Next day his ferment had subsided. The unknown never left him, but she
kept her distance. Her less certain features were effaced in mist, her
fascination became feebler, and she no longer was his sole
preoccupation.
The idea, suddenly formed on a word of Des Hermies, that the unknown
must be Chantelouve's wife, had, in fashion, checked his fever. If it
was she--and his contrary conclusions of the evening before seemed
hardly valid when he took up one by one the arguments by which he had
arrived at them--then her reasons for wanting him were obscure,
dangerous, and he was on his guard, no longer letting himself go in
complete self-abandon.
And yet, there was another phenomenon taking place within him. He had
never paid any especial attention to Hyacinthe Chantelouve, he had never
been in love with her. She interested him by the mystery of her person
and her life, but outside her drawing-room he had never given her a
thought. Now ruminating about her he began almost to desire her.
Suddenly she benefited by the face of the unknown, for when Durtal
evoked her she came confused to his sight, her physiognomy mingled with
that which he had visualized when the first letters came.
Though the sneaking scoundrelism of her husband displeased him, he did
not think her the less attractive, but his desires were no longer beyond
control. In spite of the distrust which she aroused, she might be an
interesting mistress, making up for her barefaced vices by her good
grace, but she was no longer the non-existent, the chimera raised in a
moment of uncertainty.
On the other hand, if his conjectures were false, if it was not Mme.
Chantelouve who had written the letters, then the other, the unknown,
lost a little of her subtlety by the mere fact that she could be
incarnated in a creature whom he knew. Still remote, she became less so;
then her beauty deteriorated, because, in turn, she took on certain
features of Mme. Chantelouve, and if the latter had profited, the
former, on the contrary, lost by the confusion which Durtal had
established.
In one as in the other case, whether she were Mme. Chantelouve or not,
he felt appeased, calmed. At heart he did not know, when he revolved the
adventure, whether he preferred his chimera, even diminished, or this
Hyacinthe, who at least, in her reality, was not a disenchanting frump,
wrinkled with age. He profited by the respite to get back to work, but
he had presumed too much upon his powers. When he tried to begin his
chapter on the crimes of Gilles de Rais he discovered that he was
incapable of sewing two sentences together. He wandered in pursuit of
the Marshal and caught up with him, but the prose in which he wished to
embody the man remained listless and lifeless, and he could think only
patchily.
He threw down his pen and sank into an armchair. In revery he was
transported to Tiffauges, where Satan, who had refused so obstinately to
show himself, now became incarnate in the unwitting Marshal, to wallow
him, vociferating, in the joys of murder.
"For this, basically, is what Satanism is," said Durtal to himself. "The
external semblance of the Demon is a minor matter. He has no need of
exhibiting himself in human or bestial form to attest his presence. For
him to prove himself, it is enough that he choose a domicile in souls
which he ulcerates and incites to inexplicable crimes. Then, he can hold
his victims by that hope which he breathes into them, that instead of
living in them as he does, and as they don't often know, he will obey
evocations, appear to them, and deal out, duly, legally, the advantages
he concedes in exchange for certain forfeits. Our very willingness to
make a pact with him must be able often to produce his infusion into us.
"All the modern theories of the followers of Maudsley and Lombroso do
not, in fact, render the singular abuses of the Marshal comprehensible.
Nothing could be more just than to class him as a monomaniac, for he was
one, if by the word monomaniac we designate every man who is dominated
by a fixed idea. But so is every one of us, more or less, from the
business man, all whose thoughts converge on the one idea of gain, to
the artist absorbed in bringing his masterpiece into the world. But why
was the Marshal a monomaniac, how did he become one? That is what all
the Lombrosos in the world can't tell you. Encephalic lesions, adherence
of the _pia mater_ to the cerebrum, mean absolutely nothing in this
question. For they are simple resultants, effects derived from a cause
which ought to be explained, and which no materialist can explain. It is
easy to declare that a disturbance of the cerebral lobes produces
assassins and demonomaniacs. The famous alienists of our time claim that
analysis of the brain of an insane woman disclosed a lesion or a
deterioration of the grey matter. And suppose it did! It would still be
a question whether, in the case of a woman possessed with demonomania,
the lesion produced the demonomania, or the demonomania produced the
lesion.... Admitting that there was a lesion! The spiritual Comprachicos
have never resorted to cerebral surgery. They don't amputate the
lobes--supposed to be reliably identified--after carefully trepanning.
