by Ouida
CHAPTER XXI.
"I will let her alone, and she will marry Jeannot," thought Flamen; andhe believed himself a good man for once in his life, and pitied himselffor having become a sentimentalist.
She would marry Jeannot, and bear many children, as those people alwaysdid; and ruddy little peasants would cling about these pretty, soft,little breasts of hers; and she would love them after the manner of suchwomen, and be very content clattering over the stones in her woodenshoes; and growing brown and stout, and more careful after money, andceasing to dream of unknown things, and not seeing God at all in thefields, but looking low and beholding only the ears of the gleaning wheatand the feet of the tottering children; and so gaining her bread, andlosing her soul, and stooping nearer and nearer to earth till she droppedinto it like one of her own wind-blown wall-flowers when the bee hassucked out all its sweetness and the heats have scorched up all itsbloom:--yes, of course, she would marry Jeannot and end so!
Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that was the one great matter.
So he left the street of Mary of Burgundy, and went on his way out of thechiming city as its matin bells were rung, and took with him a certainregret, and the only innocent affection that had ever awakened in him;and thought of his self-negation with half admiration and half derision;and so drifted away into the whirlpool of his amorous, cynical,changeful, passionate, callous, many-colored life, and said to himself ashe saw the last line of the low green plains shine against the sun, "Shewill marry Jeannot--of course, she will marry Jeannot. And my Gretchen isgreater than Scheffer's."
What else mattered very much, after all, except what they would say inParis of Gretchen?