It was about half-past ten in the morning when Madame Chazel received a
small packet from the Baron de Querne. It contained two books--two new
novels--and a letter, the last being similar to all those that a man of
the world may write to a woman with whom he is on friendly terms. But
the postscript pressed as with a hand upon her heart. It ran as follows:
"If your country friend decides to come to Paris, the best furnished
apartments that I have seen are at 16, Rue de Stockholm. They are on the
second floor, to the right."
Yes, Helen was seized with inward trepidation on reading these simple
lines. In proportion as her action drew closer to her--the action that
would for ever separate her future and her past--the fever which had
been preying upon her since the previous evening had increased still
more. She had just left her bath, and, wrapped in a dressing-gown of
pure white, was crouched on a low chair beside the fire, her naked feet
in slippers, her form unconstrained by the flexible material, and her
hair rolled in a great twist about her neck. She shivered in her
wool-lined robe, and, with Armand's letter in her fingers, gazed now at
the paper, the mere touch of which overwhelmed her, and now around the
room--a refuge which she preferred even to the little drawing-room, as
enabling her to retire into a domain that was all her own.
She had been so pleased at the time of their settling in Paris to obtain
this room all to herself! She had during so many nights known the
torture of sleeping beside a man whom she did not love, and if sleeping
side by side, almost breath to breath, forms the delight of blissful
passion, physical aversion, on the other hand, is augmented by such
intimacy, until it becomes a species of animal hatred. Alfred's
movements, the sound of his breathing, the mere existence of his person,
angered her and hurt her, in the hours that she spent thus beside him,
when silence hung heavy upon their rest, and she lay awake quivering and
in revolt. When requesting this separation of rooms she certainly had
not foreseen that the solitude of her couch would one day avail her as a
weapon against material partition, that terrible ransom for adultery
which prudent women accept as a security. It is a rare thing for those
who deceive their husbands to sleep apart from them. They would rather
not have to carry with them to their lover the anxiety due to a
watchfulness but little reconcilable with complete pleasure.
But Helen was not capable of such calculations. The most charming trait
in her character was a spontaneity that might draw her into very great
perils, but that at least always preserved her from a foulness which is
more degrading than anything else--reflection in the midst of error. At
this very moment, as she sat crouching upon her low chair, she did not
think about the consequences of her approaching action, nor did she
reason--she felt. The presence of Armand's letter caused her to be
visited with excessive emotion. She scarcely so much as listened to the
noise that her little boy made in playing beside her bed. The child was
shaking his flaxen ringlets, and shouting and running about. He had set
two chairs beside each other, and was creeping between them, pretending
that he was a railway train passing through a tunnel.
Since she had been in love with Armand, Helen had experienced strange
feelings of sadness in the presence of her little Henry, and she had
reproached herself for them as for a lack of tenderness, attributing
them to remorse. In reality, her sorrow was due to the discovery in her
son of an astonishing likeness to her husband. Even in his games the
child recalled the conversation of the father, who from principle gave
him for books nothing but scientific works, and then he had Alfred
Chazel's eyes and his awkwardness in using his hands, and had only his
mother's mouth and forehead. She spoiled him all the more for her
consciousness of what she had taken from him to give to another! The
child continued to play, looking sometimes towards his mother. The
latter, at one moment, heaving a deep sigh, crumpled up the paper that
she held in her hand, and flung it into the fire.
The note had grown intolerable to her. She told herself, indeed, that it
was more prudent on her lover's part to write to her in this tone of
formal politeness, but it was such prudence as freezes, and in Helen's
then unnerved condition she had need of a letter whose every phrase acts
upon the reader's heart like invisible and caressing lips. The crumpled
paper, letter and envelope together, rolled into the fire, and the child
left the two chairs with which he was playing to come to his mother's
side and watch it burn.
"What are you looking at there, darling?" Helen said to him.
"At the nuns, mamma," he replied. So he called the luminous dots that
run across the black surface of paper consumed by fire. These dots were
in his eyes nuns distractedly traversing their burnt cloister. "How they
hurry," he said; "how frightened they are! Oh! that one, mamma, look at
that one! The convent is falling down. They are all dead."
Madame Chazel felt herself incapable of enduring this merriment. The
whole odious nature of her moral situation had just been rendered
palpable to her by a petty, insignificant fact, that of her son making a
plaything of the letter in which her lover made an appointment with her
for their first secret meeting. She would have been so glad to have held
her home life, the maternal obligations of which she would fulfil to the
utmost, distinct from the other, from that life of passion upon which
she was entering, carried away by something stronger than her reason,
something so obscure to herself and yet so real. Was this distinction,
then, altogether impossible, seeing that on the very first day all that
she would have wished apart were being blended together?