They simply act upon the pupil by inculcating ignoble ideas in him,
developing his bad instincts, pushing him little by little into the
paths of vice; and if this gymnastic of persuasion deteriorates the
cerebral tissues in the subject, that proves precisely that the lesion
is only the derivative and not the cause of the psychological state.
"And then, and then, these doctrines which consist nowadays in
confounding the criminal with the insane, the demonomaniac with the mad,
have absolutely no foundation. Nine years ago a lad of fourteen, Felix
Lemaîre, assassinated a little boy whom he did not know. He just wanted
to see the child suffer, just wanted to hear him cry. Felix slashed the
little fellow's stomach with a knife, turned the blade round and round
in the warm flesh, then slowly sawed his victim's head off. Felix
manifested no remorse, and in the ensuing investigation proved himself
to be intelligent and atrocious. Dr. Legrand Du Saule and other
specialists kept him under vigilant surveillance for months, and could
not discover the slightest pathological symptom. And he had had fairly
good rearing and certainly had not been corrupted by others.
"His behaviour was like that of the conscious or unconscious
demonomaniacs who do evil for evil's sake. They are no more mad than the
rapt monk in his cell, than the man who does good for good's sake.
Anybody but a medical theorist can see that the desire for good and the
desire for evil simply form the two opposing poles of the soul. In the
fifteenth century these extremes were represented by Jeanne d'Arc and
the Marshal de Rais. Now there is no more reason for attributing madness
to Gilles than there is for attributing it to Jeanne d'Arc, whose
admirable excesses certainly have no connection with vesania and
delirium.
"All the same, some frightful nights must have been passed in that
fortress," said Durtal. He was thinking of the château de Tiffauges,
which he had visited a year ago, believing that it would aid him in his
work to live in the country where Gilles had lived and to dig among the
ruins.
He had established himself in the little hamlet which stretches along
the base of the abandoned donjon. He learned what a living thing the
legend of Bluebeard was in this isolated part of La Vendée on the border
of Brittany.
"He was a young man who came to a bad end," said the young women. More
fearful, their grandmothers crossed themselves as they went along the
foot of the wall in the evening. The memory of the disembowelled
children persisted. The Marshal, known only by his surname, still had
power to terrify.
Durtal had gone every day from the inn where he lodged to the château,
towering over the valleys of the Crume and of the Sèvre, facing hills
excoriated with blocks of granite and overgrown with formidable oaks,
whose roots, protruding out of the ground, resembled monstrous nests of
frightened snakes.
One might have believed oneself transported into the real Brittany.
There was the same melancholy, heavy sky, the same sun, which seemed
older than in other parts of the world and which but feebly gilded the
sorrowful, age-old forests and the mossy sandstone. There were the same
endless stretches of broken, rocky soil, pitted with ponds of rusty
water, dotted with scattered clumps of gorse and furze copse, and
sprinkled with pink harebells and nameless yellow prairie flowers.
One felt that this iron-grey sky; this starving soil, empurpled only
here and there by the bleeding flower of the buckwheat; that these
roads, bordered with stones placed one on top of the other, without
cement or plaster; that these paths, bordered with impenetrable hedges;
that these grudging plants; these inhospitable fields; these crippled
beggars, eaten with vermin, plastered with filth; that even the flocks,
undersized and wasted, the dumpy little cows, the black sheep whose blue
eyes had the cold, pale gleam that is in the eyes of the Slav or of the
tribade; had perpetuated their primordial state, preserving an identical
landscape through all the centuries.
