in the green room;--she had in her hand a piece of embroidery, for,
notwithstanding her sixty-eight years, she was never idle, being
desirous, as she said, to finish before her death a piece of furniture
on which she had been at work for a very long time. Feeling a little
tired she put aside her work and leaned back in her great easy-chair;
she looked at me very attentively and her gray eyes gleamed through
her spectacles with strange vivacity; two or three times she passed
her thin hand across her wrinkled forehead and seemed to be in deep
thought.--The memory of a time that was no more and which she regretted
gave to her face an expression of melancholy emotion.--I said nothing
for fear of disturbing her thoughts, and the silence lasted some
minutes; at last she broke it.
"They are Henri's eyes,--my dear Henri's,--the same bright, melting
glance, the same way of carrying the head, the same sweet, proud
face;--one would say it was he.--You cannot imagine how striking the
resemblance is, Monsieur Théodore;--when I see you, I can no longer
believe that Henri is dead; I think that he has been on a long journey
from which he has at last returned.--You have given me much pleasure
and much pain, Théodore!--pleasure by reminding me of my poor Henri,
pain by showing me how great a loss I have suffered; sometimes I have
taken you for his phantom.--I cannot get used to the idea that you are
going to leave us; it seems to me that I am losing my Henri once more."
I told her that if it were possible for me to remain longer I would
do it with pleasure, but that my stay had already been prolonged far
beyond what it should have been; that I looked forward to returning,
however, and that my memories of the chateau would be too pleasant to
allow me to forget it so quickly.
"Sorry as I am to have you leave us, Monsieur Théodore," she continued,
pursuing her thought, "there is some one here who will be more so than
I.--You understand whom I refer to, without my telling you. I don't
know what we shall do with Rosette when you have gone; but the old
chateau is a very dull place. Alcibiades is always hunting, and for a
young woman like her the society of a poor helpless old creature like
myself is not very entertaining."
"If any one should feel regret, madame, it is neither you nor Rosette,
but myself; you lose little, I lose much; you will readily find society
more agreeable than mine, but it is more than doubtful if I can ever
find any to replace yours and Rosette's."
"I have no wish to quarrel with your modesty, my dear monsieur, but
I know what I am saying, and I say what is true: it is probable that
we shall not see Madame Rosette in good humor for a long while, for
you are the one who makes rain or fair weather on her cheeks now.
Her period of mourning is drawing to an end and it would be truly a
deplorable thing that she should lay aside her cheerfulness with her
last black dress; that would be a very bad example and altogether
opposed to ordinary laws. It is something that you can prevent without
much trouble, and that you will prevent, I have no doubt," said the old
lady, dwelling on the last words.
"Most assuredly I will do my utmost to have your dear niece preserve
her cheerfulness, as you credit me with so much influence over her. But
I can hardly see how I am to set about it."
"Oh! really, you can hardly see! What are your bright eyes good for?--I
didn't know that you were so near-sighted. Rosette is free; she has
eighty thousand francs a year absolutely at her own disposal, and some
women twice as ugly as she are considered very pretty. You are young,
well-favored, and, so far as I know, unmarried; it seems to me the
simplest thing in the world, unless you have an insurmountable horror
for Rosette, which is difficult to believe."--
"And which is not and cannot be the fact; for her mind is as attractive
as her body, and she is one of those who might be ugly without any one
noticing it or wishing her otherwise."--
"She might be ugly with impunity and she is charming.--That is what I
call being right twice over; I do not doubt what you say, but she has
taken the wisest course.--So far as she is concerned, I can readily
assure you that there are a thousand people whom she hates worse than
you, and that, if she were to be asked the question several times, she
would finally confess perhaps that you are not exactly indifferent to
her. You have on your finger a ring that would fit her perfectly, for
your hand is almost as small as hers, and I am almost sure that she
would accept it with pleasure."
