THE THORNS OF THE ROSE
He was in torments, for he loved her. Differing in this from the
common run of lovers, in whose eyes the woman chosen of their heart
appears surrounded by an aureole of perfection, his attachment for
her had grown within him while studying her with the clairvoyant
eyes of a suspicious and distrustful man who had never been entirely
enslaved. His timid and sluggish but penetrating disposition, always
standing on the defensive in life, had saved him from his passions. A
few intrigues, two brief _liaisons_ that had perished of _ennui_, and
some mercenary loves that had been broken off from disgust, comprised
the history of his heart. He regarded women as an object of utility
for those who desire a well-kept house and a family, as an object of
comparative pleasure to those who are in quest of the pastime of love.
Before he entered Mme. de Burne's house his friends had confidentially
warned him against her. What he had learned of her interested,
puzzled, and pleased him, but it was also rather distasteful to him.
As a matter of principle he did not like those gamblers who never pay
when they lose. After their first few meetings he had decided that she
was very amusing, and that she possessed a special charm that had a
contagion in it. The natural and artificial beauties of this charming,
slender, blond person, who was neither fat nor lean, who was furnished
with beautiful arms that seemed formed to attract and embrace, and with
legs that one might imagine long and tapering, calculated for flight,
like those of a gazelle, with feet so small that they would leave
no trace, seemed to him to be a symbol of hopes that could never be
realized.
He had experienced, moreover, in his conversation with her a pleasure
that he had never thought of meeting with in the intercourse of
fashionable society. Gifted with a wit that was full of familiar
animation, unforeseen and mocking and of a caressing irony, she would,
notwithstanding this, sometimes allow herself to be carried away by
sentimental or intellectual influences, as if beneath her derisive
gaiety there still lingered the secular shade of poetic tenderness
drawn from some remote ancestress. These things combined to render her
exquisite.
She petted him and made much of him, desirous of conquering him as
she had conquered the others, and he visited her house as often as he
could, drawn thither by his increasing need of seeing more of her. It
was like a force emanating from her and taking possession of him, a
force that lay in her charm, her look, her smile, her speech, a force
that there was no resisting, although he frequently left her house
provoked at something that she had said or done.
The more he felt working on him that indescribable influence with which
a woman penetrates and subjugates us, the more clearly did he see
through her, the more did he understand and suffer from her nature,
which he devoutly wished was different. It was certainly true, however,
that the very qualities which he disapproved of in her were the
qualities that had drawn him toward her and captivated him, in spite
of himself, in spite of his reason, and more, perhaps, than her real
merits.
Her coquetry, with which she toyed, making no attempt at concealing
it, as with a fan, opening and folding it in presence of everybody
according as the men to whom she was talking were pleasing to her
or the reverse; her way of taking nothing in earnest, which had
seemed droll to him upon their first acquaintance, but now seemed
threatening; her constant desire for distraction, for novelty, which
rested insatiable in her heart, always weary--all these things would
so exasperate him that sometimes upon returning to his house he would
resolve to make his visits to her more infrequent until such time as he
might do away with them altogether. The very next day he would invent
some pretext for going to see her. What he thought to impress upon
himself, as he became more and more enamored, was the insecurity of
this love and the certainty that he would have to suffer for it.
He was not blind; little by little he yielded to this sentiment,
as a man drowns because his vessel has gone down under him and he
is too far from the shore. He knew her as well as it was possible
to know her, for his passion had served to make his mental vision
abnormally clairvoyant, and he could not prevent his thoughts from
going into indefinite speculations concerning her. With indefatigable
perseverance, he was continually seeking to analyze and understand
the obscure depths of this feminine soul, this incomprehensible
mixture of bright intelligence and disenchantment, of sober reason and
childish triviality, of apparent affection and fickleness, of all those
ill-assorted inclinations that can be brought together and co-ordinated
to form an unnatural, perplexing, and seductive being.
But why was it that she attracted him thus? He constantly asked himself
this question, and was unable to find a satisfactory answer to it,
for, with his reflective, observing, and proudly retiring nature,
his logical course would have been to look in a woman for those
old-fashioned and soothing attributes of tenderness and constancy which
seem to offer the most reliable assurance of happiness to a man. In
her, however, he had encountered something that he had not expected to
find, a sort of early vegetable of the human race, as it were, one of
those creatures who are the beginning of a new generation, exciting
one by their strange novelty, unlike anything that one has ever known
before, and even in their imperfections awakening the dormant senses by
a formidable power of attraction.
To the romantic and dreamily passionate women of the Restoration had
succeeded the gay triflers of the imperial epoch, convinced that
pleasure is a reality; and now, here there was afforded him a new
development of this everlasting femininity, a woman of refinement,
of indeterminate sensibility, restless, without fixed resolves, her
feelings in constant turmoil, who seemed to have made it part of her
experience to employ every narcotic that quiets the aching nerves:
chloroform that stupefies, ether and morphine that excite to abnormal
reverie, kill the senses, and deaden the emotions.
