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Updated: May 22, 2025
His mother, deeply moved, murmured: "Well said, my boy." But Beausire cried out: "Come, Mme. Rosemilly, speak on behalf of the fair sex." She raised her glass, and in a pretty voice, slightly touched with sadness, she said: "I will pledge you to the memory of M. Marechal." There was a few moments' lull, a pause for decent meditation, as after prayer.
But as she scarcely heeded him, and as he was bursting with the desire to confide in some one, he led her away and in a low voice said to her: "Guess what I have done!" "But what I don't know." "Guess." "I cannot. I don't know." "Well, I have told Mme. Rosemilly that I wish to marry her." She did not answer, for her brain was buzzing, her mind in such distress that she could scarcely take it in.
He felt better, and glad to have understood, to have detected himself, to have unmasked the other which lurks in us. "Then I was jealous of Jean," thought he. "That is really vilely mean. And I am sure of it now, for the first idea which came into my head was that he would marry Mme. Rosemilly.
Rosemilly, who began to smile and glanced at Mme. Roland. Mme. Roland took her hand and pressed it. Jean, in high spirits, cut a caper like a school-boy, exclaiming: "Hah! How well the voice carries in this room; it would be capital for speaking in."
Roland, always so self-possessed, started violently, betraying to her doctor son the anguish of her nerves. Then she said: "It must be Mme. Rosemilly;" and her eye again anxiously turned to the mantel-shelf. Pierre understood, or thought he understood, her fears and misery. A woman's eye is keen, a woman's wit is nimble, and her instincts suspicious.
Another little circumstance, too, just now disturbed her peace of mind, and she was in fear of some complications; for in the course of the winter, while her boys were finishing their studies, each in his own line, she had made the acquaintance of a neighbour, Mme. Rosemilly, the widow of a captain of a merchantman who had died at sea two years before.
The men took off their socks and went to the shoemaker's to buy wooden shoes instead. Then they set out, the nets over their shoulders and creels on their backs. Mme. Rosemilly was very sweet in this costume, with an unexpected charm of countrified audacity.
He clinked his glass against father Roland's, while Jean was offering two freshly filled glasses to the ladies. Mme. Rosemilly refused, till Captain Beausire, who had known her husband, cried: "Come, come, madame, bis repetita placent, as we say in the lingo, which is as much as to say two glasses of vermouth never hurt any one.
How glad he would be to know a woman, a true woman! He started up with a sudden determination to go and call on Mme. Rosemilly. But he promptly sat down again. He did not like that woman. Why not? She had too much vulgar and sordid common sense; besides, did she not seem to prefer Jean?
Rosemilly seemed suddenly to remember a further detail and asked: "You have consulted M. Roland, I suppose?" A flush of colour mounted at the same instant on the face of both mother and son. It was the mother who replied: "Oh, no, it is quite unnecessary!" Then she hesitated, feeling that some explanation was needed, and added: "We do everything without saying anything to him.
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