THE PRIMROSE PATH
After her return to Paris, for six weeks Therese lived in the ardent half
sleep of happiness, and prolonged delightfully her thoughtless dream.
She went to see Jacques every day in the little house shaded by a tree;
and when they had at last parted at night, she took away with her adored
reminiscences. They had the same tastes; they yielded to the same
fantasies. The same capricious thoughts carried them away. They found
pleasure in running to the suburbs that border the city, the streets
where the wine-shops are shaded by acacia, the stony roads where the
grass grows at the foot of walls, the little woods and the fields over
which extended the blue sky striped by the smoke of manufactories. She
was happy to feel him near her in this region where she did not know
herself, and where she gave to herself the illusion of being lost with
him.
One day they had taken the boat that she had seen pass so often under her
windows. She was not afraid of being recognized. Her danger was not
great, and, since she was in love, she had lost prudence. They saw
shores which little by little grew gay, escaping the dusty aridity of the
suburbs; they went by islands with bouquets of trees shading taverns,
and innumerable boats tied under willows. They debarked at Bas-Meudon.
As she said she was warm and thirsty, he made her enter a wine-shop.
It was a building with wooden galleries, which solitude made to appear
larger, and which slept in rustic peace, waiting for Sunday to fill it
with the laughter of girls, the cries of boatmen, the odor of fried fish,
and the smoke of stews.
They went up the creaking stairway, shaped like a ladder, and in a first-
story room a maid servant brought wine and biscuits to them. On the
mantelpiece, at one of the corners of the room, was an oval mirror in a
flower-covered frame. Through the open window one saw the Seine, its
green shores, and the hills in the distance bathed with warm air. The
trembling peace of a summer evening filled the sky, the earth, and the
water.
Therese looked at the running river. The boat passed on the water, and
when the wake which it left reached the shore it seemed as if the house
rocked like a vessel.
"I like the water," said Therese. "How happy I am!"
Their lips met.
Lost in the enchanted despair of love, time was not marked for them
except by the cool plash of the water, which at intervals broke under the
half-open window. To the caressing praise of her lover she replied:
"It is true I was made for love. I love myself because you love me."
Certainly, he loved her; and it was not possible for him to explain to
himself why he loved her with ardent piety, with a sort of sacred fury.
It was not because of her beauty, although it was rare and infinitely
precious. She had exquisite lines, but lines follow movement, and escape
incessantly; they are lost and found again; they cause aesthetic joys and
despair. A beautiful line is the lightning which deliciously wounds the
eyes. One admires and one is surprised. What makes one love is a soft
and terrible force, more powerful than beauty. One finds one woman among
a thousand whom one wants always. Therese was that woman whom one can
not leave or betray.
She exclaimed, joyfully:
"I never shall be forsaken?"
She asked why he did not make her bust, since he thought her beautiful.
"Why? Because I am an ordinary sculptor, and I know it; which is not the
faculty of an ordinary mind. But if you wish to think that I am a great
artist, I will give you other reasons. To create a figure that will
live, one must take the model like common material from which one will
extract the beauty, press it, crush it, and obtain its essence. There is
nothing in you that is not precious to me. If I made your bust I should
be servilely attached to these things which are everything to me because
they are something of you. I should stubbornly attach myself to the
details, and should not succeed in composing a finished figure."
She looked at him astonished.
He continued:
"From memory I might. I tried a pencil sketch." As she wished to see
it, he showed it to her. It was on an album leaf, a very simple sketch.
She did not recognize herself in it, and thought he had represented her
with a kind of soul that she did not have.
"Ah, is that the way in which you see me? Is that the way in which you
love me?"
He closed the album.
"No; this is only a note. But I think the note is just. It is probable
you do not see yourself exactly as I see you. Every human creature is a
different being for every one that looks at it."
He added, with a sort of gayety:
"In that sense one may say one woman never belonged to two men. That is
one of Paul Vence's ideas."
"I think it is true," said Therese.
It was seven o'clock. She said she must go. Every day she returned home
later. Her husband had noticed it. He had said: "We are the last to
arrive at all the dinners; there is a fatality about it!" But, detained
every day in the Chamber of Deputies, where the budget was being
discussed, and absorbed by the work of a subcommittee of which he was the
chairman, state reasons excused Therese's lack of punctuality. She
recalled smilingly a night when she had arrived at Madame Garain's at
half-past eight. She had feared to cause a scandal. But it was a day of
great affairs. Her husband came from the Chamber at nine o'clock only,
with Garain. They dined in morning dress. They had saved the Ministry.
Then she fell into a dream.
"When the Chamber shall be adjourned, my friend, I shall not have a
pretext to remain in Paris. My father does not understand my devotion to
my husband which makes me stay in Paris. In a week I shall have to go to
Dinard. What will become of me without you?"
She clasped her hands and looked at him with a sadness infinitely tender.
But he, more sombre, said:
"It is I, Therese, it is I who must ask anxiously, What will become of me
without you? When you leave me alone I am assailed by painful thoughts;
black ideas come and sit in a circle around me."
She asked him what those ideas were.
He replied:
"My beloved, I have already told you: I have to forget you with you.
When you are gone, your memory will torment me. I have to pay for the
happiness you give me."