At the same time a host of thoughts, which had not occurred to me

during the happy months of my seclusion, beset and assailed me. I

breathed again the intoxication of certain successes, I recollected the

splendid alliances which had been offered me, I evoked the memory of

some mistress whose rouge and whose treachery I had passed over because

she carried to perfection the arts of dress and of fencing with words.

What a position I might have held in Paris, had I wished! Forgotten

impressions, as glittering and as false as the jewelry of a bazaar,

impressions which tarnished my youth but had been happily lost during

my rides with a pure child in the Sleeping Woods, conquests which had

temporarily faded from my memory, these Ducal brought back to me as if

they were precious stones that he had recovered.

However, he had not yet seen _Her_. My radiant Raymonde would restore

order in my heart.

We were to take luncheon at the lodge before going to the mayor’s

office. The religious ceremony was to be celebrated on the following

day. Raymonde appeared in her plain street dress, almost entirely

devoid of trimming or ornament, and for the first time I noticed those

faults in attire which cost youth so little.

“She is charming,” Ducal said to me in an undertone. “She has a little

gown--”

He hesitated a moment, then continued:

“A delightful little gown. My compliments.”

In words such as these the sneer is as plain as day, and I tasted

its poison. It spoiled my pleasure. Why should I have attached any

significance to what he said? I was like a mediocre artist or savant,

who, not completely absorbed in his work, keeps his ears open for

external sounds, for the voice of the critics, of rivals and of public

opinion. The most beautiful love that could have illumined my youth did

not shield me from such petty slights. Oh, dissipations of time and

energy! Why must we perceive the greatest wonder of this life, that we

can live but once, only when it has been put irreparably beyond our

reach, when, like some perfect form arrested in the marble, or cloaked

by night we cannot see it moving past?

* * *

My farmers, woodcutters and the neighbouring peasants, who adored M.

Mairieux, but for whom I was a distant and puzzling landlord, had,

during the night, covered with branches of fir trees the road which led

from the lodge to the little church. They had despoiled the borders of

the forest, in order that on this day of festivity we might walk on

green boughs. It was late autumn in the forest, bare of leaves, but on

the road it was spring. And in our hearts? Ah! Mine would have burst

with joy, with that sheer joy which no impurity can spot, if Pierre

Ducal had not been there.

But he was there, piercing the least detail with his gimlet eyes. I

should have been indifferent to him, and I hated him. He absorbed part

of my attention, he prevented me from abandoning myself without reserve

to the current of my love.

Raymonde, her Book of Hours in her hand, slender and delicate, the

contour of her face and the varying shades of gold in her hair softened

despite the sunlight by her veil, looked in her white dress like one of

those old missal pictures so radiant that it stands out from a golden

background. Knowing the delicacy of her feelings I expected to see her

agitated, but inwardly and outwardly she was peace. And seeing her thus

I recalled the words she had said to me:

“My Soul is so high that I can hardly hold it down.”

I almost looked for wings, and it seemed to me that I could hear them

beat. The first time I made a flight in my aeroplane, I distinctly saw

a vision of Raymonde on the road strewn with foliage for the procession.

Pierre Ducal approached to greet her. As he bowed, I noticed an uneven

pleat in her gown. He straightened up and looked at me. I thought that

I read his meaning: “That gown is certainly not a Maulet creation.”

I realise that I am laying too much stress on impressions that were

almost imperceptible, which slipped and fled away almost as soon as

they were born. They indicated nevertheless the existence of that

invisible crack in our happiness which made it the most vulnerable, the

easiest to break.

The sky was of that delicate tint which it assumes in mountainous

countries at the end of the season, changing from pale blue to a pearl

grey, as though by its transparency it was announcing the coming of

snow.

Raymonde, in order that we might be together in thought each moment of

this unique day, had asked me to read the marriage service.

“You will see,” she said, “how beautiful the Liturgy is.”

I read it then. Since her death I have many times reread the words of

St. Paul: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the

church. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet

hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ

also the church: because we are members of his body. They two shall

become one flesh--”

I understood, I realised for one moment at least, that miracle of

immortal love, which dares to brave time and because of its injuries

from the union of body and soul, arrives at unity, order and peace.

Yes, I understood that in loving Raymonde and in Raymonde’s love, I

loved my better self, the heart of my heart, that which lives on in us

after our youth is fled, that which, in each one of us, is part of the

living Spirit of God.

I had closed my Book of Hours. The thoughts which came to me were as

refreshing as the living waters. I felt a kind of ecstasy. We were on

our knees, and my bride signed to me to rise with her. I embraced her

with my look, as though she were an object of infinite value, of which

the internal charm exceeds by a thousand times the visible beauty. She

smiled at me with perfect confidence, and at this moment we exchanged

the mystic promise which includes in anticipation the sacramental “Yes.”

A slight movement brought Pierre Ducal within my range of vision. I

knew well the subtle smile which hollowed his cheeks. He was amusing

himself, collecting anecdotes, already preparing an interesting story

in which I was to figure as a first communicant. I felt it intuitively.

Seized suddenly by fear of becoming ridiculous, I studied my actions.

The ecstasy did not return. I placed the wedding ring on my bride’s

finger with the indifference of some trivial mechanical duty.

After luncheon Ducal asked me to lend him my automobile, for he wished

to return to Paris that night. His many trunks, for which he had had no

use, were placed on the machine, and after he had disappeared around

the curve in the road, the wheels of the car crushing the fir boughs

that had not yet been picked up, I breathed more easily, in fact I was

conscious of a distinct sense of relief. Raymonde noticed the change at

once.

“Why were you not like this a little while ago?” she asked. “During the

service you changed completely. Did you regret anything?”

“Oh, Raymonde, what could I have regretted?”

“Listen, I think I have guessed it,” she said. “You were looking at my

white gown. Perhaps it did not become me very well.”

“But, it did, I assure you.”

“No, no, I know it,” she said. “But I should have grieved my little

dressmaker in the village too much if I had given the order to any one

else. What does a bad pleat amount to? But in the midst of happiness,

to be neglectful of others, you agree with me that that would have been

wicked?”

I agreed with her, and moreover I did not discover the bad pleat again.

It was as if it had disappeared with Pierre Ducal.

Mme. Mairieux, to whom Col. Briare was telling stories of hunting

in the forest of Fontainebleau, had followed the course of our

conversation and now began to excuse her daughter.

“I scolded her,” she said. “She is lacking in elegance. You will know

how to give it to her.”

“Is it necessary?” asked Raymonde, laughing.

“Of course it is, in the world to which your husband is going to take

you. You will be gowned by the great dressmakers. Isn’t she fortunate,

Colonel?”

She spoke to every one of the luck of Mme. Cernay. These two words,

“Madame Cernay,” assumed in her mouth majestic importance. Our marriage

flattered her as though it were a personal triumph. The lack of guests,

however, appeared to her unreasonable, harmful, and distressing.

One had to talk continually to the same people. For lack of anything

better, want of better guests, she gave orders that every peasant who

passed the gate that day should receive entertainment.

When the evening came, and I was leading my wife away, Mme. Mairieux,

at the moment of parting, looked at her daughter in admiration before

kissing her, like a commander embracing a newly decorated soldier. The

chateau represented in her eyes the Promised Land.

Her husband expressed his emotion differently:

“She is my only child,” he said to me. “Take care of her.”

Fearing lest he might break down, he dared not say more. In the midst

of our little group, swayed by such different sentiments, Raymonde

preserved her face of peace.

We had only to walk the length of the avenue, and we were at home.

After the fir branches which carpeted the space in front of the lodge,

we found the ground hard, and it crackled under our feet, for it was

freezing. The night was not dark. In the depths of the sky, between

the chestnut trees whose branches stood out black and bare, and the

oaks with their dry, shrivelled leaves, shone thousands of stars, that

almost touched each other, and seemed to be in motion like a swarm of

bees. Certainly this sense of throbbing has remained in my memory. Have

I since seen similar nights? Did I dream of that one? I do not know now.

The cold was stinging.

“Suppose we run?” I suggested.

“Come,” she answered.

She picked up the train of her wedding dress and darted off. Practice

in the woods had made her agile, and I still see clearly before me this

flight in the shadow, the bare trees, the lawn and the empty urns. Oh!

it was a wonderful night, a holy night, when in the majestic silence I

heard her two little shoes striking the ground.

I stopped, and then at last I pursued her. She was the first to gain

the arches of the cloister. Without doubt the apparent life in the sky

had struck her too, for when I rejoined her, she pointed it out to me

with these words:

“There are no falling stars to-night. Do you still want something more?”

“No, Raymonde,” I said. “Nothing more.”

