference to her—then the novels of the day. She took a feverish interest in the heroines of love stories, comparing their lives with her own, and contrasted the male characters with her husband, always to his disadvantage.

M. Daubrel naturally saw nothing of what was going on. If he sometimes noticed the care-worn face or paler complexion of his wife, he attributed the change to a slight ailment, and would offer her some trifling amusement or outing, which Marthe would refuse with a constrained smile.

In this frame of mind, in this hunger of soul and weariness of everything, Mme. Daubrel was in the fourth year of her marriage when she went with her mother to Luchon.

M. Daubrel had hesitated about letting his wife go to take the waters at so distant a place, whither he could not run down to her by train every Saturday, as his wont was when she went to the sea-side, and was but a few hours distant from Paris, but Mme. Percier, whose doctor insisted upon her trying the Pyrenees, having declared that she would not have the courage to go alone, the worthy merchant had yielded. He kept his son Charles with him, whom Marthe, indeed, good mother though she was, had not spoken of taking with her. Besides, the stay was not meant to go beyond a month, and the child's health was perfect.

Mme. Percier and her daughter accordingly undertook the journey, and arriving at Luchon engaged rooms at one of the best hotels in this fashionable watering-place, where, salutary as the waters might be for certain ailments, people were wont to amuse rather than physic themselves.

At the beginning of July the season sets in. There are concerts, balls at the Casino and at private residences, besides hunting parties in the forests of fir-trees, boating parties on the Oo Lake, and excursions to the Devil's Cave, the port of Vénasque, and the romantic villages of Oneil and Lys. Here and there an occasional patient was to be found taking the waters with severe regularity, and likely to feel the benefit of the course when he came to return home, but at Luchon the treatment seemed to more commonly consist in pleasure and various amusements. Acquaintances were readily formed, as they are in all places of this sort. If the Americans had not invented flirting, it would have been born in the shades of the Alpine avenues of Etigny or on the banks of the Pique. What else was there to do if not to flirt, in a charming neighborhood where were found an Avenue of Sighs and a Fountain of Love, as in the days of the Queen of Navarre; where one could fancy one heard constantly retold, in the echoes of the bounding mountain torrents, the liveliest stories of Heptameron!

Mme. Percier and her daughter found the place very pleasant, and the next morning after their arrival they began to make acquaintances, in the garden of the hotel, near the band-stand, and at the medicinal springs, which were especially welcome to Mme. Daubrel, who, as they left Paris, had dreaded that during their absence her part would simply be that of a nurse to her mother. It was, alas! to be otherwise, and one of the friendships began here was to have a fatal influence on Marthe's future. The friendship was formed one night at a concert, with a young poet, Robert Premontier.

He was a good-looking fellow of five- or six-and-twenty, full of conceit and literary pretensions, and posing, from taste, as a neglected genius, a sort of Gilbert or Chatterton. Mme. Daubrel, who had introduced him to her mother, too quickly let him see beyond a doubt the pleasure she took in listening to him; so much so that he soon came to think he had the right to pay close court to her.

This was not Robert's first appearance in the lists of gallantry. He began adroitly with the young woman by avowing his pure and platonic love for her. He wished only to regard her as a sister; he only besought that she would permit him to adore her on his knees. The poor, simple woman heard this sort of thing now for the first time; she believed it, and the affair ended as all encounters do between the inexperienced and the bold. Marthe fell, the excuse she found for herself being that she too, as well as others, had a right to a share of happiness in the world, and that the loneliness of her heart was the cause of her fault.