"Go and play with Miette," she said to her son, "I have a slight
headache."
Miette was the little boy's nurse. A lady's maid, a cook, and a
man-servant completed the _personnel_ of the household. Miette, who had
come from the country with her employers, had taken care of Henry from
his earliest infancy. At night, to send him to sleep, she used to sing
canticles to him, one especially of which delighted and terrified him:
"Come, divine Messiah."
"What is Messiah?" he would ask his nurse.
"He is Antichrist," she used to reply.
"When will He come?" asked the child.
"At the end of the world."
"In how many years?"
"Seven," said the nurse.
"Then I shall be twelve years old," Henry would calculate.
This astonishing prediction had so struck him the night before, that at
the mere mention of his nurse's name, he began to tell it to his mother.
At any other time this confidence would have amused her, but while
speaking he had in his bright grey eyes a look that the young woman knew
only too well.
"Don't be frightened," she said, "for you are good, and go and play."
The little boy cast a glance at the fire where the black residue alone
marked the site of the burnt convent; at the chairs whose backs were no
longer the walls of a deep tunnel; at his mother, to know whether he
might not remain. Unconsciously he was affected by the sadness
overspreading her face. By one of those almost animal intuitions
peculiar to extremely sensitive children, he discerned that his presence
was vexing to his mother. He kissed her hand, and then suddenly burst
into tears.
"What is the matter, my angel, what is the matter?" said Helen, pressing
him in her arms and covering him with kisses.
"I thought you were angry with me," he said. Then, warmed by her
caresses, he said: "I am going, mamma; I will be good."
"Have children presentiments?" Helen asked of herself when she was left
alone. "One would think he were conscious that something unusual is
taking place." And with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting
upon her closed hands, she relapsed into the state of fever that had
kept her awake the whole night. The nacreous bruise that encircled her
eyes too clearly revealed this sleeplessness. On rising, she had looked
at herself in the glass, and said to herself:
"I am not pretty--I shall not please him."
What had been preying upon her had been neither prudish reasoning nor
moral reflection. It was a sort of ardent languor. She could see Armand
in her thought, and as it were a wave of blood, but having greater heat,
surged to her heart, her throat choked a little, and her will tottered.
It was not only her first intrigue, in the sense in which the world
understands the term, but it was her first love. Helen Chazel, while
still Mademoiselle de Vaivre, had endured one of the most painful trials
that can weigh upon youth. She had been persecuted by a step-mother who
hated her, while believing that she was only bringing her up well and
correcting her. The De Vaivres lived in a kind of château, four miles
from Bourges, and this had been a prison to the young girl. The father,
a weak man, who cherished an innocent mania for an archaeological
collection, patiently and complacently gathered together, had never
suspected the mute drama played between step-mother and step-daughter
for twelve years.
Madame de Vaivre loved her husband, and, without herself comprehending
as much, was jealous of the dead wife, that first wife whose grace she
saw renewed in the features of the child, in her smiles and in her
gestures. Nothing is so dangerous as an evil feeling of the existence of
which we are not quite aware. To gratify it we discover all kinds of
excuses which enable us to feed our hatred without losing our
self-esteem. It was thus that Madame de Vaivre, having taken Helen's
education in hand, made every lesson and every admonition a means for
torture.
This woman, pretty and refined, but unfeeling, very solicitous about
propriety in consequence of the lengthened sojournings at Paris with her
father, who had been an official deputy under the July monarchy, was
withal minutely devout, and instinctively unkind, like all persons who
are accustomed never to admit the just sensibilities of others. When
Alfred Chazel had come to be intimate with Monsieur de Vaivre, owing to
their common taste for excavations and antiquities, she had with joy
perceived that he was falling in love with Helen. It afforded her a
secret pleasure to marry her step-daughter to a man who had no fortune,
and, the dowry being very small, to condemn her for years to a middling
existence. Death, which takes as little account of our evil calculations
as of our great intentions, had taken in hand to render abortive this
woman's hateful anticipation, through which poor Helen had seen no more
clearly than Monsieur de Vaivre himself.
All that the young girl understood on the day that Chazel asked her in
marriage was that she would be free from her step-mother's tyranny. She
had a plain perception of that from which she was escaping. As to
marriage and its physical realities, what could she have known of them?
