Guy de Lissac occupied a small summer-house forming a residence situated
at the end of a court on Rue D'Aumale. He had given carte-blanche for
the arrangement of this bachelor's nest,--a nest in which sitting-hens
without eggs succeeded each other rapidly,--to one of those upholsterers
who installed, in regulation style, the knickknacks so much in vogue,
and who sell at very high prices to Bourse operators and courtesans the
spurious Clodions and imitation Boulles that they pick up by chance at
auction sales.
Lissac, who had sufficient taste to discover artistic nuggets in the
gutters of Paris, had found it very convenient to wake up one fine
morning in a little mansion crowded with Japanese bric-à-brac, Chinese
satin draperies, tapestries, Renaissance chests and terra-cotta figures
writhing upon their sculptured bases. The upholsterer had taste, Lissac
had money. The knickknacks were genuine. There was a coquettish
attractiveness about the abode that made itself evident in every detail.
This bachelor's suite lacked, however, something personal, something
living, some cherished object, the mark of some particular taste, some
passion for a period, for a thing, or pictures or books. In this jumble
of ill-matched curiosities, where ivory _netzkés_ on tables surrounded
Barye bronzes and Dresden figures, there lacked some evidence of an
individual character that would give a dominant tone, an original key,
to the collection. This worldly dwelling, with its white lacquered bed
and Louis XV. canopy and its heads of birds carved in wood like the
queen's bed at Trianon, vaguely resembled the apartments of a
fashionable woman.
But Guy had hung around here and there a Samouraï sabre, Malay krises,
Oriental daggers in purple velvet sheaths, and upon the green tapestry
background of the antechamber a panoply on which keen-bladed swords with
steel guards were mingled with Scotch claymores with silver hilts, thus
giving a masculine character to this hôtel of a fashionable lounger,
steeped with the odor of ylang-ylang like the little house of a pretty
courtesan.
This Guy enjoyed in Paris a free and easy life, leaving to Vaudrey, his
old college-comrade at Grenoble, the pursuit of the pleasures of
political life, and, as Lissac said in that bantering tone which is
peculiar to Parisian gossip, the relish of the "sweets of power"; for
himself, what kept him in Paris was Paris itself, just that and nothing
more:--its pleasures, its first nights, its surprises, its women, that
flavor of scandal and perfume of refined immorality that seemed peculiar
to his time and surroundings.
He had squandered two fortunes, one after the other, without feeling any
regret; he had made a brush at journalism, tried finance, won at the
Bourse, lost at the clubs, knew everybody and was known by all, had a
smiling lip, was sound of tooth, loved the girls, was dreaded by the
men, was of fine appearance, and was unquestionably noble, which
permitted him to enjoy all the frolics of Bohemian life without sullying
himself, having always discovered a forgotten uncle or met some
considerate friend to pay his gambling debts and adjust his differences
on the Bourse speculations at the very nick of time; just now he was
well in the saddle and decidedly attractive, with a sound heart and a
well-lined pocket, enjoying, not disliking life, which seemed to him a
term of imprisonment to be passed merrily--a Parisian to the finger-tips
and to the bottom of his soul, worse than a Parisian in fact, a
Parisianized provincial inoculated with _Parisine_, just as certain sick
persons are with morphine, judging men by their wit, actions by their
results, women by the size of their gloves; as sceptical as the devil,
wicked in speech and considerate in thought, still agile at forty,
claiming even that this is man's best time--the period of fortune and
gallantry--sliding along in life and taking things as he found them,
wisely considering that a day's snow or rain lasts no longer than a
day's sunshine, and that, after all, a wretched night is soon over.
On leaving Vaudrey the previous night, Lissac had passed part of the
night at his club on Place Vendôme. He had played and won. He had gone
to sleep over a fashionable novel, very faithfully written, but
wearisome in the extreme, and he had awakened late and somewhat
heavy-headed. There were fringes of snow upon the window-sills and upon
the house facing his little mansion. The roofs were hidden under a large
white sheet and half lost in the grayish-white background of the sky.
"Detestable weather! So much the better," thought Lissac, "I shall have
no visitors."
"I will see no one," he said to his servant. "In such weather no one but
borrowers will come."
He had just finished his déjeuner, plunging a Russian enamelled silver
spoon into his egg, his tea smoking at his side in a burnished silver
teapot with Japanese designs, when, notwithstanding his orders, the
servant handed him a card written in pencil on a scrap of paper torn
from a note-book.
