The Marquise, on the verge of passing out again, pulled the midwife down towards her and laid her head, which was shaking heavily, on her breast. With a broken voice she asked how nature took its course and if unconscious conception was possible. The midwife smiled, loosened the Marquise’s kerchief and said of course that could not be in her case. “No, no,” the Marquise said, she had consciously conceived. She just wanted to know in general if such a phenomenon existed in the realm of nature. To this the midwife replied that it hadn’t yet happened to any woman on earth except the Holy Virgin. The Marquise shook more and more violently. She thought she would give birth there and then and begged the midwife, turning to her in desperate anxiety, not to leave her. The midwife comforted her, assured her that confinement was still a long way off, showed her how it was possible to avoid the talk of the world in such cases and all would be well. Such grounds for comfort, however, entered the unhappy woman’s breast like the stabs of a knife, so she pulled herself together, said she felt better and asked the midwife to leave.
Hardly had the midwife left the room when the Marquise was brought a letter from her mother in which she expressed herself thus: under the prevailing conditions the Commandant wishes her to leave his house. He encloses the documents pertaining to her estate and hopes that God will spare him the misery of seeing her again. The letter had become damp with tears, and in a corner of the page the smudged word “dictated” could be read. The Marquise, crying her eyes out and weeping copiously over her parents’ mistake and at the injustice by which those close to her had been misled, approached her mother’s quarters. She was told that she was with her father, so she stumbled on to his apartments. When she found the doors locked, she sank down in front of them and in the most pitiful voice called upon all the saints as witnesses to her innocence. She must have lain there for some minutes when the head forester stepped out of one of them and said to her, cheeks aglow, “You’ve surely heard that the Commandant will not see you.” “My dear brother,” cried the Marquise, sobbing heavily, pushing her way inside the room crying, “My dearest Father!” and stretching out her arms to him. As soon as he saw her, the Commandant turned his back and hurried into his bedroom. When she tried to follow him there he shouted, “Go away!” and tried to shut the door, but as his daughter, moaning and beseeching, prevented him, he suddenly gave up and hurried to the back wall of his room as she entered. Though he had turned his back on her, she threw herself at his feet and, trembling, grasped his knees. At that moment a pistol he had seized from the wall went off and the shot shattered the ceiling. “Lord of my life!” cried the Marquise, rose from her knees white as a sheet and hurried out of his quarters. “Harness the horses immediately!” she ordered while entering her own quarters, where she sat in a chair, weary to death, quickly dressed her children and saw to the packing of her belongings. She had just taken her youngest child between her knees and wrapped a scarf round her, ready to get into the carriage now that everything was prepared for departure, when the head forester entered and on the orders of the Commandant demanded that the children be left behind and their care transferred to him. “These children?” she asked, and stood up. “Tell your inhuman father that he can come and shoot me dead, but that he cannot tear my children away from me!” With that she lifted the children up with all the pride of innocence, carried them into the carriage without her brother daring to stop her, and drove off.
Coming to herself through this supreme effort, she suddenly lifted herself as if with her own two hands out of the depths into which fate had thrown her. The tumult that tore her heart apart subsided in the fresh air. She repeatedly kissed her children, her beloved prize, and considered with great satisfaction what a victory she had won over her brother through the power of her clear conscience. Her mind, strong enough not to give way in her strange situation, surrendered totally to the great, sacred and inexplicable ways of the world. She realized the impossibility of convincing her family of her innocence and understood that she would have to reconcile herself to that if she was not going to go under, and not many days passed after her arrival in V— before pain had completely given way to heroic intentions of arming herself with pride against the onslaughts of the world. She determined to retreat into her innermost self and to devote herself exclusively to the education of both her children, and to cherish the gift God had given her with the third child with all her maternal love. She made preparations in a few weeks, as soon as she had recovered from the birth, to restore her beautiful but, due to her long absence, rather neglected country estate. Now she sat in the summer house and, while knitting little caps and socks for little legs, considered how best to apportion the rooms, and which to fill with books and where her easel might best go. And so even before the Count was due back from Naples, she was already reconciled to the fate of living for ever in cloistered seclusion. The porter received orders to let no one into the house. The only thought that was unbearable to her was that the young being she had conceived in the greatest innocence and purity and whose origin, precisely because it was more secret and so seemingly more divine than that of other people, would be scorned as a shameful stain on bourgeois society. A strange means of discovering the father had occurred to her, a means which, when she first thought of it, made her drop her knitting on the floor out of sheer terror. In restless sleeplessness night after night she turned and twisted this idea, offensive to her innermost sentiments, around in her mind to try and make it seem naturally acceptable. She still resisted forming any kind of relationship with the person who had so betrayed her, justifiably concluding that such a creature must be fated, without rescue, to be expelled from the human race; wherever in the world he might have come from, he must have hailed from the lowest scum of the low. But as her feeling of independence grew ever more lively, and she considered how a precious stone keeps its value no matter how it is set, she took her heart in her hands one morning when she felt the young life stirring in her body and had that strange announcement inserted in the newspapers which can be read at the beginning of this story.
Meanwhile the Count, delayed by unavoidable duties in Naples, had written a second time to the Marquise reminding her that unforeseen circumstances might arise necessitating her to keep to her implied agreement. As soon as he had successfully declined his further tour of duty to Constantinople and as other circumstances allowed, he immediately left Naples and arrived in good time in M— only a few days after he predicted. The Commandant received him with an embarrassed look, said that pressing business meant he himself had to leave the house, and asked his son to entertain him meanwhile. The head forester drew him into his room, greeted him briefly, and asked if he knew what had happened in the Commandant’s house during his absence. The Count said no, and for a moment went pale; whereupon the head forester told him of the shame the Marquise had brought upon the family and all that our readers have just heard. The Count struck his brow with his hand. “Why are so many obstacles put in my way?” he cried, forgetting himself. “If the marriage had taken place, we would have been spared all the humiliation and unhappiness.” Staring at him, the head forester asked if he was mad enough to want to be married to such a contemptible person. The Count replied that she was worth more than the whole world which despised her, that he fully believed her declaration of innocence and that he would go to V— today to repeat his proposal. Grasping his hat, he presented his compliments to the head forester, who considered him entirely bereft of his senses, and left.