I might have added: “_Not even you_.” No, not even her! Beyond desire,

I was experiencing that kind of love, which one enjoys in moments of

ecstatic adoration, when the blood flows gently not to thwart the

rush of the spirit, when life means sweetness, goodness, joy, light,

serenity--

* * *

“Let us go in,” I said, “you will catch cold.”

“Listen,” she replied.

The branches nearest to the cloister cracked with the frost. And from

the forest, of which we could distinguish only a vague outline, a

confused murmur came to us.

“The night sings,” said I.

“The night is praying,” she replied, and again she raised her head to

the stars.

“How many there are! How many there are!”

She named some of the constellations. Cygnus, the most beautiful,

appeared to be on the wing like a diamond-shaped flock of birds. I took

Raymonde’s hand in mine so that she would look at me.

“Now,” I said, “there is no one in the world but you and me. I shall

love you all my life.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “that is not sufficient.”

“What must you have?”

“Our life--that is not enough. It will end. I wish a love which will

never end. Never. Never.”

“Is that possible?”

“Of course, since there is Eternity.”

At that moment her faith was contagious, enlarging and consecrating our

love.

* * *

At the chateau we found a large fire burning in the little salon, which

I had refurnished for her. She looked at the furniture, the pictures

and the hangings, and then at me with a smile that was a little sad.

Did she have a presentiment of the future? Now that I am able to

interpret truly the past, I recall having seen, one morning when I was

out shooting, a young hind stop at the entrance to a wood, where I

was hiding. She inhaled the fresh breeze and then hesitated in fear.

Finally she came on in my direction.

“You are in your own home, Raymonde,” I said.

“Oh! it is very beautiful, but I am not accustomed to it.”

“You will become so soon.”

“Of course, I must.”

To her the new luxury was a burden. Otherwise it meant nothing. The

only effect of this change of conditions for her was one of restraint.

She left me to change her gown. When she reappeared, she came over and

clung to me.

“My love,” she said.

And as I held her to my heart, so young, so pure and so confiding, I

felt two tears fill my eyes. Raising her head a little she saw them.

“What troubles you?” she asked anxiously. “Are you weeping?”

I am proud now to remember those tears, the quivering of my love and

the obscure confession of my own unworthiness. Through them Raymonde

recognised the upheaval that I felt before the perfection of her love.

Later they unquestionably helped her to endure my cruelty and to

forgive it.

I was silent.

“Dear,” she repeated, “why do you weep?”

“No doubt because I love you too much,” I managed to say at last, in an

attempt to play with my emotion.

“That is so simple,” she answered.

Our happiness was indeed so simple that I could not believe that it

was happiness. Until then I had sought it in the artificialities and

complexities of pleasure. My engagement and marriage had restored it

to me in its integrity and fulness, and I was astonished that it was

serene.

She took down her hair, and it spread over her shoulders and breast,

even more golden at the ends than on top. The various shades of gold

blended to frame the whiteness of her face and neck. She had chosen the

white woollen dress which she had worn on the day I had asked for her

hand. I felt that this act brought her closer to me, and that I shared

in the radiance which emanated from her.

We did not touch the supper which had been prepared. The chateau was

asleep, and when we were silent there was nothing but the solemn

silence of the country night. There was no one but us in the world;

only us and love that was stronger than we.

“It is late,” she murmured, and it was like a prayer. “Don’t you want

me to retire? I am tired.”

She leaned toward me and my mouth touched her forehead. Then I let her

go. The peace that was in her dominated my love.

I sat long before the open fire--how long, I cannot say--and my heart

opened to all the sweetness of life.

When I rejoined her she was sleeping. I did not waken her.

_Second Note Book_

November 19--

As we were nearing Rome, I pointed out to Raymonde the Sabine

mountains, already covered with snow. But she only saw a rainbow,

trembling in the golden haze which the setting sun, reappearing after

the rain, drew from the damp soil. She derived from it a happy omen.

Then she compared the dome of St. Peter’s, which one sees first of

all, to a rick in the field. Later, was she not to compare the Eternal

City, upon which the centuries have left their imprint, to her forest,

with its centenarian trees covered with moss, ivy, and mistletoe? One

thinks that one will always remain bewildered, and soon things become

so familiar, although imposing, that one speaks and listens to them.

Her forest had prepared her. The shafts of the trees formed innumerable

arches as at St. Paul’s outside the Walls; on the old trunks new stems

grew, and the fallen leaves composed the soil which nourished the

roots. Thus the continuity of historic Rome, which allowed Christian

churches to flourish on the sites of pagan temples, did not astonish

her.

Her divine ignorance preserved her miraculously from that insincere

admiration which the sanctity of established reputations imposes upon

most of us. She delighted in art as she breathed the morning air in

the woods, of which one knows neither where it comes from nor why it

leaves upon the lips so agreeable a flavour. With sure taste she walked

through the midst of statues and pictures as through a garden pointing

out to me her favourites. Invariably these were works of calmness and

serenity, in which the old masters represented life either with all its

natural joy or with religious acceptation,--the draped Muses of the

Vatican, that veiled woman on one of the sides of the throne of the

goddess in the “Thermos” Museum who keeps alive the sacred fire on the

hearth,--what others shall I name, a young Madonna by Fra Angelico;

Raphael’s Parnassus; or Michelangelo’s sublime creation of the first

man. By instinct she turned to them as to old friends. I never caught

her in a mistake. Like the doves of the Villa Adrien who stoop on the

basin and then lift their throats swelled with water, she was drinking

in the masterpieces, in her appreciation of which I might well have

tried to imitate her.

However, I did not accept this unexpected superiority, this

straightforward impulse of a young and unspoiled sensitiveness. I

paraded my learning, I imposed on her my instruction. Her assurance

disconcerted me, at the same time that her willing attention did not

prevent her from confusing the different schools and classifications I

tried to teach her. I corrected and scolded her, and she apologized and

made more mistakes--except in the selection of her favourites.

Through a spirit of contradiction in which vanity played the chief

part, I turned her attention to works palpitating with unrest,

misery, passion or sensuality. The contortions of a Laocoön, the

“Dying Gladiator” crushed to the ground, Apollo darting forward with

a theatrical gesture, Venus bowed under the weight of her own beauty

and not like a Diana free in her movements,--these satisfied me

but offended her. She did not respond to my enthusiasms, surmising

perhaps that they were forced, and inwardly I reproached her for not

understanding, for not knowing.

“She knows nothing,” I thought, “of the passion that disfigures, the

jealousy that twists, the doubt that convulses these countenances and

permits them no peace. For the moment she and I are far apart.”

And I prided myself on the discovery.

All this she was to learn one day through me without permitting any

alteration in her features to reveal it, merely becoming whiter and

more distant as my cruelty increased and she grew nearer to death,

death which writes for us our definitive expression, her own too pure

and too noble to lower itself to complaints.

These differences, which I considered insignificant and which were in

fact hardly perceptible, were they not already part of a more profound

discord?

* * *

Nevertheless the first months of our marriage flowed on like a limpid

stream that seems motionless. Our days slipped by without our being

aware of them. I was amazed at the intimate peace I breathed; it did

not seem consistent with the passion I wished to feel again. In time I

came to ask myself whether I was really sufficiently in love. I looked

for disturbances, outbreaks, storms, a great thirst for life, and

around me, within me, I found only simplicity and clearness. Thus I

grew distrustful of the new order that was making over my heart.

I had been accustomed to think of love as a combat, and victory

appeared to me to be filled with idleness. I began to scorn the harmony

which was for her the summit of love, which united her by a thousand

secret bonds to artistic perfection.

I was afraid of monotony, even though I had not known it, I attained

it very soon through the bitterness I mingled with Raymonde’s pure

offerings.

* * *

Among the books and the guides that I had selected in order to give

her what I called, pretentiously enough, “intellectual culture,” were

included some extracts from Chateaubriand, compositions that conjured

up ruins, prose nothings that accompanied admirable descriptions

throbbing with the soul of Rome, After a visit to the church of Saint

Louis-des-Français, in which Chateaubriand had erected the tomb of

Pauline de Beaumont--she is reclining on a couch, one arm hanging

down and the other folded, in a mournful attitude that is much too

beautiful--I read aloud the passage from the “Memoirs,” in which her

lover tells of alms that he had condescended to bestow upon one in

agony.

“I observed that until her last breath, Mme. de Beaumont did not doubt

the truth of my attachment to her; she did not cease to show her

surprise at it, and she seemed to die both disconsolate and overjoyed.

She had believed that she was a burden to me, and she had wished to go

away in order to rid me of her.”

With what sadness these sentences were later to come back to us!

I turned to Raymonde to note the effect upon her of such magnanimity.

“How is it possible,” she said, “to write things like that if one is

really in love. And if one is not in love, what an abominable farce!”