Thus, on leaving the church, she found herself in a moral situation that
was full of peril. Her childhood, spent, as it had been, beneath
continual oppression, had to an excessive degree developed within her a
taste for the romantic--a power, that is, of fashioning beforehand an
image of life with which the reality is subsequently compared. Through
her joy at deliverance, her future marriage showed to her like a
paradise of delight.
Misfortune had it that Alfred Chazel should be one of those men who,
with all kindness, all delicacy even, at the bottom of their hearts, are
for ever ignorant of a woman's nature. The consummation of the marriage
was to Helen something as hateful as it had been unexpected--like a
tribute paid to clumsy brutality. The result was that she received her
husband's endearments with a repugnance that was imperfectly dissembled,
and that added to the timidity of a man already timid by nature and
awkwardly impassioned, as those who have not slackened the initial
ardour of their youth in facile intrigues often are. Alfred was secretly
afraid of showing his tenderness to his wife, and he concealed from her
the intensity of a love that would perhaps have touched her had she been
able to perceive it.
Moral divorce between husband and wife has nearly always physiological
divorce for its first and hidden cause. If community in voluptuousness
is the most powerful agent for the fusion of temperaments, the torturing
possession of a woman by a man remains the certain origin of
unconquerable antipathy. It came to pass in the Chazel household, as in
all similar households, that this first antipathy was heightened from
week to week by reason of the fact that two beings, condemned to live
side by side, unceasingly afford each other grounds for more love or
greater hatred. Do not all the petty events of life render them every
minute more present to each other? The divergence in tastes, ideas, and
habits that parted Alfred from Helen, would have provided the latter,
had she loved her husband, with pretexts for a loving education. Not
loving him, she found in them only reasons for separating from him still
more.
Alfred Chazel was in fact a son of the people, and in spite of the
intellectual refinement of two generations, his peasant origin showed
itself again in him in clumsiness of gesture and attitude. He was not
vulgar, and at the same time he was lacking in manner. Helen, on the
contrary, came of a noble family, and her step-mother's continual
superintendence had developed to an extreme in her a sense of detailed
particularity concerning her person and everything about her. Her
husband's manner of eating shocked her; his manner of going and coming
and sitting down--a certain slowness in grasping all that constituted
the material side of life. When it was needful to accomplish a rapid and
precise movement, during a walk, or at table, or in a shop, he would
pause for a moment, with lips slightly gaping, and with a startled
demeanour, like a peasant passing through a terminus in a large town.
Alfred, moreover, was fond of saying that he was an absent man, and that
the external world had no existence for him; and it was true, for two
influences had contributed to uproot him from the said external
world--the sudden transition of his family from one social class into
another, and the nature of his mathematical studies. His wife had never
been able to ensure that the cord of his eyeglass should not be broken,
and then knotted in several places, that the collar of his overcoat
should be kept down, his silk hat brushed, and his cravat properly tied.
The carelessness characteristic of men of thought was visible in his
entire person.
Helen would have blushed with indignation and shame had she been told of
the part played by these trifles in her conjugal aversion. But is not
the life of the heart, like physical life, a summing of the infinitely
little? Moreover, these minute facts, which formed a mass in their
totality, symbolised an essential ground for dissociation between the
husband and wife, namely, the absolute distinction between the minds of
both. Helen's instruction had not been of a very solid kind; she had not
been fortified by that sum of positive learning which alone is able to
balance intense development of thought. Thus, all her reading as a girl
and as a young woman had been directed towards those works of
imagination for which Alfred professed the innocent contempt of a
scientist whose literary culture is almost non-existent. It appeared
extraordinary to him, and he used ingenuously to say so, that in an age
of chemistry, steam, and electricity, intelligent beings should occupy
themselves with the composition of such trash. Hence, in conversation,
husband and wife had not a single opinion in common. Alfred was quite
sensible that an abyss, growing constantly more impassable, was yawning
between Helen and himself, and he was pained by it, but in the way that
he would have been pained by an incomprehensible misfortune.
"What does she want to make her happy?" he would ask himself, and then
he would in thought draw up a list of the conditions for happiness that
were realised about his wife: "We have money, and a dear child; she
wished to live in Paris, and here we are; I give her every freedom; I
have the most absolute confidence in her; I do her honour by my
position; everything smiles upon us and flatters us--and she is not
happy!"
