A LOVE CRIME

PAUL BOURGET

A LOVE CRIME

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Titel

DEDICATION.

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

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DEDICATION.

A LOVE CRIME

PAUL BOURGET

_Author of a "CRUEL ENIGMA._"

LONDON

_W. W. GIBBINGS, 18 BURY STREET W.C._

1892.

TO GASTON CRÉHANGE.

Many days have elapsed, my dear friend, since our childhood, but they

have passed away without effecting any alteration in the affectionate

feelings we then entertained. In memory of an intimacy of heart and mind

which has never known a cloud, it is very pleasant to me to write your

name at the beginning of that one of my books which you preferred to all

the rest. It is further the book in which I have stated with most

sincerity what I think concerning some of the essential problems of the

modern life of our day. May this complete sincerity, by which you, the

truest and most loyal being I know, have doubtless been attracted, plead

in favour of the work with readers who would otherwise be startled by a

certain boldness of depicture and cruelty of analysis!

For the rest, whatever may be the verdict of public opinion respecting

"A Love Crime," as I have called this minute diagnostic of a certain

distemper of the soul, it will always be possessed of one great merit in

my eyes, for it will have pleased you, and have enabled me once more to

subscribe myself, my dear Gaston, your ever faithful friend,

CHAPTER I

The little drawing-room was illuminated by the soft light of three

lamps--tall lamps standing on Japanese vases and bearing globes upon

which rested flexible shades of a pale blue tint. The door was hidden by

a piece of tapestry; two walls were hung with another piece, which was

covered with large figures. Both windows were draped with

curtains--drawn just now--of deep red colour and heavy of fold.

The apartment thus closed in had a homelike air, which was heightened by

the profusion of small articles scattered over the furniture:

photographs set in frames, lacquered boxes, old-fashioned cases, a few

Saxon statuettes, books stitched in covers of antique stuff, such as

were coming into fashion in the year 1883. The wreathing foliage of an

evergreen plant showed in one corner. Close beside it, an open piano

displayed its white keys. An English screen with coloured glass and a

shelf on which tea-cups, books, or work might be laid, stood in folds on

one side of the fire-place. The fire burned with a peaceful crackling

noise which formed an accompaniment to the sound proceeding from the

tea-pot as the latter received the caresses from the flame of its lamp

on the low table designed for such service.

The furniture of the somewhat crowded drawing-room presented that

composite appearance which is characteristic of our time, together with

the peculiarity that everything in it seemed to be almost too new. At a

first glance, certain slight indications would have seemed to show that

its Parisian aspect had been voluntarily aimed at. Objects were

contrasted here and there; there were, for instance, little

old-fashioned silver spoons; on the walls were two excellent copies of

small religious pictures, to which memories of childhood were certainly

linked, and which could have come only from an old country house. The

photographs, also, witnessed, by the dress and demeanour of the

relatives or friends represented, to altogether provincial

relationships. The feeling of contrast would have become still more

perceptible to one visiting the other rooms and finding everywhere

evident tokens that the persons dwelling in them had lived but a very

short time at Paris.

This small-sized drawing-room belonged to a small-sized house situated

at No. 3½, Rue de La Rochefoucauld. The lower part of this street,

which descends in a very steep slope to the Rue Saint-Lazare, comprises

several private houses of very varied build, and a few retired dwellings

surrounded by gardens. The house containing the little drawing-room was

built for an actress by a celebrated financier under the Empire, at a

period when the Rue de la Tour des Dames harboured many princes and

princesses of the footlights. Too small to suit a wealthy family, too

inconvenient, owing to certain deficiencies in accommodation, for

tenants accustomed to the completeness of English comfort, it must have

proved quite seductive to persons accustomed to a semi-country life by

its attraction as a "home," as well as by the quiet pervading the end of

the street, which is rarely affronted by vehicles on account of the

difficulty of the ascent.

During this November evening, although the windows of the little

drawing-room looked upon the courtyard, and the latter opened upon the

street, only a dim and distant murmuring penetrated from without, broken

by occasional gusts of the north wind. Judging by the whistling of this

north wind the night must have been a cold one. So, at least, opined a

fairly young man, one of the three persons assembled in the

drawing-room, as he rose from his chair, set down his empty cup on the

tea-tray with a sigh, and looked at the time-piece.

"Ten o'clock. Must I really go to see the Malhoures this evening? What a

disaster it is to have a sensible wife who thinks about your future!

Never get married, Armand. Listen to that wind! I was so comfortable

here with you. Look here, Helen," he went on, leaning on the back of the

easy-chair in which his wife was seated, "what will happen if I do not

put in an appearance this evening?"

