Solange

“ The other half, keener-eyed, stern of face, capable, drew together in small groups of two or three or four, talking more quietly and ignoring all others except as they kept a general alert watch on what was going on. These were the old-timers, experienced men, who trusted no strangers and had no mind to allow indiscreet familiarities from the more reckless and ignorant.
When the door opened to admit Solange, straight and slim in her plain leather tunic and breeches, stained dark with melted snow, the drunken musicians perched on upended logs were the first to see her. ”

“ Solange reclined against a pile of bedding and canvas and fairly drank in the heat from the fire.
He found a clump of spruce and hacked branches from it, with which he filled the bunk, making a thick, springy mattress. On this he spread a tarpaulin, and then heaped it with blankets. Solange, flushed and half comatose, he carried to the bed.
The damp leather of her outer garments oppressed him. He knew they must come off. Hard soldier as he was, the girl, lying there with half-closed eyes and flushed face, awed him. ”

“ Solange’s mouth curled scornfully as she noted again the stack of saucers indicating his habits. “I’m going to marry Morgan la fée, the Queen of Avalon, and I’m going to enlist in her service to do her bidding, even to unlicensed butchery where necessary. Mademoiselle, lead on!”
Solange led on, but her head was high and her face expressed an extreme disdain for the mercenary who had signed on with her. ”

“ Solange’s premonition made him smile tolerantly. Still, he was pledged to the search, and he would go through with it. They would not find it, of course, but there might be some way in which he could make up the disappointment to her. He thought he could understand the urge that had led her on the ridiculous quest. A young, pretty, but portionless girl, with just enough money to support 142 life in France for a few years, hopeless of marriage in a country where the women outnumbered the men by at least a million, would have a bleak future before her. ”

“ In the sloppy mess underfoot could be heard the sucking, splashing sound of feet moving, as men all about drew back instinctively and rapidly to be out of the way.
Solange felt what had happened rather than saw it. The fearful convulsion of fright, followed by maniac rage that leaped to Banker’s face told her as though he had shouted the news. His companions and allies were merely stupefied and startled.
With an impulse to cry out a warning or to rush to him and throw her body between De Launay and these enemies, she suddenly whirled about to face him. ”

“ Solange looked steadily at Banker. “Louisiana!” she answered, clearly. But old Jim turned pale and showed his rat’s teeth.
The others merely chuckled and nudged each other.
Solange sensed that two considered her request merely a wild joke while the other was afraid. She slowly drew from her bag the yellow poster that De Launay had sent back to her by Sucatash.
“You would be within the law,” she pleaded, spreading it out before them. As they bent over it, reading it slowly: “See. He is a fugitive with a price on his head. Any one may slay him and collect a reward. ”

“ I leave to Solange his shame; he is a madman whose crippled understanding is blind to this idea: that only those who suffer from the refinements of their sensitiveness are permitted to toy ironically with the cankers that life is soiled with, and not those who delight in breathing, without disgust, the sordid purulence. ”

“ Solange had some rather just views before his malady: it is distressing that the chastity of devotees should be defiled in the hour when they regain their solitary oratories. I shall do well to read Tertullian and some consoling pages before retiring, for I fear the power of words. No, I shall dream of Sixtine. Dear creature of my desire, I trust in your magic: what wanton importunities will not yield to the grace of your gestures? Abode of my will, retreat of my illusions of love, appear to me and protect me! ”

“ They laid Annette down in the garden of the Villards.
XXXVII
When Solange discovered Annette again, she also discovered in herself once more the old feeling she had had for her: she fell in love with her. Like everyone else, she knew about Annette's "irregular" life. But in her goodness—a goodness without depth, but also without prudery—she did not think any the worse of her. ”

