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?
It was about half-past ten in the morning when Madame Chazel received a
small packet from the Baron de Querne. It contained two books--two new
novels--and a letter, the last being similar to all those that a man of
the world may write to a woman with whom he is on friendly terms. But
the postscript pressed as with a hand upon her heart. It ran as follows:
"If your country friend decides to come to Paris, the best furnished
apartments that I have seen are at 16, Rue de Stockholm. They are on the
second floor, to the right."
Yes, Helen was seized with inward trepidation on reading these simple
lines. In proportion as her action drew closer to her--the action that
would for ever separate her future and her past--the fever which had
been preying upon her since the previous evening had increased still
more. She had just left her bath, and, wrapped in a dressing-gown of
pure white, was crouched on a low chair beside the fire, her naked feet
in slippers, her form unconstrained by the flexible material, and her
hair rolled in a great twist about her neck. She shivered in her
wool-lined robe, and, with Armand's letter in her fingers, gazed now at
the paper, the mere touch of which overwhelmed her, and now around the
room--a refuge which she preferred even to the little drawing-room, as
enabling her to retire into a domain that was all her own.
She had been so pleased at the time of their settling in Paris to obtain
this room all to herself! She had during so many nights known the
torture of sleeping beside a man whom she did not love, and if sleeping
side by side, almost breath to breath, forms the delight of blissful
passion, physical aversion, on the other hand, is augmented by such
intimacy, until it becomes a species of animal hatred. Alfred's
movements, the sound of his breathing, the mere existence of his person,
angered her and hurt her, in the hours that she spent thus beside him,
when silence hung heavy upon their rest, and she lay awake quivering and
in revolt. When requesting this separation of rooms she certainly had
not foreseen that the solitude of her couch would one day avail her as a
weapon against material partition, that terrible ransom for adultery
which prudent women accept as a security. It is a rare thing for those
who deceive their husbands to sleep apart from them. They would rather
not have to carry with them to their lover the anxiety due to a
watchfulness but little reconcilable with complete pleasure.
But Helen was not capable of such calculations. The most charming trait
in her character was a spontaneity that might draw her into very great
perils, but that at least always preserved her from a foulness which is
more degrading than anything else--reflection in the midst of error. At
this very moment, as she sat crouching upon her low chair, she did not
think about the consequences of her approaching action, nor did she
reason--she felt. The presence of Armand's letter caused her to be
visited with excessive emotion. She scarcely so much as listened to the
noise that her little boy made in playing beside her bed. The child was
shaking his flaxen ringlets, and shouting and running about. He had set
two chairs beside each other, and was creeping between them, pretending
that he was a railway train passing through a tunnel.
Since she had been in love with Armand, Helen had experienced strange
feelings of sadness in the presence of her little Henry, and she had
reproached herself for them as for a lack of tenderness, attributing
them to remorse. In reality, her sorrow was due to the discovery in her
son of an astonishing likeness to her husband. Even in his games the
child recalled the conversation of the father, who from principle gave
him for books nothing but scientific works, and then he had Alfred
Chazel's eyes and his awkwardness in using his hands, and had only his
mother's mouth and forehead. She spoiled him all the more for her
consciousness of what she had taken from him to give to another! The
child continued to play, looking sometimes towards his mother. The
latter, at one moment, heaving a deep sigh, crumpled up the paper that
she held in her hand, and flung it into the fire.
The note had grown intolerable to her. She told herself, indeed, that it
was more prudent on her lover's part to write to her in this tone of
formal politeness, but it was such prudence as freezes, and in Helen's
then unnerved condition she had need of a letter whose every phrase acts
upon the reader's heart like invisible and caressing lips. The crumpled
paper, letter and envelope together, rolled into the fire, and the child
left the two chairs with which he was playing to come to his mother's
side and watch it burn.
"What are you looking at there, darling?" Helen said to him.
"At the nuns, mamma," he replied. So he called the luminous dots that
run across the black surface of paper consumed by fire. These dots were
in his eyes nuns distractedly traversing their burnt cloister. "How they
hurry," he said; "how frightened they are! Oh! that one, mamma, look at
that one! The convent is falling down. They are all dead."
Madame Chazel felt herself incapable of enduring this merriment. The
whole odious nature of her moral situation had just been rendered
palpable to her by a petty, insignificant fact, that of her son making a
plaything of the letter in which her lover made an appointment with her
for their first secret meeting. She would have been so glad to have held
her home life, the maternal obligations of which she would fulfil to the
utmost, distinct from the other, from that life of passion upon which
she was entering, carried away by something stronger than her reason,
something so obscure to herself and yet so real. Was this distinction,
then, altogether impossible, seeing that on the very first day all that
she would have wished apart were being blended together?
"Go and play with Miette," she said to her son, "I have a slight
headache."
Miette was the little boy's nurse. A lady's maid, a cook, and a
man-servant completed the _personnel_ of the household. Miette, who had
come from the country with her employers, had taken care of Henry from
his earliest infancy. At night, to send him to sleep, she used to sing
canticles to him, one especially of which delighted and terrified him:
"Come, divine Messiah."
"What is Messiah?" he would ask his nurse.
"He is Antichrist," she used to reply.
"When will He come?" asked the child.
"At the end of the world."
"In how many years?"
"Seven," said the nurse.
"Then I shall be twelve years old," Henry would calculate.
This astonishing prediction had so struck him the night before, that at
the mere mention of his nurse's name, he began to tell it to his mother.
At any other time this confidence would have amused her, but while
speaking he had in his bright grey eyes a look that the young woman knew
only too well.
"Don't be frightened," she said, "for you are good, and go and play."
