Juana (tr. Katharine Prescott Wormeley)
by Honore de Balzac
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

JUANA  
  
BY  
  
HONORE DE BALZAC  
  
  
  
Translated By  
Katharine Prescott Wormeley  
  
  
  
DEDICATION  
  
To Madame la Comtesse Merlin.
  
  
  
  
JUANA  
(THE MARANAS)  
  
  
  
CHAPTER I  
  
EXPOSITION  
  
Notwithstanding the discipline which Marechal Suchet had introduced  
into his army corps, he was unable to prevent a short period of  
trouble and disorder at the taking of Tarragona. According to certain  
fair-minded military men, this intoxication of victory bore a striking  
resemblance to pillage, though the marechal promptly suppressed it.
Order being re-established, each regiment quartered in its respective  
lines, and the commandant of the city appointed, military  
administration began. The place assumed a mongrel aspect. Though all  
things were organized on a French system, the Spaniards were left free  
to follow "in petto" their national tastes.
  
This period of pillage (it is difficult to determine how long it  
lasted) had, like all other sublunary effects, a cause, not so  
difficult to discover. In the marechal's army was a regiment, composed  
almost entirely of Italians and commanded by a certain Colonel Eugene,  
a man of remarkable bravery, a second Murat, who, having entered the  
military service too late, obtained neither a Grand Duchy of Berg nor  
a Kingdom of Naples, nor balls at the Pizzo. But if he won no crown he  
had ample opportunity to obtain wounds, and it was not surprising that  
he met with several. His regiment was composed of the scattered  
fragments of the Italian legion. This legion was to Italy what the  
colonial battalions are to France. Its permanent cantonments,  
established on the island of Elba, served as an honorable place of  
exile for the troublesome sons of good families and for those great  
men who have just missed greatness, whom society brands with a hot  
iron and designates by the term "mauvais sujets"; men who are for the  
most part misunderstood; whose existence may become either noble  
through the smile of a woman lifting them out of their rut, or  
shocking at the close of an orgy under the influence of some damnable  
reflection dropped by a drunken comrade.
  
Napoleon had incorporated these vigorous beings in the sixth of the  
line, hoping to metamorphose them finally into generals,--barring  
those whom the bullets might take off. But the emperor's calculation  
was scarcely fulfilled, except in the matter of the bullets. This  
regiment, often decimated but always the same in character, acquired a  
great reputation for valor in the field and for wickedness in private  
life. At the siege of Tarragona it lost its celebrated hero, Bianchi,  
the man who, during the campaign, had wagered that he would eat the  
heart of a Spanish sentinel, and did eat it. Though Bianchi was the  
prince of the devils incarnate to whom the regiment owed its dual  
reputation, he had, nevertheless, that sort of chivalrous honor which  
excuses, in the army, the worst excesses. In a word, he would have  
been, at an earlier period, an admirable pirate. A few days before his  
death he distinguished himself by a daring action which the marechal  
wished to reward. Bianchi refused rank, pension, and additional  
decoration, asking, for sole recompense, the favor of being the first  
to mount the breach at the assault on Tarragona. The marechal granted  
the request and then forgot his promise; but Bianchi forced him to  
remember Bianchi. The enraged hero was the first to plant our flag on  
the wall, where he was shot by a monk.
  
This historical digression was necessary, in order to explain how it  
was that the 6th of the line was the regiment to enter Tarragona, and  
why the disorder and confusion, natural enough in a city taken by  
storm, degenerated for a time into a slight pillage.
  
This regiment possessed two officers, not at all remarkable among  
these men of iron, who played, nevertheless, in the history we shall  
now relate, a somewhat important part.
  
The first, a captain in the quartermaster's department, an officer  
half civil, half military, was considered, in soldier phrase, to be  
fighting his own battle. He pretended bravery, boasted loudly of  
belonging to the 6th of the line, twirled his moustache with the air  
of a man who was ready to demolish everything; but his brother  
officers did not esteem him. The fortune he possessed made him  
cautious. He was nicknamed, for two reasons, "captain of crows." In  
the first place, he could smell powder a league off, and took wing at  
the sound of a musket; secondly, the nickname was based on an innocent  
military pun, which his position in the regiment warranted. Captain  
Montefiore, of the illustrious Montefiore family of Milan (though the  
laws of the Kingdom of Italy forbade him to bear his title in the  
French service) was one of the handsomest men in the army. This beauty  
may have been among the secret causes of his prudence on fighting  
days. A wound which might have injured his nose, cleft his forehead,  
or scarred his cheek, would have destroyed one of the most beautiful  
Italian faces which a woman ever dreamed of in all its delicate  
proportions. This face, not unlike the type which Girodet has given to  
the dying young Turk, in the "Revolt at Cairo," was instinct with that  
melancholy by which all women are more or less duped.
  
The Marquis de Montefiore possessed an entailed property, but his  
income was mortgaged for a number of years to pay off the costs of  
certain Italian escapades which are inconceivable in Paris. He had  
ruined himself in supporting a theatre at Milan in order to force upon  
a public a very inferior prima donna, whom he was said to love madly.
A fine future was therefore before him, and he did not care to risk it  
for the paltry distinction of a bit of red ribbon. He was not a brave  
man, but he was certainly a philosopher; and he had precedents, if we  
may use so parliamentary an expression. Did not Philip the Second  
register a vow after the battle of Saint Quentin that never again  
would he put himself under fire? And did not the Duke of Alba  
encourage him in thinking that the worst trade in the world was the  
involuntary exchange of a crown for a bullet? Hence, Montefiore was  
Philippiste in his capacity of rich marquis and handsome man; and in  
other respects also he was quite as profound a politician as Philip  
the Second himself. He consoled himself for his nickname, and for the  
disesteem of the regiment by thinking that his comrades were  
blackguards, whose opinion would never be of any consequence to him if  
by chance they survived the present war, which seemed to be one of  
extermination. He relied on his face to win him promotion; he saw  
himself made colonel by feminine influence and a carefully managed  
transition from captain of equipment to orderly officer, and from  
orderly officer to aide-de-camp on the staff of some easy-going  
marshal. By that time, he reflected, he should come into his property  
of a hundred thousand scudi a year, some journal would speak of him as  
"the brave Montefiore," he would marry a girl of rank, and no one  
would dare to dispute his courage or verify his wounds.
  
Captain Montefiore had one friend in the person of the quartermaster,  
--a Provencal, born in the neighborhood of Nice, whose name was Diard.
A friend, whether at the galleys or in the garret of an artist,  
consoles for many troubles. Now Montefiore and Diard were two  
philosophers, who consoled each other for their present lives by the  
study of vice, as artists soothe the immediate disappointment of their  
hopes by the expectation of future fame. Both regarded the war in its  
results, not its action; they simply considered those who died for  
glory fools. Chance had made soldiers of them; whereas their natural  
proclivities would have seated them at the green table of a congress.
Nature had poured Montefiore into the mould of a Rizzio, and Diard  
into that of a diplomatist. Both were endowed with that nervous,  
feverish, half-feminine organization, which is equally strong for good  
or evil, and from which may emanate, according to the impulse of these  
singular temperaments, a crime or a generous action, a noble deed or a  
base one. The fate of such natures depends at any moment on the  
pressure, more or less powerful, produced on their nervous systems by  
violent and transitory passions.
  
Diard was considered a good accountant, but no soldier would have  
trusted him with his purse or his will, possibly because of the  
antipathy felt by all real soldiers against the bureaucrats. The  
quartermaster was not without courage and a certain juvenile  
generosity, sentiments which many men give up as they grow older, by  
dint of reasoning or calculating. Variable as the beauty of a fair  
woman, Diard was a great boaster and a great talker, talking of  
everything. He said he was artistic, and he made prizes (like two  
celebrated generals) of works of art, solely, he declared, to preserve  
them for posterity. His military comrades would have been puzzled  
indeed to form a correct judgment of him. Many of them, accustomed to  
draw upon his funds when occasion obliged them, thought him rich; but  
in truth, he was a gambler, and gamblers may be said to have nothing  
of their own. Montefiore was also a gambler, and all the officers of  
the regiment played with the pair; for, to the shame of men be it  
said, it is not a rare thing to see persons gambling together around a  
green table who, when the game is finished, will not bow to their  
companions, feeling no respect for them. Montefiore was the man with  
whom Bianchi made his bet about the heart of the Spanish sentinel.
  
Montefiore and Diard were among the last to mount the breach at  
Tarragona, but the first in the heart of the town as soon as it was  
taken. Accidents of this sort happen in all attacks, but with this  
pair of friends they were customary. Supporting each other, they made  
their way bravely through a labyrinth of narrow and gloomy little  
streets in quest of their personal objects; one seeking for painted  
madonnas, the other for madonnas of flesh and blood.
  
In what part of Tarragona it happened I cannot say, but Diard  
presently recognized by its architecture the portal of a convent, the  
gate of which was already battered in. Springing into the cloister to  
put a stop to the fury of the soldiers, he arrived just in time to  
prevent two Parisians from shooting a Virgin by Albano. In spite of  
the moustache with which in their military fanaticism they had  
decorated her face, he bought the picture. Montefiore, left alone  
during this episode, noticed, nearly opposite the convent, the house  
and shop of a draper, from which a shot was fired at him at the moment  
when his eyes caught a flaming glance from those of an inquisitive  
young girl, whose head was advanced under the shelter of a blind.
Tarragona taken by assault, Tarragona furious, firing from every  
window, Tarragona violated, with dishevelled hair, and half-naked, was  
indeed an object of curiosity,--the curiosity of a daring Spanish  
woman. It was a magnified bull-fight.
  
Montefiore forgot the pillage, and heard, for the moment, neither the  
cries, nor the musketry, nor the growling of the artillery. The  
profile of that Spanish girl was the most divinely delicious thing  
which he, an Italian libertine, weary of Italian beauty, and dreaming  
of an impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever  
seen. He could still quiver, he, who had wasted his fortune on a  
thousand follies, the thousand passions of a young and blase man--the  
most abominable monster that society generates. An idea came into his  
head, suggested perhaps by the shot of the draper-patriot, namely,--to  
set fire to the house. But he was now alone, and without any means of  
action; the fighting was centred in the market-place, where a few  
obstinate beings were still defending the town. A better idea then  
occurred to him. Diard came out of the convent, but Montefiore said  
not a word of his discovery; on the contrary, he accompanied him on a  
series of rambles about the streets. But the next day, the Italian had  
obtained his military billet in the house of the draper,--an  
appropriate lodging for an equipment captain!
  
The house of the worthy Spaniard consisted, on the ground-floor, of a  
vast and gloomy shop, externally fortified with stout iron bars, such  
as we see in the old storehouses of the rue des Lombards. This shop  
communicated with a parlor lighted from an interior courtyard, a large  
room breathing the very spirit of the middle-ages, with smoky old  
pictures, old tapestries, antique "brazero," a plumed hat hanging to a  
nail, the musket of the guerrillas, and the cloak of Bartholo. The  
kitchen adjoined this unique living-room, where the inmates took their  
meals and warmed themselves over the dull glow of the brazier, smoking  
cigars and discoursing bitterly to animate all hearts with hatred  
against the French. Silver pitchers and precious dishes of plate and  
porcelain adorned a buttery shelf of the old fashion. But the light,  
sparsely admitted, allowed these dazzling objects to show but  
slightly; all things, as in pictures of the Dutch school, looked  
brown, even the faces. Between the shop and this living-room, so fine  
in color and in its tone of patriarchal life, was a dark staircase  
leading to a ware-room where the light, carefully distributed,  
permitted the examination of goods. Above this were the apartments of  
the merchant and his wife. Rooms for an apprentice and a servant-woman  
were in a garret under the roof, which projected over the street and  
was supported by buttresses, giving a somewhat fantastic appearance to  
the exterior of the building. These chambers were now taken by the  
merchant and his wife who gave up their own rooms to the officer who  
was billeted upon them,--probably because they wished to avoid all  
quarrelling.
  
Montefiore gave himself out as a former Spanish subject, persecuted by  
Napoleon, whom he was serving against his will; and these semi-lies  
had the success he expected. He was invited to share the meals of the  
family, and was treated with the respect due to his name, his birth,  
and his title. He had his reasons for capturing the good-will of the  
merchant and his wife; he scented his madonna as the ogre scented the  
youthful flesh of Tom Thumb and his brothers. But in spite of the  
confidence he managed to inspire in the worthy pair the latter  
maintained the most profound silence as to the said madonna; and not  
only did the captain see no trace of the young girl during the first  
day he spent under the roof of the honest Spaniard, but he heard no  
sound and came upon no indication which revealed her presence in that  
ancient building. Supposing that she was the only daughter of the old  
couple, Montefiore concluded they had consigned her to the garret,  
where, for the time being, they made their home.
  
But no revelation came to betray the hiding-place of that precious  
treasure. The marquis glued his face to the lozenge-shaped leaded  
panes which looked upon the black-walled enclosure of the inner  
courtyard; but in vain; he saw no gleam of light except from the  
windows of the old couple, whom he could see and hear as they went and  
came and talked and coughed. Of the young girl, not a shadow!
  
Montefiore was far too wary to risk the future of his passion by  
exploring the house nocturnally, or by tapping softly on the doors.
Discovery by that hot patriot, the mercer, suspicious as a Spaniard  
must be, meant ruin infallibly. The captain therefore resolved to wait  
patiently, resting his faith on time and the imperfection of men,  
which always results--even with scoundrels, and how much more with  
honest men!--in the neglect of precautions.
  