The good lady paused for a few seconds to see what effect her words
produced on me, and I cannot say whether she was likely to be satisfied
with the expression of my face.--I was cruelly embarrassed, and I
didn't know what to reply. From the beginning of the interview I had
seen whither all her hints were tending; and although I almost expected
what she had just said, I was surprised and dumfounded; I had no
choice but to refuse; but what plausible reasons could I give for such
a refusal? I had none except that I was a woman; that was an excellent
reason, I agree, but it was precisely the one that I did not choose to
give.
I could hardly throw the blame upon intractable, ridiculous relations;
all the relations in the world would have welcomed such a match with
delirious joy. Even if Rosette had not been what she was, sweet and
lovely, and of gentle birth, the eighty thousand francs a year would
have removed every obstacle.--To say that I did not love her would have
been neither true nor honorable, for I really loved her dearly, more
dearly than one woman loves another.
I was too young to pretend to be engaged to somebody else: the best
expedient I could invent was to give her to understand that, as I was a
younger son, family interests required that I should enter the Order of
Malta, and thus made it impossible for me to think of marriage: which
fact caused me the greatest sorrow imaginable since I had seen Rosette.
That answer was not worth the breath required to put it into words and
I was perfectly conscious of it. The old lady was not deceived by it
and did not look upon it as definitive; she thought that I had spoken
thus in order to have time to reflect and consult my relations.--In
truth, such a marriage was so advantageous and so far beyond my hopes
that it was not possible that I should refuse it, even if I had loved
Rosette only a little or none at all; it was an opportunity not to be
neglected.
I am unable to say whether the aunt opened the subject to me at her
niece's instigation, but I am inclined to think that Rosette was not
a party to it; she loved me too simple-mindedly and ardently to think
of anything else than immediate possession of me, and marriage would
certainly have been the last method she would have employed.--The
dowager, who had not failed to notice our intimacy, which she probably
believed to be much greater than it was, had arranged this plan in her
head, in order to keep me with her, and to replace, as far as possible,
her dear son Henri, killed in the army, to whom she discovered such
a striking resemblance in me. She had taken great pleasure in the
idea and had taken advantage of that brief tête-à-tête to come to an
understanding with me. I saw by her manner that she did not consider
herself defeated, and that she proposed to return soon to the charge,
which vexed me to the last degree.
Rosette, for her part, in the evening of that same day, took a
step which had such serious results, that I must tell you the
story by itself and not in this letter, which has already exceeded
all bounds.--You will see to what extraordinary adventures I am
predestined, and that Heaven plainly cut me out for a hero of romance;
upon my word, I don't know just what moral can be drawn from all
this,--but lives are not like fables, each chapter hasn't a rhymed
sentence for a tailpiece.--Very often the meaning of life is that it is
not death. Nothing more. Adieu, my dear, I kiss your lovely eyes. You
will soon receive the sequel of my triumphant biography.
XIII
Théodore--Rosalind--for I know not by what name to call you--I saw you
a moment ago and now I am writing to you.--How I wish I might know your
woman's name! it must be as sweet as honey and float about the lips
softer and more melodious than poetry! I should never have dared to
tell you that, and yet I should die not to tell you.--No one knows what
I have suffered, no one can know, I myself could give only a faint idea
of it; words do not express such agony; I should seem to have twisted
my phrases at will, to have made mighty efforts to say strange and
novel things and to indulge in the most extravagant exaggeration even
if I should describe my feelings in far from adequate terms.
O Rosalind, I love you, I adore you, would that there were a word
stronger than that! I have never loved, I have never adored any woman
but you;--I prostrate myself, I annihilate myself before you, and I
would like to compel all creation to bend the knee before my idol;
to me you are more than all nature, more than myself, more than
God;--indeed, it seems strange to me that God does not come down from
heaven to be your slave. Where you are not, everything is a desert,
everything is dead, everything is black; you alone people the world for
me; you are my life, my sun;--you are everything.--Your smile makes the
day, your sadness makes the night; the spheres follow the movements of
your body and the celestial harmonies govern themselves by you, O my
beloved queen! O my beautiful real dream! You are arrayed in splendor
and you swim always in a flood of radiant beams.
