In the morning, when Madame Liauran sent to ask for her son, the latter
replied that he would be down for luncheon. He appeared, in fact, at
noon. His mother and he exchanged merely a look, and she at once
understood the extent of the suffering which he had undergone, simply by
the kind of shiver with which he was affected on seeing her again. She
was associated with this suffering as its occasion, if not its cause,
and he could never forget the fact. His eyes had something so
particularly distant in them, and his mouth so close a curve of lip, his
whole face was so expressive of a determination to permit no explanation
of any kind, that neither Madame Liauran nor Madame Castel ventured to
question him.
For a year past these three persons had had many silent meals in the
antiquely-wainscoted dining-room--an apartment so spacious as to make
the round table placed in the centre appear small. But all three had
never been sensible of an impression, as they were on this day, that,
even when speaking to one another, there would henceforth be a silence
between them impossible to break, something which could not be put into
words, and which, for a very long time, would create a background of
muteness, even behind their most cordial expansions.
After luncheon, when Hubert, who had scarcely touched the various
dishes, took the handle of the door, in order to leave the little
drawing-room in which he had remained for scarcely five minutes, his
mother felt a timid and almost repentant desire to ask his forgiveness
for the pain that she read on his taciturn countenance.
"Hubert?" she said.
"Mamma?" he replied, turning round.
"You feel quite well to-day?" she asked.
"Quite well," he replied in a blank tone, such a tone as immediately
suppresses all possibility of conversation; and he added: "I shall be
punctual at dinner-time this evening."
The young man was now singularly preoccupied. After a night of torture,
so continuously keen that he could not remember having ever undergone
anything like it, he had become master of himself again. He had passed
through the first crisis of his grief, a crisis after which a man ceases
to die from despair, because he has really reached the deepest depth of
sorrow. Then he had recovered that momentary calm which follows upon
prodigious deperditions of nervous energy, and had been able to think.
It was then that he had been seized with anxiety respecting Madame de
Sauve--an anxiety which was devoid of tenderness, for at this moment,
after the assault of grief which he had just sustained, his soul was
dried up, his inward lethargy was absolute, all capacity for feeling was
gone.
But he had suddenly remembered that he had left Theresa in the little
ground floor apartment in Avenue Friedland, and his imagination dared
not form any conjectures upon what had taken place after his departure.
It was just at the end of luncheon that this thought had assailed him,
and, over and above his main sorrow, it had immediately caused him a
shiver of nervous terror--the only emotion of which he was capable.
He went straight from the Rue Vaneau to the Avenue, and when he found
himself in front of the house he dared not enter, although he had the
key in his hand. He called the doorkeeper, an ugly individual to whom he
could never speak without repugnance, so hateful to him was his brazen,
glabrous face, his servile and, at the same time, insolent eye, and the
tone which he assumed as a generously-paid accomplice.
"I beg a thousand pardons, sir," said this man, even before Hubert had
questioned him. "I did not know that the lady was still there. I had
seen you go out, sir, and in the afternoon I went in to give a look
round the place, as I do every day, and found the lady sitting on the
sofa. She seemed to be in great pain. Is she better to-day, sir?" he
added.
"She is very well," replied Hubert, and as he suddenly felt a strong
repugnance to entering the apartments, and on the other hand wished at
all costs to avoid giving this man, for whom he had such an antipathy,
any grounds for suspecting the drama in his life, he replied, "I have
come to settle your bill. I am going on a journey."
"But you have already paid me, sir, at the beginning of the month," said
the other.
"I may be away for a long time," said Hubert drawing a bank-note from
his pocket-book. "You will put this down to the account."
"You are not coming in, sir?" resumed the doorkeeper.
"No," said Hubert, and he went away, saying to himself, "I am a
simpleton. Women of that sort don't kill themselves!"
Women of that sort! The phrase, which had occurred naturally to him, the
youth hitherto so ingenuous, so gentle, and so refined, was a fitting
translation of the kind of feeling which now held the ascendancy over
him, and which lasted for several days. It was a boundless disgust, a
thorough nausea; but so complete and so profound was it, that it left no
room in his heart for anything else. He could not even have told whether
he was suffering, so entirely did contempt absorb all the living
energies of his being.
