“And Maxime?” insisted the child. I knew that this was the name of the
_fiancé_ of Mlle. de Jussat. These two syllables had no sooner
left the lips of her brother than the paleness of her face gave way to
a sudden wave of blood. There was an interval of silence during which I
could hear the murmuring of Sister Anaclet, the crackling of the fire
in the chimney, the swinging of the pendulum, and the child himself
astonished at this silence.
“Yes, Maxime, is not he coming either?”
“M. de Plane has also gone back to his regiment,” said Charlotte.
“Are you going away already, M. Greslon?” asked Lucien as I rose
brusquely.
“I am coming back,” I replied; “I have forgotten a letter on my table.”
And I went out, leaving Lucien with a smile on his face, and Charlotte
with her eyes cast down.
Ah! my dear master, you must believe what I am telling you; in spite of
the incoherencies of a heart almost unintelligible to itself, you must
not doubt my sincerity in that moment. I have so great need not to
doubt it myself; need to say to myself that I was not lying then.
There was not an atom of voluntary comedy in the sudden movement by
which I rose at the simple mention of the name of the man to whom
Charlotte ought to belong, to whom she did belong. There was no
comedy in the tears which burst from my eyes, as soon as I passed the
threshold of the door, nor in those which I wept during the night which
followed, in despair at this double and frightful certainty that we
loved one another, and that never, never, could we be anything one to
the other; no comedy in the starts of pain which her presence inflicted
on me during the days which followed. Her pale face, her emaciated
profile, her suffering eyes were there to disturb me, and this pallor
rent my soul, and this spare outline of her body made me love her more,
and those eyes besought me.
“Do not speak. I know that you are unhappy too. It would be cruel to
reproach me, to complain, to show your hurt.”
Tell me, if I had not been sincere in those days, would I have let
them pass without acting, when their hours were counted? But I do not
recall a single reflection, a single combination. I do recall confusing
sensations, something burning, frantic, intolerable, a prostrating
neuralgia of my inmost being, a lancination continuous, and growing,
growing always, the dream of putting an end to it, a project of suicide.
You see that I truly loved, since all my subtleties were melted in
the flame of this passion, as lead in a furnace; since I did not find
material for analysis in what was a real alienation, an abdication of
my old self in this martyrdom. This thought of death came from the
inmost depths of my being, this obscure appetite for the grave of which
I was possessed as of physical thirst and hunger, in which, my dear
master, you will recognize a necessary consequence of this disease of
love, so admirably studied by you.
This instinct of destruction, of which you point out the mysterious
awaking at the same time as that of sex, was turned against myself.
This was shown first by an infinite lassitude, the lassitude of feeling
much but never expressing anything. For the anguish in Charlotte’s
eyes, when they met mine, defended her better than all words could have
done.
Beside, we were never alone, except sometimes for a few minutes in
the salon, by chance, and these minutes passed in a silence which we
could not break. To speak at such times is as impossible as for a
paralytic to move his feet. A superhuman effort would not suffice. One
experiences how emotion, to a certain degree of intensity, becomes
incommunicable. One feels himself imprisoned, walled up in his self,
and he would like to get away from this unhappy self, to plunge, to
lose himself in the coldness of death is where all ended.
That continued with a kind of delirious desire to make on the heart of
Charlotte an imprint which could not be effaced, with an insane desire
to give her some proof of love, against which neither the tenderness
of her future husband nor the magnificence of her social surroundings,
could ever prevail.
“If I die of despair at being separated from her forever, she must
remember the simple preceptor, the poor provincial, capable of
sentiments so powerful!”
It seems to me that I formulated these reflections. You notice that
I say: “It seems to me.” For in truth, I did not comprehend myself
at that period. I did not recognize myself in the fever of violence
and of tragedy by which I was consumed. Scarcely do I discern in this
ungovernable come-and-go of my thoughts a kind of auto-suggestion,
as you say. I was hypnotized, and it was as a somnambulist that I
determined to kill myself at such a day, at such an hour, as I was
going to the druggist to procure the fatal bottle of nux vomica.