It is hardly three months that I have known you, but I have loved you
a long, long time.--Before I ever saw you, I was languishing with love
of you; I called you, I sought you, and I was in despair at not meeting
you on my road, for I knew that I could never love another woman.--How
many times you have appeared to me--at the window of the mysterious
chateau, leaning in melancholy mood on the balcony and throwing to the
wind the petals of some flower, or galloping through the dark paths of
the forest, an impetuous Amazon, on your Turkish horse, whiter than the
snow!--There were your proud yet gentle eyes, your transparent hands,
your lovely, waving hair and your adorably disdainful half-smile.--But
you were less beautiful, for the most ardent, unbridled imagination,
the imagination of painter or poet, could not attain the sublime
poesy of the original. There is within you an inexhaustible spring of
charms, an ever-gushing fountain of irresistible seductions; you are a
casket, always open, of the most precious pearls, and in your slightest
movements, in your most careless gestures, in your most unstudied
poses, you scatter to right and left inestimable treasures of beauty,
with royal profusion. If the graceful undulations of a contour, the
fleeting outlines of an attitude, could be fixed and preserved in a
mirror, the mirrors before which you pass would cause the divinest
canvases of Raphael to be despised and looked upon as tavern signs.
[Illustration: Chapter XIII--_How many times you have appeared to me--at
the window of the mysterious château, leaning in melancholy mood on the
balcony and throwing to the wind the petals of some flower. * * * There
were your proud yet gentle eyes, your transparent hands, your lovely,
waving hair and your adorably disdainful half smile._]
Every gesture, every motion of the head, every different aspect of your
beauty, was engraved on the mirror of my mind with a diamond-point, and
nothing in the world could efface its deep impression; I know where
the shadow was and where the light, the flat surface illumined by the
sunbeam, and the spot where the wandering reflection blended with the
softer tints of the neck and cheek.--I could draw you absent; your
image is always posing before me.
When I was a child, I stood for whole hours before the pictures of the
old masters and gazed eagerly into their dark depths.--I scanned the
lovely faces of saints and goddesses whose flesh, of the whiteness of
ivory or wax, stood out so marvellously against the dark backgrounds,
blackened by the decomposition of the colors; I admired the simplicity
and magnificence of their carriage, the strange grace of their
hands and feet, the nobility and beauty of their features, at once
so delicate and so strong; the magnificence of the draperies which
enveloped their divine forms, and whose purple folds seemed to thrust
themselves forward like lips to kiss those lovely bodies.--By dint of
persistently plunging my eyes beneath the veil of haze thickened by
centuries, my sight would become confused, the outlines of objects
would lose their precision, and a sort of motionless, inanimate life
would seem to inspire all those pale phantoms of vanished beauties; I
always ended by discovering that the faces bore a vague resemblance
to the fair stranger whom I adored with all my heart; I sighed as I
thought that she whom I was destined to love was perhaps one of them
and had been dead three hundred years. That thought often affected
me so deeply as to make me shed tears, and I would fly into a fierce
passion against myself for not having been born in the sixteenth
century, when all those beauties lived. I considered that it was
unpardonable stupidity and folly on my part.
When I grew older, the pleasing phantom possessed me even more
completely. I saw it always between me and the women I had for
mistresses, smiling ironically and mocking at their human beauty with
all the perfection of its divine beauty. It made women who were really
charming seem ugly to me--women well adapted to make any man happy who
was not in love with the adorable shadow, whose body I did not believe
to be in existence, but which was only the premonition of your beauty.
O Rosalind! how wretched I have been because of you before I knew you!
O Théodore! what wretchedness I have endured because of you since I
have known you!--If you wish, you can throw open to me the paradise of
my dreams. You are standing on the threshold, like a guardian angel
enveloped in her wings, and you hold the golden key in your fair
hands.--Tell me, Rosalind, tell me, will you do it?
I await only a word from you to live or die;--will you say it?
