To be the wife of a poet! that had been the dream of her life! but
ruthless fate, instead of the romantic and fevered existence she sighed
for, had doomed her to a peaceful, humdrum happiness, and married her to
a rich man at Auteuil, gentle and amiable, perhaps indeed a trifle
old for her, possessed of but one passion,--perfectly inoffensive and
unexciting--that of horticulture. This excellent man spent his days
pruning, scissors in hand, tending and trimming a magnificent collection
of rose trees, heating a greenhouse, watering flower beds; and really it
must be admitted that, for a poor little heart hungering after an ideal,
this was hardly sufficient food. Nevertheless for ten years her life
remained straightforward and uniform, like the smooth sanded paths in
her husband's garden, and she pursued it with measured steps, listening
with resigned weariness to the dry and irritating sound of the
ever-moving scissors, or to the monotonous and endless showers that fell
from the watering pots on to the leafy shrubs. The rabid horticulturist
bestowed on his wife the same scrupulous attention he gave to his
flowers. He carefully regulated the temperature of the drawing-room,
overcrowded with nosegays, fearing for her the April frosts or March
sun; and like the plants in pots that are put out and taken in at stated
times, he made her live methodically, ever watchful of a change of
barometer or phase of the moon.
She remained like this for a long time, closed in by the four walls
of the conjugal garden, innocent as a clematis, full however of wild
aspirations towards other gardens, less staid, less humdrum, where the
rose trees would fling out their branches untrained, and the wild growth
of weed and briar be taller than the trees, and blossom with unknown and
fantastic flowers, luxuriantly coloured by a warmer sun. Such gardens
are rarely found save in the books of poets, and so she read many
verses, all unknown to the nurseryman, who knew no other poetry than a
few almanac distichs such as:
Quand il pleut à la Saint-Médard,
Il pleut quarante jours plus tard.*
* When it rains on Saint Medard's day,
It rains on for forty more days.
At haphazard, the unfortunate creature ravenously devoured the paltriest
rhymes, satisfied if she found in them lines ending in "love" and
"passion"; then closing the book, she would spend hours dreaming and
sighing: "That would have been the husband for me!"
It is probable that all this would have remained in a state of vague
aspiration, if at the terrible age of thirty, which seems to be the
decisive critical moment for woman's virtue, as twelve o'clock is for
the day's beauty, the irresistible Amaury had not chanced to cross her
path. Amaury was a drawing-room poet, one of those fanatics in dress
coat and grey kid gloves, who between ten o'clock and midnight, go
and recite to the world their ecstasies of love, their raptures, their
despair, leaning mournfully against the mantel-piece, in the blaze of
the lights, while seated around him women, in full evening dress, listen
entranced behind their fans.
This one might pose as the very ideal of his kind; with his vulgar but
irresistible countenance, sunken eye, pallid complexion, hair cut short
and moustaches stiffly plastered with cosmetic. A desperate man such
as women love, hopeless of life but irreproachably dressed, a lyric
enthusiast, chilled and disheartened, in whom the madness of inspiration
can be divined only in the loose and neglected tie of his cravat. But
also what success awaits him, when he delivers in a strident voice
a tirade from his poem, the _Credo of Love_, more especially the one
ending in this extraordinary line: