To-day the state of her mind and feelings prompted Suzanne herself to say, as soon as she had entered the room, 'I am very sorry, Frédéric dear, but I shall have to leave you rather early.'
'Has it put you out to come?' asked the Baron as he helped her off with her cloak. 'Why didn't you send me a line to countermand our appointment?'
'He is really too kind,' thought Suzanne, feeling some slight remorse for her unnecessary fib. Taking her hat off before the glass the flash of her diamond earrings caught her eye, and suddenly reminded her of all that she owed this man, who asked for so little in return.
False situations sometimes give rise to conscientious paradoxes, and it was a feeling of honesty that impelled this woman to come and seat herself on the arm of the Baron's easy chair and to sigh, 'I should have been terribly disappointed myself. Will you never believe that I am really glad to come here?—I owe him that at least,' she thought, and in further obedience to her strange qualms of conscience she contrived to be more than usually fascinating and docile during the whole of theirtête-à-tête.
At the end of a couple of hours, whilst she was lying back half buried in one of the great arm-chairs, enjoying a caviar sandwich and a thimbleful of fine old sherry, Desforges, who was watching her dainty movements as she ate, could not help exclaiming: 'Ah! Suzon! At my age, too! What would Noirot say?'
This Noirot who had so suddenly troubled the Baron's mind was a doctor who treated him to a course of massage every morning and watched over his general health. Everything in the life of this systematic voluptuary was carefully planned out, from the amount of exercise to be taken each day to the attendance he should receive when in his dotage. He had taken into his house a poor and pious female relative, to whose good works he annually subscribed a pretty round sum. When complimented on his generosity, he would reply in his own jocular and cynical way: 'What can I do? I must have some one to look after me in my old age. My cousin will be my nurse, and make the best one in Paris.'
Generally these outbursts of unblushing egotism amused Suzanne. She saw in them a conception of life whose pronounced materialism was far from displeasing her. But to-day she looked a little more closely at the Baron as he uttered his doctor's name, and sitting there with the lamp-light full upon his wrinkled face, his drooping moustache and his swollen eyelids, he looked so broken down and so fully his age that the hideousness of her own life suddenly burst upon her. It is a horrible thing for a young and beautiful woman to endure the caresses of a man she does not love, even when that man is young, full of passion and ardour. But when he is bordering on old age, when he pays for the right to pollute this fair woman whose love he cannot win, then it is prostitution so terrible that disgust gives way to sorrow. For the first time, perhaps, Desforges looked old in Suzanne's eyes, and by an irresistible impulse of her whole soul she called to mind, as a contrast, the fresh lips and fair young face of the man whose image had haunted her for the past two days. She felt how foolishly she had behaved in hesitating for an instant, and, being a person of determination, she commenced to act at once.
She was now dressed, and having put on her bonnet and buttoned her gloves, she said to Desforges before tying on her veil, 'When are you coming to lunch with me? Once upon a time you often used to come without being asked—it was so nice of you.'
'To-morrow I can't,' he replied, 'nor the next day either, but the day after that——'
'Tuesday, then? That's an understood thing. And to-night I shall see you at Madame de Sermoises', sha'n't I?'
'Charming woman!' thought the Baron, as he was left alone. 'She might have so many adventures, and her only thought is of pleasing me.'
'The day after to-morrow, then, I am sure of being alone,' said Suzanne to herself as she swept along the pavement of the Rue du Mont-Thabor, casting cautious glances to the right and left, but with such art that her eyes scarcely seemed to move. 'But what excuse can I give René'—she already called him by that name in her thoughts—'to make him come? I know—I'll ask him to write a few lines on a copy of the "Sigisbée" that I'm going to send to a friend.'
She had to pass a bookseller's in the Rue Castiglione, and went in to buy the book, being in that state of mind when the execution of an idea follows almost automatically upon its conception. 'I hope he'll not do anything foolish before then. And I hope he won't hear anything about me that will dampen his ardour.' Claude Larcher once more came into her mind. 'Yes—he's certainly dangerous,' she thought, and saw at once the means of avoiding the danger provided René came to her before speaking to Claude. Then it suddenly struck her that she did not know the poet's address, but that difficulty could be got over by calling on Madame Komof. 'It is past six now, and she is sure to be at home.' Hailing a cab, she drove to the Rue du Bel-Respiro, and was lucky enough to find the Comtesse alone, from whom it was easy to obtain the information she wanted.