He perceived the woman whom he had idolised so religiously and with so
noble a fervour, plunged, as it were, and wallowing in such an abyss of
uncleanness, that he felt as though by loving her he had himself been
rolling in the mire. This was the physical sight of which he was now the
victim from one end of the day to the other, and to such a degree that
he was unable to interpret it or form any hypothesis concerning
Theresa's character. The sight of it was inflicted upon him with a
material exactness which bordered on hallucination. Yes, he could see
the act, and the act alone, without having strength enough to shake off
the hideous, besetting fellowship. It paralysed him with horror, and he
could think of nothing else.
A sort of unbroken mirage showed him the abominable pollution of his
mistress's prostitution, and, just as a man attacked by jaundice looks
at all objects through bile-infected eyes, so it was, through his
disgust, that he viewed, the whole of life. His soul was as though
saturated with bitterness, and yet was frightfully dry. There was not an
impression that was not transformed in him into this perception of
foulness and melancholy.
He rose, and spent the morning among his books, opening but not reading
them. He lunched, and the sight of his mother irritated, instead of
softening him. He went back to his room, and resumed the dull idleness
of the morning. He dined, and then, immediately after dinner, left the
drawing-room, so as not to encounter either the General or his cousin,
whose presence was intolerable to him.
At night he lay awake, continuing to see the accursed scene with the
same impossibility of arriving at relaxation of grief. If he fell
asleep, he had every second time to endure the nightmare of this same
vision. As he had no conception of the physiognomy of the man with whom
his mistress had deceived him, there rose up in his morbid sleep
horrible dreams wherein all kinds of different faces were mingled
together. The distress which such imagining caused him would awake him.
His body would be bathed in sweat, he could feel a rending of the bosom
as though his quick-beating heart were about to leave its place, and
with this suffering there was, as before, such complete prostration of
his affectionate powers, that he was not even anxious to know what had
become of Theresa.
"After all," he said to himself one morning as he was getting up, "I
lived well enough before I knew her! I have only to put myself again in
thought into the condition in which I was before that 12th of October."
He had an exact recollection of the date. "It was scarcely more than a
year ago; I was so tranquil then! I have had an evil dream, that is all.
But I must destroy everything that might bring back the memory of it to
me."
He sat down before his writing table after putting fresh wood upon the
fire to increase the blaze, and double-locking the door. Involuntarily,
he recollected that he used so to act formerly, when he wished to see
the precious treasure of his love-relics again. He opened the drawer in
which the treasure was hidden: it consisted of a black morocco box, on
which were entwined two initial letters--a "T." and an "H." Theresa and
he had exchanged two of these boxes, to keep their letters in them. Upon
the one which he had given to his mistress he had caused Theresa's name
to be autographed in full, instead of the two initials.
"What a child I was!" he thought, as he recollected the thousand little
weaknesses of this order in which he had indulged. There is always
puerility, indeed, in extreme weaknesses; but it is on the day when we
are on the road to hardness of heart that we think so.
Beside this box lay two objects which Hubert had thrown there on the
evening of the same day on which he had learnt his mistress's treachery:
one was his ring, and the other a slender gold chain, to which hung a
tiny key. He took the little hoop in his hand, and, in spite of himself,
looked at the inner surface. Theresa had had a star engraved there, with
the date of their stay at Folkestone. This simple token suddenly called
up before Hubert an indefinite perspective of reminiscences; he could
again see the door of the hotel, the staircase with its red carpet, the
drawing-room in which they had dined, and the waiter who had waited on
them, with his face of Britannic respectability, his shaven lip, and his
over-long chin. He could hear him say: "I beg your pardon," and
Theresa's smile appeared before him. What languishment swam then in her
eyes--those eyes, whose green-grey shade was at such moments completely
liquid--completely bathed with an entire abandonment of the inmost
nature!--those eyes, wherein slumbered a sleep which seemed to invite
you to be its dream!