No, Helen had not been happy, and on the morning of this winter day,
which was to prove to her a date that could never be forgotten, she felt
her whole melancholy past surging back upon her. A thousand scenes
showed themselves, and she discerned that through them all she had been
advancing towards the hour at which, as she believed, her true life
would begin. Often at Bourges, while walking with her husband along the
Seraucourt promenade, she had asked herself whether she should ever,
ever be acquainted with happiness, with the warm radiancy within her of
a light that might illumine the cold darkness in which she languished.
Her husband conversed with her about his plans, his college life, and
his companions, with the calmness which he displayed in all matters,
holding it a principle that a man should look at life on its good side,
should be submissive, and accept.
These talks prostrated her with sadness. She sighed vaguely after an
infinitude of emotion which she conceived to be possible, and the
tokens, the reflection of which she discovered in a few phrases in the
novels of her reading when they treated of love. Of all the emotions of
life this was the only one with which she was unacquainted. She had been
a daughter, and had loved her father, but her affection had been cruelly
deceived. She had been a sister, but little Adèle, Monsieur de Vaivre's
daughter by his second marriage, resembled her mother, and Helen had
never been able to become unreservedly attached to her. She had had
friends, but it had always seemed to her that these friends did not feel
as she did, and she had never ventured to speak to them of what touched
her most closely, of what was dearest to her heart. She would have been
pious had not the sight of her step-mother's piety given her an aversion
to religious practices which, as she saw only too clearly, might be made
a justification for the worst egotism. She was a mother, and she loved
her son; but, as formerly, in the case of her little sister, a
resemblance checked her in her feeling. Little Henry recalled Alfred too
much at certain moments.
Then it was, when she had fathomed the bankruptcy of her first youth,
that her imagination pictured to her the dawn of a reparative feeling;
and what could this mysterious feeling be if it were not that one with
which she was unacquainted, and the sweetness, power and happiness of
which were celebrated by all?
"But no," she said to herself, "it is a crime to love when one is not
free."
Then she recalled conversations heard on her friends' "days" at Bourges,
and the manner in which people spoke of a doctor's wife who had eloped
with a young Conseiller de Préfecture. And then she met with men who
had so little resemblance to the image that she had formed of him whom
she might have loved! She remembered the painful surprise which had been
caused her by that very Monsieur de Varades, of whom De Querne had
heard. She had believed in the genuineness of his sympathy. He came to
see her. They used to have a little music together. Then, had he not
offered violence to her one evening when they were alone in the house?
She had said nothing to her husband from dread of a scandal and a duel;
but she had never received the young officer again when alone. She did
not suspect that he had revenged himself upon her by saying that she had
been his mistress.
By what familiarities had she challenged the audacity of this garrison
Don Juan? Yet she was not a coquette. The feeling that sprang up within
her in the presence of a stranger was rather an apprehension of offence
than a desire to please. She had been as little of a coquette with
Armand de Querne. If there was a man whom she would have refrained from
approaching with a desire to seduce, it was assuredly he. Her husband
had so often extolled him to her.
"When we were at college, Armand and I," or, "Armand used to say to me,"
or, "Armand wrote to me." And so on.
Helen had anticipated another and a more pretentious Alfred. She had
told herself that some day, if ever she left the country, she would be
obliged to endure in her home the presence of this friend, who would be
a hostile judge, and would raise fresh difficulties between her husband
and herself. If they were separated for so many reasons the one from the
other, her own reserve and Alfred's good nature at least prevented the
separation from breaking out in scenes and disputes. What would be the
outcome of the intrusion of Alfred's old chum into their home, she
almost anxiously asked herself on the occasion of her first visit to
Paris.
Her rapid interview with Monsieur de Querne had modified the colouring
of these fears. He had come to take the Chazels to their hotel, and all
three had dined together in a restaurant on the Boulevards. Helen had
been surprised by Armand's outward appearance, and by the contrast that
he presented to the carelessness of Alfred; but further, the young man's
questions, his keen way of looking, the irony that tinted his slightest
expressions, together with an indefinable shade of contempt for Alfred,
which a woman's acuteness could not but remark, had disconcerted her,
causing her a slight shiver of mistrust. She would have wished never to
see the man again. She had been unable to refrain from mentioning this
antipathy to her husband, and he had replied: "He looks like that, but
he is such a good fellow, and then he has been so unfortunate." And he
told his wife about Armand's childhood, his guardian's selfishness, his
youthful melancholy, and he commiserated him for other mysterious
sufferings.