Are you Apollo driven forth from heaven, or the fair Aphrodite coming
from the bosom of the sea? Where did you leave your chariot of precious
stones drawn by four fiery steeds? what have you done with your shell
of mother-of-pearl, and your dolphins with the sky-blue tails?--what
amorous nymph has blended her body with yours in the midst of a kiss,
O thou comely youth, more charming than Cyparissus or Adonis, more
adorable than all women in the world?
But you are a woman; we are no longer living in the days of the
Metamorphoses;--Adonis and Hermaphroditus are dead,--and such a degree
of beauty cannot now be attained by a man;--for, since heroes and gods
are no more, women alone retain in their marble bodies, as in a Grecian
temple, the priceless gift of shape anathematized by Christ, and
prove that earth has no reason to envy heaven; you worthily represent
the first divinity in the world, the purest symbol of the eternal
essence--beauty.
As soon as I saw you, something was torn away within me, a veil fell, a
door opened, I felt that I was flooded inwardly with waves of light; I
realized that my life was before me, and that I had finally reached the
decisive crossroads.--The obscure, lost portions of the half-radiant
face I was seeking to distinguish in the shadow were suddenly
illuminated; the dark tints in which the background of the picture
was enveloped were flooded with a soft light; a delicate rosy flush
stole over the ultramarine, slightly tinged with green, of the middle
distances; the trees, which formed only confused silhouettes, began
to stand out more clearly; the dew-laden flowers made bright spots on
the dull green of the turf. I saw the scarlet-breasted bullfinch at
the end of an elder branch; the little white rabbit, pink-eyed and
with ears erect, putting out his head between two wisps of wild thyme
and passing his paw over his nose, and the timid stag coming to drink
at the spring and gaze at his branching antlers in the water.--On the
morning when the sun of love rose upon my life, everything was changed;
where shapes barely outlined and rendered terrible or unnatural by
their uncertainty, once vacillated before my eyes, were now graceful
groups of trees in blossom, hillsides forming charming amphitheatres,
silver palaces, with their terraces covered with urns and statues,
bathing their feet in the azure lakes and apparently swimming between
two skies; the shape that I took in the obscurity for a gigantic dragon
with wings armed with talons, crawling on the darkness with his scaly
paws, was simply a felucca with silken sails and oars painted and
gilded, filled with women and musicians; and the horrible crab which I
fancied that I saw waving his claws and nippers over my head was only
a fan-shaped palm whose long, narrow leaves moved gently in the night
wind.--My chimeras and my errors have vanished:--I love.
Despairing of ever finding you, I accused my dream of falsehood, and
reviled fate bitterly;--I said to myself that I was very foolish to
seek such a type, or that nature was very unfruitful and the Creator
very unskilful, not to be able to realize the simple thought of
my heart.--Prometheus had the noble aspiration to make a man and
enter into rivalry with God; I had created a woman, and I believed
that, to punish me for my audacity, a longing always unsatisfied
would gnaw at my liver like another vulture; I expected to be bound
with diamond chains upon a hoary rock on the shore of the wild
ocean,--but the lovely sea-nymphs with long green hair, lifting their
snow-white, swelling breasts above the waves and showing the sun
their mother-of-pearl bodies all dripping with the tears of the sea,
would not have come and reclined upon the bank to converse with me and
comfort me in my agony, as they do in old Æschylus's play.
It did not turn out so.
You came and I was fain to reproach my imagination with its
impotence.--I have not suffered the torture that I dreaded, of being
chained forever upon a sterile rock, the victim of an idea; but I have
suffered none the less. I had seen that you did, in fact, exist; that
my presentiments had not lied to me in that respect; but you appeared
to me with the ambiguous, and terrifying beauty of the sphinx. Like
Isis, the mysterious goddess, you were enveloped in a veil which I
dared not raise for fear of falling dead.
If you knew with what panting, anxious scrutiny, under my apparent
indifference, I watched you and followed your slightest movements!
Nothing escaped me; how earnestly I gazed at the little flesh that
appeared at your neck or your wrists, trying to determine your sex!
