The first days of this marriage were apparently happy;or,to express one of those latent facts,the miseries of which are buried by women in the depths of their souls,Juana would not cast down her husband's joy,--a double role,dreadful to play,but to which,sooner or later,all women unhappily married come.This is a history impossible to recount in its full truth.Juana,struggling hourly against her nature,a nature both Spanish and Italian,having dried up the source of her tears by dint of weeping,was a human type,destined to represent woman's misery in its utmost expression,namely,sorrow undyingly active;the deion of which would need such minute observations that to persons eager for dramatic emotions they would seem insipid.This analysis,in which every wife would find some one of her own sufferings,would require a volume to express them all;a fruitless,hopeless volume by its very nature,the merit of which would consist in faintest tints and delicate shadings which critics would declare to be effeminate and diffuse.Besides,what man could rightly approach,unless he bore another heart within his heart,those solemn and touching elegies which certain women carry with them to their tomb;melancholies,misunderstood even by those who cause them;sighs unheeded,devotions unrewarded,--on earth at least,--splendid silences misconstrued;vengeances withheld,disdained;generosities perpetually bestowed and wasted;pleasures longed for and denied;angelic charities secretly accomplished,--in short,all the religions of womanhood and its inextinguishable love.
Juana knew that life;fate spared her nought.She was wholly a wife,but a sorrowful and suffering wife;a wife incessantly wounded,yet forgiving always;a wife pure as a flawless diamond,--she who had the beauty and the glow of the diamond,and in that beauty,that glow,a vengeance in her hand;for she was certainly not a woman to fear the dagger added to her "dot."At first,inspired by a real love,by one of those passions which for the time being change even odious characters and bring to light all that may be noble in a soul,Diard behaved like a man of honor.He forced Montefiore to leave the regiment and even the army corps,so that his wife might never meet him during the time they remained in Spain.Next,he petitioned for his own removal,and succeeded in entering the Imperial Guard.He desired at any price to obtain a title,honors,and consideration in keeping with his present wealth.
With this idea in his mind,he behaved courageously in one of the most bloody battles in Germany,but,unfortunately,he was too severely wounded to remain in the service.Threatened with the loss of a leg,he was forced to retire on a pension,without the title of baron,without those rewards he hoped to win,and would have won had he not been Diard.
This event,this wound,and his thwarted hopes contributed to change his character.His Provencal energy,roused for a time,sank down.At first he was sustained by his wife,in whom his efforts,his courage,his ambition had induced some belief in his nature,and who showed herself,what women are,tender and consoling in the troubles of life.
Inspired by a few words from Juana,the retired soldier came to Paris,resolved to win in an administrative career a position to command respect,bury in oblivion the quartermaster of the 6th of the line,and secure for Madame Diard a noble title.His passion for that seductive creature enabled him to divine her most secret wishes.Juana expressed nothing,but he understood her.He was not loved as a lover dreams of being loved;he knew this,and he strove to make himself respected,loved,and cherished.He foresaw a coming happiness,poor man,in the patience and gentleness shown on all occasions by his wife;but that patience,that gentleness,were only the outward signs of the resignation which had made her his wife.Resignation,religion,were they love?Often Diard wished for refusal where he met with chaste obedience;often he would have given his eternal life that Juana might have wept upon his bosom and not disguised her secret thoughts behind a smiling face which lied to him nobly.Many young men --for after a certain age men no longer struggle--persist in the effort to triumph over an evil fate,the thunder of which they hear,from time to time,on the horizon of their lives;and when at last they succumb and roll down the precipice of evil,we ought to do them justice and acknowledge these inward struggles.
Like many men Diard tried all things,and all things were hostile to him.His wealth enabled him to surround his wife with the enjoyments of Parisian luxury.She lived in a fine house,with noble rooms,where she maintained a salon,in which abounded artists (by nature no judges of men),men of pleasure ready to amuse themselves anywhere,a few politicians who swelled the numbers,and certain men of fashion,all of whom admired Juana.Those who put themselves before the eyes of the public in Paris must either conquer Paris or be subject to it.Diard's character was not sufficiently strong,compact,or persistent to command society at that epoch,because it was an epoch when all men were endeavoring to rise.Social classifications ready-made are perhaps a great boon even for the people.Napoleon has confided to us the pains he took to inspire respect in his court,where most of the courtiers had been his equals.But Napoleon was Corsican,and Diard Provencal.Given equal genius,an islander will always be more compact and rounded than the man of terrafirma in the same latitude;the arm of the sea which separates Corsica from Provence is,in spite of human science,an ocean which has made two nations.
Diard's mongrel position,which he himself made still more questionable,brought him great troubles.Perhaps there is useful instruction to be derived from the almost imperceptible connection of acts which led to the finale of this history.