Chapter 2: Madame Du Boys

“ ... Quid agunt in corpore casto Cerussa
et minium, centumque venena colorum?
Mentis honor morumque decus sunt vincula
Conjugii...”
(Sancti Claudius Marius Victor,
De perversis suae aetatis moribus)

Hubert had left Rabodanges a few days after Sixtine’s departure. The unvaried green of the fields saddened him and, despite the ingenuity of the countess, deprived of the company of the young woman who puzzled him to the utmost, the château seemed to him as though plunged in a funereal widowhood.

He did not even execute his plans of visiting the Mortagne Trappists, but took the train and entered Paris one evening in a state of real satisfaction.

For him, Paris was neither the streets nor the boulevards and theaters. Paris, for Entragues, was confined within the somewhat narrow bounds of his study, peopled with pleasant phantoms of his imagination. There, sad and vague beings, pensive and formless, stirred restlessly, imploring existence, Entragues lived with them in an almost disquieting familiarity. He beheld them, heard them, repaired with them to whatever sphere their activity necessitated. In short, he underwent the keenest phenomena of hallucination.

Thus it was that, on the morrow of his return, Madame du Boys came to occupy him with her adventures. It was a matter of reconciling her in a logical way with her husband whom she had abandoned, to follow to Geneva a Polish count, retired there after sundry nihilistic adventures. Artémise du Boys was how she spelled her name after her adulterous lark, the while her husband, secretary-cashier of the Union de la Bonne-Science, the simple Monsieur Dubois, bewailed his irreparable misfortune.