All her simplicity and frankness was opposed to the sentimental

buffoonery which is so widespread in our society, and from which she

herself was shortly to suffer in her inability to accommodate herself

to it.

* * *

When my thoughts are turned toward Rome by these moving memories, whose

sweetness--which happily I did not succeed in utterly spoiling--I can

better appreciate at a distance, I recall particularly two or three

pilgrimages that drew me closer to her. In my thoughts I return alone

to places where we had been together.

We were standing at the edge of the first of the basins that occupy

to-day the site of the palace of the Vestals. It was in the beginning

of Spring, and some newly blown red roses were reflected in the water.

Behind her stood the three remaining columns of the temple of Castor

and Pollux, their marble shining with the caress of the sun. Around

her there was nothing but ancient debris, mutilated statues, and these

flowers. As at the end of autumn in the Sleeping Woods, she stood quite

congruously in this past of more than two thousand years ago.

Again, we were at the Coliseum, the arena already plunged into shadow,

while the upper part of the huge wall, completely covered with

gillyflowers, was still lighted by the rays of the setting sun. A guide

had shown us the door through which they carried the dead bodies of the

Christians that had been sacrificed to the wild beasts. Long shudders

shook her whole body, and suddenly two tears, which she tried too long

to keep back, fell from her eyes.

“Why do you weep?” I asked.

“It was here,” she murmured.

What was the use of asking the cause of her emotion? The fire of

sacrifice was burning her. I had before me a young martyr in the

making. And then again I recall the cloister of St. John Lateran,

a quiet corner, where one inhales with the perfume of roses the

unchanging charm of Rome. We were there alone one sunny afternoon. The

recollection of the roses growing among the palms in the little central

garden about the wall fixes the time for me as again the beginning

of Spring, doubtless a short time before our departure. She was at a

little distance from me, standing between two of those slender columns

which support the cloister and seem as transparent as alabaster in the

sunlight. She was dressed in white; she smiled. I have never since seen

so perfect an image of peace.

* * *

Her catholic heart rejoiced in the city of three hundred and fifty

churches, eighty of which are dedicated to the Virgin. And here her

knowledge surpassed mine. She gave me brief accounts of the lives of

Saint Cecilia, Saint Agnes and Saint Catherine of Siena, of whom I

knew nothing. The places which their deaths have sanctified derived

all their meaning from these narratives. At the church of Santa Maria

Maggiore she told me of the miracle of the snow which fell in the month

of August, to point out to the Pope the site of the basilica. I grieved

her with my ironies and doubts, whereas the miracle of her charm should

have watered the barrenness of my mind like that cool snowfall itself.

Then, having amused myself with the religious instruction of which she

gave me the benefit, little by little I began to be annoyed by it. It

seemed to me that I was reduced to second place. My vanity could not

endure it. In consequence, for several days I systematically selected

for the object of our walks those ancient ruins wherein I had the

advantage of her.

However, I did go with her sometimes to service at Santa Maria del

Popolo, and the Trinità dei Monte, which, being near the Piazza di

Spagna, where we were living, were her particular churches. For

Trinity, whose rose-coloured bell towers at the alluring hour of the

Benediction, are beautified by the evening light, we had only to mount

the staircase, from the flower market at the bottom. It is on the Road

to the Pincio, where we went later.

But instead of admiring this elevation of spirit I derived bitterness

from it. Did I not wish to confiscate all her powers of feeling to the

profit of my love alone?

“A moment ago,” I protested once, “you were praying, and I was not in

your thoughts.”

She was much surprised at my remark.

“You are always in my thoughts when I pray,” she replied. “How could it

be otherwise?”

I was struggling against a happiness the perfection of which I was

incapable of understanding. My wife charmed and at the same time

bewildered me. I had thought to find her a docile pupil and yet

sometimes my teachings seemed vain, useless and absurd, sometimes in

advance of her age and preparation. I had at times, in the bottom of

my heart, the instinctive feeling that she surpassed me, and perhaps

without self-love I might have bowed to her nobility. But what man

ever renounces his self-love? Instead of renouncing mine I hastened to

pronounce her childish.

* * *

I recall one more incident at Rome in which I find our differences

revealed.

The night before our departure, we had climbed to the garden of the

Pincio. After sunset, which one watches from the terrace as if it

were a play, we walked on in the direction of the Villa Borghese. On

our right, a lawn sloped down to a small wood of pine trees, on the

outskirts of which a group of seminary students, in their red robes,

were walking up and down, reciting their breviary. A bareheaded young

girl of the people ran past us. I noticed her erect carriage, her

black hair, the beads of perspiration on her neck. Presently she lay

down on the grass, drawing up her dress round her for a rug. A young

man who had followed her approached her from behind. He had plucked

several clusters from a border of flowering acacias, and began to throw

them at her laughingly. She did not move. Then he came nearer, and,

stooping, kissed her on the neck in the spot where I had seen the bead

of perspiration. Even pleasure did not change her motionless attitude.

“Look,” I said to Raymonde, “is that not as beautiful as an antique

marble?”

But she stood still, her ear strained, her arm a little raised.

“Listen,” she murmured.

Answering each other the bells of countless churches announced the

_Angelus_. Their chimes came faintly up the slope to us, but she was

familiar with several and recognised them. For the last time, religious

Rome was speaking to her.

I was jealous of her diverted attention; that hour of peace, which the

voices of the evening, the twilight, and the realisation of our love

combined to make sacred, I spoiled by a wish to oppose my companion, to

humiliate her, to bruise her.

I was tormented by restlessness and sensuality instead of yielding

myself to the beneficent tranquillity which sprang naturally from her

love.

* * *

When we returned from Italy, the springtime which we had left in full

blossom in the Roman campagna, where the grain was already tall and

ripening, had hardly begun to make our woods verdant again.

M. and Mme. Mairieux awaited us.

“My little one,” stammered her father on seeing us.

He, ordinarily so calm and self-controlled, was greatly moved now,

showing openly the emotion that gripped him. He had grown older,

and stooped; and for the first time I thought his demonstrations of

fatherly affection overdone. After loving and almost minute scrutiny of

his daughter, he turned to me and took my hand:

“Thank you,” he said.

He gave me the credit for Raymonde’s good health, and assured me of

his confidence in me at the very moment when I was thinking how to get

away, astonished at this excess of gratitude.

Mme. Mairieux was never weary of admiring us. Sometimes she made a

special point of calling me by my first name; and again she abandoned

these happy advances as if she feared their boldness. She gloried in

the length of our journey, the importance of our hotels, and even in

the beauty of Rome. It was all part of the new and longed-for luxury

which I gave my wife, the mere announcement of which pleased her like a

coloured poster.

One day, when Raymonde was a little later than usual, I had an

opportunity to watch from my window the manœuvres of her father, who

rode up for the express purpose of waiting for her at the threshold. It

was very natural, yet instead of sympathising with his expectation I

felt only impatience at it.

My wife came in after the luncheon bell had sounded.

“Where have you been?” I asked quite unfairly.

“Down there.”

“I suppose so. Are you not always thrusting yourself in there?”

Unquestionably she was about to say: “I am their only child, and they

love to see me,” but instead she looked at me with her clear glance and

kept silent.

That was my first direct blow at the ideal which, she had formed of me.

My opinions on our journey, my restlessness, my strange curiosity, had

made her uneasy, but she had kept her faith intact. Now, in the way

she looked at me, I read her distress at seeing me reveal this petty

jealousy. Tears rose in her eyes, but she restrained them. Irritated

with myself and angry with her as well, instead of restoring my lost

tenderness, I permitted the sense of my injustice to drop into her

heart, to grow there as the circles from a falling stone in a quiet

lake widen until they reach the shore.

Next day, timid and bashful, she asked me if I objected to her going to

the lodge.

“Of course not,” I answered crossly. “Have I ever hindered your

liberty?”

Again an opportunity offered itself to make amends, and again I did not

avail myself of it.

She went to the lodge, but shortened her visit. After her return, the

promptness of which I refrained from mentioning, M. Mairieux appeared

more than once at the doorstep, wandering about like a soul in pain

in the avenue leading up to the chateau. I saw him take up several

pieces of work only to abandon them again, passing confusedly from one

thing to another. Something was missing in his day: the smile of his

daughter, of which I had deprived him. He continually approached the

door and then withdrew again. I should have called to him, “She is

here, come in,” and instead I contented myself with watching him. My

apprenticeship of cruelty was beginning already. Raymonde saw him too,

but she did not move. She was waiting for my decision, resolved not to

thwart me, and hoping everything from my tenderness. Hating the wrong

I did, I none the less accentuated it, and thus, without benefit to

myself, I impaired a source of joy.

