de Beauseant. Mme. de
Beauseant quite understood that the worthy dowager must of necessity
be her enemy, and that she would try to draw Gaston from his
unhallowed and immoral way of life. The Marquise de Beauseant would
willingly have sold her property and gone back to Geneva, but she
could not bring herself to do it; it would mean that she distrusted M.
de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this very Valleroy
estate, where he was making plantations and improvements. She would
not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routine-work, such as women
always wish for their husbands, and even for their lovers.
A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with a
rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the
neighborhood. Gaston always met her at Manerville whenever he was
obliged to go thither. These various personages being to each other as
the terms of a proportion sum, the following letter will throw light
on the appalling problem which Mme. de Beauseant had been trying for
the past month to solve:--
"My beloved angel, it seems like nonsense, does it not, to write
to you when there is nothing to keep us apart, when a caress so
often takes the place of words, and words too are caresses? Ah,
well, no, love. There are some things that a woman cannot say when
she is face to face with the man she loves; at the bare thought of
them her voice fails her, and the blood goes back to her heart;
she has no strength, no intelligence left.
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