A Life

A Life by Guy de Maupassant Page A

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Authors: Guy de Maupassant
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to take her exercise, supported by the Baron and escorted by her two priests. Jeanne and Julien walked towards the copse and entered its narrow, overgrown paths; and suddenly he took hold of her hands:
    'Tell me now, will you be my wife?'
    Again she bent her head; and as he stammered: 'Please tell me, I beg you!', she lifted her eyes towards his, quite gently, and in the look she gave him he read her reply.
    IV
    One morning the Baron entered Jeanne's bedroom before she had risen, and sat down at the foot of her bed:
    'Monsieur le Vicomte de Lamare has asked us for your hand in marriage.'
    She felt like hiding her face under the sheets.
    Her father went on:
    'We have postponed making our reply.'
    She was gasping for breath, choking with emotion. Presently the Baron added with a smile:
    'We didn't want to do anything without asking you. Your mother and I are not opposed to such a marriage, but we have no wish to force you into it. You are much wealthier than he is, but when a whole life's happiness is at stake, it doesn't do to become preoccupied with money. He has no surviving relatives; so if you were to marry him, it would be like a son joining our family, whereas with someone else it is you, our daughter, who would be going off to be with strangers. We like the boy. Do you . . . like him?'
    'I accept, Papa,' she stammered, blushing to the roots of her hair.
    And Papa, gazing deep into her eyes and still smiling, muttered:
    'I thought as much, young lady.'
    She spent the rest of the day as though in a state of inebriation, not knowing what she was doing, absent-mindedly picking up the wrong thing by mistake, and her legs felt limp with fatigue although she had walked nowhere.
    Towards six o'clock, as she was sitting with Mama beneath the plane-tree, the Vicomte appeared.
    Jeanne's heart began to beat wildly. The young man came towards them without apparent emotion. When he reached them, he took the Baroness's hand and kissed her fingers; and then, lifting the young lady's quivering hand in its turn, he placed upon it a long, full kiss of tenderness and gratitude.
    And so began the blissful period of engagement. They would converse alone in the corner of the drawing-room or else seated on the bank at the far side of the copse overlooking the wild heathland. Sometimes they would stroll along Mama's avenue, he talking of the future, she staring at the dusty trail left by the Baroness's foot.
    The matter being now decided, there was a general desire to hasten its conclusion; and so it was agreed that the ceremony should take place in six weeks' time, on the fifteenth of August; and that the young couple would depart immediately on their honeymoon. Asked which country she would like to visit, Jeanne decided on Corsica, where they would be more on their own together than in the cities of Italy.
    They awaited the moment appointed for their union without undue impatience, but suffused, wrapped all about in a delicious tenderness of feeling, savouring the exquisite charm of inconsequential caresses, of squeezed fingers, of passionate gazes so protracted that their very souls seemed to merge, and all the while dimly aware of a vague longing for more substantial embraces.
    It was decided to invite no one to the wedding apart from Aunt Lison, the Baroness's sister, who lived as a paying guest in a convent at Versailles.
    After their father's death, the Baroness had wanted to keep her sister by her; but the old maid, convinced that she was a burden to everyone, no better than a useless nuisance, withdrew into one of those religious houses that rent out apartments to persons having the misfortune to be all alone in the world.
    From time to time she would come and spend a month or two with her family.
    She was a small woman of few words, who faded into the background and appeared only at mealtimes before then retiring once more to her room where she would remain closeted for hours on end.
    She had the kind face of a little, old lady,

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