question in my eyes and on my lips. ‘Yes, yes; I have made the attempt.
My wife was formerly living in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. One day when,
from what Gobain told me, I believed in some chance of a reconciliation,
I wrote by post a letter, in which I tried to propitiate my wife--a
letter written and re-written twenty times! I will not describe my
agonies. I went from the Rue Payenne to the Rue de Reuilly like a
condemned wretch going from the Palais de Justice to his execution, but
he goes on a cart, and I was on foot. It was dark--there was a fog; I
went to meet Madame Gobain, who was to come and tell me what my wife had
done. Honorine, on recognizing my writing, had thrown the letter into
the fire without reading it.--“Madame Gobain,” she had exclaimed, “I
leave this to-morrow.”
“‘What a dagger-stroke was this to a man who found inexhaustible
pleasure in the trickery by which he gets the finest Lyons velvet at
twelve francs a yard, a pheasant, a fish, a dish of fruit, for a tenth
of their value, for a woman so ignorant as to believe that she is paying
ample wages with two hundred and fifty francs to Madame Gobain, a cook
fit for a bishop.
“‘You have sometimes found me rubbing my hands in the enjoyment of a
sort of happiness. Well, I had just succeeded in some ruse worthy of
the stage. I had just deceived my wife--I had sent her by a purchaser
of wardrobes an Indian shawl, to be offered to her as the property of an
actress who had hardly worn it, but in which I--the solemn lawyer whom
you know--had wrapped myself for a night! In short, my life at this
day may be summed up in the two words which express the extremes of
torment--I love, and I wait! I have in Madame Gobain a faithful spy on
the heart I worship. I go every evening to chat with the old woman, to
hear from her all that Honorine has done during the day, the lightest
word she has spoken, for a single exclamation might betray to me the
secrets of that soul which is wilfully deaf and dumb. Honorine is pious;
she attends the Church services and prays, but she has never been to
confession or taken the Communion; she foresees what a priest would
tell her. She will not listen to the advice, to the injunction, that she
should return to me. This horror of me overwhelms me, dismays me, for I
have never done her the smallest harm. I have always been kind to her.
Granting even that I may have been a little hasty when teaching her,
that my man’s irony may have hurt her legitimate girlish pride, is
that a reason for persisting in a determination which only the most
implacable hatred could have inspired? Honorine has never told Madame
Gobain who she is; she keeps absolute silence as to her marriage, so
that the worthy and respectable woman can never speak a word in my
favor, for she is the only person in the house who knows my secret. The
others know nothing; they live under the awe caused by the name of the
Prefect of Police, and their respect for the power of a Minister. Hence
it is impossible for me to penetrate that heart; the citadel is mine,
but I cannot get into it. I have not a single means of action. An act of
violence would ruin me for ever.
“‘How can I argue against reasons of which I know nothing? Should I
write a letter, and have it copied by a public writer, and laid before
Honorine? But that would be to run the risk of a third removal. The
last cost me fifty thousand francs. The purchase was made in the first
instance in the name of the secretary whom you succeeded. The unhappy
man, who did not know how lightly I sleep, was detected by me in the act
of opening a box in which I had put the private agreement; I coughed,
and he was seized with a panic; next day I compelled him to sell the
house to the man in whose name it now stands, and I turned him out.
“‘If it were not that I feel all my noblest faculties as a man
satisfied, happy, expansive; if the part I am playing were not that of
divine fatherhood; if I did not drink in delight by every pore, there
are moments when I should believe that I was a monomaniac. Sometimes
at night I hear the jingling bells of madness. I dread the violent
transitions from a feeble hope, which sometimes shines and flashes up,
to complete despair, falling as low as man can fall. A few days since I
was seriously considering the horrible end of the story of Lovelace and
Clarissa Harlowe, and saying to myself, if Honorine were the mother of a
child of mine, must she not necessarily return under her husband’s roof?