During all these preparations and under the influence of this
resolution, I hoped for nothing, I calculated nothing. A force entirely
foreign to my own consciousness was acting on me. At no time was I the
spectator of my gestures, my thoughts and my actions, with an exterior
of the acting “I” in relation to the thinking “I.” But I have written
a note upon this point, which you will find on the fly leaf, in my
_exemplaire_ of the book of Brière de Boismont on suicide.
I experienced in these preparations an indefinable sensation of a
waking dream, of lucid automatism. I attribute these strange phenomena
to a nervous disorder, almost a madness, caused by the ravages of
a fixed idea. It was only on the morning of the day chosen for the
execution of my project that I thought of making a last attempt to win
Charlotte.
I sat down at my table to write her a letter of farewell. I saw her
reading this letter, and this question suddenly presented itself to me:
“What would she do?” Was it possible that she might not be moved by
this announcement of my intended suicide? Would she hasten to prevent
it? Yes, she would run to my room and find me dead. At least, should I
not wait for the effect of this last proof?
Here I am very sure that I saw myself clearly. I know that hope was
born in me exactly in this way and precisely at this point of my
project. “Ah, well!” said I, “I will try.”
I resolved that if, at midnight, she had not come, I would drink the
poison. I had studied the effects of it, and hoped I should not suffer
very long.
It is strange that all that day was passed in a singular serenity. I
was as if relieved of a weight, as if really detached from myself, and
my anxiety commenced only toward ten o’clock, when, having retired
first, I had placed the letter on the table in the room of the young
girl.
At half-past ten I heard through my partly-open door the marquis, the
marquise and Charlotte ascending the stairs. They stopped to talk a few
minutes in the passage, then there were the customary good-nights, and
each entered a separate chamber.
Eleven o’clock--a quarter-past eleven.
Still nothing.
I looked at my watch, placed in front of me, near three letters
prepared for M. de Jussat, for my mother, and for you, my dear master.
My heart beat as if it would burst; but I wish you to note that my will
was firm and cool. I had told Mlle. de Jussat that she would not see me
the next day. I was sure of not failing my word if--I did not dare to
strengthen what hope this “if” contained.
I watched the second-hand go round and I made a mechanical calculation,
an exact multiplication: “at sixty seconds a minute, I shall see the
hand go round so many times, for at midnight I shall kill myself.”
A noise of furtive and light steps on the stairs, which I perceived
with supreme emotion, interrupted my calculation. These steps
approached. They stopped before my door. Suddenly the door was opened.
Charlotte was before me. I arose.
We rested thus face to face, both standing. Her face was distorted by
the shock of her own action, very pale, and her eyes shone with an
extraordinary brilliancy, nearly black, so dilated was the pupil by
emotion, almost covering the iris.
I noticed this detail because it transformed her physiognomy.
Ordinarily so reserved, her face betrayed the wildness of a being ruled
by a passion stronger than her will. She must have lain down, then
arose again, for her hair was braided in a large plait instead of being
knotted on her head. A white _robe-de-chambre_, fastened by a cord
and tassel was folded around her form, and in her haste she had slipped
her bare feet into her slippers without thinking.
Evidently an insupportable anguish had precipitated her from her
chamber into my room. She did not care what I might think of her nor
what I might be tempted to say. She had read my letter, and she came, a
prey to an excitement so intense that she did not tremble.
“Ah!” said she in a broken voice after the silence of the first
minute. “God be praised, I am not too late. Dead! I believed you were
dead! Ah! that is horrible! But that is all over, is it not? Say that
you will obey me, say that you will not kill yourself. Ah! swear, swear
it to me.”
She took my hand in hers with a supplicating gesture. Her fingers
were like ice. There was something so decisive in this entrance, such
a proof of love in a moment in which I was so excited that I did not
reflect, and, without replying to her, I took her in my arms, weeping,
my lips sought her lips, and through the most scalding tears I gave her
the most loving, the most sincere kisses; that was a moment of infinite
ecstasy, of supreme felicity, and as she drew away from me, with the
shame at what she had permitted depicted on her face, always wild.
“Wretched creature that I am!” said she, “Ah! I must go away! Let me go
away! Do not come near me.”
“You see that I must die,” I responded, “for you do not love me,
you are going to be the wife of another, we shall be separated, and
forever.”
