"Thus have I lived for thirty months! From this marble prison my cries can reach no ear. There is no chance for me. I will hope no more. Indeed, the Duchess' room is at the furthest end of the palace, and when I am carried up there none can hear my voice. Each time I see my wife she shows me the 226 OLYMPIApoison I had prepared for her and her lover. I crave it for myself, but she will not let me die; she gives me bread, and I eat it.
"I have done well to eat and live;
I had not reckoned on robbers!"
"Yes, Eccellenza, when those fools the honest men are asleep, we are wide awake.""Oh, Rinaldo, all I possess shall be yours; we will share my treasure like brothers; I would give you everything--even to my Duchy----""Eccellenza, procure from the Pope an absolution /in articulo mor-tis/. It would be of more use to me in my walk of life."OR ROMAN REVENGE227
"What you will. Only file through the bars of my cage and lend me your dagger. We have but little time, quick, quick! Oh, if my teeth were but files!--I have tried to eat through this iron.""Eccellenza," said Rinaldo, "I
have already filed through one bar."
"You are a god!"
"Your wife was at the fete given by the Princess Villaviciosa. She brought home her little Frenchman;she is drunk with love.--You have plenty of time.""Have you done?"
"Yes."
228OLYMPIA
"Your dagger?" said the Duke eagerly to the brigand.
"Here it is."
"Good. I hear the clatter of the spring.""Do not forget me!" cried the robber, who knew what gratitude was.
"No more than my father," cried the Duke.
"Good-bye!" said Rinaldo. "Lord!
How he flies up!" he added to him-
self as the Duke disappeared.--"No more than his father! If that is all he means to do for me.--And IOR ROMAN REVENGE229
had sworn a vow never to injure a woman!"But let us leave the robber for a moment to his meditations and go up, like the Duke, to the rooms in the palace.
"Another tailpiece, a Cupid on a snail! And page 230 is blank," said the journalist. "Then there are two more blank pages before we come to the word it is such a joy to write when one is unhappily so happy as to be a novelist--/Conclusion/!
CONCLUSION
Never had the Duchess been more lovely; she came from her bath clothed like a goddess, and on seeing 234OLYMPIAAdolphe voluptuously reclining on piles of cushions--"You are beautiful," said she.
"And so are you, Olympia!"
"And you still love me?"
"More and more," said he.
"Ah, none but a Frenchman knows how to love!" cried the Duchess. "Do you love me well to-night?"
"Yes."
"Then come!"
And with an impulse of love and hate--whether it was that Cardinal Borborigano had reminded her of her husband, or that she felt un-wonted passion to display, she pressed the springs and held out her arms.
"That is all," said Lousteau, "for the foreman has torn off the rest in wrapping up my proofs. But it is enough to show that the author was full of promise.""I cannot make head or tail of it," said Gatien Boirouge, who was the first to break the silence of the party from Sancerre.
"Nor I," replied Monsieur Gravier.
"And yet it is a novel of the time of the Empire," said Lousteau.
"By the way in which the brigand is made to speak," said Monsieur Gravier, "it is evident that the author knew nothing of Italy.
Banditti do not allow themselves such graceful conceits."Madame Gorju came up to Bianchon, seeing him pensive, and with a glance towards her daughter Mademoiselle Euphemie Gorju, the owner of a fairly good fortune--"What a rhodomontade!" said she. "The prescriptions you write are worth more than all that rubbish."The Mayoress had elaborately worked up this speech, which, in her opinion, showed strong judgment.
"Well, madame, we must be lenient, we have but twenty pages out of a thousand," said Bianchon, looking at Mademoiselle Gorju, whose figure threatened terrible things after the birth of her first child.
"Well, Monsieur de Clagny," said Lousteau, "we were talking yesterday of the forms of revenge invented by husbands. What do you say to those invented by wives?""I say," replied the Public Prosecutor, "that the romance is not by a Councillor of State, but by a woman. For extravagant inventions the imagination of women far outdoes that of men; witness /Frankenstein/by Mrs. Shelley, /Leone Leoni/ by George Sand, the works of Anne Radcliffe, and the /Nouveau Promethee/ (New Prometheus) of Camille de Maupin."Dinah looked steadily at Monsieur de Clagny, ****** him feel, by an expression that gave him a chill, that in spite of the illustrious examples he had quoted, she regarded this as a reflection on /Paquita la Sevillane/.
"Pooh!" said little Baudraye, "the Duke of Bracciano, whom his wife puts into a cage, and to whom she shows herself every night in the arms of her lover, will kill her--and do you call that revenge?--Our laws and our society are far more cruel.""Why, little La Baudraye is talking!" said Monsieur Boirouge to his wife.
"Why, the woman is left to live on a small allowance, the world turns its back on her, she has no more finery, and no respect paid her--the two things which, in my opinion, are the sum-total of woman," said the little old man.
"But she has happiness!" said Madame de la Baudraye sententiously.
"No," said the master of the house, lighting his candle to go to bed, "for she has a lover.""For a man who thinks of nothing but his vine-stocks and poles, he has some spunk," said Lousteau.
"Well, he must have something!" replied Bianchon.
Madame de la Baudraye, the only person who could hear Bianchon's remark, laughed so knowingly, and at the same time so bitterly, that the physician could guess the mystery of this woman's life; her premature wrinkles had been puzzling him all day.