Ferdinand was, after the circumstance we have just related, reduced to a species of misery even he had as yet not suspected. Unable to pay for the lodging, small and dirty as it was, that he had hitherto inhabited, he was now reduced to rent a small attic belonging to the collection of servants’ rooms in a tolerably good-looking house. The one thought that absorbed him was fear lest Blanche de Vouvray should discover the necessities of his life. This, and this alone, combated the wild passion wherewith she had inspired him. But he reckoned without feminine instinct and feminine curiosity. Blanche de Vouvray had not been half-a-dozen times in the same salon with M. de Candolles, before she felt she was adored, and her next feeling was one of considerable anxiety to know how she should bring her slave to confess the charm. Blanche was a person of irreproachable conduct; but still, it was tiresome to be so evidently worshiped, and yet know nothing at all about it!
Poor Ferdinand! The struggle for existence was rapidly wearing him out. The want of almost every necessary of life, the constant recourse to a morsel of bread, or a little rice, and a few potatoes, for daily food, coupled with the perpetual tension of the brain, required to secure even these, miserable as they were—all this was doing its deadly work, and M. de Candolles’ health was visibly failing every day. One evening, this was so plain to all eyes that, at Madame de Guesvillers’ house, many good-natured persons told Ferdinand he really must take care, or they should hear of his going off in a galloping consumption. An hour or two later, some one opened a window behind where he was standing—
“Do not remain where you are—pray!” said a voice beside him. It was timidly yet earnestly said—the sweet voice was unsteady, and there was such an expression in the last word, “Pray!” Ferdinand turned without answering: his eyes met Blanche de Vouvray’s—she looked down, but not before she had involuntarily replied to his passionate and melancholy glance.
M. de Candolles soon left the room. His brain was on fire, and he rushed homeward like one possessed. Part of his prudence was gone. He snatched up pen and ink, and wrote—wrote to her! All that Ferdinand had never yet found, was found now—the hidden spring was reached, and the tide of eloquence gushed forth, strong, rapid, irresistible.
Such a letter as few women have ever received was put, the next morning, into Mademoiselle de Vouvray’s hands. The first effect of it was electrical—she became confused, and like one in a dream; but, almost as soon, the feminine instinct awoke, and involuntarily she admitted that her end was gained—he had spoken at last! What lay beyond was uncertain—might be dangerous, and had best be altogether set aside. She would avoid M. de Candolles in future. This was not so easy: that very night she met him in the vestibule of the Grand Opera, with little, old Madame de Guesvillers on his arm. He bowed to, but did not look at her; was cold, silent and reserved, and really did seem as though he had one foot in the tomb. He would, perhaps, not live another year—that was a shocking thought—and Blanche shivered as she rolled over the Pont Royal in her comfortable carriage. There could be no harm in answering his letter from a certain point of view she now adopted, and accordingly she did answer it, and a very virtuous, and consoling, and amiable composition her answer was. From this moment the possibility of writing tempted both; and, from time to time, they availed themselves of it, though it never degenerated into a habit. Ferdinand’s pecuniary resources growing less and less with every day, he literally starved himself, in order to cover the extravagance of his heart-expenses. For a bouquet dropped in at her carriage-window, as she drove from the Italiens—for a perfume to put upon his own handkerchief, that she should inhale, he constantly observed a four-and-twenty hours’ fast, broken only by a crust of bread and a glass of water.
There were days, it cannot be denied, when the fair Blanche de Vouvray admitted to herself that it might have been better for her never to have seen M. de Candolles. His strange adoration captivated and preoccupied her by its very strangeness, probably far more than if it had followed the ordinary method in such cases.
One day, after saving during three weeks, and Heaven only knows with what pains, the sum of fifteen francs, Ferdinand therewith secured the loan of a really handsome horse, from one of the dealers in the Champs Elysées. When the carriage came in view—than which there was no other in the world for him—he made his steed execute certain evolutions gracefully enough, for he was a remarkably good horseman, darted off upon the road to the Bois de Boulogne, crossed once or twice the path of the calèche he was pursuing, received one look of recognition, one sign from a small gloved hand, and was over-paid! That evening, they met in the same salon: a lady—who was standing by the piano whereon Blanche had just been playing a new waltz—asked Ferdinand whether she had not seen him on horseback in the Champs Elysées.
“I thought I would try how it might suit me now,” was his reply: “but I find it will not do; the exercise is too strong, and I am unequal to it.” Blanche de Vouvray grew pale, and bent down to look over some music.
“If riding is too much for his nerves,” observed—later in the evening, to his neighbor—one of the beardless lions who happened to be present, “I should imagine such a monstrous quantity of cake must be equally so!” and jumping forward to Ferdinand’s side—
“Halte là, mon vieux!” he exclaimed, with all the elegance and atticism of Mabille in his intonation. “Leave a little of that Savarin for me, will you? Que diable! why, one would swear you hadn’t eaten since yesterday!”