REVENGE! Such was scarcely the subject of Helen's reflections while
returning from the Rue Lincoln. The sudden blow which she had just
received had been too heavy a one to leave room within her for any other
feeling but that of the most continuous and crushing grief. At the
dinner table, during the evening, then during the night when alone in
her own room with every light extinguished, and sleepless, then during
the day that succeeded to that night, and during the other nights and
days that ensued for a fortnight afterwards, what she perceived
unremittingly and with the same cruel, uninterrupted clearness was the
brutal fact that had at last been grasped in its indisputable reality,
the fact that her lover had never loved her!
Not for a moment? No, not for a moment, seeing that when he had
possessed her for the first time, he had believed himself in the
possession of the former mistress of Monsieur de Varades, and perhaps of
others. The smiles and reticences and unresponsiveness and mistrust on
the part of Armand were now clearly accounted for, and her whole being
rebelled against the murderous injustice, as she compared what she had
given with what she had received. What! the tender refinements of her
dreams, the noble madness of her dear love, the idolatry of her
ecstasies, the sincerity of the sacrifices made without regret or
remorse to give happiness to the man she loved, all this wasted upon a
lie, upon a void, as vainly as the leaves driven by the wind along the
walks of the old garden in which they had walked together, as uselessly
as the motes dancing in a sunbeam on the edge of the window in the
little room during those afternoons devoted to their loves.
Devoted to their loves? Yes, she had loved deeply, madly, and alas! for
nothing--to find herself looked upon as a woman that passed from one
intrigue to another, as one that had loosed her robe for this man and
for that, as one that collected sensations, just as others collect fans
or trinkets. Ah! she could not endure the injustice of it. To be
deprived of the sight of Armand--for on the day following the
explanation that had proved so tragical to her, Alfred had received a
line from his friend announcing a temporary absence necessitated by
business of importance--yes, to be deprived of the sight of Armand was
an anguish to her, but she possessed a weapon against this anguish: the
contempt with which she had been inspired by her lover's poverty of
heart, by the implacable egotism of the man that the last conversation
had revealed.
How should she ever accustom her heart to the iniquity of this same
being whom she had so greatly loved. He had parted from her abruptly,
and unworthily, but the recognition of the extent of her love for him
would not have caused her so much suffering as she had endured. The
martyrdom, the intolerable martyrdom consisted in the impotence of her
love, not to command a return, but to make itself merely understood. She
was like one under sentence of death who is willing indeed to die, but
whose worst agony is the powerlessness to exclaim before death: "I am
innocent."
How keenly he had made her feel the arrogant outrage inflicted by his
honour as a man, for it was in the name of this honour that he had
sacrificed her. Ah! had he loved her, how lightly he would have held
this honour, just as she had lightly held her own; but how could he have
loved her since from the very first he had believed her guilty of
deception? She used to come and say to him: "I have kept myself for
you," and he used to say to himself: "After Monsieur de Varades!" All
the proofs of her affection--and how she had lavished them upon
him!--had been shattered against this invincible conviction, and yet,
heavens! her affection was real, as real as the life which had begun
only on the day when she had come to know him. And she could hear his
voice saying:
"We were both persons of experience. Do you believe that I was not
acquainted with your life?"
Oh! what injustice, what hideous injustice! She sobbed her heart out at
the thought of it. She came and went, a prey to continual fever, finding
no more rest for her poor burning head than for her poor bleeding heart,
and inwardly given over to a medley of emotions--despair for happiness
that was lost for ever, keen regret for her absent lover, frenzy at
having been misunderstood in the noblest and most genuine of her
feelings. To repent of having belonged to this cruel Armand before the
hour of her supreme deception, was what she could not do. Love, sublime
love had impelled her to the act, as sublime as itself. Sublime love!
"No," she now exclaimed, "blind, insensate love!"
And she walked to and fro, at random, in her room like a caged animal,
and ever, as against an irrefragable wall, she struck against this
thought:
"What was the use of having loved like that? What was the use? Ah! the
lying, lying, lying!--"
What served to complete her provocation in the mortal crisis through
which she was passing was the tender and untimely solicitude of her
husband. As he had no suspicion of the drama that was being enacted in
this distempered soul, he would chance to say to her, in the belief that
he was holding out an agreeable prospect: "We will make a trip as soon
as I am free. Perhaps Armand will come with us." Or perhaps: "I am
surprised at not having heard from Armand. Has he not written to you?"
