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Updated: July 21, 2025
For three days she feverishly expected an answer, knowing the while that she ought to go to Portland to meet Duvernois, should he chance to come, yet unable to tear herself away from Leighton, even for twenty-four hours. In the afternoon of the third day she made one of her frequent visits of charity. At the house of a poor and bed-ridden widow she met, as she had hoped to meet, her husband.
During the moments when she was certain that Leighton would not forgive her, Alice made wild clutches at the hope that Duvernois might. There were glimpses of the earlier days of her married life; cheering phantoms of the days when she believed that she loved and that she was beloved phantoms which swore by altars and bridal veils to secure her pardon.
He greatly assisted MacMahon to reconstitute his army at Chalons, he planned the organization of three more army corps, and he started on the work of placing Paris in a state of defence, whilst his colleague, Clement Duvernois, the new Minister of Commerce, began gathering flocks and herds together, in order that the city, if besieged, might have the necessary means of subsistence.
She imagined Duvernois overtaking her with the words, "Alice, I forgive your madness: do you also forgive the coldness which drove you to it?" She imagined herself springing to him, reaching out her hands for reconciliation, putting up her mouth for a kiss, and sobbing, "Ah, why were you not always so?"
Somewhat later, when Duvernois came once more to the house, accompanied by a fashionably-dressed youth, who, as it subsequently appeared, was his younger brother, he found the family and the neighborhood in wild alarm over the disappearance of Mrs. Leighton. The two at once returned to the hotel, procured saddle-horses and joined in the general chase.
"But there comes Doctor Leighton," remarked the girl as the visitor turned to leave. Even in this frightful conjuncture the characteristic coolness of Duvernois did not forsake him: after a moment's hesitation and a quick glance at his rival, he said, "I do not know him: I will call again."
Clément Duvernois, an ex-radical, an ex-Bonapartist, and one of the members of the Ministry of Defence, gave ignorant and reckless orders for supplies, which, in spite of the gravity of the situation, amused the Parisians immensely. Droves of cattle passed all day along the Boulevards, going to be pastured in the Bois de Boulogne, where they were tended by Gardes Mobiles from the rural districts.
At the village hotel he had learned that a lady named Duvernois had arrived in the place during the previous summer, and that she had been publicly married to a Doctor Leighton. He did not divulge his name he did not so much as divulge his emotions: he listened to this story calmly, his eyes fixed on vacancy. At the door of the boarding-house he asked for Mrs.
Duvernois had not a friend intelligent enough to say to him, "You must love your wife; if you cannot love her, you must with merciful deception make her believe that you do. You must show her when you return from business that you have thought of her; you must buy a bouquet, a toy, a trifle, to carry home to her. If you do these things, you will be rewarded; if not, you will be punished."
Duvernois, and then corrected himself, saying, "I mean Mrs. Leighton." He must have had singular emotions at the moment, yet the servant-girl noticed nothing singular in his demeanor. Mrs. Leighton could not be found. None of the family had seen her enter or go out: it was not known that she had been in the house for an hour.
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