The Project Gutenberg eBook ofA Cruel EnigmaThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: A Cruel EnigmaAuthor: Paul BourgetTranslator: Julian CrayRelease date: June 15, 2021 [eBook #65620]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Dagny and Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CRUEL ENIGMA ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: A Cruel EnigmaAuthor: Paul BourgetTranslator: Julian CrayRelease date: June 15, 2021 [eBook #65620]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Dagny and Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
Title: A Cruel Enigma
Author: Paul BourgetTranslator: Julian Cray
Author: Paul Bourget
Translator: Julian Cray
Release date: June 15, 2021 [eBook #65620]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Dagny and Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CRUEL ENIGMA ***
A poet of merit, an acute, clear-sighted critic, and an accomplished and successful novelist, M. Paul Bourget occupies an important position among the brilliant crowd of modern Frenchlittérateurs, upon the younger generation especially of whom he exercises an acknowledged and a constantly widening influence. Nor will this influence appear other than natural if it be borne in mind that, gifted with no mean qualifications for the task, M. Bourget has made a deep and particular study of just those problems which, to this self-conscious, introspective age of ours, are possessed of an all-absorbing interest. Complex as his nature undoubtedly is, and many-sided as its accomplishment might, to a first and superficial view, appear, he is in all his writings primarily a critic, while his criticism has, moreover, uniformly occupied itself with the same objects, with the hidden movements of the mind, that is to say, considered in their bearings upon external manifestation, with all the varied promptings which underlie the surface of conduct.
For the prosecution of such psychological studies, M. Bourget is in every needful particular well fitted. He possesses keen insight, and a remarkable power of sympathetically appreciating the play and counter-play of motives, passions, and delicate shades of feeling; while he is also endowed with that tact, subtlety, refinement, and, above all, exact lucidity of expression, by which a writer is enabled to convey his divinings unimpaired to the reader. This flexibility of sympathy, with its answering flexibility of language, enabling to the expression alike of widely sundered and of delicately blending diversities of thought and emotion, correspond to, and are, perhaps, partly the outcome of, a richly varied life-experience. Just as M. Bourget has made himself equally at home in London and in Florence, in Paris and in Morocco, so is he equally at ease and equally successful whether he be engaged in indicating some of the consequences wrought by cosmopolitan existence in the characters of Stendhal, Tourgéniev, and Amiel; in analysing the conceptions of modern love presented in the writings of Baudelaire and M. Alexandre Dumas; in measuring the modifications produced by science in the imaginations and diverse sensibilities of Flaubert, M. Leconte de Lisle, and M. Taine; or, finally, in living the life of his own fictitious characters, and portraying for us a Hubert or a Theresa de Sauve.
It is evident that the wielder of such exceptional powers must be obvious to peculiar dangers with which the mere dead-level narrator of outer phenomena has little or no acquaintance. To the very fulness of these powers, and to their supremely overmastering presence are due faults from which less gifted writers are shielded by their mediocrity as by a wall. It would be possible, did space and inclination serve, to point out instances of affectation both of idea and of expression in M. Bourget's writings. As in the case of some of our own premier authors—George Eliot, for instance, and Mr. George Meredith—his thought is not invariably worthy of the richness of its setting, while his analysis is occasionally pushed so far as to be superfluous, not to say absurd. The charge of "literary dandyism" brought against him by M. Jules Lemaitre is not destitute of foundation. It must be acknowledged that his subtlety borders at times on pedantry, and his refinement on conceit. Having said this, it is only fair to add that these flaws do not enter excessively into the texture of his work; indeed, they rather serve, by force of sufficiently rare and sharply defined contrast, to throw into relief its general sterling excellence. And such imperfections should not be allowed to weigh overmuch with us in attempting to estimate the worth of our author's achievement. It is notorious that—si parva licet componere magnis—there are spots on the sun.
Conversant as he is with the entire gamut of human feeling, M. Bourget has in all his novels—with the single exception of the last of them, "André Cornélis"—elected to direct exclusive attention to the passion of love. His treatment of this theme is as characteristic as it is fresh. It is, further, in complete harmony with what appears to be his doctrine of life. Accuracy of vision, assisted, doubtless, by the breadth of cosmopolitan experience, has produced in him a result not uncommon with men of his calibre. In spite of his own protestation to the contrary, it has, in fact, made him a pessimist. Like Flaubert, with whom he has some affinity, and one of the most striking of whose phrases he, in the course of the following pages, unconsciously adopts, he discerns too clearly to be greatly pleased with what he sees. The pessimism of the two men was, however, arrived at by somewhat different routes. Setting aside any origins of a purely physical nature, it arose with Flaubert mainly from the inconsistency of his external surroundings with his inward ideals, and denoted simply that his objective world and his subjective world were at strife. M. Bourget's dissatisfaction flows from the unpleasing result of his analyses of the inward feelings themselves. He probes them and penetrates them throughout their complex ramifications and windings until he reaches some ultimate fact or some irreducible instinct, from which he draws the moral of an unbending necessity. And here he finds the aspirings of his imagination and the decrees of destiny at daggers drawn.
In these considerations we have a key to the proper interpretation of the present volume. "Love," its author has said elsewhere, "has, like death, remained irreducible to human conventions. It is wild and free in spite of codes and modes. The woman who disrobes to give herself to a man, lays aside her entire social personality with her garments. For him she again becomes what he, too, becomes again for her—the natural, solitary creature to whom no protection can guarantee happiness, and from whom no decree can avert woe." These lines sum in brief the teaching of the book. Its author has, after his own fashion, made an uncompromising analysis of the passion that he undertakes to describe, and, stripping from it all the adventitious grace and mysticism and sentiment with which society is wont to shroud it, has found it to consist, in the last resort, of a single and simple fact: the physical, fleshly desire of man for woman and woman for man. Hence it is that Theresa, while receiving, and rejoicing exceedingly in, Hubert's loftier and more ideal affection, betrays it at the first opportunity for the sensual brutishness of a hard-livingroué, and hence, too, it is that the pure-souled Hubert, even while he scorns his mistress for her treachery and loathes himself for his weakness, returns loveless and despairing to her arms.
The book is a pitiless study of the inevitable. We are made to feel that, given the particular primary conditions, the results specified could not but follow. It would almost seem that in the modern scientific conception of the universal reign of Law, and the comparatively remote possibilities of modifying its operation, we are approximating to a renewed, but far more vividly realised, enthronement of the old Greek idea of that Necessity against which the gods themselves were believed to strive in vain, and M. Bourget is too completely a man of his century not to reflect faithfully one of the most striking phases of latter-day thought. The contemplation of a fatalistic ordering of the moral world cannot be otherwise than exceptionally painful to one who, like M. Bourget, is as sensitive to moral and spiritual, as he is to physical and natural beauty. His nobler nature is wounded by the hard sequence of inevitable law, and would fain have a deeply different moulding of circumstance, but for all that the true novelist can tell us only what he sees, and what he believes to be true, and so it comes to pass that in M. Bourget's novels, with, perhaps, a single exception, we find the eternal contrast between the "might be" and the "must be" consistently indicated. In his "L'Irréparable" and its companion tale, "Deuxième Amour," in "Crime d'Amour" and in "Cruelle Enigme," the topic which engrosses him is still the same. In all alike we are sensible of the antagonism between the cherished aspirations of the moralist and the conclusions which the psychologist finds himself unwillingly compelled to draw. And not in them only, but throughout his other writings also, we can trace the spirit-workings of the man to whom life in its entirety, no less than certain sorrowful phases of it is "a cruel enigma."
