CLAUDE'S LOVE
I cannot stop, I cannot lie to myself. I had resolved to hide my
misfortune from myself, to seem ignorant of my wound, hoping to forget.
One sometimes kills death in its germ when one believes in life.
I suffer and weep. Without doubt, by searching within myself I will find
a lamentable certainty, but I prefer to know everything to living thus,
affecting a carelessness which costs me such great effort.
I wish to ascertain to what point of despair I have descended; I wish to
open my heart and there read the truth; I wish to penetrate to the
utmost depths of my being, to interrogate it and to demand from it an
account of itself. At least, I ought to discover how it happens that I
have fallen so low; I have the right to probe my wound, at the risk of
torturing myself and ascertaining that I must die of it.
If, in this disagreeable task, I should make my wound greater than it
is, if my love should increase by affirming itself, I will accept this
augmented pain with joy, for the brutal truth is necessary to those who
walk unshackled in life, obeying only their instincts.
I love Laurence, and I exact from my heart the explanation of this love.
I did not fall in love with her at first sight, as men fall in love with
women in romances. I have felt myself attracted little by little,
melted, so to speak, gnawed and covered gradually by the horrible
affliction. Now, I am altogether under its influence; there is not a
single fibre of my flesh which does not belong to Laurence.
A month ago I was free; I kept Laurence beside me as one keeps an object
which one cannot cast into the street. At present, she has bound me to
her; I watch over her, I gaze at her when she is wrapped in slumber; I
do not wish her to leave me.
All this was decreed by fate, and I think I can comprehend how love for
this woman entered into me, took slow possession of my entire being.
Amid suffering and abandonment, one cannot live with impunity beside a
woman who suffers as one does, who is abandoned as one is. Tears have
their sympathy, hunger is fraternal; those who are dying together, with
empty stomachs, warmly grasp each other's hands.
I have remained five weeks in this sad and cold chamber, always in
Laurence's company. I saw only her in the whole world; she was for me
the universe, life, affection. From morning till night, I had before my
eyes the face of this woman upon which I imagined I sometimes surprised
a rapid flash of friendship. As for me, I was wretched and weak; I lived
wrapped in my coverlet, an exile from society, not even possessing the
power to go to seek my portion of the sunlight. I no longer had the
smallest hope of anything; I had limited my existence to these four dark
walls, to that corner of the sky which I saw between the chimney tops; I
had fastened myself up in my dungeon, I had there imprisoned my
thoughts, my wishes. I know not if you can thoroughly understand this:
if you are some day without a shirt, you will realize that man can
create a world, vast and full of living beings, from the bed upon which
he is stretched.
I was in that condition when I met a woman as I went from the window to
the door, enveloped in my coverlet. Laurence, seated in her chair, saw
me walking about for hours together. Each time I trudged back and forth,
I passed before her and found her eyes tranquilly following me. I felt
her glance fasten itself upon me, and I was solaced in my weariness. I
cannot tell what intense and strange consolation I derived from knowing
myself regarded by a living creature, by a woman. It is from the period
of these glances that my love must date. I perceived for the first time
that I was not alone; I felt a profound satisfaction in discovering a
human creature near me.
This creature was, without doubt, at first only a friend. I finally sat
down beside her, talked, and wept without concealing my tears. Laurence,
whom my sad situation and extreme poverty must have filled with pity,
answered me, wiped away my tears. She also was weary of thus dying by
inches; the silence and cold had at last begun to be tiresome to her.
Her words seemed to me more refined, her gestures more caressing than
usual; she had almost become a woman again.
At this point, brothers, I was suddenly invaded by love. My sphere of
life was growing narrower each day. The earth was fleeing from me;
Paris, France, yourselves, my thoughts and my acquaintances, all were no
more. Laurence represented in my eyes God and mankind, humanity and the
Divinity; the chamber in which she was had acquired a horizon out of all
proportion. I felt myself beyond the world, almost in the embrace of
death; I no longer thought that I might one day descend into the street,
the noise of which mounted to my ears, and I had so little comprehension
that I was alive that the thought had come to me to live without eating.
It seemed to me that Laurence and I were in another part of the
celestial system, lost, separated from the living, transported to some
unknown corner beyond time and space. We could not have been more alone
in the midst of the infinite.
One evening, as twilight came on, filling the chamber with a transparent
gloom, I was walking slowly about, still going from the door to the
window. In the growing obscurity, I saw Laurence's pale face, standing
out from amid her dishevelled black hair; her sombre eyes had a vague
brightness, and she looked at me thus, steadily, beautiful in her
sufferings. I stopped in my weary walk and contemplated her. I knew not
what had taken place within me; my flesh was shaken, my heart was open
and I trembled like a leaf in every limb. All of a quiver, I ran to
Laurence and clasped her in my arms. I loved her.
