My mother-in-law took me aside yesterday, while they were dancing, and
with tears in her eyes, she said in a tremulous voice:
"You are going to possess the most precious object that we possess here,
and what we love best.... I beg you to always spare the slightest
unhappiness, and to be kind and gentle towards her.... I count on your
uprightness and affection to guide her and protect her in this dangerous
life in Paris."... And then, giving way to her feelings more and more,
she added: "I do not think that you suppose that I have tried to
instruct her in her new duties or to disturb her charming innocence,
which has been my work; when two persons worship each other like you two
do, a girl learns what she is ignorant of, so quickly and so well!"
I very nearly burst out laughing in her face, for such a theatrical
phrase appeared to me both ridiculous and doubtful. So that respectable
woman had always been a passive, pliable, inert object, who never had
one moment of vibration, of tender emotion in her husband's arms, and I
understood why, as I wasted at the clubs, he escaped from her as soon as
possible and made other connections which cost him dear, but in which he
found at least some appearance of love.
Oh! to call that supreme bliss of possession, which makes human beings
divine and which transports them far from everything, that despotic pain
of virginity, which guesses, which waits, which longs for those
mysterious, unknown, brief sufferings that contain the germs of future
pleasure, the only happiness of which one never tires, a duty!
And that piece of advice, at the last moment, which was as common-place
and natural, and which I ought to have expected, enervated me, and, in
spite of myself, plunged me into a state of perplexity, from which I
could not extricate myself. I remembered those absurd stories which we
hear among friends, after a good dinner. What would be that last trial
of our love for her and for me, and could that love which then was my
whole life, come out of the ordeal lessened or increased tenfold? And
when I looked at the couch on which Elaine, my adored Elaine, was
sitting, with her head half-hidden behind the feathers of her fan, she
whispered in a rather vexed voice:
"How cross you look, my dear Jacques? Is the fact of your getting
married the cause of it? And you have such a mocking look on your face.
If the thought of it terrifies you too much, there is still time to say
no!"
And delighted, bewitched by her caressing looks, I said in a low voice,
almost into her small ear:
"I adore you; and these last moments that still separate us from each
other, seem centuries to me, my dear Elaine!"