JULIAN CRAY.
Allow me, my dear Henry James, to place your name on the first page of this book in memory of the time at which I was beginning to write it, and which was also the time when we became acquainted. In our conversations in England last summer, protracted sometimes at one of the tables in the hospitable Athenæum Club, sometimes beneath the shade of the trees in some vast park, sometimes on the Dover esplanade while it echoed to the tumult of the waves, we often discussed the art of novel-writing, an art which is the most modern of all because it is the most flexible, and the most capable of adaptation to the varied requirements of every temperament. We were agreed that the laws imposed upon novelists by the various æsthetics resolve themselves ultimately into this: to give a personal impression of life. Will you find this impression in "A Cruel Enigma"? I trust so, that this work may be truly worthy of being offered to one whose rare and subtle talent, intelligent sympathy, and noble character, I have been able to appreciate as reader, fellow-worker, and friend.
P.B.
Paris, 9th February, 1885.
CHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VCHAPTER VICHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIICHAPTER IXCHAPTER XCHAPTER XICHAPTER XII
All men accustomed to feel through their imaginations are well acquainted with that unique description of melancholy which is inflicted by too complete a likeness between a mother and her daughter, when the mother is fifty years old and the daughter twenty-five, and the one happens thus to exhibit the looked-for spectre of the old age of the other. How fruitful in bitterness for a lover is such a vision of the inevitable withering reserved for the beauty that he loves! To the eye of a disinterested observer such likenesses abound in singularly suggestive reflections. Rarely, indeed, does the analogy between the features of the two faces extend to identity, and still more rarely are the expressions completely alike. There has usually been a sort of onward march in the common temperament from one generation to the next. The predominant quality in the physiognomy has become more predominant still—a visible symbol of a development of character produced by heredity. Already too refined, the face has become still more so; sensual, it has been materialised; wilful, it has grown hard and dry.
But it is especially at the period when life has done its work, when the mother has passed her sixtieth year and the daughter her fortieth, that this gradation in likenesses becomes palpable to the student, and with it the history of the moral circumstances wherein the soul of the race of which the two beings mark two halting-places has striven. The perception of fatalities of blood is then so clear that it sometimes turns to pain. It is in such cases that the implacable, tragical action of the laws of Nature is revealed even to minds which are the most destitute of general ideas, and if this action be at all exercised against creatures who—apart even from love—are dear to us, how it hurts us to admit it!
Although a man who had started formerly as a private soldier and has been retired as General of division, who is seventy-two years old, who has a liver complaint contracted in Africa, five wounds and the experience of fifteen campaigns, is not very prone to philosophical dreamings, it was nevertheless to impressions of this kind that General Count Alexander Scilly resigned himself one evening, on leaving the drawing-room of a small house in the Rue Vaneau, where he had left his old friend Madame Castel, and this friend's daughter, Madame Liauran, alone together. Eleven had just struck from a clock of the purest style of the Empire—a gift from Napoleon I. to Madame Castel's father—which stood on the mantelpiece in this drawing-room, and, as was his custom, the General had risen at precisely the first stroke, to go to his carriage, which had been announced.
Truth to tell, the Count had the strongest reasons in the world to be dimly and profoundly disquieted. After the campaign of 1870, which had won him his last epaulets, but in which the ruin of his health had been completed, this man had found himself at Paris with no relations but distant cousins whom he did not like, having had grounds of complaint against them on the occasion of the succession to a common cousin. Had they not impugned the old lady's will, and made a charge of undue influence against—whom? Against him, Count Scilly, own son to the Leipsic hero! Feeling that desire, which distinguishes bachelors of all ages, to replace, by settled habits, the tranquility of the family that he lacked, the General had been led to create a home external to the rooms of the resting soldier.
Circumstances had thus made him the almost daily guest of the house in the Rue Vaneau, where the two ladies to whom he had long been attached resided. The eldest, Madame Marie Alice Castel, was the widow of his first protector, Captain Hubert Castel, who had been killed at his side in Algeria, when he, Scilly, was as yet only a plain sergeant. The second, Madame Marie Alice Liauran, was the widow of his dearest protégé, Captain Alfred Liauran, who had been killed in Italy.
All those who have given any study to the character of an old bachelor and old soldier—a combination of two celibacies in one—will, from the mere announcement of these facts, understand the place occupied by the mother and daughter in the General's existence. Whenever he left their house, and during the whole of the time which it took his carriage to bring him home again, his one mental occupation was to recur to all the incidents in his visit. This interval was a long one, for the General lived on the Quai d'Orléans on the ground floor of an old house which had been formally bequeathed to him by his cousin. The carriage went but slowly; it was drawn by an old army horse, very aged and very quiet, gently driven by an old orderly soldier, faithful Bertrand, who would not have whipped the animal for a cask of grape-skin brandy, his favourite drink.
The carriage itself did not run easily, low and heavy as it was—a regular dowager's chariot which the General had preserved unaltered, with the pale green leather of its lining and the dark green shade of its panels. Is there any need to add that Scilly had inherited this carriage at the same time as the house? In the ignorance of an old soldier accustomed to the roughness of a profession to which he had taken very seriously, he ingenuously considered this lumbering vehicle as the height of comfort, and seated with his hand in one of the slings, on the edge of those cushions on which his cousin used once to stretch herself voluptuously, he unceasingly saw again before him the drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, and the two inmates of that calm retreat—oh! so calm; with its lofty closed windows, beyond which extended the princely garden reaching from the Rue Vaneau to the Rue de Babylon; yes, so calm and so well known to him, Scilly, in its slightest details!
On the walls hung three large portraits, witnessing that, since the Revolution, all the men of the family had been soldiers. There was first the grandfather, Colonel Hubert Castel, represented by the painter Gros in the dark uniform of the cuirassiers of the Empire, his head bare, his sturdy neck confined in its blue-black collar, his torso clad in its cuirass, his arms enclosed in the dark cloth of their sleeves, and his hands covered with their white rounded gauntlets. Napoleon had fallen from his throne too soon to reward, as he wished, the officer who had saved his life in the Russian campaign. Next, there was the son of this stern cavalier, a captain in the African army, painted by Delacroix in the blue tunic with its plaited folds, and the wide red trousers, tight fitting at the feet; then the portrait, painted by Flandrin, of Alfred Liauran, in the uniform of an officer of the line, such as Scilly himself had worn. On both sides were miniatures representing Colonel Castel again, but before he had attained to that rank, and also some men and women of the old régime; for Madame Castel was a Mademoiselle de Trans, of the De Transes of Provence, a very numerous and noble family belonging to the district of Aix. Colonel Castel's father, who had been merely the steward of Marie Alice's father, had saved the, in truth, somewhat inconsiderable property of the family during the storm of 1792, and when in 1829 Mademoiselle de Trans had wished to marry this wealthy man's grandson, who happened to be the son of a celebrated soldier, she had met with no opposition.
