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Updated: July 20, 2025
"Roncieres, August 8th. "MY FRIEND: I am ill, and so fatigued that you would not recognize me at all. I believe that I have wept too much. I must rest a little before I return, for I do not wish you to see me as I am. My husband sets out for Paris the day after to-morrow, and will give you news of us.
Then, to change the conversation, she talked about her life at Roncieres, spoke of her grandmother, to whom she read aloud a long time every day, and who must now feel very lonely and sad. As he listened, the painter felt as gay as a bird, gay as he never had been. All that she had said, all the doings, the trifling everyday details of the simple life of a young girl, amused and interested him.
After dinner, instead of going out as on the evening before, they spent the hours in the drawing-room. Suddenly the Countess said: "We must leave here soon." "Oh, don't speak of that yet!" Olivier exclaimed. "You would not leave Roncieres when I was not here; now what I have come, you think only of going away." "But, my dear friend," said she, "we three cannot remain here indefinitely."
"Good-day, dear master," said she gravely. He began to laugh, shook hands with her, and sitting near her, said: "Guess why I have come." She thought a few seconds. "I don't know." "To take you and your mother to the jeweler's to choose the sapphire cornflower I promised you at Roncieres." The young girl's face was illumined with delight. "Oh, and mamma has gone out," said she.
She could not even convince herself that her return from Roncieres dated only from the day before, so much was the condition of her soul modified since her return to Paris, as if that little change had healed her wounds. Bertin, arriving at dinner-time, exclaimed on seeing her: "You are dazzling this evening!" And this exclamation sent a warm wave of happiness through her being.
Guilleroy, filled with the gaiety of Parisians when they return, to whom the city, after every absence, seems rejuvenated and full of possible surprises, questioned the painter about a thousand details of what people had been doing and saying; and Olivier, after indifferent replies which betrayed all the boredom of his solitude, spoke of Roncieres, tried to capture from this man, in order to gather round him that almost tangible something left with us by persons with whom we have recently been associated, that subtle emanation of being one carries away when leaving them, which remains with us a few hours and evaporates amid new surroundings.
My husband is making some little trips around the country, and I insisted that he should take Annette with him, to distract and console her a little. They go in the carriage or on horseback as far as eight or ten leagues from Roncieres, and she returns to me rosy with youth, in spite of her sadness, her eyes shining with life, animated by the country air and the excursion she has had.
I will leave to-morrow by the one o'clock train. Shall I send her a telegram?" "No, I will attend to that. I will telegraph, so that you will find a carriage at the station." The Countess and her daughter, dressed in black crape, had just seated themselves opposite each other, for breakfast, in the large dining-room at Roncieres.
Dead, perhaps, too! The ten minutes she had to wait seemed interminable to her; then, when she had torn open the despatch and recognized the name of her husband, she read: "I telegraph to tell you that our friend Bertin leaves for Roncieres on the one o'clock train. Send Phaeton station. Love." "Well, mamma?" said Annette. "Monsieur Olivier Bertin is coming to see us." "Ah, how lucky! When?"
He remembered it, for the stings of jealousy smart afresh like reopened wounds. He had first felt it at Roncieres, in returning from the cemetery, when he felt for the first time that she was escaping from him, that he could not control her, that young girl as independent as a young animal.
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