He relished in her that flavor of an artificial nature, the sole
object of whose existence was to charm and allure. She was a rare and
attractive bauble, exquisite and delicate, drawing men's eyes to her,
causing the heart to throb, and desire to awake, as one's appetite is
excited when he looks through the glass of the shop-window and beholds
the dainty viands that have been prepared and arranged for the purpose
of making him hunger for them.
When he was quite assured that he had started on his perilous descent
toward the bottom of the gulf, he began to reflect with consternation
upon the dangers of his infatuation. What would happen him? What would
she do with him? Most assuredly she would do with him what she had
done with everyone else: she would bring him to the point where a man
follows a woman's capricious fancies as a dog follows his master's
steps, and she would classify him among her collection of more or less
illustrious favorites. Had she really played this game with all the
others? Was there not one, not a single one, whom she had loved, if
only for a month, a day, an hour, in one of those effusions of feeling
that she had the faculty of repressing so readily? He talked with them
interminably about her as they came forth from her dinners, warmed
by contact with her. He felt that they were all uneasy, dissatisfied,
unstrung, like men whose dreams have failed of realization.
No, she had loved no one among these paraders before public curiosity.
But he, who was a nullity in comparison with them, he, to whom it was
not granted that heads should turn and wondering eyes be fixed on him
when his name was mentioned in a crowd or in a salon,--what would he
be for her? Nothing, nothing; a mere supernumerary upon her scene,
a Monsieur, the sort of man that becomes a familiar, commonplace
attendant upon a distinguished woman, useful to hold her bouquet, a man
comparable to the common grade of wine that one drinks with water. Had
he been a famous man he might have been willing to accept this rôle,
which his celebrity would have made less humiliating; but unknown as he
was, he would have none of it. So he wrote to bid her farewell.
When he received her brief answer he was moved by it as by the
intelligence of some unexpected piece of good fortune, and when she had
made him promise that he would not go away he was as delighted as a
schoolboy released for a holiday.
Several days elapsed without bringing any fresh development to their
relations, but when the calm that succeeds the storm had passed, he
felt his longing for her increasing within him and burning him. He
had promised that he would never again speak to her on the forbidden
topic, but he had not promised that he would not write, and one night
when he could not sleep, when she had taken possession of all his
faculties in the restless vigil of his insomnia of love, he seated
himself at his table, almost against his will, and set himself to put
down his feelings and his sufferings upon fair, white paper. It was not
a letter; it was an aggregation of notes, phrases, thoughts, throbs of
moral anguish, transmuting themselves into words. It soothed him; it
seemed to him to give him a little comfort in his suffering, and lying
down upon his bed, he was at last able to obtain some sleep.
Upon awaking the next morning he read over these few pages and decided
that they were sufficiently harrowing; then he inclosed and addressed
them, kept them by him until evening, and mailed them very late so that
she might receive them when she arose. He thought that she would not be
alarmed by these innocent sheets of paper. The most timorous of women
have an infinite kindness for a letter that speaks to them of a sincere
love, and when these letters are written by a trembling hand, with
tearful eyes and melancholy face, the power that they exercise over the
female heart is unbounded.
He went to her house late that afternoon to see how she would receive
him and what she would say to him. He found M. de Pradon there, smoking
cigarettes and conversing with his daughter. He would often pass whole
hours with her in this way, for his manner toward her was rather that
of a gentleman visitor than of a father. She had brought into their
relations and their affection a tinge of that homage of love which she
bestowed upon herself and exacted from everyone else.
When she beheld Mariolle her face brightened with delight; she shook
hands with him warmly and her smile told him: "You have afforded me
much pleasure."
Mariolle was in hopes that the father would go away soon, but M. de
Pradon did not budge. Although he knew his daughter thoroughly, and
for a long time past had placed the most implicit confidence in her as
regarded her relations with men, he always kept an eye on her with a
kind of curious, uneasy, somewhat marital attention. He wanted to know
what chance of success there might be for this newly discovered friend,
who he was, what he amounted to. Would he be a mere bird of passage,
like so many others, or a permanent member of their usual circle?
He intrenched himself, therefore, and Mariolle immediately perceived
that he was not to be dislodged. The visitor made up his mind
accordingly, and even resolved to gain him over if it were possible,
considering that his good-will, or at any rate his neutrality, would
be better than his hostility. He exerted himself and was brilliant
and amusing, without any of the airs of a sighing lover. She said to
herself contentedly: "He is not stupid; he acts his part in the comedy
extremely well"; and M. de Pradon thought: "This is a very agreeable
man, whose head my daughter does not seem to have turned."
When Mariolle decided that it was time for him to take his leave, he
left them both delighted with him.
But he left that house with sorrow in his soul. In the presence of
that woman he felt deeply the bondage in which she held him, realizing
that it would be vain to knock at that heart, as a man imprisoned
fruitlessly beats the iron door with his fist. He was well assured
that he was entirely in her power, and he did not try to free himself.