"He has not understood life well. He was rich. He has not employed his
fine powers. He has said nothing to me, but I always believed that he
had experienced a deep passion."
Helen would have been much astonished if any one had revealed to her
that the species of agony with which her thought rested upon the
probable secret nature of this disquieting personage, comprised that
form of anxiety which often precedes love. The settlement at Paris had
taken place, and Armand had begun to visit them, at first in their
furnished rooms, and then in the little house in the Rue de La
Rochefoucauld. It was he who had found it for them, he who courteously
offered his assistance in the countless goings and comings necessitated
by the furnishing of the new home. In the constant interviews thus
brought about, whether in a shop, or while walking together from one
tradesman's to another, or when driving in a carriage, as often
happened, Helen learnt to know all the delightful outward qualities
possessed by Armand. Unlike the men, all of them occupied with science
or self-advancement, who met at her husband's house, he appeared to
attach only a secondary importance to acquired merits or positive
learning. Questions of feeling alone interested him.
In all the men that she had seen, Helen had encountered the same idea
about love, namely, that it pertained to youth, was to be relegated to
the background, and that rational people should never weigh it against
family or professional interests. Her discussions with Armand revealed
to her a man who had reflected a great deal about the mutual relations
of the sexes. He possessed that imagination of heart which women so
readily confuse with genuine sensibility, together with that experience
of amorous life which lends to libertines their prestige even with the
most virtuous. The expression of melancholy which was familiar to him
seemed to say that this experience had been purchased at the cost of
cruel deceptions. It was these unknown griefs that completed the work of
seduction which had begun in timorous astonishment, and been continued
in the admiration of the provincial for the Parisian; for the
superiority of judgment concerning life which distinguished the young
man, corresponded to too many stifled aspirations on Helen's part, to
leave her indifferent to it. It was he whose taste she perceived
scattered over the walls of her little drawing-room; he who had chosen
that old tapestry and hung it in its corner; he who had chosen this
piece of furniture or that piece of material from among several others.
This softened admiration, which led her to say to herself: "What a
happiness it would be to comfort him for all that he has suffered," had
soon ended in the hope that her presence was really sweet to him, for he
was occupied about her with visible sympathy.
At different times she had heard him tell her:
"I had an invitation to Madame So-and-so's this evening, but I broke my
engagement in order to spend the evening with you."
One day, on the occasion of one of those insignificant events which in
the heart's darkness are as tiny lights revealing an immense gulf, she
had confessed to herself that she loved him. Armand, who was to have
come to dinner in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, had sent a note of excuse
to the effect that he was unwell. She had sent Alfred to see him, and
Alfred had found nobody in the Rue Lincoln. By the sorrow that the young
woman experienced, she recognised the extent of the interest that she
took in Monsieur de Querne, and, to her misfortune, she recognised it at
a moment when, upon one of those petty troubles, which are great
disasters in love, she must inevitably doubt whether her feeling was
returned. Instead of striving against this love, as she would have done
had she believed herself loved, she said to herself:
"Why has he not kept his promise? With whom has he spent the evening?"
When she saw him again, he spoke somewhat hardly to her, and she
suffered a disconcerted countenance to be seen. He gently took her hand,
and she burst into tears. From that hour she ceased to be capable of
concealing the disquiet with which the mere sight of Armand inspired
her. She began to enter upon that stage wherein the soul finds itself
ceaselessly divided between the sight of the direst misfortune and of
the highest felicity. How is it possible to reason then? Armand, who
knew love's halting-places too well not to perceive the progress that he
was making in Helen's heart, was adroit enough to show her that he
doubted her feelings towards himself, and that he was unhappy on account
of this doubt.
He thus led her in succession to tell him that she loved him, to let him
take her hands, her arms, her waist, and to lend her cheek, her eyes,
her lips to kisses. Nothing could be more opposed than these progressive
familiarities to the ideas that Helen entertained respecting the manner
in which a woman ought to behave towards a man when she loves. She
considered, as do all truly loyal natures, that a slight deception is
morally equivalent to one that is complete. But she yielded to the
faintest expression of pain in the young man's eyes with a weakness for
which she reproached herself on each occasion, only to relapse once
more.
"Ah! do not be pained; what does it matter if I ruin myself?" such was
the translation of the poor woman's looks, the words that she uttered in
a whisper.
She had not spoken falsely when putting to him the sorrowful question:
"You will at least be happy?"
And now, within a few hours of the moment when she would be entirely
his, it was this hope and this uncertainty that floated above all else.
