Paul Bourget A LOVE CRIME

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

blows from butt-ends of guns; the splashes of blood, that feel sticky

beneath the soles of our boots; the flames of the conflagrations in the

distant sky; and on the footpath, lying on the same straw, and sleeping

like wearied brutes, the little chasseurs who have taken the quarter.

_Homo homini lupior lupis._"

"DIEPPE, _July_ 1874.

"The daughter resembles the mother. She is only twelve years old, and

already I can catch the coquetry, the glances, the premonition of the

woman in the presence of the man; and it will end as it did with her

mother, in a marriage of convenience, first acts of thoughtlessness, a

first lover, then a series of lovers down to some young Baron de Querne,

whom there will be an attempt to persuade that none was ever loved but

he; and, more foolish or more intelligent than myself, he will perhaps

believe it.

"Yes, more intelligent; for in love the great thing is to have as much

emotion as possible; and the real deception is to paralyse one's heart

by clear-sightedness. Whether was it Valmont in the 'Liaisons'--dear

Valmont--or the President's wife that was deceived? She who felt or he

who calculated? Whether was it Elvire or Don Juan, who does not

understand that Elvire, seeing that she has been able to intoxicate

herself with love, is alone to be envied, while he himself is not? I

know all this, but the inward demon is the stronger, and as soon as I

begin to pay my addresses to a woman I am at pains to procure all such

information concerning her as can render me incapable of loving her.

"At my age, ought I not to write in this book: 'O divine fate! that has

caused me so speedily to light upon the unique, the ideal woman, the

sister-soul,' &c. (It would call for some of Gounod's music). Not

exactly, Monsieur de Querne, but rather a lady of experience, who has

had five or six lovers, who has retained sufficient taste to give the

title of 'sentiment' to what belongs to fair and fitting and the most

brutal sensation; a lady of tact, who has given herself a good deal of

trouble to persuade you that you have seduced her. And the deuce take me

if I am angry with her for such charming hypocrisy! Besides, what is the

good of being angry with anyone for anything? Every human being is a

pretentious little watch, which, seeing its hands go round, fancies that

it is itself the cause of the motion. Foolishness and vanity! There is a

delicate mechanism inside, and this mechanism has it that Madame ----

shall be a sentimental prostitute, her daughter a future quean, and I a

mirthless debauchee, who parch my soul by setting forth all this instead

of enjoying what is granted to me."

"PARIS, _22nd May_ 1877.

"An evening of folly yesterday and debauchery, but debauchery that was

gay and healthy which is undoubtedly the truth. Nothing but this remains

to me that does not leave disgust behind.

"I went to see Duret, the painter, with that sad dog René W----, who

first stopped in the Rue de la Tour-Auvergne to ask for Marie, a tall

brunette.

"I have a Marie here," said the doorkeeper, "but she is a tall blonde,

red even," and in fact at a window in the first floor I saw a head of

warm, golden hair, a dress of clear, bright blue, and a made complexion

as extravagantly pink as a doll's. In my dark hours I have had

sufficient knowledge of the degrading and consolatory fascination of

these painted charms, of these slain bodies, of these ringed eyes, of

all this lying!

"At Duret's found Léonie, the model who stood to him for his _Delilah_

in the last Salon: a somewhat wearied face, with a refined and arched

nose, eyes of gleaming blackness, a strongly marked chin, with a

slightly masculine appearance in the profile--the masculine appearance

of theatrical women who act in burlesque--and a long countenance. But

that is but the skeleton of the face. The slight moustache was tinged

with black, the patch on the cheek underlined with black, the eyes made

still larger with black, the complexion covered with powder, and the

powder blending with the pale pink of the blood gave the woman an

extravagant and sophisticated look which was completed by the

brilliantly nacreous teeth that twinkled with the splendour of moist

imitation pearls.

"The toilet completed the woman. She had some black, gauzy material

round her neck, a hat trimmed with gauze and flowers, a dress of

variegated and friezed material, with a huge, red rose blooming on her

left breast.

"'She's a luxurious woman,' said René ironically, and, indeed, with the

material of her dress, her gauze and her flower, she looked like a

creature that lived on nothing but superfluity. I paid my addresses to

her, pleased her, and did not leave her house until this morning.

"O enchantment of the senses when the surcharge of thought comes not to

mar physical intoxication! O enchantment of prostitutes, seen thus as

dispensers of pleasure free from disquiet of heart! No asking whether or

how one loves or is loved, no measuring of sensation with an ideal type

of feeling that is perceived, and striven after, and that never can be

felt! I write these lines, and see! already my enjoyment has evaporated.

I write these lines and yet would that on a solitary terrace fronting a

landscape of trees and waters a woman might appear having the eyes of

which I long have dreamed--eyes which I know without having ever met

them--and might swear to me that this life has been nothing but an evil

dream! And she should tell me _all_, and by that all be made the dearer

to me;--and then I should love!"

"PARIS, _June_ 1879.

"Luncheons and dinners; dinners and luncheons. Assignations and evening

parties. Ah! how empty my life is! I do nothing that I like; nothing;

for I like nothing.

"In presence of the living creature, nothing at heart but pity for him

who suffers, if he does suffer--who will suffer since he endures the

evil of existence.

"If death, inevitable death, were neither physically painful in the

passage thither from life, nor terrible in its sequel to our imagining,

ah! how I would seek that which has prompted thoughts to mar my life!

"We live on--and why? We think--and why? Why between two glasses of

delicate wine and amid naked shoulders does there come to me ceaselessly

at table the image of the grave, and the insoluble question concerning

the meaning of this deadly farce of nature, and the world, and life?

"I muse on the sweets of mutual love, an absurd dream that civilisation

grafts upon the simple need of coupling. Ah! for a simple passion that

might apply my entire sensibility to another being, like wet paper

against a window-pane.

"And all this declamatory philosophy due to the fact that yesterday I

saw Madame de Rugle again at the Théâtre Français, and that the sight

did not move me one whit. What does logic say? That a man should not

force himself to tenderness when his lack of feeling is self-admitted,

but turn on his heel, whistling that polonaise of Chopin's which she

used to play to me sometimes in the evening with so much intention and

sentimentality. And of that passion this is all that is left."

"PARIS, _January_ 1881.

"I am aware that I have become horribly, fiercely egoistic, and the

external manifestations of this egoism are now offensive to me, whereas

formerly I used to surrender myself to it without scruple, at a time,

however, when I was of more worth than I am now by reason of the dream

that I cherished concerning myself.

"Philosophising truthfully about oneself is as great a relief as the

vomiting of bile. I look for the history of my temperament from the days

of my childhood. I see that my imagination has been excessive,

destroying my sensibility by raising a fore-fashioned idea between

myself and reality. I expected to feel in a certain way--and then, I

never did so. This same imagination, darkened by my uncle's harsh

treatment, has turned also to mistrust. I have always dreaded every

creature. The loss of my father and mother prevented the correction of

this early fault. College life and modern literature stained my thought

before I had lived. The same literature separated me from religion at

fifteen. Impiety, to my shame, acted like refinement to seduce me! The