HELL.
I am sitting in a restaurant in the town of ————, at the seaside.
It is the height of the bathing season, the carnival of salt and
fresh water, and the whole world is forgetting the labour and
unpleasantnesses of city life for a few weeks.
I am waiting for my breakfast, seated at a table just outside the
house, under an arbour of vines and convolvulus. The sea breeze
reaches me, plays with my tablecloth and sports with my hair, uniting
itself to the perfume of flowers which peep up, red, white, and
violet, happy also in the midst of all the sunshine, greenery, and
freshness.
Nearly all the tables, scattered about under the arbours or in the
shade of the trees, are surrounded by happy people who have just taken
their baths, fresh, with disordered hair, hungry and merry. Even human
life has its good quarters of an hour.
Near me I see a teacher to whom two girls of about ten and twelve
have been intrusted, and who, faithful to her trust, is giving them
a noisy lesson in morality and gallantry, whilst she eats and drinks
as if she were starving. I cannot imagine how she does it, but she
manages not to interrupt her educational discourse, whilst she never
ceases to eat and drink. The pupils do not listen to her, but look
at each other, slyly laughing at the inexhaustible conversation of
their instructress. A little further off there are three young fellows
who, having passed their examinations well, have been rewarded by a
visit to the seaside. They are laughing, noisy, and giddy with youth,
thoughtless, envying no living soul. One of them has just finished his
breakfast, and in order to pay his bill of one franc fifty centimes
he brings out a red banknote of a hundred francs, and offers it to
the waiter with great pride, and in such a way that everyone can see
it. It is the first he has ever had, and already that morning he has
offered it at the coffeehouse to pay fifteen centimes, and at the
baths to pay for his ticket of fifty centimes. No one would change it,
and even the waiter says he has no change; and the young fellow is
happy, for he will be able to display it a fourth, a fifth, and even a
sixth time.
Facing me a whole family of some seven or eight persons are eating
merrily, and the children, in a chromatic scale of bright colours and
different heights, range from two to fifteen years. Each one is giving
utterance to its joy, clambering up and down the chairs, playing with
a little dog to which they give the tid-bits on their plates. The
father is red, stout, and in his shirt sleeves; he looks smilingly at
his blond companion, reading in her smile the reflection of all that
lisping chatter, laughter, and folly which surround them.
All these people, differing in age, condition, and intellect, unite in
the same merriment, which they seem to have drawn from the sea, the
father of planetary life, the dispenser of spirit and energy; and all
the while the golden rays of the sun shine through the vine leaves,
the ivy, and convolvulus, painting with the shade and penumbra of the
leaves the tablecloth, the dresses of the women, and the rosy faces of
the children, throwing patches, half shades, and glistening spots on
the garden sand.
I, too, a solitary observer, enjoyed all the bright sunshine and the
happiness of the people, but forgot that I had only looked to the
right and straight before me; I turned calmly to the left, sure of
finding there another scene of joy and brightness.
On the contrary, the picture was very different.
At a table just as clean and white as the others, played on
capriciously by light and shade, two persons were sitting, a man and a
woman.
He was about thirty, she forty-five. He was handsome, robust, with
manly energy; she lame, fat, and hunch-backed. There ought to have
been a neck, but there was none to be seen, for the heavy head
appeared to have been put on the chest awry; and all the cruel
artifices resorted to for hiding the hump behind seemed made on
purpose to produce another in front. Even her features were ugly, and
the ill-made hands were laden with rings. Large earrings were in her
ears, and a colossal locket surrounded by diamonds, inclosing the
man’s portrait, was hanging in front. Husband and wife, no doubt.
She was eating, but could not have known the flavour of the food, for
the mouthful went round and round between her teeth, whilst another
piece on the fork was waiting in vain for its turn to enter the mouth.
That poor deformed being did not cry, that is, no tears fell on her
cheeks, but she blew her nose every now and then, and the eyes were
moist and sad. She placed the fork automatically from time to time
on the plate, with the mouthful still on it, and gazed at the man
lovingly, tenderly, waiting, imploring for a look.
But the look never came. With one hand he hastily conveyed the food to
his mouth, and with the other held a newspaper, which he was reading
with pretended interest, so as not to have the silence interrupted. He
did not shed tears nor blow his nose, but he frowned, and he was also
suffering one of those intense and hidden agonies to which one does
not confess, but which furrow the soul like harrows of steel.
I did not remove my eyes again from that dumb and agonizing scene.
After a long interval she said to him, timidly, hesitatingly, almost
as if committing a crime:
“Will you take anything else?”
He started as if the voice had struck him like a blow in the face; he
turned to her and twisted his mouth like one seized with a sudden and
irresistible disgust.
“No, I want nothing more.”
