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Updated: September 22, 2025
He made her foresee that her stepmother would marry again would marry Marien. "But I shall not be there!" she cried, "I will not countenance such an infamy!" Oh, how she hoped Gerard de Cymier loved her! The hypocritical tears of Madame de Nailles disgusted her. She could not bear to have such false grief associated with her own.
And the next morning, after going to sleep full of that pleasant thought, he would awake glad to find that he was still as free as ever, and able to carry on a flirtation with a woman of the world, which imposed no obligations upon him, and yet at the same time make love to a young girl whom he would gladly have married but for certain reports which were beginning to circulate among men of business concerning the financial position of M. de Nailles.
Madame de Nailles was pouring out for herself a cup of tea with singular care and attention. "Of course," said M. de Nailles. His daughter pitied him, and cried, with an increasing wish to annoy her stepmother: "Mamma, don't you see that your teapot has no tea in it?
Besides her, he had no one who could receive his confidences, who would bear with his perplexities, who could assist in delivering him from the network of hopes and fears in which, after every interview with Jacqueline, he seemed to himself to become more and more entangled. At last, however, at one of the soirees given every fortnight by Madame de Nailles, he succeeded in gaining her attention.
"Mon Dieu! I can't see that Jacqueline leads a life like that!" said M. de Nailles, who felt that he must say something. "You don't see, you don't see! How can any one see who won't open his eyes? My poor friend, just look for once at what is going on around you, under your own roof " "Jacqueline is devoted to music," said her father, good-humoredly.
To Madame d'Avrigny he made apologies for having to give up his part in her theatricals; he entreated Madame de Nailles to accept both for herself and for Mademoiselle Jacqueline his deepest condolences and the assurance of his sympathy. The manner in which this was said was all it ought to have been, except that it might have been rather more brief.
"But I can not see any reason why we should not take Jacqueline with us to Italy. She is just of an age to profit by it." These words were spoken by M. de Nailles after a long silence at the breakfast-table. They startled his hearers like a bomb. Jacqueline waited to hear what would come next, fixing a keen look upon her stepmother. Their eyes met like the flash of two swords.
When the portrait was sufficiently advanced, M. de Nailles came to the studio to judge of the likeness. He was delighted: "Only, my friend, I think," he cried to Marien, endeavoring to soften his one objection to the picture, "that you have given her a look how can I put it? an expression very charming no doubt, but which is not that of a child of her age. You know what I mean.
But here Madame de Nailles gave a dry little cough which was meant to impose silence on the subject. She was not a prude, but she disapproved of anything that was bad form at her receptions.
In secret she often asked herself, with the keen insight of a woman of the world well trained in artifice and who possessed a thorough knowledge of mankind, whether there might not be women capable of using a young girl so as to put the world on a wrong scent; whether, in other words, Madame de Villegry did not talk everywhere about M. de Cymier's attentions to Mademoiselle de Nailles in order to conceal his relations to herself?
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