"No," she would reply.
Alfred now reproached himself for the explanation that he had had with
his friend, feeling persuaded that the latter had gone to travel only in
order to spare his jealousy. He thought about his wife's melancholy, he
found it ever more inexplicable, and he told himself that he had
deprived her of one of her few relaxations. She, on the other hand, was
profoundly sensible of angered pride on thus encountering her husband's
trust, which contrasted too sharply with the distrust of her lover. And
then these plans of travelling together, which Alfred called up, were
they not the very ones that she had herself formerly cherished? They
showed her with only too great precision what might have been--those
summer months whose intimate holiday-making she had imagined beforehand.
They would have lived together by the seashore in one of the villages of
Normandy, where the trees grow green to the very margin of the blue
waves. Perhaps they would have seen together one of those Italian towns
whose mere names seem to shroud a promise of happiness with light. And
then there came nothing but freezing solitude, nothing but desertion! He
had not written her a note since their rupture, not a line of pity. But
why should he have pitied her? Doubtless he believed her already
comforted, perhaps in the arms of another. Why not? He had deemed her
capable of having Varades before himself. Two lovers, three, ten, what
matters the total if there be more than one?
From day to day the keen pain of this injustice became more keen within
her, and the pain resulted in a mad and morbid thought, yet the only one
that could satisfy somewhat the despair that raged in her heart. Yes, in
those hours of anguish she conceived the criminal thought of indeed
committing frightful actions, since she had been deemed capable of them,
of being like the image that Armand had formed of her, like that fast
and facile woman whom he had believed himself to possess.
Moral life, like physical life, has its suicidal fevers, its damning
frenzies. There are moments when we are driven at all costs to renounce
our inner personality, to assassinate it, to become another being. It is
especially injustice that produces these crises, mysterious yet so
necessary, and so natural that even children, like animals, are subject
to them. Are not the best rendered the worst by being beaten without
having deserved it? The more Helen was sensible of having been
irredeemably misunderstood, the more a frightful attraction impelled her
to become just the opposite of what she had formerly been. A vertigo
seized her, and, as it were, a delirious longing for degradation. "'Tis
too foolish," she said to herself, "to have any heart."
This appetite for destruction which works in all creatures
simultaneously with the sense of love, recoiled upon herself. She set
herself to attack her own inner nature systematically, as some men
intoxicate themselves, in analogous circumstances, glass by glass, in
spite of disgust and, so to speak, from a sense of duty. She began to
exhibit strange phenomena of nervous gaiety in the ordinary affairs of
life. She, who hitherto had detested light conversation, affected to
fill her talk with the most direct allusions to the things of love. She
sent for those works which, during the last few years, she had heard
spoken of as being the most audacious, in order to have them upon her
table. She was seized with a sort of frenzy for pleasure, and every
evening there would be a party at the theatre to which she brought
Alfred, and she would speak of her intentions of going again into
society, and interest herself with surprising activity in the disguise
that she was to wear at a fancy ball given by the Malhoures, a ball for
which Armand was to have chosen her costume. Her voice seemed to be of a
higher pitch. She laughed a more sonorous laugh, and at all the
demonstrations of this painful merriment Alfred, in spite of himself,
felt affected by an indefinable anxiety, so completely were her eyes
characterised by that extraordinary brightness, her gestures by those
nervous jerkings, and her words by that abruptness which occasion a
dread lest a woman capable of looking, gesticulating, and talking in
this way should suddenly be seized by a fit of insanity, and should
commit some extravagant and irretrievable action.
She was stranger still on the morning of the day on which she was to go
to the Malhoures' ball. It was the first time since her quarrel with
Armand that she was going out for the evening. She did not come down to
breakfast. Alfred, seated at the square table with his wife's cover laid
opposite to him, and with his son on his right, ate without speaking, a
prey to the increasing distress inflicted upon him by the mournful
oddness of Helen's behaviour. She no longer seemed to be aware of the
little boy's existence. "Good morning, dear," "Good night, dear," and
that was nearly all. She, a mother usually so loving, seemed to have the
maternal instinct paralysed within her, and for the moment such was
indeed the case.
