Some very august personages
indeed (whom in her fury she had insisted upon scandalously involving
in her affairs) had incurred her animosity. I find it perfectly easy to
believe that she had come to within an ace of being spirited away, for
reasons of state, into some discreet _maison de sante_--a madhouse
of sorts, to be plain. It appears, however, that certain high-placed
personages opposed it for reasons which....
But it's no use to go into details.
Wonder may be expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of
languages knowing all this with such definiteness. A novelist says this
and that of his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly
enough he may not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in
which his own belief is made sufficiently manifest by a telling phrase,
a poetic image, the accent of emotion. Art is great! But I have no art,
and not having invented Madame de S--, I feel bound to explain how I
came to know so much about her.
My informant was the Russian wife of a friend of mine already mentioned,
the professor of Lausanne University. It was from her that I learned the
last fact of Madame de S--'s history, with which I intend to trouble
my readers. She told me, speaking positively, as a person who trusts her
sources, of the cause of Madame de S--'s flight from Russia, some years
before.
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