"We shall be discourteous to some very kind people, who have always

behaved perfectly towards us since we came to Paris a year ago," replied

the young woman; she stretched out to the fire her slender feet, in the

pretty patent leather shoes and mauve stockings, the latter being of the

same colour as her dress. "If I had not my neuralgia!" she added,

putting her fingers to her temple. "You will make all my excuses to

them. Come, my poor Alfred, courage!"

She rose and held out her hand to her husband, who drew her to him in

order to give her a kiss. Visible pain was depicted on Helen's handsome

face for a minute, during which she was constrained to submit to this

caress. Standing thus, in her mauve-coloured, lace-trimmed dress, the

contrast between the elegance of her entire person and the clumsiness of

the man whose name she bore was still more striking.

She was tall, slender, and supple. The delicacy with which her hand

joined the arm which the sleeve of her dress left half uncovered, the

fulness of this arm, on which shone the gold of a bracelet, the

roundness of her dainty waist, the grace of her youthful figure,--all

revealed in her the blooming of a bodily beauty in harmony with the

beauty of her head. Her bright chestnut hair, parted simply in the

centre, half concealed a forehead that was almost too high--a probable

sign that with her feeling predominated over judgment. She had brown

eyes, in a fair complexion, such eyes as become hazel or black according

as the pupil contracts or dilates; and everything in the face declared

passion, energy, and pride, from the rather too pronounced line of the

oval, indicating the firm structure of the lower part of the head, to

the mouth, which was strongly outlined, and from the chin, which was

worthy of an ancient medal, to the nose, which was nearly straight, and

was united to the forehead by a noble attachment.

The pure and living quality of her beauty fully justified the fervour

depicted on the face of her husband while he was kissing his wife, just

as the evident aversion of the young woman was explained by the

unpleasing aspect of her lord and master. They were not creatures of the

same breed. Alfred Chazel presented the regular type of a middle-class

Frenchman, who has had to work too diligently, to prepare for too many

examinations, to spend too many hours over papers or before a desk, at

an age when the body is developing.

Although he was scarcely thirty-two, the first tokens of physical wear

and tear were abundant with him. His hair was thin, his complexion

looked impoverished, his shoulders were both broad and bony, and there

was an angularity in his gestures as well as an awkwardness about his

entire person. His tall figure, his big bones, and his large hand

suggested a disparity between the initial constitution, which must have

been robust, and the education, which must have been reducing. Chazel

carried an eye-glass, which he was always letting fall, for he was

clumsy with his long, thin hands, as was attested by the tying of the

white evening cravat, so badly adjusted round his already crumpled

collar. But when the eye-glass fell, the blue colour of his eyes was the

better seen--a blue so open, so fresh, so childlike, that the most

ill-disposed persons would have found it hard to attribute this man's

weariness to any excess save that of thought.

His still very youthful smile, displaying white teeth beneath a fair

beard, which Alfred wore in its entirety, harmonised with this childlike

frankness of look. And, in fact, Chazel's life had been passed in

continuous, absorbing work, and in an absolute inexperience of what was

not "his business," as he used to say. Son of a modest professor of

chemistry, and grandson of a peasant, Alfred, having inherited aptitude

for the sciences from his father, and tenacity of purpose from his

grandfather, had, by dint of energy, and with but moderate abilities,

been one of the first at the entrance to that École Polytechnique

which, in the estimation of many excellent intellects, exercises, by its

overloaded and precocious examinations, a murderous influence upon the

development of the middle-class youth of our country.

At twenty-two, Chazel passed out twelfth, and three years later first

from the School of Roads and Bridges. Sent to Bourges, he fell in love

with Mademoiselle de Vaivre, whose father, having married a second time,

could give her only a very slender dowry. The unexpected death, first of

Monsieur de Vaivre, then of his second wife and of their child, suddenly

enriched the young household. Appointed the preceding year to a

municipal post at Paris, the engineer found that he had realised a

hundredfold the most ambitious hopes of his youth. His wife's fortune

amounted to about nine hundred thousand francs, to the returns from

which were added the ten thousand francs of his own salary and the small

income which had been left by his father. But this competency, instead

of blunting the young man's activity, stimulated it to the ambition of

compensating in honour for the inequality of position between himself

and his wife. He had, accordingly, gone back to mathematical labours

with fresh ardour. Admission to the Institute shone on the horizon of

his dreams, like a sort of final apotheosis to a destiny, the happiness

of which he modestly referred to his father's wise maxim: "To keep to

the high road."

