Mme. Bourjot had married in order that two important business houses
should be united; for the sake of amalgamating various interests she had
been wedded to a man whom she did not know, and at the end of a week of
married life she had felt all the contempt that a wife can possibly feel
for a husband. It was not that she had expected anything very ideal, nor
that she had looked on marriage as a romantic and imaginative girl so
often does. She was remarkably intelligent herself, and seriously
inclined, her mind had been formed and nurtured by reading, study, and
acquirements which were almost more suitable for a man. All that she
asked from the companion of her life was that he should be intellectual
and intelligent, a being in whom she could place all her ambitions and
her pride as a married woman, a man with a brilliant future before him,
capable of winning for himself one of those immense fortunes to which
money nowadays leads, and who should prove himself able to leap over the
gaps of modern society to a high place in the Ministry, the Public
Works, or the Exchequer.
All her castles in the air crumbled away with this husband, whom she
found day by day more and more hopelessly shallow, more and more
incapable, devoid of all that should have been in him, and which was in
her instead, more narrow-minded, more mean and petty as time went on,
and all this mingled with and contradicted by all the violences and
weaknesses of a childish disposition.
It was her pride that had preserved Mme. Bourjot from adultery, a pride
which, it may be said, was aided by circumstances. When she was young,
Mme. Bourjot, who was of a spare build and southern type, had features
which were too pronounced to be pleasing or beautiful. When she was
about thirty-four she began to get rather more plump, and it seemed then
that another woman had evolved from the one she had been. Her features,
though still strongly pronounced, became softer and more pleasing; the
hardness of her expression appeared to have melted away, and her whole
face smiled. It was one of those autumn beauties such as age brings to
certain women, making one wish to have seen them as they were at twenty;
a beauty which makes one imagine for them a youthfulness they never had.
As a matter of fact, then, so far Mme. Bourjot had not run any great
danger, nor had she known any very great temptations. The society, which
on account of her tastes she had chosen, her surroundings, the men who
frequented her _salon_ and whom she met elsewhere, had scarcely made it
necessary for her to stand seriously on the defensive. They were, for
the most part, academicians, savants, elderly literary men, and
politicians, all of them unassuming and calm, men who seemed old, some
of them from stirring up the past and the others the present. Satisfied
with very little, they were happy with a mere nothing--the presence of a
woman, a flattering speech, or the expression of eyes that were drinking
in their words. Accustomed to their academic adoration, Mme. Bourjot
had, without much risk, allowed it free scope and had treated it with
jests like an Egeria: it had been a flame which did not scorch, and with
which she had been able to play.
But the time of maturity arrived for Mme. Bourjot. A great
transformation in her face and figure took place. Tormented, as it were,
by health which was too robust and an excess of vitality, she seemed to
lose the strength morally which she was gaining physically. She had a
great admiration for her past, and she felt now that she was less
strong-minded, and that there was less assurance in her pride than
formerly.
It was just at this time that Henri Mauperin had made his appearance in
her drawing-room. He seemed to her young, intelligent, serious, and
thorough, equipped for the victories of life with all those
dispassionate and unwavering qualities that she had dreamed before her
marriage of finding in a husband. Henri had seized the situation at a
glance, and, divining his own chances, he made his plans and swooped
down on this woman as his prey. He began to make love to her, and this
woman, who had a husband and daughter, who had been a faithful wife for
twenty years, and who held a high position in Parisian society, scarcely
waited for him to tempt her. She yielded to him at their first
interview, conducting herself like a mere cocotte. Her love became a mad
passion with her, as it so frequently does with women of her age, and
Henri proved himself a genius in the art of attaching her to himself and
of chaining her, as it were, to her sin. He never betrayed himself, and
never for an instant allowed her to see a sign of the weariness, the
indifference, or the contempt that a man feels after a too easy
conquest, or of that sort of disgust with which certain situations of a
woman in love inspire him. He was always affectionate, and always
appeared to be deeply moved. He had for Mme. Bourjot those transports of
love and jealousy, all those scruples, little attentions, and
thoughtfulness which a woman, after a certain age, no longer expects
from her lover. He treated her as if she were a young girl, and begged
her to give him a ring which she always wore, and which had been one of
her confirmation presents. He put up with all the childishness and
coquetry which was so ridiculous in the passion of this mother of a
family, and he encouraged it all without a sign of impatience on his
face or a shade of mockery in his voice. At the same time he made
himself entirely master of her, accustoming her to be docile and
obedient to him, revealing to her such passionate love that Mme. Bourjot
was both grateful to him and proud of her victory over this apparently
cold and reserved young man. When he was thus completely master of her,
Henri worked her up still more by impressing her with the danger of
their meetings and the risks there were in their _liaison_, while by all
the emotions of a criminal passion he excited her imagination to such a
pitch of fear that her love increased with the very thought of all she
had to lose.
She finally reached that stage when she only lived through him and for
him, by his presence, his thoughts, his future, his portrait, all that
remained to her of him after she had seen him. Before leaving him she
would stroke his hair with her hands and then put her gloves on quickly.
And all day afterward, when she was at home again with her husband and
her daughter, she would put the palms of her hands, which she had not
washed since, to her face and inhale the perfume of her lover's hair.
This _soirée_, and this treason and rupture at the end of a year,
completely crushed Mme. Bourjot. She felt at first as if she had
received a blow, and her life seemed to be ebbing away through the
wound. She fancied she was really dying, and there was a certain
sweetness in this thought. The following day she hoped Henri would come.
She was vanquished and quite prepared to beg his pardon, to tell him
that she had been in the wrong, to beg him to forgive her, to entreat
him to be kind to her, and to allow her to gather up the crumbs of his
love. She waited a week, but Henri did not come. She asked him for an
interview that he might return her letters, and he sent them to her. She
wrote and begged to see him for the last time that she might bid him
farewell. Henri did not answer her letter, but, through his friends and
through the newspaper and society gossip, he contrived to let Mme.
Bourjot hear the rumour of an action that had been taken against him for
one of his articles on the misery of the poor. For a whole week he
managed to keep her mind occupied with the ideas of police and police
courts, prison, and all that the dramatic imagination of a woman
pictures to itself as the consequence of a lawsuit.
When the Attorney-General assured Mme. Bourjot that the action would not
be taken, she felt quite a coward after all the terror she had gone
through, and weak and helpless from emotion, she could not endure any
more, and so wrote in desperation to Henri:
"To-morrow at two o'clock. If you are not there I shall wait on the
staircase. I shall sit down on one of the stairs till you come."