Alfred Chazel had been quite aware that a mysterious drama was being
played in his household. He had been sensible of it, dimly at first. It
has not been sufficiently remarked how much the peculiar nature of
imagination, when developed by the habits of the mind, prevails over
sensibility itself, and modifies it. Alfred had an altogether
mathematical intellect, very skilful in abstract reasonings, very
unskilful in the perception of the real. He was as little acquainted
with his wife's character after several years of married life as he had
been on the day when he fell in love with her during a visit to Monsieur
de Vaivre. But it was not only Helen's soul, with its depths, and
complexities, and singularities, that was unknown to him; it was her
whole life. Just as he had accepted the principles of conduct of the
middle class to which he belonged, so had he accepted its ideas; and to
the credit of the French provincial middle class it must be said that
their morals are, relatively speaking, very pure. The men have, perhaps,
in their youth low pleasures. But the married women who cause themselves
to be talked about are immediately pointed at in such a way that the
number of them is very small.
Alfred had on this point preserved the impressions received in his own
family, impressions which no experience had corrected; for very chaste
men are like very virtuous women, and no one reposes in them those
confidences which illuminate the unclean depths of life, the grossness
hidden beneath sentimental phraseology, the sensual egotism dissembled
beneath the hypocrisy of pretences. The notion of suspecting Helen of
having a lover could no more occur to him than the notion of suspecting
her of theft or forgery, and much less the notion that she had for lover
De Querne, his own companion in childhood.
Towards the latter he entertained a feeling of friendship all the more
intense that there was blended with it an element of admiration. When
they were studying on the same form at school, he used to look at him,
and the refinement of Armand's manners, his beauty, his intellect, his
halo of social superiority, inspired him with a sort of fetichism.
Himself so modest, so hard-working, so akin to the people, he had
vaguely considered his friend as a being of a somewhat different
species; and when a very clear vision of a difference of this kind
produces neither hatred nor envy, it gives birth to an almost blind
enthusiasm. Never had Chazel judged De Querne. He had become so
habituated to taking him as he was, that he did not even ask himself
what manner of friendship Armand was giving him in return for his own.
When they had separated, and the young baron used to send about two
hastily scribbled pages in reply to the interminable letters from his
old companion, the latter would say to himself:
"Armand is very fond of me, but it is wearisome to him to write. It is
only natural. He is such an agreeable fellow, and so much sought after;"
and this was all the complaint of an excellent heart that was ever
deceived by a trifling exhibition of sympathy.
At every visit that he paid to Paris he met with the same reception from
Armand--a clasp of the hand, an invitation to luncheon, to dinner, to
the theatre. These tokens of comradeship, at once indifferent and
cordial, appeared to him proofs of loyal affection. Not having observed
Armand any more than, once married, he was to observe his wife, he could
not measure the depth of the abyss which from year to year yawned still
wider between his old classmate and himself. He knew not how to
recognise the visible signs of radical indifference: the absolute
dumbness of the young baron respecting himself, his looks of inattention
during their conversations.
While Alfred, for example, was detailing to him the beginnings of his
love for Mademoiselle de Vaivre, the innocent privacies of his furtive
wooing and his hopes, Armand would smoke a cigar, and think of the loves
which had crossed his own life, amid all the studied elegance and
corruption which at Paris make a woman of pleasure so complex a thing,
an extreme attained in the art of refining upon voluptuousness. He could
by anticipation see in the young girl loved by his friend an awkward and
undesirable creature, with red hands, badly-made dresses, and white
stockings.
Like all men in whom the source of sensibility is not flowing and rich,
he discovered pretexts for disgust in the trifles of petty external
fact, and he involuntarily despised Chazel for not being disgusted like
himself. This contempt was even so continuous, that it prevented him
from looking seriously on the life of this worthy student, this prize of
social excellence, as he used to call him in his absence. The
astonishment caused him by Helen's distinguished appearance, had merely
prompted him to say to himself below his breath:
"It's only ninnies like him that ever get hold of such a woman as that."