The following day Mme. Mairieux invaded our apartment. She came to make

certain on the spot of the happiness of her daughter. Raymonde would

have liked to spare me these interminable and noisy visits, which my

coldness could not shorten. She knew how impatient I was after them. I

was growing tired of the Sleeping Woods; she knew it and mourned for

it, and, thinking only of me, blamed herself for it.

* * *

Almost immediately after our return to the chateau Raymonde’s condition

necessitated our giving up our horseback rides.

“Let us walk,” she said, “we can see better when we go slowly, and one

hears the life in the trees better, too, and the stirring of the little

blades of grass. Shan’t we?”

In the early morning, especially when the air is keen and freshened by

the dew, these slow strolls under the trees should have been exquisite.

The leaves were not yet thick enough to keep the sun from filtering

through the branches and throwing its gold on the footpaths, but they

had already that effect of young verdure that is so delightful. The

paths were carpeted with grass, and, since our footfalls made no sound

upon it, we were often surprised by almost touching a woodpecker or a

chaffinch, who, believing himself master in his own house, flew off

in safe and leisurely flight. Oftentimes a hare crossed the avenue in

front of us with little bounds.

Yes, these strolls would have been exquisite but for the skill I

employed to spoil them! As I had tormented Raymonde about her parents,

so now I tormented her about the hope that filled her with a joy that

was all but sacred. She saw in it the continuation of our cherished

love, the palpable thrill of our union, the living bond of our united

bodies and souls. I saw only the inconvenience, and I showed my

irritation and nervousness over it. I appreciate to-day that this

new affection which preceded its object, far from diminishing it,

broadened, strengthened and extended her love as a wife. I did not

recognise it then, and I spurred myself on to detect in her beforehand

some cause of estrangement.

When I was silent too long, she would say to me with an adorable flush

of colour:

“Let us talk about _him_.”

And then, correcting herself, in order not to be unfair, she would add:

“Or, of _her_.”

She pictured it as an image of our happiness that we should see grow,

whose youth, one day, should prolong ours in its decline. She smiled as

she thought of him and saw him. These first maternal smiles, bestowed

on one who does not yet exist, seem to give a woman the sweetness,

freshness and purity of a young girl again. Barren love is ignorant of

many forms of beauty. The madonnas have a deeper beauty, but not less

innocent, not less melodious than the young maid who carries in herself

the Springtime. But these first smiles, whose charm I understand

so well now, I questioned then, as I remember, in jealousy, not in

admiration. So new were they to me that I did not know how to gather

them. Thus we permit the simple emotions that are the ornament of life

to escape from it because we seek our happiness in ourselves instead of

finding it on the faces of others. While I made our love complicated by

trying to confine it to my personal satisfactions, Raymonde gave to it

quite naturally her primitive capacity for acceptation, her radiance,

her creative splendour.

“_He_ will look like you,” she assured me.

“How can we tell?”

“Why should he not look like you? My child is my thought, and my

thought is you.”

She wished us to give him a name, and wanted, herself, that of her

father, but she dared not suggest it. I often changed the conversation,

yet what more beautiful topic can there be than the certainty that the

future is holding for us the continuation of our race?

My wife remarked my coldness and lack of enthusiasm. She talked less

to me in consequence of that which constantly preoccupied her. And

then, with an effort which I now understand, she spoke again to me of

it. Already forgetful of herself, she was willing to make herself less

agreeable to me if in that way she could induce me to bestow a little

of my love on the one who was to come, who was beginning to live within

her.

However, her lassitude and the change in her figure increased. It all

seemed to threaten blows at my pleasure, attacks on her beauty,--I

saw this in it instead of the patience and gentle pity and sense of

protection which ennoble a woman’s love. I did not altogether conceal

my boredom. One evening, as we were returning from the woods a little

later than usual, where I had been for a part of the way inattentive,

she stopped, very weary, before passing through the gate.

“I am afraid,” she said.

I looked about us; there was no noise, no movement to cause her fear. I

thought that perhaps the shadows and the silence had affected her.

“There is nothing, Raymonde.”

“No,” she agreed, “there is nothing.”

I let the matter drop, satisfied. I did not understand that she needed

to be reassured. Her fear was not of external things; those she

understood and trusted. Already, her fear was of me.

* * *

During my previous visits in the Sleeping Woods, I had had scarcely a

word to say to the farmers and workmen whom I met on my estate. They

were my superintendent’s affair, not mine; such people were total

strangers to me. During our engagement, I had been much surprised at

the looks of understanding exchanged between them and Raymonde when I

accompanied her. Later, love traced around us its circle of isolation

and no one addressed us, but through its social aspect, marriage made

us more accessible. On our return from Italy, the tenants and day

labourers whom we encountered, never failed to salute my wife. They

called her “Our Lady.” She was “Our Lady of the Woods,” and at first

it amused me. But they told her of the deaths and the births, obscure

stories of the village or the household, bad crops, or the sickness of

the live stock, and I saw myself put aside. They consulted her and let

me alone.

“But here is your Master,” she objected, pointing to me, and

entrenching herself behind my authority.

“Yes, but you are our lady.”

Instead of rejoicing in this, at last I became offended.

“Speak to them,” she advised me. “Are you not their master?”

“I do not know them,” I answered.

“Exactly, but you will know them.”

“They bore me,” I replied.

“Give them a little friendship, and they will cease to weary you.”

“I don’t find it easy,” I said.

“There is poor Fannette, the washerwoman: her hands are covered with

cracks and chilblains. Then there is Pierre, the deaf man, who works in

our garden.”

“If he is deaf, it would be useless to talk to him.”

“Oh, but one can speak to him with a hearty laugh, or a handshake,

or a finger showing him a flower bed. That is the language which

he understands. He has never forgotten to bring me a bouquet on my

birthday.”

She was teaching me a little humanity, after all the art that I had

thought to teach her! I did not care for it at all, and profited very

little from her lessons. It is the same with most of those who screen

themselves behind agents in the administration of their estates: they

ignore the sweat and labour which all production exacts, and the money

which labour makes for them, so far from putting them in contact with

other men, only succeeds in keeping them apart.

The sovereignty which Raymonde exercised on my estate made me uneasy.

Of a certainty, I refused to confess it to myself, but was not the

sympathy she showed and inspired in all these worthy people in itself a

criticism of my disdain and indifference? With the intuition which she

possessed for my slightest, my most secret annoyances, she perceived my

state of mind. Thereafter she cut short her conversations with these

people, contenting herself for the most part with a courteous greeting

from a distance, which yet managed to cheer them, even if they hoped

for more.

And so again, without benefit to myself, I turned aside a source of joy.

Our daughter Odette, whom we afterwards called Dilette, was born in

October.

In the face of Raymonde’s sufferings I was less courageous than she.

And if I dare confess the whole truth to myself, a horror of anything

which attacked the ordering of my life mingled with the compassion

which I felt for her.

After the birth of the child, when my own nerves were shattered, I was

surprised at the long shudder which shook the mother. She suffered

no more, but trembled before the life which she had brought into the

world. It was the mysterious prelude to maternal love.

* * *

The autumn advanced. Tired of “the desert” of the Sleeping Woods, and

of the incessant attention which a new-born baby demands, deprived

by my own act of the strong ties which bound us to a region where we

directed the labour and endeavoured to create prosperity, I was eager

to return to Paris after so long an absence. Our apartment in the

Avenue du Bois was in readiness for us. We had nothing to do but depart.

“Whenever you wish,” consented Raymonde.

We arranged our departure for the first of December. The baby could

travel then without danger. The milk of her nurse agreed with her

wonderfully. For a child of two months, she showed good strength.

Raymonde suggested a last walk, and a pale, cold sun enticed us. It

scarcely melted the white frost in the fields and on the weed-grown

paths. The grass crackled under our steps as we entered the woods.

We went deep into them. Along the edge, the leaves more exposed to

the wind had already fallen. Deeper within there were still a few,

especially on the oaks and maples. Copper-coloured or golden, they

clung stiffly to the branches, and with the least breath of wind

sounded like toy bells. At the Green Fountain, where our horses had

drunk that day, they nearly stopped the basin.

Beside me, enveloped in a white cloak and hood, my wife gazed

absorbedly, her eyes dim with tears. I was astonished, and even

somewhat annoyed by such emotion. Was I not sufficient for her

happiness? Why should a mere change of environment, one at which,

indeed, she ought to have rejoiced, since I was offering her Paris and

its gaieties, have so affected her?

“What troubles you, my dear?” I asked her.

“I have been so happy here,” she replied.

“But we shall be happy in Paris.”

“Here my trees help me. Everything helps me. I feel myself at ease and

protected. Yonder I shall be alone.”

“You will be with me. Is not that enough?” I asked.

