Madame Regnault never knew how Léon died. The little body was not mangled: it had been caught and thrown aside by something attached to the engine—I do not know exactly how—and the mother was left to believe that he had died of sickness like the baby. She bore her sorrow with the still meekness consonant with her character, and with wifely tenderness exerted herself to soothe her husband's violent grief.
A little later in the summer the war broke out. Colonel Regnault went gladly, even rashly, into danger, and found neither death nor wounds, but in his anguish for the desolation of his country he made a truce with his own remorse.
The last time I was in Paris—which was in 1874—General and Madame Regnault called on me at my old friend's, Madame Le Fort's. A charming little girl about three years old was with them, a blue-eyed, fair-haired child—very beautiful, and as much like her father as a little girl can be like a man approaching fifty. I was not surprised to see that she was, as her mother said, "une petite fille gâtée." I inquired for Léonie.
"Can you believe that Léonie has not been in Paris since you saw her here?" replied her father. "She is a thorough little provincial. She has been married more than a year now."
"Ah, I congratulate you! I hope her marriage was pleasing to you," I added, as he did not respond immediately.
"Assez. Her husband is a very worthy young man for a provincial—Théophile Duprès, the brother of a little school-friend of hers. I went down to the wedding, not to grieve Léonie, but I shall never be reconciled to it—never! To think what that girl threw away! Such talent! and to have it lost, utterly lost! It is inexplicable. Every motive that could influence a girl on the one hand, and—But I give it up. Let us not talk of it," he concluded with a little wave of his hand, as if dismissing Léonie and all that pertained to her.
But I could not turn my thoughts from her so quickly. Even now, when I am, so to speak, in another world, she causes me not a little perplexity. Was she right? was she wrong? Can one ever be happy in suppressing a great talent? How it strives and agonizes for some manifestation of itself! and when it slowly dies, stifled in its living grave, must not one feel a bitter regret for having slain the nobler part of one's self?
But is it not heresy to doubt that a woman can sacrifice genius for love, and be content—yea, glad—with an infinite joy? And why not have love and genius too? Alas! most lives are opaque planets, like the earth on which they are evolved, and can have only one bright side at a time.
Madame Regnault was little changed: she preserved the old sweet gentleness and quiet refinement of manner, but she seemed more at ease with her husband, and did not watch so timidly his least gesture. Colonel—or rather General—Regnault had changed more. He had grown quite gray: he was still a handsome, high-bred gentleman, with the same exquisite urbanity of manner, but the disappointment of his ambition for Léonie, the anguish which had smitten him for his children's death, and the great calamity which had almost crushed France, the idol of every Frenchman, had softened and humanized him. He was less like an Apollo exulting in his own divinity; and when I marked his tender thoughtfulness for his wife, his unwonted appreciation of her lovely character, and especially his indulgence of the caprices of little Aimée, who was almost always his companion, I was ready to believe in his entire conversion.
But can the Ethiopian change his skin? One morning Madame Le Fort's little dressmaker came rushing in in a very excited way: "Mon Dieu! I am so glad to get here! Quel homme terrible!"