CHAPTER VII.

MADAME DAUBREL'S STORY.

At the time of his marriage with Mlle. Marthe Percier, M. Raymond Daubrel was nearly forty years old. His wife, on the contrary, was barely twenty.

The son of a Frenchman in business in New York, where he represented the house of Percier, of Paris, in which he was a partner, Raymond Daubrel was sent to France by his father on the death of M. Percier, whose widow retained an interest in the business.

Mme. Percier had then a daughter of seventeen, pretty, gentle, well-bred, and a good musician, whose youthful charms made a deep impression on M. Daubrel. Having no relations in Paris, feeling lonely, and being kept by the serious turn of his mind from loose love affairs, he had little choice about living as one of the family with the widow of his father's late partner. He soon fell in love with the young girl, who was a very tolerable match for him, and proposed for her. Mme. Percier, a sickly and rather melancholy woman, consulted with Marthe, as a matter of form, and this business-like marriage was celebrated within less than six months of M. Daubrel's arrival in France.

Mme. Percier saw in the union a means of avoiding a separation from her daughter, her son-in-law having to remain at the head of the business house in Paris. As for Marthe, who was fancy free, notwithstanding that she had a tender heart and a rather romantic mind, she had accepted without enthusiasm, but also without repugnance, the first husband that was offered to her.

The death of her father having happened at the time when she was about to make her entry into the world as a woman, she had not up to that moment met with any one who especially pleased her. She could be certain that M. Daubrel was an excellent man, rather commonplace perhaps, but presentable enough, and even fairly good-looking, who would no doubt do his best to make her happy.

His means were far above those of his young wife. Her dowry was only about four thousand pounds, while he had in hand nearly twice as much, leaving out of account what his father would bequeath him at his death, and the considerable profits he derived from the commission house at the head of which he was in France.

After their marriage, M. and Mme. Daubrel set up housekeeping in a handsome suite of rooms in the Faubourg Poissonniere, hard by the merchant's office; and for three years everything went smoothly.

Raymond was neither very demonstrative nor very passionate in his love, and Marthe felt only a calm and honest affection for her husband; but this moderate conjugal sentiment seemed enough for both of them. Their temperament led them to dream of nothing more. Mme. Daubrel became the mother of a son that she worshiped. Her husband was consistently kind and attentive to her, refusing her none of the pleasures which his easy circumstances warranted him in allowing: in the winter, the theaters and an occasional ball, in the summer a couple of months at the sea-side at Dieppe or Trouville, outings during which Mme. Percier accompanied her daughter, so that she might not be left alone when M. Daubrel was kept in or called back to Paris by his business.

There was, therefore, in this middle-class but fairly refined and tolerably active life, all that was necessary for the happiness of a young woman reared simply and in good moral principles; or there would have been, had not its very monotony, regularity, and calmness roused in Marthe's mind aspirations, which she herself at first scarcely understood, for rather more stir and excitement. She was not likely to find with the Meyrins what she lacked.

Mme. Frantz, we know, was nothing if not staid. There was capital music at her house, but not much conversation; and the auditors at her matinees were changed too often for an enduring acquaintance to be formed among them. It resulted from this that the pretty Mme. Daubrel had not a single woman friend such as women love to tell their petty sorrows to, and that her life seemed to her very dull and drear.

As long, however, as her son was an infant, that is, while her care over and watchfulness of him were needed at every hour, Marthe triumphed over the weariness of her mode of life; but when the child was handed to the care of a nurse, the young mother felt herself alone; her husband was scarcely seen except at meal times, and not unfrequently he returned home at night so tired out that he would go straight from table to his bed.

Nor was Mme. Percier a very agreeable companion for her daughter. Being in poor health, she rarely left her home, and often several days would pass without Marthe seeing her. The widow, for that matter, would not have understood what there was for her daughter to complain of. She had led a very calm and passionless life. She would have laughed at, or perhaps sharply blamed, her daughter for not being perfectly happy.

It was inevitable that Mme. Daubrel should soon find the days long and the evenings endless. She took to reading, first the Parisian newspapers--echoes of the scandal of love affairs which up to now had been matters of indifference to her--then the novels of the day. She took a feverish interest in the heroines of love stories, comparing their lives with her own, and contrasted the male characters with her husband, always to his disadvantage.

M. Daubrel naturally saw nothing of what was going on. If he sometimes noticed the care-worn face or paler complexion of his wife, he attributed the change to a slight ailment, and would offer her some trifling amusement or outing, which Marthe would refuse with a constrained smile.

In this frame of mind, in this hunger of soul and weariness of everything, Mme. Daubrel was in the fourth year of her marriage when she went with her mother to Luchon.

M. Daubrel had hesitated about letting his wife go to take the waters at so distant a place, whither he could not run down to her by train every Saturday, as his wont was when she went to the sea-side, and was but a few hours distant from Paris, but Mme. Percier, whose doctor insisted upon her trying the Pyrenees, having declared that she would not have the courage to go alone, the worthy merchant had yielded. He kept his son Charles with him, whom Marthe, indeed, good mother though she was, had not spoken of taking with her. Besides, the stay was not meant to go beyond a month, and the child's health was perfect.

Mme. Percier and her daughter accordingly undertook the journey, and arriving at Luchon engaged rooms at one of the best hotels in this fashionable watering-place, where, salutary as the waters might be for certain ailments, people were wont to amuse rather than physic themselves.