The next day he discovered a hammock in the kitchen, showing plainly  
where the servant-woman slept. As for the apprentice, his bed was  
evidently made on the shop counter. During supper on the second day  
Montefiore succeeded, by cursing Napoleon, in smoothing the anxious  
forehead of the merchant, a grave, black-visaged Spaniard, much like  
the faces formerly carved on the handles of Moorish lutes; even the  
wife let a gay smile of hatred appear in the folds of her elderly  
face. The lamp and the reflections of the brazier illumined  
fantastically the shadows of the noble room. The mistress of the house  
offered a "cigarrito" to their semi-compatriot. At this moment the  
rustle of a dress and the fall of a chair behind the tapestry were  
plainly heard.
  
"Ah!" cried the wife, turning pale, "may the saints assist us! God  
grant no harm has happened!"  
  
"You have some one in the next room, have you not?" said Montefiore,  
giving no sign of emotion.
  
The draper dropped a word of imprecation against the girls. Evidently  
alarmed, the wife opened a secret door, and led in, half fainting, the  
Italian's madonna, to whom he was careful to pay no attention; only,  
to avoid a too-studied indifference, he glanced at the girl before he  
turned to his host and said in his own language:--  
  
"Is that your daughter, signore?"  
  
Perez de Lagounia (such was the merchant's name) had large commercial  
relations with Genoa, Florence, and Livorno; he knew Italian, and  
replied in the same language:--  
  
"No; if she were my daughter I should take less precautions. The child  
is confided to our care, and I would rather die than see any evil  
happen to her. But how is it possible to put sense into a girl of  
eighteen?"  
  
"She is very handsome," said Montefiore, coldly, not looking at her  
face again.
  
"Her mother's beauty is celebrated," replied the merchant, briefly.
  
They continued to smoke, watching each other. Though Montefiore  
compelled himself not to give the slightest look which might  
contradict his apparent coldness, he could not refrain, at a moment  
when Perez turned his head to expectorate, from casting a rapid glance  
at the young girl, whose sparkling eyes met his. Then, with that  
science of vision which gives to a libertine, as it does to a  
sculptor, the fatal power of disrobing, if we may so express it, a  
woman, and divining her shape by inductions both rapid and sagacious,  
he beheld one of those masterpieces of Nature whose creation appears  
to demand as its right all the happiness of love. Here was a fair  
young face, on which the sun of Spain had cast faint tones of bistre  
which added to its expression of seraphic calmness a passionate pride,  
like a flash of light infused beneath that diaphanous complexion,--  
due, perhaps, to the Moorish blood which vivified and colored it. Her  
hair, raised to the top of her head, fell thence with black  
reflections round the delicate transparent ears and defined the  
outlines of a blue-veined throat. These luxuriant locks brought into  
strong relief the dazzling eyes and the scarlet lips of a well-arched  
mouth. The bodice of the country set off the lines of a figure that  
swayed as easily as a branch of willow. She was not the Virgin of  
Italy, but the Virgin of Spain, of Murillo, the only artist daring  
enough to have painted the Mother of God intoxicated with the joy of  
conceiving the Christ,--the glowing imagination of the boldest and  
also the warmest of painters.
  
In this young girl three things were united, a single one of which  
would have sufficed for the glory of a woman: the purity of the pearl  
in the depths of ocean; the sublime exaltation of the Spanish Saint  
Teresa; and a passion of love which was ignorant of itself. The  
presence of such a woman has the virtue of a talisman. Montefiore no  
longer felt worn and jaded. That young girl brought back his youthful  
freshness.
  
But, though the apparition was delightful, it did not last. The girl  
was taken back to the secret chamber, where the servant-woman carried  
to her openly both light and food.
  
"You do right to hide her," said Montefiore in Italian. "I will keep  
your secret. The devil! we have generals in our army who are capable  
of abducting her."  
  
Montefiore's infatuation went so far as to suggest to him the idea of  
marrying her. He accordingly asked her history, and Perez very  
willingly told him the circumstances under which she had become his  
ward. The prudent Spaniard was led to make this confidence because he  
had heard of Montefiore in Italy, and knowing his reputation was  
desirous to let him see how strong were the barriers which protected  
the young girl from the possibility of seduction. Though the good-man  
was gifted with a certain patriarchal eloquence, in keeping with his  
simple life and customs, his tale will be improved by abridgment.
  
At the period when the French Revolution changed the manners and  
morals of every country which served as the scene of its wars, a  
street prostitute came to Tarragona, driven from Venice at the time of  
its fall. The life of this woman had been a tissue of romantic  
adventures and strange vicissitudes. To her, oftener than to any other  
woman of her class, it had happened, thanks to the caprice of great  
lords struck with her extraordinary beauty, to be literally gorged  
with gold and jewels and all the delights of excessive wealth,--  
flowers, carriages, pages, maids, palaces, pictures, journeys (like  
those of Catherine II.); in short, the life of a queen, despotic in  
her caprices and obeyed, often beyond her own imaginings. Then,  
without herself, or any one, chemist, physician, or man of science,  
being able to discover how her gold evaporated, she would find herself  
back in the streets, poor, denuded of everything, preserving nothing  
but her all-powerful beauty, yet living on without thought or care of  
the past, the present, or the future. Cast, in her poverty, into the  
hands of some poor gambling officer, she attached herself to him as a  
dog to its master, sharing the discomforts of the military life, which  
indeed she comforted, as content under the roof of a garret as beneath  
the silken hangings of opulence. Italian and Spanish both, she  
fulfilled very scrupulously the duties of religion, and more than once  
she had said to love:--  
  
"Return to-morrow; to-day I belong to God."  
  
But this slime permeated with gold and perfumes, this careless  
indifference to all things, these unbridled passions, these religious  
beliefs cast into that heart like diamonds into mire, this life begun,  
and ended, in a hospital, these gambling chances transferred to the  
soul, to the very existence,--in short, this great alchemy, for which  
vice lit the fire beneath the crucible in which fortunes were melted  
up and the gold of ancestors and the honor of great names evaporated,  
proceeded from a CAUSE, a particular heredity, faithfully transmitted  
from mother to daughter since the middle ages. The name of this woman  
was La Marana. In her family, existing solely in the female line, the  
idea, person, name and power of a father had been completely unknown  
since the thirteenth century. The name Marana was to her what the  
designation of Stuart is to the celebrated royal race of Scotland, a  
name of distinction substituted for the patronymic name by the  
constant heredity of the same office devolving on the family.
  
Formerly, in France, Spain, and Italy, when those three countries had,  
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mutual interests which  
united and disunited them by perpetual warfare, the name Marana served  
to express in its general sense, a prostitute. In those days women of  
that sort had a certain rank in the world of which nothing in our day  
can give an idea. Ninon de l'Enclos and Marian Delorme have alone  
played, in France, the role of the Imperias, Catalinas, and Maranas  
who, in preceding centuries, gathered around them the cassock, gown,  
and sword. An Imperia built I forget which church in Rome in a frenzy  
of repentance, as Rhodope built, in earlier times, a pyramid in Egypt.
The name Marana, inflicted at first as a disgrace upon the singular  
family with which we are now concerned, had ended by becoming its  
veritable name and by ennobling its vice by incontestable antiquity.
  
One day, a day of opulence or of penury I know not which, for this  
event was a secret between herself and God, but assuredly it was in a  
moment of repentance and melancholy, this Marana of the nineteenth  
century stood with her feet in the slime and her head raised to  
heaven. She cursed the blood in her veins, she cursed herself, she  
trembled lest she should have a daughter, and she swore, as such women  
swear, on the honor and with the will of the galleys--the firmest  
will, the most scrupulous honor that there is on earth--she swore,  
before an altar, and believing in that altar, to make her daughter a  
virtuous creature, a saint, and thus to gain, after that long line of  
lost women, criminals in love, an angel in heaven for them all.
  
The vow once made, the blood of the Maranas spoke; the courtesan  
returned to her reckless life, a thought the more within her heart. At  
last she loved, with the violent love of such women, as Henrietta  
Wilson loved Lord Ponsonby, as Mademoiselle Dupuis loved Bolingbroke,  
as the Marchesa Pescara loved her husband--but no, she did not love,  
she adored one of those fair men, half women, to whom she gave the  
virtues which she had not, striving to keep for herself all that there  
was of vice between them. It was from that weak man, that senseless  
marriage unblessed by God or man which happiness is thought to  
justify, but which no happiness absolves, and for which men blush at  
last, that she had a daughter, a daughter to save, a daughter for whom  
to desire a noble life and the chastity she had not. Henceforth, happy  
or not happy, opulent or beggared, she had in her heart a pure,  
untainted sentiment, the highest of all human feelings because the  
most disinterested. Love has its egotism, but motherhood has none. La  
Marana was a mother like none other; for, in her total, her eternal  
shipwreck, motherhood might still redeem her. To accomplish sacredly  
through life the task of sending a pure soul to heaven, was not that a  
better thing than a tardy repentance? was it not, in truth, the only  
spotless prayer which she could lift to God?
  
So, when this daughter, when her Marie-Juana-Pepita (she would fain  
have given her all the saints in the calendar as guardians), when this  
dear little creature was granted to her, she became possessed of so  
high an idea of the dignity of motherhood that she entreated vice to  
grant her a respite. She made herself virtuous and lived in solitude.
No more fetes, no more orgies, no more love. All joys, all fortunes  
were centred now in the cradle of her child. The tones of that infant  
voice made an oasis for her soul in the burning sands of her  
existence. That sentiment could not be measured or estimated by any  
other. Did it not, in fact, comprise all human sentiments, all  
heavenly hopes? La Marana was so resolved not to soil her daughter  
with any stain other than that of birth, that she sought to invest her  
with social virtues; she even obliged the young father to settle a  
handsome patrimony upon the child and to give her his name. Thus the  
girl was not know as Juana Marana, but as Juana di Mancini.
  
Then, after seven years of joy, and kisses, and intoxicating  
happiness, the time came when the poor Marana deprived herself of her  
idol. That Juana might never bow her head under their hereditary  
shame, the mother had the courage to renounce her child for her  
child's sake, and to seek, not without horrible suffering, for another  
mother, another home, other principles to follow, other and saintlier  
examples to imitate. The abdication of a mother is either a revolting  
act or a sublime one; in this case, was it not sublime?
  
At Tarragona a lucky accident threw the Lagounias in her way, under  
circumstances which enabled her to recognize the integrity of the  
Spaniard and the noble virtue of his wife. She came to them at a time  
when her proposal seemed that of a liberating angel. The fortune and  
honor of the merchant, momentarily compromised, required a prompt and  
secret succor. La Marana made over to the husband the whole sum she  
had obtained of the father for Juana's "dot," requiring neither  
acknowledgment nor interest. According to her own code of honor, a  
contract, a trust, was a thing of the heart, and God its supreme  
judge. After stating the miseries of her position to Dona Lagounia,  
she confided her daughter and her daughter's fortune to the fine old  
Spanish honor, pure and spotless, which filled the precincts of that  
ancient house. Dona Lagounia had no child, and she was only too happy  
to obtain one to nurture. The mother then parted from her Juana,  
convinced that the child's future was safe, and certain of having  
found her a mother, a mother who would bring her up as a Mancini, and  
not as a Marana.
  
Leaving her child in the simple modest house of the merchant where the  
burgher virtues reigned, where religion and sacred sentiments and  
honor filled the air, the poor prostitute, the disinherited mother was  
enabled to bear her trial by visions of Juana, virgin, wife, and  
mother, a mother throughout her life. On the threshold of that house  
Marana left a tear such as the angels garner up.
  
Since that day of mourning and hope the mother, drawn by some  
invincible presentiment, had thrice returned to see her daughter. Once  
when Juana fell ill with a dangerous complaint:
  
"I knew it," she said to Perez when she reached the house.
  
Asleep, she had seen her Juana dying. She nursed her and watched her,  
until one morning, sure of the girl's convalescence, she kissed her,  
still asleep, on the forehead and left her without betraying whom she  
was. A second time the Marana came to the church where Juana made her  
first communion. Simply dressed, concealing herself behind a column,  
the exiled mother recognized herself in her daughter such as she once  
had been, pure as the snow fresh-fallen on the Alps. A courtesan even  
in maternity, the Marana felt in the depths of her soul a jealous  
sentiment, stronger for the moment than that of love, and she left the  
church, incapable of resisting any longer the desire to kill Dona  
Lagounia, as she sat there, with radiant face, too much the mother of  
her child. A third and last meeting had taken place between mother and  
daughter in the streets of Milan, to which city the merchant and his  
wife had paid a visit. The Marana drove through the Corso in all the  
splendor of a sovereign; she passed her daughter like a flash of  
lightning and was not recognized. Horrible anguish! To this Marana,  
surfeited with kisses, one was lacking, a single one, for which she  
would have bartered all the others: the joyous, girlish kiss of a  
daughter to a mother, an honored mother, a mother in whom shone all  
the domestic virtues. Juana living was dead to her. One thought  
revived the soul of the courtesan--a precious thought! Juana was  
henceforth safe. She might be the humblest of women, but at least she  
was not what her mother was--an infamous courtesan.
  
The merchant and his wife had fulfilled their trust with scrupulous  
integrity. Juana's fortune, managed by them, had increased tenfold.
Perez de Lagounia, now the richest merchant in the provinces, felt for  
the young girl a sentiment that was semi-superstitious. Her money had  
preserved his ancient house from dishonorable ruin, and the presence  
of so precious a treasure had brought him untold prosperity. His wife,  
a heart of gold, and full of delicacy, had made the child religious,  
and as pure as she was beautiful. Juana might well become the wife of  
either a great seigneur or a wealthy merchant; she lacked no virtue  
necessary to the highest destiny. Perez had intended taking her to  
Madrid and marrying her to some grandee, but the events of the present  
war delayed the fulfilment of this project.
  