Such being the case, and as he could not avoid this fatality, he
resolved that he would be patient, tenacious, cunning, dissembling,
that he would conquer by address, by the homage that she was so greedy
of, by the adoration that intoxicated her, by the voluntary servitude
to which he would suffer himself to be reduced.
His letter had pleased her; he would write. He wrote. Almost every
night, when he came home, at that hour when the mind, fresh from the
influence of the day's occurrences, regards whatever interests or moves
it with a sort of abnormally developed hallucination, he would seat
himself at his table by his lamp and exalt his imagination by thoughts
of her. The poetic germ, that so many indolent men suffer to perish
within them from mere slothfulness, grew and throve under this regimen.
He infused a feverish ardor into this task of literary tenderness by
means of constantly writing the same thing, the same idea, that is,
his love, in expressions that were ever renewed by the constantly
fresh-springing, daily renewal of his desire. All through the long day
he would seek for and find those irresistible words that stream from
the brain like fiery sparks, compelled by the over-excited emotions.
Thus he would breathe upon the fire of his own heart and kindle it into
raging flames, for often love-letters contain more danger for him who
writes than for her who receives them.
By keeping himself in this continuous state of effervescence, by
heating his blood with words and peopling his brain with one solitary
thought, his ideas gradually became confused as to the reality of this
woman. He had ceased to entertain the opinion of her that he had first
held, and now beheld her only through the medium of his own lyrical
phrases, and all that he wrote of her night by night became to his
heart so many gospel truths. This daily labor of idealization displayed
her to him as in a dream. His former resistance melted away, moreover,
in presence of the affection that Mme. de Burne undeniably evinced
for him. Although no word had passed between them at this time, she
certainly showed a preference for him beyond others, and took no pains
to conceal it from him. He therefore thought, with a kind of mad hope,
that she might finally come to love him.
The fact was that the charm of those letters afforded her a complicated
and naïve delight. No one had ever flattered and caressed her in that
manner, with such mute reserve. No one had ever had the delicious idea
of sending to her bedside, every morning, that feast of sentiment in
paper wrapping that her maid presented to her on the little silver
salver. And what made it all the dearer in her eyes was that he never
mentioned it, that he seemed to be quite unaware of it himself, that
when he visited her salon he was the most undemonstrative of her
friends, that he never by word or look alluded to those showers of
tenderness that he was secretly raining down upon her.
Of course she had had love-letters before that, but they had been
pitched in a different key, had been less reserved, more pressing, more
like a summons to surrender. For the three months that his "crisis" had
lasted Lamarthe had dedicated to her a very nice correspondence from a
much-smitten novelist who maunders in a literary way. She kept in her
secretary, in a drawer specially allotted to them, these delicate and
seductive epistles from a writer who had shown much feeling, who had
caressed her with his pen up to the very day when he saw that he had no
hope of success.
Mariolle's letters were quite different; they were so strong in their
concentrated desire, so deep in the expression of their sincerity, so
humble in their submissiveness, breathing a devotion that promised to
be lasting, that she received and read them with a delight that no
other writings could have afforded her.
It was natural that her friendly feeling for the man should increase
under such conditions. She invited him to her house the more frequently
because he displayed such entire reserve in his relations toward
her, seeming not to have the slightest recollection in conversation
with her that he had ever taken up a sheet of paper to tell her of
his adoration. Moreover she looked upon the situation as an original
one, worthy of being celebrated in a book; and in the depths of her
satisfaction in having at her side a being who loved her thus, she
experienced a sort of active fermentation of sympathy which caused her
to measure him by a standard other than her usual one.
Up to the present time, notwithstanding the vanity of her coquetry she
had been conscious of preoccupations that antagonized her in all the
hearts that she had laid waste. She had not held undisputed sovereignty
over them, she had found in them powerful interests that were entirely
dissociated from her. Jealous of music in Massival's case, of
literature in Lamarthe's, always jealous of something, discontented
that she only obtained partial successes, powerless to drive all before
her in the minds of these ambitious men, men of celebrity, or artists
to whom their profession was a mistress from whom nobody could part
them, she had now for the first time fallen in with one to whom she
was all in all. Certainly big Fresnel, and he alone, loved her to the
same degree. But then he was big Fresnel. She felt that it had never
been granted her to exercise such complete dominion over anyone, and
her selfish gratitude for the man who had afforded her this triumph
displayed itself in manifestations of tenderness. She had need of him
now; she had need of his presence, of his glance, of his subjection,
of all this domesticity of love. If he flattered her vanity less than
the others did, he flattered more those supreme exactions that sway
coquettes body and soul--her pride and her instinct of domination, her
strong instinct of feminine repose.
Like an invader she gradually assumed possession of his life by a
series of small incursions that every day became more numerous. She got
up _fêtes_, theater-parties, and dinners at the restaurant, so that he
might be of the party. She dragged him after her with the satisfaction
of a conqueror; she could not dispense with his presence, or rather
with the state of slavery to which he was reduced. He followed in
her train, happy to feel himself thus petted, caressed by her eyes,
her voice, by her every caprice, and he lived only in a continuous
transport of love and longing that desolated and burned like a wasting
fever.