A settled idea produces upon the heart the same effect as is produced by
a bright and motionless point upon our eyes; it hypnotises the being
which it sways, and limits its susceptibility to a tiny circle of
sensations. It was impossible for the unhappy woman to have any feeling
whatever in respect of her son, because in her condition of lucid
aberration it was impossible for her to be sensible of his existence.
The little boy was raised on a high chair, and had that morning on his
face the sad, and at the same time perplexed expression of a child that
grieves without knowing why. A depth of undefined sorrow was in his
eyes; his father was aware, merely by observing the way in which he ate
with the tips of his teeth, that a hidden trouble was tormenting this
curly head.
"Have you not been good this morning," he said to him, "that you are so
sad?"
"Yes, I have been good," Henry replied, and was again silent; then
suddenly he said: "Papa, what does 'to prejudice' mean?"
"It is a wrong done to a person unjustly. But why do you ask me that?"
"Because Miette said the other day that someone had prejudiced her uncle
against her cousin." This expression, heard for the first time, and only
half understood, had struck his childish imagination, and he went on:
"Could anyone prejudice you or mamma against me?"
"What notions are you taking into your head?" replied the father.
He had just become sensible that his son was himself perceiving the
change in his mother's disposition. He looked at him, and felt that
inclination to weep which comes upon a widower at the sight of his
orphan child--a poor little thing who has lost the greatest of earthly
blessings, who does not suspect this, but who nevertheless forebodes and
guesses irretrievable misfortune. Father and son preserved silence, when
through the dining-room door, which had been left open, was heard a
voice, Helen's voice, completing an order to a workwoman. "For nine
o'clock then, punctually." She was engaged about her ball-dress. She was
not there where her glance, her smile, would have cast such a ray of
joy, and Alfred reflected upon the incomprehensible, and at the same
time unconquerable disaster which had brought them all there, himself,
his son, and his wife--especially his wife. Heavens! what was the matter
with her?
He was still thinking of this many hours later, in the brougham that was
taking them both in the direction of the Rue du Bac, where the Malhoures
lived. She was in the corner of the carriage, with powdered hair and two
patches at the corner of her thin, pale cheek. The powder, and the
patches, and the dark touches that she had put round her eyes, in which
the flame of fever was burning, imparted to her beauty something
dangerous, and disquieting, and more inaccessible than ever to the man
who was sitting by her side, and looking at her without venturing to
speak.
Her neck, mobile and graceful, issued from the furs which hid her
disguise as a flower-girl of the time of Louis XV. She wore pink silk
stockings, pink satin shoes, a flowered skirt, and in her soul was the
mortal blending of frenzy and despair of a woman who would ruin herself
with delight, for nothing--for the sake of being ruined and ruined for
ever! Through the brougham windows, the glass of which she had let down
in order to inhale something of the keen night air, she watched the
houses filing past, and the picture presented by Paris after the toils
of the day. The shops were flaming on the ground floor; the cafés were
opening their doors to customers; the wind was sending a quiver through
the gas flames that outlined the notices of the theatres. Along the
Boulevards, as in the Avenue de l'Opéra and in the Rue des Tuileries,
there was a moving crowd.
Of what was this crowd in quest? Of pleasure, and of nothing but
pleasure. _She_ had pursued an ideal which had proved most false! It was
time to live like the rest. A woman's amusement consists of coquetry, of
intrigue. She would be a coquette. She would have lovers--yes, lovers.
She repeated these words, in thought, with strange passion, for the face
of the man she had loved had just appeared again before her
recollection, and with it the unbearable palpitation of the heart had
begun again. Ah! between that face and herself, between that memory and
her heart, she would put other faces, other memories!
Yet, how he had mocked her! She now at certain moments felt a genuine
hatred towards him. By a sort of backward crystallisation, she
multiplied reasons for animosity round the thought of Armand that she
bore in her mind, and she calumniated him fiercely on her own behalf.