The _No_ was pronounced angrily and with scorn; it was, and must have
been, a blow to her to whom it was addressed. He looked at her a long
time, a look full of hatred, remorse, and disgust. It seemed as if he
were passing in review all his companion’s ugliness, and as if until
that moment he had never seen it so clearly: those wrinkles, that gray
hair, that hump, the deformed neck, those arms which looked like
hams in sacks, and then those rings and jewels which seemed to jeer
at the white, flabby flesh with their brightness. The deformity, the
grotesque violation of good taste, suddenly struck that handsome and
robust man, for he had sold youth and manhood to an unfortunate woman
who had believed it possible to still love and be loved.
The two had plunged into the waves of the sea a little before; they
had drunk of the sun’s rays too, but neither sea nor sun had been able
to give happiness to these unfortunate creatures who had bartered
carnal pleasures for gold, who had changed sacred love to a vile
prostitution of flesh and banknotes.
She had already passed the meridian of her second youth; he was still
young.
She was undressing. He was already in bed, and followed the
progressive unclothing of that body with an anxious curiosity, that
body once so active, so handsome and fascinating, now all submerged in
the high waters of an invading corpulence.
He wished to hide his head under the counterpane, and did so, but a
morbid curiosity made him put out his head again directly, and he
looked.
She had read in her glass only too well the ruin of her form, and had
always sought to undress alone; but this time she was obliged to do
it before his eyes. She ingeniously hid the regions which had most
suffered wreck, and with a remnant of coquetry kept uncovered her
shoulders, the _ultimum moriens_ in the woman’s body; but diffident
of herself, and fearful of those looks which seemed to pierce her
through, her last garment fell from her hands to her feet, and the
disasters of the wreck suddenly appeared, standing out cruelly,
without pity for her or for him.
She uttered a cry and stooped down to cover herself....
He, egotistical, pitiless, forgot all the delights that this body once
so fragrant of youth and beauty had given him, and exclaimed, throwing
the words in her face:
“At a certain age I think a little more modesty is demanded.”
From that moment, from that evening, the two were enemies, two galley
slaves bound by the same chain.
⁂
She was reclining, rather than seated, on the sofa, with small and
large cushions, which allowed her to change the frame of which she
was the picture. She was smoking a cigarette, and had a French novel
on her knee that could not have interested her very much, for at that
moment she yawned. The yawn was cut short, or rather interrupted, by
the sudden opening of the sitting-room door; no one ever entered the
room in that way but him. This time it was more like him than usual:
always a husband, now an angry one.
He entered with his hat on his head, his stick in his hand, as if he
were just going out or had just come in. The latter was the case. On
returning from his walk a large envelope had been put into his hand in
the anteroom. It contained a dressmaker’s bill, the third or fourth
he had received in a few months. The total was very high, higher than
usual, and he came into the room with the bill in his hand to make a
scene.
“Come, now, come, now, my lady, when shall we finish with these
accounts?”
She made no answer, but continued to smoke, only growing a little red
in the face.
“It seems that my lady believes herself to be a millionaire; this is
the third bill that I have had to pay in little more than four months.
But what game are we playing, my lady?”
And _my lady_, throwing the end of her cigarette on a Japanese tray,
stretched out her voluptuous limbs, and showed, as if by chance, a
fairy-like foot and a leg for a sculptor. More than once already had
the disclosure of such a picture, sacred to love, warded off a heavy
storm. Now, however, neither foot nor leg could disarm her husband,
who had thrown his stick on a chair, but kept on his hat, to increase
the violence of his words and to give authority to his threats. In the
meantime he rumpled and then folded the innocent paper with alternate
convulsive movements.
“I shall not pay this bill; you must pay it yourself. You have jewels
(given by me, of course); put them in pawn. You will then learn not to
play the princess with other people’s money.”
The little foot and leg retired under the dress, ashamed of their
defeat, and at last the lady opened her mouth too:
“I think you can hardly expect me to cut a sorry figure in society.”
“But what society? Society of Egypt! Many ladies who are more truly
ladies than you don’t spend half what you do. I have inquired and know
very well.”
“Yes, your Fifi told you, your Fifi, for whom you pay much larger
bills than you do for your wife.”
Never had his wife uttered the name of the stage dancer until that
moment, and he had believed her to be quite ignorant of his amours.
He reddened up to his hair, frowned, and shook himself as if he had
been stung by a viper, and the conversation became embittered even to
brutality.
“Ah! jealous, and impertinent too! It seems to me that when one has
not brought a halfpenny of dowry there ought to be a little more
modesty and economy.”
“Good, very good, sir! I have brought youth and beauty as a dowry,
and a dowry besides; yes, you insolent man, a good dowry, a large sum
which was lost in the failure of the Bank of Turin. And is that my
fault? And you, what have you brought me? A bald head, false teeth,
and a body eaten through with vice—a fine patrimony, truly.”
“Ah, you had a dowry, had you? I have never seen it; the only treasure
I have seen is the gold with which your teeth are stopped. Sell that
and pay the dressmaker’s bill with it.”
The bill flew in the air and fell at the woman’s feet.
The husband went out of the room, slamming the door so loudly as to
make the little Japanese figures and the other bric-a-brac on the
table tremble. And the wife, lighting a fresh cigarette, set to, with
all the force of her intellect, to invent some revenge worthy of the
insult received.