“Alone to keep your love, which I am so afraid of losing.”

“But that is absurd.”

Why did she doubt herself? In the clear light of the winter sun, which

filled the woods, she was resplendent with youth; or rather not youth,

but almost childish beauty. Maternity had restored to her that air of

extreme purity that one sees in young novices. I looked at her, all in

white, so sweet and so gentle, and then round us again at the familiar

forest which contented her.

“My love,” I said, with condescending protection, “I will watch over

you.”

Oh, the smile with which she rewarded this promise that I was to keep

so badly!

* * *

A day or two after our arrival in Paris I surprised her leaning against

the window of her room overlooking the Avenue du Bois. She was so

absorbed that she did not hear me come in. I approached her. It was of

course the novelty of the sight that held her prisoner.

A beautiful winter morning had drawn all the idle world of Paris to a

promenade before luncheon. Men and women on horseback, riding at a walk

or a quiet canter, crowded the beaten earth of the bridle path. The

roadway was devoted to a few surviving carriages, whose ancient steeds

seemed hardly able to move their thin legs, and above all to many

motors, which, under less restraint than in the crowded city, passed

by at full speed, as though revenging themselves with absolute license

in the country. On the broad pavement by the side of the grass plots

pedestrians were taking their constitutionals among the nurses and

children scattered about in pursuit of hoops and balloons. The bluish

haze of the clear day softened the outlines of the Arch of Triumph and

the light, entering it from all sides, seemingly, increased the height

of its arch and columns. At the other end of the Avenue, the Bois slept.

“I am sure you love Paris already,” I said.

Much to her astonishment, I had ceased in Paris calling her “thou,”

on account of the custom in society, of which I had already begun

to think, and she had obediently imitated me, without asking any

explanation. Now, not knowing that I was near, she gave a slight start

when she heard my voice.

“Oh, no,” she answered. “There are too many houses and too many people.”

“What were you looking at?”

“I was looking yonder for the forest of the Maiden and the lodge at the

gate.”

“That is the Porte Dauphine and the Chinese Pavilion.”

“I did not know it. I imagined that we were at home.”

I had thought this procession that our apartment commanded would have

attracted and captivated the love of elegance latent in every woman,

that Paris would not have failed to awaken it in her; and behold, the

nook where she was born, the country of her love, was sufficient for

her. She did not see beyond it; or rather she saw it everywhere.

“You will come to love it,” I continued, with a gesture toward the

city. “At your age Paris is irresistible, above all when you will be

one of its queens.”

“Oh, one of its queens? You are laughing at me.”

At that moment, attentive and interested, her blond hair caressed

by a ray of sunlight, she was at the same time so sensible and so

fascinating that I felt I could hope everything for her.

“I am not joking,” I said. “You do not know my power.”

“Do you dare say that?”

“Well, I will make you a queen.”

“Again?”

“That is to say, a woman of fashion.”

Before this prospect she opened her large eyes like a child who is

taken to the zoological gardens for the first time and introduced to

unknown and strange animals, ostriches, giraffes, or delicate and

impossible-looking pink flamingoes. She repeated my phrase, uttering

the words as if they hurt her.

“A woman of fashion.”

It meant nothing to her. There had never been any question of it at

the Sleeping Woods, and in Rome we lived as strangers, apart from the

regular social hierarchy and absolutely at liberty to do as we wished.

Now, however, this was the goal that I proposed for her. Already Paris

had begun to claim me once again. I breathed its atmosphere, laden with

envy and vanity and artificial charms, the more eagerly because for a

time it had ceased to intoxicate me and I brought to it new appetite.

I had not retained that which my love had given me--regeneration and

peace of heart. On the contrary, I wished to force upon her my own

habits of life. Face to face with this child, I became aware of the

absurdity of my desire. I became aware of it, but I did not abandon it

on that account. I wished the world to appreciate and to envy me the

treasure that I possessed. In order to be in the fashion, my happiness

required publicity.

She turned her head:

“It is impossible,” she said. “I should not know how.”

“Yes, yes,” I insisted, not without a little impatience. “You will

learn. You can learn everything.”

“Dost thou wish it?” and then, correcting herself, “Do you wish it?”

she asked.

“Certainly.”

“Then I will obey you to the best of my ability.”

That evening, when the nurse did not succeed in quieting Dilette,

who was for some reason out of sorts, Raymonde insisted on putting

the baby to sleep herself, a privilege which she had always enjoyed

at the chateau. As a lullaby she sang in a low voice, to the tune of

“Malbrough,” a romance of Chérubin. When she came to the stanza:

There, by a fountain green,

O, my heart, my heart, it grieves!

There had my lover been,

And my tears were full, I ween.

And my grief believes.

whether it was because of the contagious sadness of the verses, the

memory of our own Green Fountain, or a presentiment of the dangers that

threw their shadows across our love, I do not know, but she stopped.

I was in the next room and the curtains between us were drawn back.

I heard what sounded like a stifled sigh. Awakened by the silence,

Dilette began to cry again, and my wife slowly continued her song.

* * *

The occasion I had chosen for presenting her to society was a reception

given one evening by Madame de Saunois, at whose house in the old days

I was a frequent guest. Mme. de Saunois is a lady who has attained the

summit of that social elegance which springs from exquisite dressing,

novel entertainment, clever conversation and the careful cultivation of

every natural and artificial charm. Though her age may be subject to

some debate, her name and fortune admit of no discussion. Her visiting

list is restricted and select, and her invitations are proportionately

sought for. Outwardly manners and taste are the same at her house as

anywhere else but she would regard herself as old-fashioned if she

were thought for one moment to set any limit to liberty of conduct or

opinion. She accepts every irregularity of mind or heart if only it is

perpetrated by one of the socially elect. According to my ideas at that

time her drawing-room was just the one in which I could count upon a

gratifying reception for Raymonde.

Promptly upon our arrival in Paris I besought my wife to put herself in

the hands of one of the big dressmakers. As she seemed almost averse to

this idea I myself looked over her wardrobe with her before we started

out to order anything new.

“What’s this?” I asked, picking up a cheap looking woollen skirt. I did

not recognise the little wedding dress that had produced such a sweet

and simple effect in the Sleeping Woods. Alas, effects change with

place and mood: in Paris the little dress was not the same at all.

Guessing my thoughts she said with a blush, “I shall never wear it

again, you may be sure.”

“Why not give it away to some poor girl to whom it would be of some

use?” I said, with the best intentions in the world.

Raymonde’s flush, which I did not yet understand, faded suddenly. I saw

her cheek whiten.

“I was a poor girl once,” she said.

“Oh, but you must forget that.”

“No, let me have my memories. If ever I am tempted to become proud some

day, they will keep me humble.”

I understood, then, the wound I had given, but instead of asking her

pardon, I said nothing.

To me nothing seemed too sumptuous and elaborate for her, while her one

desire was to pass unnoticed. She “set no store” by success: she wished

only to please me. But must she not please the whole world, to please

me? As to the clothes, she had her way more than I, and I had to be

content with a lace robe that suited marvellously her air of candour.

All the time the fittings and appraising looks of the tailors, the

insulting physical evaluations as of professional buyers, positively

affronted her. Again and again she turned toward me eyes that besought

mercy like the tender eyes of a hunted doe! But I held to my conquest

with an unpitying tenacity.

When she had tried on the skirt and waist, that brought out and moulded

her body under the vapory lightness of the material, leaving no outline

unseen, and displaying the bare expanse of her throat, she was ashamed

at the sight of herself in the mirror.

“Is it possible,” she protested, “that you can wish me to appear like

this?”

“Why not?” said I. “You are beautiful.”

“But every one will see me,” she objected.

It began to seem laughable to me, her idea of reserving her beauty for

me alone.

The evening upon which we made our first appearance in the drawing-room

of Madame de Saunois I felt a curious diminution in my proprietary

satisfaction. My too long absence had allowed people to recover from

their concern with me, and become indifferent. Paris avenges herself

upon those who scorn her. Pierre Ducal was there, informing every one

of my marriage. I thought I heard whispered as we passed: “The daughter

of his superintendent.” When one is conscious of ill-will one is prompt

to imagine hostile remarks, and it seemed to me that every one there

was spying jealously upon my wife. The sharp contrast of her youth and

bloom with the maturer charms of the other women made instant enemies

of them, enemies fully accoutred in the art of feminine war. There were

young girls there crowned with name and fortune any one of whom I might

have married. Not that I had any regret, but I committed the indelicacy

of remembering the advantages I had let slip. There was indeed one

woman there, not a stranger to me, whose presence should have been very

painful to me, since I especially watched for her opinion of my wife

and hoped it would be favourable. Such is the host of petty infamies a

man can harbour in his heart when he surrenders himself to vanity.