Did not his whole behaviour towards her bear the stamp of abominable and
daily calculation? When he had entreated her to be his under the
pretence that he would not believe in her love without this proof, was
it not that he would not fail where another had succeeded? Was it true
even that Alfred was jealous? This was doubtless a pretext devised for
the purpose of bringing about a rupture. And how carefully he had kept
the name of Varades to himself, to throw it into his mistress's teeth
only at the last moment, without giving her time to justify herself! She
ought to have spoken, to have looked for old letters, to have found some
testimony. But why? Would he have believed her for an instant? And
bruising herself afresh against the poisoned point of injustice, she
detested all men in this man, she envied those who mock the hateful
race, the jades who take the initiative in this duel of distrust and are
the first to betray. How glad she would be to have been one of them, to
have really had a dozen intrigues before that one with Armand, and to be
able to tell him so, and to degrade herself and him, and to pollute
everything within her and about her, her soul and her body, with a
pollution such as no water could wash away.
She was enduring, while in this carriage, one of those tempests of
passion which she had to pass through several times in the day, and
especially at night, for she had not slept two hours out of the
twenty-four during the past three weeks. It was as though a tide of
bitterness were rising within her, and the whirling of her thoughts
became so rapid that all idea of ambient things was blotted out from her
consciousness; and she did not emerge from her dream until some
inevitable detail compelled her to action, such as Alfred's hand shaking
her arm as the brougham stopped, and his voice saying to her: "We have
arrived." The stupor of an awakening from sleep showed in her eyes, and
she recognised the Malhoures' gate.
The house stood at the back of a courtyard and was one of those old
mansions such as are still found in that part of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, with views behind over vast stretches of garden, while in
front there is the narrow, populous, noisy street. The house was let in
floors, and the Malhoures occupied the second. The lofty windows were
gleaming, and the shadows of the various couples were thrown in black,
moving silhouettes upon the luminous glass. Old Malhoure, as he was
familiarly called, was a professor in the École Polytechnique, a member
of the Institute, and tolerably rich by inheritance from his father, the
celebrated inventor. He had three marriageable daughters, and received
every Wednesday. Twice a year he gave a fancy dress dance. On these
evenings a general clearance was made. All the rooms, even the
_savant's_ study, were in requisition for the entertainment, and
although they were large and lofty apartments, they scarcely sufficed
for the number of the guests.
People used to visit the Malhoures a great deal. Their house was in the
first place a centre of reunion for the great professor's former pupils
who were separated by their modes of life; intrigue also went on behind
the doors with important personages of the Academy of Sciences; finally
people were amused by the youthfulness of the three young ladies and the
good nature of their father, whose appearance--a legendary one in the
École--was in itself an element of mirth. He was huge and short, with
eyes hidden behind blue spectacles, a beard collar of greenish-white,
clothes of extraordinary cut, and a continual nodding of the head.
Though he presented this figure, it was pretended that the old man had
once been a lady's man, a gay dog, as the students used to say
facetiously to one another. At twenty-two, he had discovered a theorem,
which bore his name, and since then he had multiplied treatises after
treatises. When, wearied by fourteen hours of work, he went out in the
evening, he used to follow the young workwomen in the Quartier de
l'Observatoire, where he then lived. He used to heap up engaging offers
to entice them, but he was so ugly--so ugly--that they laughed
impudently in his face. The savant used to look round him to make sure
he was not heard, and then murmur as a supreme argument:
"I am Malhoure, the inventor of the theorem!"
After his marriage he had grown somewhat religious, but he had remained
very cheerful, especially when he had discovered some particularly
elegant formula during the day. Such was doubtless the case that
evening, for he was standing on the threshold receiving the guests with
his most cordial smile, although he did not recognise one person out of
ten; he had no memory for faces. By his side, and grumbling, was his
intimate friend, Professor Moreau, a calculator long and lean, and as
great a pessimist as Malhoure was an optimist. Just as Madame Chazel
reached the landing, and while she was leaving her furs in the care of
the servant, the two professors were speaking of a lady who had just
passed, wearing a dress as outrageously low as she herself was faded,
and old Malhoure was saying to his friend:
"Well, geometry does not grow old. The square of the hypotenuse is
always young."
"For my own part," replied Moreau, "I can see whether a woman is
hump-backed or blind of an eye, whether she walks straight or is lame.