"It is not a borrower, monsieur!"
Guy seized the paper disdainfully, thinking, in spite of the servant's
opinion, that he would find the name of a beggar who had not even had
his name printed on a piece of Bristol-board, and, adjusting his glass,
he deciphered the fine writing on the paper; then after involuntarily
exclaiming: _Ah! bah_! and _well! well!_ greatly astonished, he said as
he rose:
"Show her in!"
He had thrown on a chair his damask napkin of Muscovite pattern, and
instinctively glanced at himself in the mirror, just as a coquette might
do before a rendezvous, smoothing out his flannel vest and spreading out
his cravat that only half-fastened the blue foulard collar of his
dressing-gown.
At the moment that he was examining the folds made on his red leather
slippers by his ample flannel trousers, a woman half-raised the satin
portière, and, standing within a frame formed by the folds of yellow
satin, looked at the young man, displaying her brilliant teeth as she
smilingly said:
"Good-morning, Guy!"
Lissac went straight toward her with outstretched hands.
She allowed the large satin portière to fall behind her, and after
having permitted her little suède gloved hands to be raised for a
moment, she boldly abandoned them to Guy, laughing the while, as they
looked at each other face to face. He betrayed some little astonishment,
gazing at her as a person examines one whom one has not seen for a long
time, and the young woman raised her head unabashed, displaying her
features in full light, as if submitting to an inspection with
confidence.
"You did not expect me, eh?"
"I confess--"
"Doubtless it is a considerable time since you thought of me."
Guy was inclined to bow and, as his only reply, to kiss the tips of her
fingers; but he reflected that, since they last met, the parting of his
brown locks had been devilishly widened, and he remained standing,
answering with the conceit of a handsome man:
"You are mistaken, I often think of you."
She had, with, a sweeping glance around the room, examined the furniture
of the apartment, the framed pictures, the designs and the gilding, and,
on sitting down near the fire with her little feet crossed, she
expressed her opinion:
"Very stylishly ensconced! You always had good taste, I know, my dear
Guy."
"I have less now than formerly, my dear Marianne," he said, giving to
this airy remark the turn of a compliment.
Marianne shrugged her shoulders and smiled.
"Do you find me very much altered?" she asked abruptly.
"Yes, rejuvenated."
"I don't believe a word of it."
"Upon my honor. You look like a communicant."
"Good heavens! what kind?" said Marianne, laughing in a clear, ringing,
but slightly convulsive tone.
He was still looking at her curiously, seated thus near the fireplace.
The bright and sparkling fire cast its reflections on the gold frames in
waving and rosy tints that brightened the somewhat pale complexion of
this young woman and imparted a warm tone to her small and brilliant
gray eyes. She half turned her fair face toward him, her retroussé nose
was tiny, spirituelle and mobile, her large sensuous mouth was provoking
and seductive, and suggested by its upturned corners, encouragement or a
challenge.
She had allowed her cloak, whose fur trimming was well-worn, to slip
from her shoulders, exposing her form to the waist; she trembled
slightly in her tight-fitting dress, and golden tints played on her bare
neck, which was almost hidden under the waves of her copper-colored
hair.
She had just taken off her suède gloves with a jerky movement and was
abstractedly twisting them between her fingers.
In spite of the somewhat depressing effect of her worn garments, she
displayed a natural elegance, a perfect form and graceful movements, and
Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition
of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he
had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a
life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now
burned out like an exploded rocket.
Marianne Kayser!
Of all the women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most
sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad.
She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of
restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too
rebellious to accept the humiliations of destiny.
She was an orphan, and had been brought up by her uncle, Simon Kayser, a
serious painter, indifferent to all that did not concern his art,--its
morality, its dignity, its superiority--who had, under cover of his own
ignorance, allowed the ardent dreams of his niece and her wayward fits
to develop freely like poisonous plants; near this man, in the vicious
atmosphere of an old bachelor's disorderly household, Marianne had lived
the bitter life of a young woman out of her element, poor, but with
every instinct unswervingly leaning towards the enjoyments of luxury.
She had grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and,
as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she
served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed
her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the
child lighted his stove and filled his pipe.