"Ah!" she thought, "if only I may see that light in his eyes! Afterwards
I shall become what I may. What matter if I have given him that?"
She had reached this point in her reflections when a kiss made her
start. Alfred had just come in to bid her good morning. Having gone out
before eight o'clock he had not yet seen her, and finding her so pretty
in the robe of soft material that showed the outline of her graceful
shoulders, and bust, and the lines of her legs terminating in the white,
blue-veined, naked feet in their black slippers, he could not refrain
from approaching her and stealing a kiss from the sweet place on her
neck, between the ear and nape. This was such a surprise to her on
emerging from the universe of ideas in which she had just been absorbed,
that she gave a slight scream.
"Lazy, chilly, timorous creature," said Chazel, who strove to jest in
order to banish the angry expression which his caresses had just called
up upon that charming face. "Do you know what o'clock it is? A quarter
to twelve. You will never be ready for breakfast. What are you reading?"
he continued, taking up the two volumes sent by Monsieur de Querne which
were lying on the table; "more novels--but they are not cut. What have
you been doing all the morning?"
"I have been settling papers and making up accounts."
How many of these little falsehoods her lips had uttered, and not one,
even the slightest and most innocent of them, that did not cost her a
cruel effort.
"Will you ring for Julia?" she resumed. "I am going to have my hair
dressed, and I shall be ready in ten minutes."
"I am not in your way if I remain here?" he said.
"Not particularly--for the present," she replied, and already she had
passed into her dressing-room. She had put on a light cambric wrapper,
and was unfastening her beautiful chestnut hair, combing it herself.
Alfred remained on his feet, leaning against one of the leaves of the
door and reading a newspaper which he had taken out of his pocket. The
mere rustling of the paper irritated Helen's nerves, because it recalled
this man's presence to her, and his presence appeared at this moment a
profanation. Ah! if Armand had been there instead of the other, how
charming she would have found it to associate him thus with the
coquettish portion of the mysterious attentions to her beauty. But such
familiarity in one whom they do not love is so displeasing to women,
that even prostitutes are pained by it. In all, whether virtuous or not,
modesty is the beginning and the ending of love. Alfred had never
understood this. He was still in love with Helen; and these sudden
intrusions upon her privacy procured him a dumb happiness that was
composed of timid desires and furtive contemplations. Over the top of
his open newspaper he watched the white hands passing backwards and
forwards among the yielding hair, and the graceful shape of the arms
which the wide sleeves, when thrown back by certain movements, allowed
to be seen.
How he would have liked to handle that hair which she always denied to
him! And she too looked at her hair with happiness, in spite of the pain
which her husband caused her by remaining there, for she perceived that
it was as long and as wave-like as when she had been a young girl. Every
time that she paid attention to her beauty now, she studied herself with
childish anxiety, spying out the slightest wrinkle on her temples, about
her lips, around her neck, asking herself whether she was still pretty
enough to intoxicate the man she loved, and she smiled at herself in the
glass as she twined her hair, and leaning forward a little she saw in a
corner of the same glass the reflection of her husband's face with a
blaze in his eyes--that swift gleam of desire which she knew and hated
well. She shivered as though she had awoke to find herself exposed naked
in a public square, blushed violently, and said:
"I do not know why Julia is not here. Ring again, please, and leave me."
She got up, pushed Alfred away, shut the door, and when alone, felt the
tears come.
"Ah!" she said to herself; "I do not truly love him. Ought not these
trifles to be sweet to me since I endure them for his sake?"
Such were her thoughts as she sat at the breakfast table, dressed now in
a dark-coloured dress, and wearing boots--the boots in which she was
presently, and in a very short time, for the time-piece hanging on the
wall was pointing to thirty-five minutes past twelve--to walk to that
Rue de Stockholm which she had not known even by name before receiving
her lover's note. Where was it? What would the house look like? At the
mere thought of it, an intoxicating, burning fluid seem to course
through her veins. To remain quiet was a torture to her, and as for
eating, she was unequal to it. It seemed to her that her throat was so
choked that not even a piece of bread would pass through it. Little
Henry was talking to his father, and the latter, on failing to receive
even a reply from her to two or three questions, said:
"How strange you are to-day. Are you not well?"
"I?" she said. "Why I am as cheerful and merry as possible," and she
began to laugh and to talk in a loud tone. "Can he suspect anything?"
she asked herself; "but what matter if he does?"
"What are you going to do this afternoon?" asked Alfred again
mechanically.
