"Die Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft der mit Eifer sucht muss Leiden schaffen."—German Proverb.
Very many years ago, in a valley a few miles from the coast, there stood a French château, beautifully situated in a handsome park near the Norman village of Carolles. The rich woodland scenery, the green pastures with their large wild fences now laden with wild roses; the shady lanes, whose banks will soon be covered with the long, bright green fronds of the hartstongue, and the delicate drooping trichomanes; the fine timber, and the picturesque farmhouses with their thatched roofs nestling in the valleys—all tend to give a home-like English air to the scenery of Normandy. And the district in which the Château de Thorens stands possesses all these attractions for an English eye. Not that any English people lived in the château; the De Thorens were French, or rather Norman, to the backbone, descended from the great duke, and proud as Lucifer of their birth. Pride and poverty are generally supposed to go together; and though poor is perhaps hardly the word to apply to people who could afford to live in the ease and luxury which prevailed at Château de Thorens, yet for their rank the De Thorens were not rich, and, consequently, after the fashion of many French families, there were three generations of them now all living under the ancestral roof.
First there was the old baroness, a picturesque old lady with very white hair and piercing black eyes, with whom we have very little to do; then there was her eldest son, the present baron, for his father had been dead some years, and his beautiful young wife, whom he was so passionately fond of that he was jealous—dreadfully jealous—of her love for her baby, a little girl a few months old; and, lastly, there were the baron's three younger brothers, who with Père Yvon, the chaplain, made up the family party. The two younger brothers were mere boys, still under Père Yvon's charge, for he acted as tutor to them as well as chaplain; but Léon de Thorens was a young man of five-and-twenty, only a year or two younger than the baron. He was a fine, handsome man, tall and thin, with his mother's fine black eyes and small well-cut nose and mouth. He was of a bold, reckless nature, full of animal spirits, the very life of the house when he was at home, which was seldom, as he owned a yacht, in which he spent a great deal of his time. He was his mother's favourite son, and both he and she had often privately regretted that he was not the eldest.
The baron was smaller and fairer than Léon, and not so handsome, though there was a strong family likeness between the brothers. He was of a quieter disposition, and his restlessness took an intellectual rather than a physical form, his wanderings being confined to the shelves of the valuable library which the château boasted, instead of extending over the seas on which Léon spent so much of his time. The baron's studious nature had endeared him very much to Père Yvon, with whom he was a prime favourite, and who had never shown him any of the severity of which the other brothers often complained, but, on the contrary, had erred on the opposite side with the baron, whose wishes had never been crossed in any way, and who had grown up to think himself the one important person in the world to whom the convenience of everyone else must be sacrificed.
For the first year of their married life the pretty baroness had contributed as much as Père Yvon to spoil her husband, whose every whim she had humoured until her baby was born, and then, much to his astonishment, the baron found that his beautiful, gentle wife had a will of her own, and, what was still worse in his eyes, a large place in her heart for someone else besides himself, and although that someone else was only his infant daughter, the baron was jealous.
In vain had he urged that the baby should be sent away to some peasant to nurse until it was a year or two old, as he and all his brothers had been, after a very common custom in French families. No, the baroness would not hear of such a thing; she could not live without her baby, and every moment she could spare she spent by its cradle. Indeed, so infatuated was she with her new possession, whose every movement was a delight to her, that she did not notice the baron became daily more and more morose, and that an ominous frown had settled on his fine forehead, while his mouth was closed with a determination that boded ill for his wife and daughter. But the baroness lived so much in her child that she did not observe the change in her husband; and as he never allowed the baby to be brought into his presence, the baroness saw but little of him except at meals, when all the others were present, and Léon's wild spirits covered his brother's depression and silence.
At last, one fine June morning, matters reached a climax, when the family sat down to their one o'clock déjeuner. The baroness was late; the first course was finished, and still she did not appear.
"Where is Mathilde, Arnaut?" asked the old baroness.
"I don't know," said the baron, sulkily.
"I do," said Léon; "she is worshipping at the shrine of that precious baby of yours, Arnaut. Why on earth don't you send it away till it is old enough to amuse us?"