She tried to speak, but he stopped her, bowed, and left the room.
He was more astonished and sad than unhappy. He had loved her dearly during the first period of their married life; but his ardor had cooled, and now he often had a caprice, either in a theater or in society, though he always preserved a certain liking for the Baroness.
She was very young, hardly four-and-twenty, small, slight--too slight--and very fair. She was a true Parisian doll: clever, spoilt, elegant, coquettish, witty, with more charm than real beauty. He used to say familiarly to his brother, when speaking of her:
"My wife is charming, attractive, but--there is nothing to lay hold of. She is like a glass of champagne that is all froth--when you have got to the wine it is very good, but there is too little of it, unfortunately."
He walked up and down the room in great agitation, and thinking of a thousand things. At one moment he felt in a great rage, and felt inclined to give the Marquis a good thrashing or to smack his face publicly, in the club. But he thought that would not do, it would not be at all _the thing_; he would be laughed at, and not the Marquis, and as he felt that his anger proceeded more from wounded vanity than from a broken heart he went to bed, but could not go to sleep.
A few days afterwards it was known in Paris that the Baron and Baroness d'Etraille had agreed to an amicable separation on account of incompatibility of temper. Nobody suspected anything, nobody laughed, and nobody was astonished.
The Baron, however, to avoid meeting her, traveled for a year, then he spent the summer at the seaside, and the autumn in shooting, returning to Paris for the winter. He did not meet his wife once.
He did not even know what people said about her. At any rate, she took care to save appearances, and that was all he asked for.
He got dreadfully bored, traveled again, restored his old castle of Villebosc, which took him two years; then for over a year he received relays of friends there, till at last, tired of all these commonplace, so-called pleasures, he returned to his mansion in the Rue de Lills, just six years after their separation.
He was then forty-five, with a good crop of gray hair, rather stout, and with that melancholy look of people who have been handsome, sought after, and much liked, and who are deteriorating daily.