"Will you take me with you, mamma?" said Henry.
"No, darling," she replied, evading a reply to her husband, "you will go
to the Champs-Élysées, and I will wish you good morning as I pass,
perhaps. Is it fine to-day?" she went on, although she had watched both
sky and pavement with impatient anxiety since early morning. And on his
replying in the affirmative she said: "You can take the carriage; I will
go on foot, it will do me good."
They had a brougham that was hired by the month, and that they used in
turns, he for business expeditions, and she for paying visits.
"At last!" she sighed, when she found herself alone in the little
drawing-room, Alfred having left for his office, and Henry for his walk;
and the distresses of the morning were succeeded by a delicious feeling
of relief.
Already even, in her drawing-room, which was filled with recollections
of Armand, she was surrendered unreservedly to her love. The recovery of
her freedom overwhelmed her with joy such as the vision of the future
could no longer take from before her mind. She evoked in thought her
lover's gaze, she kindled in it that gleam of felicity which was as the
stars towards which her being was uplifted.
"I am sacrificing everything for him," she thought to herself, returning
for a moment to the impressions of that painful morning; "but the more I
sacrifice for him the more will he feel how much I love him. And how I
love him! how I love him!" she repeated aloud in exultation. She looked
at her watch. "It is past one o'clock. He is to wait for me from twelve.
What a surprise for him if I arrive so soon. For he does not expect me
immediately."
And she hastened to put on her hat, taking a thick veil with her at the
bottom of her pocket to put over her face in the cab. He had the day
before recommended her to do so. And now she was already passing down
the Rue Saint-Lazare, like one walking in her sleep, not daring to look
at anything around her. It seemed to her that everyone could see by her
figure and gait where she was going, and her elation had given place to
a sort of terror--but a resolute terror, like that of a man of courage
when on the way to fight his first duel--when she ventured to hail a cab
in the Place de la Trinité.
"The Rue de Stockholm," she said.
"What number?" asked the man.
"I will tell you when to stop," she replied.
To get out of the cab in front of the house had just appeared to her
suddenly as an impossibility. Her hands shook when she fastened on her
double veil in the vehicle, which began to move forward, heavy and slow;
at least it seemed to her that every revolution of the wheels lasted a
minute. She looked at the shops in the Rue Saint-Lazare, as they filed
past, then at the courtyard in front of the terminus, and the sight of a
traveller paying his cabman set her searching in her muff in agony. What
if she had forgotten her purse? No, she had forty francs, in small
ten-franc pieces. So much the worse; she would give one to the man, for
to wait for the change on the footpath would be too much for her.
All these emotions were painful to her feelings. She would willingly
have fixed her imagination upon her lover--her lover, for she was going
to be his mistress. How contemptuous the tones of her friends at Bourges
used formerly to become when uttering these words in reference to some
compromised woman! Then her nervous emotion proved the stronger.
"If only he does not guess what it has cost me! Ah, may my cowardly
fears not spoil his happiness!"
The cab having meanwhile climbed the beginning of the ascent of the Rue
de Rome, was turning down past the wall of a private garden which forms
the corner of the Rue de Stockholm, and the driver leaned down from his
seat to ask Helen where he was to stop.
"Here," she said.
She got out, and placed the small gold piece in the man's hand, saying
to him:
"Keep it, keep it."
Then she was immediately afraid that he would guess why she did not wait
for the change, and she stopped and busied herself with gazing, without
reading it, at a placard affixed to the wall, until she heard the cab
wheels rolling away. She followed the footpath, lifting her head with a
throbbing of the heart which seemed to be driving her mad. Eight,
ten--two numbers more, and she had reached the house mentioned in the
note. She entered the gateway, seeing nothing. She passed in front of
the porter thinking that her limbs would not support her. Her feet were
giving way on the stair-carpet. One more effort, and she was at the door
of the apartments on the second floor.
She leaned against this closed door. Not a sound was to be heard on the
staircase; not a sound came up from the street. She could hear the
beatings of her heart, and instead of ringing she remained where she
was. She wanted to recover a little calmness before appearing in
Armand's presence. Why had she come here? To make him happy! What, then,
would be the good of letting him see how much she had suffered? Her
heart beat less rapidly; she forced herself to smile; and the thought of
the happiness she was about to give was already a happiness to her
greater than her anguish had just been.
