It must be said that Marguerite was just then very ill. The past seemed
to her sensitive nature as if it were one of the main causes of her
illness, and a sort of superstition led her to hope that God would
restore to her both health and beauty in return for her repentance and
conversion. By the end of the summer, the waters, sleep, the natural
fatigue of long walks, had indeed more or less restored her health. The
duke accompanied her to Paris, where he continued to see her as he had
done at Bagneres.
This liaison, whose motive and origin were quite unknown, caused a great
sensation, for the duke, already known for his immense fortune,
now became known for his prodigality. All this was set down to the
debauchery of a rich old man, and everything was believed except the
truth. The father's sentiment for Marguerite had, in truth, so pure a
cause that anything but a communion of hearts would have seemed to him a
kind of incest, and he had never spoken to her a word which his daughter
might not have heard.
Far be it from me to make out our heroine to be anything but what she
was. As long as she remained at Bagneres, the promise she had made to
the duke had not been hard to keep, and she had kept it; but, once back
in Paris, it seemed to her, accustomed to a life of dissipation, of
balls, of orgies, as if the solitude, only interrupted by the duke's
stated visits, would kill her with boredom, and the hot breath of her
old life came back across her head and heart.
We must add that Marguerite had returned more beautiful than she had
ever been; she was but twenty, and her malady, sleeping but not subdued,
continued to give her those feverish desires which are almost always the
result of diseases of the chest.
It was a great grief to the duke when his friends, always on the lookout
for some scandal on the part of the woman with whom, it seemed to them,
he was compromising himself, came to tell him, indeed to prove to him,
that at times when she was sure of not seeing him she received other
visits, and that these visits were often prolonged till the following
day. On being questioned, Marguerite admitted everything to the duke,
and advised him, without arriere-pensee, to concern himself with her no
longer, for she felt incapable of carrying out what she had undertaken,
and she did not wish to go on accepting benefits from a man whom she was
deceiving. The duke did not return for a week; it was all he could do,
and on the eighth day he came to beg Marguerite to let him still visit
her, promising that he would take her as she was, so long as he might
see her, and swearing that he would never utter a reproach against her,
not though he were to die of it.