At the beginning of July the season sets in. There are concerts, balls at the Casino and at private residences, besides hunting parties in the forests of fir-trees, boating parties on the Oo Lake, and excursions to the Devil's Cave, the port of Venasque, and the romantic villages of Oneil and Lys. Here and there an occasional patient was to be found taking the waters with severe regularity, and likely to feel the benefit of the course when he came to return home, but at Luchon the treatment seemed to more commonly consist in pleasure and various amusements. Acquaintances were readily formed, as they are in all places of this sort. If the Americans had not invented flirting, it would have been born in the shades of the Alpine avenues of Etigny or on the banks of the Pique. What else was there to do if not to flirt, in a charming neighborhood where were found an Avenue of Sighs and a Fountain of Love, as in the days of the Queen of Navarre; where one could fancy one heard constantly retold, in the echoes of the bounding mountain torrents, the liveliest stories of Heptameron!

Mme. Percier and her daughter found the place very pleasant, and the next morning after their arrival they began to make acquaintances, in the garden of the hotel, near the band-stand, and at the medicinal springs, which were especially welcome to Mme. Daubrel, who, as they left Paris, had dreaded that during their absence her part would simply be that of a nurse to her mother. It was, alas! to be otherwise, and one of the friendships began here was to have a fatal influence on Marthe's future. The friendship was formed one night at a concert, with a young poet, Robert Premontier.

He was a good-looking fellow of five- or six-and-twenty, full of conceit and literary pretensions, and posing, from taste, as a neglected genius, a sort of Gilbert or Chatterton. Mme. Daubrel, who had introduced him to her mother, too quickly let him see beyond a doubt the pleasure she took in listening to him; so much so that he soon came to think he had the right to pay close court to her.

This was not Robert's first appearance in the lists of gallantry. He began adroitly with the young woman by avowing his pure and platonic love for her. He wished only to regard her as a sister; he only besought that she would permit him to adore her on his knees. The poor, simple woman heard this sort of thing now for the first time; she believed it, and the affair ended as all encounters do between the inexperienced and the bold. Marthe fell, the excuse she found for herself being that she too, as well as others, had a right to a share of happiness in the world, and that the loneliness of her heart was the cause of her fault.

In a word, when Mme. Daubrel returned to Paris she had a lover. Her life henceforward was but a series of wild raptures, lies, and terrors. Little made, as a whole, for a great passion, too chaste, notwithstanding her sins, not to be more reserved than formerly with her husband, she was a poor dissembler; she gave rise to suspicions, and soon afterward the treachery of a maid in whom she had confided precipitated the inevitable discovery.

M. Daubrel was neither a violent nor a romantic man, but simply an honest fellow. At first he would not believe in the frightful misfortune with which he was so suddenly overwhelmed after four years of peaceful happiness; but he watched his wife, bought Robert's letters from the treacherous servant who had already sold her mistress, and, when he had acquired the certainty that he was deceived, being filled with contempt rather than anger for the guilty woman, he had her taken _in flagrante delicto_ and lodged forthwith in St. Lazare.

A month afterward Marthe and Robert were sentenced to three months' imprisonment, and a judgment of the tribunal pronounced a decree of separation between M. and Mme. Daubrel, on the petition of the husband.

The decree was pronounced against M. Premontier in his absence, for he had fled the country, abandoning, like a coward, to her despair the woman he had ruined. Mme. Percier was nearly killed by the shame of the scandal.

She said she would never look upon her daughter again.

As for Marthe, she was still a prisoner in St. Lazare, in a state of moral and physical prostration impossible to describe, when she was told that her husband had left Paris to return to New York, intrusting to his cashier the liquidation of the business.

M. Daubrel took with him his son, not giving his mother the chance to embrace and say good-bye to the child.

When she heard this the poor woman thought she would go out of her mind. All was over; everything was falling with a crash around her; nothing was left to her in the world. Her lover, who had so hatefully deserted when he ought to have supported her, she did not wish to see again, understanding now the hollowness of the love she had so simply believed in; her mother cast her off; her son was taken from her. Her health was so seriously affected by all these trials that for some weeks her life was despaired of. Mme. Percier hurried to St. Lazare, and having got by telegraph from M. Daubrel the authority for Marthe's release, she had her carried to her house, where, four months afterward, the adulterous wife, weeping tears of shame, was brought to bed of a child that only lived a few weeks.

For many days the unhappy woman was in danger, but her youth mastered the illness. Little by little she regained health and strength, to live on with her regrets and remorse. Her lover, Robert Premontier, died abroad, after leading a life of debauchery and excess, not having written to her once. Her heart could not even regret him. Resolved thenceforward to live an exemplary life, caring nothing whether she were still young and handsome, Marthe hid herself away and broke with all her friends, except Mme. Frantz Meyrin, who had steadily shown great affection for her through all her trials, but whom Marthe did not visit, and only then at long intervals until more than two years after the conjugal drama of which she had been the miserable heroine.

There, as we have seen, she made the acquaintance of the Princess Olsdorf, toward whom she was drawn by an instinctive sympathy and the similarity between her past and the present circumstances of the great foreign lady.

Meanwhile Mme. Percier had won upon M. Daubrel to send her each month news of her grandson which she told to her daughter, whose only happy moments these were, though they recalled to her a dread time. Mme. Percier, touched by Marthe's repentance, never failed in replying to her son-in-law, to tell him how his wife was doing her utmost to expiate her sin, and M. Daubrel, after avoiding for several years any reference to this subject which was so painful to him, had come little by little to show that he was less indifferent as to what would become of the woman who bore his name.

Then Marthe began to hope that one day she would see her son again. At last, in reply to a letter from the adulterous wife imploring her husband's pardon he had written, "perhaps," and sent her kisses from her son, who had been reared in respect and love for his mother.

This was the state of things between the parted husband and wife when, in less than three years after her divorce and her marriage with Paul Meyrin, the ex-Princess Olsdorf found herself the deserted woman whose humiliation and sorrows we have tried to depict.