I took the dark vial from the table and showed it to her by the light
of the lamp.
“Only a fourth of this flask,” I continued, and it is the remedy
for much suffering. “In five minutes it will be ended,” and gently
and without making a single gesture that would force her to defend
herself: “Go away now, and I thank you for having come. Before a
quarter of an hour I shall have ceased to feel what I am feeling now,
this intolerable privation of you for so many months. Come, adieu, do
not take away my courage.”
She had trembled when the flame had lighted up the black liquid. She
extended her hand and snatched the flask away, saying: “No! No!” She
looked at it, read the inscription on the red label and trembled.
Her countenance became still more changed. A wrinkle hollowed itself
between her eyebrows. Her lips trembled. Her eyes expressed the agony
of a last anxiety, then, in a voice almost harsh, jerking her words as
if they were drawn from her by a torturing and irresistible power.
“I, too,” said she, “I have suffered much, I have struggled hard. No,”
she continued, advancing toward me and taking me by the arm, “you must
not go alone, not alone. We will die together. After what I have done,
it is all that is left.” She put the vial to her lips, but I took it
away from her, and with a smile almost insane she continued: “To die,
yes, to die here, near you, with you,” and she approached again, laying
her head on my shoulder, so that I felt her soft hair against my cheek.
“So! Ah! it is a long time that I have loved you, so long I can tell
you the truth now, since I shall pay for it with my life. You will take
me with you, we will go away together, both of us.”
“Yes! yes,” I answered, “we will die together. I swear it to you. But
not immediately. Ah! leave me time to feel that you love me.” Our lips
were again united, but this time she returned my kisses. Ah! Those
were kisses in which the ecstasy of the senses and of the soul were
deliciously confounded, in which the past, the present, the future were
abolished to give place to love alone, to the painful, the intoxicating
madness of love. This frail body, this living statuette of Tanagra was
mine in its grace and innocence, and it seemed to me that this hour was
not real, it so far surpassed my hopes, almost my desire.
In the softened light of the lamp and of the half-extinguished fire,
the delicacy of her features, her consummate pallor, her disordered
hair, made her seem an apparition, and it was with a phantom’s voice, a
voice beyond life, that she spoke to me, relating the long history of
her sentiments for me.
She said that she had loved at the first look and without suspecting
it; then how she had suffered at my sadness and at my confidence; how
she had dreamed of being my friend, a friend who would gently console
me; then the fearful light which my declaration in the forest had
suddenly thrown upon her heart, and that she had sworn to put an abyss
between us.
She recounted her struggles when she received my letters, and her vain
resolutions not to read them, and the folly of her engagement in order
that all might be irremediable, and her return, and the rest. She
found, to reveal to me the secret and cruel romance of her tenderness,
phrases modest and impassioned, which fell from the mysterious brim of
the soul as tears fall from the brim of the eyes. She said: “I could
not if I wished efface these griefs, so much do I need to feel that I
have lived for you.” She said: “You will let me die first, that I may
not see you suffer.” And she wrapped me in her hair, and upon her face
which I had known so controlled was a kind of ecstasy of martyrdom, a
supernatural joy mingled with a profound grief, an exaltation mingled
with remorse.
When she was silent, clasped in my arms, absorbed in me, we could hear
the wind which moaned outside the closed windows, and this sleeping
château, in its peaceful silence, was already the tomb, the tomb toward
which we were going, drawn out of life by the ardor of love which had
thus thrown us heart to heart.
It is here, my dear master, where comes the most singular episode of
this adventure, the one which men will call the most shameful; but for
you and me these words have no meaning, and I will have the courage to
tell you all.
I had been sincere, and sincere without the shadow of calculation, in
the resolution of suicide which caused me to buy the nux vomica, and
then to write to Charlotte. When she had come, when she had fallen
into my arms and cried: “Let us die together!” I responded: “Let us
die together,” with the most perfect good faith. It had appeared so
simple, so natural, so easy for us to go away together. You, who have
written some strong pages upon the vapor of illusion created in us by
physical causes, which is like that intoxication produced by wine, you
will not judge me a monster for having felt this vapor dissipate, this
intoxication disappear with possession.