"I don't know where the Marana now is," said Perez, ending the above  
history, "but in whatever quarter of the world she may be living, when  
she hears of the occupation of our province by your armies, and of the  
siege of Tarragona, she will assuredly set out at once to come here  
and see to her daughter's safety."  
  
  
  
CHAPTER II  
  
AUCTION  
  
The foregoing narrative changed the intentions of the Italian captain;  
no longer did he think of making a Marchesa di Montefiore of Juana di  
Mancini. He recognized the blood of the Maranas in the glance the girl  
had given from behind the blinds, in the trick she had just played to  
satisfy her curiosity, and also in the parting look she had cast upon  
him. The libertine wanted a virtuous woman for a wife.
  
The adventure was full of danger, but danger of a kind that never  
daunts the least courageous man, for love and pleasure followed it.
The apprentice sleeping in the shop, the cook bivouacking in the  
kitchen, Perez and his wife sleeping, no doubt, the wakeful sleep of  
the aged, the echoing sonority of the old mansion, the close  
surveillance of the girl in the day-time,--all these things were  
obstacles, and made success a thing well-nigh impossible. But  
Montefiore had in his favor against all impossibilities the blood of  
the Maranas which gushed in the heart of that inquisitive girl,  
Italian by birth, Spanish in principles, virgin indeed, but impatient  
to love. Passion, the girl, and Montefiore were ready and able to defy  
the whole universe.
  
Montefiore, impelled as much by the instinct of a man of gallantry as  
by those vague hopes which cannot be explained, and to which we give  
the name of presentiments (a word of astonishing verbal accuracy),  
Montefiore spent the first hours of the night at his window,  
endeavoring to look below him to the secret apartment where,  
undoubtedly, the merchant and his wife had hidden the love and  
joyfulness of their old age. The ware-room of the "entresol" separated  
him from the rooms on the ground-floor. The captain therefore could  
not have recourse to noises significantly made from one floor to the  
other, an artificial language which all lovers know well how to  
create. But chance, or it may have been the young girl herself, came  
to his assistance. At the moment when he stationed himself at his  
window, he saw, on the black wall of the courtyard, a circle of light,  
in the centre of which the silhouette of Juana was clearly defined;  
the consecutive movement of the arms, and the attitude, gave evidence  
that she was arranging her hair for the night.
  
"Is she alone?" Montefiore asked himself; "could I, without danger,  
lower a letter filled with coin and strike it against that circular  
window in her hiding-place?"  
  
At once he wrote a note, the note of a man exiled by his family to  
Elba, the note of a degraded marquis now a mere captain of equipment.
Then he made a cord of whatever he could find that was capable of  
being turned into string, filled the note with a few silver crowns,  
and lowered it in the deepest silence to the centre of that spherical  
gleam.
  
"The shadows will show if her mother or the servant is with her,"  
thought Montefiore. "If she is not alone, I can pull up the string at  
once."  
  
But, after succeeding with infinite trouble in striking the glass, a  
single form, the little figure of Juana, appeared upon the wall. The  
young girl opened her window cautiously, saw the note, took it, and  
stood before the window while she read it. In it, Montefiore had given  
his name and asked for an interview, offering, after the style of the  
old romances, his heart and hand to the Signorina Juana di Mancini--a  
common trick, the success of which is nearly always certain. At  
Juana's age, nobility of soul increases the dangers which surround  
youth. A poet of our day has said: "Woman succumbs only to her own  
nobility. The lover pretends to doubt the love he inspires at the  
moment when he is most beloved; the young girl, confident and proud,  
longs to make sacrifices to prove her love, and knows the world and  
men too little to continue calm in the midst of her rising emotions  
and repel with contempt the man who accepts a life offered in  
expiation of a false reproach."  
  
Ever since the constitution of societies the young girl finds herself  
torn by a struggle between the caution of prudent virtue and the evils  
of wrong-doing. Often she loses a love, delightful in prospect, and  
the first, if she resists; on the other hand, she loses a marriage if  
she is imprudent. Casting a glance over the vicissitudes of social  
life in Paris, it is impossible to doubt the necessity of religion;  
and yet Paris is situated in the forty-eighth degree of latitude,  
while Tarragona is in the forty-first. The old question of climates is  
still useful to narrators to explain the sudden denouements, the  
imprudences, or the resistances of love.
  
Montefiore kept his eyes fixed on the exquisite black profile  
projected by the gleam upon the wall. Neither he nor Juana could see  
each other; a troublesome cornice, vexatiously placed, deprived them  
of the mute correspondence which may be established between a pair of  
lovers as they bend to each other from their windows. Thus the mind  
and the attention of the captain were concentrated on that luminous  
circle where, without perhaps knowing it herself, the young girl  
would, he thought, innocently reveal her thoughts by a series of  
gestures. But no! The singular motions she proceeded to make gave not  
a particle of hope to the expectant lover. Juana was amusing herself  
by cutting up his missive. But virtue and innocence sometimes imitate  
the clever proceedings inspired by jealousy to the Bartholos of  
comedy. Juana, without pens, ink, or paper, was replying by snip of  
scissors. Presently she refastened the note to the string; the officer  
drew it up, opened it, and read by the light of his lamp one word,  
carefully cut out of the paper: COME.
  
"Come!" he said to himself; "but what of poison? or the dagger or  
carbine of Perez? And that apprentice not yet asleep, perhaps, in the  
shop? and the servant in her hammock? Besides, this old house echoes  
the slightest sound; I can hear old Perez snoring even here. Come,  
indeed! She can have nothing more to lose."  
  
Bitter reflection! rakes alone are logical and will punish a woman for  
devotion. Man created Satan and Lovelace; but a virgin is an angel on  
whom he can bestow naught but his own vices. She is so grand, so  
beautiful, that he cannot magnify or embellish her; he has only the  
fatal power to blast her and drag her down into his own mire.
  
Montefiore waited for a later and more somnolent hour of the night;  
then, in spite of his reflections, he descended the stairs without  
boots, armed with his pistols, moving step by step, stopping to  
question the silence, putting forth his hands, measuring the stairs,  
peering into the darkness, and ready at the slightest incident to fly  
back into his room. The Italian had put on his handsomest uniform; he  
had perfumed his black hair, and now shone with the particular  
brilliancy which dress and toilet bestow upon natural beauty. Under  
such circumstances most men are as feminine as a woman.
  
The marquis arrived without hindrance before the secret door of the  
room in which the girl was hidden, a sort of cell made in the angle of  
the house and belonging exclusively to Juana, who had remained there  
hidden during the day from every eye while the siege lasted. Up to the  
present time she had slept in the room of her adopted mother, but the  
limited space in the garret where the merchant and his wife had gone  
to make room for the officer who was billeted upon them, did not allow  
of her going with them. Dona Lagounia had therefore left the young  
girl to the guardianship of lock and key, under the protection of  
religious ideas, all the more efficacious because they were partly  
superstitious, and also under the shield of a native pride and  
sensitive modesty which made the young Mancini in sort an exception  
among her sex. Juana possessed in an equal degree the most attaching  
virtues and the most passionate impulses; she had needed the modesty  
and sanctity of this monotonous life to calm and cool the tumultuous  
blood of the Maranas which bounded in her heart, the desires of which  
her adopted mother told her were an instigation of the devil.
  
A faint ray of light traced along the sill of the secret door guided  
Montefiore to the place; he scratched the panel softly and Juana  
opened to him. Montefiore entered, palpitating, but he recognized in  
the expression of the girl's face complete ignorance of her peril, a  
sort of naive curiosity, and an innocent admiration. He stopped short,  
arrested for a moment by the sacredness of the picture which met his  
eyes.
  
He saw before him a tapestry on the walls with a gray ground sprinkled  
with violets, a little coffer of ebony, an antique mirror, an immense  
and very old arm chair also in ebony and covered with tapestry, a  
table with twisted legs, a pretty carpet on the floor, near the table  
a single chair; and that was all. On the table, however, were flowers  
and embroidery; in a recess at the farther end of the room was the  
narrow little bed where Juana dreamed. Above the bed were three  
pictures; and near the pillow a crucifix, with a holy water basin and  
a prayer, printed in letters of gold and framed. Flowers exhaled their  
perfume faintly; the candles cast a tender light; all was calm and  
pure and sacred. The dreamy thoughts of Juana, but above all Juana  
herself, had communicated to all things her own peculiar charm; her  
soul appeared to shine there, like the pearl in its matrix. Juana,  
dressed in white, beautiful with naught but her own beauty, laying  
down her rosary to answer love, might have inspired respect, even in a  
Montefiore, if the silence, if the night, if Juana herself had not  
seemed so amorous. Montefiore stood still, intoxicated with an unknown  
happiness, possibly that of Satan beholding heaven through a rift of  
the clouds which form its enclosure.
  
"As soon as I saw you," he said in pure Tuscan, and in the modest tone  
of voice so peculiarly Italian, "I loved you. My soul and my life are  
now in you, and in you they will be forever, if you will have it so."  
  
Juana listened, inhaling from the atmosphere the sound of these words  
which the accents of love made magnificent.
  
"Poor child! how have you breathed so long the air of this dismal  
house without dying of it? You, made to reign in the world, to inhabit  
the palace of a prince, to live in the midst of fetes, to feel the  
joys which love bestows, to see the world at your feet, to efface all  
other beauty by your own which can have no rival--you, to live here,  
solitary, with those two shopkeepers!"  
  
Adroit question! He wished to know if Juana had a lover.
  
"True," she replied. "But who can have told you my secret thoughts?
For the last few months I have nearly died of sadness. Yes, I would  
RATHER die than stay longer in this house. Look at that embroidery;  
there is not a stitch there which I did not set with dreadful  
thoughts. How many times I have thought of escaping to fling myself  
into the sea! Why? I don't know why,--little childish troubles, but  
very keen, though they are so silly. Often I have kissed my mother at  
night as one would kiss a mother for the last time, saying in my  
heart: 'To-morrow I will kill myself.' But I do not die. Suicides go  
to hell, you know, and I am so afraid of hell that I resign myself to  
live, to get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and work the  
same hours, and do the same things. I am not so weary of it, but I  
suffer--And yet, my father and mother adore me. Oh! I am bad, I am  
bad; I say so to my confessor."  
  
"Do you always live here alone, without amusement, without pleasures?"  
  
"Oh! I have not always been like this. Till I was fifteen the  
festivals of the church, the chants, the music gave me pleasure. I was  
happy, feeling myself like the angels without sin and able to  
communicate every week--I loved God then. But for the last three  
years, from day to day, all things have changed. First, I wanted  
flowers here--and I have them, lovely flowers! Then I wanted--but I  
want nothing now," she added, after a pause, smiling at Montefiore.
"Have you not said that you would love me always?"  
  
"Yes, my Juana," cried Montefiore, softly, taking her round the waist  
and pressing her to his heart, "yes. But let me speak to you as you  
speak to God. Are you not as beautiful as Mary in heaven? Listen. I  
swear to you," he continued, kissing her hair, "I swear to take that  
forehead for my altar, to make you my idol, to lay at your feet all  
the luxuries of the world. For you, my palace at Milan; for you my  
horses, my jewels, the diamonds of my ancient family; for you, each  
day, fresh jewels, a thousand pleasures, and all the joys of earth!"  
  
"Yes," she said reflectively, "I would like that; but I feel within my  
soul that I would like better than all the world my husband. Mio caro  
sposo!" she said, as if it were impossible to give in any other  
language the infinite tenderness, the loving elegance with which the  
Italian tongue and accent clothe those delightful words. Besides,  
Italian was Juana's maternal language.
  
"I should find," she continued, with a glance at Montefiore in which  
shone the purity of the cherubim, "I should find in HIM my dear  
religion, him and God--God and him. Is he to be you?" she said. "Yes,  
surely it will be you," she cried, after a pause. "Come, and see the  
picture my father brought me from Italy."  
  
She took a candle, made a sign to Montefiore, and showed him at the  
foot of her bed a Saint Michael overthrowing the demon.
  
"Look!" she said, "has he not your eyes? When I saw you from my window  
in the street, our meeting seemed to me a sign from heaven. Every day  
during my morning meditation, while waiting for my mother to call me  
to prayer, I have so gazed at that picture, that angel, that I have  
ended by thinking him my husband--oh! heavens, I speak to you as  
though you were myself. I must seem crazy to you; but if you only knew  
how a poor captive wants to tell the thoughts that choke her! When  
alone, I talk to my flowers, to my tapestry; they can understand me  
better, I think, than my father and mother, who are so grave."  
  
"Juana," said Montefiore, taking her hands and kissing them with the  
passion that gushed in his eyes, in his gestures, in the tones of his  
voice, "speak to me as your husband, as yourself. I have suffered all  
that you have suffered. Between us two few words are needed to make us  
comprehend our past, but there will never be enough to express our  
coming happiness. Lay your hand upon my heart. Feel how it beats. Let  
us promise before God, who sees and hears us, to be faithful to each  
other throughout our lives. Here, take my ring--and give me yours."  
  
"Give you my ring!" she said in terror.
  
"Why not?" asked Montefiore, uneasy at such artlessness.
  
"But our holy father the Pope has blessed it; it was put upon my  
finger in childhood by a beautiful lady who took care of me, and who  
told me never to part with it."  
  
"Juana, you cannot love me!"  
  
"Ah!" she said, "here it is; take it. You, are you not another  
myself?"  
  
She held out the ring with a trembling hand, holding it tightly as she  
looked at Montefiore with a clear and penetrating eye that questioned  
him. That ring! all of herself was in it; but she gave it to him.
  
"Oh, my Juana!" said Montefiore, again pressing her in his arms. "I  
should be a monster indeed if I deceived you. I will love you  
forever."  
  
