She had returned home in a burning fever. Robert, after dining _en
famille_, had retired to his attic. His nerves were on edge, and he was
badly out of temper as a result of the manner in which Nanteuil had left
him.
His shirt and his clothes, laid out on the bed by his valet, seemed to
be waiting for him in a domestic and obsequious attitude. He began to
dress himself with a somewhat ill-tempered alacrity. He was impatient to
leave the house. He opened his round window, listened to the murmur of
the city, and saw above the roofs the glow which rose into the sky from
the city of Paris. He scented from afar all the amorous flesh gathered,
on this winter's night, in the theatres and the great _cabarets_, the
café-concerts and the bars.
Irritated by Félicie's denial of his desires, he had decided to satisfy
them elsewhere, and as he was not conscious of any preference he
believed that his only difficulty would be to make a choice; but he
presently realized that he had no desire for any of the women of his
acquaintance, nor did he even feel any desire for an unknown woman. He
closed his window, and seated himself before the fire.
It was a coke fire; Madame de Ligny, who wore cloaks costing a thousand
pounds, was wont to economize in the matter of her table and her fires.
She would not allow wood to be burned in her house.
He reflected upon his own affairs, to which he had so far given little
or no thought; upon the career he had embraced, and which he beheld
obscurely before him. The Minister was a great friend of his family. A
mountaineer of the Cévennes, brought up on chestnuts, his dazzled eyes
blinked at the flower-bedecked tables of Paris. He was too shrewd and
too wily not to retain his advantage over the old aristocracy, which
welcomed him to its bosom: the advantage of harsh caprices and arrogant
refusals. Ligny knew him, and expected no favours at his hands. In this
respect he was more perspicacious than his mother, who credited herself
with a certain power over the dark, hairy little man, whom every
Thursday she engulfed in her majestic skirts on the way from the
drawing-room to the dinner-table. He judged him to be disobliging. And
then something had gone wrong between them. Robert, as ill luck would
have it, had forestalled his Minister in his intimacy with a lady whom
the latter loved to the verge of absurdity: Madame de Neuilles, a woman
of easy virtue. And it seemed to him that the hairy little man suspected
it, and regarded him with an unfriendly eye. And, lastly, the idea had
grown upon him at the Quai d'Orsay that Ministers are neither able nor
willing to do very much. But he did not exaggerate matters, and thought
it quite possible that he might obtain a minor secretaryship. Such had
been his wish hitherto. He was most anxious not to leave Paris. His
mother, on the contrary, would have preferred that he should be sent to
The Hague, where a post as third secretary was vacant. Now, of a sudden,
he decided in favour of The Hague. "I'll go," he said. "The sooner the
better." Having made up his mind, he reviewed his reasons. In the first
place, it would be an excellent thing for his future career. Again, The
Hague post was a pleasant one. A friend of his, who had held it, had
enlarged upon the delightful hypocrisy of the sleepy little capital,
where everything was engineered and "wangled" for the comfort of the
Diplomatic Corps. He reflected, also, that The Hague was the august
cradle of a new international law, and finally went so far as to invoke
the argument that he would be giving pleasure to his mother. After which
he realized that he wanted to leave home solely on account of Félicie.
His thoughts of her were not benevolent. He knew her to be mendacious,
timorous, and a malicious friend. He had proof that she was given to
falling in love with actors of the lowest type, or, at all events, that
she made shift with them. He was not certain that she did not deceive
him, not that he had discovered anything suspect in the life which she
was leading, but because he was properly distrustful of all women. He
conjured up in his mind all the evil that he knew of her, and persuaded
himself that she was a little jade, and, being conscious that he loved
her, he believed that he loved her merely because of her extreme
prettiness. This reason seemed to him a sound one; but on analysing it
he perceived that it explained nothing; that he loved the girl not
because she was exceedingly pretty, but because she was pretty in a
certain uncommon fashion of her own; that he loved her for that which
was incomparable and rare in her; because, in a word, she was a
wonderful thing of art and voluptuousness, a living gem of priceless
value. Thereupon, realizing how weak he was, he wept, mourning over his
lost freedom, his captive mind, his disordered soul, the devotion of his
very flesh and blood to a weak, perfidious little creature.
He had scorched his eyes by gazing at the coke fire behind the bars of
the grate. He closed them in pain and, under his closed eyes, he saw
negroes leaping before him in an obscene and bloody riot. While he
sought to remember from what book of travel, read in boyhood, these
blacks emerged, he saw them diminish, resolve themselves into
imperceptible specks, and disappear into a red Africa, which little by
little came to represent the wound seen by the light of a match on the
night of the suicide. He reflected.
"That fool of a Chevalier! Why, I was scarcely thinking of the fellow!"
Suddenly, against this background of blood and flame; appeared the
slender form of Félicie, and he felt lurking within him a hot, cruel
desire.