Charlotte had placed her head on my breast and she fell asleep,
exhausted by the excess of her emotions. I looked at her and I felt,
without knowing how, that I fell back from my state before this
happiness, to the reflective, philosophic, and lucid one which had been
mine, and which a sorcery had metamorphosed into another.
I looked at Charlotte, and thought that in a few hours this adorable
body, animated at this moment by all the ardors of life, would be
immovable, cold, dead--dead this mouth which trembled still with my
kiss, dead these beautiful eyes shaded under their trembling lids,
dead this mind filled with me, intoxicated of me!
I repeated mentally several times this word: “Dead, dead, dead,”
and what it represents of a sudden falling into the night, of an
irreparable fall into the darkness, the cold, the emptiness, oppressed
my heart.
This entrance into the gulf without bottom of annihilation which had
seemed, not only easy, but profoundly desirable when the fury of
unfortunate love dominated me--suddenly, and this fury once appeased,
appeared to me the most formidable of actions, the most foolish, the
most impossible of execution. Charlotte continued to keep her eyes
closed. The emaciation of her poor face, rendered more perceptible
by the way in which the softened light revealed her features, told
too plainly what she had felt for days. And I was going to kill her,
or at least, to assist her to destroy herself. We were about to kill
ourselves.
A shudder ran through me at the thought, and I was afraid. For her? For
myself? For both? I do not know. I was afraid, afraid of feeling to
grow numb in my most secret being, the soul of my soul, the indefinable
center of all our energy. And suddenly by a sudden facing about of
ideas like to that of the dying who throw a last look upon their
existence, and who perceive, in the mirage of a secret regret, the joys
known or coveted, the vision was evoked of that life, all thought of
which I had turn by turn desired and abjured.
I saw you in your little cell, my dear master, in meditation, and
the universe of intelligence developed before me the splendor of its
horizons. My personal works, this brain of which I had been so proud,
this Self cultivated so complaisantly, I was about to sacrifice all
these treasures.
“To your pledged word,” ought I to have responded? “To a caprice of
excitement,” I did respond. Strictly, this suicide had a signification,
when to be forever separated from Charlotte filled me with despair. But
now? We love each other, we belong to each other. Who can prevent us,
young and free, from fleeing together, if on the next day we cannot
endure separation? This hypothesis of an elopement brought before my
mind the image of Count André. Why not make a note of this also? An
exhilarating titillation of self-love ran through my heart at this
souvenir.
I looked at Charlotte again, and I felt filled with the most ferocious
pride. The rivalry instituted by my secret envy between her brother
and myself awoke again in a start of triumph. There is a celebrated
proverb which says that all animals are sad after pleasure: “_Omne
animal_.” It was not sadness that I felt then, but an absolute
drying up of my tenderness, a rapid return--rapid as the action of a
chemical precipitation--to a state of mind anterior.
I do not believe that this displacement of sensibility could have
taken more than half an hour. I continued to regard Charlotte, while
abandoning myself to these passage of ideas, with the delight of a
reconquered liberty.
The fullness of the voluntary and reflective life flowed in me now, as
the water of a river whose dam has been raised. The passion for this
absent child had raised up a barrier against which the flood of my old
sentiment was dammed up. This barrier thrown down, I became myself
again. She was sleeping. I heard her light, equal breath, then suddenly
a great sob, and she awoke:
“Ah!” said she, pressing me to her in a convulsive fashion, “you are
here, you are here. I had lost consciousness. I dreamed. Ah! what a
dream! I saw my brother come toward you. Oh! the horrible dream!”
She kissed me again, and, as her mouth was pressed to mine, the clock
struck. She listened and counted the strokes.
“Four o’clock,” said she, “it is time--farewell, my love, farewell.”
She embraced me again. Her face had become calm in her exaltation,
almost smiling.
“Give me the poison,” said she in a firm voice.
I remained immovable without answering.
“You are afraid for me,” she resumed; “I shall know how to die. Give
it to me.” I rose, still without replying. She sat up and clasped her
hands without looking at me. Was she praying? Was this the last effort
of this soul to extract the love of life which pushes its roots so
deeply in a creature of twenty years?