The studio was littered with books. As chance offered, she read them all
eagerly and examined with curiosity the pictures drawn by an Eisen or a
Moreau, depicting passionate kisses exchanged under arbors, where
behind curtains, short silk skirts appeared in a rumpled state. She had
rapidly reached womanhood without Kayser's perceiving that she could
comprehend and judge for herself.
This falsely inspired man, entirely devoted to mystical compositions,
vaguely painted--philosophical and critical, as he said--this thinker,
whose brush painted obscure subjects as it might have produced signs,
did not dream that the girl growing up beside him was also in love with
chimeras, and drawn toward the abyss, not however to learn the mysteries
hidden by the clouds, but the mystery of life, the secret of the visions
that haunted her, of the disquieting temptations that filled her with
such feverish excitement.
If Uncle Kayser could for one moment have descended from the nebulous
regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor
in the depth of Marianne's glance, and something feverish and restless
in her movements. But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his
rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, æsthetic dignity,
and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission
for it, an end, an idea--_art the educator, art the moralizer_,--and
allowed this feverish, wearied, impulsive creature, moulded by vice, who
bore his name, to wander around his studio like a stray dog.
Isolated, forgotten, the young girl sometimes passed whole days bending
over a book, her lips dry, her face pale, but with a burning light in
her gray eyes, while her fingers were thrust through her hair, or she
rested upon a window-sill, following afar off, some imaginary picture in
the depths of the clouds.
The studio overlooked a silent, gloomy street in which no sound was
heard save the slow footfalls of weary and exhausted pedestrians. It was
stifling behind this window and Marianne's gloomy horizon was this frame
of stones against which her wandering thoughts bruised themselves as a
bird might break its wings.
Ah! to fly away, to escape from the solemn egotism and the theories of
Simon Kayser, and to live the passionate life of those who are free,
loved, rich and happy! Such was the dream upon which Marianne nourished
herself.
She had perpetually before her eyes, as well as before her life, the
gray wall of that high house opposite the painter's studio, pierced with
its many eyes, and whether on summer's stifling evenings, the shutters
closed--the whole street being deserted, the neighbors having gone into
the country--or in winter, with its gray sky, the roofs covered with the
snow that was stained all too soon, when the brilliant lights behind the
curtains looked like red spots on the varnished paper, Marianne ever
felt in her inmost being the bitter void of Parisian melancholy, the
overwhelming sadness of black loneliness, of hollow dreams, gnawing like
incurable sorrows.
She grew up thus, her mind and body poisoned by this dwelling which she
never left except to drag her feet wearily through the galleries of the
Louvre, leaning on the arm of her uncle, who invariably repeated before
the same pictures, in the loud and bombastic tone of a _comediante_, the
same opinions, and grew enthusiastic and excited according as the
pictures of the masters agreed with his _style_, his _system_, his
_creed_. One should hear him run the gamut of all his great phrases: My
_sys-tem!_ Marianne knew when the expression was coming. All these
Flemish painters! Painters of snuff-boxes, without any ideal, without
grasp! "And the Titian, look at this Titian! Where is _thought_
expressed in this Titian? And _mo-ral-i-ty?_ Titian! A vendor of pink
flesh! Art should have a majesty, a dignity, a purity, an ideality very
different."
Ah! these words in _ty_, solemn, bombastic, pedantic, with a false ring,
they entered Marianne's ears like burning injections.
These visits to the museum impressed her with a gloom such as a ramble
in a cemetery would create, she returned to the house with depressing
headaches and muttering wrathful imprecations against destiny. She even
preferred that studio with its worn-out divans and its worm-eaten
tapestries that were slowly shredding away.
There, at least, she was all alone, face to face with herself, consumed
by a cowardly fear--the fear of the future--this young girl who had read
everything, learned everything, understood everything, knew everything,
sullied by all the jokes of the Kayser studio, which, in spite of the
exalted, sacrosanct, æsthetic discussions which took place therein,
sometimes shockingly resembled a smoking-room--this physical virgin
without any virginity of mind, could there take refuge in herself, and
there in the solitude to which she was condemned, she questioned herself
as to the end to which her present life would lead her.
Of dowry she had none. Her father had left her nothing. Kayser was poor
and in debt. She had no occupation. To run about giving private lessons
on the piano, seemed to Marianne to degrade her almost to the level of
domestic service. Those who wished to pose for the Montyon prize might
do so! She never would!