Add to this that a son had been born to him, in whom he already

discerned a reflection of his own disposition, and it cannot fail to be

understood how this man would congratulate himself daily for having

taken life, as he had done, with complete submission to all the average

conditions of the social class in which he had been born.

Did these various reflections pass through the mind of the third

individual--the man whom Alfred Chazel had called Armand, as he

contemplated the conjugal tableau through the smoke from a Russian

cigarette which he had just lighted--a liberty which revealed the extent

of his intimacy with the family? The same contrast which separated

Alfred from Helen separated him also from Armand. The latter looked at

first younger than his age, though he too had passed his thirty-second

year. If Alfred's carelessly-worn coat revealed rather the leanness and

disproportion of his body, the frock of the Baron de Querne--such was

Armand's family-name--fitted close to the shoulders and bust of a man,

small but robust, and evidently devoted to fencing, riding, tennis, and

all the sporting habits which the youths of the richer classes have

contracted in imitation of the English, now that political

careers--diplomacy, the Council of State, and the Audit Office--are

denied them by their real or assumed opinions.

The quiet jewellery with which the young baron was adorned, the delicacy

of his hands and feet, and everything in his appearance, from his cravat

and his collar to the curls in his dark hair, and to the turn of his

moustache, drawn out over a somewhat contemptuous lip, disclosed that

deep attention to the toilet which assumes the lengthened leisure of an

idle life. But what preserved De Querne from the commonplaceness usual

to men who are visibly occupied with the trifles of masculine fashion

was a look, in a generally immovable face, of peculiar keenness and

unrest. This look, which was not at all like that of a young man,

contradicted the remainder of his person to the extent of imparting an

appearance of strangeness to one who looked in this way, although a

desire to evade remark, and to be above all things correct, evidently

influenced his mode of dress.

Just as Chazel seemed to have remained quite young at heart, in spite of

the failure of constitution, so the other, if only in the expression of

his eyes, which were very dark ones, appeared to have undergone a

premature aging of soul and intellect, in spite of the energy maintained

by his physical machine. The face was somewhat long and somewhat

browned, like that of one in whom bile would prevail some day, the

forehead without a wrinkle, the nose very refined; a slight dimple was

impressed upon the square chin. It would have been impossible to assign

any profession or even occupation to this man, and yet there was

something superior in his nature which seemed irreconcilable with the

emptiness of an absolutely idle life, as well, too, as lines of

melancholy about the mouth which banished the idea of a life of nothing

but pleasure.

Meanwhile he continued to smoke with perfect calmness, showing every

time that he rejected the smoke small, close teeth, the lower ones being

set in an irregular fashion, which is, people say, a probable indication

of fierceness. He watched Chazel kiss his wife on the temple, while

_she_ lowered her eyelids without venturing to look at Armand; and yet,

had the dark eyes of the young man been encountered by her own, she

would not have surprised any trace of sorrow, but an indefinable

blending of irony and curiosity.

"Yes," said Alfred, replying thus to the mute reproach which Helen's

countenance seemed to make to him, "it is bad form to love one's wife in

public, but Armand will forgive me. Well, goodbye," he went on, holding

out his hand to his friend, "I shall not be away for more than an hour.

I shall find you here again, shall I not?"

The young Baron and Madame Chazel thus remained alone. They were silent

for a few minutes, both keeping the positions in which Alfred had left

them, she standing, but this time with her eyes raised towards Armand,

and the latter answering her look with a smile while he continued to

wrap himself in a cloud of smoke. She breathed in the slight acridity of

the smoke, half opening her fresh lips. The sound of carriage wheels

became audible beneath the windows. It was the rolling of the cab that

was taking Chazel away.

Helen slowly advanced to the easy chair in which Armand was sitting;

with a pretty gesture she took the cigarette and threw it into the fire,

then knelt before the young man, encircled his head with her arms, and,

seeking his lips, kissed him; it looked as though she wished to destroy

immediately the painful impression which her husband's attitude might

have left on the man she loved, and in a clear tone of voice, the

liveliness of which discovered a free expansiveness after a lengthened

constraint, she said:

"How do you do, Armand. Are you in love with me to-day?"

"And yourself," he questioned, "are you in love with me?"

He was caressing the hand of the young woman who had thrown herself upon

the ground, and with her head resting on her lover's knees, was looking

at him in a fever of ecstasy.

"Ah! you flirt," she returned, "I have no need to tell you so to have

you believe it."

"No," he replied, "I know that you love me--much--though not enough to

go all lengths with the feeling."