At my wedding in the Sleeping Woods it was the presence of Pierre Ducal

that had been the cause of my noticing the cut of my bride’s wedding

gown. To-night Raymonde was in faultless toilette, though timidity and

reserve and half fright, made her seem full of awkwardness. Her modest

embarrassment under the steady gaze of so many people became ridiculous

constraint, and instead of encouraging her I too became ill at ease and

caught some of her discomfort.

My friend Pierre Ducal came forward to speak to us. He was cordial in

his greeting, but my wife did not remember him.

“I looked at him so little,” she explained to me later, by way of

apology. “And how should I have seen him? It was our wedding day!”

Nothing is more offensive to a man who prides himself on the number of

hearts he has broken, than the knowledge that he has left absolutely

no impression on a young woman’s mind. Ducal turned coldly away to pay

his homages elsewhere and make his scathing comments; and as I had

no doubt of his pique nor of the vengeance he was taking, Raymonde’s

maladroitness gave me fresh cause for irritation. The very man upon

whom I had counted as an ally she had succeeded in offending.

Mme. de Saunois being asked--asked, it must be confessed, without

much eagerness--consented to give us a romance by Duparc, which no

doubt she would follow with one or two others, perhaps three, if she

found herself in voice or were sufficiently encouraged. Singing was

her passion, a perfect mania, indeed. She had a thread of a voice,

which she eked out with a pantomime meant to suggest unbounded

temperament. Her pretensions to artistic ability were inordinate. She

allowed herself to be called a great society singer in the newspaper

paragraphs. People laughed heartily about it all behind her back, but

in her presence restrained their amusement as best they could, so that

she was doomed never to know the real impression she created.

After her first selection, the last note of it still hanging on

her lips, her guests rushed to her from all sides, at the risk of

stifling her, and let loose upon her an avalanche of compliments

and appreciation. They compared her, without shame, to this or that

celebrity, preferably foreigners, who are more apt to pass current

without the stamp of critical approval. Being unable to praise the

volume of her voice, they made up by praising its timbre, and above

all, her spirit, as being something less definite and discernible and

so a safer basis of compliment.

Raymonde alone kept her place, motionless, a slender isle of truth in

the midst of this sea of falsehood. Mme. de Saunois, after her last

grand aria, with unrestrained enthusiasm in her wake, passed in front

of us.

“Well, Madame, have I your approval?” she inquired. Apparently she

had not yet her fill of praise: she must have something from Raymonde

too, all the more delicious because it was kept back by some resisting

scruple.

I listened anxiously for Raymonde’s reply.

“The music is new to me,” murmured my wife. “I think I shall like it

when I know it better.”

“Yes, isn’t it, and so suggestive! It has to be well interpreted,” said

Mme. de Saunois.

Clearly enough it was not a question of the romance but of its

interpreter.

“I am not accustomed to it,” answered Raymonde. “But perhaps that will

come later,” she added, poor little one, calling to her aid her most

gracious smile.

Instead of being pleased with the charming sight of so much sincerity

in the midst of these conventional praises, I anxiously followed Mme.

de Saunois in her further majestic progress.

“She knows nothing of music,” I heard some one reassure her.

Later in the evening, a young professional pianist, of considerable

though as yet unrecognised talent, began to play Mozart’s sonata in F,

that one whose yielding rhythm expresses so much fresh and wholesome

joy, touched here and there by the melancholy of youth. Every one in

the drawing-room chattered, because this time there was no need to

compliment, but Raymonde, attentive, forgotten and forgetful, listened

gravely to the divine poem of youth.

The people near her were talking aloud. Suddenly she seemed to awaken

from her dream and I saw her quickly change her seat. What remarks I

wondered had provoked her confusion and flight? Instead of being drawn

toward her protection, I blamed her for holding such scruples about

insignificant things. In short everything turned against her at this

gathering, where I had expected to exhibit her proudly and obtain the

approbation of the world. Soon people began to avoid her. Hostesses

do not squander their energies at receptions or put themselves to any

trouble for the entertainment of their guests nowadays as they used to

do: they merely give them a chance to amuse themselves or be bored as

they may see fit.

In the hubbub which the end of the selection had called forth,

she found herself alone, while all the others surrounded a

woman--young?--whom I had not specially noticed, but whose evident fame

now attracted my attention and took possession of me. I asked Mme. de

Saunois about her as she was passing.

“You do not know her? Why, she is famous. Mme. de H--, the author of

‘The Open Garden.’ A new muse.”

There are so many of these nowadays that only the specialists can

enumerate them: I confessed my ignorance, which amused my hostess.

“You will know her very soon,” she added. “For she is going to recite

some verses for us. She has a prodigious memory--for her own works. She

has never been known to forget a single one of them--fortunately for

us.”

I confessed in the same tone of badinage my satisfaction at the

prospect in store for me, remarking that the muse was already

interesting to look at.

This drew from Madame de Saunois the comment, “In what respect?”

“In her colouring--that dark skin and red hair.”

“It is dyed.”

“Her pale face and those blood-red lips.”

“Paint.”

“Listen to her. She speaks our language with a singing accent. It

sounds foreign and has a charm.”

“Her mother is an Italian and her father a Pole. In her writing she

expresses the soul of France. Her husband, that very excellent H--,

brought her back from somewhere. But she is well connected. I have made

inquiries. But what of that? With her here any drawing-room will be

like a public garden, and the invasion will begin.”

“What invasion?”

“The foreign invasion. Go and make love to her. She is as contagious as

the whooping cough with you men.”

“Indeed!”

“Oh, don’t boast. You will go the way of all the others. She makes the

necessary concessions.”

A call for silence interrupted us. Mme. de H--, with a queenly gesture,

enlarged the circle about her; then, with an apparent inward search for

inspiration, began her recitation.

I am not expert enough in poetry to decide on the merit of her poem;

besides, too many conflicting impressions affected my judgment. In her

verses deified nature took human shape, the better to offer herself

to our comprehension. Once more the Bacchantes, after having killed

Orpheus, substituted for his sacred rhythms their wild fanatic dances

and disorderly rounds. In the tone of her warm, flexible, and sonorous

voice and the harmonious gestures with which she accompanied her poem,

in the whole dashing movement of her lithe body, which appeared to be

burning with earnestness, there was a certain sensual appeal which

disturbed one’s nerves. It was the return to primitive instincts,

to the cult of force and desire. Yet no one, except Raymonde, who

preserved her calm in the midst of the general emotion, thought of

being surprised at hearing such ideas exploited in the most refined

salon in Paris by a woman whose face was rouged and whose youth was

already a thing of the past.

Mme. de Saunois had evidently known what was coming. As for me, I was

eager to be presented to Mme. de H--, the beautiful Nacha she was

familiarly called by those about me, like an established celebrity. She

barely deigned to acknowledge my compliments by a movement of her head.

The rouge and powder, at close range, did not seem to detract from her

beauty.

“What did I say?” whispered Mme. de Saunois, with the air of improving

her prediction. For the success of another was hardly pleasing to her.

Raymonde did not consent to manifest any sort of approval, although

Mme. de H-- regarded her fixedly. What was the matter with them that

they all wanted the approbation which she could not give? Is a single

reproach, probably justified, more important than an outburst of

acclamations?

In the carriage in which we drove away, my wife and I exchanged only

the vaguest remarks. But when we were at home and she was removing her

cloak, I noticed that she was on the verge of tears.

“Did you not enjoy yourself?” I asked, hypocritically.

“Oh, I didn’t go for that purpose,” she answered, naively.

“Why, then?”

“So that you might be pleased with me. And you are not.”

“Oh, yes, I am.”

I could not deceive her by my weak protestations.

“No, you’re not. You can’t be. And I shall never know how to please

you.”

I condescendingly consoled her. I promised to direct and form her.

And when I questioned her (what made me do it?) about the impression

which Mme. de H-- had produced on her, I received, after a moment’s

hesitation, this abrupt reply:

“She is indecent. Don’t you think so?”

Frankness pleases us so little when it is at variance with our

concealed views and inclinations that I was offended by her remark.

As the result of this first contact with a sphere which love had

temporarily abolished, was I beginning to lose or even reject the sweet

simplicity which had been poured into my heart by the little maiden of

the Sleeping Woods?

If the most insignificant details and conversations of that evening

come back to me, it is because in reality nothing happened that was not

important. Memory does not encumber itself with frivolities: that which

is of no value it lets escape as water flows through one’s fingers.

What stays, one may often undervalue, but the day comes at length when

it is perceived to be of real worth.