Ah! what sufferings! what would be the end of such a life? Marriage? But
who desired her? One of those talentless painters, who ventilated at
Kayser's house, not merely their contemptuous theories, but also their
down-at-the-heel shoes? To fall from one Bohemian condition to another,
from exigency to want, to be the wife of one of these greasy-haired
dreamers? Her whole nature shuddered in revolt at this idea. Through the
open window, the tepid breath of nature wafted toward her the odor of
the rising sap in gentle, warm whiffs that filled her with a feverish
astonishment. Stretched on the patched divan, her eyes closed and her
lovely form kissed by the tepid breeze, she dreamed, dreamed, dreamed--
The awakening was folly, a rash act, an elopement.
In the house on Rue de Navarin there happened to be one fellow more
daring than the rest, he was an artist who, in the jostling daily life,
kindled his love at the strange flame that burned in the lustful
virgin's eyes. A glance revealed all.
The meeting with a rake determined the life of this girl. She fell, not
through ignorance or curiosity, but moved by anger and, as it were, out
of bravado. Since she was without social position, motherless and
isolated, having no family, without a prop and unloved, well, she threw
off the yoke absolutely. She broke through her shackles at one bound.
She rebelled!--
She eloped with this man.
He was a handsome fellow, who thirsted for pleasure, and took his prize
boldly about, plunging Marianne into the ranks of vulgar mistresses, and
had not the mad woman's superior intelligence, will, and even her
disgust, ruled at once over this first lover and the equivocal
surroundings into which he had thrust her, she would have become a mere
courtesan.
Kayser had experienced only astonishment at the flight of his niece. How
was it that he had never suspected the cause that disturbed her
thoughts? "These diabolical women, nobody knows them, not even those who
made them. A father even would not have detected anything. The more
excuse therefore for an uncle!" So he resumed his musing on elevated
art, quieting his displeasure--for his comrades jeered him--by the
fumes of his pipe.
Moreover, all things considered, the painter added, Marianne had
followed the natural law. Full liberty for everybody, was still one of
Simon Kayser's pet theories. Marianne was of age and could dispose of
her lot without the necessity of submitting to a strict endorsement of
her conduct. When she had "sounded all the depths of the abyss,"--and
Kayser pronounced these words while puffing his tobacco--she would
return. Uncle Kayser would always keep a place for her at what he called
_his fireside_.
"The fireside of your pipe," Marianne once remarked to him.
So Kayser consoled himself for this escapade by the sacredness of art,
the only sacredness he recognized. On that indeed he yielded nothing.
What mattered it to the world, if a girl went astray, even if that girl
were his niece? Public morality was not hurt thereby. Ah! if he, Kayser,
had exhibited to the world a lewd picture, it would have been "a horse
of a different color"! The dignity, seriousness, purity of art, that was
right enough!--But a woman! Pshaw! a woman!--Nor was he heard once to
express any uneasiness as to what might become of Marianne.
In the course of her perilous career, which, however, was not that of a
courtesan, but that of a freed woman avenging herself, Marianne had met
Guy de Lissac and loved him as completely as her nature allowed her to
love. Guy entertained her. With him she talked over everything, she gave
herself up to him, and made plans for the future. Why should they ever
separate? They adored each other. Guy was rich, or at any rate he lived
sumptuously. Marianne was a lovely mistress, clever, in fact, ten women
in one. Guy became madly attached to her and he felt himself drawn
closer to her day by day. She often repeated with perfect sincerity that
she had never loved any one before.
The first lover, then? She did not even know his name now!
There was no reason why they should not live together for ever, a life
of mutual joy and happiness, led by the same fancies, stirred by the
same desires. Why ever leave each other, even once? But it was just this
that induced Guy to abandon this pretty girl. He was afraid. He saw no
end to such a union as theirs. The little love-affair that enticed him
assumed another name: _The Chain_. He sometimes debated with himself
seriously about marrying this Marianne, whose adventures he knew, but
who so intoxicated him that he forgot all the past.
Uncle Kayser, entirely engrossed in the "dignity of art," and occupied
with the composition of an allegorical production entitled _The Modern
Family_,--a page of pure, mystic, social, regenerative art,--had
certainly forgotten his niece; nevertheless, Lissac at times felt
somewhat tempted to restore her to him. He was grieved at the thought
of abandoning Marianne to another. His dread of marriage triumphed over
his jealousy. One fine day, Guy suddenly brought about a separation.