Hubert mechanically slipped the ring upon his finger, and then flung it
almost angrily into the drawer, causing the metal to rebound against the
wood. To open the box it was necessary to handle the chain. It was an
old chain which he had from Theresa. He had given her the bracelet with
the key of the apartments attached to it, and she had given him this
chainlet that he might carry the key of the box at his neck. He had worn
this scapulary of love for months and months, and often had he felt
beneath his shirt for the tiny trinket to hurt himself a little by
pressing it against his breast, and thus remind himself of the tender
mystery of his dear happiness.
How far away to-day was all this intoxication, ah! how far and how lost
in the abyss of the past, whence there issues so frightful an odour of
death! When he had raised the lid of the box he leaned upon his elbow,
and, with his forehead in his hand, gazed upon what was left of his
happiness, the few nothings so perfectly insignificant to anyone else,
but so full of soul to him; an embroidered handkerchief, a glove, a
veil, a bundle of letters, a bundle of little blue notes, placed within
one another, and forming as it were a tiny book of tenderness. And the
envelopes of the letters had been opened so carefully, and the paper of
the blue notes torn with such precision. The slightest details reminded
Hubert of the scruples of loving piety which he had felt for everything
that came from his mistress.
Beneath the letters and blue notes there was still a likeness of her,
representing her in the costume which she had worn at Folkestone: a
plain, close-fitting cloth jacket, and a projecting hat which cast a
slight shadow upon the upper part of the face. She had had this portrait
taken for Hubert alone, and, when giving it, she had said to him:
"I thought so much of ourselves while I was sitting. If you knew how
much this likeness, loves you!"
And Hubert felt himself really loved by it. It seemed to him that from
the oval face, the slender lips, and the dream-bathed eyes, there
proceeded a tender effluence which encompassed him, and it was there
that, by the side of the vision of perfidy, there began to rise afresh
the vision of Theresa's love. He knew as clearly from the memories of
this woman that she had loved, and still loved him, as he knew from her
own confession that she had betrayed him. He saw her again as he had
left her on the sofa in their retreat, with her face convulsed, and,
above all, her tears--ah, what tears! For the first time since the fatal
hour he perceived the nobility with which she had acknowledged her
fault, when it was so easy for her to speak falsely, and he suddenly
uttered a cry which hitherto had not come to him through his days of
parched and passionate pain:
"But why? why?"
Yes, why? why? This anguish of a completely moral order henceforward
accompanied the anguish of physical sight. Hubert began to think, not
only about his trouble, but about the cause of his trouble. To burn
these letters, to tear this likeness, to break and throw away the chain
and ring, to destroy this last remnant of his love, would have been as
impossible to him as to rend with steel his mistress's quivering body.
These objects were living persons with looks, caresses, pantings,
voices. He closed the drawer, unable any longer to endure the presence
of these things which to him seemed made of the very substance of his
heart.
He threw himself upon the couch and lost himself in the gulf of his
reflection. Yes, Theresa had loved him, and Theresa loved him still.
There are tears, embraces, and a warmth of soul which do not lie. She
loved him and she had betrayed him! With his own name in her heart she
had given herself to another, less than six weeks after leaving him! But
why? why? Driven by what force? Led away by what dizziness? Overwhelmed
by what intoxication? What was the nature--not of women of that sort
now, for he had no longer any such fierceness of thought--but of woman,
that so monstrous an action should be barely possible to her? Of what
flesh was she formed, this deceiving creature, that with all the
appearances and all the realities of love, it was not possible to place
more reliance upon her than upon water.
How soft they were, those woman's hands, and how loyal they seemed! but
to entrust one's heart to them, believing in a mutual affection, was the
most foolish of follies! She smiles upon you, and weeps for you, and
already she has noticed a passer-by, to whom, if he amuse her for an
hour, she will sacrifice all your tenderness, with flame in her eyes and
grace on her lips! Ah! why? why? Yet what truth can there be in the
world if even love is not true? And what love? Hubert was now thoroughly
investigating his past; he conscientiously examined his attachment to
Theresa, and he did himself the justice to acknowledge that for months
past he had not had a thought that was not for her. He had certainly
made mistakes, but they had always been for her, and even at this hour
he could not repent them.