Raymonde’s unsuccessful effort, and even more her fear, which wounded

me sensibly; the many moments when I turned from her and her truthful

face for some tangle of youth and beauty, some fabric of bleached hair

and painted lips and assumed merriment, some embodiment of all the

usual artful powers of feminine enslavement;--in a single evening, in a

single place, I saw these things grouped before me, calling up visions

of my errors and the distant but certain causes of the misfortune or

the crime toward which I was advancing--

* * *

--Toward which I was advancing, but not without hesitations and glances

back. One cannot quickly or entirely throw off a past in which one has

securely attained, in spite of oneself, to some marvellous state of

sweetness, rectitude and cheer. The most diverse sentiments, far from

excluding each other, often exist quietly side by side, preserving that

fatal ignorance that shall finally rend us in twain.

If, during that time, I resumed my interest in work, which I had too

long neglected, I owe it to Raymonde and her influence. The new life

upon which I had entered demanded that I should not be content even

with happy idleness. In order that the harmony created by our love

continue, all our faculties must be employed, our entire personality

must develop in right directions. A single love, if it aspires to be

lasting, if it wishes to be definitive, considers the balance in our

natures, prevents us from scattering our forces and restores them

rather to our command.

By a gift of happy flattery Raymonde impelled me to make use of gifts

which she recognised in me. I collected my notes of a journey I had

once made through Northern India. I published them, and expressed a

desire to dedicate them to her; but she could not bear the idea of

having her name in print.

“It would be an invasion of our privacy,” she objected quite

obstinately.

I also modelled a few statuettes: a Group of Girls Announcing Spring,

and a Young Girl at the Fountain, inspired by my engagement and that

lost fountain in the forest which the autumn leaves had covered.

It often happens that our most disinterested and normal resolutions

turn, against us. My work, which was also hers, was destined to be

harmful to her. People gave my modelling unmerited praise. Criticism

willingly caresses geniuses whom it believes to be short-lived: they

can not be a burden; their course will soon be run, and consequently

they may be praised without fear. A reputation at the Salons was

bestowed upon me at once, and I was too sensible of the advantages

which renown brings not to accept it with alacrity.

Deceived by myself, I was astonished that Raymonde did not exhibit

more satisfaction. Our first disagreement came from the offer of an

illustrated magazine which, following a small exhibition where only

amateurs of art could have seen it, asked permission to reproduce the

Young Girl at the Fountain. Radiant with delight, I informed my wife,

and was surprised at her repugnance to the idea.

“One would think you were displeased,” I said.

“Refuse permission: I beg you to,” was her reply.

“But why?”

“Did I not pose for the statue?” she demanded.

“Of course.”

“Don’t you see then it’s impossible?”

“But I don’t understand, Raymonde,” I said.

“Keep me all for yourself. Don’t share me with the world. I submitted

to your exhibiting my statue. Was not that enough?”

However that was not the sole reason for her protest, that sense of

modesty. With unfailing intuition she fathomed too the limitations

of my ability. Her love warned her not to allow me to seek that more

extensive reputation which requires, besides enthusiasm, a daily

perseverance and obstinacy. Later I realised better the thorough

preparation and almost superhuman energy required by art, if the artist

aspires to conquer time. And having realised them I gave up my art.

But now this publicity attracted and fascinated me, and I considered

my wife’s susceptibility singularly retrograde, absurd even. Should

one not obey the conventions? Nowadays fashion has its laws and its

rites. A politician, a writer, an artist belongs to the public, which

is no longer content with dancers and actresses. And not only do the

notabilities of to-day belong to the public in their official capacity;

in their private life also, together with their wives and children,

cats and dogs, country homes too if they have any, are they public

property. They are seen spread out in magazines, in all forms, alone

and with their families. Their poses are accompanied with captions for

which a new style has been created, a style uniformly conventional.

Their privacy is taken by assault. They consent to it willingly when

they do not hunt for it from vanity or self-advertisement. They even

appear regularly on commercial posters destined to advertise one or

another of our modern industrial products.

I was now to have an opportunity for free advertisement, and should I

give it up for the fancy of a too scrupulous woman? Was it reasonable?

Who would do it in my place? I reserved my reply, and a day or two

later reopened the subject.

“The magazines insist on having that photograph. Are you still so

opposed to my giving it?” I began.

As a matter of fact I did not need her consent, and yet I asked her

for it. Was it for the purpose of giving her proof of my affection and

condescension? Or was it, rather, to oblige her to give in? She gave

in, and fifty thousand copies of “The Young Girl at the Fountain” were

printed. I distributed some of them myself. Mme. de Saunois had one,

and so did Mme. de H-- whose opinion, of course in lyric form, created

much talk.

I had made that statue for Raymonde and for her alone. How many times,

while she gently encouraged me, during its execution, had I told her

so? And yet I did not know how to resist the first temptation to make

it public.

I remembered reading of the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti that

when he lost his wife he placed beside her in the coffin the manuscript

of the poems that she had inspired, but later did not hesitate to

violate her grave to get them back and publish them. How many artists

pluck out their tenderest memories to offer them to the crowd! They

invoke glory, but vanity more often is the spirit that leads them.

Vanity, vanity! It is the motive of so many lives! I too chose it

rather than the greatest love. There is the whole story.

A little later I had a chance to compare my attitude with Raymonde’s.

A series of old French dances was arranged by Mme. de Saunois. Against

her wishes, but upon my insisting, she had figured in a gavotte. A

society journal asked permission to photograph her.

“If she agrees,” I thought, “that will be my revenge.”

At bottom I was certain that she would refuse, which she did, much

to the chagrin of the other dancers, who could not forgive her

for depriving the public of their simperings. The gavotte, in the

journal, was replaced by a minuet, which admitted of but two persons,

and no more; and people avoided thereafter giving her a part in any

presentation for fear she might stand in the way of that publicity that

was so useful, they assured themselves, to their charity.

As for myself I saw in it another failure.

* * *

At that time, I was interested in the first experiments in aviation,

still of questionable success, just as I had formerly been enamoured

of automobiling. She would not have selected this field for me, but

at the same time she refused to turn me aside from it. She saw that

it appealed strongly to my activities, which in-door work could not

satisfy and which needed some out-door strife more closely allied to

sport.

“If I fly,” I said to her, “you will not be afraid?”

“Oh, yes, I shall.”

“Ought I to give it up then?”

“Oh, no, indeed. Your work is your glory. I shall be afraid, but I

shall pray. A woman can fear--”

However, I soon abandoned my studies because they seemed too

problematical, and would not have been productive of immediate visible

prestige. I was not to take them up again until much later.

* * *

One makes mistakes: I was mistaken in my belief of Raymonde’s

lowly origin. I prided myself that I had raised her to my rank, by

magnificent generosity, without seeking to divine how such tact and

moral culture as hers had come about without the slow formation of

time. The chance discovery of some legal document one day informed

me of the great age and secular distinction of her family, which

reverses had forced to take up service in almost the same place where

it had once enjoyed its fortune. This discovery seemed a blow at my

superiority. Pride kept me from mentioning it.

* * *

One evening we came home and found that her maid was not there for us.

I made the occasion an excuse for reprimands.

“You do not know how to give your orders,” I said.

“I did not want her to wait up for me.”

“That is a mistake,” I said.

“I can wait on myself.”

She did not think it right that she should oblige a servant to wait up

for her pleasure. She preferred to arrange her beautiful hair for the

night herself.

* * *

I had noticed the time she spent each day in going over her accounts.

It seemed that she always had too much money at her disposal. I was

not accustomed to such saving. I attributed to a narrow education that

admirable sense of economy which is one of the superiorities of the

French woman, expert in thrift and housekeeping, knowing how to be

unostentatiously charitable as well, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan

crowd encamped among us with its dissipations and luxuries.

“Leave that,” I assured her, “you do not know how to spend money.”

“I need nothing now.”

“But that is the point, you should want all sorts of things.”

“Why should I?”

“Why not, since we can afford them.”

She made me share her charities with her, which were numerous, but she

resisted all entreaties to personal luxuries, with a gentleness and

disinterestedness which offended me. I unceasingly suggested changes

of toilette, and was irritated by the resistance which I encountered,

unexpected in any woman, much less in the wife of the millionaire

Cernay.

“Do you find no pleasure in being more fashionable than the others,

better dressed and more noticed?”

“None, I assure you.”

“I want every one to mark your appearance as soon as you enter a salon.

I want all the men to admire you and all the women to envy you. That is

an artistic pleasure. But you are insensible to everything. You like

nothing.”

“Oh, but I do like so many things.”

“What, for instance?”

“I need not tell you.”

I did not yet understand the tenderness of her feeling toward me.

However, it was hardly like the sentiments I held toward her, and I

ceased presently to compare them.