Feeling ill, he took to his bed, when one morning Marianne came to him
and said in passionate tones:
"Now I will never leave you again! You are in danger, and I am here to
save you!"
Guy now felt himself lost. His rapid perception, whose operation was as
sudden as a blow of the fist, warned him that if he allowed this woman
to install herself in his house, he might say good-by to liberty, and
probably also to his life. This Parisian had laid down as a principle,
that a man should always be _unfettered_. He held in horror this
shameful half-marriage that the language of slang had baptized, as with
a stain: _Collage_. He therefore decided to play his life against his
liberty, and during the temporary absence of this nurse established at
his bedside, he packed his clothes in his trunk at random, shivering as
he was with fever, threw himself into a hack, and, with chattering teeth
and a morbid shudder creeping over his entire body, had himself driven
to the railroad station and departed for Italy.
Marianne was heartbroken anew at this unexpected departure. A hope had
vanished. She loved Guy very sincerely, and she vainly hoped that she
would hold him. He fled from her! Whither had he gone? For a moment,
she was tempted to rejoin him when she received his letters. She
surmised, however, that Guy, desiring to avoid her, caused his brief
notes to be sent by some friend from towns that he had left. To play
there the absurd part of a woman chasing her lover would have been
ridiculous. She remained, therefore, disgusted, heartbroken for a moment
like a widow in despair, then she retraced her steps to the Rue de
Navarin, and returned to the fold, where she found Uncle Kayser still
quite unruffled, with the almost finished picture of _The Modern
Family_.
"That is, I verily believe, the best I have done, the most moral," said
Kayser to her. "In art, morality before everything, my girl! Come, sit
down and tell me your little adventures."
It was five years--five whole years--since Lissac had seen Marianne.
Their passion had subsided little by little into friendship,--expressed
though by letters. Marianne wrote, Guy replied. All the bitter reproofs
had been exchanged through the post, yet, in spite of this
correspondence, neither had sought the opportunity nor felt the desire
to meet. The fancy was dead! Nevertheless, they had loved each other
well!
Suddenly, without overtures, on this bitingly cold morning, Marianne
arrived, half shivering, in the new apartment, warmed her tiny feet at
the fire and raised to him the rosy tip of her cold nose.
Guy was somewhat surprised.
He looked with a curiosity not unmixed with pain at that woman whom he
had loved truly enough to suffer love's pangs,--the innocents say to die
of it. He tried to find again in the depths of those gray eyes,
sparkling and malicious, the old burning passion, extinguished without
leaving even a fragment of its embers. To think that he had risked his
life for that woman; that he should have sacrificed his name; that he
should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he
should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he
had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and
forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love
of this blasé Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again
looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had
flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had
agreeably affected him.
Marianne evidently understood what was passing in Guy's mind. She smiled
strangely. Buried in the armchair, whose back supported her own, and
half-bending her fair neck that reclined on the lace-covered head-rest,
she looked at Lissac fixedly with an odd expression, the sidelong glance
of a woman, that seems to be her keenest scrutiny.
Through her half-closed lashes he seemed to feel that a malicious glance
embraced him. The mobile nostrils of her delicate nose dilated with a
nervous trembling that intensified the mocking smile betrayed by her
curling lips. Her hands were resting upon her plump arms, and with a
trembling motion of the fingers beat a feverish little march as if she
were playing a scale on a keyboard.
Guy sought to evoke from the well-set, gracefully reclining form, from
the half-sly and half-concealed glance, from the palpitating nostrils,
something that reminded him of his former ecstasies. Again he saw,
shadowed by the chin, that part of her neck where he loved to bury his
brow and to rest his lips, greedily, lingeringly, as when one sips a
liqueur. A strange emotion seized him. All that had not yet been
gratified of his shattered, but not wholly destroyed love, surged within
him.
Were it fancy or reminiscence, beside this woman he still felt as of
old, a feeling that oppressed his heart and caused him that delightful
sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection
with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet
odor floated around Marianne, reminding Lissac of the intoxicating
perfume of vanished days, an irritating odor as of new-mown hay.
He said nothing, while she awaited his remarks with curiosity. Guy's
mute interrogation possibly embarrassed her, for she suddenly shook her
head and rose to her feet.
"May one smoke here?" she said, as she opened a Russia leather
cigarette-case bearing her monogram.
"What next?" said Guy, lighting a sponge steeped in alcohol that stood
in a silver holder and offering it to Marianne.
