I have loved but one woman in my life, the painter D------ said one day
to us.
I spent five years of perfect happiness and peaceful and fruitful
tranquillity with her. I may say that to her I owe my present celebrity,
so easy was work, and so spontaneous was inspiration by her side. Even
when I first met her, she seemed to have been mine from time immemorial.
Her beauty, her character were the realization of all my dreams. That
woman never left me; she died in my house, in my arms, loving to the
last. Well, when I think of her, it is with a feeling of rage. If I
strive to recall her, the same as I ever saw her during those five
years, in all the radiance of love, with her lithe yielding figure, the
gilded pallor of her cheeks, her oriental Jewish features, regular and
delicate in the soft roundness of her face, her slow speech as velvety
as her glance, if I seek to embody that charming vision, it is only in
order the more fiercely to cry to it: "I hate you!"
Her name was Clotilde. At the house of the mutual acquaintances where we
met, she was known under the name of Madame Deloche, and was said to be
the widow of a captain in the merchant service. Indeed, she appeared to
have travelled a great deal. In the course of conversation, she would
suddenly say: When I was at Tampico; or else: once in the harbour at
Valparaiso. But apart from this, there was no trace in her manners or
language of a wandering existence, nothing betrayed the disorder or
precipitation of sudden departures or abrupt returns. She was a thorough
Parisian, dressed in perfect good taste, without any of those bur-nooses
or eccentric _sarapés_ by which one recognizes the wives of officers and
sailors who are always arrayed in travelling costume.
[Illustration: p179-190]
When I found that I loved her, my first, my only idea was to ask her in
marriage. Someone spoke on my behalf. She simply replied that she would
never marry again. Henceforth I avoided meeting her; and as my thoughts
were too wholly absorbed and occupied by her to allow me to work,
I determined to travel. I was busily engaged in preparations for my
departure, when one morning, in my own apartment, in the midst of all
the litter of opened drawers and scattered trunks, to my great surprise,
I saw Madame Deloche enter.
"Why are you leaving?" she said softly. "Because you love me? I also
love. I love you. Only (and here her voice shook a little) only, I am
married." And she told me her history.
It was a romance of love and desertion. Her husband drank, struck her!
At the end of three years they had separated Her family, of whom she
seemed very proud, held a high position in Paris, but ever since her
marriage had refused to receive her. She was the niece of the Chief
Rabbi. Her sister, the widow of a superior officer, had married for the
second time a Chief Ranger of the woods and forests of Saint-Germain. As
for her, ruined by her husband, she had fortunately had a very thorough
education and possessed some accomplishments, by which she was able to
augment her resources. She gave music lessons in various rich houses
of the Chaussée d'Antin and Faubourg Saint Honoré, and gained an ample
livelihood.
The story was touching, although somewhat lengthy, full of the
pretty repetitions, the interminable incidents that entangle feminine
discourse.
[Illustration: p181-192]
Indeed she took several days to relate it. I had hired for us two, a
little house in the Avenue de l'Impératrice, standing between the silent
streets and peaceful lawns. I could have spent a year listening to and
looking at her, without a thought for my work. She was the first to send
me back to my studio, and I could not prevent her from again taking up
her lessons. I was touched by her concern for the dignity of her life.
I admired the proud spirit, notwithstanding that I could not help being
rather humiliated at her expressed determination to owe nothing save to
her own exertions. We were therefore separated all day long, and only
met in the evening in our little house.
With what joy did I not return home, what impatience I felt when she was
late, and how happy I was when I found her there before me! She would
bring me back bouquets and choice flowers from her journeys to Paris.
Often I pressed upon her some present, but she laughingly said she was
richer than I; and in truth her lessons must have been very well paid,
for she always dressed in an expensively elegant manner, and the black
dresses which, with coquettish care for her complexion and style of
beauty she preferred, had the dull softness of velvet, the brilliancy
of satin and jet, a confusion of silken lace, which revealed to the
astonished eye, under an apparent simplicity, a world of feminine
elegance in the thousand shades contained in a single colour.
[Illustration: p183-194]
Moreover her occupation was by no means laborious, she said. All her
pupils, daughters of bankers or stock brokers, loved and respected her;
and many a time she would show me a bracelet or a ring, that had been
presented as a mark of gratitude for her care. Except for our work, we
never left one another, and we went nowhere. Only on Sundays she went
off to Saint-Germain to see her sister, the wife of the Chief Ranger,
with whom she was now reconciled. I would accompany her to the station.
She would return the same evening, and often in the long summer days, we
would agree to meet at some station on the way, by the riverside or in
the woods. She would tell me about her visit, the children's good looks,
the air of happiness that reigned in the household. My heart bled for
her, deprived of the pleasures of family life as she was doomed to be;
and my tenderness increased tenfold in order to make her forget the
falseness of her position, so painful to a woman of her character.
What a happy time of perfect confidence, and how well I worked! I
suspected nothing. All she said seemed so true, so natural. I could only
reproach her with one thing. When talking of the houses she frequented,
and the different families of her pupils, she would indulge in a
superabundance of imaginary details and fancied intrigues, which she
invented without any _apropos_.
[Illustration: p185-196]
Calm herself, she was ever conjuring up romances around her, and her
life was spent in composing dramatic situations. These idle fancies
disturbed my happiness. I, who longed to leave the world and society, in
order to devote myself exclusively to her, found her too much taken up
by indifferent subjects. However, I could easily excuse this defect in a
young and unhappy woman, whose life had been hitherto a sad romance, the
issue of which could not be foreseen.
Once only did a suspicion or rather a presentiment cross my mind. One
Sunday evening she failed to return home. I was in despair. What could
I do? Go to Saint-Germain? I might compromise her. Nevertheless, after a
dreadful night of anguish, I had decided on starting, when she arrived,
looking pale and worried. Her sister was ill, she had been obliged to
stay and nurse her. I believed all she told me, not distrusting the
overflow of words called forth by the slightest question, which swamped
the principal matter in a deluge of idle details: such as the hour of
arrival, the rudeness of a guard, the lateness of the train. Twice or
three times in the same week, she returned to Saint-Germain and slept
there; then, her sister's illness over, she resumed her regular and
peaceful existence.
[Illustration: p187-198]
Unfortunately, shortly after this, she in her turn fell ill. She came
back one day from her lessons, shivering, wet, and fevered. Inflammation
of the lungs set in; from the first her case was serious, and soon--the
doctor told me--hopeless. My despair was maddening. Then I thought only
of soothing her last moments. The family she loved so well, of which she
was so proud, I would bring to her deathbed. Without letting her know,
I first wrote to her sister at Saint-Germain, and I went off at
once myself to her uncle, the Chief Rabbi. I hardly remember at what
unreasonable hour I reached his house. Great catastrophes throw such a
confusion into life and upset every detail. I fancy the good Rabbi was
dining. He came out into the hall, wondering and amazed, to speak to me.
"Monsieur," I said to him, "there are moments when all hatred must
cease."
He turned his venerable face towards me with a bewildered look.