Juana was thoughtful. Montefiore, reflecting that in this first  
interview he ought to venture upon nothing that might frighten a young  
girl so ignorantly pure, so imprudent by virtue rather than from  
desire, postponed all further action to the future, relying on his  
beauty, of which he knew the power, and on this innocent ring-  
marriage, the hymen of the heart, the lightest, yet the strongest of  
all ceremonies. For the rest of that night, and throughout the next  
day, Juana's imagination was the accomplice of her passion.
  
On this first evening Montefiore forced himself to be as respectful as  
he was tender. With that intention, in the interests of his passion  
and the desires with which Juana inspired him, he was caressing and  
unctuous in language; he launched the young creature into plans for a  
new existence, described to her the world under glowing colors, talked  
to her of household details always attractive to the mind of girls,  
giving her a sense of the rights and realities of love. Then, having  
agreed upon the hour for their future nocturnal interviews, he left  
her happy, but changed; the pure and pious Juana existed no longer; in  
the last glance she gave him, in the pretty movement by which she  
brought her forehead to his lips, there was already more of passion  
than a girl should feel. Solitude, weariness of employments contrary  
to her nature had brought this about. To make the daughter of the  
Maranas truly virtuous, she ought to have been habituated, little by  
little, to the world, or else to have been wholly withdrawn from it.
  
"The day, to-morrow, will seem very long to me," she said, receiving  
his kisses on her forehead. "But stay in the salon, and speak loud,  
that I may hear your voice; it fills my soul."  
  
Montefiore, clever enough to imagine the girl's life, was all the more  
satisfied with himself for restraining his desires because he saw that  
it would lead to his greater contentment. He returned to his room  
without accident.
  
Ten days went by without any event occurring to trouble the peace and  
solitude of the house. Montefiore employed his Italian cajolery on old  
Perez, on Dona Lagounia, on the apprentice, even on the cook, and they  
all liked him; but, in spite of the confidence he now inspired in  
them, he never asked to see Juana, or to have the door of her  
mysterious hiding-place opened to him. The young girl, hungry to see  
her lover, implored him to do so; but he always refused her from an  
instinct of prudence. Besides, he had used his best powers and  
fascinations to lull the suspicions of the old couple, and had now  
accustomed them to see him, a soldier, stay in bed till midday on  
pretence that he was ill. Thus the lovers lived only in the night-  
time, when the rest of the household were asleep. If Montefiore had  
not been one of those libertines whom the habit of gallantry enables  
to retain their self-possession under all circumstances, he might have  
been lost a dozen times during those ten days. A young lover, in the  
simplicity of a first love, would have committed the enchanting  
imprudences which are so difficult to resist. But he did resist even  
Juana herself, Juana pouting, Juana making her long hair a chain which  
she wound about his neck when caution told him he must go.
  
The most suspicious of guardians would however have been puzzled to  
detect the secret of their nightly meetings. It is to be supposed  
that, sure of success, the Italian marquis gave himself the ineffable  
pleasures of a slow seduction, step by step, leading gradually to the  
fire which should end the affair in a conflagration. On the eleventh  
day, at the dinner-table, he thought it wise to inform old Perez,  
under seal of secrecy, that the reason of his separation from his  
family was an ill-assorted marriage. This false revelation was an  
infamous thing in view of the nocturnal drama which was being played  
under that roof. Montefiore, an experienced rake, was preparing for  
the finale of that drama which he foresaw and enjoyed as an artist who  
loves his art. He expected to leave before long, and without regret,  
the house and his love. It would happen, he thought, in this way:
Juana, after waiting for him in vain for several nights, would risk  
her life, perhaps, in asking Perez what had become of his guest; and  
Perez would reply, not aware of the importance of his answer,--  
  
"The Marquis de Montefiore is reconciled to his family, who consent to  
receive his wife; he has gone to Italy to present her to them."  
  
And Juana?--The marquis never asked himself what would become of  
Juana; but he had studied her character, its nobility, candor, and  
strength, and he knew he might be sure of her silence.
  
He obtained a mission from one of the generals. Three days later, on  
the night preceding his intended departure, Montefiore, instead of  
returning to his own room after dinner, contrived to enter unseen that  
of Juana, to make that farewell night the longer. Juana, true Spaniard  
and true Italian, was enchanted with such boldness; it argued ardor!
For herself she did not fear discovery. To find in the pure love of  
marriage the excitements of intrigue, to hide her husband behind the  
curtains of her bed, and say to her adopted father and mother, in case  
of detection: "I am the Marquise de Montefiore!"--was to an ignorant  
and romantic young girl, who for three years past had dreamed of love  
without dreaming of its dangers, delightful. The door closed on this  
last evening upon her folly, her happiness, like a veil, which it is  
useless here to raise.
  
It was nine o'clock; the merchant and his wife were reading their  
evening prayers; suddenly the noise of a carriage drawn by several  
horses resounded in the street; loud and hasty raps echoed from the  
shop where the servant hurried to open the door, and into that  
venerable salon rushed a woman, magnificently dressed in spite of the  
mud upon the wheels of her travelling-carriage, which had just crossed  
Italy, France, and Spain. It was, of course, the Marana,--the Marana  
who, in spite of her thirty-six years, was still in all the glory of  
her ravishing beauty; the Marana who, being at that time the mistress  
of a king, had left Naples, the fetes, the skies of Naples, the climax  
of her life of luxury, on hearing from her royal lover of the events  
in Spain and the siege of Tarragona.
  
"Tarragona! I must get to Tarragona before the town is taken!" she  
cried. "Ten days to reach Tarragona!"  
  
Then without caring for crown or court, she arrived in Tarragona,  
furnished with an almost imperial safe-conduct; furnished too with  
gold which enabled her to cross France with the velocity of a rocket.
  
"My daughter! my daughter!" cried the Marana.
  
At this voice, and the abrupt invasion of their solitude, the prayer-  
book fell from the hands of the old couple.
  
"She is there," replied the merchant, calmly, after a pause during  
which he recovered from the emotion caused by the abrupt entrance, and  
the look and voice of the mother. "She is there," he repeated,  
pointing to the door of the little chamber.
  
"Yes, but has any harm come to her; is she still--"  
  
"Perfectly well," said Dona Lagounia.
  
"O God! send me to hell if it so pleases thee!" cried the Marana,  
dropping, exhausted and half dead, into a chair.
  
The flush in her cheeks, due to anxiety, paled suddenly; she had  
strength to endure suffering, but none to bear this joy. Joy was more  
violent in her soul than suffering, for it contained the echoes of her  
pain and the agonies of its own emotion.
  
"But," she said, "how have you kept her safe? Tarragona is taken."  
  
"Yes," said Perez, "but since you see me living why do you ask that  
question? Should I not have died before harm could have come to  
Juana?"  
  
At that answer, the Marana seized the calloused hand of the old man,  
and kissed it, wetting it with the tears that flowed from her eyes--  
she who never wept! those tears were all she had most precious under  
heaven.
  
"My good Perez!" she said at last. "But have you had no soldiers  
quartered in your house?"  
  
"Only one," replied the Spaniard. "Fortunately for us the most loyal  
of men; a Spaniard by birth, but now an Italian who hates Bonaparte; a  
married man. He is ill, and gets up late and goes to bed early."  
  
"An Italian! What is his name?"  
  
"Montefiore."  
  
"Can it be the Marquis de Montefiore--"  
  
"Yes, Senora, he himself."  
  
"Has he seen Juana?"  
  
"No," said Dona Lagounia.
  
"You are mistaken, wife," said Perez. "The marquis must have seen her  
for a moment, a short moment, it is true; but I think he looked at her  
that evening she came in here during supper."  
  
"Ah, let me see my daughter!"  
  
"Nothing easier," said Perez; "she is now asleep. If she has left the  
key in the lock we must waken her."  
  
As he rose to take the duplicate key of Juana's door his eyes fell by  
chance on the circular gleam of light upon the black wall of the inner  
courtyard. Within that circle he saw the shadow of a group such as  
Canova alone has attempted to render. The Spaniard turned back.
  
"I do not know," he said to the Marana, "where to find the key."  
  
"You are very pale," she said.
  
"And I will show you why," he cried, seizing his dagger and rapping  
its hilt violently on Juana's door as he shouted,--  
  
"Open! open! open! Juana!"  
  
Juana did not open, for she needed time to conceal Montefiore. She  
knew nothing of what was passing in the salon; the double portieres of  
thick tapestry deadened all sounds.
  
"Madame, I lied to you in saying I could not find the key. Here it  
is," added Perez, taking it from a sideboard. "But it is useless.
Juana's key is in the lock; her door is barricaded. We have been  
deceived, my wife!" he added, turning to Dona Lagounia. "There is a  
man in Juana's room."  
  
"Impossible! By my eternal salvation I say it is impossible!" said his  
wife.
  
"Do not swear, Dona Lagounia. Our honor is dead, and this woman--" He  
pointed to the Marana, who had risen and was standing motionless,  
blasted by his words, "this woman has the right to despise us. She  
saved our life, our fortune, and our honor, and we have saved nothing  
for her but her money--Juana!" he cried again, "open, or I will burst  
in your door."  
  
His voice, rising in violence, echoed through the garrets in the roof.
He was cold and calm. The life of Montefiore was in his hands; he  
would wash away his remorse in the blood of that Italian.
  
"Out, out, out! out, all of you!" cried the Marana, springing like a  
tigress on the dagger, which she wrenched from the hand of the  
astonished Perez. "Out, Perez," she continued more calmly, "out, you  
and your wife and servants! There will be murder here. You might be  
shot by the French. Have nothing to do with this; it is my affair,  
mine only. Between my daughter and me there is none but God. As for  
the man, he belongs to ME. The whole earth could not tear him from my  
grasp. Go, go! I forgive you. I see plainly that the girl is a Marana.
You, your religion, your virtue, were too weak to fight against my  
blood."  
  
She gave a dreadful sigh, turning her dry eyes on them. She had lost  
all, but she knew how to suffer,--a true courtesan.
  
The door opened. The Marana forgot all else, and Perez, making a sign  
to his wife, remained at his post. With his old invincible Spanish  
honor he was determined to share the vengeance of the betrayed mother.
Juana, all in white, and softly lighted by the wax candles, was  
standing calmly in the centre of her chamber.
  
"What do you want with me?" she said.
  
The Marana could not repress a passing shudder.
  
"Perez," she asked, "has this room another issue?"  
  
Perez made a negative gesture; confiding in that gesture, the mother  
entered the room.
  
"Juana," she said, "I am your mother, your judge; you have placed  
yourself in the only situation in which I could reveal myself to you.
You have come down to me, you, whom I thought in heaven. Ah! you have  
fallen low indeed. You have a lover in this room."  
  
"Madame, there is and can be no one but my husband," answered the  
girl. "I am the Marquise de Montefiore."  
  
"Then there are two," said Perez, in a grave voice. "He told me he was  
married."  
  
"Montefiore, my love!" cried the girl, tearing aside the curtain and  
revealing the officer. "Come! they are slandering you."  
  
The Italian appeared, pale and speechless; he saw the dagger in the  
Marana's hand, and he knew her well. With one bound he sprang from the  
room, crying out in a thundering voice,--  
  
"Help! help! they are murdering a Frenchman. Soldiers of the 6th of  
the line, rush for Captain Diard! Help, help!"  
  
Perez had gripped the man and was trying to gag him with his large  
hand, but the Marana stopped him, saying,--  
  
"Bind him fast, but let him shout. Open the doors, leave them open,  
and go, go, as I told you; go, all of you.--As for you," she said,  
addressing Montefiore, "shout, call for help if you choose; by the  
time your soldiers get here this blade will be in your heart. Are you  
married? Answer."  
  
Montefiore, who had fallen on the threshold of the door, scarcely a  
step from Juana, saw nothing but the blade of the dagger, the gleam of  
which blinded him.
  
"Has he deceived me?" said Juana, slowly. "He told me he was free."  
  
"He told me that he was married," repeated Perez, in his solemn voice.
  
"Holy Virgin!" murmured Dona Lagounia.
  
"Answer, soul of corruption," said the Marana, in a low voice, bending  
to the ear of the marquis.
  
"Your daughter--" began Montefiore.
  
"The daughter that was mine is dead or dying," interrupted the Marana.
"I have no daughter; do not utter that word. Answer, are you married?"  
  
"No, madame," said Montefiore, at last, striving to gain time, "I  
desire to marry your daughter."  
  
"My noble Montefiore!" said Juana, drawing a deep breath.
  
"Then why did you attempt to fly and cry for help?" asked Perez.
  
Terrible, revealing light!
  
Juana said nothing, but she wrung her hands and went to her arm-chair  
and sat down.
  
At that moment a tumult rose in the street which was plainly heard in  
the silence of the room. A soldier of the 6th, hearing Montefiore's  
cry for help, had summoned Diard. The quartermaster, who was  
fortunately in his bivouac, came, accompanied by friends.
  
"Why did I fly?" said Montefiore, hearing the voice of his friend.
"Because I told you the truth; I am married--Diard! Diard!" he shouted  
in a piercing voice.
  
But, at a word from Perez, the apprentice closed and bolted the doors,  
so that the soldiers were delayed by battering them in. Before they  
could enter, the Marana had time to strike her dagger into the guilty  
man; but anger hindered her aim, the blade slipped upon the Italian's  
epaulet, though she struck her blow with such force that he fell at  
the very feet of Juana, who took no notice of him. The Marana sprang  
upon him, and this time, resolved not to miss her prey, she caught him  
by the throat.
  
"I am free and I will marry her! I swear it, by God, by my mother, by  
all there is most sacred in the world; I am a bachelor; I will marry  
her, on my honor!"  
  