All Madame Castel's past, and that of her daughter, was, therefore, spread over the walls of this drawing-room, which was at once austere and homely, like all apartments which are much occupied, and occupied by persons who have cherished recollections. The furniture, which was composed of a curious mixture of objects of the First Empire, the Restoration, and the July Monarchy, certainly had no correspondence with the fortune of the two ladies, which had become very large owing to the modesty of their mode of life; but of this furniture there was not a single piece that did not speak of someone dear both to them and to Scilly, who from childhood had found interest in everything belonging to this family. Had not his father been made a Count on the same day that his companion-in-arms, Castel, had been made a Colonel?
And it was just this intimate acquaintance with the life of these two women which rendered the old man so strangely sensitive in respect of them. He had identified himself with them to the extent of being unable to sleep at night when he had left them visibly pre-occupied. This spare man, sunk as it were into himself, in whom everything revealed strict discipline from the stolidity of his look to the regularity of his gait, and the punctilious rigour of his dress, disclosed, when his two friends were in question, all those treasures of feeling which his mode of life had given him little opportunity to expend; and on this evening, in the month of February, 1880, he was in a state of agitation, like that of a lover who has seen his mistress's eyes bathed in tears the cause of which is unknown to him.
"What subject of grief can they have which they would not tell me?" This question passed again and again through the General's head while his carriage drove along, beaten by the wind and lashed by the rain. It was "regular Prussian weather," as the Count's coachman expressed it; but his master never thought of pulling up the open window through which squalls were coming in every five minutes, and he constantly reverted to his question, for his poor friends had been dreadfully dull the whole evening, and the General could see them mentally just as his last glance had caught them. The mother was seated in an easy-chair at the corner of the fireplace, with her white hair, her profile which had not yet lost its pride, and her strangely-black eyes set in a face wrinkled with those long vertical wrinkles which tell of nobleness of life. The extraordinary paleness of her colourless and, as it were, bloodless complexion betrayed at all times the great sorrows of a widowhood which had found nothing to divert or console it. But that evening this paleness had appeared to the Count even more startling, as, too, had the restlessness in the physiognomy of the daughter.
Although Madame Liauran was past forty, not one thread of silver mingled as yet with the bands of black hair crowning the faded yet not withered face, in which all her mother's features were reproduced, but with more emaciation and pain. A nervous complaint kept her always lying on her couch, which, that evening, was exactly opposite to Madame Castel's easy chair, so that the General, on leaving the drawing-room had been able to see both women at once, and to feel confusedly that on the second there was weighing a double widowhood. No, there was nothing left in this creature to enable her to support life without suffering. To Scilly, who knew in what an atmosphere of tenderness and sorrow the second Marie Alice had grown up, before herself entering an atmosphere of new troubles, this sort of intensified widowhood afforded an easy explanation of the existence in the daughter of a sensitiveness that was already keen in the mother.
But then, were there not years in which the melancholy of the two widows was enlivened or rather warded off by the presence of a child, Alexander Hubert Liauran, who had been born a few months before the Italian war—a charming creature, somewhat too frail to suit the taste of his godfather, the General, who was fond of calling him "Mademoiselle Hubert," and as graceful as all young people are who have been brought up only by women? In the circumstances in which his mother and grandmother found themselves, how could this boy have been anything but the whole world to them?
"If they are so downcast, it can only be on his account," said the Count to himself; "yet there is no question of war—" for the old soldier recollected the promise which the young man had made to him to enlist at once if ever a new strife should bring Germany and France into conflict. This one condition had induced him not to dispute the frightened wish of the two women who had been desirous of keeping the son by their side. The young man, in fact, had at first been attracted by the military profession; but the mere idea of seeing their child dressed in uniform had been too stern a martyrdom for Madame Castel and Madame Liauran, and the child had remained with them, unprovided with any career but that of loving and of being loved.
The remembrance of his godson, Hubert, awakened a fresh train of musing in the Count. His brougham had gone down the Rue du Bac, and was now advancing along the quays. A rain-splash fell on the old soldier's cheek and he closed the pane which had remained open. The sudden sensation of cold made him shrink further into the corner of his carriage and into his thoughts. That kind of backset which is produced by physical annoyance often has the strange effect of heightening the power of remembrance within us. Such was the case with the General, who suddenly began to reflect that for several weeks his godson had rarely spent the evening at the Rue Vaneau. He had not been disturbed by this, knowing that Madame Liauran was very anxious that her son should go into society. They were so much afraid lest he should weary of their narrow life.
Scilly was now compelled by a secret instinct to connect this absence with the inexplicable sadness overspreading the faces of the two women. He understood so well that all the keen forces of the grandmother's and of the mother's heart, had their supreme centre in the existence of their child! And he pictured to himself pell-mell the thousand scenes of passionate affection which he had witnessed since the time of Hubert's birth. He remembered Madame Castel's recrudescent paleness, and Madame Liauran's deadly headaches at the slightest uneasiness in the child. He could see again the days of his education, the course of which was followed by the mother herself. How many times had he admired the young woman as, with her elbow resting on a little table, she employed her evening hours in studying the page of a Latin or Greek book, which the boy was to repeat next day?
With a touching, infatuated tenderness such as is peculiar to certain mothers who would be pained by the slightest divorce between their own mind and their son's, Madame Liauran had sought to associate herself hour by hour with the development of her child's intelligence. Hubert had not taken a lesson in the upper room in the little house at which his mother was not present, engaged with some piece of charitable work, such as knitting a coverlet or hemming handkerchiefs for the poor, but listening with all her attention to what the master was saying. She had pushed the divine susceptibility of her soul's jealousy so far as to be unwilling to have a private tutor. Hubert had, therefore, received instruction from different masters whom Madame Liauran had engaged on the recommendations of her confessor, the Vicar of Sainte-Clotilde, and none of them had been able to dispute with her an influence which she would share only with the grandmother.
When it was necessary that the youth should learn how to ride and fence, the poor woman, to whom an hour spent away from her son was a period of ill-dissembled anguish, had taken months and months to make up her mind. At last she had consented to fit up a room on the ground floor as a fencing school. An old regimental instructor, who was settled in Paris, and whom General Scilly had had under him in the service, used to come three times a week. The mother did not venture to acknowledge that the mere noise of the clashing of the swords awakened within her a dread of some accident, and caused her almost insurmountable emotion. The Count had likewise induced Madame Liauran to entrust her son to him to be taken to the riding-school; but she had done so on condition that he would not leave him for a minute, and every departure for this horse-exercise had continued to be an occasion of secret agony.
Foreign as they might be to his own character, all these shades of feeling, which had made the education of the young man a mysterious poem of foolish terror, painful felicity, and continual effusiveness, had been understood by Count Scilly, thanks to the intelligence of the most devoted affection, and he knew that Madame Castel, though outwardly more mistress of herself, was little better than her daughter. How many glances from the pale woman had he not caught, wrapping Marie Alice Liauran and Hubert in too ardent and absolute idolatry?
