Less reserved than his friend, the actor at the Odéon Theatre had written to her:
"My dear Madeleine,—I am very happy and very proud at Lise's marriage. I do not regret now the sacrifice I made, when you became the Countess Barineff, in allowing this dear child to be acknowledged by him who gave you his name. I wished above all things to secure the future of our daughter. Afterward, sacrificing my own future, I did not rejoin you in Russia, where, it may be, fortune and glory awaited me."
The old comedian continued his letter with a lamentation on the decadence of the theater, the want of taste in the public, and the isolation to which he was condemned. He concluded by charging his former mistress to kiss, for an old friend, her whom he might not kiss as a father.
The letter recalled to the Countess Barineff a crowd of disagreeable memories, and she rather regretted having written to Dumesnil, while she felt that it would have been difficult not to do so, for she had every reason to praise the conduct of this good fellow.
It was Dumesnil, in fact, who had guided the first steps of Madeleine Froment in her theatrical career, lifting her from the precarious and doubtful life to which the abandon of her relatives had consigned her before she was twenty years old. Having made her a mother, he had no thought of deserting her. On the contrary, he was anxious to acknowledge his child, when an unhoped-for engagement at St. Petersburg was proposed to Madeleine, who left Paris with the promise to obtain an engagement for Dumesnil too at the Michael Theatre. We know what happened. Sought after, courted, she soon forgot her comrade of the Odéon. Dumesnil did not know of her marriage with Count Barineff until it was too late to make any attempt at hindering it.
Mme. Froment touched adroitly the paternal fiber in Dumesnil's heart, and the good fellow, as we have seen, had let his child become the child of Count Barineff as much from affection as vanity. But all these deceptions had sharpened his temper. He had remained an actor through necessity rather than taste. Sad, discouraged, convinced that all was over in dramatic composition, and only feeling pleasures when the old stock pieces were in the bill, he played his parts in the dramas of the writers of the past with a strict regard for tradition.
However, notwithstanding the cloud that had formed in her azure sky, the Countess Barineff continued busying herself with the installation of the future couple. On the appointed day the mansion only lacked its master and mistress.
The two months' probation that Pierre Olsdorf had undergone had not lowered him in the estimation of his sweetheart. Certainly Lise did not feel her heart beat violently when the man whose name she was to bear kissed her hand, for this grave cavalier, with his slight fair mustache and half-closed blue eyes, was, perhaps, not the husband of whom she had caught glimpses in her dreams; but he would make a princess of her, and the Countess Barineff told her daughter that the happiest unions were often those which love had not preceded.
The ex-comedienne had made up her mind that the house of the young couple should become the liveliest place in the world. She would introduce her friends there; all the artistes that she loved to receive, all the foreigners who for years back had given her own house a deserved reputation for wit and elegance.
The last unconscious hesitations of Lise vanished on seeing the marriage present that the prince offered to her a few days before the ceremony. There was a fortune in jewels and furs, which were marvels, too, of good taste. Nevertheless, she slept that evening with her accustomed calm, and her last nights of maidenhood were troubled by none of the dreams that haunt the purest on the eve of the most important act of life.