Time doled out to the marquis a lagging hour. There were moments when
the sounds of merriment, coming from the dining-hall, awakened in his
breast the slumbering canker of envy,--envy of youth, of health, of the
joy of living. They were young in yonder room; the purse of life was
filled with golden metal; Folly had not yet thrown aside her cunning
mask, and she was still darling to the eye. Oh, to be young again; that
light step of youth, that bold and sparkling glance, that steady
hand,--if only these were once more his! Where was all the gold Time had
given to him? Upon what had he expended it, to have become thus
beggared? To find an apothecary having the elixir of eternal youth! How
quickly he would gulp the draft to bring back that beauty which had so
often compelled the admiration of women, a Duchesse de Montbazon, a
Duchesse de Longueville, a Princesse de Savoie, among the great; a Margot
Bourdaloue among the obscure!
Margot Bourdaloue. . . . The marquis closed his eyes; the revelry
dissolved into silence. How distinctly he could see that face,
sculptured with all the delicacy of a Florentine cameo; that yellow hair
of hers, full of captive sunshine; those eyes, giving forth the
velvet-bloom of heartsease; those slender brown hands which defied the
lowliness of her birth, and those ankles the beauty of which not even the
clumsy sabots could conceal! He knew a duchess whose line of blood was
older than the Capets' or the Bourbons'. Was not nature the great
Satirist? To give nobility to that duchess and beauty to that peasant!
Margot Bourdaloue, a girl of the people, of that race of animals he
tolerated because they were necessary; of the people, who understood
nothing of the poetry of passing loves; Margot Bourdaloue, the one
softening influence his gay and careless life had known.
Sometimes in the heart of swamps, surrounded by chilling or fetid airs, a
flower blossoms, tender and fragrant as any rose of sunny Tours: such a
flower Margot had been. Thirty years; yet her face had lost to him not a
single detail; for there are some faces which print themselves so
indelibly upon the mind that they become not elusive like the memory of
an enhancing melody or an exquisite poem, but lasting, like the sense of
life itself. And Margot, daughter of his own miller--she had loved him
with all the strength and fervor of her simple peasant heart. And he?
Yes, yes; he could now see that he had loved her as deeply as it was
possible for a noble to love a peasant. And in a moment of rage and
jealousy and suspicion, he had struck her across the face with his
riding-whip.
What a recompense for such a love! In all the thirty years only once had
he heard from her: a letter, burning with love, stained and blurred with
tears, lofty with forgiveness, between the lines of which he could read
the quiet tragedy of an unimportant life. Whither had she gone, carrying
that brutal, unjust blow? Was she living? . . . dead? Was there such a
thing as a soul, and was the subtile force of hers compelling him to
regret true happiness for the dross he had accepted as such? Soul?
What! shall the atheist doubt in his old age?