The days had passed away; their child was reaching his twenty-second year, and the two widows continued to entwine and bind him with the thousand attentions by which impassioned women, whether mothers, wives, or lovers, know how to keep the object of their passion beside them. With a careful minuteness that was fruitful in intimate delight, they had taken pleasure in furnishing for Hubert the most charming bachelor's rooms that could be imagined. They had enlarged a pavilion running out from behind the house into a little garden which was itself contiguous to the immense garden in the Rue de Varenne. From her own bedroom windows Madame Liauran could see those of her son, who had thus a little independent universe to himself. The two women had had the sense to understand that they could keep Hubert altogether with themselves only by anticipating the wish for a personal existence inevitable in a man of twenty.
On the ground floor of this pavilion were two spacious rooms on a level with the garden—one containing a billiard table, and the other every requisite for fencing. It was here that Hubert received his friends, consisting of some people from the Faubourg Saint-Germain; for, although Madame Castel and Madame Liauran did not visit, they had maintained continuous relations with all those in the Faubourg who occupied themselves with works of charity. These formed a distinct society, very different from the worldly clan, and united in a mode all the closer, because its relations were very frequent, serious and personal. But certainly none of Hubert's young friends moved in an establishment comparable to that which the two women had organised on the first story of the pavilion. They who lived in the simplicity of unexpectant widows, and who would not for the world have modified anything in the antique furniture of their house, had had modern luxury and comfort suddenly revealed to them by their feelings towards Hubert.
The young man's bedroom was hung with prettily and coquettishly fantastical Japanese stuffs, and all the furniture had come from England. Madame Castel and Madame Liauran had been charmed with some specimens which they had seen at the house of a furious Anglomaniac and distant relation of their own, and with the caprice of love they had proposed to give themselves the pleasure of affording this original elegance to their child. Accordingly, the room, which looked towards the south and always had the sun upon it, contained a charming, triple-panelled wardrobe, a wooden wainscot and a what-not mirror over the mantlepiece, two graceful brackets, a low square bed, and arm-chairs that one could lounge in for ever—in short, it was really such ahomeof refined convenience as every rich Englishman likes to obtain. A bath-room and a smoking-room adjoined this apartment.
Although Hubert was not as yet addicted to tobacco, the two women had anticipated even this habit, and it had afforded them a pretext for fitting up a little room in quite an Oriental fashion, with a profusion of Persian carpets and a broad divan draped with Algerian stuffs brought back by the General from his campaigns, while similar stuffs adorned ceilings and walls, upon which might be seen all the weapons which three generations of officers had left behind them. Some Egyptian sabres recalled the first campaign in which Hubert Castel had served in Buonaparte's retinue. The Captain in the African Army had been the owner of these Arab weapons, and those memorials of the Crimea bore witness to the presence of Sub-Lieutenant Liauran beneath the walls of Sebastopol.
On leaving the smoking-room you entered the study, the windows of which were double, those inside being of coloured glass, so that on dull days it was possible not to notice the aspect of the hour. The two women had endured such frightful recurrences of melancholy on gloomy afternoons, and beneath cruel skies! A large writing-table standing in the middle of the room had in front of it one of those revolving arm-chairs which allows the worker to turn round towards the fireplace without so much as rising. A little Tronchin table presented its raised desk, if the young man took a fancy to stand as he wrote, while a couch awaited his idleness. A cottage piano stood in the corner, and a long, low bookshelf ran along the back part of the room.
Perhaps the books with which the shelves of the last-named piece of furniture were provided interpreted even better than all the other details the anxious solicitude with which Madame Castel and Madame Liauran had made every arrangement in order to remain mistresses of the son during those difficult years which intervene between the twentieth and the thirtieth. Having both, as soldiers' widows, preserved a reverence for a life of action while, at the same time, their extreme tenderness for Hubert rendered them incapable of enduring that he should face it, they had found a compromise for their consciences in the dream of a studious life for him. They ingenuously cherished a wish that he should undertake a large and long work of military history, such as one of the De Trans family had left behind him in the eighteenth century. Was not this the best means for ensuring that he would remain a great deal at home—that is to say, with them? Accordingly, thanks to Scilly's advice, they had formed a tolerable collection of books suitable for this project. Some religious works, a small number of novels, and, alone among modern writers, the works of Lamartine completed the equipment of the shelves.
It is right to say that in that corner of the world where no journal was taken in, contemporary literature was completely unknown. The ideas of the General and of the two women were identical on this point. And the case was nearly the same in respect of the whole contemporary world as it was in respect of literature. Astonishing conversations might have been heard in that drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, in the course of which the Count would explain to his friends that France was governed by the delegates of the secret societies, with other political theories of similar scope. The same causes always produce the same effects. Precisely as happens in very small country towns, monotony of habit had resulted, with the two widows, in monotony of thought. Feelings were very deep and ideas very narrow in that old house the entrance gate of which was opened but rarely. On such occasions the passer-by could see, at the end of a court, a building on the pediment of which might be read a Latin motto, engraved in former times in honour of Marshal de Créquy, the first owner of the house:Marti invicto atque indefesso—to unconquered and indefatigable Mars. The lofty windows of the first storey and of the ground floor, the old colour of the stone, the appropriate silence of the court, all harmonised with the characters of the two residents, whose prejudices were infinite.
Madame Castel and her daughter believed in presentiments, double sight, and somnambulists. They were persuaded that the Emperor Napoleon III. had undertaken the Italian war in fulfilment of a carbonaro oath. Never would these divinely good women have bestowed their friendship upon a Protestant or an Israelite. The mere idea that there might be a conscientious Freethinker would have disconcerted them as though they had been told of the sanctity of a criminal. In short, even the General thought them ingenuous. But, as it sometimes happens with officers condemned to fleeting loves by their roving life and the timid feelings hidden beneath their martial appearance Scilly was not well enough acquainted with women to appreciate the reality of this ingenuousness or the depth of the ignorance of evil in which the two Marie Alices lived. He supposed that all virtuous women were similar, and he confounded all others under the term of "queans." When his liver troubled him excessively he would pronounce this word in a tone which gave grounds for suspecting some bitter deception in his past life. But who among the few people that he met at the house of "his two saints," as he called Madame Castel and her daughter, dreamed of troubling themselves about whether he had been deceived by some garrison adventuress or not?
Still lulled by the rolling of his carriage, the General continued to resign himself to the memory-crisis through which he had been passing since his departure from the Rue Vaneau, and which had caused him to review, in a quarter of an hour, the entire existence of his friends. Other faces also were evoked around these two forms, those, for instance, of Madame de Trans, Madame Castel's first cousin, who lived in the country for part of the year, and who used to come with her three daughters, Yolande, Yseult and Ysabeau, to spend the winter at Paris. These four ladies used to take up their abode in apartments in the Rue de Monsieur, and their Parisian life consisted in hearing low mass at seven o'clock in the morning in the private chapel of a convent situated in the Rue de La Barouillère, in visiting other convents, or in busying themselves in workrooms during the afternoon. They went to bed at about half-past eight, after dining at noon and supping at six.