Alfred had trembled to know the judgment passed by his friend upon his
wife, and had been enraptured to find that she pleased him. Armand's
constant presence in their home, after they had settled at Paris, caused
him intense joy. He became still more attached to his friend, because he
appreciated the woman he himself loved so dearly, and to the latter
because she appreciated his friend.
"I knew he would please you," he used to say ingenuously to his wife.
"He is such an affectionate fellow, for all his sceptical ways."
And he would tell her how, in the days of their early youth, the elder
Chazel had been in want of ten thousand francs to pay a brother's debts,
and how Armand had immediately lent them.
For the first few months Helen listened to these praises with brilliant
eyes, and a happy soul; she found in them reason for loving still more
the man she loved. Since she had been the young man's mistress, these
same praises darkened her countenance as they wounded her love. Did not
the husband's trust degrade the lover? If Alfred's ingenuous sensibility
discovered in this sign, as well as in many others, a metamorphosis in
his wife's character, he was incapable of discerning its secret cause.
It was just this too delicate sensibility which rendered it intolerable
to him to think continuously of evil instincts, disgraceful actions,
treacheries. There is hardness of heart in all distrust. The admission
of evil tortured Chazel, and he forced himself not to think about it.
What, however, was the matter with Helen, for she was not the same? He
had begun by believing her seriously ill, after the visit to the doctor,
which had passed off as Helen had foreseen. He had accompanied her, had
waited in the drawing-room of the celebrated practitioner, who was a
friend of Armand's, and had afterwards been too modest to ask her for
any details. He was one of those men who shroud the feminine nature in a
deep veneration, to whom the matters relating to the sex are confined
within inaccessible mystery, who have never looked upon complete
nakedness. Let him who will reconcile women's pretensions to refinement
with the profound contempt which most of them feel for such men, while
the purest have in them a slight weakness towards the wicked fellow who
has seen and done everything. Everything? They do not know what this is,
and they dream about it.
Although deeply in love with Helen in the physical meaning of the term,
Alfred had found a species of pleasure in sacrificing to the
requirements of a health so dear, pleasures which she had never shared;
but having scarcely any points of comparison, he had come to dream no
more. Yes, this renunciation was sweet to him--sweet and yet useless,
since Helen's countenance was shadowed every day, and she was evidently
suffering. When Alfred saw her absorbed in indefinite silence, when he
was aware of the thinness and paleness of the cheeks that he had known
so full and rosy, he gave way to unexpressed pity.
"What is the matter with her?" he would then ask himself. "What if she
is in serious danger, and dares not tell me, that she may not make me
anxious?"
The result of these reflections was that his ingenuousness and
trustfulness prompted him to venture upon exactly the same procedure
that would have been dictated to him by suspicion. Helen had thought it
necessary to speak to him on several occasions of fresh visits to the
doctor, in order to avoid further attempts at intimacy.
"Well," said Chazel to himself, "I will go to the doctor;" and one
afternoon towards the end of that winter he again found himself, this
time alone, in the waiting-room, an apartment furnished like a museum
with that wealth of knick-knacks which is characteristic of modern
interiors.
The French windows opened upon the garden of the old house, the
ground-floor of which was occupied by Dr. Louvet. The latter belonged to
that generation of society scientists who visit the hospital in the
morning, receive their clients in the afternoon, and find means to be as
witty as idlers in a drawing-room at ten o'clock in the evening.
Further, they are intelligent enough to prepare for the prolonged
waitings of their fair patients an adornment wherein the latter may find
something of what they have left at home, and an aspect of things
similar to that to which they have been accustomed. Alfred involuntarily
felt uncomfortable in this vast room which, with its tapestries and
wainscotings and pictures, appeared to be intended rather for lordly
receptions than for the use of suffering humanity.
He experienced a feeling of relief on entering the doctor's room, in
which there was nothing but books--a contrast skilfully contrived by
Louvet, who was as able in stage management as he was excellent in
diagnosis. He was a man still young and very fair, with a face that
suggested somewhat the traditional type of the Valois, and dark eyes of
singular penetration. He was slight and pale, and when he placed his
finger against his temple--a familiar gesture of his which was
reproduced in a fine portrait, by Nittis, that hung in the room--he
presented a strange blending of extreme delicacy and studied posture,
which women especially found imposing.
