Chapter 22

THE NORMAL HISTORY OF AN UPPER-CLASS GRISETTE

A storm was gathering, as we see, over Monsieur de Rochefide, who
enjoyed at that moment the greatest amount of happiness that a
Parisian can desire in being to Madame Schontz as much a husband as he
had been to Beatrix. It seemed therefore, as the duke had very
sensibly said to his wife, almost an impossibility to upset so
agreeable and satisfactory an existence. This opinion will oblige us
to give certain details on the life led by Monsieur de Rochefide after
his wife had placed him in the position of a /deserted husband/. The
reader will then be enabled to understand the enormous difference
which our laws and our morals put between the two sexes in the same
situation. That which turns to misery for the woman turns to happiness
for the man. This contrast may inspire more than one young woman with
the determination to remain in her own home, and to struggle there,
like Sabine du Guenic, by practising (as she may select) the most
aggressive or the most inoffensive virtues.

Some days after Beatrix had abandoned him, Arthur de Rochefide, now an
only child in consequence of the death of his sister, the first wife
of the Marquis d'Ajuda-Pinto, who left no children, found himself sole
master of the hotel de Rochefide, rue d'Anjou Saint-Honore, and of two
hundred thousand francs a year left to him by his father. This rich
inheritance, added to the fortune which Arthur possessed when he
married, brought his income, including that from the fortune of his
wife, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman endowed with a nature
such as Mademoiselle des Touches had described it in a few words to
Calyste, such wealth was happiness enough. While his wife continued in
her home and fulfilled the duties of maternity, Rochefide enjoyed this
immense fortune; but he did not spend it any more than he expended the
faculties of his mind. His good, stout vanity, gratified by the figure
he presented as a handsome man (to which he owed a few successes that
authorized him to despise women), allowed itself free scope in the
matter of brains. Gifted with the sort of mind which we must call a
reflector, he appropriated the sallies of others, the wit of the stage
and the /petits journaux/, by his method of repeating them, and
applied them as formulas of criticism. His military joviality (he had
served in the Royal Guard) seasoned conversation with so much point
that women without any intellects proclaimed him witty, and the rest
did not dare to contradict them.

This system Arthur pursued in all things; he owed to nature the
convenient genius of imitation without mimicry; he imitated seriously.
Thus without any taste of his own, he knew how to be the first to
adopt and the