She at last made up her mind to ring. The tinkling was succeeded by the
sound of footsteps, the key turned in the lock, and she sank upon
Armand's bosom, and was immediately drawn into a little drawing-room
furnished in blue. Flames were burning in the fire-place. At the first
glance Helen saw that there was no bed in the apartment. She had so
dreaded the sight of this on first entering that she felt an infinite
gratitude to Armand for having selected their place of meeting in such
a way as to spare her this initial shock. He, meanwhile, had unfastened
both her veils, taken off her bonnet, compelled her to sit down in an
arm-chair beside the fire, and, kneeling in front of her, was clasping
her almost madly, repeating again and again:
"Ah, my love! how sweet of you to come!"
And he gazed at her with eyes made very loving with the joy of desire
that is certain of its satisfaction--the joy of desire only, for on
seeing her smile at him with that easy smile to which she had compelled
her countenance, in order not to displease him, he had just told himself
that it was not the first time that she had come to a like meeting, and
a terrible duality had been set up within him between his sensations and
his thoughts.
"She has a fancy for me," he reflected; "let us take advantage of it.
But why have all women a mania for telling you that you are their first
lover?"
His kisses were loosening the locks of her hair, which she tried to
readjust above her forehead with her hand.
"Do not be afraid," he said to her; "I have thought of everything." And
he led her through the bedroom to the door of a little dressing-room, on
the table in which were arranged all the articles belonging to his
travelling dressing-case.
"You will be able to comb your hair again," he said.
"Oh!" she said, blushing, "you make me ashamed."
Just then he had led her into the bedroom, and as he was taking off the
jacket which she wore over her dress, a small object rolled out of her
pocket. It was a pocket-comb of light tortoise-shell, which Helen had
taken up unreflectingly before going out, as she often did.
"She remembered that, too," he thought.
Then with loving entreaty:
"Be mine," he asked of her.
"Nay, I am yours," she replied.
A twilight prevailed in the bedroom, for he had loosed the
window-curtains, as also those of the bed--of that bed which she found
strength to look at for the first time. How fain would she have bidden
him leave her to herself! And she turned her eyes towards him. He had
begun to unfasten the buttons of her dress, and she was about to say to
him, "Go away!" when she saw in his eyes that expression of felicity of
which she had so often dreamed, and she suffered him, with that divine
weakness whose sublime flattery so few men understand.
If a woman who loves wishes to be loved in the same degree, is it then
needful that she borrow something from the methods of those creatures
devoid of true sensibility, to whom their persons are but instruments of
supremacy, and who surrender themselves that they may the better
possess? Helen did not suspect, while Armand, intoxicated with her
beauty, was sweeping her away in his arms, after warming her feet with
kisses and taking from her all her attire, from her bracelets to her
hair-pins--no, Helen did not suspect that, at that very moment, this man
had just found in the absolute submission to his desires that had cost
the poor woman so dear, a reason for not believing in her.
"Are you happy?" she asked of him an hour later, lying on his heart, and
giving herself up to the languid voluptuousness that succeeds caresses;
"tell me, are you happy? You see, _I_ am."
And it was true, for she had just for the first time felt an unfamiliar
emotion waking in her beneath the caresses of the man she loved so
dearly.
"Oh! very happy," replied Armand, and he spoke falsely, for reviewing in
thought all the slight incidents of this first meeting--the smiling
entry, the presence of the comb, the compliant disrobing, the burning
susceptibility of his mistress--he said again to himself that he was
certainly not Helen's first lover.
And then, he secretly despised her for not having denied herself in
detail. The evident absence of remorse in the woman seemed to him a
proof that she had no kind of moral sense. He did not tell himself that,
if she had manifested remorse, he would have treated her as a hypocrite,
and meanwhile she was speaking to him.
"See," she sighed, "as soon as I saw you, I loved you. I felt that you
had not had your share of happiness here below, and it was my dream to
impart it to you, and to do away with all your troubles. There is a
wrinkle in your forehead which I cannot endure. When you asked me to be
yours and I said no, I saw that wrinkle between your eyebrows, there,"
she said, kissing the spot, "and then, when I said yes, the wrinkle was
gone. That is why I am here, and proud of being here, for I am so proud
of loving you."
"How strange it is," thought Armand, "that no woman has conscience
enough to say to herself: 'I am acting disgracefully, lying, betraying;
it amuses me, but it is disgraceful.' The cloth on the communion-table
and the sheet on the bed of a furnished room are all one to them. There,
my angel, go on with your romances," and he closed her lips with kisses.
"Ah!" he thought again, "she is very pretty. If only she had wit enough
to hold her tongue!"