I loved Laurence with all the strength of my abandonment and poverty. I
was suffering from hunger and cold, I was clad in a rag of wool, I felt
myself forsaken by everybody, and yet I had a sweetheart to fold to my
bosom, to love with the love of desperation! In the depths of infamy, I
had found the sweetheart who was waiting for me. Now, in the gulf, far
removed from the light, we were alone to embrace, to clasp each other,
like children who are afraid and who reassure themselves by hiding their
heads on each other's shoulders. What silence was around us, and what
gloom! How sweet it is to love in solitude, amid those deserts of
despair whither all sounds of life have ceased to penetrate! I plunged
to the depths of this supreme felicity; I loved Laurence with the
caressing delight with which the dying man must love the existence which
is escaping from him.
I passed a week in a sort of dolorous ecstasy. I was tempted to stop up
the window, that we might live in the midst of darkness for the balance
of our lives; I wished to shut out the entire world and all it
contained; I wished that the garret were very much smaller, so small, in
fact, that no intruder could ever get into it to remind us that we were
mortal like the rest of mankind and womankind. I did not think myself
sufficiently miserable; I wanted more wretchedness, an excess of
affliction of the most biting and terrible description; I desired the
advent of some frightful misfortune that should strip me of all that
want had left, that should tear from me every remaining comfort and
leave Laurence and myself to live without having to thank this earth for
anything whatever! I sighed for perfect independence and complete
isolation. Then, my days would sweep by, each in its turn plunging me
deeper into my love and my poverty. I was enraptured with cold and
hunger, with the dirty mansarde, with the stains upon the walls and the
furniture. I was enraptured with the blue silk dress, that lamentable
assemblage of soiled tatters. My heart almost burst with pity when I saw
Laurence standing before me, with this rag upon her back; I asked myself
with the utmost anxiety by what kiss, by what superhuman kindness, I
could clearly and unmistakably prove to her that I adored her in her
poverty. As for me, I was happy in possessing only my coverlet: I would
be colder, I would suffer more. I recall those first days like some
strange, bewildering dream; I see the mansarde more in disorder,
gloomier than ever, I breathe the thick and suffocating atmosphere which
the window did not renew; I see Laurence and myself, like shadowy
ghosts, walking about the miserable garret in our repulsive rags,
chatting lovingly together, living in ourselves.
Yes, I love her, I love her desperately. I interrogate myself, and my
palpitating heart narrates to me the horrible story, telling me how it
came about. I have enlarged my wound; now that I have searched within
myself, now that I know the reason and the depth of my love, I feel that
I have more fever, that I have become mad and reckless.
A short time ago, I was shocked at the very thought of loving Laurence.
My pride is dead, for I am shocked no longer. I have descended to
Laurence's level; I understand her perfectly now, and do not wish her to
be other than she is. I take a savage joy in saying to myself that I am
now at the very bottom of the social scale, that I am satisfied there,
and that there I will remain. I appreciate Laurence the more because of
the gay and careless life she led in the past. There is, I know,
despair, a sort of bitter irony, in my love; I have the intoxication of
evil, the delirium of abandonment and hunger; I give myself up to the
existence which has suddenly welcomed me, in order to insult the light
on which my soul dotes and to which I cannot ascend.
Did I not at one time speak of redemption? I wished to reform Laurence,
to lead her into better ways, to make her good and useful. What an
insane idea! It was much easier for me to become unworthy. To-day, we
love each other. Poverty betrothed us, agony married us. I love Laurence
in all her ugliness and wretchedness, I love Laurence in her blue silk
rag, in her rough degradation. I do not wish another sort of a Laurence,
I do not wish a spotless innocent with a white soul and rosy
countenance.
I do not know what are my companion's thoughts, I do not know whether my
kisses delight or fatigue her. She is paler and graver than of old. With
closed lips, staring eyes and expressionless face, she returns my
caresses with a sort of repressed strength. Sometimes, she seems weary,
as if she were discouraged at searching for something which she could
not find; but soon she appears to resume her task and search anew,
looking me in the face, her hands upon my shoulders. Besides, she has
still the same weary appearance, the same dull soul; she sleeps
constantly with her eyes open, and awakes with a start when I place my
lips upon hers. When I told her of my love, she showed considerable
astonishment, then, for two weeks, she lived a younger and more active
life; a few days ago, she fell back into her eternal sleep.
But what difference does this make to me? I do not as yet feel that I
need Laurence to love me. I am at that point of supreme selfishness
which, in love, is satisfied with its own tenderness. I love and desire
nothing more; I forget myself in the society of this woman and ask no
other consolation.