Chapter 54
A few lines of the article consecrated to Martial de Sairmeuse in the "General Biography of the Men of the Century," give the history of his life after his marriage.
"Martial de Sairmeuse," it says there, "brought to the service of his party a brilliant intellect and admirable endowments. Called to the front at the moment when political strife was raging with the utmost violence, he had courage to assume the sole responsibility of the most extreme measures.
"Compelled by almost universal opprobrium to retire from office, he left behind him animosities which will be extinguished only with life."
But what this article does not state is this: if Martial was wrong-- and that depends entirely upon the point of view from which his conduct is regarded--he was doubly wrong, since he was not possessed of those ardent convictions verging upon fanaticism which make men fools, heroes, and martyrs.
He was not even ambitious.
Those associated with him, witnessing his passionate struggle and his unceasing activity, thought him actuated by an insatiable thirst for power.
He cared little or nothing for it. He considered its burdens heavy; its compensations small. His pride was too lofty to feel any satisfaction in the applause that delights the vain, and flattery disgusted him. Often, in his princely drawing-rooms, during some brilliant fete, his acquaintances noticed a shade of gloom steal over his features, and seeing him thus thoughtful and preoccupied, they respectfully refrained from disturbing him.
"His mind is occupied with momentous questions," they thought. "Who can tell what important decisions may result from this revery?"
They were mistaken.
At the very moment when his brilliant success made his rivals pale with envy--when it would seem that he had nothing left to wish for in this world, Martial was saying to himself:
"What an empty life! What weariness and vexation of spirit! To live for others--what a mockery!"
He looked at his wife, radiant in her beauty, worshipped like a queen, and he sighed.
He thought of her who was dead--Marie-Anne--the only woman whom he had ever loved.
She was never absent from his mind. After all these years he saw her yet, cold, rigid, lifeless, in that luxurious room at the Borderie; and time, far from effacing the image of the fair girl who had won his youthful heart, made it still more radiant and endowed his lost idol with almost superhuman grace of person and of character.
If fate had but given him Marie-Anne for his wife! He said this to himself again and again, picturing the exquisite happiness which a life with her would have afforded him.
They would have remained at Sairmeuse. They would have had lovely children playing around them! He would not be condemned to this continual warfare--to this hollow, unsatisfying, restless life.
The truly happy are not those who parade their satisfaction and good fortune before the eyes of the multitude. The truly happy hide themselves from the curious gaze, and they are right; happiness is almost a crime.
So thought Martial; and he, the great statesman, often said to himself, in a sort of rage: "To love, and to be loved--that is everything! All else is vanity."
He had really tried to love his wife; he had done his best to rekindle the admiration with which she had inspired him at their first meeting. He had not succeeded.
Between them there seemed to be a wall of ice which nothing could melt, and which was constantly increasing in height and thickness.
"Why is it?" he wondered, again and again. "It is incomprehensible. There are days when I could swear that she loved me. Her character, formerly so irritable, is entirely changed; she is gentleness itself."
But he could not conquer his aversion; it was stronger than his own will.
These unavailing regrets, and the disappointments and sorrow that preyed upon him, undoubtedly aggravated the bitterness and severity of Martial's policy.
But he, at least, knew how to fall nobly.
He passed, without even a change of countenance, from almost omnipotence to a position so compromising that his very life was endangered.
On seeing his ante-chambers, formerly thronged with flatterers and office-seekers, empty and deserted, he laughed, and his laugh was unaffected.
"The ship is sinking," said he; "the rats have deserted it."
He did not even pale when the noisy crowd came to hoot and curse and hurl stones at his windows; and when Otto, his faithful valet de chambre, entreated him to assume a disguise and make his escape through the gardens, he responded:
"By no means! I am simply odious; I do not wish to become ridiculous!"
They could not even dissuade him from going to a window and looking down upon the rabble in the street below.
A singular idea had just occurred to him.
"If Jean Lacheneur is still alive," he thought, "how much he would enjoy this! And if he is alive, he is undoubtedly there in the foremost rank, urging on the crowd."
And he wished to see.
But Jean Lacheneur was in Russia at that epoch. The excitement subsided; the Hotel de Sairmeuse was not seriously threatened. Still Martial realized that it would be better for him to go away for a while, and allow people to forget him.