And he bit the arm of the courtesan.
  
"Mother," said Juana, "kill him. He is so base that I will not have  
him for my husband, were he ten times as beautiful."  
  
"Ah! I recognize my daughter!" cried the mother.
  
"What is all this?" demanded the quartermaster, entering the room.
  
"They are murdering me," cried Montefiore, "on account of this girl;  
she says I am her lover. She inveigled me into a trap, and they are  
forcing me to marry her--"  
  
"And you reject her?" cried Diard, struck with the splendid beauty  
which contempt, hatred, and indignation had given to the girl, already  
so beautiful. "Then you are hard to please. If she wants a husband I  
am ready to marry her. Put up your weapons; there is no trouble here."  
  
The Marana pulled the Italian to the side of her daughter's bed and  
said to him, in a low voice,--  
  
"If I spare you, give thanks for the rest of your life; but, remember  
this, if your tongue ever injures my daughter you will see me again.
Go!--How much 'dot' do you give her?" she continued, going up to  
Perez.
  
"She has two hundred thousand gold piastres," replied the Spaniard.
  
"And that is not all, monsieur," said the Marana, turning to Diard.
"Who are you?--Go!" she repeated to Montefiore.
  
The marquis, hearing this statement of gold piastres, came forward  
once more, saying,--  
  
"I am really free--"  
  
A glance from Juana silenced him.
  
"You are really free to go," she said.
  
And he went immediately.
  
"Alas! monsieur," said the girl, turning to Diard, "I thank you with  
admiration. But my husband is in heaven. To-morrow I shall enter a  
convent--"  
  
"Juana, my Juana, hush!" cried the mother, clasping her in her arms.
Then she whispered in the girl's ear. "You MUST have another husband."  
  
Juana turned pale. She freed herself from her mother and sat down once  
more in her arm-chair.
  
"Who are you, monsieur?" repeated the Marana, addressing Diard.
  
"Madame, I am at present only the quartermaster of the 6th of the  
line. But for such a wife I have the heart to make myself a marshal of  
France. My name is Pierre-Francois Diard. My father was provost of  
merchants. I am not--"  
  
"But, at least, you are an honest man, are you not?" cried the Marana,  
interrupting him. "If you please the Signorina Juana di Mancini, you  
can marry her and be happy together.--Juana," she continued in a grave  
tone, "in becoming the wife of a brave and worthy man remember that  
you will also be a mother. I have sworn that you shall kiss your  
children without a blush upon your face" (her voice faltered  
slightly). "I have sworn that you shall live a virtuous life; expect,  
therefore, many troubles. But, whatever happens, continue pure, and be  
faithful to your husband. Sacrifice all things to him, for he will be  
the father of your children--the father of your children! If you take  
a lover, I, your mother, will stand between you and him. Do you see  
that dagger? It is in your 'dot,'" she continued, throwing the weapon  
on Juana's bed. "I leave it there as the guarantee of your honor so  
long as my eyes are open and my arm free. Farewell," she said,  
restraining her tears. "God grant that we may never meet again."  
  
At that idea, her tears began to flow.
  
"Poor child!" she added, "you have been happier than you knew in this  
dull home.--Do not allow her to regret it," she said, turning to  
Diard.
  
The foregoing rapid narrative is not the principal subject of this  
Study, for the understanding of which it was necessary to explain how  
it happened that the quartermaster Diard married Juana di Mancini,  
that Montefiore and Diard were intimately known to each other, and to  
show plainly what blood and what passions were in Madame Diard.
  
  
  
CHAPTER III  
  
THE HISTORY OF MADAME DIARD  
  
By the time that the quartermaster had fulfilled all the long and  
dilatory formalities without which no French soldier can be married,  
he was passionately in love with Juana di Mancini, and Juana had had  
time to think of her coming destiny.
  
An awful destiny! Juana, who felt neither esteem nor love for Diard,  
was bound to him forever, by a rash but necessary promise. The man was  
neither handsome nor well-made. His manners, devoid of all  
distinction, were a mixture of the worst army tone, the habits of his  
province, and his own insufficient education. How could she love  
Diard, she, a young girl all grace and elegance, born with an  
invincible instinct for luxury and good taste, her very nature tending  
toward the sphere of the higher social classes? As for esteeming him,  
she rejected the very thought precisely because he had married her.
This repulsion was natural. Woman is a saintly and noble creature, but  
almost always misunderstood, and nearly always misjudged because she  
is misunderstood. If Juana had loved Diard she would have esteemed  
him. Love creates in a wife a new woman; the woman of the day before  
no longer exists on the morrow. Putting on the nuptial robe of a  
passion in which life itself is concerned, the woman wraps herself in  
purity and whiteness. Reborn into virtue and chastity, there is no  
past for her; she is all future, and should forget the things behind  
her to relearn life. In this sense the famous words which a modern  
poet has put into the lips of Marion Delorme is infused with truth,--  
  
"And Love remade me virgin."  
  
That line seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so  
truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern  
theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially  
vaudevillist spirit of the pit.
  
So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded,  
hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in  
all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in  
appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart's legality, which  
women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least  
reflective. Juana became profoundly sad as she saw the nature and the  
extent of the life before her. Often she turned her eyes, brimming  
with tears proudly repressed, upon Perez and Dona Lagounia, who fully  
comprehended, both of them, the bitter thoughts those tears contained.
But they were silent: of what good were reproaches now; why look for  
consolations? The deeper they were, the more they enlarged the wound.
  
One evening, Juana, stupid with grief, heard through the open door of  
her little room, which the old couple had thought shut, a pitying moan  
from her adopted mother.
  
"The child will die of grief."  
  
"Yes," said Perez, in a shaking voice, "but what can we do? I cannot  
now boast of her beauty and her chastity to Comte d'Arcos, to whom I  
hoped to marry her."  
  
"But a single fault is not vice," said the old woman, pitying as the  
angels.
  
"Her mother gave her to this man," said Perez.
  
"Yes, in a moment; without consulting the poor child!" cried Dona  
Lagounia.
  
"She knew what she was doing."  
  
"But oh! into what hands our pearl is going!"  
  
"Say no more, or I shall seek a quarrel with that Diard."  
  
"And that would only lead to other miseries."  
  
Hearing these dreadful words Juana saw the happy future she had lost  
by her own wrongdoing. The pure and simple years of her quiet life  
would have been rewarded by a brilliant existence such as she had  
fondly dreamed,--dreams which had caused her ruin. To fall from the  
height of Greatness to Monsieur Diard! She wept. At times she went  
nearly mad. She floated for a while between vice and religion. Vice  
was a speedy solution, religion a lifetime of suffering. The  
meditation was stormy and solemn. The next day was the fatal day, the  
day for the marriage. But Juana could still remain free. Free, she  
knew how far her misery would go; married, she was ignorant of where  
it went or what it might bring her.
  
Religion triumphed. Dona Lagounia stayed beside her child and prayed  
and watched as she would have prayed and watched beside the dying.
  
"God wills it," she said to Juana.
  
Nature gives to woman alternately a strength which enables her to  
suffer and a weakness which leads her to resignation. Juana resigned  
herself; and without restriction. She determined to obey her mother's  
prayer, and cross the desert of life to reach God's heaven, knowing  
well that no flowers grew for her along the way of that painful  
journey.
  
She married Diard. As for the quartermaster, though he had no grace in  
Juana's eyes, we may well absolve him. He loved her distractedly. The  
Marana, so keen to know the signs of love, had recognized in that man  
the accents of passion and the brusque nature, the generous impulses,  
that are common to Southerners. In the paroxysm of her anger and her  
distress she had thought such qualities enough for her daughter's  
happiness.
  
The first days of this marriage were apparently happy; or, to express  
one of those latent facts, the miseries of which are buried by women  
in the depths of their souls, Juana would not cast down her husband's  
joy,--a double role, dreadful to play, but to which, sooner or later,  
all women unhappily married come. This is a history impossible to  
recount in its full truth. Juana, struggling hourly against her  
nature, a nature both Spanish and Italian, having dried up the source  
of her tears by dint of weeping, was a human type, destined to  
represent woman's misery in its utmost expression, namely, sorrow  
undyingly active; the description of which would need such minute  
observations that to persons eager for dramatic emotions they would  
seem insipid. This analysis, in which every wife would find some one  
of her own sufferings, would require a volume to express them all; a  
fruitless, hopeless volume by its very nature, the merit of which  
would consist in faintest tints and delicate shadings which critics  
would declare to be effeminate and diffuse. Besides, what man could  
rightly approach, unless he bore another heart within his heart, those  
solemn and touching elegies which certain women carry with them to  
their tomb; melancholies, misunderstood even by those who cause them;  
sighs unheeded, devotions unrewarded,--on earth at least,--splendid  
silences misconstrued; vengeances withheld, disdained; generosities  
perpetually bestowed and wasted; pleasures longed for and denied;  
angelic charities secretly accomplished,--in short, all the religions  
of womanhood and its inextinguishable love.
  
Juana knew that life; fate spared her nought. She was wholly a wife,  
but a sorrowful and suffering wife; a wife incessantly wounded, yet  
forgiving always; a wife pure as a flawless diamond,--she who had the  
beauty and the glow of the diamond, and in that beauty, that glow, a  
vengeance in her hand; for she was certainly not a woman to fear the  
dagger added to her "dot."  
  
At first, inspired by a real love, by one of those passions which for  
the time being change even odious characters and bring to light all  
that may be noble in a soul, Diard behaved like a man of honor. He  
forced Montefiore to leave the regiment and even the army corps, so  
that his wife might never meet him during the time they remained in  
Spain. Next, he petitioned for his own removal, and succeeded in  
entering the Imperial Guard. He desired at any price to obtain a  
title, honors, and consideration in keeping with his present wealth.
With this idea in his mind, he behaved courageously in one of the most  
bloody battles in Germany, but, unfortunately, he was too severely  
wounded to remain in the service. Threatened with the loss of a leg,  
he was forced to retire on a pension, without the title of baron,  
without those rewards he hoped to win, and would have won had he not  
been Diard.
  
This event, this wound, and his thwarted hopes contributed to change  
his character. His Provencal energy, roused for a time, sank down. At  
first he was sustained by his wife, in whom his efforts, his courage,  
his ambition had induced some belief in his nature, and who showed  
herself, what women are, tender and consoling in the troubles of life.
Inspired by a few words from Juana, the retired soldier came to Paris,  
resolved to win in an administrative career a position to command  
respect, bury in oblivion the quartermaster of the 6th of the line,  
and secure for Madame Diard a noble title. His passion for that  
seductive creature enabled him to divine her most secret wishes. Juana  
expressed nothing, but he understood her. He was not loved as a lover  
dreams of being loved; he knew this, and he strove to make himself  
respected, loved, and cherished. He foresaw a coming happiness, poor  
man, in the patience and gentleness shown on all occasions by his  
wife; but that patience, that gentleness, were only the outward signs  
of the resignation which had made her his wife. Resignation, religion,  
were they love? Often Diard wished for refusal where he met with  
chaste obedience; often he would have given his eternal life that  
Juana might have wept upon his bosom and not disguised her secret  
thoughts behind a smiling face which lied to him nobly. Many young men  
--for after a certain age men no longer struggle--persist in the  
effort to triumph over an evil fate, the thunder of which they hear,  
from time to time, on the horizon of their lives; and when at last  
they succumb and roll down the precipice of evil, we ought to do them  
justice and acknowledge these inward struggles.
  
Like many men Diard tried all things, and all things were hostile to  
him. His wealth enabled him to surround his wife with the enjoyments  
of Parisian luxury. She lived in a fine house, with noble rooms, where  
she maintained a salon, in which abounded artists (by nature no judges  
of men), men of pleasure ready to amuse themselves anywhere, a few  
politicians who swelled the numbers, and certain men of fashion, all  
of whom admired Juana. Those who put themselves before the eyes of the  
public in Paris must either conquer Paris or be subject to it. Diard's  
character was not sufficiently strong, compact, or persistent to  
command society at that epoch, because it was an epoch when all men  
were endeavoring to rise. Social classifications ready-made are  
perhaps a great boon even for the people. Napoleon has confided to us  
the pains he took to inspire respect in his court, where most of the  
courtiers had been his equals. But Napoleon was Corsican, and Diard  
Provencal. Given equal genius, an islander will always be more compact  
and rounded than the man of terra firma in the same latitude; the arm  
of the sea which separates Corsica from Provence is, in spite of human  
science, an ocean which has made two nations.
  
Diard's mongrel position, which he himself made still more  
questionable, brought him great troubles. Perhaps there is useful  
instruction to be derived from the almost imperceptible connection of  
acts which led to the finale of this history.
  
In the first place, the sneerers of Paris did not see without  
malicious smiles and words the pictures with which the former  
quartermaster adorned his handsome mansion. Works of art purchased the  
night before were said to be spoils from Spain; and this accusation  
was the revenge of those who were jealous of his present fortune.
Juana comprehended this reproach, and by her advice Diard sent back to  
Tarragona all the pictures he had brought from there. But the public,  
determined to see things in the worst light, only said, "That Diard is  
shrewd; he has sold his pictures." Worthy people continued to think  
that those which remained in the Diard salons were not honorably  
acquired. Some jealous women asked how it was that a DIARD (!) had  
been able to marry so rich and beautiful a young girl. Hence comments  
and satires without end, such as Paris contributes. And yet, it must  
be said, that Juana met on all sides the respect inspired by her pure  
and religious life, which triumphed over everything, even Parisian  
calumny; but this respect stopped short with her, her husband received  
none of it. Juana's feminine perception and her keen eye hovering over  
her salons, brought her nothing but pain.
  