Except for an incongruous factory chimney further away on the bank of
the Sèvre, the countryside of Tiffauges remained in perfect harmony with
the immense château, erect among its ruins. Within the close, still to
be traced by the ruins of the towers, was a whole plain, now converted
into a miserable truck garden. Cabbages, in long bluish lines,
impoverished carrots, consumptive navews, spread over this enormous
circle where iron mail had clanked in the tournament and where
processionals had slowly devolved, in the smoke of incense, to the
chanting of psalms.
A thatched hut had been built in a corner. The peasant inhabitants,
returned to a state of savagery, no longer understood the meaning of
words, and could be roused out of their apathy only by the display of a
silver coin. Seizing the coin, they would hand over the keys.
For hours one could browse around at ease among the ruins, and smoke and
daydream. Unfortunately, certain parts were inaccessible. The donjon was
still shut off, on the Tiffauges side, by a vast moat, at the bottom of
which mighty trees were growing. One would have had to pass over the
tops of the trees, growing to the very verge of the wall, to gain a
porch on the other side, for there was now no drawbridge.
But quite accessible was another part which overhung the Sèvre. There
the wings of the castle, overgrown with ivy and white-crested viburnum,
were intact. Spongy, dry as pumice stone, silvered with lichen and
gilded with moss, the towers rose entire, though from their crenelated
collarettes whole blocks were blown away on windy nights.
Within, room succeeded glacial room, cut into the granite, surmounted
with vaulted roofs, and as close as the hold of a ship. Then by spiral
stairways one descended into similar chambers, joined by cellar
passageways into the walls of which were dug deep niches and lairs of
unknown utility.
Beneath, those corridors, so narrow that two persons could not walk
along them abreast, descended at a gentle slope, and bifurcated so that
there was a labyrinth of lanes, leading to veritable cells, on the walls
of which the nitre scintillated in the light of the lantern like steel
mica or twinkling grains of sugar. In the cells above, in the dungeons
beneath, one stumbled over rifts of hard earth, in the centre or in a
corner of which yawned now the mouth of an unsealed oubliette, now a
well.
Finally, at the summit of one of the towers, that at the left as one
entered, there was a roofed gallery running parallel to a circular
foothold cut from the rock. There, without doubt, the men-at-arms had
been stationed to fire on their assailants through wide loopholes
opening overhead and underfoot. In this gallery the voice, even the
lowest, followed the curving walls and could be heard all around the
circuit.
Briefly, the exterior of the castle revealed a fortified place built to
stand long sieges, and the dismantled interior made one think of a
prison in which flesh, mildewed by the moisture, must rot in a few
months. Out in the open air again, one felt a sensation of well-being,
of relief, which one lost on traversing the ruins of the isolated chapel
and penetrating, by a cellar door, to the crypt below.
This chapel, low, squat, its vaulted roof upheld by massive columns on
whose capitals lozenges and bishop's croziers were carved, dated from
the eleventh century. The altar stone survived intact. Brackish
daylight, which seemed to have been filtered through layers of horn,
came in at the openings, hardly lighting the shadowed, begrimed walls
and the earth floor, which too was pierced by the entrance to an
oubliette or by a well shaft.
In the evening after dinner he had often climbed up on the embankment
and followed the cracked walls of the ruins. On bright nights one part
of the castle was thrown back into shadow, and the other, by contrast,
stood forth, washed in silver and blue, as if rubbed with mercurial
lusters, above the Sèvre, along whose surface streaks of moonlight
darted like the backs of fishes. The silence was overpowering. After
nine o'clock not a dog, not a soul. He would return to the poor chamber
of the inn, where an old woman, in black, wearing the cornet head-dress
her ancestors wore in the sixteenth century, waited with a candle to bar
the door as soon as he returned.