Twice a week "those De Trans ladies," as the General called them, spent the evening with their cousins. On these occasions they returned to the Rue de Monsieur at ten o'clock, and their servant used to come for them with a parcel containing their pattens and with a lantern that they might cross the courtyard of Madame Castel's house without danger. The Countess de Trans and her three daughters had the sunburnt and freckled faces of peasant women, dresses home-made by seamstresses chosen for them by the nuns, parsimonious tastes written in the meanness of their whole existence, and—a detail revealing their native aristocracy—charming hands and delicious feet which could not be disgraced by the ready-made boots purchased in a pious establishment in the Rue de Sèvres.
The most singular contrast existed between these four women and George Liauran, another cousin on the side of the second Marie Alice. He represented all the fashions in the drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau. He was a man of forty-five who had been launched into wealthy society with a fortune that had at first been a moderate one but had increased by clever speculations on the Bourse. He had his rooms in his club, where he used to breakfast, and every evening a cover was laid for him in one of the houses in which he was a familiar guest. He was small, thin, and very brown. Whether or not he maintained the youth of his pointed beard and very short hair by the artifice of a dye, was a question that had long been debated among the three Demoiselles de Trans, who were stupefied at the sight of George's superior appearance, the varnished soles of his dress-shoes, the embroidered clocks of his silk socks, the chased gold studs in his cuffs, the single pearl in his shirt front, by the slightest knick-knacks, in fact, belonging to this man with the shrewd lively eyes, whose toilet represented to them a life of thrilling prodigality. It was agreed among them that he exercised a fatal influence over Hubert.
Such was doubtless not Madame Liauran's opinion, for she had desired George to act as a chaperon to the young man in the life of the world, when she wished her son to cultivate their family relations. The noble woman rewarded her cousin's lengthened attention by this mark of confidence. He had come to the quiet house very regularly for years, whether it was that the security of this affection was pleasing to him amid the falsities of Parisian society, or that he had long conceived a secret adoration for Marie Alice Liauran, such as the purest women sometimes unconsciously inspire in misanthropes—for George had that shade of pessimism which is to be met with in nearly all club-livers. The nature of the character of this man, who was always inclined to believe the worst of everything, was the object of an astonishment on the part of the General that custom had failed to allay; but on this evening he omitted to reflect upon it. The recollection of George only served to heighten that of Hubert still more.
Irresistibly the worthy man came to recognise the obviousness of the fact that his two friends could not be so cruelly downcast except on account of their child. Yes; but why? This point of interrogation, which summed up the whole of his reverie, was more present than ever to the Count's mind as his dowager equipage stopped before his house. Another carriage was standing on the other side of the gateway, and Scilly thought that in it he could recognise the little brougham which Madame Liauran had given to her son.
"Is that you, John?" he cried to the coachman through the rain.
"The Count, sir? . . . ." replied a voice which Scilly was startled to recognise.
"Hubert is waiting for me within," he said to himself; and he crossed the threshold of the door a prey to curiosity such as he had not experienced for years.
Nevertheless, in spite of his curiosity, the General did not make a gesture the quicker. The habit of military minuteness was too strong with him to be vanquished by any emotion. He himself put his stick into the stand, drew off his furred gloves one after the other and laid them on the table in the antechamber beside his hat, which was carefully placed on its side. His servant took off his overcoat with the same slowness. Not until then did he enter the apartment where, as his servant had just told him, the young man had been awaiting him for half-an-hour.
It was a cheerless looking room, and one which revealed the simplicity of a life reduced to its strictest wants. Oak shelves overladen with books, the mere appearance of which indicated official publications, ran along two sides. Some maps and a few weapon-trophies adorned the rest. A writing-table placed in the centre of the apartment displayed papers classified in groups—notes for the great work which the Count had been preparing for an indefinite time on the reorganisation of the army. Two lustring sleeves, methodically folded, lay among the squares and rulers; a bust of Marshal Bugeaud adorned the fireplace, which was furnished with a grate, in which a coke fire was dying out.
The tile-paved floor was tinted red, and the carpet scarcely extended beyond the legs of the table which rested upon them. On the table stood a bright copper lamp, which was lighted at the present moment, and the green cardboard shade threw the light upon the face of young Liauran, who was seated beside it in the straw arm-chair, and was looking at the fire, with his chin resting on his hand. He was so absorbed in his reverie that he appeared to have heard neither the rolling of the carriage-wheels nor the General's entrance into the apartment. Never, moreover, had the latter been so struck as he was just then with the astonishing likeness presented by the physiognomy of the child with that of the two women by whom he had been brought up.
If Madame Liauran appeared more frail than her mother, and less capable of coping with the bitterness of life, this fragility was still more exaggerated in Hubert. The thin cloth of his dress-coat—for he was in evening dress, with a white nosegay in his button-hole—allowed the outlines of his slender shoulders to be seen. The fingers extended across his temple were as delicate as a woman's. The paleness of his complexion, which, owing to the extreme regularity of his life, was usually tinged with pink, betrayed, in this hour of sadness, the depth of vibration awakened by all emotion in this too delicate organism. There were deep, nacreous circles round his handsome black eyes; but, at the same time, a touch of pride in the line of the nobly-cut forehead and almost perfectly straight nose, the curve of the lips with its slender dark moustache, the set of the chin marked with a manly dimple, and other tokens still, such as the bar of the knitted eyebrows, betrayed the heredity of a race of action in the over-petted child of two lovely women.
If the General had been as good a connoisseur in painting as he was skilled in arms, this face would certainly have reminded him of those portraits of young princes painted by Van Dyck, in which the almost morbid delicacy of an ancient race is blended with the obstinate pride of heroic blood. After pausing for a few seconds in contemplation, the General walked towards the table. Hubert raised the charming head which his brown ringlets, disordered as they were at that moment, rendered completely similar to the portraits executed by the painter of Charles I.; he saw his godfather and rose to greet him. He had a slight and well-made figure, and merely in the graceful fashion in which he held out his hand could be traced the lengthened watchfulness of maternal eyes. Are not our manners the indestructible work of the looks which have followed us and judged us during our childhood?
"And so you have come to speak to me on very serious business," said the General, going straight to the point. "I suspected as much," he added. "I left your mother and your grandmother more melancholy than I had ever seen them since the Italian war. Why were you not with them this evening? If you do not make those two women happy, Hubert, you are cruelly ungrateful, for they would give their lives for your happiness. And now, what is going on?"
The General, in uttering these words, had pursued aloud the thoughts which had been tormenting him during the drive home from the Rue Vaneau. He could see the young man's features changing visibly as he spoke. It was one of the hereditary fatalities in the temperament of this too dearly loved child that the sound of a harsh voice always gave him a painful little spasm of the heart; but, no doubt, to the harshness of Count Scilly's accents there was added the harshness of the meaning of his words. They brutally laid bare a too sensitive wound. Hubert sat down as though crushed; then he replied in a voice which, naturally somewhat clouded, was at this moment more muffled than usual. He did not even attempt to deny that he was the cause of the sorrow on the part of the two women.
