I suppose nobody but the creative artist knows the agony that follows a
great success. For once Sidney had touched the stars, and his hands were
impatient to reach them again. In the months that followed he was like a
caged demon, creating and destroying, brooding. He even drank absinthe,
a thing he had always been afraid of, and finally in a fit of what was
probably more anguish than anger, he threw Julie out of the house for
good. She seemed, I imagine, to shorten his grasp. I know he formulated
a theory at that time as to the connection between celibacy and
inspiration, and he and Father Alexis, the curé, mustered between them
an imposing list to prove their case.
But it did not come back, the thing that had created Cynara. Indeed, it
was twelve years in coming, and that twelve years forgot Julie, wrecked
Anne and did more things to me than I care to remember.
For he married Anne.
Possibly it was his method of attaining the ideal he had somehow lost.
Anne, you see, _was_ the Cynara to him. He must have felt that she would
bring him again whatever it was that had come and gone. And of course
she did not. He did not love her, for one thing. He had no lover’s
illusion with which to cover her, once she had ceased to represent the
lost woman of a man’s dreams.
“If only I hadn’t married him,” she said to me once, “I would have
helped him more. I stood for something then, Maurice. Now—!”
The truth is, of course, that he was not capable of love. Not then,
anyhow. His mind was entirely turned in on himself, not so much
selfishly, as with the conviction that somewhere there, inside him, lay
the thing he was waiting for.
The man who marries a woman only because of her aloofness and her
essential virginity has little enough to go on, once the one is bridged
and the other destroyed. And he had had little enough at the best. What
Anne suffered was shown by what she did later.