"All this," said Durtal to himself, "is the skeleton of a dead keep. To
reanimate it we must revisualize the opulent flesh which once covered
these bones of sandstone. Documents give us every detail. This carcass
was magnificently clad, and if we are to see Gilles in his own
environment, we must remember all the sumptuosity of fifteenth century
furnishing.
"We must reclothe these walls with wainscots of Irish wood or with high
warp tapestries of gold and thread of Arras, so much sought after in
that epoch. Then this hard, black soil must be repaved with green and
yellow bricks or black and white flagstones. The vault must be starred
with gold and sown with crossbows on a field _azur_, and the Marshal's
cross, _sable_ on shield _or_, must be set shining there."
Of themselves the furnishings returned, each to its own place. Here and
there were high-backed signorial chairs, thrones, and stools. Against
the walls were sideboards on whose carved panels were bas-reliefs
representing the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi. On top of
the sideboards, beneath lace canopies, stood the painted and gilded
statues of Saint Anne, Saint Marguerite, and Saint Catherine, so often
reproduced by the wood-carvers of the Middle Ages. There were
linen-chests, bound in iron, studded with great nails, and covered with
sowskin leather. Then there were coffers fastened by great metal clasps
and overlaid with leather or fabric on which fair faced angels, cut from
illuminated missal-backgrounds, had been mounted. There were great beds
reached by carpeted steps. There were tasselled pillows and counterpanes
heavily perfumed, and canopies and curtains embroidered with armories or
sprinkled with stars.
So one must reconstruct the decorations of the other rooms, in which
nothing was standing but the walls and the high, basket-funneled
fireplaces, whose spacious hearths, wanting andirons, were still charred
from the old fires. One could easily imagine the dining-rooms and those
terrible repasts which Gilles deplored in his trial at Nantes. Gilles
admitted with tears that he had ordered his diet so as to kindle the
fury of his senses, and these reprobate menus can be easily reproduced.
When he was at table with Eustache Blanchet, Prelati, Gilles de Sillé,
all his trusted companions, in the great room, the plates and the ewers
filled with water of medlar, rose, and melilote for washing the hands,
were placed on credences. Gilles ate beef-, salmon-, and bream-pies;
levert- and squab-tarts; roast heron, stork, crane, peacock, bustard, and
swan; venison in verjuice; Nantes lampreys; salads of briony, hops,
beard of judas, mallow; vehement dishes seasoned with marjoram and mace,
coriander and sage, peony and rosemary, basil and hyssop, grain of
paradise and ginger; perfumed, acidulous dishes, giving one a violent
thirst; heavy pastries; tarts of elder-flower and rape; rice with milk
of hazelnuts sprinkled with cinnamon; stuffy dishes necessitating
copious drafts of beer and fermented mulberry juice, of dry wine, or
wine aged to tannic bitterness, of heady hypocras charged with cinnamon,
with almonds, and with musk, of raging liquors clouded with golden
particles--mad drinks which spurred the guests in this womanless castle
to frenzies of lechery and made them, at the end of the meal, writhe in
monstrous dreams.
"Remain the costumes to be restored," said Durtal to himself, and he
imagined Gilles and his friends, not in their damaskeened field harness,
but in their indoor costumes, their robes of peace. He visualized them
in harmony with the luxury of their surroundings. They wore glittering
vestments, pleated jackets, bellying out in a little flounced skirt at
the waist. The legs were encased in dark skin-tight hose. On their heads
were the artichoke chaperon hats like that of Charles VII in his
portrait in the Louvre. The torso was enveloped in silver-threaded
damask, which was crusted with jewelleries and bordered with marten.
