Why, I cannot endure the thought of it, even now. Do not wrong me, dear;
only understand me."
Thus did she speak, laying bare the profoundly romantic side of her
nature, as also her heart's secret wound. Although she did not account
fully to herself for Armand's character--a character frightful in
aridity beneath loving externals, for in this man there was an absolute
divorce between imagination and heart--she perceived only too clearly
that he was inclined to misinterpret the slightest indications. She saw
that distrust was springing up in him with an almost unhealthy
suddenness. She had been quite aware that he suspected her, but she had
believed that this doubt proceeded solely from her refusals to belong to
him.
It was on this account that she was consenting to give him this last
proof. "He will doubt no longer," she thought to herself, and the mere
idea of this warmed her whole heart. If only he did not give a guilty
construction to her replies? She rose to go to him, and leaning over the
back of his arm-chair, encircled his forehead with her hands.
"Ah!" she said with a sigh, "if I could know what is going on in here.
It is such a little space, and it is in this little space that all my
happiness and my misfortune are contained."
"If you were able to read in it," the young man replied, "you would see
only your own image."
"I shall read in it to-morrow," she said subtly.
"To-morrow," he returned with a smile; "but what about the place of our
meeting? There is nothing left but furnished rooms or a hotel."
Furnished rooms! A hotel! These words made Helen shudder. All the shames
of adultery appeared to her to be comprised in their syllables. There
was the hiring of a cab, with the driver's cunning smile; there was the
entry into one of those houses, whose thresholds have seen the passage
of so many furtive, quivering women; and, as a setting for her divine
passion, there was the furniture that had, perhaps, been utilised for
similar scenes. Yes, but there was also an element of anonymity, of
impersonality, of never-ending strangeness. And since all was pollution,
the former of the two alternatives carried with it the least. She was
too certain of Armand's refinement to think that he might take her to a
place which he had visited with others. She would have to endure
personal loathing, but nothing that would touch the very essence of her
feeling. It was accordingly with courageous resolution that she replied
to her lover.
"Will you have time enough to find them in one morning?"
"Yes," he said, after a moment's reflection. "I have in my mind a very
convenient house, where one of my English friends always used to stay.
See," he went on, "between eleven and twelve o'clock I will send you
some books and a note. I will give you the address of the house and the
number of the room, just as though you had asked me for the address for
one of your country friends. Don't let that prevent you, however, from
burning the note immediately. You will come at whatever hour you can; I
will spend the whole afternoon waiting for you, and, if you do not come,
I shall not be put out; I shall think that you have not been able."
She listened to him with a mingling of pain and enchantment--pain,
because it would cost her so dear to keep her promise; and enchantment,
because all the trouble that he took to point out these details to her,
instead of enlightening her concerning the man's heart, appeared to her
a sign of his love, and their talk proceeded in the quiet drawing-room,
in front of the expiring fire, until the stopping of a carriage at the
door announced Alfred's return.
"Good-bye, my love," said Helen, taking Armand's hand and kissing it, as
she sometimes did with sweet coaxing; and she had already begun a piece
of work when Chazel came in, with a cheery "Well!" He looked at once
towards his wife with his loyal, honest gaze.
How well Armand knew that gaze, one which had not altered from the days
of their childhood, when they were both at the Institution Vanaboste,
whence they followed the courses of study in the Lycée Henri IV.! The
establishment stood yonder behind the Panthéon, at the corner of the
Rue du Puits-qui-Parle, now the Rue Amyot. Yet it was not remorse for
deceiving the man whom he had known from quite a child that suddenly
made De Querne feel uncomfortable. It was the thought that Helen was
deceiving this confiding nature. Masculine egotism has such monstrous
ingenuousness. A seducer engaged in enticing a woman, despises the woman
for yielding to him, and forgets to despise himself for seducing her.
Meanwhile Alfred had taken Helen's hands.
"I have bored myself conscientiously this evening; what will you give me
in reward?" he asked.