She quickly closed her fine teeth on the end of the paper cigarette that
she had rolled between her fingers and lighted it at the flame. The
gleam of the alcohol brightened her eyes and slightly flushed her pale
cheeks, which Guy regarded with strange feelings.
"Your invention is an odd one!" she said, as she returned him the little
sponge upon which a tongue of blue flame played.
He extinguished it, and abandoning himself to the disturbing charm of
reminiscences, watched Marianne who was already half-enveloped in a
light cloud of smoke.
"There is one thing you do not know," he said. "More than once--on my
honor--at the corner of the street, at some chance meeting, my old
Parisian heart has beaten wildly on seeing in some coquettish outline,
or in some fair hair falling loosely over an otter-skin cloak, or in
some fair, vanishing profile with a pearl set in the lobe of the ear,
something that resembled you. Those fur toques with little feathers that
everybody wears now, you wore before any one else, on your fair head.
Whenever I see one, I follow it. On my word, though, not for her. The
fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch
of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her
under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the
journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been
scattered. It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the
streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only one, Marianne,
who has felt the anguish and heart-fluttering that I have experienced.
Often have I found my eyes moist after such an experience; but if it
were winter, I attributed my tears simply to a cold. Tell me, Marianne,
was it really the cold that moistened my eyes?"
Marianne laughed.
"Come, but you are idyllic, my dear Guy," said she, looking at Lissac.
"Melancholy, nothing more."
"Let us say elegiac. Those little fits have come upon you rather late in
the day, have they not? A little valerian and quinine, made up into
silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy."
"You are making fun of me."
"No," she said. "But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection
of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot
along for such a distance behind plumed toques--it was so easy not to
take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a
creditor."
Guy could not refrain from smiling.
"Ah! it is because--I loved you too dearly!"
"I know that!" exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her
elegance, of an artist's model giving a pupil a retort. "A madrigal that
has not answered, no; does it rain?"
"I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?" said Lissac.
"Do not doubt it, my dear friend. It is always stupid to deprive one's
self of the woman who adores one. Such rarities are not common."
"You remember, dear Marianne," said Guy, "the day when you boldly wrote
upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly: 'To him I love
more than every one else in the world?'"
"Yes," said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward. "Such things as
that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity."
"And you were sincere?"
"On the faith of an honest man," she answered laughingly.
"And yet I have been assured since that time, that you adored another
before that one."
"It is possible," said Marianne with sudden bitterness; "but, in the
life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been
more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have
derived."
In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke
of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and
hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.
Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and
unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of
the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to
enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger
who had come there to tempt him. In her languishing and, as it were,
abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming
in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely
clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost
mistress, the forgotten one, assumed in his eyes the relish of a caprice
and an adventure. And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of
their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and
awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a passion formerly suddenly
severed.
He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young
woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that
nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace
that his feelings prompted.
Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone
of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for
the future:
"Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?"
Lissac smiled.
"Come," she said, "nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have
already often turned over."
"The romance of my life," whispered Lissac in Marianne's ear.
"The more reason that it should not be read again. It is true there are
books one never reads but once. And for that reason, probably, one never
forgets them."
She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and
looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac's surprised eyes.
"Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly--we have
both heartily laughed at it--of the 'caprices of Marianne.' Do you know
what I am, my dear Guy? Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly
your mistress? Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable _ennui_, I yawn
my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of
dislocating my jaw. The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books
insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools. It is to have
the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless
objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible. A
thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add. The pure, fresh spring that
should slake my thirst has not yet gushed."
She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way
to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were
attacked with a fit of coughing. From time to time, she blew away a
cloud of smoke that escaped from her lips, for she had resumed her
cigarette, or with the tip of her nail struck her papelito, knocking the
ashes on the carpet.
Moved and greatly puzzled, but no longer thinking of the temptation of a
moment before, Guy looked at her and nodded his head gravely, like a
physician who finds a patient's illness more serious than the latter is
willing to acknowledge.
"You are very unhappy, Marianne!" he remarked.
"I? Nonsense! Weary, disgusted, bored, yes; but not unhappy. There is
still something great in misery. That can be battled against. It is like
thunder. But the rain, the eternal rain, incessantly falling, with its
liquid mud, that--ah! that, ugh! that is crushing. And in my life it
rains, it rains with terrible constancy."