He thought of the costume of the women of the time, robes of precious
tentered stuffs, with tight sleeves, great collars thrown back over the
shoulders, cramping bodices, long trains lined with fur. And as he thus
dressed an imaginary manikin, hanging ropes of heavy stones, purplish
or milky crystals, cloudy uncut gems, over the slashed corsage, a woman
slipped in, filled the robe, swelled the bodice, and thrust her head
under the two-horned steeple-headdress. From behind the pendent lace
smiled the composite features of the unknown and of Mme. Chantelouve.
Delighted, he gazed at the apparition without ever perceiving whom he
had evoked, when his cat, jumping into his lap, distracted his thoughts
and brought him back to his room.
"Well, well, she won't let me alone," and in spite of himself he began
to laugh at the thought of the unknown following him even to the château
de Tiffauges. "It's foolish to let my thoughts wander this way," he
said, drawing himself up, "but daydream is the only good thing in life.
Everything else is vulgar and empty.
"No doubt about it, that was a singular epoch, the Middle Epoch of
ignorance and darkness, the history professors and Ages," he went on,
lighting a cigarette. "For some it's all white and for others utterly
black. No intermediate shade, atheists reiterate. Dolorous and exquisite
epoch, say the artists and the religious savants.
"What is certain is that the immutable classes, the nobility, the
clergy, the bourgeoisie, the people, had loftier souls at that time. You
can prove it: society has done nothing but deteriorate in the four
centuries separating us from the Middle Ages.
"True, a baron then was usually a formidable brute. He was a drunken and
lecherous bandit, a sanguinary and boisterous tyrant, but he was a child
in mind and spirit. The Church bullied him, and to deliver the Holy
Sepulchre he sacrificed his wealth, abandoned home, wife, and children,
and accepted unconscionable fatigues, extraordinary sufferings,
unheard-of dangers.
"By pious heroism he redeemed the baseness of his morals. The race has
since become moderate. It has reduced, sometimes even done away with,
its instincts of carnage and rape, but it has replaced them by the
monomania of business, the passion for lucre. It has done worse. It has
sunk to such a state of abjectness as to be attracted by the doings of
the lowest of the low. The aristocracy disguises itself as a mountebank,
puts on tights and spangles, gives public trapeze performances, jumps
through hoops, and does weight-lifting stunts in the trampled tan-bark
ring!
"The clergy, then a good example--if we except a few convents ravaged by
frenzied Satanism and lechery--launched itself into superhuman
transports and attained God. Saints swarmed, miracles multiplied, and
while still omnipotent the Church was gentle with the humble, it
consoled the afflicted, defended the little ones, and mourned or
rejoiced with the people of low estate. Today it hates the poor, and
mysticism dies in a clergy which checks ardent thoughts and preaches
sobriety of mind, continence of postulation, common sense in prayer,
bourgeoisie of the soul! Yet here and there, buried in cloisters far
from these lukewarm priests, there perhaps still are real saints who
weep, monks who pray, to the point of dying of sorrow and prayer, for
each of us. And they--with the demoniacs--are the sole connecting link
between that age and this.
"The smug, sententious side of the bourgeoisie already existed in the
time of Charles VII. But cupidity was repressed by the confessor, and
the tradesman, just like the labourer, was maintained by the
corporations, which denounced overcharging and fraud, saw that decried
merchandise was destroyed, and fixed a fair price and a high standard of
excellence for commodities. Trades and professions were handed down from
father to son. The corporations assured work and pay. People were not,
as now, subject to the fluctuations of the market and the merciless
capitalistic exploitation. Great fortunes did not exist and everybody
had enough to live on. Sure of the future, unhurried, they created
marvels of art, whose secret remains for ever lost.
"All the artisans who passed the three degrees of apprentice,
journeyman, and master, developed subtlety and became veritable artists.
They ennobled the simplest of iron work, the commonest faience, the most
ordinary chests and coffers. Those corporations, putting themselves
under the patronage of Saints--whose images, frequently besought,
figured on their banners--preserved through the centuries the honest
existence of the humble and notably raised the spiritual level of the
people whom they protected.
