of this has descended to her son, with whom, in spite
or because of it, Delphine (she has not seen him before her rash
generosity) proceeds to fall frantically in love, as he does with her.
The marriage, however, partly by trickery on Madame de Vernon's part,
and partly owing to Delphine's more than indiscreet furthering of her
friend Madame d'Ervin's intrigue with the Italian M. de Serbellane, does
take place, and Mme. de Stael's idea of a nice heroine makes her station
Delphine in a white veil, behind a pillar of the church, muttering
reproaches at the bridegroom. No open family rupture, however, is
caused; on the contrary, a remarkable and inevitably disastrous "triple
arrangement" follows (as mentioned above), for an entire volume, in
which the widow and the bridegroom make despairing love to each other,
refraining, however, from any impropriety, and the wife, though
suffering (for she, in her apparently frigid way, really loves her
husband), tolerates the proceeding after a fashion. This impossible and
preposterous situation is at last broken up by the passion and violence
of another admirer of Delphine--a certain M. de Valorbe. These bring
about duels, wounds, and Delphine's flight to Switzerland, where she
puts up in a convent with a most superfluous and in every way
unrefreshing new personage, a widowed sister of Madame de Mandeville.
Valorbe follows, and, to get hold of Delphine, machinates one of the
most absurd scenes in the whole realm of fiction. He lures her into
Austrian territory and a chamber with himself alone, locks the door and
throws the key out of the window,[10] storms, rants, threatens, but
proceeds to no _voie de fait_, and merely gets himself and the object of
his desires arrested by the Austrians! He thus succeeds, while procuring
no gratification for himself, in entirely demolishing the last shred of
reputation which, virtuous as she is in her own way, Delphine's various
eccentricities and escapades have left her; and she takes the veil. In
the first form the authoress crowned this mass of absurdities with the
suicide of the heroine and the judicial shooting of the hero. Somebody
remonstrated, and she made Delphine throw off her vows, engage herself
to Leonce (whose unhappy wife has died from too much carrying out of the
duty of a mother to her child), and go with him to his estates in La
Vendee, where he is to take up arms for the king. Unfortunately, the
Vendeans by no means "see" their _sei