How his familiarity hurt her! How willingly would she have cried to this
unsuspecting husband:
"Do you not see that I love another? Let me go away. I do not want to
lie to you any more."
But two rooms farther off stood a little bed, beneath the white curtains
of which slept her son, her little Henry. Why was it that the picture of
this curly head was something too weak to arrest her on the fatal high
road to adultery, and yet strong enough to prevent her from seeing her
passion through to the end. She had a glimpse of the child while her
husband was speaking to her. It did not occur to her to scorn Armand for
having gained her love, although she was the wife of his friend. She
scorned herself for not loving him enough, since she did not love the
sufferings of which he was the cause, and, sustained by the thought that
she was doing it for him, it was with something like an impulse of pride
that she held out her forehead to her husband's kiss, and said
gracefully:
"That's just like men; they must be paid, and immediately too, for doing
their duty."
CHAPTER II
It was half-past eleven o'clock when Armand de Querne left the house in
the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. The wind had swept away all the clouds, and
the sky was filled with stars. "What a beautiful night!" said Armand to
himself; "I shall walk home." It was a long way, for he lived in the Rue
Lincoln, in the upper part of the Champs-Élysées. Here, on the second
floor of a wing projecting upon a garden, he had rooms which he had once
amused himself with furnishing in quaint and exquisite fashion with all
kinds of old-fashioned trifles. But how long had he ceased to spend the
evening in this "home?"
He was following the pavement of the Rue St.-Lazare, which, after quite
a narrow and slender beginning, suddenly, like a river swelled by
tributaries, widens after the Place de la Trinité, when it receives,
one after the other, the flood of passengers and vehicles drifting
through the Rue de Chateaudun, the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and the
Rue de Londres. Cabs were plying, omnibuses were changing horses, the
crowd was surging. Sometimes a girl came out from the corner of a
doorway, and with obscene speech accosted the young man, who put her
away gently with his hand.
Was it the contrast between the intimacy of the little drawing-room and
the swarming infamy of the pavement? Armand felt deeply melancholy. He
could not help seeing Alfred's face again in thought, with Helen's close
beside it. Yet, was he jealous? No. Pictures of childhood came back to
him as they had done just before, but with increased precision, showing
him Chazel dressed in the uniform of the "Vanabosteans"--a small jacket
similar to that of the Barbistes. They always went side by side in the
ranks. Poor Chazel! he was not rich. The head of the establishment had
taken him as a foundationer, with a view, to making a show-pupil of
him--a machine for winning prizes in competitions. How many times had
Armand paid for him at the little wicket, when the porter sold to the
pupils sweetmeats, fragments of iced chestnuts, cakes, and Parisian
creams--tablets of chocolate having a thick and oversweet liquid inside!
They had gone through all their classes together from the fourth up, and
had together passed through the evil days of the Commune, when, on
returning both of them from the country, after the siege, they found
themselves blockaded in Paris. Alfred had afterwards entered the École
Polytechnique. And when he came on Wednesdays and Sundays to visit his
old schoolfellow, who had already crossed the Seine and begun to lead
the life of a rich and idle young man, how ludicrous he was in his
military dress, embarrassed by his sword, not knowing how to set his hat
upon his head, and invariably scarred with clumsy razor-cuts!
While Alfred was at the School of Bridges, Armand was travelling. He had
gone round the world in the society of an amateur artist. On his return
he found that his friend was no longer at Paris. The letters passing
between them became rare. Could they have told why? Armand perhaps
might. There was only one point left in common between Alfred's life and
his own. Alfred had married Mademoiselle de Vaivre. They had made a trip
to Paris, and Armand well remembered how he had been deliciously
surprised by Helen's distinguished demeanour, when he had expected to
find her awkward, pretentious, and a fright. But at this period he was
taken up with another woman, little Aline, a mistress of his for whom he
had cherished the only genuine passion of which he was capable--painful
jealousy blended with delirium of the senses.