"All that is decisively at an end. The bourgeoise has taken the place
forfeited by a wastrel nobility which now subsists only to set ignoble
fashions and whose sole contribution to our 'civilization' is the
establishment of gluttonous dining clubs, so-called gymnastic societies,
and pari-mutuel associations. Today the business man has but these aims,
to exploit the working man, manufacture shoddy, lie about the quality of
merchandise, and give short weight.
"As for the people, they have been relieved of the indispensable fear of
hell, and notified, at the same time, that they are not to expect to be
recompensed, after death, for their sufferings here. So they scamp their
ill-paid work and take to drink. From time to time, when they have
ingurgitated too violent liquids, they revolt, and then they must be
slaughtered, for once let loose they would act as a crazed stampeded
herd.
"Good God, what a mess! And to think that the nineteenth century takes
on airs and adulates itself. There is one word in the mouths of all.
Progress. Progress of whom? Progress of what? For this miserable century
hasn't invented anything great.
"It has constructed nothing and destroyed everything. At the present
hour it glorifies itself in this electricity which it thinks it
discovered. But electricity was known and used in remotest antiquity,
and if the ancients could not explain its nature nor even its essence,
the moderns are just as incapable of identifying that force which
conveys the spark and carries the voice--acutely nasalized--along the
wire. This century thinks it discovered the terrible science of
hypnotism, which the priests and Brahmins in Egypt and India knew and
practised to the utmost. No, the only thing this century has invented
is the sophistication of products. Therein it is passed master. It has
even gone so far as to adulterate excrement. Yes, in 1888 the two houses
of parliament had to pass a law destined to suppress the falsification
of fertilizer. Now that's the limit."
The doorbell rang. He opened the door and nearly fell over backward.
Mme. Chantelouve was before him.
Stupefied, he bowed, while Mme. Chantelouve, without a word, went
straight into the study. There she turned around, and Durtal, who had
followed, found himself face to face with her.
"Won't you please sit down?" He advanced an armchair and hastened to
push back, with his foot, the edge of the carpet turned up by the cat.
He asked her to excuse the disorder. She made a vague gesture and
remained standing.
In a calm but very low voice she said, "It is I who wrote you those mad
letters. I have come to drive away this bad fever and get it over with
in a quite frank way. As you yourself wrote, no liaison between us is
possible. Let us forget what has happened. And before I go, tell me that
you bear me no grudge."
He cried out at this. He would not have it so. He had not been beside
himself when he wrote her those ardent pages, he was in perfectly good
faith, he loved her--
"You love me! Why, you didn't even know that those letters were from me.
You loved an unknown, a chimera. Well, admitting that you are telling
the truth, the chimera does not exist now, for here I am."
"You are mistaken. I knew perfectly that it was Mme. Chantelouve hiding
behind the pseudonym of Mme. Maubel." And he half-explained to her,
without, of course, letting her know of his doubts, how he had lifted
her mask.
"Ah!" She reflected, blinking her troubled eyes. "At any rate," she
said, again facing him squarely, "you could not have recognized me in
the first letters, to which you responded with cries of passion. Those
cries were not addressed to me."
He contested this observation, and became entangled in the dates and
happenings and in the sequence of the notes. She at length lost the
thread of his remarks. The situation was so ridiculous that both were
silent. Then she sat down and burst out laughing.
Her strident, shrill laugh, revealing magnificent, but short and pointed
teeth, in a mocking mouth, vexed him.
"She has been playing with me," he said to himself, and dissatisfied
with the turn the conversation had taken, and furious at seeing this
woman so calm, so different from her burning letters, he asked, in a
tone of irritation, "Am I to know why you laugh?"
"Pardon me. It's a trick my nerves play on me, sometimes in public
places. But never mind. Let us be reasonable and talk things over. You
tell me you love me--"
"And I mean it."