It was her greatest pleasure to remain at home, to play with Dilette,

who laughed and appreciated her little mother always; or to read some

“Introduction to a Devoted Life,” or “The Letters of Saint Francis of

Sales to Mme. de Chanta” (in which he urges her to light her own fire

in the morning rather than make her chambermaid rise before her); or

perhaps some other pious work, or some fairy tales and legends, as if

she were preparing herself for maternal instruction generally. She

delighted too in such simple tales of good folk as gave them the air

of having really lived. “Mireille” enchanted her, and “Genevieve, or

the Story of a Servant,” and “Dominique” and “Ramuntcho,” and “Nerte,”

in which she had underlined these four lines of a benediction which

the Pope, traversing a path through the ripe grain, addresses to some

workmen in the field:

Search peace in field and home--

It is the better part;

And drops from labour’s brow

Like pearls shall deck the heart.

Such an attitude toward life as hers has gone out of style. Nowadays,

all women, young and old alike, leave their homes as soon as they are

rigged out, fleeing from their firesides as from a pest. They hurry

their automobiles in all directions; to teas, to bridge-parties,

to soirées that are like exhibitions, to fashionable weddings that

seem like parades of the most enterprising dressmakers, to lectures

where art and history are popularised; even to the hospitals, where

they learn how to care for other people’s children while their own,

supposing they have deigned to bear any, are abandoned in the nursery.

I urged her to follow their example!

“You are not seen about at all. You never go out,” I said. “Do you not

care to go out?”

“With you? With Dilette?”

“No, alone.”

She suggested walks in the Bois, which she knew better than the rest of

Paris. At first, when Spring came, we had ourselves taken there almost

every day. When I gave up going she went with Dilette. She preferred

those paths which lead from the lakes to St. James Pond and are never

crowded. It was not the Sleeping Woods, but at least there were trees.

“Why do we know so many people?” she sighed one day, as she was putting

on her hat, vainly hoping that I would forego my plan of sending her

out.

“It is not your fault if we keep them,” I replied impatiently.

At that she departed as quickly as possible, in order to please me. And

yet, whenever I returned before she did I was impatient at not finding

her there.

It was not only at Mme. de Saunois’ first reception that Raymonde

failed of sufficiently enthusiastic formulæ for amateur singers and

elocutionists. Even on occasions when she was genuinely stirred, the

exaggerated congratulations of those about her arrested her enthusiasm.

Her lips would half open to express a compliment, but if she deemed it

insufficient she would blush and remain silent after all. I believe it

was a physical impossibility for her to conceal her thoughts. People

complained of her disdain, her coldness, but never of her candour. And

I was distressed by this silence that other people took for hostility.

“You do not talk. One must talk,” I told her.

“I do not dare,” she answered.

“Say anything, no matter what.”

“It is just that kind of thing I dare not say.”

Indeed she could neither speak nor understand those little nothings

which pretty lips can utter with so much assurance.

I made some pretence of teaching hey how to converse: I led her to

those places where one selects subjects of conversation like cakes at

the baker’s--such as art exhibitions and first nights. She felt out of

her element in the company of those painted, enamelled women, versed

in all the arts and graces of Parisian life, who, though they may

please separately, in an assemblage strike one with a sort of solemn

horror, with their perfume of withered flowers. I brought her into

the midst of this and tolerated the insult of this impure air. Stiff,

and a little stilted, slender and distant, she retired within herself

like a sensitive plant. Those others, large and many-decked ships,

fast-sailing torpedo-boats, old hulks from the waters of the theatre

or of gallantry, all artifice and rouge, backed by their husbands or

protectors, had the air of setting victoriously out to sea to capture

public opinion. Vaguely they would announce success or failure. And I

was disposed to accept their judgment as to Raymonde, never questioning

if it were not as false as their faces.

The day after a new play, Paris would learn from such as these

whether or not the presentation deserved success: they made or

unmade reputations. When we attended the theatre, Raymonde would

sit motionless in the corner of the box. Occasionally she fell

back--recoiling as if from some insupportable contact--though she

herself was all the time unconscious of her instinctive movements.

“What is the matter?” I asked once.

“Nothing.”

“You do not look as if you were enjoying yourself.”

“To be truthful with you, I am not.”

“This play displeases you?”

“Oh, how could it please me?”

“But there is nothing but enthusiasm in the lobby between the acts.

Every one is delighted with it,” I argued.

“I do not share every one’s opinion. You must excuse me.”

How often our dialogue ran like that! The drama or the comedy changed,

but our words were usually the same. I can still see her mechanical

gesture. Before us, on the stage, a woman would torment and harass

her husband with her sensual love; another, virtuous all her life to

that time, surrender at last to an unknown blackguard; a third stole

money to buy beautiful gowns in which to excite her husband’s waning

desire for her; all, shedding an odour of the alcove upon the audience,

represented to us as heroines of love; and upon that basis applauded

frantically by the public, its nerves shaken.

“They love; that is all,” was the general comment all about us.

Raymonde shook her head, as if that were not all. One evening, aroused

by the general acclamation, unable to resist that magnetic current

which comes from an electrified crowd, I insisted on sustaining the

popular theories regarding a play in which the heroine, a young girl,

gave herself up in a burst of passion to her sister’s husband.

“Love, true love, disregards morals, tramples upon suffering, takes no

account of anything outside of itself. That has its beauty, don’t you

think so?”

“That is not loving,” she murmured.

I continued my panegyric.

“Love, true love, in its splendid violence, does not stop at a fault,

or even a crime.”

“That isn’t loving,” she repeated.

“What then does love mean, according to your idea?” I demanded,

surprised at her resistance.

“According to my idea? Oh, I don’t know. Don’t ask me that.”

“Yes, you must acquire the habit of being able to express what you

feel, Raymonde. That is the whole art of conversation.”

She hesitated: I saw her lips open and tremble a little. She shook her

head, and then suddenly made up her mind:

“Do you remember going into a little chapel one evening?”

“Yes, with you.”

“A dark chapel, lighted only by the altar lamp? It seems to me that

one’s heart is like that.”

“One’s heart?”

“Yes, the heart is in darkness, unknown. But the lamp which shines

in the sanctuary is our love. It is there, watching and praying. To

love is to understand oneself more clearly, to take one’s impulses

and thoughts out of the shadow. We do not take faults and crimes out

of the shadow. And since love is light, it is also the desire to make

ourselves better.” And then very low, as if to herself, she added:

“As for myself, the more I love, the less I can do evil.”

But when would she have done so? When had she not loved?

She rarely expressed herself at so great length. The flame which

watches and prays shone from her eyes all over her face; carried away

by her subject her every feature reflected the light of which she had

spoken. Had I been away from the theatre, the world, and its false

conception of life, I might have adored her for her simple lesson of

love, her ineffable avowal of tenderness. The air of the Sleeping Woods

suddenly refreshed me. I drank from those springs of youth and felt

their purifying virtue.

The curtain rose again. And once more the great wave of sophisms and

errors, of erratic folly and passional disorder, surged up, rolled over

the public and submerged it. I believe that in the whole theatre there

was only this young woman against whom it struck and broke in vain. I

did not realise the beauty of the spectacle.

“She is sweet,” I thought, in a moment of gentleness, “but still a

little childish. She does not understand these devastating passions

which sweep away everything. One should be able to comprehend what

one has not experienced even; she goes through life with blinders on

her eyes; she does not wish to see anything outside of her own narrow

little life, straight ahead of her.”

In good faith, I dared to think: “_her little life_--”

* * *

That very evening, or on another like it, as we were driving home from

the theatre in our automobile, she asked me suddenly:

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That there are women and young girls like those whom we saw on the

stage?”

“Of course there are, many like them, and many worse. What a child you

are.”

“Ah!” she murmured.

She said no more, but the electric light which shone upon her showed me

her look of pain. She felt a deep sadness at learning of the existence

of so many guilty women.

* * *

The popular books of the day, which I purposely placed about her,

thinking to tempt her into reading, usually inspired her with the same

repulsion. She did not retain the names of the authors,--they were

destined to be forgotten. Their literary beauty could not, for her, be

separated from the beauty of the matter. Those charming modern books in

which youth is presented to us as an animal at liberty, through which

pleasure runs fearless of the attacks of time and death, in which the

mind even has become sensual,--she only opened and began: she never

finished them.

“Why do you not go on with them?” I asked.

“My heart isn’t in them.”

“But the author cannot always paint one’s own heart.”

“But it is so difficult to read a book in which you find nothing of

yourself.”

I picked up one of the rejected books on her centre table.

“Listen to these beautiful sentences,” I began.

“Oh!” she replied, “a mannequin, too, wears beautiful clothes. I prefer

something living underneath. Do you remember my wedding gown? It did

not become me any too well. But I loved you so much--”