Mirages

By Max du Veuzit

"You are the daughter of a painter, a bohemian whom I rejected from my life because he was not worthy to remain my husband." Such is the revelation that Cylia learns from her mother's lips on her twentieth birthday, remarried - to the Count of Liancourt!

His father! As Cylia would like to know him, to love him, whatever his wrongs and even his indifference towards him. Certainly, the Count of Liancourt was a second father to her. It was he who raised her, provided her with an education, but Cylia, driven by her filial love, rejected these considerations.

By chance, she will meet her real father, Mr. Férias, a renowned painter. But the meeting will be disappointing for Cylia, who will withdraw into her grief and want to break with the man she already considered her fiancé, the lawyer André Villaines.

Max du Veuzit, by his immense talent, was able to translate this painful problem of the teenage girl, an innocent victim of her parents' disagreement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Jan 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9782322126705

Book preview

Mirages

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Copyright

Max the Veuzit

Mirages

Max the Veuzit is the pen name of Alphonsine Zéphirine Vavasseur, born in Petit-Quevilly 29 October 1876 and died in Bois-Colombes 15 April 1952. It is a French language writer, author of numerous romance novels with great success.

I

The day Cylia Liancourt - or at least the one that was known by that name - took twenty years, she experienced her first great sorrow.

This afternoon, his mother told him that she was not the daughter of Count de Liancourt as it previously thought, but that of Guy Farias, a landscape painter, her first husband to with whom she had divorced four years after his marriage.

As for the reasons that motivated this separation, the countess did not think it useful to talk; it was none of her daughter; and Cylia, although she desired good to know, did not dare ask.

Appalled by this revelation that she was far from expected, she put on her mother's green eyes clouded everything.

A thousand thoughts waved vaguely in his head that his brain was pounding blows.

- Why, she stammered in a trembling voice, why wait for that day to tell me these things? Before ... when I was little, it would have been less painful ...

Surprised and upset by these explanations to give to her child, she looked up from Liancourt:

- Painful ... I do not see what this news painful for you! There will be no change to what has been so far. The Count loves you like you're his daughter, you make her affection! ... Many children cannot said of their real father. Besides, she added, seeing the eyes of his daughter to darken stoically repressed tears, if we did so, the Count and me, it was for your own good, to let you in complete tranquility wit ...

She stopped, violently moved suddenly through all those painful memories that he had to move. Then she finished:

- That was us even easier than my first husband never did assert the rights that the court had granted him on you.

- What rights? Cylia asked softly.

- Those seeing you two days each month, she explained, pity.

The child hung his head, became even paler.

- Ah! She whispered. My real father never sought me? ... He did not like me?

Madame de Liancourt shrugged helplessly gesture. Then, with disdain, if annoying as she spoke:

- I think I told you he was a painter ... a bit bohemian, even ... And what's more: a reveler in truth ... These people generally don '! have little sense of family. Your father, he had not!

This was said in a tone so dry and contemptuous that the girl looked up at her mother a look full of reproach.

- Hey! my God ! made it a little irritated by the attitude of Cylia that seemed to take his tragic secret. Would not one think, looking at you, I'm an exceptional woman ... because I speak a little hard this man made me suffer so much? After how many insults and deplorable scenes, am I decided to separation ... Divorce! This word was odious to me! Then, finally, I realized ... I realized ... Divorce is not a disgrace! It is a misfortune that reaches all classes of society, so it seems to become standard practice ... and after all, it is best for scandalous betrayals mismatched households.

She stopped, realizing she had gone too far in front of his daughter.

- But you cannot understand these things, 'she said, giving a pat on the cheek of it. Suffice you to know that my marriage was broken in court of Rome, and I am entirely in accordance with my conscience ... Come on, darling, get dressed. I want to take you to the fair the Bois de Boulogne, on your birthday.

She stood up.

- No ! said Cylia in the retaining arm. Please, do not go out today ... Let me just get used to ... to what you taught me.

Again, Madame de Liancourt shrugged.

- You're ridiculous ... Why, do you plan to keep this figure funeral all day? Before your father, that would be bit tricky!

- I know what I owe to my adopted father severely said the young girl. Through him I met caresses and tenderness of a father ... affection or pity, he has largely dished out to me. And when I was sitting on his knees, arms around his neck, I had nothing to envy to other children ... However, this does not make me forget that another entitled him to my thoughts and my prayers because you have not told me if he was still alive?

- He saw silently uttered Madame de Liancourt, whose eyes stood out more than those of Cylia.

The girl shuddered with his whole being under the spear that put it in these words:

- He lives !

A man who was his father lived somewhere away from her, and she learned only today its existence.

This revelation was devastating for her as is for a quiet passenger compartment in a railway disaster.

A need was in it, spontaneous, thoughtless, to know, to know more ...

- I want to ... can I see it ... my father?

- What? ... What are you saying ... you want!

Although the mother would have expected this request paled its features and deepened.

- You want ? repeated she, anxious and panicking.

- I do not ask to speak to him, the child replied, horribly embarrassed to have to discuss this question, so it seemed natural that her mother had taken the initiative. I wish the know, she continued, seeing from afar ... To be able to put a face to the name when I think of him.