"Well, admitting that I too am not indifferent, where is this going to
lead us? Oh, you know so well, you poor dear, that you refused, right at
first, the meeting which I asked in a moment of madness--and you gave
well-thought-out reasons for refusing."
"But I refused because I did not know then that you were the women in
the case! I have told you that it was several days later that Des
Hermies unwittingly revealed your identity to me. Did I hesitate as soon
as I knew? No! I immediately implored you to come."
"That may be, but you admit that I'm right when I claim that you wrote
your first letters to another and not me."
She was pensive for a moment. Durtal began to be prodigiously bored by
this discussion. He thought it more prudent not to answer, and was
seeking a change of subject that would put an end to the deadlock.
She herself got him out of his difficulty. "Let us not discuss it any
more," she said, smiling, "we shall not get anywhere. You see, this is
the situation: I am married to a very nice man who loves me and whose
only crime is that he represents the rather insipid happiness which one
has right at hand. I started this correspondence with you, so I am to
blame, and believe me, on his account I suffer. You have work to do,
beautiful books to write. You don't need to have a crazy woman come
walking into your life. So, you see, the best thing is for us to remain
friends, but true friends, and go no further."
"And it is the woman who wrote me such vivid letters, who now speaks to
me of reason, good sense, and God knows what!"
"But be frank, now. You don't love me."
"I don't?"
He took her hands, gently. She made no resistance, but looking at him
squarely she said, "Listen. If you had loved me you would have come to
see me; and yet for months you haven't tried to find out whether I was
alive or dead."
"But you understand that I could not hope to be welcomed by you on the
terms we now are on, and too, in your parlour there are guests, your
husband--I have never had you even a little bit to myself at your home."
He pressed her hands more tightly and came closer to her. She regarded
him with her smoky eyes, in which he now saw that dolent, almost
dolorous expression which had captivated him. He completely lost control
of himself before this voluptuous and plaintive face, but with a firm
gesture she freed her hands.
"Enough. Sit down, now, and let's talk of something else. Do you know
your apartment is charming? Which saint is that?" she asked, examining
the picture, over the mantel, of the monk on his knees beside a
cardinal's hat and cloak.
"I do not know."
"I will find out for you. I have the lives of all the saints at home. It
ought to be easy to find out about a cardinal who renounced the purple
to go live in a hut. Wait. I think Saint Peter Damian did, but I am not
sure. I have such a poor memory. Help me think."
"But I don't know who he is!"
She came closer to him and put her hand on his shoulder.
"Are you angry at me?"
"I should say I am! When I desire you frantically, when I've been
dreaming for a whole week about this meeting, you come here and tell me
that all is over between us, that you do not love me--"
She became demure. "But if I did not love you, would I have come to you?
Understand, then, that reality kills a dream; that it is better for us
not to expose ourselves to fearful regrets. We are not children, you
see. No! Let me go. Do not squeeze me like that!" Very pale, she
struggled in his embrace. "I swear to you that I will go away and that
you shall never see me again if you do not let me loose." Her voice
became hard. She was almost hissing her words. He let go of her. "Sit
down there behind the table. Do that for me." And tapping the floor with
her heel, she said, in a tone of melancholy, "Then it is impossible to
be friends, only friends, with a man. But it would be very nice to come
and see you without having evil thoughts to fear, wouldn't it?" She was
silent. Then she added, "Yes, just to see each other--and if we did not
have any sublime things to say to each other, it is also very nice to
sit and say nothing!"
Then she said, "My time is up. I must go home."
"And leave me with no hope?" he exclaimed, kissing her gloved hands.
She did not answer, but gently shook her head, then, as he looked
pleadingly at her, she said, "Listen. If you will promise to make no
demands on me and to be good, I will come here night after next at nine
o'clock."
He promised whatever she wished. And as he raised his head from her
hands and as his lips brushed lightly over her breast, which seemed to
tighten, she disengaged her hands, caught his nervously, and, clenching
her teeth, offered her neck to his lips. Then she fled.