“‘And I have such complete faith in a happy future, that ten months
ago I bought and paid for one of the handsomest houses in the Faubourg
Saint-Honore. If I win back Honorine, I will not allow her to see this
house again, nor the room from which she fled. I mean to place my idol
in a new temple, where she may feel that life is altogether new. That
house is being made a marvel of elegance and taste. I have been told
of a poet who, being almost mad with love for an actress, bought the
handsomest bed in Paris without knowing how the actress would reward his
passion. Well, one of the coldest of lawyers, a man who is supposed to
be the gravest adviser of the Crown, was stirred to the depths of
his heart by that anecdote. The orator of the Legislative Chamber can
understand the poet who fed his ideal on material possibilities. Three
days before the arrival of Maria Louisa, Napoleon flung himself on
his wedding bed at Compiegne. All stupendous passions have the same
impulses. I love as a poet--as an emperor!’
“As I heard the last words, I believed that Count Octave’s fears were
realized; he had risen, and was walking up and down, and gesticulating,
but he stopped as if shocked by the vehemence of his own words.
“‘I am very ridiculous,’ he added, after a long pause, looking at me, as
if craving a glance of pity.
“‘No, monsieur, you are very unhappy.’
“‘Ah yes!’ said he, taking up the thread of his confidences. ‘From the
violence of my speech you may, you must believe in the intensity of a
physical passion which for nine years has absorbed all my faculties; but
that is nothing in comparison with the worship I feel for the soul, the
mind, the heart, all in that woman; the enchanting divinities in the
train of Love, with whom we pass our life, and who form the daily poem
of a fugitive delight. By a phenomenon of retrospection I see now the
graces of Honorine’s mind and heart, to which I paid little heed in the
time of my happiness--like all who are happy. From day to day I have
appreciated the extent of my loss, discovering the exquisite gifts of
that capricious and refractory young creature who has grown so strong
and so proud under the heavy hand of poverty and the shock of the most
cowardly desertion. And that heavenly blossom is fading in solitude and
hiding!--Ah! The law of which we were speaking,’ he went on with bitter
irony, ‘the law is a squad of gendarmes--my wife seized and dragged away
by force! Would not that be to triumph over a corpse? Religion has no
hold on her; she craves its poetry, she prays, but she does not listen
to the commandments of the Church. I, for my part, have exhausted
everything in the way of mercy, of kindness, of love; I am at my wits’
end. Only one chance of victory is left to me; the cunning and patience
with which bird-catchers at last entrap the wariest birds, the swiftest,
the most capricious, and the rarest. Hence, Maurice, when M. de
Grandville’s indiscretion betrayed to you the secret of my life, I ended
by regarding this incident as one of the decrees of fate, one of the
utterances for which gamblers listen and pray in the midst of their
most impassioned play.... Have you enough affection for me to show me
romantic devotion?’
“‘I see what you are coming to, Monsieur le Comte,’ said I, interrupting
him; ‘I guess your purpose. Your first secretary tried to open your deed
box. I know the heart of your second--he might fall in love with your
wife. And can you devote him to destruction by sending him into the
fire? Can any one put his hand into a brazier without burning it?’
“‘You are a foolish boy,’ replied the Count. ‘I will send you well
gloved. It is no secretary of mine that will be lodged in the Rue
Saint-Maur in the little garden-house which I have at his disposal. It
is my distant cousin, Baron de l’Hostal, a lawyer high in office...”
“After a moment of silent surprise, I heard the gate bell ring, and a
carriage came into the courtyard. Presently the footman announced Madame
de Courteville and her daughter. The Count had a large family connection
on his mother’s side. Madame de Courteville, his cousin, was the widow
of a judge on the bench of the Seine division, who had left her a
daughter and no fortune whatever. What could a woman of nine-and-twenty
be in comparison with a young girl of twenty, as lovely as imagination
could wish for an ideal mistress?
“‘Baron, and Master of Appeals, till you get something better, and this
old house settled on her,--would not you have enough good reasons for
not falling in love with the Countess?’ he said to me in a whisper, as
he took me by the hand and introduced me to Madame de Courteville and
her daughter.
“I was dazzled, not so much by these advantages of which I had never
dreamed, but by Amelie de Courteville, whose beauty was thrown into
relief by one of those well-chosen toilets which a mother can achieve
for a daughter when she wants to see her married.
“But I will not talk of myself,” said the Consul after a pause.