Later on, some one had spoken to him of Helen Chazel, and told him ugly
stories about her. And who was it that had done so? Another
school-fellow--big Lucien Rieume, who had been educated at the Vanaboste
establishment like Alfred and himself--during one of these
_tête-à-tête_ luncheons when an opening of the heart usually
accompanies that of the oysters between two college companions; and
Lucien--cordial, indiscreet, intolerable--had talked a great deal,
pouring out pell-mell whatever he knew concerning former friends. Armand
could again hear him chuckle, leaning forward somewhat with kindled eye
and humid lip:
"Poor Chazel, he hadn't a head worth a fig! It seems that his wife is
tricking him. I heard the gentleman's name: Marades, Tarades--just wait
a moment--yes, De Varades, an artillery officer. It was the talk of
Bourges. He was never out of the house."
It was an unfortunate trait in Armand's character that he was unable to
withstand the tempting of mistrust. When evil was asserted to him, he
preserved an indelible impression of it. He did not altogether believe
in it, and yet he believed in it sufficiently for a suspicion, and a
busy suspicion, to be planted within him. When the Chazels had come to
settle in Paris, ten months previously, and Armand had begun to interest
himself in Helen, the scruples of an old friendship might perhaps have
been stronger than his freak of curiosity if big Rieume's words had not
risen before his recollection.
"Really," he had said to himself, "it would be too foolish,"--a criminal
phrase which serves men for the justification of many a dastardly
action. Helen had not been slow in displaying towards him a kind of
passion which he had attributed to the natural exaltation of a
provincial. "I am the first Parisian who has paid her attentions," he
had said again to himself, and as she possessed charming gracefulness of
gesture, so sweet an expression of countenance and such an air of
complete refinement and nobility about her entire personality, he had
taken a pleasure in completing her education in elegance, thinking to
himself that she would be a delightful mistress.
But for many days she had refused really to become his mistress, and her
resistance had made him obstinate. He had become bent upon overcoming
her, recollecting the officer and telling himself that the officer had
not been the only one. A few skilful conversations with Alfred had
taught him that at one time Varades had really been a constant guest at
the house; was he not the same year's student at the École
Polytechnique as Alfred himself? Armand had lost his doubts, and in
Helen's refusals to be his, he had seen nothing but coquetry. Now, in
this respect like all men who hold the strange ethics of seducers,
Querne considered coquetry in a women a justification for the worst
behaviour. At last the long siege was about to issue in the coveted
result. Madame Chazel had granted him an appointment for the following
day. Twenty-four hours more and he would have a new mistress, as
desirable and as pretty as those whose memory was the most flattering to
the pride of his recollection. Why then did he, instead of being happy,
feel so deeply melancholy. Was it remorse for the treason to his friend?
His friend? Was Alfred really his friend? Yes, that was understood
between themselves, as well as in the eyes of others. But a friend is a
man who knows you and whom you know, to whom you show your heart and who
shows you his. Would he ever bring the tale of one of his hopes, his
joys, his sadnesses, to the calculating machine that bore the name of
Chazel? Had the latter ever confided a secret to him? So much the
better, too, for the ideas of this worthy schoolboy who seemed to look
upon life as the prolongation of a college task, must be silly enough.
It was their college life that continued to link them together, and the
recollections of their childhood. Their childhood? Turning down the Rue
Royale and arriving at the Champs Élysées, Armand suddenly recalled
the ranks of Vanaboste's school, on Thursdays, as they walked three and
three under the superintendence of a poor wretch of an usher who strove
to hide himself among the groups of people, so as to seem a passer-by
like the rest and not a watch-dog charged with the duty of looking after
a flock of schoolboys.
And what a flock it was! The majority had pale complexions, hollow eyes,
an enervated exhaustion of the whole being that spoke of secret
excesses. How much ignominy and baseness was there in that community,
the eldest in which were nineteen years of age and the youngest eight!