- But how do you, my poor child? protested the Countess upset. I lost sight of me ... It is totally foreign, now that I'm married, and you must understand that my second husband found very badly that I occupied yet another ... even what you ask me!

- Grandmother knows him. Without it you could take care of this? ...

Troubled by the announcement of the father whose only on this day, it was informed that the existence Cylia forgot everything that was not him. She did not even realized how much his demand to see her mother was cruel and disrespectful vis-à-vis the Count de Liancourt who had raised her.

The news had reached in his innermost fibers as if a sharp point had penetrated into his living flesh. She was hurt, humiliated and more injured. In fact, it seemed that by not telling him earlier this natural father, he had been private, - she thought almost fly - of property belonging to him alone and that we had no right dispose without consent.

And without noticing his cruel selfishness, she repeated:

- Yes. Grandmother could replace you and tell me the father I know. I have the right to see, it seems to me!

- The right ! raised his mother, hurt by such a word on the lips of his daughter. A man that I had to scratch my life ... a man who does not care about you ... who forgot all his father's duties ... No! be reasonable ! You lived so far without even rub his life ... He never held you, for eighteen years I am separated from him, and I do not see why you'd go on to impose him, or put you in martel at the head about it.

Coaxingly, she drew her daughter against her and hugged her, trembling with maternal love and perhaps even instinctive jealousy against one who, without his knowledge and without having sought or deserved, could rob him of a plot heart of her child.

Long, the two women remained in the arms of one another. The mother, his face bathed in tears, Cylia, to the distress of his mother, walled suddenly in a sullen silence.

Finally, after many kisses and with a great rustling silk, the countess left the little white room and Cylia issued its constraint could exhale let all the distress which his soul suddenly was full.

- I have a father ... another ... a real father ... I do not know and who cares not for me, 'she whispered, with a kind of madness!.

His hands joined unconsciously suffering from tension.

Inexpressible emptiness seized her suddenly, before the revelation of the existence of an unknown being that the largest blood ties bound to it. It seemed to him that so far she had lived as in a dream ... a dream gentle she awoke only at this moment, a rude awakening that the deeply bruised.

His mother she adored so far, with a zeal and an infinite respect, seemed as diminished as diminished in his eyes without her to explain himself this feeling again. Still, a poignant regret was that he reached his filial veneration.

And she translated her suffering by a naive cry of his inner child who did not understand that grief could come from the hand of a mother:

- Oh ! mum ! like you hurt me! ...

II

In the tidy and scented room shade gradually be thronged around corners and mystery of the drowning people and things.

Through the open window, the evening came with the great murmur boulevards with the approach of night.

Cylia, oppressed by the heavy sadness that gripped him since the middle of the day, remained motionless in the high chair where she disappeared all, his head resting back on the silk back cushion and large eyes, expanded, seeming to contemplate some vague indecipherable picture.

For the thousandth time, she kept going over the revelations of his mother without being able to get used to his mind.

No ! no ! I dream ... It's a bad dream that I wake up just now ... It's not possible that I have another father ... he lives not far from me, perhaps, and I do not know him! ...

For what especially was hurting, it was to say that his father was a stranger to her and that she was a stranger to him.

Then she accepted the idea that other father of the real father of which she was the flesh of the flesh, and she sought in her memory if the materiality of its existence does not appear to him as a distant image floating in her childhood dreams.

I should remember ... remember something ... a nothing relating to him. I had, however, live a little of his life.

Indeed, his father was to be one of the first baby that her looks had encountered. Eighteen years later, she does not remember him, his serious or gay air, its more or less serious voice, hugs, kisses that he had to provide him or reservation , a coldness that had once ice?

These are very impressive things for the child and remain in it, though in long perennial erased strokes.

But nothing stated at the thought of the girl, or the undecided contours of a vaporous and be charming or intangible austere silhouette of a ghost and feared.

Then, discouraged, she wondered if she had only known his real father, lived near him ... even if he had a little loved.

Should I ever been anything for him?

From this last question which reached full soul, she had a tension at the heart, and with a sudden movement, she rose as if to escape the painful supposition.

A totally foreign father to her child! A completely foreign child to his father! ... No, my God! it is not possible! ... Such a thing cannot exist!

At its strict sense to a teenager, it was like a monster standing in front of her, as a sacrilege which Heaven been complicit.

It would be terrible! She stammered.

And head on fire, she began pacing the room. The darkness was now complete.

Groping Cylia sought wall switch, and rotated, a blonde clarity - slightly obscured by the large yellow silk tulip surrounding the crystal Bulb - overtook her, spread on light walls and brought out the arabesques of hangings.

She breathed a little relieved.

In the full light of the chandelier, its saddening visions seemed paler and more distant.

Suddenly, in a thought that sprang to her, she walked to the mirror and stared at it.

Arms raised, hands clasped behind his head with a gesture that was familiar to her, she examined her face carefully: his forehead, black bow - as a line in ink - his great eyebrows; green eyes, dreaming and deep