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Updated: June 22, 2025
A woman! and a sick one! Every man carries his cross and his was Josephina. But she, as if she penetrated his thoughts, stopped crying and spoke to him slowly in a voice that shook with cruel irony. "You need not expect anything from the Alberca woman," she said suddenly with feminine incoherence.
Besides, he missed the company of Cotoner, who had gone to a historic little town in Castile, where with a comic pride he received the honors due to genius, living in the palace of the prelate and ruining several pictures in the Cathedral by an infamous restoration. His loneliness made Renovales remember the Alberca woman with all the greater longing.
The fashionable assemblage went out, glad they had gathered and seen each other again. Many lips laughed at the speech behind their gauze fans, delighted to be able to scratch indirectly his friend the Alberca woman. "Awful, my dear! Insufferably boring!"
Cotoner, in the full bliss of digestion, strove with his jests to bring a faint smile to the face of the master's wife, but she stayed in the corner, shivering with cold. Renovales, in a smoking jacket, read the papers, soothed by the charming atmosphere of his quiet home. If the countess could only see him! One night the Alberca woman's name was mentioned in the drawing-room.
The ladies at whose houses he dined spoke ill of the Alberca woman, but perhaps it was merely woman's gossip. There was a moment of silence and Renovales, as if he wanted to change the subject of conversation, turned to Soldevilla. "And you, aren't you painting any longer? I always find you here in working hours."
They were silent for a long time he, painting with an absent-minded air, she watching the movement of the brush, buried in an armchair in the sweet calm of rest. But the Alberca woman was incapable of remaining silent long. Little by little her usual chatter began, paying no attention to the painter's silence, talking to relieve the convent-like stillness of the studio with her words and laughter.
The Alberca woman was greatly amused at her following of admirers; she laughed at their intolerance and their proposals. "Yes, I know what it is," said Renovales breaking his long silence. "You want to annihilate us, to reign over man, whom you hate." The countess laughed at the recollection of the fierce feminism of some of her acolytes.
Inferior to those young bloods that swarmed around the Alberca woman; he, a man known all over Europe, and in whose presence all the young ladies that painted fans and water-colors of birds and flowers, grew pale with emotion, looking at him with worshiping eyes! "I will soon show you, you poor woman," he thought, while a cruel laugh shook silently in the darkness.
"It's intolerable," he said to dissipate his friend's surprise. "I can't stand her. She's a regular barnacle, and won't let me go for a minute." He had never spoken to Cotoner of his affair with the Alberca woman, but he did not have to tell him anything, he assumed that he knew. "But she's pretty, Mariano," said he. "A wonderful woman! You know I admire her.
His wife laughed to see him, so little, bald and solemn, with high boots, a dangling sword, his breast covered with trinkets, a white plumed helmet resting in his lap. During the life of isolation and privation with which Renovales struggled so courageously, the papers brought to the artist's wretched house the echoes of the triumphs of the "fair Countess of Alberca."
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