“ The tone is a high implication of the moral advantages that Solange had inveterately enjoyed and had decided none the less to avail herself of so little; which advantages we absolutely believe in as we read—there is the prodigious part: such an education of the soul, and in fact of every faculty, such a claim for the irreproachable, it would fairly seem, do we feel any association with the great fluent artist, in whatever conditions taking place, inevitably, necessarily to have been. ”

“ Solange spoke of an author who, she said, had the gift of tears.
"A pretty gift!" said Philippe. "Tears in life are not worth much. But in art I know nothing more disgusting than to collect them in a bottle."
The ladies cried out at this. Madame Villard said that tears were one of the pleasures of life, and Solange said they were an ornament of the soul.
"Well, how about you, don't you protest?" he asked Annette. "Do you too get your supplies from the property-man?" ”

“ Solange listened intently, sitting now on the edge of the bunk. When he was done, she slid to her feet and took position beside him, laying her hand on his shoulder. Behind her, by the side of the bunk, was a short log, set on end as a 269 little table, on which rested the holstered automatic which De Launay had left with her.
“It appears then,” she said, when he had finished, “that, in any event I have no right to this mine. In order to seize it, you would have to fight and perhaps kill some one. But, monsieur, I am not one who would wish you to be a common bravo—a desperado—for me. ”

“ The month of November was nearly ended, and that morning Michou had told Jean-Louis that Jeannette's betrothal would take place a little before Christmas, and the marriage soon after. The poor fellow was overwhelmed with sorrow; he poured all his grief into Solange's ear, and [Pg 653] so great was his confidence in her that he allowed himself to weep in her presence.
"You have lost your courage and become thoroughly hopeless," said Solange gently. "I don't like that in a man, still less in a Christian." ”

“ During the course of these trying years, however, Solange would sometimes totally forget her protégé for months, and as a result of her carelessness the promised pension would cease to come. With all their good will, the rich cannot understand that some people have to think of money all the time. Money is a constant anxiety with the poor. Solange would send Philippe tickets to concerts. Philippe had to swallow all his pride to remind this charming woman, in her box at the theatre, of the unpaid pension. ”

“ Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange are to be found in Samuel Rocheblave's George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left Clésinger she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis Alfieri, nephew of the great Italian poet. "Soli" opened a salon in Paris, to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Hervé, Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, the [Pg 81] critic who describes her as having the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black." She, too, must write novels. She died at Nohant, her mother's old home, in 1899. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier. ”

“ He and his wife had no children. They determined to adopt the child which had been found. Monsieur Solange confessed that he had been wanting in his duty in not making the necessary search. He excused himself sadly by saying that he was convinced of the death of the parents of the child, and he begged for pardon, as he had wished to bring this child up and make him happy. In finishing, he said that the linen of the child was marked "G. L. M.," and that the boy could pronounce the French words "maman" and "papa."
"I pardon him," said, gravely and solemnly, Monsieur Roger. ”

“ When the child we are expecting comes, she will not be able to look after your little Solange, and above all your Sylvain, who is not four years old, and who is never quiet day or night. He has a restless disposition like yours; that will make a good workman of him, but it makes a dreadful child, and my old wife cannot run fast enough to save him when he almost tumbles into the ditch, or when he throws himself in front of the tramping cattle. ”

“ It is too bad!” 309
“Why too bad?” asked Solange, with eyes on broth and spoon.
“After this even a Nevada divorce will mean notoriety for you. And you’ve lost the mine.”
“I have not lost it,” said Solange. “Monsieur Murphy gave me half of it—but I traded it away.”
“Traded it?”
“For a team of dogs to take you out. As for a divorce, Monsieur de Launay, there is a difficulty in the way.”
“A difficulty! What’s that? All you have to do is establish a residence. I’m still an American citizen—at least I never took steps to be naturalized in France. Perhaps that’s why they demoted me. ”