As she uttered these words, she stretched her arms out with a movement
that expressed boundless weariness and disclosed to Guy the dull
dejection that followed a great deception and a hopeless fall.
"Life? My life? A mere millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual
round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you
understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is
mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I
abandon to others--whom I have abandoned, thank God! for I am satiated
at length and have now no lover, nor do I desire one. I desire to be my
own mistress, in short, and not the mistress of any person. I have but
one desire, hear--"
"What?" asked Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and
suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his
feelings vacillating between doubt and pity.
"My pleasure," Marianne replied, "is to shut myself up alone in a little
room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the
Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage
saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not
what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name,
whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves,
everything, in fact, a secret. I shall cloister myself. I shall stretch
myself out on a reclining-chair and think that if, by chance,--as
happens sometimes--an aneurism, a congestion, or I don't know what,
should strike me down in that solitude, no one would know who I am,
nobody, nobody, and my body would be taken to the Morgue, or to the
grave, it matters little to me, that body of which the little
otter-trimmed toques recall to you the graceful, serpentine line. Ah!
those plans are not very lively, are they? Well, my dear, such are my
good moments. Judge of the others, then."
Lissac was profoundly stirred and very greatly puzzled. To call on him:
that implied a need of him. But there was no attempt to find the marker
at the place where the romance had been interrupted: therefore the visit
was not to renew the relations that had been severed, yet not broken.
What, then, brought this creature, still charming and giddy, whose heart
was gnawed and wrung with grief? And was she the woman--Guy knew her so
well!--to return thus, only to conjure up the vanished recollections, to
communicate the secret of her present sorrows and to permit Lissac to
inhale the odor of a departed perfume, more airy than the blue
smoke-wreaths that escaped from her cigarette?
After entrusting Guy with the secret of her yearning for solitude, she
again indulged in her sickly smile, and still looking at Guy:
"You are, I am told, a constant guest at Sabine Marsy's receptions?" she
said abruptly.
"Yes," replied Lissac. "But I have no great liking for political
salons."
"It is a political centre, and yet not, seemingly. It is about to become
a scientific one, if one may believe the reporters--Monsieur de Rosas is
announced.--By the way, my dear Guy, you still see Monsieur de Rosas!"
While Marianne uttered this name with an indifferent tone, she slightly
bent her head in order to scrutinize Guy.
He did not reply at once, seeking first to discover what object
Marianne had in speaking to him about De Rosas. In a vague way he
surmised that the great Castilian noble counted for something in
Marianne's visit.
"I always see him when he is in Paris," he said after a moment's pause.
"Then you will see him very soon, for he will arrive to-morrow."
"Who told you that?"
"The newspapers. You don't read the newspapers, then?--He is returning
from the East. Madame Marsy is bent on his narrating his travels, on the
occasion of a special soirée. A lecture! Our Rosas must have altered
immensely. He was wild enough of old."
"A shy fellow, which is quite different. But," asked Lissac after a
moment, "what about Rosas?"
"Tell me, in the first place, that you know perfectly well that he will
arrive to-morrow."
"I know it through the reporters, as you say. To-day, it is through the
reporters that one learns news of one's friends."
"The important fact is that you know him, and it is because I am
particularly anxious to hear Monsieur de Rosas that I come to ask you to
present me at Madame Marsy's."
"Oh! that is it?" Guy began.
"Yes, that is it. I am weary. I am crazy over the Orient. You remember
Félicien David's _Desert_ that I used to play for you on the piano? I
would like to hear this story of travel. It would make me forget Paris."
"You shall hear it, my dear Marianne. Madame Marsy asked me to introduce
Vaudrey to her the other evening. You ask me to present you to Madame
Marsy. I am both crimp and introducer; but I am delighted to introduce
you to a salon that you will, I trust, find less gloomy than your little
room of the Jardin des Plantes. In fact, I thought you were one of
Sabine Marsy's friends. Did I dream so?"
"I have occasionally met her, and have found her very agreeable. She
invited me to call on her, but I have not dared--my hunger for
solitude--my den yonder--"
"Is the little room forbidden ground, is one absolutely prohibited from
seeing it?" said Guy with a smile.
"It is not forbidden, but it is difficult. Moreover, I have nothing
hidden from my friends," said Marianne, "on one condition, which is,
that they are my friends--"