She was alone in her boudoir, seated before a writing table of ebony
inlaid with ivory. She wrote rapidly and smiled to herself, as one
smiles when one is writing to one beloved, and saying a saucy thing
flavoured with much tenderness.
Nothing was heard in the room but the soft and rhythmical scratching
of the steel pen on the paper. She was so intent on what she was
writing that she had not heard someone raise the _portière_, enter the
room, and stand before her.
That someone was not the person to whom she was writing, for raising
her graceful head for a moment as if to seek an adjective more merrily
saucy to put with the others, she saw her husband, whom she believed
was out, standing before her.
She uttered a startled cry, and unconsciously covered the paper she
was writing on with her right hand.
“Ah, is it you? How you frightened me!”
“Another time I will have myself announced.”
These words were said without anger, and with a serene calmness; but a
diabolic irony played round the mouth.
The smile gradually converted itself to a real laugh, to which the
nodding head seemed to beat time.
“Perhaps you were writing to Count B. Who can write the better, you or
he? His letters are pretty, very pretty! How much passion—no, passion
is not a fit word, it is too flattering; let us say _sensuality,
lasciviousness, debauchery_. Which of these words do you find most
suitable?”
The lady had become white as death. The pen fell from her hand and
made a large blot on the elegant paper.
But the husband, continuing to laugh, had approached her, and having
drawn a chair to the writing table, stroked her hair lovingly.
“You were afraid; but of what? You think, perhaps, that I am come to
make a scene, or perhaps to kill you, and then myself after. No, no;
I only like double suicides on the stage or in novels, provided the
author of the book or the drama has talent. But here, why stain this
beautiful Persian carpet with your blood, why scatter mine over the
elegant paper you were covering with your words of love? It would
really be a pity, a crime, and above all a folly. I am come to make a
compact,” and he laid a long kiss on the little fair curls at her neck.
It seemed to the lady as if that kiss burnt her like a red-hot iron.
She withdrew her head and gazed at her husband with glassy eyes,
petrified with astonishment.
No, he had not really the look of an assassin. He was calm, cheerful,
like a good-tempered fellow who was playing an innocent joke, a very
innocent one.
“Give me a cigarette. The air is heavy with the odour of your
cigarettes! They must be very good ones. Probably Count B. brought
them for you from Constantinople?” He did not wait for her to give it
to him, but took one himself from a bronze bowl and lighted it. “I
told you, then, that I was come to make a compact with you, a compact
of purchase and sale, in which we shall both gain something. Look!”
And here the husband took out of the pocket of his greatcoat a
perfumed packet of letters tied with a golden cord.
“I have a treasure here! the entire and complete collection of all the
letters the count has written you. Not one is missing! The lady’s maid
you dismissed last week made me a present of them, gave them to me for
nothing. There are a hundred and thirty, written in three months! How
much will you give me for this treasure?”
The lady, being suddenly reassured that her husband’s intentions were
not homicidal, looked at him with a gaze full of contempt and cruelty.
She no longer felt fear or remorse. She could have wished at that
moment that the letters might have been not from one lover only, but
from ten, a hundred, and that each one could strike him and spit in
his face. She began to laugh too.
“Bravo! capital! you are a man of spirit. Give me a kiss!”
And the kiss was given, a faithful copy of the one that Judas gave
Christ nearly twenty centuries ago.
“I will give you a thousand francs!”
“Oh! oh! oh!”
And here followed a long and loud laugh.
“A thousand francs! a thousand francs! What are you thinking of? I
want ten thousand francs, not a penny more or less. If not, I will
give them to your father for nothing, only reserving two or three of
the most lascivious to publish in the papers. Do you agree?”
“Give them to him if you will. I shall say that you wrote them, that
they are false. My father esteems me highly.”
“Um! Your father is not a fool, and the writing of the count is not
forged. I want ten thousand francs!”
“I will give you five.”
“No; it is too little. I must pay Nina’s milliner’s bill, and I want
to go to Paris.”
“I will give you six.”
“No, ten. Not a penny more or less.”
“Very well; I will give you ten thousand francs. Give me the letters.
Swear that they are all here!”
“Look at the dates. They are really all here. They are numbered too by
the count, with red ink, perhaps with his blood.”
And here there was a loud laugh.
“When you bring me the ten thousand francs I will give you the
letters, not before.”
⁂
The compact was made, the letters were returned, the sum was paid.
The husband paid Nina’s milliner’s bill, and has gone to Paris.
Indeed, he has already returned and is still living in the house of
his wife, with whom he hopes soon to be able to negotiate a new ransom.
And she?
She has a new lover to whom she never writes and from whom she will
not receive any letters. When he complains of this strange proceeding
she throws her arms round his neck and, kissing him, says:
“Is it not better, dear, to have a kiss the more and a letter the
less?”
And the husband has waited a long time in vain, hoping to discover a
new packet of perfumed letters, tied with a golden cord, all marked in
progressive numbers, written with red ink, perhaps with blood.