He did not ask the duchess to accompany him.
"The fault has been mine entirely," he said to her, "and to make you suffer for it by condemning you to exile would be unjust. Remain here; I think it will be much better for you to remain here."
She did not offer to go with him. It would have been a pleasure to her, but she dared not leave Paris. She knew that she must remain in order to insure the silence of her persecutors. Both times she had left Paris before, all came near being discovered, and yet she had Aunt Medea, then, to take her place.
Martial went away, accompanied only by his devoted servant, Otto. In intelligence, this man was decidedly superior to his position; he possessed an independent fortune, and he had a hundred reasons--one, by the way, was a very pretty one--for desiring to remain in Paris; but his master was in trouble, and he did not hesitate.
For four years the Duc de Sairmeuse wandered over Europe, ever accompanied by his ennui and his dejection, and chafing beneath the burden of a life no longer animated by interest or sustained by hope.
He remained awhile in London, then he went to Vienna, afterward to Venice. One day he was seized by an irresistible desire to see Paris again, and he returned.
It was not a very prudent step, perhaps. His bitterest enemies-- personal enemies, whom he had mortally offended and persecuted--were in power; but he did not hesitate. Besides, how could they injure him, since he had no favors to ask, no cravings of ambition to satisfy?
The exile which had weighed so heavily upon him, the sorrow, the disappointments and loneliness he had endured had softened his nature and inclined his heart to tenderness; and he returned firmly resolved to overcome his aversion to his wife, and seek a reconciliation.
"Old age is approaching," he thought. "If I have not a beloved wife at my fireside, I may at least have a friend."
His manner toward her, on his return, astonished Mme. Blanche. She almost believed she saw again the Martial of the little blue salon at Courtornieu; but the realization of her cherished dream was now only another torture added to all the others.
Martial was striving to carry his plan into execution, when the following laconic epistle came to him one day through the post:
"Monsieur le Duc--I, if I were in your place, would watch my wife."
It was only an anonymous letter, but Martial's blood mounted to his forehead. "Can it be that she has a lover?" he thought.
Then reflecting on his own conduct toward his wife since their marriage, he said to himself:
"And if she has, have I any right to complain? Did I not tacitly give her back her liberty?" He was greatly troubled, and yet he would not have degraded himself so much as to play the spy, had it not been for one of those trifling circumstances which so often decide a man's destiny.
He was returning from a ride on horseback one morning about eleven o'clock, and he was not thirty paces from the Hotel de Sairmeuse when he saw a lady hurriedly emerge from the house. She was very plainly dressed--entirely in black--but her whole appearance was strikingly that of the duchess.
"It is certainly my wife; but why is she dressed in such a fashion?" he thought.
Had he been on foot he would certainly have entered the house; as it was, he slowly followed Mme. Blanche, who was going up the Rue Crenelle. She walked very quickly, and without turning her head, and kept her face persistently shrouded in a very thick veil.
When she reached the Rue Taranne, she threw herself into one of the fiacres at the carriage-stand.
The coachman came to the door to speak to her; then nimbly sprang upon the box, and gave his bony horses one of those cuts of the whip that announce a princely pourboire.
The carriage had already turned the corner of the Rue du Dragon, and Martial, ashamed and irresolute, had not moved from the place where he had stopped his horse, just around the corner of the Rue Saint Pares.
Not daring to admit his suspicions, he tried to deceive himself.
"Nonsense!" he thought, giving the reins to his horse, "what do I risk in advancing? The carriage is a long way off by this time, and I shall not overtake it."
He did overtake it, however, on reaching the intersection of the Croix-Rouge, where there was, as usual, a crowd of vehicles.
It was the same fiacre; Martial recognized it by its green body, and its wheels striped with white.
Emerging from the crowd of carriages, the driver whipped up his horses, and it was at a gallop that they flew up the Rue du Vieux Columbier--the narrowest street that borders the Place Saint Sulpice-- and gained the outer boulevards.
Martial's thoughts were busy as he trotted along about a hundred yards behind the vehicle.
"She is in a terrible hurry," he said to himself. "This, however, is scarcely the quarter for a lover's rendezvous."
The carriage had passed the Place d'Italie. It entered the Rue du Chateau-des-Rentiers and soon paused before a tract of unoccupied ground.
