CHAPTER III. THE HISTORY OF MADAME DIARD

By the time that the quartermaster had fulfilled all the long and
dilatory formalities without which no French soldier can be married, he
was passionately in love with Juana di Mancini, and Juana had had time
to think of her coming destiny.

An awful destiny! Juana, who felt neither esteem nor love for Diard,
was bound to him forever, by a rash but necessary promise. The man was
neither handsome nor well-made. His manners, devoid of all distinction,
were a mixture of the worst army tone, the habits of his province, and
his own insufficient education. How could she love Diard, she, a young
girl all grace and elegance, born with an invincible instinct for luxury
and good taste, her very nature tending toward the sphere of the higher
social classes? As for esteeming him, she rejected the very thought
precisely because he had married her. This repulsion was natural. Woman
is a saintly and noble creature, but almost always misunderstood, and
nearly always misjudged because she is misunderstood. If Juana had loved
Diard she would have esteemed him. Love creates in a wife a new woman;
the woman of the day before no longer exists on the morrow. Putting on
the nuptial robe of a passion in which life itself is concerned, the
woman wraps herself in purity and whiteness. Reborn into virtue and
chastity, there is no past for her; she is all future, and should forget
the things behind her to relearn life. In this sense the famous words
which a modern poet has put into the lips of Marion Delorme is infused
with truth,--

"And Love remade me virgin."

That line seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so
truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern
theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially
vaudevillist spirit of the pit.

So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded, hopeless.
She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in all
the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in
appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart's legality, which
women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least
reflective. Juana became profoundly sad as she saw the nature and the
extent of the life before her. Often she turned her eyes, brimming
with tears proudly repressed, upon Perez and Dona Lagounia, who fully
comprehended, both of them, the bitter thoughts those tears contai