“Three weeks later I went to live in the gardener’s cottage, which
had been cleaned, repaired, and furnished with the celerity which is
explained by three words: Paris; French workmen; money! I was as much
in love as the Count could possibly desire as a security. Would the
prudence of a young man of five-and-twenty be equal to the part I was
undertaking, involving a friend’s happiness? To settle that matter, I
may confess that I counted very much on my uncle’s advice; for I had
been authorized by the Count to take him into confidence in any case
where I deemed his interference necessary. I engaged a garden; I devoted
myself to horticulture; I worked frantically, like a man whom nothing
can divert, turning up the soil of the market-garden, and appropriating
the ground to the culture of flowers. Like the maniacs of England, or
of Holland, I gave it out that I was devoted to one kind of flower, and
especially grew dahlias, collecting every variety. You will understand
that my conduct, even in the smallest details, was laid down for me by
the Count, whose whole intellectual powers were directed to the most
trifling incidents of the tragi-comedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Maur. As
soon as the Countess had gone to bed, at about eleven at night, Octave,
Madame Gobain, and I sat in council. I heard the old woman’s report to
the Count of his wife’s least proceedings during the day. He inquired
into everything: her meals, her occupations, her frame of mind, her
plans for the morrow, the flowers she proposed to imitate. I understood
what love in despair may be when it is the threefold passion of the
heart, the mind, and the senses. Octave lived only for that hour.
“During two months, while my work in the garden lasted, I never set
eyes on the little house where my fair neighbor dwelt. I had not even
inquired whether I had a neighbor, though the Countess’ garden was
divided from mine by a paling, along which she had planted cypress trees
already four feet high. One fine morning Madame Gobain announced to her
mistress, as a disastrous piece of news, the intention, expressed by
an eccentric creature who had become her neighbor, of building a wall
between the two gardens, at the end of the year. I will say nothing of
the curiosity which consumed me to see the Countess! The wish almost
extinguished my budding love for Amelie de Courteville. My scheme for
building a wall was indeed a dangerous threat. There would be no more
fresh air for Honorine, whose garden would then be a sort of narrow
alley shut in between my wall and her own little house. This dwelling,
formerly a summer villa, was like a house of cards; it was not more
than thirty feet deep, and about a hundred feet long. The garden front,
painted in the German fashion, imitated a trellis with flowers up to the
second floor, and was really a charming example of the Pompadour style,
so well called rococo. A long avenue of limes led up to it. The gardens
of the pavilion and my plot of ground were in the shape of a hatchet, of
which this avenue was the handle. My wall would cut away three-quarters
of the hatchet.
“The Countess was in despair.
“‘My good Gobain,’ said she, ‘what sort of man is this florist?’
“‘On my word,’ said the housekeeper, ‘I do not know whether it will
be possible to tame him. He seems to have a horror of women. He is the
nephew of a Paris cure. I have seen the uncle but once; a fine old man
of sixty, very ugly, but very amiable. It is quite possible that this
priest encourages his nephew, as they say in the neighborhood, in his
love of flowers, that nothing worse may happen----’
“‘Why--what?’
“‘Well, your neighbor is a little cracked!’ said Gobain, tapping her
head!
“Now a harmless lunatic is the only man whom no woman ever distrusts
in the matter of sentiment. You will see how wise the Count had been in
choosing this disguise for me.
“‘What ails him then?’ asked the Countess.
“‘He has studied too hard,’ replied Gobain; ‘he has turned misanthropic.
And he has his reasons for disliking women--well, if you want to know
all that is said about him----’
“‘Well,’ said Honorine, ‘madmen frighten me less than sane folks; I will
speak to him myself! Tell him that I beg him to come here. If I do not
succeed, I will send for the cure.’
“The day after this conversation, as I was walking along my graveled
path, I caught sight of the half-opened curtains on the first floor of
the little house, and of a woman’s face curiously peeping out. Madame
Gobain called me. I hastily glanced at the Countess’ house, and by a
rude shrug expressed, ‘What do I care for your mistress!’
“‘Madame,’ said Gobain, called upon to give an account of her errand,
‘the madman bid me leave him in peace, saying that even a charcoal
seller is master in his own premises, especially when he has no wife.’
“‘He is perfectly right,’ said the Countess.
“‘Yes, but he ended by saying, “I will go,” when I told him that he
would greatly distress a lady living in retirement, who found her
greatest solace in growing flowers.’