The tone in which he uttered this sentence was marked with an irony

which made it palpably an epigram. It was an allusion to oft-stated

complaints. Helen, however, received the derisive utterance with the

smile of a woman who has her answer ready.

"So you will always have the same distrust," she said, and although she

was very happy, as her eyes sufficiently testified, a shadow of

melancholy passed into those soft eyes when she added: "So you cannot

believe in my feelings without this last proof?"

"Proof," said Armand, "you call that a proof! Why the unqualified gift

of the person is not a proof of love, it is love itself. It is true," he

went on with a more gloomy air, "so long as you refuse to be entirely

mine I shall suspect--not your sincerity, for I think that you think you

love me, but the truth of this love. Too often people imagine that they

have feelings which they have not. Ah! if you loved me, as you say, and

as you think, would you deny me yourself as you do? Would you refuse me

the meeting that I have asked of you more than twenty times? Why you

would grant it as much for your own sake as for mine."

"Armand--" she began thus, then stopped, blushing.

She had risen and was walking about the room without looking at her

lover, her arms apart from her body with the backs of her hands laid on

her hips, as was usual with her at moments of intense thought. Since she

had begun to love, and had acknowledged her feelings to Monsieur de

Querne she was quite aware that she must some day give up her beautiful

dream of an attachment which, though forbidden, should remain pure. Yes,

she knew that she must give her entire self after giving her heart, and

become the mistress of the man whom she had suffered to say to her: "I

love you." She knew it, and she had found strength for the prolonging of

her resistance to that day, not in coquetry--no woman was less capable

of speculating with a man's ungratified desire in order to kindle his

passion--but in the persistence of the duty-sense within her.

Where is the married woman who has not fondled this chimera of a

reconciliation between the infidelity of heart and the faith sworn to her

husband? The renunciation of the delights of complete love seems at

first to her a sufficient expiation. She engages in adultery believing

that she will not pass beyond a certain limit, and she does in fact keep

within it a longer or a shorter time according to the disposition of the

man she loves. But the inflexible logic that governs life resumes its

rights. Soul and body do not separate, and love admits of no other law

than itself.

Yes, the fatal hour had struck for Helen, and she felt it. How many

times during the last fortnight had she had this horrible discussion

with Armand, who always ended by requiring from her this last token of

love? She was sensible that after each of these scenes she had been

lessened in the eyes of this man. A few more, and he would lose

completely his faith in the feeling which she entertained towards him, a

feeling that was absolute and unreasoned; for she loved him, as women

alone are capable of loving, with such a love as is almost in the nature

of a bewitchment, and is the outcome of an irresistible longing to

afford happiness to the person who is thus loved. She loved him and she

loved to love him. Pain in those beloved eyes was physically intolerable

to her, and intolerable also mistrust, which betokened the shrinking

back of his soul.

She had taken account of all this, she had looked the necessity for her

guilt in the face, and she had resolved to offer herself to her

"beloved," as in her letters she always called him, because "friend" was

too cold, and the word "lover" purpled her heart with shame,--yes, to

offer him the supreme proof of tenderness that he asked for, and now,

when on the point of consenting, she was impotent. Her will was failing

at the last moment. Was she going again to begin what she used to call,

when she thought about it, a hateful contract? Ah! why was she not

free--free, that is, from duties towards her child, the only being whom

she could not sacrifice to him whom she loved--free to offer this man

not a clandestine interview but a flight together, a complete sacrifice

of her entire life.

All these thoughts came and went in her poor head while she herself was

walking to and fro in the room. She looked again at her lover. She

fancied she could see a change come over the features of the countenance

she idolised.

"Armand," she resumed, "do not be sad. I consent to all that you wish."

These words, which were uttered in the deep voice of a woman probing to

the inmost chamber of her heart, appeared to astonish the young man even

more than they moved him. He wrapped Helen in his strange gaze. If the

poor woman had had strength enough to observe him she would not have

encountered in those keen eyes the divine emotion which atones for the

guilt of the mistress by the happiness of the lover. It was just the

same gaze, at once contemptuous and inquisitive, with which he had

lately contemplated the group formed by Alfred and Helen. But the latter

was too much confused by what she had just said to keep cool enough for

observing anything.

Then, as she had come back and was crouching on Armand's knees, and

pressing against his breast, a fresh expression, that, namely, of almost

intoxicated desire, was depicted on the young man's face. He felt close

to him the beauty of this yielding body, he held in his arms those

charming shoulders of which he had knowledge from having seen them in

the ball-room, he drank in that indefinable aroma which lingers about

every woman, and he pressed his lips upon those eyelids, which he could

feel quivering beneath his kiss.

