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Page 36
All the friends of her husband had been in love with her, and had built
great hopes upon her forlorn condition, but unfaithful husbands do not
always make guilty wives. The reverse is rather more frequently the case,
so little is this poor world submitted to the rules of logic. In short,
Madame de Trecoeur, after her husband's death was left forlorn, exhausted,
and broken down, but spotless.
From this melancholy union, a daughter had been born, named Julia, and
whom her father, notwithstanding all Clotilde's efforts of resistance, had
spoilt to excess. Monsieur de Trecoeur's idolatry for his daughter was
well-known, and the world, with its habitual weakness of judgment, forgave
him readily his scandalous existence in consideration of that merit, which
is not always a great one. It is not, indeed, a very difficult matter to
love one's children; it is sufficient for that not to be a monster. The
love that one has for them is not in itself a virtue; it is a passion
which, like all others, may be good or bad, as one is its master or its
slave. It may even be thought that there is no passion which may be more
than this one, pregnant with good or with evil.
Julia seemed splendidly gifted; but her ardent and precocious disposition
had been developed, thanks to the paternal education, as in the primeval
forest, wholly at random. She was small in person, dark and pale, lithe
and slender, with large blue eyes full of fire, unruly black hair, and
superbly arched eyebrows. Her habitual air was reserved and haughty;
nevertheless she laid aside, at home, these majestic appearances to frolic
on the carpet. She played games of her own invention. She translated her
history lessons into little dramas interspersed with speeches to the
people, dialogues, music, and particularly chariot-races. In spite of her
serious countenance, she could be very funny at times, and made cruel fun
of those she did not like.
She manifested for her father a passionate predilection, singularly
mitigated by the sentiments of tender pity which her mother's unhappiness
inspired in her youthful heart. She saw her weep often; she would then
throw herself upon the floor, curled up at her feet, and there remain for
hours, motionless and dumb, looking at her with moist eyes, and drinking
from time to time a tear from her cheek.
She had apparently caught, as many children do, some echoes of the
domestic woes. Doubtless her quick intellect appreciated her father's
wrong-doings; but her father--that handsome gentleman, so witty, generous,
and wild--she worshiped him; she was proud to be his daughter; she
palpitated with joy when he clasped her to his heart. She could neither
judge him nor blame him; he was a superior being. She contented herself
with pitying and consoling, as best she could, that gentle and charming
creature who was her mother, and who suffered.
Within the circle of Madame de Trecoeur's acquaintances, Julia simply
passed for a little plague. The dear madames, as she called them, who
formed the ornament of her mother's Thursdays, related with bitterness to
each other the scenes of comical imitation with which the child followed
their entrance and their departure. The men considered themselves
fortunate when they did not carry off a bit of paper or silk on the back
of their coats. All this amused Monsieur de Trecoeur extremely. When his
daughter performed with half a dozen chairs some of those Olympian races
that knocked every piano in the neighborhood out of tune--
"Julia!" he would exclaim, "you don't make noise enough. Smash a vase."
And a vase she did smash; whereupon her father kissed her with enthusiasm.
This method of education assumed a graver character as the child grew
older. Her father's affection became shaded with a species of gallantry.
He took her with him to the Bois, to the races, to the theater. She had
not a fancy that he did not anticipate and gratify. At thirteen years of
age, she had her horse, her groom, and a carriage bearing her monogram.
Already ill, and having perhaps a presentiment of his death, the
unfortunate man overwhelmed that beloved daughter with the tokens of his
baleful affection. He was thus blunting all her tastes by too precocious
satiety, as if he had intended to leave her no taste save for the
forbidden fruit.
Julia wept over him with furious transports, and preserved for his memory
a fervid worship. She had a private room which she filled with the
portraits of her father and with a thousand personal souvenirs, around
which she kept up flowers.
Madame de Trecoeur, like the greater number of young girls who marry their
cousins, had married very young. She was left a widow at twenty-eight, and
her mother, the Baroness de Pers, who was still living, and who was even
of the liveliest, was not long in suggesting discreetly to her the
propriety of a second marriage. After having exhausted the practical and,
in fact, quite sensible reasons that seemed to urge that course, the
baroness then came down to the sentimental reasons:
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