But what difference there is between ugliness and beauty I have never
been able to conceive."
The piano was playing a quadrille, the din of the dance filled the
rooms, and Malhoure clasped both of Chazel's hands, taking him for some
one else, and calling him "My dear, my very dear Arthur." Helen was
looking, with strange feeling of envy, at the professors, whose
conversation she had just overheard. They at least would never know that
continuous, settled torture which brings with it incapacity for a
thought foreign to itself, for study, for reading, for conversation!
But she was already in the hands of Madame Malhoure and her three
daughters, all four being equally unreasonable, and having no object
save that of amusing themselves. The mother was dressed as Catherine de
Médicis, and the three daughters as a gipsy, a milk-woman, and a
Cauchois peasant. Their costumes savoured of work done at home, and
fashioned with chance materials after the engravings of the illustrated
papers, and the same held good of the toilets worn by these ladies'
friends. The men, on their side, seemed uncomfortable in their black
coats; several looked like people who had to get up early in the
morning, and were computing that every call from the piano robbed them
of a little of their sleep.
The talk that was flying about in the warm atmosphere was astonishing by
contrast. Fragments of frivolous phrases alternated with thoughtful
conversation.
"Don't talk to me of these new theories about space that has more than
three dimensions--"
"Have you danced much this winter, mademoiselle?--"
"Ah! what a genius Cauchy had, what power of analysis!--"
"Mamma, will you allow me to stay for the cotillon?--"
Alfred Chazel had lighted upon one of his old companions, and was
communicating to him a long-cherished project of a new algebra--that,
namely, of order--and Helen, assailed by the effusiveness of the
Malhoure ladies, was telling herself that it had been scarcely worth
while to take trouble about her dress. Thanks to the education received
from her step-mother, and also to her talks with Monsieur de Querne, she
had acquired tolerably accurate ideas concerning society. She
comprehended the distinction that separates true assemblies of the world
from middle-class carnivals such as she was now present at.
Nevertheless, as she was charming in her pale blue and bright pink
costume, and could read the triumph of her beauty in the envious glances
of many women, and the admiring gaze of the men, she gave herself up of
set purpose to that sensation of success so intoxicating to feminine
pride, even when it is a success that is despised; and she proceeded to
dance every dance that she might exhaust the inward torture by physical
activity, and she desisted only to visit the refreshment room and drink
a little champagne. The wine sent a trifle of light and sparkling froth
to her head that was so wearied by excessive thought.
She was standing thus beside the table in the refreshment room, fanning
herself with one hand, and holding in the other the cup containing the
last golden drops of the drink whose vague enervation was pleasant to
her; her partner, an insignificant and sufficiently correct young man,
who was quite proud of having promenaded with her on his arm, was trying
to talk; he was speaking of the new play, a middle-class comedy which
Monsieur de Querne had cruelly ridiculed one evening, and Helen was
replying with praise of a work which hitherto on her lover's authority
she had considered detestable. At the mere mention of the actors' names
and the title of the play, she could see herself in a box beside him,
and a flame coursed through her blood as she suddenly heard close to her
a voice that completed her emotion--that voice?--no, but the voice of
Monsieur de Varades, of the man who had exercised so fatal an influence
upon the destiny of her love, the voice of him whose name Armand had
flung in insult into her teeth during the scene of their rupture. By
what cruel mystery of fate was the officer here, almost within two steps
of her, and talking without appearing to see her?
Had she been able to reflect for a moment she would have deemed the
presence of old Malhoure's former pupil as natural as her own. Was she
not at this ball as the wife of an old fellow-student of De Varades? She
would also have reflected that living for months and months, as she had
done, apart from the society frequented by her husband, she was ignorant
of the movements of Alfred's companions. But in her present state of
morbid over-excitement, this sudden meeting struck her with a sort of
almost terror-stricken stupor, which was immediately replaced by a fresh
sweep of her secret grief, of that maddening grief which made her long
to cry _Fire!_ and _Murder!_
Without paying any further attention to what her partner was saying, she
looked with devouring curiosity at De Varades as though she had not met
him for years. He was a handsome fellow, slenderly built, and muscular
all over. The contrast in colour between his hair, which had become
nearly white, and his moustache, which had remained very dark, gave a
singular aspect to his refined head. A low forehead, a hooked nose, eyes
that were somewhat too small and close together, and a flashing glance,
in which bravery and temerity could alike be read, caused his
countenance to be vaguely suggestive of the profile of a bird of prey.