"Do not question me, godfather. I give you my word of honour that I am not guilty, only I cannot explain to you the misunderstanding which makes me a subject of grief to them. I cannot help it. I have gone out oftener than usual, and that is my only crime."
"You are not telling me the whole truth," replied Scilly, softened, in spite of his anger, by the young man's evident grief. "Your mother and your grandmother are too fond of keeping you tied to their apron strings, and I have always thought so. You would have been brought up more hardily if I had been your father. Women do not understand how to train a man. But have they not been urging you for the last two years to go into society? It is not your going out, therefore, that grieves them, but your motive for doing so."
As he uttered these words, which he considered very clever, the Count looked at his godson through the smoke from a little brier pipe which he had just lighted, a mechanical custom sufficiently explaining the acrid atmosphere with which the room was saturated. He saw Hubert's cheeks colour with a sudden inflow of blood, which to a more perspicacious observer would have been an undeniable confession. Only an allusion or the dread of an allusion to a woman whom he loves, has the power to disturb a young man of such evident purity as Hubert was. After a few moments of this sudden emotion, he replied:
"I declare to you, godfather, that there is nothing in my conduct of which I should be ashamed. It is the first time that neither my mother nor my grandmother has understood me—but I shall not yield to them on the point in dispute. They are unjust about it, frightfully unjust," he continued, rising and taking a few steps.
This time his face was no longer expressive of submission, but of the indomitable pride which military heredity had infused into his blood. He did not give the General time to notice his words, which in the mouth of a son, usually only too submissive, disclosed an extraordinary intensity of passion. He contracted his eyebrows, shook his head as though to drive away some tormenting thought, and, once more master of himself, went on:
"I have not come here to complain to you, godfather; you would give me a bad reception, and you would not be wrong. I have to ask a service of you, a great service. But I would wish all that I am going to confide to you to remain between ourselves."
"I never enter into such engagements," said the Count. "A man has not always the right to be silent," he added. "All that I can promise you is to keep your secret if my affection for you know whom, does not make it a duty that I should speak. Come, now, decide for yourself."
"Be it so," rejoined the young man, after a silence, during which he had, no doubt, judged of the situation in which he found himself; "you will do as you please. What I have to say to you is comprised in a short sentence. Godfather, can you lend me three thousand francs?"
This question was so unexpected by the Count that it forthwith changed the current of his thoughts. Since the beginning of the conversation he had been trying to guess the young man's secret, which was also the secret of his two friends, and he had necessarily thought that some intrigue was in question. To tell the truth, he did not consider this very shocking. Though very devout, Scilly had remained too essentially a soldier not to have most indulgent theories respecting love. Military life leads those who follow it to a simplification of thought which causes them to admit all facts, whatever they may be, in their verity. A "quean" in Scilly's eyes was a necessary malady with a young man. It was enough if the malady did not last too long, and if the young man came out of it with tolerable impunity. Now he had suddenly a misgiving that was more alarming to him, for, owing to his regimental experience, he considered cards much more dangerous than women.
"You have been gambling?" he said abruptly.
"No, godfather," replied the young man. "I have merely spent more than my allowance for the last few months; I have debts to settle, and," he added, "I am leaving for England the day after to-morrow."
"And your mother knows of this journey?"
"Undoubtedly; I am going to spend a fortnight in London with my friend, Emmanuel Deroy, of the Embassy, whom you know."
"If your mother lets you go," returned the old man, continuing the logical pursuit of his inquiry, "it is because your conduct in Paris is grieving her cruelly. Answer me frankly—You have a mistress?"
"No," replied Hubert, with a fresh rush of purple across his cheeks. "I have no mistress."
"If it is neither the Queen of Spades nor the Queen of Hearts," said the General, who did not doubt his godson's veracity for a moment—he knew him to be incapable of a falsehood—"will you do me the honour of telling me what has become of the five hundred francs a month, a colonel's pay, which your mother gives you for pocket-money?"
"Ah! godfather," returned the young man, visibly relieved; "you do not know the requirements of a life in society. Why, to-day I gave a dinner to three friends at the Café Anglais; that came to very nearly a hundred and fifty francs. I have sent several bouquets, hired carriages to go into the country, and given a few keepsakes. The five bank-notes are so soon at an end! In short, I repeat, I have debts that I want to pay, I have to meet the expenses of my journey, and I do not want to apply to my mother or my grandmother just now. They do not know what a young man's life in Paris is like; I do not want to add a second misunderstanding to the first. With our present relations what they are they would see faults where there have been only inevitable necessities. And, then, I am physically unable to endure a scene with my mother."
"And if I refuse?" Scilly asked.
"I shall apply elsewhere," said Alexander Hubert; "it will be terribly painful to me, but I shall do so."
There was silence between the two men. The whole story was darkening again in the General's eyes, like the smoke which he was sending from his pipe in methodical puffs. But what he did see clearly was the definitive nature of Hubert's resolve, whatever its secret cause might be. To refuse him would be perhaps to send him to a money-lender, or at all events to force him to take some step wounding to his pride. On the other hand, to advance this sum to his godson was to acquire a right to follow out more closely the mystery which lay at the bottom of his excitement, as well as behind the melancholy of the two women. And then, when all is told, the Count loved Hubert with an affection that bordered closely on weakness. If he had been deeply moved by Madame Liauran's and Madame Castel's dull despair, he was now completely upset by the visible anguish written on the face of this child, who was, in his thoughts, an adopted son as dear as any real son could have been.
"My dear fellow," he said at last, taking Hubert's hand, and in a tone of voice giving no further token of the harshness which had marked the beginning of their conversation, "I think too highly of you to believe that you would associate me in any action that could displease your mother. I will do what you wish, but on one condition——"
Hubert's eyes betrayed fresh anxiety.
"It is merely to fix the date on which you expect to repay me the money. I want to oblige you," continued the old soldier, "but it would not be worthy of you to borrow a sum that you believed yourself unable to pay back again, nor of me to lend myself to a calculation of the kind. Will you come back here to-morrow afternoon? You will bring me an account of what you can spare from your allowance every month. Ah! it will not do to offer any more bouquets, or dinners at the Café Anglais, or keepsakes. But, then, have you not lived for a long time past without these foolish expenses?"
This little speech, in which the spirit of order that was essential to the General, his goodness of heart, and his taste for regularity of life were blended in equal proportion, moved Hubert so deeply that he pressed his godfather's fingers without replying, as though crushed by emotions which he had left unexpressed. He suspected that while this interview was taking place at the Quai d'Orléans, the evening was being lengthened out at the house in the Rue Vaneau, and that the two beings whom he loved so deeply were commenting on his absence. He himself suffered from the pain that he was causing, as though a mysterious thread linked him to those two women seated beside their lonely hearth.