"How is Madame Chazel?" he asked in the polished and detached tone which
he always affected.
"Well, doctor," said Alfred, "it is precisely about her health that I
have come to consult you."
"And why has she not come herself?" asked the physician.
"She does not even know of the step I have taken," replied the husband.
"She causes me much anxiety. You know how she is wasting away; you have
seen her several times lately."
Doctor Louvet listened in the attitude of his portrait, with his eyelids
half closed. Although he was completely master of himself, as became a
man accustomed daily to receive the confidences of many persons deprived
of hypocrisy by the presence of danger, he was unable, on hearing these
words of Chazel's, to restrain a movement of his eyelids. Rapid as was
this movement and the glance which accompanied it, it could not escape
poor Alfred, whose whole powers of attention were at that moment
concentrated upon the doctor's face. Why did that glance cause him a
little shiver, and tempt him to ask:
"When have you seen my wife?"
But it was a question impossible to put. Moreover, the physician was
already making his reply.
"When Madame Chazel did me the honour to consult me last"--and this word
expressed both everything and nothing--"she appeared to me to be
suffering more particularly in the nervous system."
And he entered into lengthened details respecting the delicacy of the
feminine organisation, dwelling upon the contrast between the life to
which his patient had been accustomed in the country and the life of
Paris. Lacking in observation as Alfred might be, his habit of reasoning
with precision forced him to recognise the vagueness of this talk, and
he asked somewhat heedlessly:
"And you have no observation to make to the husband?"
"None," replied Louvet with a half smile, "unless it be to spoil our
dear patient a good deal and to contradict her as little as possible."
Alfred's heart sank within his breast, and while the liveried servant,
who waited fashionably in the physician's ante-chamber, was assisting
him to put on his overcoat, he was already being gnawed by this thought:
"Helen has deceived me. It was not the doctor who ordered her to live
apart from me. She has come to have a horror of me; but, what have I
done to her?"
What had he done to her? A deep melancholy took possession of him from
the time of this visit to Louvet, of which he was very careful not to
speak. What was the use of adding another pain to those which Helen
already felt? For she suffered, as he could see--but why? Ingenuously he
made it his study to find out the wrongs that he had done her. What
frightened him most was that he could almost palpably feel the whole
mystery in his wife's character. This is one of the most cruel trials
that can come to a loving husband. When she was beside him, and alone
with him, drawing out the stitches in her tapestry, he used to look at
her and ask himself of what she was thinking.
Of what? All his superiority of education availed him nothing in the
presence of this silent creature whose mere presence troubled him in so
obscure a fashion. The desire of her person, a desire the satisfaction
of which he was incapable of demanding as a right, paralysed him with a
sort of nervous suffering which, united to natural timidity and to the
anxiety respecting this increasing paleness, was growing into a
veritable torture. And then, when Armand arrived in the middle of such a
silence, a comparison was inevitably instituted on Alfred's part between
his friend's easy manners and his own constraint, and especially between
the difficulty which he found in talking to Helen and the abundance of
words that came to the Baron de Querne. Helen, too, appeared to make the
same comparison, for in Armand's presence she took an interest at once
in what was being said.
These visits gave Chazel an uncomfortable feeling; he experienced a
vague impression that he was in the way in his own house. He had several
times remarked when it was he himself who interrupted a _tête-à-tête_
between Armand and his wife, that the conversation suddenly ceased on
his arrival; he recognised this by the brightness in Helen's eyes. On
such occasions, that he might not give way to the vexation which he
felt, he used to engage in those already mentioned abstract
disquisitions. He saw that his old comrade had become more of a friend
to his wife than to himself, he was hurt by it, he reproached himself
for feeling hurt, and by the mere fact that he reproached himself,
reflected about it.
