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Updated: June 11, 2025
Wenceslas, by nature a dreamer, had expended so much energy in production, in study, and in work under Lisbeth's despotic rule, that love and happiness resulted in reaction. His real character reappeared, the weakness, recklessness, and indolence of the Sarmatian returned to nestle in the comfortable corners of his soul, whence the schoolmaster's rod had routed them.
In another moment the unauthorised version of King Wenceslas, which, like many other scandals, grew worse on repetition, went echoing up the garden path; two of the revellers gave an impromptu performance on the way by executing the staircase waltz up the terraces of what Luke Steffink, hitherto with some justification, called his rock-garden.
"But if I die before I am rich?" said Wenceslas dolefully. "Die!" cried she. "Oh, I will not let you die. I have life enough for both, and I would have my blood injected into your veins if necessary." Tears rose to Steinbock's eyes as he heard her vehement and artless speech. "Do not be unhappy, my little Wenceslas," said Lisbeth with feeling.
Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient. Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine.
The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her.
Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck. "Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas she is yours!" She sighed deeply.
Once a month she went to see Valerie, sent, indeed, by Hortense, who wanted news of Wenceslas, and by Celestine, who was seriously uneasy at the acknowledged and well-known connection between her father and a woman to whom her mother-in-law and sister-in-law owed their ruin and their sorrows. As may be supposed, Lisbeth took advantage of this to see Valerie as often as possible.
"A poor boy with no fortune, and no one to depend on! Cast off by a carrotty giraffe! What do you expect, Crevel? Wenceslas is my poet, and I love him as if he were my own child, and make no secret of it. Bah! your virtuous women see evil everywhere and in everything. Bless me, could they not sit by a man without doing wrong?
While Lisbeth was speaking aside on this wise to Crevel, Valerie had asked Wenceslas to give her back her letter, and she was saying things that dispelled all his griefs. "So now you are free, my dear," said she. "Ought any great artist to marry? You live only by fancy and freedom! There, I shall love you so much, beloved poet, that you shall never regret your wife.
He would have a tidy sum by now if he had stayed with us. What is to be done? Artists have a horror of not being free." "They have a proper sense of their value and dignity," replied Stidmann. "I do not blame Wenceslas for walking alone, trying to make a name, and to become a great man; he had a right to do so! But he was a great loss to me when he left."
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