The stiffness, as of a uniform, assumed by the officer's evening coat,
which he wore in a military style, was all that was further required to
single him out and render him remarkable in an assembly wherein the
wearied race of the men of desk and study was predominant. Since the
audacious attempt at Bourges, Helen had never seen this disquieting
individual coming towards her without feeling dimly uncomfortable, so
sensible was she that in him she had an enemy capable of anything. And
now, a prey to a maddening ulceration, she would on the contrary have
liked him to approach her, to pay her attentions as he did formerly.
Yes, to pay her attentions, and she would not be childish and silly as
she had been before. In her misery and madness, she went so far as to
regret her former behaviour! She had been a loyal wife, and what had
this done for her? Only brought her to an hour when nothing in the world
remained to her save an incurable wound in the most sensitive portion of
her heart. She drank a few more drops of champagne in order to relieve
her thoughts, and De Varades, off whom she never took her eyes, turned
in her direction. Did he see her for the first time, or had he perhaps
affected not to notice her? He bowed and came to greet her, with the
expression at once ironical, respectful, and freezing, with which he
used to accost her at Bourges; and instead of replying to it, as she did
then, with equal coldness, she had a light in her eyes and a smile on
her lips. She held out her hand to him, and after the first polite
formulas, immediately asked:
"Are you passing through Paris?"
"No, madame, I am living here," he replied; "I was appointed professor
at the School of War four months ago."
"Four months, and you have not come to see us?" she said in a
coquettishly reproachful tone of voice.
"No, but I heard about you," replied the young man, and to himself: "How
Paris has changed her!" He detested her deeply, first because she had
wounded his pride, and then by reason of the infamous conduct of which
he had been guilty towards her. He had boasted of having been her lover,
giving details in proof; it was not true, and he could not forgive her
for the irreparable wrong that he had done her. Ah! if the calumny had
only been like those others that are stated aloud and that it is
possible to grasp! But no, it passes from ear to ear and from lip to lip
until it reaches a man who might have loved this woman, and whose heart
is stayed, suddenly paralysed by the terrible uncertainty concerning the
answer to the question: "Has she that in her past?"
To the young officer's credit it must be said that he had not seen so
far. He had yielded to the hideous spite of masculine vanity, and it was
again this vanity which, on Helen's unexpected reception of him,
prompted him to murmur an interrogative "Eh?" and immediately to begin
again the love-comedy that had formerly been played. A waltz was
sounding--the waltz of _Faust_, for the second of the young Malhoure
ladies was at the piano, and she, the artist of the family, liked people
to dance to classical subjects, whereas the eldest and the youngest, who
prided themselves upon being regular Parisians, doted on popular music,
and airs from the operettas and musical cafés.
"May I have the honour of this waltz, madame?" asked De Varades of
Helen.
"Was I engaged or was I not?" said the latter. "So much the worse! I
restore you your liberty," she added, addressing the young man who had
accompanied her to the refreshment room, but who through timidity did
not venture to remind her of the promise she had given of dancing with
himself; and immediately she was whirling round in the ball-room in the
arms of De Varades.
She was whirling round, prettier than ever with the feverish pink that
coloured her cheeks and imparted to them a tint similar to that of her
stockings, her skirt, and her corsage. The two patches at the corner of
her cheek, her black eyes, and her powdered hair, clothed her with a
sovereign grace that, apart from feelings of pride, stirred old longings
in the young man's heart. He was speaking to her while they danced. She
listened to him with--strange contrast!--Armand's image before her
thoughts. "If he could see me," she said to herself, "he would have
doubts no longer, he would triumph. Well! what does that matter to me?"