He thus grew accustomed continually to unite the thoughts of his friend
with that of his wife. But when we depict to ourselves simultaneously
the images of two living persons, it is not long before we depict them
acting upon each other, and in spite of himself Alfred came to consider
the relations which united Armand to Helen. To ascertain the cause of
his wife's suffering he had proceeded by elimination, instinctively
studying as a problem the data that he possessed concerning her, and
every time that he dwelt upon the mystery, he always struck upon a
thought which he used to drive away, and which came back again. At other
times he asked himself whether she had not confided the reason of her
grief to De Querne, was on the point of questioning his friend, and then
abstained from doing so.
"It would not be delicate," he thought to himself; "if she says nothing
to me, she has her reasons for it."
One day, however, he saw her so pale, so downcast, that he took courage.
"You are suffering, Helen," he said; "will you find a better friend than
I am to whom to confide your troubles, whatever they may be?"
"Nay, I have no troubles," she had replied, and she spoke falsely once
more.
Why were her eyes then filled with that moisture which speaks of
suppressed tears? Ah! it was because the loving kindness of her husband
was a torture to her in her torture, were it only by its contrast to the
frigidity of another man, the memory of whom was then passing through
her heart. Why did the same memory pass at the same moment through
Alfred's imagination? She, however, kept this memory before her mind,
while he repelled it.
"Helen," he said to himself, "is an honourable woman. Armand is an
honourable man. What right should I have to insult them with suspicion?
He takes an interest in her; did I not desire that it should be so? She
is attached to him--and why not? Can there not be honourable friendship
between a man and a woman?"
Such were the habitual reasonings by which Alfred sought to stifle the
growing viper of suspicion. But the more he reasoned in this way, the
more his suspicion augmented, since by reasoning about his distrust he
thought about it, and in consequence rendered it more present to his
mind. He was striving against these inward thoughts one afternoon of
that same month of February, when returning on foot from the Orleans
terminus, whither a piece of duty had led him. The weather was fine, the
pale, fresh azure of the cool winter days was floating over Paris, and
although it took him out of his way, Alfred entered the Jardin des
Plantes, in order to enjoy his walk a little. At a turning in one of the
main avenues of the garden, his heart beat more quickly, for walking
slowly under the bare trees, and talking together in an absorbed
fashion, he had just perceived a woman who had Helen's figure and a man
with the figure of Armand.
Yes, it was indeed they. He knew so well his wife's easy gait, and that
other somewhat lagging step which reminded him of so many strolls in a
college quadrangle, not very far from this spot. But why was he seized
with acute pain at this meeting? What could be more natural than that
Helen should walk thus with Armand, what more natural or more innocent?
Do people who wish to do wrong come in this way into a public garden?
They were not even arm-in-arm. Yes, but why had not Helen mentioned at
luncheon that she was going to walk with Armand? Did she not know that
he would think nothing of it? Hiding from him? Why?
"I will go up to them," he thought. "I will speak to them, and soon see
whether she is confused. But no; it would look as though I had followed
them. Perhaps they have met by chance? What if I were now to follow
them?"
The thought of such espionage sickened him.
They were still walking in front of him in that vast avenue which runs
beside the bison enclosure and the bear-pits. Overhead, the gigantic
trees curved their naked boughs, the blackness of which stood out sadly
against the blue sky. Chazel felt his limbs shaking beneath him, and
sank upon a bench. He told himself that he must either look upon this
meeting as a most natural thing, and in that case it was childish not to
speak to his wife and her friend, or else--and it was just this second
hypothesis whose sudden thrusting into his mind paralysed him.
"All," he said to himself, "will be explained on her return."
Some minutes passed away in this anguish and irresolution. The couple
disappeared in the direction of the little hill that leads to the
labyrinth. Chazel was almost happy at their disappearance. It provided
him with a pretext for not acting immediately. And, in fact, he went out
of the garden by the opposite gate, saying to himself, in vindication of
the impotence of will to which he had just fallen a victim, that it was,
moreover, the surest way of arriving at a certainty. If Helen spoke to
him in the evening about this walk, the walk was, as he believed it to
be, innocence itself. If not--but what sort of ideas was he again taking
into his head?