“ The poor child dared not write directly to Jeannet, in the fear that new events might prevent his receiving the missive; but she did not doubt that Solange would find means to read it to him who would receive so much consolation from its contents. The misfortune was that, in the midst of the fray, that good girl could hear nothing about her old friend; and, between ourselves, it was, I believe, because she had no permission to mix herself up in the affair, as she lived retired and absorbed in prayer with the other young sisters of the novitiate. ”

“ The standing men, awkwardly and with a muttered word or two, backed away from the table, alert and watchful. Women meant danger in such a community. Under the deep shadow of her hat brim, Solange’s eyes smoldered, dim and mysterious.
“You are Monsieur Banker!” she asserted, tonelessly. “You need not be frightened. I have not come to ask you for an accounting—yet. It is for another purpose that I am here.”
“Shore! Anything I kin do fer old Pete’s gal—all yuh got to do is ask me, honey! Old Jim Banker; that’s me! White an’ tender an’ faithful to a friend, is Jim Banker, ma’am. ”

“ It was not good to avoid people too much; one found it hard to get into touch with them again; one became aware of an odor of corruption under the flowers. In the quiet household of the Mouton-Chevalliers, Annette was not at her ease; their conjugal happiness did not make her envious. "Too mild, too mild, too mild!" as somebody says in Molière. "No, thank you! Not for me!". . . She had reached a time when she needed the harsh winds of life. . . .
Well, she ought to have been satisfied! The mild Solange was going to see that she got them. ”

“ Run after me, run after the pretty beast."
"Ah! I am weary with running for sixty years; come, my son, it is thou who will catch the pretty beast.
"I am weary, I sit down to rest; go, it is now thy hour to run after the pretty beast!"
Having finished this rhapsody, Entragues wrote the beginning of the story of Gaetan Solange, which had long tormented him.
It was a way of explaining himself by means of an anticipated commentary, for he was on the verge, doubtless! of a similar state of soul: would not Hubert and Gaetan be true counterparts, to-morrow, if this continued? ”

“ However, he had no intention of telling her of De Launay’s situation. He had a notion that Morgan la fée would be driven off by that knowledge.
“But, mademoiselle, it is not necessary that you marry a rough and common soldier. Surely there are officers, gentlemen, distinguished, whom one of your charms might win?”
“We will not bring my charms into the discussion, monsieur,” said Solange. “I reject the idea that I 51 should marry in order to get to America. I have serious business before me, and not such business as I could bring into a husband’s family—unless, indeed, he were a Basque. ”

“ Didn’t I?”
“I suppose so,” said Solange indifferently. “I do not care about the mine, monsieur. It is yours. But there is something that I wish and—I have money——”
The instant light of greed that answered this announcement convinced her that she had struck the right note. If the mine had been as rich as Golconda these men would have coveted additional money.
“You got money, ma’am?” Banker spoke whiningly.
“Money to pay for your service. You are brave men; men who would help a woman, I feel sure. 293 You, Monsieur Banker, knew my father and would help his daughter—if she paid you.” ”

“ It is an evil thing, these days, to be a poor woman in France. Therefore I wish to find the mine and be rich, for, 72 if I cannot marry, wealth will at least make life pleasant for me. But I wish to find that man, more than the mine.”
“And if I marry you, I will be deputized to do the butchery?”
“Monsieur mistakes me,” Solange spoke scornfully. “I can do my own avenging. Monsieur need not alarm himself.”
De Launay smiled. “I don’t think I’m alarmed. In fact, I am not sure I wouldn’t be willing to do it. Still, this vendetta seems to be rather old for any great amount of feeling on your part. ”

“ All the children of God belong to one family, and feel in their souls a fraternal tenderness for each other. Jeannet, on taking Solange to the convent, found a mother in the good superioress, who received them both. She made him relate his story to her in a few words, and, learning that he was alone in the world and desirous of some engagement, she gave him the address of a good priest who passed his life in aiding young working-men who, owing to unfortunate circumstances or lack of employment, ran the risk of becoming dissipated from the want of a helping hand. ”