ANGER
"Lui ne vous connait plus. Vous l' Ombre déjà vue
Vous qu' il avait couchée en son ciel tout nue,
Quand il était un Dieu...."
Tristan Corbière, _les Amours jaunes._
It was the maid who made inquiries. She knew nothing, did not
understand. Madame had certainly returned, but the bed had not been
used, only rumpled, as if she had lain upon it fully dressed. The
closet was open and the dressing table in an unwonted disorder, for
Madame had never failed to place all her little belongings carefully.
"I should say," she continued, "that Madame has left for a trip on the
go, as you might say, but I have not found the ball dress. No one goes
far in a ball dress! When I came down at seven o'clock, things were
as I have told you and since then I have been waiting, very uneasy, I
assure you. And does Monsieur know nothing?"
"Nothing," answered Entragues. "She must have returned about half past
four, or at five o'clock at the most. But come, if she had left for a
trip, at least a street dress would be missing, a hat, some necessary
objects, and especially a traveling bag, a valise."
"The bags, valises and trunks are above a dark closet, near my room.
She would have to pass through my room to get to it. As for dresses and
the rest, the wardrobe is locked with a key and I do not know where the
keys are. But Madame always carries them with her."
Entragues asked:
"Are you sure that she returned?"
"She did return. After Madame's departure, yesterday, I put everything
in order, I even smoothed the bed in which she had thrown herself for
a moment after dinner. It is Madame's habit when she goes to a ball.
And this morning the bed was disordered. Yet Madame is not heavy, and
usually, when she sleeps, one can hardly see the mark of her body."
"Well," said Entragues, giving his address and a few coins to the maid,
"if you learn anything, come and tell me. I am as uneasy as you are,
Azélia. Come to-morrow morning, at any rate, perhaps I shall have news."
He departed. In the street, his calm grew agitated.
"I am deceived," he cried, "scandalously deceived!"
He opened his umbrella so violently that the silk snapped; then he
smashed it against the edge of the sidewalk, threw it into the gutter,
and, under the heavy and frigid fog, reached the end of the boulevard
Saint-Germain, near the quai Saint-Bernard.
There, in a blind alley, amid huts, stood a little furnished house,
patronized by Russian students and having the name of the Hôtel de
Moscow.
"Monsieur Moscowitch."
"Monsieur Moscowitch left this morning for Nice. Does Monsieur wish his
address? Grand Hôtel des Deux-Mondes."
"Thank you."
"The hotel is good, well situated. I spent a pleasant week there, the
other winter. If I had known of your decision, Madame, I should have
recommended the room I occupied, for the view through its sunny windows
is delightful. Ah! just a year ago from to-day. I am becoming tranquil!"
He slowly walked as far as the boulevard Saint-Michel, under the
pitiless rain which now fell in fine and penetrating needles.
"This Russian was imprudent in giving his address in advance! For I
might go to trouble the first peace of this improvised honey-moon by a
duel. So, at midnight she gives me a rendezvous for the next evening at
her home, and at five o'clock in the morning she yields to Moscowitch
in her own home, in her ball dress, and at about seven o'clock the two
lovers take the express for Nice. Either it was well planned, and she
decoyed me shamefully or, as I think, it is a matter of an impromptu
affair and she held her modesty of soul in contempt so as to repel
me. It is evident that Moscowitch waited for her at the door of the
Aubry mansion, in a carriage, and that she let herself be carried off.
Ah! he is a clever rascal. I am quite anxious to have some details.
If he really followed my ironic advice, if the plan I gave him was
good, I am ... I am truly below the most naive school boy. Well! there
still remains for me the satisfaction of a dilettante: I have not
myself won the battle, but like a staff-chief major general, I have
directed the victory's course. Yes, in short, I am the organizer of
my own defeat.... Now, it is a matter of producing a strict reasoning
and not to lose myself in the by-ways of analysis. A proof? There is
none, or not yet. I should, to the very end, respect the dignity of my
sentiment. Coincidences, probabilities, but in the end she will give me
an explanation. Then I shall judge. What reproaches? She has followed
her pleasure."
He entered a café where warm drinks comforted him. At this moment
he perceived that he was pierced with cold and that his hands were
shivering. It was not only with cold that, he trembled, but his pride
would not admit it and haughtily clothed itself in the cloak of irony.
He did not even admit that his heart could bleed under a real wound;
the griefs where he condescended to quench his original thirst were
divine, voluntary, and not the work of a human hand. He possessed to
a high degree the art of crucifying and stigmatizing himself, like
a visionary, of leading his wounded heart to frightful tortures, to
a slow agony; he had the art of being his own executioner. He had
voluntarily sweated with anguish, but that the gentle thrust of a
woman's delicate gauntlet should drive the crown of thorns into his
skull, no, no, no! "For after all, complicity is essential to suffering
and it must be voluntary; and that is a favor no creature will ever
obtain from me."