The door was at once opened, and the Duchesse de Sairmeuse hastily alighted. Without stopping to look to the right or to the left, she hurried across the open space.
A man, by no means prepossessing in appearance, with a long beard, and with a pipe in his mouth, and clad in a workman's blouse, was seated upon a large block of stone not far off.
"Will you hold my horse a moment?" inquired Martial. "Certainly," answered the man.
Had Martial been less preoccupied, his suspicions might have been aroused by the malicious smile that curved the man's lips; and had he examined his features closely, he would perhaps have recognized him.
For it was Jean Lacheneur.
Since addressing that anonymous letter to the Duc de Sairmeuse, he had made the duchess multiply her visits to the Widow Chupin; and each time he had watched for her coming.
"So, if her husband decides to follow her I shall know it," he thought.
It was indispensable for the success of his plans that Mme. Blanche should be watched by her husband.
For Jean Lacheneur had decided upon his course. From a thousand schemes for revenge he had chosen the most frightful and ignoble that a brain maddened and enfevered by hatred could possibly conceive.
He longed to see the haughty Duchesse de Sairmeuse subjected to the vilest ignominy, Martial in the hands of the lowest of the low. He pictured a bloody struggle in this miserable den; the sudden arrival of the police, summoned by himself, who would arrest all the parties indiscriminately. He gloated over the thought of a trial in which the crime committed at the Borderie would be brought to light; he saw the duke and the duchess in prison, and the great names of Sairmeuse and of Courtornieu shrouded in eternal disgrace.
And he believed that nothing was wanting to insure the success of his plans. He had at his disposal two miserable wretches who were capable of any crime; and an unfortunate youth named Gustave, made his willing slave by poverty and cowardice, was intended to play the part of Marie-Anne's son.
These three accomplices had no suspicion of his real intentions. As for the Widow Chupin and her son, if they suspected some infamous plot, the name of the duchess was all they really knew in regard to it. Moreover, Jean held Polyte and his mother completely under his control by the wealth which he had promised them if they served him docilely.
And if Martial followed his wife into the Poivriere, Jean had so arranged matters that the duke would at first suppose that she had been led there by charity.
"But he will not go in," thought Lacheneur, whose heart throbbed wildly with sinister joy as he held Martial's horse. "Monsieur le Duc is too fine for that."
And Martial did not go in. Though he was horrified when he saw his wife enter that vile den, as if she were at home there, he said to himself that he should learn nothing by following her.
He, therefore, contented himself by making a thorough examination of the outside of the house; then, remounting his horse, he departed on a gallop. He was completely mystified; he did not know what to think, what to imagine, what to believe.
But he was fully resolved to fathom this mystery and as soon as he returned home he sent Otto out in search of information. He could confide everything to this devoted servant; he had no secrets from him.
About four o'clock his faithful valet de chambre returned, an expression of profound consternation visible upon his countenance.
"What is it?" asked Martial, divining some great misfortune.
"Ah, sir, the mistress of that wretched den is the widow of Chupin's son----" Martial's face became as white as his linen.
He knew life too well not to understand that since the duchess had been compelled to submit to the power of these people, they must be masters of some secret which she was willing to make any sacrifice to preserve. But what secret?
The years which had silvered Martial's hair, had not cooled the ardor of his blood. He was, as he had always been, a man of impulses.
He rushed to his wife's apartments.
"Madame has just gone down to receive the Countess de Mussidan and the Marquise d'Arlange," said the maid.
"Very well; I will wait for her here. Retire."
And Martial entered the chamber of Mme. Blanche.
The room was in disorder, for the duchess, after returning from the Poivriere, was still engaged in her toilet when the visitors were announced.
The wardrobe-doors were open, the chairs were encumbered with wearing apparel, the articles which Mme. Blanche used daily--her watch, her purse, and several bunches of keys--were lying upon the dressing-table and mantel.
Martial did not sit down. His self-possession was returning.
"No folly," he thought, "if I question her, I shall learn nothing. I must be silent and watchful."
He was about to retire, when, on glancing about the room, his eyes fell upon a large casket, inlaid with silver, which had belonged to his wife ever since she was a young girl, and which accompanied her everywhere.
"That, doubtless, holds the solution of the mystery," he said to himself.
It was one of those moments when a m