PAUL BOURGET

A LOVE CRIME

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DEDICATION.

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

Impressum neobooks

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?

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

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

massacres of the Commune showed me the true nature of man, and the

intrigues of the ensuing years the true nature of politics. I longed to

link myself to some great idea--but to which? When quite young I had

measured the wretchedness of an artist's existence. There must be genius

or far better leave it alone. To rank as fiftieth among writers or

musicians--thank you, no. My fortune exempted me from the necessity of a

profession. Enter a Council of State for foreign affairs, or a public

office--and why? There are only too many officials already. Get married?

The thought of chaining down my life never tempted me. I should have

done the same as B---- who, on the day of his wedding, took train to

return no more.

"Then what? Nothing. I have not even grown old of heart; I am abortive.

My sentimental adventures, which have been pursued in spite of

everything, for women are even yet what is least indifferent to me,

have, alas, convinced me that there are no kisses that do not resemble

those already given and received. It is all so short, and superficial,

and vain. How desperate I should be rendered by the thoughts of

myself--of that self which I shall never be able completely to

renounce--did I often indulge in them! What else but the damnation of

the mystics is _non-love_?"

Such were a few of the pages among many others, and the abominable

monograph of a secret disease of soul was continued in hundreds of

similar confidences. Often simply the date was written, together with

two or three facts: Rode, paid visits, went to the club, the theatre in

the evening, or a party, or ball, and then came a single word like a

refrain--_Spleen._ At the beginning of the last of these note-books,

Armand, when he had closed it, could read a list of all the years of his

life since 1860, and after each date he had scrawled--_Torture_, and at

the end, these words:

"I did not ask for life. If I have committed faults, frightful ones, too,

I have also known sufferings such as, set over against the others, might

say to the inconceivable Power that has created and that sustains me, if

such a Power possess a heart: 'Have pity upon me!'"

The young man thrust away with his hand the heap of papers wherein he

encountered so faithful an image of his present moral aridity. Slowly he

began to walk about the room. Everywhere in it he recognised the same

tokens of his inward nihilism. The low bookcase contained but those few

books which he still liked: novels of withering analysis--"Dangerous

Liaisons," "Adolphus," "Affinities"--moralists of keen and self-centred

misanthropy, and memoirs. The photographs scattered over the walls

reminded him of his travels--those useless travels during which he had

failed to beguile his weariness. On the chimney-piece, between the

likenesses of two dead friends, he kept an enigmatic portrait,

representing two women, with the head of the one resting upon the

shoulder of the other. It was the present, life-like remembrance of a

terrible story--the story of the bitterest faithlessness he had ever

endured. He had been cynical or artificial enough to laugh over it

formerly with the two heroines, but he had laughed with death in his

heart.

At the sight of all these objects witnessing to the manner of his life,

he was so completely sensible of his emotional wretchedness that he

wrung his hands, saying quite aloud: "What a life! Good God! what a

life!" It was owing to experiences such as these that his lips and eyes

preserved that expression of silent melancholy to which he had perhaps

owed Helen's love. It is their pity that leads to the capture of the

noblest women. But these crises did not last long with Armand. In his

case muscles were stronger than nerves. He took up his journals, and

threw them, rather than put them, away in the box.

"That's a rational sort of occupation," he thought to himself, "for the

night before an assignation."

Immediately, his thoughts turned again to Helen. The charming air of

distinction that she possessed returned to his recollection, and

suddenly softened him to an extraordinary degree.

"Why have I entered into her life," he said, "since I do not love her?

For eleven little months she did not know me, and she was at peace.

There would still be time enough to act the part of an honest man."

He was seized by the temptation to do what he had done once already--to

renounce, before any irrevocable step had been taken, an intrigue in

which he ran the risk of taking another's heart without giving his own

in return.

"Perhaps she loves me," he said to himself; and he sat down at his

table, and even got ready a sheet of paper in order to write to her.

Then, leaning back in his easy chair, he reflected. The recollection of

Varades suddenly beset him, as also of the serenity with which Helen had

deceived her husband that evening. "Innocent child," he said aloud,

speaking to himself, "if it were not I, it would be someone else. When a

fast woman meets with a libertine, they form a pair."

He began to laugh in a nervous fashion, and recalled the boundless

contempt with which he had formerly been covered by the lady whom his

scruples had led him to give up. She was the only enemy that he had kept

among all the women with whom he had had to do. The clock struck.

"Two o'clock," he said, "and I have to get up early in order to visit

worthy Madame Palmyre, and reserve one of her little suites, as in

Madame de Rugle's days. I shall be tired. Monsieur de Varades will be

missed."

Half-an-hour later he was in bed, and, head on arm, sleeping that

infantine sleep which, in spite of his life, had still been left to him.

So he was represented in a drawing by his father, which hung on one of

the walls of his bed-room. Ah! if the dead ones, whose son he was, had

been able to see him, would they have condemned him? Would they have

pitied him?

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