Wenceslas returned home about one in the morning. Hortense had been waiting for him since about half past nine.
From half past nine to ten o’clock, she had listened to the sounds of carriages, telling herself that Wenceslas had never come home so late before when he dined without her with Chanor and Florent.
She sat sewing beside her son’s cot, for she had started economizing on a sewing-woman’s wages by doing some of the mending herself.
From ten to half past ten, a suspicion crossed her mind and she said to herself:
‘But has he really gone to have dinner with Chanor and Florent as he told me? When he was dressing, he wanted his best tie and his finest tie-pin. He spent as much time on his appearance as a woman who wants to look even better than she really is. But I’m crazy. He loves me. Anyway here he is.’
Instead of stopping, the carriage that the young wife heard went on its way.
From eleven o’clock till midnight, Hortense was a prey to indescribable terrors, caused by the isolation of the neighbourhood where she lived.
‘If he walked back,’ she said to herself, ‘he may have had an accident. People can kill themselves by stumbling over the edge of a kerb or into holes in the road. Artists are so absent-minded. What if he’s been stopped by thieves! This is the first time he’s left me here alone for six and a half hours. But why am I tormenting myself? He loves only me.’
Men ought to be faithful to the women who love them, if only because of the continual miracles produced by true love in that sublime world which we call the world of the spirit. In her relationship to the man she loves, a woman in love is like a hypnotist’s subject who has been given the unhappy power at the end of a trance of being aware as a woman of what she has seen in it. Passionate love makes a woman’s nervous energy reach the ecstatic pitch in which presentiment is as revealing as a prophetic vision. A woman knows she is betrayed, but she is so much in love that she doubts and does not listen to her own forebodings. And she gives the lie to the voice of her Pythoness’s* power.
This extreme love ought to arouse veneration. In noble minds, admiration of that divine phenomenon will always be a barrier between them and infidelity. How can a man fail to love a beautiful, intelligent woman whose heart attains to such expressions of passion?
At one in the morning, Hortense’s anxiety had reached such a pitch that she rushed to the door when she recognized Wenceslas’s way of ringing the bell. She took him in her arms and pressed him to her heart like a mother.
‘At last, you’re here!’ she said, regaining the use of her tongue. ‘After this, dearest, I’ll go wherever you go, for I don’t want to undergo the torture of waiting for you like this again. I imagined you stumbling against a kerb and breaking your head! Or killed by thieves! No, another time, I know I should go mad. So you had a good time … without me? Bad boy!’
‘What could I do, my darling good angel? Bixiou was there and he gave us some new orders. And Léon de Lora, whose wit never ceased to flow, and Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only favourable article that’s been written about the Montcornet monument. There was …’
‘There were no women?’ Hortense asked eagerly.
‘The worthy Madame Florent…’
‘You’d told me it was to be at the Rocher de Cancale* but was it at their house then?’
‘Yes, at their house. I made a mistake.’
‘You didn’t take a cab home?’
‘No.’
‘So you walked all the way from the Rue des Tournelles?’
‘Stidmann and Bixiou walked back with me along the boulevards; we were talking on the way.’
‘It must have been very dry on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne; you’re not muddy at all,’ said Hortense, scrutinizing her husband’s polished boots.
It had been raining, but from the Rue Vaneau to the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not had to muddy his boots.
‘Look, here’s five thousand francs that Chanor has generously lent me,’ said Wenceslas, to cut short this quasi-judicial inquiry.
He had made two bundles of his ten thousand-franc notes, one for Hortense and one for himself, as he had five thousand francs’ worth of debts that Hortense knew nothing about. He owed money to his assistant and his workmen.
‘Now you don’t need to worry any more, my dear,’ he said, kissing his wife. ‘I’m going to start work first thing tomorrow. Oh, tomorrow I’ll be off at half past eight, and I’ll go to the studio. So I’m going to bed right away so as to get up early. You don’t mind, sweetheart?’
The suspicion that had entered Hortense’s heart disappeared; she was a thousand miles from the truth. Madame Marneffe! The thought of her never entered her head. She was afraid of the company of courtesans for her Wenceslas. The names of Bixiou and Léon de Lora, two artists known for their licentious lives, had made her anxious.
The next day, entirely reassured, she saw Wenceslas set off at nine o’clock.
‘He’s at work now,’ she said to herself as she began to dress her baby. ‘Oh, I can see him at it; he’s in good form. Well, if we can’t have Michelangelo’s glory, we’ll have Benvenuto Cellini’s.’*