Within the walls of their prison, as within the walls of the great
Lycée to which they repaired twice a day, nothing was thought of but
the infamous amours existing between the elder boys and their juniors.
Of these unnatural loves, some were partly sensual, and had for their
theatre all the deserted corners in the house, from the dormitories to
the infirmary. And of the French youth confined within similar colleges,
how many were participators in this lewdness, while the rest defiled
their imaginations, although they repelled it! Among these college boys
there were also elevated and chaste connexions. The perusal of a certain
eclogue of Virgil's, a dialogue of Plato's, and a few of Shakespeare's
sonnets had excited the more literary of them, and Alfred Chazel, being
then in the third class, had one day received a piece of poetry written
by a sixth-form boy, beginning with the following astonishing line,
which had made them laugh like mad creatures:
"Alfred, my pale Alfred, my love, my sweet."
"Ah! what a horrible, horrible, place!" thought the young man, as he
recalled this blending of turpitude and puerility.
Alfred and he had belonged to the small number of those who had remained
untouched by the infection. But to him at least, all the advantage due
to this disgust was that it had led him when quite young to the pursuit
of women, and his initiation into natural pleasure had been effected in
the most degraded prostitution.
"And these are the youthful recollections that I should respect," said
Armand to himself. "What duty do I owe him because we were galley slaves
together?"
No, a hundred times no, it was not on Alfred's account that he felt so
melancholy as he hastened his steps and, this time with semi-brutality,
repulsed the love-beggars who accosted him with their unvarying phrases.
Ah! he knew this unconquerable melancholy only too well. Only too often
had it visited him, gnawing him in the diseased portion of his heart,
from the time that the income of thirty thousand francs coming to him at
his majority had permitted him to live according to his fancy; and this
fancy had immediately taken the direction of sentimental experiences.
Such melancholy, sharp and severe, he had experienced, even when quite a
youth, every time that he had found himself on the eve of a first
love-meeting with a new mistress, even though she had been the most
coveted. It was like an anguish-stricken apprehension--a dull, dim agony
of soul.
At first he had attributed this strange phenomenon alternately to
physical timidity, to remorse at his own unworthiness of the feelings
that he might inspire, and to hankerings after purity. Now he knew the
true explanation of these momentary sorrows, these keener crises of the
great sorrow which formed the gloomy background of his life. It was,
alas! the more present and palpable certainty of his impotence to love.
At this very moment he was asking himself:
"Am I really in love with Helen?"
He gathered and heaped together the whole of his inmost sensibility,
like a physician seeking with his fingers for the painful spot of a
diseased limb. But the spot of love, which it would have given him such
sweet pain to meet with, Armand could not discover.
"No," he answered himself with terrible sadness, yet courageously--for,
with all his failings, he had energy enough to venture upon
self-knowledge--"no, I am not in love with Helen. I desire her because
she is beautiful; I have paid my addresses to her because I feel bored;
I have grown obstinate about it because she denied me. Pride,
sensuality, and romantic twaddle--that's the top and bottom of the whole
affair. Then what is the good of it? What is the good? Why renew such an
intrigue as that with Madame de Rugle?"
And all the amours into which his depraved liking for seduction--the
fatal vice of his youth--had impelled him, came back into his memory,
with the monotony of their pleasures, the bitterness of their ruptures,
the sickening void of their duration. What was the good of this one or
of that? What was the good a year or two ago of amusing himself by
winning the love of Juliet, governess to the children of a house at
which he was received? What was the good of that comedy played to little
Maud, the pretty Englishwoman whom he had met at a watering-place?
"I dreamed of being a man of gallantry--a Don Juan. It looks as though
fate punishes us for the evil dreams of our youth by bringing them to
pass. I have had intrigues that might flatter my foolish vanity--and
what wretchedness!"