This strange inclination to act exactly contrary to her inmost nature,
which, when light and artificial is called spite, was exalted in this
distempered soul to the pitch of aberration, and she listened with a
pleased smile to what De Varades said to her. The latter, clever enough
to discern that something extraordinary was going on in Madame Chazel's
mind, and too desirous of requital not to take advantage of the
opportunity, had again begun to speak to her of his feelings. In
passionate terms he depicted to her his despair at Bourges when he had
displeased her, his vain attempts at self-consolation, his resolve never
to marry for her sake; he gave her to understand that she was the only
woman he had ever loved, and that he had sought an appointment at Paris
solely that he might meet her again. Never had he dared to tell her so
much at the period of their early relationships, and before his brutal
assault. But to all these falsehoods, repeated over and over again
during this first waltz, then in the square dances which followed, and
then in the quietude of the cotillon which they danced together, she
responded by such slight interjections of doubt as encourage avowals.
She seemed to be delirious for coquetry; she spent upon this flirtation
of an evening the fever that was preying upon her. Thus, a few hours
later, the officer, on his return to his small abode in the Rue
Saint-Dominique--a suite of apartments of which only two were furnished,
the others being filled with uniforms, weapons, and big boots--swore
inwardly as he undressed that he would carry this affair through with a
high hand. From his grandfather, who had served under the Emperor, De
Varades inherited the maxim that everything, in all circumstances,
should be ventured with women. And so, when he laid his head upon his
pillow before going to sleep, he had resolved to essay the possession of
Madame Chazel, no matter where, even were it on the couch in her
drawing-room, at the risk of a servant's entrance. "And this time she
shall not escape. She told me she was always at home between two and
four. Till to-morrow," he added, and closed his eyes on the sweet hope
of repairing his former wrong.
Poor Helen! While this man, anticipating the temerity with which frenzy
for injustice endured had inspired her, was falling asleep over his
dangerous plan, she herself was watching, a prey to those memories each
one of which was hurrying her to some act of madness. Her husband had
been unlucky enough to say to her on their return to the Rue de la
Rochefoucauld after the party at the Malhoures':
"I thought you had quite an antipathy to Varades, and you danced with
scarcely anybody else."
"Does that make you jealous?" she had asked him abruptly.
"No," he had replied, "but how is it possible to change one's
disposition towards people in this way?"
"I am what it pleases me to be," she had replied.
She might at that moment have been forbidden to throw herself into the
water, and in her rage for contradiction, and to relieve her nerves, she
would have hastened to the Seine. On entering her room again, she felt
so unhappy that she did not even undress. She walked about in her ball
costume until morning, and the champagne she had drunk, the bewilderment
of the party, the fund of despair upon which her soul had been living
for so many hours, all united to confuse her understanding.
"Yes," she said to herself at certain moments, "'tis he that I must have
and no other--for the time being," she added with such implacability in
the imagining of ill as at dark moments relieves the heart somewhat,
"and when I have done it, when I am low and in the mire, then perhaps I
shall forget, and then all this will be over, over, over."
And when her soul recoiled at the wildness of this monstrous plan, then,
that she might resume her inclination for the shame to which she was
being dizzily impelled, she pictured Armand to herself, she saw him with
his eyes and his smile, she heard his voice:
"Do you believe that I was not acquainted with your life?"
"Ah!" she would then exclaim like a wounded creature uttering a cry, and
she would stretch herself upon her bed with that whirl in her sick brow
which was intolerable to her.
In the morning she had an hour's heavy sleep, visited with nightmare. At
about nine o'clock she rose to attend to household affairs, as was her
habit, indolently and with soul roaming elsewhere. Extreme fatigue and,
as it were, a dying languor had taken possession of her. After breakfast
she went up to her room again, and, in spite of herself, her hands
opened the box containing Armand's letters. There were not fifteen--she
counted them--and the longest of them had but two pages. She read them
again, as she did nearly every day, and their aridity showed to her even
worse than on former occasions. Every phrase in these notes might have
been quoted without compromising her to whom the notes were addressed;
and so there was not one that might have been traced in a moment of
self-surrender, or to give passage to the overflowing of a heart. She
had believed formerly that he used to write to her in this way out of
regard for her peace, and she had been grateful to him for it.
Fool! Fool! He wrote to her thus because he did not love her, because he
had never loved her, and why should he have loved her, judging of her as
he did? In his eyes, what was she? A woman like all the rest! Of what
did he not believe her capable? Of making use, perhaps, of his letters
against him? Her soul was bleeding again at every pore. Ah! what remedy
was there, what remedy?--and as she was asking herself this question for
the hundredth time the servant entered and inquired whether she would
see Monsieur de Varades. The officer had kept his word, and had not lost
a day in taking advantage of the permission to come and see her which
she had granted him.