"You will at least be happy?" she asked him in a sort of anguish between

two caresses.

"What a question! Why, you have never looked at yourself," he said, and

he began to extol to her all the exquisiteness of her face. "You have

never looked at your eyes"--and he again drew his lips across

them--"your pink cheek"--and he stroked it with his hand--"your soft

hair"--and he inhaled it like a flower--"your sweet mouth"--and he laid

his own upon it.

What answer could she have given to this worship of her beauty? She lent

herself to it with a half-frightened smile, surrendering to these

endearments and to these words as to music. They caused something so

deep and withal so vague to vibrate throughout her being that she came

forth half crushed from these embraces, like one dead. It was not for

the first time that she was thus abandoning herself to Armand's kisses.

But no matter how sweet, how intoxicating these kisses, which she found

it impossible to resist, she had on each occasion been strong enough to

escape from bolder caresses.

No, never, never would she have consented, even had there existed no

danger of a surprise, to yield thus in the little drawing-room, where

the portraits of her mother, her husband, and her son reminded her of

what she was nevertheless ready to sacrifice. Ah! not like that! And

again at this moment, when she saw on Armand's face a certain expression

of which she had so deep a dread, she found courage to escape, seated

herself once more in another easy chair, and opening and shutting a fan

which she had taken up in her quivering hands, replied:

"I will be yours to-morrow, if you wish."

Armand seemed to rouse himself from the sweep of passion in which he had

just been tossing. He looked at her, and she again experienced the

sensation which had already caused her so much pain, and which was that

of a veil drawn suddenly between herself and him. Yet, what could she

have said to displease him? She thought that he was wounded by the fact

of her shrinking from him, for was not the uttering of the words that

she had just uttered equivalent to giving herself to him beforehand, and

how could he be vexed with her for desiring that their happiness might

have another setting than that of her every-day life? But he had already

answered her by the following question:

"Where would you like me to meet you? At my own house? I can send away

my servant for the whole of the afternoon."

"Oh, no!" she replied hastily, "not at your own home."

The vision had just come to her that other women had visited Armand,

those other women whom a new mistress always finds between herself and

the man she loves, like the menace of a fatal comparison, like an

anticipated discrediting of her own caresses, since love is always

similar to itself; in its outward forms.

"At least," she thought to herself, "let it not be amid the same

furniture."

"Would you like me to request one of my friends to lend me his rooms?"

Armand asked.

She shook her head as she had done just before. She could hear by

anticipation the conversation of the two men. She was a woman, and

hitherto had been a virtuous one. She was only too well aware that the

manner in which she regarded her own love would have little resemblance

to that of the unknown friend to whom Armand would apply. In her own

eyes passion sanctified everything, even the worst errors; spiritualised

everything, even the most vehement voluptuousness. But he, this

stranger, what would he see in the affair but an intrigue to afford

matter for jesting. A shudder shook her, and she looked again at Armand.

Ah! how her lover's thoughts would have horrified her had she been able

to read them. It was very far from being De Querne's first affair of the

sort, nor did he believe that it was a first act of weakness on her

part. She had, indeed, told him that he was her first lover, and it was

true.

But what proof could be given of the truth of such vows? The young man

had himself deceived and been deceived too often for distrust not to be

the most natural of his feelings. He had provoked this odious discussion

concerning their place of meeting only for the purpose of studying in

Helen's replies the traces left by the amorous experiences through which

she had passed, and mere curiosity led him to dwell upon a subject which

at that moment was stifling the young woman with shame. The scruples

that she displayed about not yielding to him in her own house seemed to

him a calculation due to voluptuousness; those about not yielding to him

at his house, a calculation due to prudence. When she refused to go to

the rooms of a friend: "She is afraid of my confiding in some one," he

said to himself, "but what does she want?"

"Suppose I furnished a little suite of rooms?" he said.

She shook her head, though this had been her secret dream, but she was

afraid that he would see in her acceptance nothing but a desire to gain

time, and then--the necessity, if their meetings occurred always in the

same place, of enduring the notice of the people of the house, the

thought of being the veiled lady whose arrival is watched! Nevertheless,

although such a contrivance also involved a question of outlay which

horrified her, she would have consented to it had she not had another

feeling, the only one which, shaking her head with its rising fever, she

uttered aloud.

"Do not misjudge me, Armand; rather understand me. I should like to be

yours in a place of which nothing would remain afterwards. What would

become of the rooms you furnished for me if ever you ceased to love me?