Fromont and Risler, vol 3 | Page 5

to live; she had all the happiness she could hope to attain. There
was nothing passionate or romantic about her feeling for Georges. He
was like a second husband to her, younger and, above all, richer than
the other. To complete the vulgarization of their liaison, she had
summoned her parents to Asnieres, lodged them in a little house in the
country, and made of that vain and wilfully blind father and that
affectionate, still bewildered mother a halo of respectability of which
she felt the necessity as she sank lower and lower.
Everything was shrewdly planned in that perverse little brain, which
reflected coolly upon vice; and it seemed to her as if she might
continue to live thus in peace, when Frantz Risler suddenly arrived.
Simply from seeing him enter the room, she had realized that her
repose was threatened, that an interview of the gravest importance was
to take place between them.
Her plan was formed on the instant. She must at once put it into
execution.
The summer-house that they entered contained one large, circular room
with four windows, each looking out upon a different landscape; it was
furnished for the purposes of summer siestas, for the hot hours when
one seeks shelter from the sunlight and the noises of the garden. A
broad, very low divan ran all around the wall. A small lacquered table,
also very low, stood in the middle of the room, covered with odd
numbers of society journals.

The hangings were new, and the Persian pattern-birds flying among
bluish reeds--produced the effect of a dream in summer, ethereal
figures floating before one's languid eyes. The lowered blinds, the
matting on the floor, the Virginia jasmine clinging to the trellis-work
outside, produced a refreshing coolness which was enhanced by the
splashing in the river near by, and the lapping of its wavelets on the
shore.
Sidonie sat down as soon as she entered the room, pushing aside her
long white skirt, which sank like a mass of snow at the foot of the divan;
and with sparkling eyes and a smile playing about her lips, bending her
little head slightly, its saucy coquettishness heightened by the bow of
ribbon on the side, she waited.
Frantz, pale as death, remained standing, looking about the room. After
a moment he began:
"I congratulate you, Madame; you understand how to make yourself
comfortable."
And in the next breath, as if he were afraid that the conversation,
beginning at such a distance, would not arrive quickly enough at the
point to which he intended to lead it, he added brutally:
"To whom do you owe this magnificence, to your lover or your
husband?"
Without moving from the divan, without even raising her eyes to his,
she answered:
"To both."
He was a little disconcerted by such self-possession.
"Then you confess that that man is your lover?"
"Confess it!--yes!"
Frantz gazed at her a moment without speaking. She, too, had turned

pale, notwithstanding her calmness, and the eternal little smile no
longer quivered at the corners of her mouth.
He continued:
"Listen to me, Sidonie! My brother's name, the name he gave his wife,
is mine as well. Since Risler is so foolish, so blind as to allow the name
to be dishonored by you, it is my place to defend it against your attacks.
I beg you, therefore, to inform Monsieur Georges Fromont that he must
change mistresses as soon as possible, and go elsewhere to ruin himself.
If not--"
"If not?" queried Sidonie, who had not ceased to play with her rings
while he was speaking.
"If not, I shall tell my brother what is going on in his house, and you
will be surprised at the Risler whose acquaintance you will make then--
a man as violent and ungovernable as he usually is inoffensive. My
disclosure will kill him perhaps, but you can be sure that he will kill
you first."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Very well! let him kill me. What do I care for that?"
This was said with such a heartbroken, despondent air that Frantz, in
spite of himself, felt a little pity for that beautiful, fortunate young
creature, who talked of dying with such self-abandonment.
"Do you love him so dearly?" he said, in an indefinably milder tone.
"Do you love this Fromont so dearly that you prefer to die rather than
renounce him?"
She drew herself up hastily.
"I? Love that fop, that doll, that silly girl in men's clothes?
Nonsense!--I took him as I would have taken any other man."
"Why?"

"Because I couldn't help it, because I was mad, because I had and still
have in my heart a criminal love, which I am determined to tear out, no
matter at what cost."
She had risen and was speaking with