"Oof!" he said, closing the door after her. He was at the same time
satisfied and vexed.
Satisfied, because he found her enigmatic, changeful, charming. Now that
he was alone he recalled her to memory. He remembered her tight black
dress, her fur cloak, the warm collar of which had caressed him as he
was covering her neck with kisses. He remembered that she wore no
jewellery, except sparkling blue sapphire eardrops. He remembered the
wayward blonde hair escaping from under the dark green otter hat.
Holding his hands to his nostrils he sniffed again the sweet and distant
odour, cinnamon lost among stronger perfumes, which he had caught from
the contact of her long, fawn-coloured suède gloves, and he saw again
her moist, rodent teeth, her thin, bitten lips, and her troubled eyes,
of a grey and opaque lustre which could suddenly be transfigured with
radiance. "Oh, night after next it will be great to kiss all that!"
Vexed also, both with himself and with her. He reproached himself with
having been brusque and reserved. He ought to have shown himself more
expansive and less restrained. But it was her fault, for she had abashed
him! The incongruity between the woman who cried with voluptuous
suffering in her letters and the woman he had seen, so thoroughly
mistress of herself in her coquetries, was truly too much!
"However you look at them, these women are astonishing creatures," he
thought. "Here is one who accomplishes the most difficult thing you can
imagine: coming to a man's room after having written him excessive
letters. I, I act like a goose. I stand there ill at ease. She, in a
second, has the self-assurance of a person in her own home, or visiting
in a drawing-room. No awkwardness, pretty gestures, a few words, and
eyes which supply everything! She isn't very agreeable," he thought,
reminded of the curt tone she had used when disengaging herself, "and
yet she has her tender spots," he continued dreamily, remembering not
so much her words as certain inflections of her voice and a certain
bewildered look in her eyes. "I must go about it prudently that night,"
he concluded, addressing his cat, which, never having seen a woman
before, had fled at the arrival of Mme. Chantelouve and taken refuge
under the bed, but had now advanced almost grovelling, to sniff the
chair where she had sat.
"Come to think of it, she is an old hand, Mme. Hyacinthe! She would not
have a meeting in a café nor in the street. She scented from afar the
assignation house or the hotel. And though, from the mere fact of my not
inviting her here, she could not doubt that I did not want to introduce
her to my lodging, she came here deliberately. Then, this first denial,
come to think of it, is only a fine farce. If she were not seeking a
liaison she would not have visited me. No, she wanted me to beg her to
do what she wanted to do. Like all women, she wanted me to offer her
what she desired. I have been rolled. Her arrival has knocked the props
out from under my whole method. But what does it matter? She is no less
desirable," he concluded, happy to get rid of disagreeable reflections
and plunge back into the delirious vision which he retained of her.
"That night won't be exactly dreary," he thought, seeing again her eyes,
imagining them in surrender, deceptive and plaintive, as he would
disrobe her and make a body white and slender, warm and supple, emerge
from her tight skirt. "She has no children. That is an earnest promise
that her flesh is quite firm, even at thirty!"
A whole draft of youth intoxicated him. Durtal, astonished, took a look
at himself in the mirror. His tired eyes brightened, his face seemed
more youthful, less worn. "Lucky I had just shaved," he said to himself.
But gradually, as he mused, he saw in this mirror, which he was so
little in the habit of consulting, his features droop and his eyes lose
their sparkle. His stature, which had seemed to increase in this
spiritual upheaval, diminished again. Sadness returned to his
thoughtful mien. "I haven't what you would call the physique of a lady's
man," he concluded. "What does she see in me? for she could very easily
find someone else with whom to be unfaithful to her husband. Enough of
these rambling thoughts. Let's cease to think them. To sum up the
situation: I love her with my head and not my heart. That's the
important thing. Under such conditions, whatever happens, a love affair
is brief, and I am almost certain to get out of it without committing
any follies."