He would have found relief for all his pain in kneeling before the
priest who had trained him, and saying: "Father, I have sinned." But no;
it was beyond his power to regret the actions in which Theresa, his
Theresa, had been involved. Yes, he had idolised her with unswerving
fervour, and it was his first love, and it would be the last, or at
least he thought so, and he had shown her his confidence in the
continuance of their feelings with incalculable ingenuousness. Nothing
of all this had had sufficient influence over her to arrest her at the
moment when she committed her infamy,--with the same body.
He could suddenly breathe its aroma, and again feel its impression over
his whole being; then there was a resurrection of jealousy, painful even
to torture, and continually he harped on the "why? why?"--in despair,
and pitiful, like so many before him, from clashing against the
unanswerable riddle of a woman's soul, guilty once, guilty again, guilty
even to her grey hairs and to her death itself.
This new form of grief lasted for days and days afterwards. The young
man was giving free rein within himself to a new feeling of which he had
never had a suspicion hitherto, and which he was henceforward to endure
continually--mistrust. From his earliest years he had lived with a
complete faith in the appearances which surrounded him. He had believed
in his mother. He had believed in God. He had believed in the sincerity
of every word and caress. Above all, he had believed in Theresa de
Sauve. He had assimilated her in thought with the rest of his life. All
was truth around him; thus Theresa's love had appealed to him as a
supreme truth, and now, by a mental revolution which betrayed the
primitive flaw in his education, he was assimilating all the rest of his
life with this woman of falsehood.
His mother had accustomed him to have nothing to say to scepticism. This
is probably the surest method of causing the first deception to
transform the too implicit believer into an absolute negator. It is
never well to expect much from men or from nature, for the former are
wild animals scantily masked with decorum; while, as for the latter, her
apparent harmony is the result of an injustice which knows no remission.
To preserve the ideal within us until death at last releases us from the
dangerous slavery to others and to ourselves, we must early habituate
ourselves to regard the universe of moral beauty as the opium-smoker
regards the dreams of his intoxication. Their charm consists in the fact
that they are dreams, and consequently correspond to nothing that is
real.
Hubert, quite on the contrary, was so accustomed to move his intellect
in one piece that he was unable to doubt or to believe by halves. If
Theresa had lied to him why should not everyone do the same? This idea
did not frame itself in an abstract form, nor did he arrive at it by the
aid of reasoning: it was the substitution of one mode of feeling for
another. During this cruel period he found himself suspecting Theresa in
their common past.
He asked himself whether her betrayal at Trouville had been the first,
whether she had not had another lover than himself at the time of their
most infatuated passion. This woman's perfidy was corrupting his very
recollections. It was doing worse. Under this misanthropical influence
he committed the greatest of moral crimes: he doubted his mother's
tenderness. Yes, in Madame Liauran's passionate affection the unhappy
fellow could see nothing but jealous egotism.
"If she really loved me," he said to himself, "she would not have told
me what she did."
Thus, he found himself in that state of feeling to which popular
language has given the expressive name of disenchantment. He had seen
the last of the beauty of the human soul, and he was beginning to prove
its misery, and always he fell back upon this question as upon the point
of a sword:
"But why? why?"
And he sifted Theresa's character without meeting with any reply. He
might as well have asked why Theresa had senses as well as a heart, and
why at certain times there was set up, as with men, a divorce between
the longings of her heart and the tyranny of her senses. Those
debauchees in whom libertinism has not killed sentimentality know the
secret of these divorces; but Hubert was not a debauchee. He must remain
pure even in his despair, and it never occurred to him to seek
forgetfulness of his trouble in the intoxication of loveless kisses. He
was still ignorant of venal and consoling alcoves--where men lose indeed
their regrets, but at the cost of losing their dreams.
And yet, since he was young, and since, in his intimacy with Theresa, he
had made a habit of the most ardent pleasure--pleasure which exalts both
mind and body in divine communion--he began, after some weeks of these
sorrows and reflections, to feel a dim desire, an unacknowledged
appetite for this woman of whom he wished to know nothing more, whom he
must regard as dead, and whom he so utterly despised.