“Next day a signal from Gobain informed me that I was expected. After
the Countess’ breakfast, when she was walking to and fro in front of
her house, I broke out some palings and went towards her. I had dressed
myself like a countryman, in an old pair of gray flannel trousers,
heavy wooden shoes, and shabby shooting coat, a peaked cap on my head,
a ragged bandana round my neck, hands soiled with mould, and a dibble in
my hand.
“‘Madame,’ said the housekeeper, ‘this good man is your neighbor.’
“The Countess was not alarmed. I saw at last the woman whom her own
conduct and her husband’s confidences had made me so curious to meet. It
was in the early days of May. The air was pure, the weather serene; the
verdure of the first foliage, the fragrance of spring formed a setting
for this creature of sorrow. As I then saw Honorine I understood
Octave’s passion and the truthfulness of his description, ‘A heavenly
flower!’
“Her pallor was what first struck me by its peculiar tone of white--for
there are as many tones of white as of red or blue. On looking at the
Countess, the eye seemed to feel that tender skin, where the blood
flowed in the blue veins. At the slightest emotion the blood mounted
under the surface in rosy flushes like a cloud. When we met, the
sunshine, filtering through the light foliage of the acacias, shed on
Honorine the pale gold, ambient glory in which Raphael and Titian, alone
of all painters, have been able to enwrap the Virgin. Her brown
eyes expressed both tenderness and vivacity; their brightness seemed
reflected in her face through the long downcast lashes. Merely by
lifting her delicate eyelids, Honorine could cast a spell; there was
so much feeling, dignity, terror, or contempt in her way of raising or
dropping those veils of the soul. She could freeze or give life by a
look. Her light-brown hair, carelessly knotted on her head, outlined
a poet’s brow, high, powerful, and dreamy. The mouth was wholly
voluptuous. And to crown all by a grace, rare in France, though common
in Italy, all the lines and forms of the head had a stamp of nobleness
which would defy the outrages of time.
“Though slight, Honorine was not thin, and her figure struck me as
being one that might revive love when it believed itself exhausted. She
perfectly represented the idea conveyed by the word _mignonne_, for she
was one of those pliant little women who allow themselves to be taken
up, petted, set down, and taken up again like a kitten. Her small feet,
as I heard them on the gravel, made a light sound essentially their own,
that harmonized with the rustle of her dress, producing a feminine
music which stamped itself on the heart, and remained distinct from the
footfall of a thousand other women. Her gait bore all the quarterings of
her race with so much pride, that, in the street, the least respectful
working man would have made way for her. Gay and tender, haughty and
imposing, it was impossible to understand her, excepting as gifted with
these apparently incompatible qualities, which, nevertheless, had left
her still a child. But it was a child who might be as strong as an
angel; and, like the angel, once hurt in her nature, she would be
implacable.
“Coldness on that face must no doubt be death to those on whom her eyes
had smiled, for whom her set lips had parted, for those whose soul had
drunk in the melody of that voice, lending to her words the poetry of
song by its peculiar intonation. Inhaling the perfume of violets that
accompanied her, I understood how the memory of this wife had arrested
the Count on the threshold of debauchery, and how impossible it would be
ever to forget a creature who really was a flower to the touch, a flower
to the eye, a flower of fragrance, a heavenly flower to the soul....
Honorine inspired devotion, chivalrous devotion, regardless of reward. A
man on seeing her must say to himself:
“‘Think, and I will divine your thought; speak, and I will obey. If my
life, sacrificed in torments, can procure you one day’s happiness, take
my life, I will smile like a martyr at the stake, for I shall offer that
day to God, as a token to which a father responds on recognizing a
gift to his child.’ Many women study their expression, and succeed in
producing effects similar to those which would have struck you at
first sight of the Countess; only, in her, it was all the outcome of a
delightful nature, that inimitable nature went at once to the heart.
If I tell you all this, it is because her soul, her thoughts, the
exquisiteness of her heart, are all we are concerned with, and you would
have blamed me if I had not sketched them for you.
“I was very near forgetting my part as a half-crazy lout, clumsy, and by
no means chivalrous.
“‘I am told, madame, that you are fond of flowers?’