Your hands were the subject of profound study on my part, and I can
fairly say that I know every detail of their shape, every imperceptible
vein, and the tiniest dimple; you might be enveloped from head to
foot in the most impenetrable domino, and I would recognize you simply
by looking at one of your fingers. I analyzed the undulations of your
gait, the way in which you put your foot to the ground, your manner
of pushing back your hair; I tried to surprise your secret in the
management of your body.--I watched you particularly in your hours
of relaxation when the bones seem to be removed from the body, and
when the limbs relax and bend as if they were unstrung, to see if the
feminine lines would declare themselves more boldly in that careless,
forgetful attitude. No one was ever the object of such ardent scrutiny
as you.
I forgot myself in contemplating you for hours at a time. Withdrawing
to some corner of the salon, with a book that I did not read in my
hand, or crouching behind the curtains in my bedroom, when you were in
yours and the blinds at your window were raised,--at such times, deeply
penetrated by the marvellous beauty that emanates from you and creates
a luminous atmosphere about you, I said to myself: "Surely it is a
woman;"--then suddenly an abrupt, decided gesture, a virile tone, or
some cavalierish action would destroy in a moment my frail edifice of
probabilities, and throw me back into my former irresolution.
I would be sailing before the wind over the boundless ocean of amorous
reverie, and you would come to ask me to fence or to play tennis with
you; the young woman, transformed into a young gallant, would deal me
terrific truncheon-like blows and send the foil flying out of my hands
as deftly and quickly as the most expert bravo in the trade; every
minute in the day I had some such disappointment.
I would be on the point of approaching you, to say: "My dear lady,
I adore you," and I would see you lean over and whisper tenderly to
some fair dame, and blow madrigals and compliments through her hair
in puffs.--Judge of my position.--Or else some woman, whom, in my
mad jealousy, I would have flayed alive with the greatest pleasure
on earth, would hang upon your arm, would lead you aside to confide
her paltry secrets to you, and detain you for whole hours in a window
recess.
It made me furious to see women speak to you, for that forced me to
believe that you were a man, and, even if you had been, I could not
have endured it without intense suffering.--When the men approached
you and addressed you freely and familiarly, I was even more jealous,
because I thought this--that you were a woman, and perhaps they
suspected it as I did; I was tortured by the most contrary passions,
and I did not know what to believe.
I became angry with myself, I reproached myself most bitterly for being
so tormented by such a love, and for not having the strength to tear
from my heart the noxious plant that had sprung up there in one night
like a poisonous mushroom; I cursed you, I called you my evil genius; I
believed for an instant that you were Beelzebub in person, for I could
not explain the sensation to which I was a prey when in your presence.
When I was thoroughly convinced that you were in reality nothing else
than a woman in disguise, the improbability of the motives with which I
sought to justify such a whim plunged me into my uncertainty once more,
and I began anew to deplore that the figure I had dreamed of for the
love of my soul, should prove to belong to a person of the same sex as
myself;--I blamed the chance that had arrayed a man in such a charming
exterior, and, to my everlasting misery, had thrown him in my way when
I had ceased to hope for the realization of the ideal of pure beauty
which I cherished so long in my heart.
But now, Rosalind, I am profoundly certain that you are the loveliest
of women; I have seen you in the costume of your sex, I have seen your
pure, perfectly-rounded shoulders and arms. The upper part of your
breast, which your neckerchief disclosed, can belong only to a young
woman; neither Meleager, the beautiful huntsman, nor the effeminate
Bacchus, with their uncertain figures, had such purity of outline or
such fineness of skin, although they were both made of Parian marble
and polished by the amorous kisses of twenty centuries.--I am no longer
worried in that direction--But that is not all: you are a woman, and
my love is no longer reprehensible; I can give myself up to it without
remorse, and abandon myself to the current that draws me toward you;
however ardent and unruly my passion, it is legitimate and I can avow
it; but you, Rosalind, for whom I have burned in silence and who knew
nothing of the immensity of my love, you in whom this tardy disclosure
will perhaps arouse no sentiment but surprise--do you hate me, do you
love me, can you love me? I do not know--and I tremble and am unhappier
than before.