en he bought Baron Silberstein's yacht, and with some friends, got up
a cruise, to Ceylon and India.
Marie-Anne began by triumphing, and felt as happy as a schoolgirl going
home for the holidays, who feels the bridle on her neck, committed every
possible folly, and soon, tired, satiated, and disgusted, she began to
yawn, cried and found out that she had sacrificed her happiness, like a
millionaire who had gone mad, and who threw his banknotes and shares
into the river, and that she was nothing more than a disabled waif and
stray. Consequently, she now married again, as the solitude of her home
made her morose from morning till night; and then, besides, a woman
requires a mansion when she goes into society, to race meetings, or to
the theater.
And so, while she became a marchioness, and pronounced her second "Yes,"
before a very few friends, at the office of the mayor of the English
urban district, and malicious ones in the Faurbourg were making fun of
the whole affair, and affirming this and that, whether rightly or
wrongly, and compromising the present husband to the former one, even
declaring that he had partially been the cause of the former divorce,
Monsieur de Baudemont was wandering over the four quarters of the globe
trying to overcome his homesickness, and to deaden his longing for love,
which had taken possession of his heart and of his body, like a slow
poison.
He traveled through the most out of the way places, and the most lovely
countries, and spent months and months at sea, and plunged into every
kind of dissipation and debauchery. But neither the supple backs nor the
luxurious gestures of the _bayaderes_, nor the large, passive eyes of
the Creoles, nor flirtations with English _missives_ with hair the color
of new cider, nor nights of waking dreams, when he saw new
constellations in the sky, nor dangers during which a man thinks it is
all over with him, and mutters a few words of prayer in spite of
himself, when the waves are so high, and the sky so black, nothing was
able to make him forget that little Parisian woman who smelled so
delicious that she might have been taken for a bouquet of rare flowers;
who was so coaxing, so curious, so funny; who never had the same
caprice, the same smile, or the same look twice, and who, at bottom, was
worth more than many others, than the saints and the sinless.
He thought of her constantly, during long hours of sleeplessness. He
carried her portrait about wit
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