Chapter 8

LA MARQUISE BEATRIX

"I promised you this tale of the past, and here it is," said Camille.
"The person from whom I received that letter yesterday, and who may be
here to-morrow, is the Marquise de Rochefide. The old marquis (whose
family is not as old as yours), after marrying his eldest daughter to
a Portuguese grandee, was anxious to find an alliance among the higher
nobility for his son, in order to obtain for him the peerage he had
never been able to get for himself. The Comtesse de Montcornet told
him of a young lady in the department of the Orne, a Mademoiselle
Beatrix-Maximilienne-Rose de Casteran, the youngest daughter of the
Marquis de Casteran, who wished to marry his two daughters without
dowries in order to reserve his whole fortune for the Comte de
Casteran, his son. The Casterans are, it seems, of the bluest blood.
Beatrix, born and brought up at the chateau de Casteran, was twenty
years old at the time of her marriage in 1828. She was remarkable for
what you provincials call originality, which is simply independence of
ideas, enthusiasm, a feeling for the beautiful, and a certain impulse
and ardor toward the things of Art. You may believe a poor woman who
has allowed herself to be drawn along the same lines, there is nothing
more dangerous for a woman. If she follows them, they lead her where
you see me, and where the marquise came,--to the verge of abysses. Men
alone have the staff on which to lean as they skirt those precipices,
--a force which is lacking to most women, but which, if we do possess
it, makes abnormal beings of us. Her old grandmother, the dowager de
Casteran, was well pleased to see her marry a man to whom she was
superior in every way. The Rochefides were equally satisfied with the
Casterans, who connected them with the Verneuils, the d'Esgrignons,
the Troisvilles, and gave them a peerage for their son in that last
big batch of peers made by Charles X., but revoked by the revolution
of July. The first days of marriage are perilous for little minds as
well as for great loves. Rochefide, being a fool, mistook his wife's
ignorance for coldness; he classed her among frigid, lymphatic women,
and made that an excuse to return to his bachelor life, relying on the
coldness of the marquise, her pride, and the thousand barriers that
the life of a great lady sets up about a woman in Paris. You'll know
what I mean when you go there. People said to Rochefide: 'You are very
lucky to possess a cold wife who will never have any but head
passions. She will always be content if she can shine; her fancies are
purely artistic, her desires will be satisfied if she can make a
salon, and collect about her distinguished minds; her debauches will
be in music and her orgies