"
"Oh, mother, can you believe----?"
"Yes, I do believe. You loved him, and you can see none of these
things. But I can remember in the early days after your marriage. I
met him in the Champs-Elysees. He was on horseback. Well, at one
minute he was galloping as hard as he could tear, and then pulled up
to a walk. I said to myself at that moment, 'There is a man devoid of
judgement.'"
"Ah, ha!" cried Monsieur Guillaume, "how wise I was to have your money
settled on yourself with such a queer fellow for a husband!"
When Augustine was so imprudent as to set forth her serious grievances
against her husband, the two old people were speechless with
indignation. But the word "divorce" was ere long spoken by Madame
Guillaume. At the sound of the word divorce the apathetic old draper
seemed to wake up. Prompted by his love for his daughter, and also by
the excitement which the proceedings would bring into his uneventful
life, father Guillaume took up the matter. He made himself the leader
of the application for a divorce, laid down the lines of it, almost
argued the case; he offered to be at all the charges, to see the
lawyers, the pleaders, the judges, to move heaven and earth. Madame de
Sommervieux was frightened, she refused her father's services, said
she would not be separated from her husband even if she were ten times
as unhappy, and talked no more about her sorrows. After being
overwhelmed by her parents with all the little wordless and consoling
kindnesses by which the old couple tried in vain to make up to her for
her distress of heart, Augustine went away, feeling the impossibility
of making a superior mind intelligible to weak intellects.
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