And, indeed, the General once gone, the "two saints" had remained silent for a long time in the quiet little drawing-room. Nothing of all the tumult of Parisian life reached them but a vast, confused murmuring analogous to that of the sea when heard a long way off. The seclusion of this retired abode, with the hum of life outside, was a symbol of what had so long been the destiny of Madame Castel and her daughter. Marie Alice Liauran, lying on her couch, and looking very slight in her black attire, seemed to be listening to this hum, or to her thoughts, for she had relinquished the work with which she had been engaged; while her mother, seated in her easy-chair, and also in black, continued to ply her tortoiseshell crochet-hook, sometimes raising her eyes towards her daughter with a look wherein a twofold anxiety might be read. She also experienced the sensation felt by her daughter, on account both of Hubert and of this daughter, whose almost morbid sensitiveness she knew. It was not she, however, who first broke the silence, but Madame Liauran, who suddenly, and as though pursuing her reverie aloud, began to lament:
"What renders my pain still more intolerable is that he sees the wound which he has dealt my heart, and that he is not to be stopped by it—he who, from childhood until within the last six months, could never encounter a shadow in my look or a wrinkle on my forehead without a change of countenance. That is what convinces me of the depth of his passion for this woman. What a passion and what a woman!"
"Do not become excited," said Madame Castel, rising and kneeling in front of her daughter's couch. "You are in a fever," she said, taking her hand. Then, in a low voice, and as though probing her consciousness to the bottom, she went on: "Alas! my child, you are jealous of your son, as I have been jealous of you. I have spent so many days—I can tell you this now—in loving your husband——"
"Ah! mother," replied Madame Liauran, "that is not the same kind of grief. I did not degrade myself in giving part of my heart to the man whom you had chosen, while you know that cousin George has told us of this Madame de Sauve, and of her education by that unworthy mother, and of her reputation since she has been married, and of the husband who can suffer his wife to have a drawing-room in which the conversation is more than free, and of the father, the old prefect, who, on being left a widower, brought up his daughter helter-skelter with his mistresses. I confess, mamma, that if there is egotism in maternal love, I have had that egotism; I have been grieved by anticipation at the thought that Hubert would marry, and that he would continue his life apart from mine. But I blamed myself greatly for feeling in that way,—whereas now he has been taken from me, and taken from me only to be disgraced!"
For some minutes longer she prolonged this violent lamentation, wherein was revealed that kind of passionate frenzy which had caused all the keen forces of her heart to be concentrated about her son. It was not only the mother that suffered in her, it was the pious mother to whom human faults were abominable crimes; it was the sad and isolated mother upon whom the rivalry of a young, rich, and elegant woman inflicted secret humiliation; in fine, her heart was bleeding at every pore. The sight of this suffering, however, wounded Madame Castel so cruelly, and her eyes expressed such sorrowful pity, that Marie Alice broke off her complaint. She leaned over on her couch, laid a kiss upon those poor eyes, so like her own, and said:
"Forgive me, mamma; but to whom should I tell my trouble if not to you? And then—would you not see it? Hubert is not coming in," she added, looking at the clock, the pendulum of which continued to move quietly to and fro. "Do you not think that I ought to have opposed this journey to England?"
"No, my child; if he is going to pay a visit to his friend, why should you exercise your authority in vain? And if he were going from any other motive, he would not obey you. Remember that he is twenty-two years old, and that he is a man."
"I am growing foolish, mother; this journey was settled a long time ago—I have seen Emmanuel's letters; but, when I am grieved, I can no longer reason, I can see nothing but my sorrow, and it obstructs all my thoughts—— Ah! how unhappy I am!"
If any proof of the thorough many-sidedness of our nature were required, it might be found in that law which is a customary object of indignation with moralists, and which ordains that the sight of the sorrow of our most loved ones cannot, at certain times, prevent us from being happy. Our feelings seem to maintain a sort of life and death struggle against one another in our hearts. Intensity of existence in anyone among them, though it be but momentary, is only to be obtained at the cost of weakening all the rest. It is certain that Hubert loved his two mothers—as he always called the two women who had brought him up—to distraction. It is certain that he had guessed that for many days they had been holding conversations together analogous to that of the evening on which he had borrowed from his godfather the three thousand francs which he required for settling his debts and meeting the cost of his journey.
And yet, on the second day after that evening, when he found himself in the train which was taking him to Boulogne, it was impossible for him not to feel his soul steeped, as it were, in divine bliss. He did not ask himself whether Count Scilly would or would not speak of the step that he had taken. He put aside the apprehension of this just as he drove away the recollection of Madame Liauran's eyes at the moment of his departure, and just as he stifled all the scruples that might be suggested by his uncompromising piety.
If he had not absolutely lied to his mother in telling her that he was going to join his friend Emmanuel Deroy in London, he had nevertheless deceived this jealous mother by concealing from her that he would meet Madame de Sauve at Folkestone. Now, Madame de Sauve was not free. Madame de Sauve was married, and in the eyes of a young man brought up as the pious Hubert had been, to love a married woman constituted an inexpiable fault. Hubert must and did believe himself in a condition of mortal sin. His Catholicism, which was not merely a religion of fashion and posture, left him in no doubt on this point. But religion, family obligations of truthfulness, fears for the future, all these phantoms of conscience appeared to him—conditioned only as phantoms, vain, powerless images, vanishing before the living evocation of the beauty of the woman who, five months before had entered into his heart to renew all within it, the woman whom he loved and by whom he knew himself to be loved.
Hubert had told the truth, in that he was not Madame de Sauve's lover in that sense of entire and physical possession in which the term is understood in our language. She had never belonged to him, and it was the first time that he was going to be really alone with her, in that solitude of a foreign land which is the secret dream of everyone who loves.
While the train was steaming at full speed through plains alternately ribbed with hills, intersected with watercourses, and bristling with bare trees, the young man was absorbed in telling the rosary of his recollections. The charm of the hours that were gone was rendered still dearer to him by the expectation of some immense and undefined happiness.
Although Madame Liauran's son was twenty-two years of age, the manner of his education had kept him in that state of purity so rare among the young men of Paris, who, for the most part, have exhausted pleasure before they have had so much as a suspicion of love. But a fact of which the young fellow was not aware was that it had been this very purity which had acted more powerfully than the most accomplished libertinism could have done upon the romantic imagination of the woman whose profile was passing to and fro before his gaze with the motion of the carriage, and showing itself alternately against woods, hills and dunes. How many images does a passing train thus bear along, and with them how many destinies rushing towards weal or woe in the distant and the unknown!
It was at the beginning of the month of October, in the preceding year, that Hubert had seen Madame de Sauve for the first time. On account of Madame Liauran's health, which rendered the shortest journey dangerous to her, the two women never left Paris; but the young man sometimes went during the summer or autumn to spend three or four days in some country house. He was coming back from one of these visits in company with his cousin George, when, getting into a carriage at a station on the same northern line along which he was now travelling, he had met the young lady with her husband. The De Sauves were acquainted with George, and thus it was that Alexander Hubert had been introduced.
Monsieur de Sauve was a man of about forty-five years of age, very tall and strong, with a face that was already too red, and with traces of wear and tear which were discernible through his vigour, and the explanation of which might be found, merely by listening to his conversation, in his mode of regarding life. Existence to him was self-lavishment, and he carried out this programme in all directions. Head of a ministerial cabinet in 1869, thrown after the war into the campaign of Bonapartist propaganda, a deputy since then, and always re-elected, but an active deputy, and one who bribed his electors, he had at the same time launched forth more and more freely into society. He had asalon, gave dinners, occupied himself with sport, and still found sufficient leisure to interest himself competently and successfully in financial enterprises. Add to this that before his marriage he had had much experience of ballet dancers, green-rooms of small theatres, and private supper-rooms.