The shock had been so great that, instead of returning home, he walked
about for part of the afternoon. The advent of the moment when he would
see his wife again was now what he desired, and at the same time what he
most dreaded. He was on the point of turning back and entering the
garden again, but it was too late.
He stepped upon the deck of one of the boats that ply on the Seine, and
there, mingling with the crowd of lower middle-class folk, he watched
the water breaking against the arches, and shattering against the quays,
the construction of which he mechanically examined; and he followed with
his gaze the huge lighters, with the clean little painted houses
standing in the centre. The air became keen, but he did not notice it
until he had reached Auteuil. He landed under the viaduct, amid the din
of the fair which every afternoon attracts such a strange tribe of
prostitutes and their followers. He returned on foot along the
interminable parapet. His anguish was so great that he could not
remember having ever experienced anything analogous to it. His heart was
paining him in his left breast, so that it seemed as though breath would
fail him. Night was falling fast, the winter night, whose oncoming is so
melancholy. The death struggle of the light is so cruelly like the agony
of thought!
Here he was at last at his own street, in his own courtyard, in front of
his own door. He did not ask whether his wife had returned, but he went
straight to her room, and knocked modestly. Helen's clear voice said,
"Come in." He was in her presence, and involuntarily he looked at her
feet. She still wore her walking boots, with that trifle of dust on them
which shows that a woman has gone on foot. Ah! how he would have liked
to question her! But instinctively he grasped that which constitutes the
powerlessness of all jealousy; what is the use of entering, with a woman
who is mistrusted, upon a discussion turning upon this very mistrust?
She will not destroy it by saying "No," seeing that there is no belief
in her.
"Where do you come from so late?" Helen asked tranquilly. No, never had
a being capable of falsehood such beautiful eyes, and such a beautiful
smile.
"Guess," he said, with more calmness. She was, no doubt, going herself
to tell him of her walk, and as she was silent he went on:
"From Auteuil. I walked because I did not feel well. And you?" he
questioned, with an anxiety grown terrible once more.
"I have been shopping," she replied.
Ah! why had he not the courage to tell her that she had just uttered a
falsehood? He sat down with the sharp point buried still deeper in his
heart. She let the conversation drop, and resumed her book.
"A frightful novel that Monsieur De Querne lent me," she said. "It is
the story of a woman who deceives her lover, and does so while loving
him. Authors don't know what to invent nowadays."
Her eyes shone as she uttered these words. She had pronounced the word
"lover" with an intonation which distressed Alfred. She seemed to impart
a mysterious depth to those two syllables. Ah! he would have given his
blood at that moment to have her speak to him of her walk! After all,
she had perhaps attached no importance to her reply. But neither then,
nor at dinner, nor during the evening that followed, did she breathe a
word about it. About ten o'clock, Armand arrived in his dress coat; he
was going out afterwards. She received him with the words:
"You have been quite well since yesterday?"
Ah, the deceiver! the deceiver!
Alfred had seated himself at the corner of a table under the pretence of
having some papers to examine, and from time to time he watched them
conversing, those two beings whom he loved best of all the world. Was it
possible that a criminal mystery united them, and at the expense of
himself, whom they had betrayed? This Armand, whom he had seen playing
in his schoolboy dress--had he been his brother he could not have loved
him more. What nobility of brow! what grace of gesture! And this was the
man who was a villain, for to deceive such a friend as himself was
villainy.
And she, with her medallion-like profile, with her modesty and proud
reserve! No; it was he, Alfred, who was losing his senses. A walk in a
garden--what could be more innocent? Perhaps--for he knew that she was
charitable, and so did Armand--yes, perhaps, they were both going to
visit the poor. But, then, why this reticence? why this deception? And
why did he himself keep silence? To this he could have given no reply,
except that speaking was beyond his strength, just as acting had lately
been.
And Armand and Helen conversed with tranquillity. He listened to their
voices uttering words of unconcern, and all his dim suspicions, all his
repressed doubts, came back simultaneously to his soul.