My resolution to prevent this double suicide was now absolute. I had
the coolness to seize the brown vial from the table and carry it to a
wardrobe and lock it. These preparations of which she took no notice no
doubt seemed long to Charlotte, for she turned toward me:
“I am ready,” said she.
She saw my empty hands. The ecstatic expression changed to one of
extreme anguish, and her voice grew harsh as she said:
“The poison! Give me the poison!” Then as if responding to a thought
which suddenly came to her mind, she added feverishly: “No, it is not
possible.”
“No,” cried I, falling on my knees before her, and seizing her hands.
“No, you are right, it is not possible. I cannot let you die before
me, for I should be your assassin. I pray you, Charlotte, do not ask
me to realize this fatal project. When I bought the poison I was mad,
I thought that you did not love me. I wished to kill myself. Oh! how
sincerely! But now that you do love me, that I know it, that you have
given yourself to me, no I cannot, I will not. Let us live, my love,
let us live, consent to live. We will go away together, if you will.
And if you will not, if you repent of this confession of your regard,
well! I will suffer the martyrdom; but, I swear to you, this shall be
as if it had never been--I will not trouble your life. But to help you
to die, to kill yourself, you so young, so fair, oh no, no, do not ask
me to do it.”
How many times I spoke thus to her, I do not know. I saw on her face
a sweet emotion, a woman’s feebleness, the “yes” of the look which
gives the lie to the “no” of the mouth. She was silent, then she fixed
her eyes on me, and now they were bright with a tragic fire. She had
withdrawn her hands from mine, crossed her arms upon her breast, and
with her hair falling all around her, as if withdrawn from me by an
invincible horror, she said, when I had ceased to supplicate her:
“So you will not keep your word?”
“No,” I stammered, “I cannot. I cannot. I did not know what I said.”
“Ah!” said she with a cruel disdain on her beautiful lips, “but tell
me then that you are afraid! Give me the poison. I will give you back
your word. I will die alone. But to have drawn me thus into the snare,
you coward! coward! coward!”
Why did I not spring up under this outrage, why did I not take the
bottle of poison, why did I not put it to my lips there before her and
say: “See if I am a coward?” I do not understand why I did not when I
think of it, when I remember the implacable contempt printed on her
face. It must be that I was afraid, I who would now go to the scaffold
without trembling, I who have had the courage to be silent for three
months, thus risking my life. But now an idea sustains me, coldly,
intellectually conceived while during that frightful scene there
was a confusion of all the forces of my mind, between my surcharged
sensations of the last months and those of the present hour, and,
sitting down on the carpet, as if I had no longer energy enough to hold
myself up, I shook my head, and said: “No, no.”
This time it was she who did not respond. I saw her mass her beautiful
hair and twist it into a knot; put her feet into her slippers, and wrap
her white robe around her. She sought with her eyes for the dark flask
with the red label, and, seeing it no longer on the table, she walked
toward the door, then, without even turning her head, she disappeared
after darting at me the terrible word:
“Coward! coward!”
I remained there a long time. Suddenly a frightful uneasiness seized my
heart. If Charlotte, exasperated as she was, should attempt her life! A
prey to the terrors of this new anguish, I dared to cross the corridors
and go down the stairs to her room, and then, putting my ear against
the door, I heard a noise, a moaning, a sign of what drama was being
acted behind this thin rampart of wood which I could have burst open
with my shoulder quickly enough to bring help.
The first noises of the château were rising from the basement. The
servants were getting up. I must go back to my room. At six o’clock I
was in the garden under the young girl’s window.
My imagination had shown me Charlotte, throwing herself from the
window, and lying dead on the ground with her limbs broken. I saw her
shutters closed, and below, the plat-band in order with its line of
rose bushes on which bloomed the last roses of the autumn.
She had told me, this night, of the charm which she tasted, in her
hours of distress, when she loved me in silence, in leaning above this
bed of roses and inhaling the aroma of these sweet flowers, spread on
the breeze.
I picked one, and its perfume almost made me faint.
To deceive an anxiety which each moment made more intense, I
walked straight on, into the country bathed in vapor, in this gray
morning of November. I went very far, since I passed the village of
Saulzet-le-Froid, and yet, at eight o’clock, I was back taking my
breakfast, or seeming to do so, in the dining-room of the château.