This strange and unconscious return towards the delights of his love,
but a return no longer ennobled by any ideal, manifested itself in a
curiosity such as those are which issue from the unfathomable depths of
our being. He felt a sickly longing to see with his own eyes this man
who had been Theresa's lover, this La Croix-Firmin, to whom his mistress
had given herself, and, in whose arms she had quivered with
voluptuousness as in his own. To a spiritual director who had traced,
period by period, the ravage wrought in this soul by the corrupt leaven
inoculated by Theresa's betrayal, such curiosity would doubtless have
appeared the most decisive symptom of a metamorphosis in this youth who
had grown up amid all modesty. Was it not the transition from that
absolute horror of evil which is the torment and glory of virgin
natures, to that kind of still more frightful attraction which borders
so closely upon depravity?
But it was especially that frightful facility of imagination about the
impurity of a desired woman, which, by one of the saddest laws of our
nature, brings it to pass that proof of infidelity, while degrading the
lover, and dishonouring the mistress, so frequently kindles love. It is
probable that, in such cases, the conception of the perfidy acts like an
infamous picture, and that this is the explanation of those fits of
sensuality which occur amid the hatred felt, and which astonish the
moralist in certain law-suits founded upon the dramas of jealousy.
Poor Hubert was certainly not one to harbour such base instincts; and
yet his curiosity to become acquainted with his Trouville rival was
already a very unhealthy one. Its nature was the same as that of
Theresa's fault. It is the obscure, indestructible recollection of the
flesh which operates without the knowledge of the being who is under its
influence. The memory of all the caresses given and received since the
night at Folkestone counted for something in this desire to feast his
eyes on the real existence of the hated man. It became something so
sharp And severe that after struggling for a long time, And with the
feeling that he was lowering himself strangely, Hubert could resist no
longer, and he employed the following almost childish procedure, for the
realisation of his singular desire.
He calculated that La Croix-Firmin must belong to a fashionable club,
and it was not long before he had discovered his name and address in the
year-book of such a one. It was to this club that he had recourse in
order to ascertain whether the individual in question was in Paris. The
reply was in the affirmative. Hubert reconnoitred the Rue La Peyrouse,
in which his rival lived, and he immediately satisfied himself that by
standing on the footpath of one of the Places intersected by this
street, he could watch the house, which was one of two stories in
height, and which certainly contained but a very small number of
tenants.
He had said to himself that he would take up a position there one
morning, and wait until he saw some man come out who appeared to be he
whom he sought. He would then question the porter, under some pretext or
other, and would, doubtless, thus receive information. It was a method
of primitive simplicity, and one in which all those who in their youth
have had a passionate adoration for some celebrated writer will
recognise the ingenuousness of the stratagems which they employed to see
their hero. If this plan failed, Hubert could fall back upon an
application to one of those whom he knew among the members of the club;
but he felt a great repugnance to taking such a step.
Accordingly he found himself on the spot at nine o'clock one cold
December morning. The weather was dry and clear, the sky of a pale blue,
and the half-fashionable, half-exotic quarter given over to the traffic
of its crowd of tradesmen and grooms. Hubert saw emerge successively
from the house which he was examining, some servants, an old lady, a
little boy followed by an abbé, and finally, at about half-past eleven,
a man who was still young, of medium height, fashionably dressed,
slender and strong in his otter-lined overcoat.
This man was just buttoning up his collar as he proceeded straight in
Hubert's direction. The latter also advanced, and brushed past the
stranger. He saw a somewhat heavy profile, a moustache of the colour of
burnished gold, a complexion already coloured by the cold, and the dull
eye of a hard liver who has gone late to bed, after a night spent at the
gaming table or elsewhere. An inexpressible pain at his heart caused the
jealous lover to hasten to the house.
"Monsieur de la Croix-Firmin?" he asked.
"The Count is not at home," replied the doorkeeper.
"But he made an appointment with me for half-past eleven, and I am
punctual," said Hubert, drawing out his watch; "has he long gone out?"
"No, sir; you ought to have met him. The Count was here five minutes
ago; he cannot have turned the corner."
Hubert had learnt what he wanted. He hurried in the direction of the
place where he had passed La Croix-Firmin, and, after a few paces he saw
him again, about to follow the footpath of the Avenue towards the Arc de
Triomphe. It was he, then! Hubert followed him slowly at a little
distance, and watched him with a sort of devouring anguish. He saw him
walking daintily along, with a litheness that was at once refined and
strong. He remembered what had taken place at Trouville, and every one
of La Croix-Firmin's movements revived the physical vision.