Quite honestly, he reflected:
"At least it was brief and the commencement, middle and end took three
months. There are many days to revive in this trilogy of zodiacs.
Thus, that first meeting which she, the traitress, recalled herself,
yesterday evening. Residual sensations still vibrate in my nerves and I
hear "the wind pass, stirring the dry leaves." May they sound in your
ears, too, Sixtine, and may the sound of their pursuit sadden, like the
tattoo of a rattle-snake, the "delicate landscape" where moves your
captive soul! You asked to be plundered, treasure: well! now you are a
prisoner of the flesh, adore your prison, your chains, and your jailer.
"This journey was for me the occasion of a return to my youth: these
renewals are anthologies, but what if it were necessary to re-read the
entire book, letter by letter! Oh! no, oh! no. And no more than the
vendor of _almanachs de Leopardi_, will I give my consent: 'Oh! no! but
another, monsieur, one quite new!' Ah! oxydized hearts aspiring after
the virginity of a new stamp, you will fall into the crucible! Ah!
patience, we shall enjoy the devouring liquefaction: and our molecules
will return into the matrix and other coins of divinity will continue
our broken circulation,--other coins eternally the same!
"Wretched logic: these three months of my life are dominated by an
absurdity which will decide its disposition, like a lunar play in an
old, used mirror.
"Sixtine, it will be good of you to tell me that legend, now that you
no longer need reserve the charm of mysteries, this one and the other,
you know which one, that of the poison!--Ah! to think that I shall
never know it,--no more than the color of your eyes when they open to
the morning light.
"When I returned to 'my enlarged room,' it was finished, you possessed
me. But know that it was not without inward struggles and that many
affections, already old, divided a large and profound heart. Also
learn that at that time Madame du Boys was not without attractions for
me, in her so ingenuously perverse naivete,--and had you not come, I
should have made perhaps another little trip with her to Switzerland.
Ah! but you have aped her! Sixtine, has your dignity consented to a
surreptitious abduction? Send me a bouquet of violets by post!... I
should have taught you the play of transcendental pleasantries, and you
would have liked it. You are too serious, you really effect too much!
You mistake accident for destiny; it is only a fragment. Shake off,
then, the dust of eternity which illusion has sprinkled on your wings!
Have you taken at least a return ticket? It is economical and gives a
value to the landscape, for, without this precaution, one would never
think of looking at it. 'We have plenty of time!'"
"If we had left together, we should first of all not have left at
all, for what is the good of moving, since in every place one remains
the same to himself. Then, as I know what to do about carnal values I
should have spared you many irritating surprises. Finally ... ah! well,
but is it not within my right to believe that I alone could have played
the rôle?
"Before I found you, in your gestures, in the tacit consent of your
good will--a consent quite momentary, it appears--my love had already
found a parallel, incarnate in Guido della Preda. At this hour, his
fate disquiets me seriously. Sixtine, you have a murder on your
conscience (that will make two), for if I do not die it will be because
Guido's death has spared my life.... Yes, he must die in my place....
"I saw you once again. The evening clothed itself in a charming minute,
unique diamond whose resplendence has not left my night. It was when
... no, that is bitter. Ah! in the opening of that stone was an orient
of psychic phantasmagories. It was full of softness and mildness and
languor. Such moments have no morrow; also, it were better never
to have lived in them. One pursues their sisters who stroll on the
dial-plate, and this can lead far, to the very depths of the hells
where gloomy victims lament over the _nessum maggior dolore_.
"In subsequent conversations, you appeared to me as a proud,
intelligent and sensual amazon. Sensuality is the ferment of feminine
nature: without this decisive gift, there might be angels, there would
be no women. But it is quite true that I have not known how to awaken
its might and my magnetism struck sudden neutralities. You are not a
woman of good-will: your very pride leads you to inopportune resistance
where force alone could be right! It is there that one is the dupe of
one's intelligence! One must have the strength to throw it off, at
certain hours, like a cloak or like the chemise of the Roman woman. For
it was not the modesty which visits only extreme youth or the first
ignorance: no, it was rather the intelligence. You wished to understand
and feel at the same time, and for this you took pains to keep your
presence of mind. See how this coincided: I, on my side, made the same
effort, with less pain perhaps. Both of us knew well what we wished,
and our wills, lacking a little salutary unconsciousness were destroyed
in their immobile efficacy.
"Nothing more. This is sufficient enlightenment."
(This was an infraction against his habits,--but a need of personal
security forced him to hurl half of himself through the window, so as
to preserve the integrity of the rest: in four hours of the night he
reached the final point of what he now called "a foolish anecdote.")