This lack of esteem was perfectly natural. Diard's comrades, in spite  
of the virtues which our imaginations attribute to soldiers, never  
forgave the former quartermaster of the 6th of the line for becoming  
suddenly so rich and for attempting to cut a figure in Paris. Now in  
Paris, from the last house in the faubourg Saint-Germain to the last  
in the rue Saint-Lazare, between the heights of the Luxembourg and the  
heights of Montmartre, all that clothes itself and gabbles, clothes  
itself to go out and goes out to gabble. All that world of great and  
small pretensions, that world of insolence and humble desires, of envy  
and cringing, all that is gilded or tarnished, young or old, noble of  
yesterday or noble from the fourth century, all that sneers at a  
parvenu, all that fears to commit itself, all that wants to demolish  
power and worships power if it resists,--ALL those ears hear, ALL  
those tongues say, ALL those minds know, in a single evening, where  
the new-comer who aspires to honor among them was born and brought up,  
and what that interloper has done, or has not done, in the course of  
his life. There may be no court of assizes for the upper classes of  
society; but at any rate they have the most cruel of public  
prosecutors, an intangible moral being, both judge and executioner,  
who accuses and brands. Do not hope to hide anything from him; tell  
him all yourself; he wants to know all and he will know all. Do not  
ask what mysterious telegraph it was which conveyed to him in the  
twinkling of an eye, at any hour, in any place, that story, that bit  
of news, that scandal; do not ask what prompts him. That telegraph is  
a social mystery; no observer can report its effects. Of many  
extraordinary instances thereof, one may suffice: The assassination of  
the Duc de Berry, which occurred at the Opera-house, was related  
within ten minutes in the Ile-Saint-Louis. Thus the opinion of the 6th  
of the line as to its quartermaster filtered through society the night  
on which he gave his first ball.
  
Diard was therefore debarred from succeeding in society. Henceforth  
his wife alone had the power to make anything of him. Miracle of our  
strange civilization! In Paris, if a man is incapable of being  
anything himself, his wife, when she is young and clever, may give him  
other chances for elevation. We sometimes meet with invalid women,  
feeble beings apparently, who, without rising from sofas or leaving  
their chambers, have ruled society, moved a thousand springs, and  
placed their husbands where their ambition or their vanity prompted.
But Juana, whose childhood was passed in her retreat in Tarragona,  
knew nothing of the vices, the meannesses, or the resources of  
Parisian society; she looked at that society with the curiosity of a  
girl, but she learned from it only that which her sorrow and her  
wounded pride revealed to her.
  
Juana had the tact of a virgin heart which receives impressions in  
advance of the event, after the manner of what are called  
"sensitives." The solitary young girl, so suddenly become a woman and  
a wife, saw plainly that were she to attempt to compel society to  
respect her husband, it must be after the manner of Spanish beggars,  
carbine in hand. Besides, the multiplicity of the precautions she  
would have to take, would they meet the necessity? Suddenly she  
divined society as, once before, she had divined life, and she saw  
nothing around her but the immense extent of an irreparable disaster.
She had, moreover, the additional grief of tardily recognizing her  
husband's peculiar form of incapacity; he was a man unfitted for any  
purpose that required continuity of ideas. He could not understand a  
consistent part, such as he ought to play in the world; he perceived  
it neither as a whole nor in its gradations, and its gradations were  
everything. He was in one of those positions where shrewdness and tact  
might have taken the place of strength; when shrewdness and tact  
succeed, they are, perhaps, the highest form of strength.
  
Now Diard, far from arresting the spot of oil on his garments left by  
his antecedents, did his best to spread it. Incapable of studying the  
phase of the empire in the midst of which he came to live in Paris, he  
wanted to be made prefect. At that time every one believed in the  
genius of Napoleon; his favor enhanced the value of all offices.
Prefectures, those miniature empires, could only be filled by men of  
great names, or chamberlains of H.M. the emperor and king. Already the  
prefects were a species of vizier. The myrmidons of the great man  
scoffed at Diard's pretensions to a prefecture, whereupon he lowered  
his demand to a sub-prefecture. There was, of course, a ridiculous  
discrepancy between this latter demand and the magnitude of his  
fortune. To frequent the imperial salons and live with insolent  
luxury, and then to abandon that millionaire life and bury himself as  
sub-prefect at Issoudun or Savenay was certainly holding himself below  
his position. Juana, too late aware of our laws and habits and  
administrative customs, did not enlighten her husband soon enough.
Diard, desperate, petitioned successively all the ministerial powers;  
repulsed everywhere, he found nothing open to him; and society then  
judged him as the government judged him and as he judged himself.
Diard, grievously wounded on the battlefield, was nevertheless not  
decorated; the quartermaster, rich as he was, was allowed no place in  
public life, and society logically refused him that to which he  
pretended in its midst.
  
Finally, to cap all, the luckless man felt in his own home the  
superiority of his wife. Though she used great tact--we might say  
velvet softness if the term were admissible--to disguise from her  
husband this supremacy, which surprised and humiliated herself, Diard  
ended by being affected by it.
  
At a game of life like this men are either unmanned, or they grow the  
stronger, or they give themselves to evil. The courage or the ardor of  
this man lessened under the reiterated blows which his own faults  
dealt to his self-appreciation, and fault after fault he committed. In  
the first place he had to struggle against his own habits and  
character. A passionate Provencal, frank in his vices as in his  
virtues, this man whose fibres vibrated like the strings of a harp,  
was all heart to his former friends. He succored the shabby and  
spattered man as readily as the needy of rank; in short, he accepted  
everybody, and gave his hand in his gilded salons to many a poor  
devil. Observing this on one occasion, a general of the empire, a  
variety of the human species of which no type will presently remain,  
refused his hand to Diard, and called him, insolently, "my good  
fellow" when he met him. The few persons of really good society whom  
Diard knew, treated him with that elegant, polished contempt against  
which a new-made man has seldom any weapons. The manners, the semi-  
Italian gesticulations, the speech of Diard, his style of dress,--all  
contributed to repulse the respect which careful observation of  
matters of good taste and dignity might otherwise obtain for vulgar  
persons; the yoke of such conventionalities can only be cast off by  
great and unthinkable powers. So goes the world.
  
These details but faintly picture the many tortures to which Juana was  
subjected; they came upon her one by one; each social nature pricked  
her with its own particular pin; and to a soul which preferred the  
thrust of a dagger, there could be no worse suffering than this  
struggle in which Diard received insults he did not feel and Juana  
felt those she did not receive. A moment came, an awful moment, when  
she gained a clear and lucid perception of society, and felt in one  
instant all the sorrows which were gathering themselves together to  
fall upon her head. She judged her husband incapable of rising to the  
honored ranks of the social order, and she felt that he would one day  
descend to where his instincts led him. Henceforth Juana felt pity for  
him.
  
The future was very gloomy for this young woman. She lived in constant  
apprehension of some disaster. This presentiment was in her soul as a  
contagion is in the air, but she had strength of mind and will to  
disguise her anguish beneath a smile. Juana had ceased to think of  
herself. She used her influence to make Diard resign his various  
pretensions and to show him, as a haven, the peaceful and consoling  
life of home. Evils came from society--why not banish it? In his home  
Diard found peace and respect; he reigned there. She felt herself  
strong to accept the trying task of making him happy,--he, a man  
dissatisfied with himself. Her energy increased with the difficulties  
of life; she had all the secret heroism necessary to her position;  
religion inspired her with those desires which support the angel  
appointed to protect a Christian soul--occult poesy, allegorical image  
of our two natures!
  
Diard abandoned his projects, closed his house to the world, and lived  
in his home. But here he found another reef. The poor soldier had one  
of those eccentric souls which need perpetual motion. Diard was one of  
the men who are instinctively compelled to start again the moment they  
arrive, and whose vital object seems to be to come and go incessantly,  
like the wheels mentioned in Holy Writ. Perhaps he felt the need of  
flying from himself. Without wearying of Juana, without blaming Juana,  
his passion for her, rendered tranquil by time, allowed his natural  
character to assert itself. Henceforth his days of gloom were more  
frequent, and he often gave way to southern excitement. The more  
virtuous a woman is and the more irreproachable, the more a man likes  
to find fault with her, if only to assert by that act his legal  
superiority. But if by chance she seems really imposing to him, he  
feels the need of foisting faults upon her. After that, between man  
and wife, trifles increase and grow till they swell to Alps.
  
But Juana, patient and without pride, gentle and without that  
bitterness which women know so well how to cast into their submission,  
left Diard no chance for planned ill-humor. Besides, she was one of  
those noble creatures to whom it is impossible to speak  
disrespectfully; her glance, in which her life, saintly and pure,  
shone out, had the weight of a fascination. Diard, embarrassed at  
first, then annoyed, ended by feeling that such high virtue was a yoke  
upon him. The goodness of his wife gave him no violent emotions, and  
violent emotions were what he wanted. What myriads of scenes are  
played in the depths of his souls, beneath the cold exterior of lives  
that are, apparently, commonplace! Among these dramas, lasting each  
but a short time, though they influence life so powerfully and are  
frequently the forerunners of the great misfortune doomed to fall on  
so many marriages, it is difficult to choose an example. There was a  
scene, however, which particularly marked the moment when in the life  
of this husband and wife estrangement began. Perhaps it may also serve  
to explain the finale of this narrative.
  
Juana had two children, happily for her, two sons. The first was born  
seven months after her marriage. He was called Juan, and he strongly  
resembled his mother. The second was born about two years after her  
arrival in Paris. The latter resembled both Diard and Juana, but more  
particularly Diard. His name was Francisque. For the last five years  
Francisque had been the object of Juana's most tender and watchful  
care. The mother was constantly occupied with that child; to him her  
prettiest caresses; to him the toys, but to him, especially, the  
penetrating mother-looks. Juana had watched him from his cradle; she  
had studied his cries, his motions; she endeavored to discern his  
nature that she might educate him wisely. It seemed at times as if she  
had but that one child. Diard, seeing that the eldest, Juan, was in a  
way neglected, took him under his own protection; and without  
inquiring even of himself whether the boy was the fruit of that  
ephemeral love to which he owed his wife, he made him his Benjamin.
  
Of all the sentiments transmitted to her through the blood of her  
grandmothers which consumed her, Madame Diard accepted one alone,--  
maternal love. But she loved her children doubly: first with the noble  
violence of which her mother the Marana had given her the example;  
secondly, with grace and purity, in the spirit of those social virtues  
the practice of which was the glory of her life and her inward  
recompense. The secret thought, the conscience of her motherhood,  
which gave to the Marana's life its stamp of untaught poesy, was to  
Juana an acknowledged life, an open consolation at all hours. Her  
mother had been virtuous as other women are criminal,--in secret; she  
had stolen a fancied happiness, she had never really tasted it. But  
Juana, unhappy in her virtue as her mother was unhappy in her vice,  
could enjoy at all moments the ineffable delights which her mother had  
so craved and could not have. To her, as to her mother, maternity  
comprised all earthly sentiments. Each, from differing causes, had no  
other comfort in their misery. Juana's maternal love may have been the  
strongest because, deprived of all other affections, she put the joys  
she lacked into the one joy of her children; and there are noble  
passions that resemble vice; the more they are satisfied the more they  
increase. Mothers and gamblers are alike insatiable.
  
When Juana saw the generous pardon laid silently on the head of Juan  
by Diard's fatherly affection, she was much moved, and from the day  
when the husband and wife changed parts she felt for him the true and  
deep interest she had hitherto shown to him as a matter of duty only.
If that man had been more consistent in his life; if he had not  
destroyed by fitful inconstancy and restlessness the forces of a true  
though excitable sensibility, Juana would doubtless have loved him in  
the end. Unfortunately, he was a type of those southern natures which  
are keen in perceptions they cannot follow out; capable of great  
things over-night, and incapable the next morning; often the victim of  
their own virtues, and often lucky through their worst passions;  
admirable men in some respects, when their good qualities are kept to  
a steady energy by some outward bond. For two years after his retreat  
from active life Diard was held captive in his home by the softest  
chains. He lived, almost in spite of himself, under the influence of  
his wife, who made herself gay and amusing to cheer him, who used the  
resources of feminine genius to attract and seduce him to a love of  
virtue, but whose ability and cleverness did not go so far as to  
simulate love.
  
At this time all Paris was talking of the affair of a captain in the  
army who in a paroxysm of libertine jealousy had killed a woman.
Diard, on coming home to dinner, told his wife that the officer was  
dead. He had killed himself to avoid the dishonor of a trial and the  
shame of death upon the scaffold. Juana did not see at first the logic  
of such conduct, and her husband was obliged to explain to her the  
fine jurisprudence of French law, which does not prosecute the dead.
  
"But, papa, didn't you tell us the other day that the king could  
pardon?" asked Francisque.
  
"The king can give nothing but life," said Juan, half scornfully.
  
Diard and Juana, the spectators of this little scene, were differently  
affected by it. The glance, moist with joy, which his wife cast upon  
her eldest child was a fatal revelation to the husband of the secrets  
of a heart hitherto impenetrable. That eldest child was all Juana;  
Juana comprehended him; she was sure of his heart, his future; she  
adored him, but her ardent love was a secret between herself, her  
child, and God. Juan instinctively enjoyed the seeming indifference of  
his mother in presence of his father and brother, for she pressed him  
to her heart when alone. Francisque was Diard, and Juana's incessant  
care and watchfulness betrayed her desire to correct in the son the  
vices of the father and to encourage his better qualities. Juana,  
unaware that her glance had said too much and that her husband had  
rightly interpreted it, took Francisque in her lap and gave him, in a  
gentle voice still trembling with the pleasure that Juan's answer had  
brought her, a lesson upon honor, simplified to his childish  
intelligence.
  