Hubert compared himself mentally, frail and slight as he was, with the
sturdy, haughty fellow, who, half a head taller than himself, was thus
passing along beneath the beautiful sky of this winter's morning, with a
step which spoke the certainty of strength, and holding his stick by the
middle, in the English fashion, at some distance from his body. The
comparison sufficiently explained the determining cause of Theresa's
fault, and for the first time the young man perceived those deadly
causes in their genuine brutishness. "Ah! the why! The why! There it
is!" he thought, as, with painful envy, he observed this man's animal
energy. His first emotion was too bitter for him, and the unhappy fellow
was about to give up his pursuit when he saw La Croix-Firmin get into a
cab. He hailed one himself.
"Follow that vehicle," he said to the driver.
The thought that his enemy was going to see Theresa had just restored
all Hubert's frenzy. From time to time he leaned out of the window of
his four-wheeler, and could see the one which conveyed his rival driving
along. This cab, which was of a yellow colour, went down the Champs
Elysées, passed along the Rue Royale, entered the Rue Saint Honoré,
and then stopped in front of the Café-Voisin. La Croix-Firmin was
merely going out to breakfast. Hubert could not repress a smile at the
pitiful result of his curiosity. Mechanically he also entered the café.
The young Count was already seated at a table with two friends, who had
been waiting for him.
At the other extremity of the hall there was a single table unoccupied,
at which Hubert placed himself. From here he was able, not, indeed, to
hear the conversation of the three guests--the noise in the restaurant
was too loud for that--but to study the physiognomy of the man whom he
detested. He ordered his own meal at random, and sank into a kind of
analysis known to those observers from taste or by profession, who will
enter a theatre, a smoking-room, or a railway carriage with the sole
desire of observing the workings of human physiology, and of tracing the
instinctive manifestations of temperament in gesture, look, sound of
breathing, or posture. It sometimes happened, indeed, that a raising of
the voice would cause a fragmentary sentence to reach Hubert; but he
paid no heed to it, sunk as he was in the contemplation of the man
himself, whom he saw almost in front of him, with his bold eyes, his
rather short neck, and his strong jaws.
When La Croix-Firmin had entered, his complexion had looked worn and
pimply; but when breakfast was half over the work of digestion began to
send an influx of blood into his face. He ate much and steadily, with
potent slowness. He laughed loudly. His hands, holding his knife and
fork, were strong, and displayed two rings. His forehead, which was
shown in all its narrowness by his short curls, could never have been
lit up by a flame of thought. All this formed a whole which, even in
Hubert's hostile eyes, was not devoid of a manly, healthy beauty; but it
was the brutish beauty of a being of flesh and blood, as to whom it was
impossible for a person of refinement to entertain an illusion for an
hour. To say of a woman that she had given herself to this man was to
say that she had yielded to an instinct of a wholly physical order.
The more Hubert identified himself by observation with this temperament,
the clearer did this become to him. He was interpreting Theresa's nature
better at this moment than he had ever done before. He grasped its
ambiguousness with frightful certainty, and it was then that there rose
up within him the saddest, but at the same time the noblest, feeling
that he had entertained since his accident, the only one truly worthy of
what his soul had formerly been, that one which, in the presence of
woman's perfidy, is man's preservation from complete ruin of
heart:--pity.
An emotion of infinite bitterness and melancholy combined came upon him
at the thought that the charming creature whom he had known, his dear
silent one, as he used to call her, she who had shown herself possessed
of such delicate refinement in the art of pleasing him, should have
surrendered herself to the caresses of this man.
He suddenly recollected the tears of the night at Folkestone, and the
tears, also, at their last interview; and, as though he had at last
understood their meaning, he could find within him but a single
utterance, which he whispered there in the restaurant filled with the
smoke of cigars, then beneath the leafless trees of the Tuileries, then
in the solitude of his own room in the Rue Vaneau--a single utterance,
but one filled with the perception of the degrading fatalities of his
life:
"What misery! My God, what misery!"