Among all the women whose faces and kisses he distinguished in his
thought, there was not one who had made him happy, even for a single
day, and--strange anomaly of a distempered heart--there was not one who
had not in some sort made him suffer. Through what moral disorder did it
come to pass that he was devoted to this continual inward calamity--to
the endurance of all the tortures of love: the jealousy of the present,
the intolerable loathing for the past, the bitter vision of the
treacheries of the future, and never, never, aught but physical
intoxication, without that ecstacy of soul which, notwithstanding,
existed, for he had seen with envy the heavenly expression due to it on
the countenances of a few of his mistresses?
One especially came before him--one whose conquest had not been effected
for the flattering of his fatuity, for she was but a girl was Aline, who
had died of consumption in the autumn of 1880. He could again see her
with her hollow eyes, her delicate cheek, and the blending of native
purity and corruption that was in her. He could see her nursing a little
sister whom she had taken to be with her, a child four years of age.
What affecting kindliness in vice, and what innocence in infamy! Yes,
Aline loved him, although she had three or four other lovers at the same
time as himself. His chief pleasure used to consist in taking this
pretty, ruined creature into the country to enjoy the childish outbreaks
of rusticity that prompted her to pick flowers, to listen to the birds,
to lean upon his arm, as though she had never exercised her hideous
profession.
What a mysterious thing is memory! He was on the eve of his first
assignation with Helen, and here he was growing tender over poor Aline,
evoking her as she was when he had so often sought her in her rooms in
the Rue de Moscow; as she was at certain moments when he had loved or
nearly loved her--on a summer evening, for instance, when she was seated
in the stern of a boat rowed on the Seine by four oarsmen of their
acquaintance. Yes, she was seated in a bright dress, looking at him over
the heads of the youths as they alternately stooped and rose. A
stillness was falling upon the river. A fine of orange was trailing
along the margin of the sky. What unspeakable emotion had bathed his
soul as he was sensible of the passing hour, the quivering water, the
living creature, and the dying light!
He ascended his staircase with these thoughts. Why this fatal
incompleteness in all his passions? Why was he incapable of attaining to
that absolute of tenderness which he conceived, of which he had
glimpses, towards which he sprang at every new intrigue? And
then--nothing! And yet how many chances had been combined for him; and
while his servant was relieving him of his overcoat, and he was passing
into the drawing-room, in which he often read at night before going to
bed, he mentally enumerated these chances: a fortune which enabled him
to pursue his fancies without much need of calculation; a genuine and
ancient title; ability to maintain a position in society that pleased
him; a robustness of health that could not recall a week of sickness; a
taste for intellectual things just sufficient to occupy his attention
without annoyance, for, absolutely free from personal ambition, he had
never ceased to be interested as an amateur by the attractions of
literature and art.
Added to all this, he had an appointment for the following day with a
charming woman whom he desired, and the fire of sense had not been
slackened within him by the excesses of his life. Why, then, was it
inevitable that the perception of an indefinable insufficiency in his
life should make him so melancholy just at this moment? He put on a
lounging jacket, dismissed his servant, and settled himself beside the
fire in his drawing-room. He again evoked Helen with an exactitude of
recollection which made her present to him from her mauve stockings to
that little mark which she had there at the right corner of her mouth.
Well! he did not love her, and he would never love her. If he had hoped
to experience at last, through her, that supreme surprise of the heart
which continually eluded him, he might tell himself that this hope was
abortive like the rest.
Like the rest! He felt a desire to convince himself that it had always
been so with him. He went and opened a box, in which were piled six or
seven note-books of different sizes. Some were made of sheets of school
paper. There were two of Japanese paper. These note-books were journals
of his life taken up repeatedly at unequal periods. In them he came upon
pages scrawled on the desk of the study-room at school, pages blackened
on the sides of boats, in hotel rooms, in this very drawing-room. He
took up these note-books, and began to turn over the leaves, finding in
them a former ego perfectly similar to the present ego in premature
misanthropy, sudden and fleeting ardours of sensuality, murderous
analysis, impotent hankering after unattainable delight, indolent
languor and incapacity ever fully to feel anything, whether real or
ideal.