"That boy's character requires care," said Diard.
  
"Yes," she replied simply.
  
"How about Juan?"  
  
Madame Diard, struck by the tone in which the words were uttered,  
looked at her husband.
  
"Juan was born perfect," he added.
  
Then he sat down gloomily, and reflected. Presently, as his wife  
continued silent, he added:--  
  
"You love one of YOUR children better than the other."  
  
"You know that," she said.
  
"No," said Diard, "I did not know until now which of them you  
preferred."  
  
"But neither of them have ever given me a moment's uneasiness," she  
answered quickly.
  
"But one of them gives you greater joys," he said, more quickly still.
  
"I never counted them," she said.
  
"How false you women are!" cried Diard. "Will you dare to say that  
Juan is not the child of your heart?"  
  
"If that were so," she said, with dignity, "do you think it a  
misfortune?"  
  
"You have never loved me. If you had chosen, I would have conquered  
worlds for your sake. You know all that I have struggled to do in  
life, supported by the hope of pleasing you. Ah! if you had only loved  
me!"  
  
"A woman who loves," said Juana, "likes to live in solitude, far from  
the world, and that is what we are doing."  
  
"I know, Juana, that YOU are never in the wrong."  
  
The words were said bitterly, and cast, for the rest of their lives  
together, a coldness between them.
  
On the morrow of that fatal day Diard went back to his old companions  
and found distractions for his mind in play. Unfortunately, he won  
much money, and continued playing. Little by little, he returned to  
the dissipated life he had formerly lived. Soon he ceased even to dine  
in his own home.
  
Some months went by in the enjoyment of this new independence; he was  
determined to preserve it, and in order to do so he separated himself  
from his wife, giving her the large apartments and lodging himself in  
the entresol. By the end of the year Diard and Juana only saw each  
other in the morning at breakfast.
  
Like all gamblers, he had his alternations of loss and gain. Not  
wishing to cut into the capital of his fortune, he felt the necessity  
of withdrawing from his wife the management of their income; and the  
day came when he took from her all she had hitherto freely disposed of  
for the household benefit, giving her instead a monthly stipend. The  
conversation they had on this subject was the last of their married  
intercourse. The silence that fell between them was a true divorce;  
Juana comprehended that from henceforth she was only a mother, and she  
was glad, not seeking for the causes of this evil. For such an event  
is a great evil. Children are conjointly one with husband and wife in  
the home, and the life of her husband could not be a source of grief  
and injury to Juana only.
  
As for Diard, now emancipated, he speedily grew accustomed to win and  
lose enormous sums. A fine player and a heavy player, he soon became  
celebrated for his style of playing. The social consideration he had  
been unable to win under the Empire, he acquired under the Restoration  
by the rolling of his gold on the green cloth and by his talent for  
all games that were in vogue. Ambassadors, bankers, persons with  
newly-acquired large fortunes, and all those men who, having sucked  
life to the dregs, turn to gambling for its feverish joys, admired  
Diard at their clubs,--seldom in their own houses,--and they all  
gambled with him. He became the fashion. Two or three times during the  
winter he gave a fete as a matter of social pride in return for the  
civilities he received. At such times Juana once more caught a glimpse  
of the world of balls, festivities, luxury, and lights; but for her it  
was a sort of tax imposed upon the comfort of her solitude. She, the  
queen of these solemnities, appeared like a being fallen from some  
other planet. Her simplicity, which nothing had corrupted, her  
beautiful virginity of soul, which her peaceful life restored to her,  
her beauty and her true modesty, won her sincere homage. But observing  
how few women ever entered her salons, she came to understand that  
though her husband was following, without communicating its nature to  
her, a new line of conduct, he had gained nothing actually in the  
world's esteem.
  
Diard was not always lucky; far from it. In three years he had  
dissipated three fourths of his fortune, but his passion for play gave  
him the energy to continue it. He was intimate with a number of men,  
more particularly with the roues of the Bourse, men who, since the  
revolution, have set up the principle that robbery done on a large  
scale is only a SMIRCH to the reputation,--transferring thus to  
financial matters the loose principles of love in the eighteenth  
century. Diard now became a sort of business man, and concerned  
himself in several of those affairs which are called SHADY in the  
slang of the law-courts. He practised the decent thievery by which so  
many men, cleverly masked, or hidden in the recesses of the political  
world, make their fortunes,--thievery which, if done in the streets by  
the light of an oil lamp, would see a poor devil to the galleys, but,  
under gilded ceilings and by the light of candelabra, is sanctioned.
Diard brought up, monopolized, and sold sugars; he sold offices; he  
had the glory of inventing the "man of straw" for lucrative posts  
which it was necessary to keep in his own hands for a short time; he  
bought votes, receiving, on one occasion, so much per cent on the  
purchase of fifteen parliamentary votes which all passed on one  
division from the benches of the Left to the benches of the Right.
Such actions are no longer crimes or thefts,--they are called  
governing, developing industry, becoming a financial power. Diard was  
placed by public opinion on the bench of infamy where many an able man  
was already seated. On that bench is the aristocracy of evil. It is  
the upper Chamber of scoundrels of high life. Diard was, therefore,  
not a mere commonplace gambler who is seen to be a blackguard, and  
ends by begging. That style of gambler is no longer seen in society of  
a certain topographical height. In these days bold scoundrels die  
brilliantly in the chariot of vice with the trappings of luxury.
Diard, at least, did not buy his remorse at a low price; he made  
himself one of these privileged men. Having studied the machinery of  
government and learned all the secrets and the passions of the men in  
power, he was able to maintain himself in the fiery furnace into which  
he had sprung.
  
Madame Diard knew nothing of her husband's infernal life. Glad of his  
abandonment, she felt no curiosity about him, and all her hours were  
occupied. She devoted what money she had to the education of her  
children, wishing to make men of them, and giving them straight-  
forward reasons, without, however, taking the bloom from their young  
imaginations. Through them alone came her interests and her emotions;  
consequently, she suffered no longer from her blemished life. Her  
children were to her what they are to many mothers for a long period  
of time,--a sort of renewal of their own existence. Diard was now an  
accidental circumstance, not a participator in her life, and since he  
had ceased to be the father and the head of the family, Juana felt  
bound to him by no tie other than that imposed by conventional laws.
Nevertheless, she brought up her children to the highest respect for  
paternal authority, however imaginary it was for them. In this she was  
greatly seconded by her husband's continual absence. If he had been  
much in the home Diard would have neutralized his wife's efforts. The  
boys had too much intelligence and shrewdness not to have judged their  
father; and to judge a father is moral parricide.
  
In the long run, however, Juana's indifference to her husband wore  
itself away; it even changed to a species of fear. She understood at  
last how the conduct of a father might long weigh on the future of her  
children, and her motherly solicitude brought her many, though  
incomplete, revelations of the truth. From day to day the dread of  
some unknown but inevitable evil in the shadow of which she lived  
became more and more keen and terrible. Therefore, during the rare  
moments when Diard and Juana met she would cast upon his hollow face,  
wan from nights of gambling and furrowed by emotions, a piercing look,  
the penetration of which made Diard shudder. At such times the assumed  
gaiety of her husband alarmed Juana more than his gloomiest  
expressions of anxiety when, by chance, he forgot that assumption of  
joy. Diard feared his wife as a criminal fears the executioner. In  
him, Juana saw her children's shame; and in her Diard dreaded a calm  
vengeance, the judgment of that serene brow, an arm raised, a weapon  
ready.
  
After fifteen years of marriage Diard found himself without resources.
He owed three hundred thousand francs and he could scarcely muster one  
hundred thousand. The house, his only visible possession, was  
mortgaged to its fullest selling value. A few days more, and the sort  
of prestige with which opulence had invested him would vanish. Not a  
hand would be offered, not a purse would be open to him. Unless some  
favorable event occurred he would fall into a slough of contempt,  
deeper perhaps than he deserved, precisely because he had mounted to a  
height he could not maintain. At this juncture he happened to hear  
that a number of strangers of distinction, diplomats and others, were  
assembled at the watering-places in the Pyrenees, where they gambled  
for enormous sums, and were doubtless well supplied with money.
  
He determined to go at once to the Pyrenees; but he would not leave  
his wife in Paris, lest some importunate creditor might reveal to her  
the secret of his horrible position. He therefore took her and the two  
children with him, refusing to allow her to take the tutor and  
scarcely permitting her to take a maid. His tone was curt and  
imperious; he seemed to have recovered some energy. This sudden  
journey, the cause of which escaped her penetration, alarmed Juana  
secretly. Her husband made it gaily. Obliged to occupy the same  
carriage, he showed himself day by day more attentive to the children  
and more amiable to their mother. Nevertheless, each day brought Juana  
dark presentiments, the presentiments of mothers who tremble without  
apparent reason, but who are seldom mistaken when they tremble thus.
For them the veil of the future seems thinner than for others.
  
At Bordeaux, Diard hired in a quiet street a quiet little house,  
neatly furnished, and in it he established his wife. The house was at  
the corner of two streets, and had a garden. Joined to the neighboring  
house on one side only, it was open to view and accessible on the  
other three sides. Diard paid the rent in advance, and left Juana  
barely enough money for the necessary expenses of three months, a sum  
not exceeding a thousand francs. Madame Diard made no observation on  
this unusual meanness. When her husband told her that he was going to  
the watering-places and that she would stay at Bordeaux, Juana offered  
no difficulty, and at once formed a plan to teach the children Spanish  
and Italian, and to make them read the two masterpieces of the two  
languages. She was glad to lead a retired life, simply and naturally  
economical. To spare herself the troubles of material life, she  
arranged with a "traiteur" the day after Diard's departure to send in  
their meals. Her maid then sufficed for the service of the house, and  
she thus found herself without money, but her wants all provided for  
until her husband's return. Her pleasures consisted in taking walks  
with the children. She was then thirty-three years old. Her beauty,  
greatly developed, was in all its lustre. Therefore as soon as she  
appeared, much talk was made in Bordeaux about the beautiful Spanish  
stranger. At the first advances made to her Juana ceased to walk  
abroad, and confined herself wholly to her own large garden.
  
Diard at first made a fortune at the baths. In two months he won three  
hundred thousand dollars, but it never occurred to him to send any  
money to his wife; he kept it all, expecting to make some great stroke  
of fortune on a vast stake. Towards the end of the second month the  
Marquis de Montefiore appeared at the same baths. The marquis was at  
this time celebrated for his wealth, his handsome face, his fortunate  
marriage with an Englishwoman, and more especially for his love of  
play. Diard, his former companion, encountered him, and desired to add  
his spoils to those of others. A gambler with four hundred thousand  
francs in hand is always in a position to do as he pleases. Diard,  
confident in his luck, renewed acquaintance with Montefiore. The  
latter received him very coldly, but nevertheless they played  
together, and Diard lost every penny that he possessed, and more.
  
"My dear Montefiore," said the ex-quartermaster, after making a tour  
of the salon, "I owe you a hundred thousand francs; but my money is in  
Bordeaux, where I have left my wife."  
  
Diard had the money in bank-bills in his pocket; but with the self-  
possession and rapid bird's-eye view of a man accustomed to catch at  
all resources, he still hoped to recover himself by some one of the  
endless caprices of play. Montefiore had already mentioned his  
intention of visiting Bordeaux. Had he paid his debt on the spot,  
Diard would have been left without the power to take his revenge; a  
revenge at cards often exceeds the amount of all preceding losses. But  
these burning expectations depended on the marquis's reply.
  
"Wait, my dear fellow," said Montefiore, "and we will go together to  
Bordeaux. In all conscience, I am rich enough to-day not to wish to  
take the money of an old comrade."  
  
Three days later Diard and Montefiore were in Bordeaux at a gambling  
table. Diard, having won enough to pay his hundred thousand francs,  
went on until he had lost two hundred thousand more on his word. He  
was gay as a man who swam in gold. Eleven o'clock sounded; the night  
was superb. Montefiore may have felt, like Diard, a desire to breathe  
the open air and recover from such emotions in a walk. The latter  
proposed to the marquis to come home with him to take a cup of tea and  
get his money.
  
"But Madame Diard?" said Montefiore.
  
"Bah!" exclaimed the husband.
  
They went down-stairs; but before taking his hat Diard entered the  
dining-room of the establishment and asked for a glass of water. While  
it was being brought, he walked up and down the room, and was able,  
without being noticed, to pick up one of those small sharp-pointed  
steel knives with pearl handles which are used for cutting fruit at  
dessert.
  
"Where do you live?" said Montefiore, in the courtyard, "for I want to  
send a carriage there to fetch me."  
  
Diard told him the exact address.
  
"You see," said Montefiore, in a low voice, taking Diard's arm, "that  
as long as I am with you I have nothing to fear; but if I came home  
alone and a scoundrel were to follow me, I should be profitable to  
kill."  
  
"Have you much with you?"  
  
"No, not much," said the wary Italian, "only my winnings. But they  
would make a pretty fortune for a beggar and turn him into an honest  
man for the rest of his life."  
  
Diard led the marquis along a lonely street where he remembered to  
have seen a house, the door of which was at the end of an avenue of  
trees with high and gloomy walls on either side of it. When they  
reached this spot he coolly invited the marquis to precede him; but as  
if the latter understood him he preferred to keep at his side. Then,  
no sooner were they fairly in the avenue, then Diard, with the agility  
of a tiger, tripped up the marquis with a kick behind the knees, and  
putting a foot on his neck stabbed him again and again to the heart  
till the blade of the knife broke in it. Then he searched Montefiore's  
pockets, took his wallet, money, everything. But though he had taken  
the Italian unawares, and had done the deed with lucid mind and the  
quickness of a pickpocket, Montefiore had time to cry "Murder! Help!"  
in a shrill and piercing voice which was fit to rouse every sleeper in  
the neighborhood. His last sighs were given in those horrible shrieks.
  