There are temperaments of this kind which nature makes into machines at a great outlay, and consequently with great returns. Everything in André de Sauve revealed a taste for what is ample and powerful, from the construction of his great body to his style of dress, or to the gesture with which he would take a long black cigar from his case to smoke it. Hubert well remembered how this man, with his hairy hands and ears, his large feet and his dragon's mien, had inspired him with that description of physical repulsion which we all endure on meeting with a physiology precisely contrary to our own.
Are there not respirations, circulations of blood, plays of muscle which are hostile to us, thanks, probably, to that indefinable instinct of life which impels two animals of different species to rend each other as soon as they come face to face? Truth to tell, the antipathy of the delicate Hubert was capable of being more simply explained on the ground of an unconscious and sudden jealousy of Madame de Sauve's husband; for Theresa, as her husband familiarly called her, had immediately exercised a sort of irresistible attraction upon the young man. In his childhood he had often turned over a portfolio of engravings brought back from Italy by his illustrious grandfather, who had served under Bonaparte, and at the first glance that fell upon this woman, he could not help recalling the heads drawn by the masters of the Lombardic school, so striking was the resemblance between her face and those of the familiar Herodiases and Madonnas of Luini and his pupils.
There was the same full, broad forehead, the same large eyes charged with somewhat heavy eyelids, the same delicious oval at the lower part of the cheek terminating in an almost square chin, the same sinuosity of lips, the same delightful union of eyebrow to the rising of the nose, and over all these charming features, a suffusion, as it were, of gentleness, grace, and mystery. Madame de Sauve had further, the vigorous neck and broad shoulders of the women of the Lombardic school, as well as all the other tokens of a race at once refined and strong, with a slender waist and the hands and feet of a child. What marked her out from this traditional type was the colour of her hair, which was not red and gold but very black, and of her eyes, the mingled grey of which bordered upon green. The amber paleness of her complexion, as well as the languishing listlessness of all her movements, completed the singular character of her beauty.
In the presence of this creature, it was impossible not to think of some portrait of past times, although she breathed youth with the purple of her mouth and the living fluid of her eyes, and although she was dressed in the fashion of the day, and wore a jacket fitting close to her figure. The skirt of her dress, made of an English material of a grey shade, her feet cased in laced boots, her little man's collar, her straight cravat, fastened with a diamond horseshoe pin, her Swede gloves, and her round hat, scarcely suggested the toilet of princesses of the sixteenth century; and yet she presented to the eye a finished model of Milanese beauty, even in this costume of Parisian elegance. By what mystery?
She was the daughter of Madame Lussac,néeBressuire, whose relations had not left the Rue Saint-Honoré for three generations, and of Adolphus Lussac, Prefect under the Empire, who had come from Auvergne in Monsieur Rouher's train. The chronicle of the drawing-rooms would have answered the question by recalling the Parisian career of the handsome Count Branciforte, somewhere about the year 1858, his greenish-grey eyes, his dead-white complexion, his attentions to Madame Lussac, and his sudden disappearance from surroundings in which for months and months he had always lived. But Hubert was never to have these particulars. By education and by nature he belonged to the race of those who accept life's official gifts and ignore their deep-lying causes, their thorough animality, and their tragic lining—a happy race, for to them belongs the enjoyment of the flower of things, but a race devoted beforehand to catastrophes, for only a clear view of the real will admit of any manipulation of it.
No; what Hubert Liauran remembered of this first interview did not consist of questions concerning the singularity of Madame de Sauve's charm. Neither had he examined himself as to the shade of character that might be indicated by the movements of the woman. Instead of studying her face he had enjoyed it as a child will relish the freshness of the atmosphere, with a sort of unconscious delight. The complete absence of irony which distinguished Theresa, and which might be noted in her gentle smile, her calm gaze, her smooth voice, and her tranquil gestures, had instantly been sweet to him. He had not felt in her presence those pangs of painful timidity which the incisive glance of most Parisian ladies inflicts upon all young men.
During the journey which they had made together, while De Sauve and George Liauran were speaking of a law concerning religious congregations, the tenour of which was at that time exciting every party, he had sat opposite to her, and had been able to talk to her softly and, without knowing why, with intimacy. He who was usually silent about himself, with a vague idea that the almost insane excitability of his being made him a unique exception, had opened his mind to this woman of twenty-five, whom he had not known for half-an-hour, more than he had ever done to people with whom he dined every fortnight.
In answer to a question from Theresa about his travels in the summer, he had naturally, as it were, spoken of his mother and her complaint, then of his grandmother, and then of their common life. He had given this stranger a glimpse of the secret retreat in the house in the Rue Vaneau, not indeed without remorse; but the remorse had been later, when he was no longer within the range of her glances, and had come less from a feeling of outraged modesty than from a fear of having been displeasing to her. How captivating, in truth, were those gentle glances. There emanated from them an inexpressible caress, and when they settled upon your eyes, full in your face, the resultant sensation was like that of a tender touch, and bordered upon physical voluptuousness.
Days afterwards Hubert still remembered the species of intoxicating comfort which he had experienced in this first chat merely through feeling himself looked at in this way, and this comfort had only increased in succeeding interviews, until it had almost immediately become a real necessity for him, like breathing or sleeping. When leaving the carriage she had told him that she was at home every Thursday, and he had soon learnt the way to the house in the Boulevard Haussmann, where she lived. In what recess of his heart had he found the energy for paying this visit, which fell on the next day but one after their meeting? Almost immediately, she had asked him to dinner. He remembered so vividly the childish pleasure which he took in reading and re-reading the insignificant note of invitation, in inhaling its slight perfume, and in following the details of the letters of his name, written by the hand of Theresa. It was a handwriting which, from the abundance of little, useless flourishes, presented a peculiarly light and fantastic appearance, in which a graphologist would have been prepared to read the sign of a romantic nature; but, at the same time, the bold fashion in which the lines were struck and the firmness of the down-strokes, where the pen pressed somewhat liberally, denoted a willingly practical and almost material mode of life.
Hubert did not reason so much as this; but, from the first note, every letter that he received in the same handwriting became to him a person whom he would have recognised among thousands, of others. With what happiness had he dressed to go to that dinner, telling himself that he was about to see Madame de Sauve during long hours, hours which, reckoned in advance, appeared infinite to him! He had felt a somewhat angry astonishment when his mother, at the moment that he was taking leave of her, had uttered a critical observation on the familiarity that was customary in society now-a-days. Then, separated though he was by months from those events, he was able, thanks to the special imagination with which, like all very sensitive creatures, he was endowed, to recall the exact shade of emotion which had been caused him by the dinner and the evening, the demeanour of the guests and that of Theresa. It is according as we possess a greater or smaller power of imagining past pains and pleasures anew that we are beings capable of cold calculation, or slaves to our sentimental life. Alas! all Hubert's faculties conspired to rivet round his heart the bruising chain of memories that were too dear.