The whole had combined to make of him a sort of child of the century, of
the year 1883, but without elegy, a Nihilist of gallantry and without
declamation.
The following is one of the pieces which his eyes, now gloomy and dull,
dwelt upon, and which would have broken Helen's heart if, gifted with
the magic faculty of second sight, she had discovered the melancholy
torpor which even the gift of her person, following upon the gift of her
entire soul, was inadequate to disturb.
"PARIS, _May_ 1871.
"Terrible days. Vanaboste comes and tells us yesterday, at one o'clock,
that we must get ready to leave, and that the pupils at Sainte Barbe
have gone already with their head. The Panthéon is full of powder, and
will soon blow up. Since morning the firing had been slowly, slowly
drawing nearer--a strange noise! It was as though some one had shaken
millions of nuts over the town in a gigantic cloth. Alfred and I spent
the morning in the attic watching the flames of the conflagrations
writhing against the sky. He was quite depressed, and I fiercely gay,
with a nervous gaiety that forced me to the utterance of outrageous
paradoxes--but were they paradoxes?--concerning the fine theories of our
professor of philosophy last week. O vision of fate! His last lesson
turned upon progress!
"We are packing up hastily in order to leave, when one of the masters
comes in a state of terror through the little door opening upon the
Rue Tournefort, which he bolts behind him. He tells us that the
federates would not allow anyone to pass their barricades. It was with
great difficulty that he himself has been able to return. We were a long
way from the good-natured National Guardsman who said to us on Monday,
at the doors of the Lycée: Shout "Long live the Commune!" boys, and you
are free." Vanaboste was as white as my paper when he heard this news.
The usher hit on the plan of having mattresses spread over the middle of
the courtyard, so that if the Panthéon blew up we should fall with less
violence. We remained for about two hours in this distress, we pupils
fourteen in number, the two assistant masters, and the head master.
Alfred and I, who, by an odd contradiction, were almost calm, talking
together in a corner.
"In spite of the firing, which was constantly drawing nearer, and the
bullets cracking against the walls, perhaps a hundred paces off, we had
neither of us a perception of reality; the danger appeared to us to be
something distant, dim, almost abstract. And we were talking--of what?
Of our childhood. 'It has been a happy one,' he said to me, 'even here.'
For once I emptied my heart to him, and let him see what I thought of
the scholastic lupanar in which, owing to my guardian's selfishness, I
have been obliged to grow up. After all, I prefer even this bagnio to
his house.
"Through this useless talking the firing can be heard coming nearer. The
Panthéon does not blow up. Suddenly a loud shout comes down from one of
ourselves in the upper story, where, at the risk of receiving a bullet,
he had stationed himself at the window. 'The Chasseurs are at the end of
the street.' That was the most trying moment. My heart beat as though it
would burst, my throat was choking in the expectation of what was going
to happen. Undefined danger had left me calm. Exact, brutal, and present
fact affected me unpleasantly. Some shots are fired quite close, then
furious summonses with the butt-ends of guns shake the gate. The same
usher who had shown his coolness in conceiving the precautionary measure
of the mattresses, rushes forward in time to strike up the levelled guns
of two chasseurs, who, blackened with powder, and with eyes gleaming in
frenzy, would have fired at random into the crowd of us if the other had
not been there. A lieutenant comes up, a little man in yellow boots,
with strap on chin and pistol in fist. Vanaboste speaks to him, and we
are saved.
"All this was yesterday. To-day we are again at our studies, a symbol of
our childish life in the midst of this tumult of action. I turn over the
leaves of an old book of spiritual philosophy with the pleasure of
contempt, and after reading official phrases about God, the immortal
soul, refinement of manners, moral liberty and innate reason, I close my
eyes and see the Square of the Panthéon as it was last night: the dead
lying with naked feet, because their shoes have been stolen; and with
battered skulls, because their deaths have just been made sure, of by