Diard was not aware that at the moment when they entered the avenue a  
crowd just issuing from a theatre was passing at the upper end of the  
street. The cries of the dying man reached them, though Diard did his  
best to stifle the noise by setting his foot firmly on Montefiore's  
neck. The crowd began to run towards the avenue, the high walls of  
which appeared to echo back the cries, directing them to the very spot  
where the crime was committed. The sound of their coming steps seemed  
to beat on Diard's brain. But not losing his head as yet, the murderer  
left the avenue and came boldly into the street, walking very gently,  
like a spectator who sees the inutility of trying to give help. He  
even turned round once or twice to judge of the distance between  
himself and the crowd, and he saw them rushing up the avenue, with the  
exception of one man, who, with a natural sense of caution, began to  
watch Diard.
  
"There he is! there he is!" cried the people, who had entered the  
avenue as soon as they saw Montefiore stretched out near the door of  
the empty house.
  
As soon as that clamor rose, Diard, feeling himself well in the  
advance, began to run or rather to fly, with the vigor of a lion and  
the bounds of a deer. At the other end of the street he saw, or  
fancied he saw, a mass of persons, and he dashed down a cross street  
to avoid them. But already every window was open, and heads were  
thrust forth right and left, while from every door came shouts and  
gleams of light. Diard kept on, going straight before him, through the  
lights and the noise; and his legs were so actively agile that he soon  
left the tumult behind him, though without being able to escape some  
eyes which took in the extent of his course more rapidly than he could  
cover it. Inhabitants, soldiers, gendarmes, every one, seemed afoot in  
the twinkling of an eye. Some men awoke the commissaries of police,  
others stayed by the body to guard it. The pursuit kept on in the  
direction of the fugitive, who dragged it after him like the flame of  
a conflagration.
  
Diard, as he ran, had all the sensations of a dream when he heard a  
whole city howling, running, panting after him. Nevertheless, he kept  
his ideas and his presence of mind. Presently he reached the wall of  
the garden of his house. The place was perfectly silent, and he  
thought he had foiled his pursuers, though a distant murmur of the  
tumult came to his ears like the roaring of the sea. He dipped some  
water from a brook and drank it. Then, observing a pile of stones on  
the road, he hid his treasure in it; obeying one of those vague  
thoughts which come to criminals at a moment when the faculty to judge  
their actions under all bearings deserts them, and they think to  
establish their innocence by want of proof of their guilt.
  
That done, he endeavored to assume a placid countenance; he even tried  
to smile as he rapped softly on the door of his house, hoping that no  
one saw him. He raised his eyes, and through the outer blinds of one  
window came a gleam of light from his wife's room. Then, in the midst  
of his trouble, visions of her gentle life, spent with her children,  
beat upon his brain with the force of a hammer. The maid opened the  
door, which Diard hastily closed behind him with a kick. For a moment  
he breathed freely; then, noticing that he was bathed in perspiration,  
he sent the servant back to Juana and stayed in the darkness of the  
passage, where he wiped his face with his handkerchief and put his  
clothes in order, like a dandy about to pay a visit to a pretty woman.
After that he walked into a track of the moonlight to examine his  
hands. A quiver of joy passed over him as he saw that no blood stains  
were on them; the hemorrhage from his victim's body was no doubt  
inward.
  
But all this took time. When at last he mounted the stairs to Juana's  
room he was calm and collected, and able to reflect on his position,  
which resolved itself into two ideas: to leave the house, and get to  
the wharves. He did not THINK these ideas, he SAW them written in  
fiery letters on the darkness. Once at the wharves he could hide all  
day, return at night for his treasure, then conceal himself, like a  
rat, in the hold of some vessel and escape without any one suspecting  
his whereabouts. But to do all this, money, gold, was his first  
necessity,--and he did not possess one penny.
  
The maid brought a light to show him up.
  
"Felicie," he said, "don't you hear a noise in the street, shouts,  
cries? Go and see what it means, and come and tell me."  
  
His wife, in her white dressing-gown, was sitting at a table, reading  
aloud to Francisque and Juan from a Spanish Cervantes, while the boys  
followed her pronunciation of the words from the text. They all three  
stopped and looked at Diard, who stood in the doorway with his hands  
in his pockets; overcome, perhaps, by finding himself in this calm  
scene, so softly lighted, so beautiful with the faces of his wife and  
children. It was a living picture of the Virgin between her son and  
John.
  
"Juana, I have something to say to you."  
  
"What has happened?" she asked, instantly perceiving from the livid  
paleness of her husband that the misfortune she had daily expected was  
upon them.
  
"Oh, nothing; but I want to speak to you--to you, alone."  
  
And he glanced at his sons.
  
"My dears, go to your room, and go to bed," said Juana; "say your  
prayers without me."  
  
The boys left the room in silence, with the incurious obedience of  
well-trained children.
  
"My dear Juana," said Diard, in a coaxing voice, "I left you with very  
little money, and I regret it now. Listen to me; since I relieved you  
of the care of our income by giving you an allowance, have you not,  
like other women, laid something by?"  
  
"No," replied Juana, "I have nothing. In making that allowance you did  
not reckon the costs of the children's education. I don't say that to  
reproach you, my friend, only to explain my want of money. All that  
you gave me went to pay masters and--"  
  
"Enough!" cried Diard, violently. "Thunder of heaven! every instant is  
precious! Where are your jewels?"  
  
"You know very well I have never worn any."  
  
"Then there's not a sou to be had here!" cried Diard, frantically.
  
"Why do you shout in that way?" she asked.
  
"Juana," he replied, "I have killed a man."  
  
Juana sprang to the door of her children's room and closed it; then  
she returned.
  
"Your sons must hear nothing," she said. "With whom have you fought?"  
  
"Montefiore," he replied.
  
"Ah!" she said with a sigh, "the only man you had the right to kill."  
  
"There were many reasons why he should die by my hand. But I can't  
lose time--Money, money! for God's sake, money! I may be pursued. We  
did not fight. I--I killed him."  
  
"Killed him!" she cried, "how?"  
  
"Why, as one kills anything. He stole my whole fortune and I took it  
back, that's all. Juana, now that everything is quiet you must go down  
to that heap of stones--you know the heap by the garden wall--and get  
that money, since you haven't any in the house."  
  
"The money that you stole?" said Juana.
  
"What does that matter to you? Have you any money to give me? I tell  
you I must get away. They are on my traces."  
  
"Who?"  
  
"The people, the police."  
  
Juana left the room, but returned immediately.
  
"Here," she said, holding out to him at arm's length a jewel, "that is  
Dona Lagounia's cross. There are four rubies in it, of great value, I  
have been told. Take it and go--go!"  
  
"Felicie hasn't come back," he cried, with a sudden thought. "Can she  
have been arrested?"  
  
Juana laid the cross on the table, and sprang to the windows that  
looked on the street. There she saw, in the moonlight, a file of  
soldiers posting themselves in deepest silence along the wall of the  
house. She turned, affecting to be calm, and said to her husband:--  
  
"You have not a minute to lose; you must escape through the garden.
Here is the key of the little gate."  
  
As a precaution she turned to the other windows, looking on the  
garden. In the shadow of the trees she saw the gleam of the silver  
lace on the hats of a body of gendarmes; and she heard the distant  
mutterings of a crowd of persons whom sentinels were holding back at  
the end of the streets up which curiosity had drawn them. Diard had,  
in truth, been seen to enter his house by persons at their windows,  
and on their information and that of the frightened maid-servant, who  
was arrested, the troops and the people had blocked the two streets  
which led to the house. A dozen gendarmes, returning from the theatre,  
had climbed the walls of the garden, and guarded all exit in that  
direction.
  
"Monsieur," said Juana, "you cannot escape. The whole town is here."  
  
Diard ran from window to window with the useless activity of a captive  
bird striking against the panes to escape. Juana stood silent and  
thoughtful.
  
"Juana, dear Juana, help me! give me, for pity's sake, some advice."  
  
"Yes," said Juana, "I will; and I will save you."  
  
"Ah! you are always my good angel."  
  
Juana left the room and returned immediately, holding out to Diard,  
with averted head, one of his own pistols. Diard did not take it.
Juana heard the entrance of the soldiers into the courtyard, where  
they laid down the body of the murdered man to confront the assassin  
with the sight of it. She turned round and saw Diard white and livid.
The man was nearly fainting, and tried to sit down.
  
"Your children implore you," she said, putting the pistol beneath his  
hand.
  
"But--my good Juana, my little Juana, do you think--Juana! is it so  
pressing?--I want to kiss you."  
  
The gendarmes were mounting the staircase. Juana grasped the pistol,  
aimed it at Diard, holding him, in spite of his cries, by the throat;  
then she blew his brains out and flung the weapon on the ground.
  
At that instant the door was opened violently. The public prosecutor,  
followed by an examining judge, a doctor, a sheriff, and a posse of  
gendarmes, all the representatives, in short, of human justice,  
entered the room.
  
"What do you want?" asked Juana.
  
"Is that Monsieur Diard?" said the prosecutor, pointing to the dead  
body bent double on the floor.
  
"Yes, monsieur."  
  
"Your gown is covered with blood, madame."  
  
"Do you not see why?" replied Juana.
  
She went to the little table and sat down, taking up the volume of  
Cervantes; she was pale, with a nervous agitation which she  
nevertheless controlled, keeping it wholly inward.
  
"Leave the room," said the prosecutor to the gendarmes.
  
Then he signed to the examining judge and the doctor to remain.
  
"Madame, under the circumstances, we can only congratulate you on the  
death of your husband," he said. "At least he has died as a soldier  
should, whatever crime his passions may have led him to commit. His  
act renders negatory that of justice. But however we may desire to  
spare you at such a moment, the law requires that we should make an  
exact report of all violent deaths. You will permit us to do our  
duty?"  
  
"May I go and change my dress?" she asked, laying down the volume.
  
"Yes, madame; but you must bring it back to us. The doctor may need  
it."  
  
"It would be too painful for madame to see me operate," said the  
doctor, understanding the suspicions of the prosecutor. "Messieurs,"  
he added, "I hope you will allow her to remain in the next room."  
  
The magistrates approved the request of the merciful physician, and  
Felicie was permitted to attend her mistress. The judge and the  
prosecutor talked together in a low voice. Officers of the law are  
very unfortunate in being forced to suspect all, and to imagine evil  
everywhere. By dint of supposing wicked intentions, and of  
comprehending them, in order to reach the truth hidden under so many  
contradictory actions, it is impossible that the exercise of their  
dreadful functions should not, in the long run, dry up at their source  
the generous emotions they are constrained to repress. If the  
sensibilities of the surgeon who probes into the mysteries of the  
human body end by growing callous, what becomes of those of the judge  
who is incessantly compelled to search the inner folds of the soul?
Martyrs to their mission, magistrates are all their lives in mourning  
for their lost illusions; crime weighs no less heavily on them than on  
the criminal. An old man seated on the bench is venerable, but a young  
judge makes a thoughtful person shudder. The examining judge in this  
case was young, and he felt obliged to say to the public prosecutor,--  
  
"Do you think that woman was her husband's accomplice? Ought we to  
take her into custody? Is it best to question her?"  
  
The prosecutor replied, with a careless shrug of his shoulders,--  
  
"Montefiore and Diard were two well-known scoundrels. The maid  
evidently knew nothing of the crime. Better let the thing rest there."  
  
The doctor performed the autopsy, and dictated his report to the  
sheriff. Suddenly he stopped, and hastily entered the next room.
  
"Madame--" he said.
  
Juana, who had removed her bloody gown, came towards him.
  
"It was you," he whispered, stooping to her ear, "who killed your  
husband."  
  
"Yes, monsieur," she replied.
  
The doctor returned and continued his dictation as follows,--  
  
"And, from the above assemblage of facts, it appears evident that the  
said Diard killed himself voluntarily and by his own hand."  
  
"Have you finished?" he said to the sheriff after a pause.
  
"Yes," replied the writer.
  
The doctor signed the report. Juana, who had followed him into the  
room, gave him one glance, repressing with difficulty the tears which  
for an instant rose into her eyes and moistened them.
  
"Messieurs," she said to the public prosecutor and the judge, "I am a  
stranger here, and a Spaniard. I am ignorant of the laws, and I know  
no one in Bordeaux. I ask of you one kindness: enable me to obtain a  
passport for Spain."  
  
"One moment!" cried the examining judge. "Madame, what has become of  
the money stolen from the Marquis de Montefiore?"  
  
"Monsieur Diard," she replied, "said something to me vaguely about a  
heap of stones, under which he must have hidden it."  
  
"Where?"  
  
"In the street."  
  
The two magistrates looked at each other. Juana made a noble gesture  
and motioned to the doctor.
  
"Monsieur," she said in his ear, "can I be suspected of some infamous  
action? I! The pile of stones must be close to the wall of my garden.
Go yourself, I implore you. Look, search, find that money."  
  
The doctor went out, taking with him the examining judge, and together  
they found Montefiore's treasure.
  
Within two days Juana had sold her cross to pay the costs of a  
journey. On her way with her two children to take the diligence which  
would carry her to the frontiers of Spain, she heard herself being  
called in the street. Her dying mother was being carried to a  
hospital, and through the curtains of her litter she had seen her  
daughter. Juana made the bearers enter a porte-cochere that was near  
them, and there the last interview between the mother and the daughter  
took place. Though the two spoke to each other in a low voice, Juan  
heard these parting words,--  
  
"Mother, die in peace; I have suffered for you all."

          The End

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