The little boy cast a glance at the fire where the black residue alone
marked the site of the burnt convent; at the chairs whose backs were no
longer the walls of a deep tunnel; at his mother, to know whether he
might not remain. Unconsciously he was affected by the sadness
overspreading her face. By one of those almost animal intuitions
peculiar to extremely sensitive children, he discerned that his presence
was vexing to his mother. He kissed her hand, and then suddenly burst
into tears.
"What is the matter, my angel, what is the matter?" said Helen, pressing
him in her arms and covering him with kisses.
"I thought you were angry with me," he said. Then, warmed by her
caresses, he said: "I am going, mamma; I will be good."
"Have children presentiments?" Helen asked of herself when she was left
alone. "One would think he were conscious that something unusual is
taking place." And with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting
upon her closed hands, she relapsed into the state of fever that had
kept her awake the whole night. The nacreous bruise that encircled her
eyes too clearly revealed this sleeplessness. On rising, she had looked
at herself in the glass, and said to herself:
"I am not pretty--I shall not please him."
What had been preying upon her had been neither prudish reasoning nor
moral reflection. It was a sort of ardent languor. She could see Armand
in her thought, and as it were a wave of blood, but having greater heat,
surged to her heart, her throat choked a little, and her will tottered.
It was not only her first intrigue, in the sense in which the world
understands the term, but it was her first love. Helen Chazel, while
still Mademoiselle de Vaivre, had endured one of the most painful trials
that can weigh upon youth. She had been persecuted by a step-mother who
hated her, while believing that she was only bringing her up well and
correcting her. The De Vaivres lived in a kind of château, four miles
from Bourges, and this had been a prison to the young girl. The father,
a weak man, who cherished an innocent mania for an archaeological
collection, patiently and complacently gathered together, had never
suspected the mute drama played between step-mother and step-daughter
for twelve years.
Madame de Vaivre loved her husband, and, without herself comprehending
as much, was jealous of the dead wife, that first wife whose grace she
saw renewed in the features of the child, in her smiles and in her
gestures. Nothing is so dangerous as an evil feeling of the existence of
which we are not quite aware. To gratify it we discover all kinds of
excuses which enable us to feed our hatred without losing our
self-esteem. It was thus that Madame de Vaivre, having taken Helen's
education in hand, made every lesson and every admonition a means for
torture.
This woman, pretty and refined, but unfeeling, very solicitous about
propriety in consequence of the lengthened sojournings at Paris with her
father, who had been an official deputy under the July monarchy, was
withal minutely devout, and instinctively unkind, like all persons who
are accustomed never to admit the just sensibilities of others. When
Alfred Chazel had come to be intimate with Monsieur de Vaivre, owing to
their common taste for excavations and antiquities, she had with joy
perceived that he was falling in love with Helen. It afforded her a
secret pleasure to marry her step-daughter to a man who had no fortune,
and, the dowry being very small, to condemn her for years to a middling
existence. Death, which takes as little account of our evil calculations
as of our great intentions, had taken in hand to render abortive this
woman's hateful anticipation, through which poor Helen had seen no more
clearly than Monsieur de Vaivre himself.
All that the young girl understood on the day that Chazel asked her in
marriage was that she would be free from her step-mother's tyranny. She
had a plain perception of that from which she was escaping. As to
marriage and its physical realities, what could she have known of them?
Thus, on leaving the church, she found herself in a moral situation that
was full of peril. Her childhood, spent, as it had been, beneath
continual oppression, had to an excessive degree developed within her a
taste for the romantic--a power, that is, of fashioning beforehand an
image of life with which the reality is subsequently compared. Through
her joy at deliverance, her future marriage showed to her like a
paradise of delight.
Misfortune had it that Alfred Chazel should be one of those men who,
with all kindness, all delicacy even, at the bottom of their hearts, are
for ever ignorant of a woman's nature. The consummation of the marriage
was to Helen something as hateful as it had been unexpected--like a
tribute paid to clumsy brutality. The result was that she received her
husband's endearments with a repugnance that was imperfectly dissembled,
and that added to the timidity of a man already timid by nature and
awkwardly impassioned, as those who have not slackened the initial
ardour of their youth in facile intrigues often are. Alfred was secretly
afraid of showing his tenderness to his wife, and he concealed from her
the intensity of a love that would perhaps have touched her had she been
able to perceive it.
Moral divorce between husband and wife has nearly always physiological
divorce for its first and hidden cause. If community in voluptuousness
is the most powerful agent for the fusion of temperaments, the torturing
possession of a woman by a man remains the certain origin of
unconquerable antipathy. It came to pass in the Chazel household, as in
all similar households, that this first antipathy was heightened from
week to week by reason of the fact that two beings, condemned to live
side by side, unceasingly afford each other grounds for more love or
greater hatred. Do not all the petty events of life render them every
minute more present to each other? The divergence in tastes, ideas, and
habits that parted Alfred from Helen, would have provided the latter,
had she loved her husband, with pretexts for a loving education. Not
loving him, she found in them only reasons for separating from him still
more.
Alfred Chazel was in fact a son of the people, and in spite of the
intellectual refinement of two generations, his peasant origin showed
itself again in him in clumsiness of gesture and attitude. He was not
vulgar, and at the same time he was lacking in manner. Helen, on the
contrary, came of a noble family, and her step-mother's continual
superintendence had developed to an extreme in her a sense of detailed
particularity concerning her person and everything about her. Her
husband's manner of eating shocked her; his manner of going and coming
and sitting down--a certain slowness in grasping all that constituted
the material side of life. When it was needful to accomplish a rapid and
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