“‘I am an artificial flower-maker,’ said she. ‘After growing flowers, I
imitate them, like a mother who is artist enough to have the pleasure of
painting her children.... That is enough to tell you that I am poor and
unable to pay for the concession I am anxious to obtain from you?’
“‘But how,’ said I, as grave as a judge, ‘can a lady of such rank as
yours would seem to be, ply so humble a calling? Have you, like me,
good reasons for employing your fingers so as to keep your brains from
working?’
“‘Let us stick to the question of the wall,’ said she, with a smile.
“‘Why, we have begun at the foundations,’ said I. ‘Must not I know which
of us ought to yield to the other in behalf of our suffering, or, if you
choose, of our mania?--Oh! what a charming clump of narcissus! They are
as fresh as this spring morning!’
“I assure you, she had made for herself a perfect museum of flowers and
shrubs, which none might see but the sun, and of which the arrangement
had been prompted by the genius of an artist; the most heartless of
landlords must have treated it with respect. The masses of plants,
arranged according to their height, or in single clumps, were really a
joy to the soul. This retired and solitary garden breathed comforting
scents, and suggested none but sweet thoughts and graceful, nay,
voluptuous pictures. On it was set that inscrutable sign-manual, which
our true character stamps on everything, as soon as nothing compels us
to obey the various hypocrisies, necessary as they are, which Society
insists on. I looked alternately at the mass of narcissus and at the
Countess, affecting to be far more in love with the flowers than with
her, to carry out my part.
“‘So you are very fond of flowers?’ said she.
“‘They are,’ I replied, ‘the only beings that never disappoint our cares
and affection.’ And I went on to deliver such a diatribe while comparing
botany and the world, that we ended miles away from the dividing wall,
and the Countess must have supposed me to be a wretched and wounded
sufferer worthy of her pity. However, at the end of half an hour my
neighbor naturally brought me back to the point; for women, when they
are not in love, have all the cold blood of an experienced attorney.
“‘If you insist on my leaving the paling,’ said I, ‘you will learn all
the secrets of gardening that I want to hide; I am seeking to grow a
blue dahlia, a blue rose; I am crazy for blue flowers. Is not blue the
favorite color of superior souls? We are neither of us really at home;
we might as well make a little door of open railings to unite our
gardens.... You, too, are fond of flowers; you will see mine, I shall
see yours. If you receive no visitors at all, I, for my part, have none
but my uncle, the Cure of the White Friars.’
“‘No,’ said she, ‘I will give you the right to come into my garden, my
premises at any hour. Come and welcome; you will always be admitted as a
neighbor with whom I hope to keep on good terms. But I like my solitude
too well to burden it with any loss of independence.’
“‘As you please,’ said I, and with one leap I was over the paling.
“‘Now, of what use would a door be?’ said I, from my own domain, turning
round to the Countess, and mocking her with a madman’s gesture and
grimace.
“For a fortnight I seemed to take no heed of my neighbor. Towards the
end of May, one lovely evening, we happened both to be out on opposite
sides of the paling, both walking slowly. Having reached the end, we
could not help exchanging a few civil words; she found me in such deep
dejection, lost in such painful meditations, that she spoke to me of
hopefulness, in brief sentences that sounded like the songs with which
nurses lull their babies. I then leaped the fence, and found myself for
the second time at her side. The Countess led me into the house, wishing
to subdue my sadness. So at last I had penetrated the sanctuary where
everything was in harmony with the woman I have tried to describe to
you.
“Exquisite simplicity reigned there. The interior of the little house
was just such a dainty box as the art of the eighteenth century devised
for the pretty profligacy of a fine gentleman. The dining-room, on the
ground floor, was painted in fresco, with garlands of flowers, admirably
and marvelously executed. The staircase was charmingly decorated in
monochrome. The little drawing-room, opposite the dining-room, was very
much faded; but the Countess had hung it with panels of tapestry of
fanciful designs, taken off old screens. A bath-room came next. Upstairs
there was but one bedroom, with a dressing-room, and a library which she
used as her workroom. The kitchen was beneath in the basement on which
the house was raised, for there was a flight of several steps outside.
The balustrade of a balcony in garlands a la Pompadour concealed the
roof; only the lead cornices were visible. In this retreat one was a
hundred leagues from Paris.