"Show him into the drawing-room," she said; suddenly the memory of
Armand's injustice awoke keener than before, and the crisis of sorrow
through which she had just been passing resulted in one of those rushes
of frenzy in which she really no longer knew what she was doing. She
went into her dressing-room. With a little water she removed the traces
of her tears, for at the times when she renewed, one by one, the details
of her wretchedness, she used to weep, almost without perceiving it, and
mad, as it were, through grief, she went down to the little
drawing-room.
"How kind of you to come to keep me company!" she said, holding out her
hand to the young man. Voluntarily she made him sit down in the
arm-chair in front of her, the one in which Monsieur de Querne used
generally to sit. How he had lied to her in that place! How he had
misunderstood her! It seemed to her that she was taking vengeance upon
him at that moment by this profanation of their common memories. She
herself took a seat on the couch which stood obliquely against the
fireplace, in which the remnant of a fire was burning. She looked at De
Varades with eyes that did not see him, but he, as he began to talk,
watched her with much attention. The obvious wildness that she
displayed, the almost incoherent rapidity of her speech, the element of
nervelessness that was manifested in her laughter, in her gestures, in
the movements of her head, all evidenced a woman that was half beside
herself.
The evening before De Varades had inwardly said in explanation of her
coquetry at the Malhoures' ball: "She wants to make some one jealous."
Then he had not discovered any one wearing towards her the countenance
of a wounded lover. In the twilight in the little drawing-room he said
to himself: "'Tis she who is jealous, and wishes to be revenged."
Insensibly he caused the conversation to glide upon the same slope as on
the previous evening; he spoke to her again of his despairing and
melancholy feelings. She listened to him almost without reply, with the
thought of the indignation that Armand would feel after all, if he could
see her at that moment. De Varades meanwhile was reasoning thus to
himself:
"What do I risk? Being shown the door once again as at Bourges?"
He made up his mind to take advantage of the disquiet which, as he could
see, possessed her, and he rose and seated himself on the couch by her
side, saying to her:
"Ah! I loved you dearly!"
She turned towards him with a delirious expression which he took for the
frenzy of spite, and he seized her in his arms. Was it that kind of
momentary aberration which at certain moments prompts us to the
performance of actions in which later on we fail to recognise ourselves?
Was it the domination of a distempered will by a will that was cold and
steady? To what extent did that frenzy for degradation, that madness for
her own ruin which had haunted this hapless soul the evening before,
enter into her weakness? The fact remains that she did not defend
herself against the young man's embrace. He grew more bold, and she was
completely his. Yes, in that very drawing-room where formerly she had
shrunk in horror from giving herself to the man she loved, she suffered
herself, alas! to be taken by a man whom she did not love, and the
latter was stupefied both by the ease of his victory and by the
corpse-like insensibility encountered in this unlooked-for mistress, of
whom he had not even been thinking twenty-four hours before.
De Varades had been gone for a long time, and evening was falling. Helen
had remained in the same place, seated in the same corner of the couch,
as though dead. The enormity of the event that had just come to pass had
suddenly dispersed the hallucination in which grief had been causing her
to live during the past few weeks. What! she was the mistress of
Monsieur de Varades--she, Helen Chazel! No, it was not true, seeing that
she loved Armand. Where was she? What had she done? Impelled by what
madness?
And through the supreme horror by which she was possessed on finding
that she was alive, and that all was true, a sudden idea rose in her
mind, the idea of seeing Armand. Why? She could not have told exactly,
but the desire had swooped upon her, irresistible; she felt that it must
be done, and not on the morrow, not that evening, but immediately. She
must speak to him, were she to fly from her home in order to find him
wherever he might be. At all costs she would see him. Had he returned to
Paris? She would ascertain. In ten minutes she had put on a fashionable
dress and a bonnet, had called a cab, and shivering with fever in a
corner of it--how great a change from the day on which a similar vehicle
was conveying her to the meeting with her lover!--was proceeding to the
Rue Lincoln.