The worthy lady, whosesoiréehad been a success, was loud in her praise of the poet. 'Idéal!' she exclaimed, with one of her wild gesticulations, 'charming! And so modest! He will be your modern Poushkin.'
'Do you know where he lives?' inquired Suzanne. 'He called on me and only left his name.'
No sooner had her note been written and sent than she became a prey to that uncertainty upon which newborn love thrives so well that in those days when the strange but not unintellectual vice of seduction was still fashionable the professors of the art used to dwell upon the importance of invoking the aid of this feverish condition. Would René come or not? If he came, what would he look like?
She would be able to see at once by his face if anything had happened to impair the impression she was sure she had made upon him the other day. The hour that she had fixed in her note at length arrived, and when the poet was announced Suzanne's heart beat faster than did that of her simple lover. She looked at him and read to the bottom of his soul. Yes, she was still to him the Madonna she had pretended to be from the first with that facility of metamorphosis peculiar to these Protei in petticoats. In his soft dark blue eyes she perceived both joy and fear—joy at seeing her again so soon, and in her own home; fear at appearing before this angel of purity after having dared to look for her at the Opera and to wait for her at the corner of the street.
This time the charming actress had devised a new background for her beauty. She was seated near the window, and with some bundles of silk thread and the aid of a few pins was working a pattern upon a drum of green cloth. Behind her the lace curtains were drawn back in their bands, and the visitor's gaze could rest upon the landscape of the Parc Monceau, upon the pale blue sky, the bare trees, the yellow grass, and the dark ivy that grew about the ruins. A February sun lit up this wintry prospect, and its rays fell caressingly upon Suzanne's hair with its soft golden sheen. A white dress, made in fanciful style, with long, wide sleeves and trimmings of violets, gave her the appearance of a lady of the Middle Ages. Her feet, encased in silk stockings of the same shade as the trimming of her dress, were modestly crossed upon a low footstool. Had she been told that less than forty-eight hours ago these same modest feet had wandered across the carpets of what was almost a house of ill-fame, that this hair had been handled by an aged lover who paid her, that she was in fact kept by Desforges, she would probably have denied the statement in perfect sincerity, so closely did her desire to please René make her identify herself with therôleshe was playing.
The poet could not be aware of this. He had spent three days in one continual state of exaltation, feeling his desire increase hourly, and very glad to feel it. The beginning of a passion is as alluring at twenty-five as at thirty-five it is terrifying. Suzanne's note had given him unmistakable proofs that the trifling imprudences which he himself looked upon as a crime had not given great displeasure, but in matters that concern us very closely we always find fresh motives for doubt, and this grown-up child had been silly enough to fear the reception that awaited him. How delighted he was, therefore, to be met with the simple familiarity, the beaming eyes, and the sweet smile of this woman whom, seated in the foreground of the wintry landscape, he immediately compared to those saints whom the early masters set in the midst of green fields and placid lakes. But this was a saint whose gown had been made by the first tailor in Paris, a saint from whom there emanated that odour of heliotrope which had already played such havoc with the poet's senses, and through the opening of whose long, wide sleeves two golden bands were seen clasping an arm as white as snow.
What René had so much feared did not take place. Madame Moraines did not make the slightest allusion either to the Opera or to their meeting at the corner of the street. For some time she continued her work, having quite naturally brought the conversation round from Madame Komof's enthusiasm to the poet's plans for the future. She, who could not have distinguished Béranger from Victor Hugo, or Voltaire from Lamartine, spoke like one entirely devoted to literature. She had met Théophile Gautier two or three times under the Empire, and though she had scarcely looked at him on account of his complete lack of British elegance, this did not prevent her from giving the enthusiastic René a minute description of the great writer. He had interested her to such a degree—she thought she must still have some of his letters.
'I must find them for you,' she said. Then, reminded by this lie, she added, 'I am sorry to have put you to all this inconvenience for your autograph, but my friend leaves for Russia to-morrow.'
'What shall I write?' asked René.
'Whatever you please,' she said, rising to get the book, and placing it on her ivy-mantled desk. She got everything ready for him to make his task easier—opened the ink-pot with its silver top and put a fresh pen in the ivory and gold penholder; in doing this she contrived to touch René lightly in passing to and fro, enveloping him with her sweet perfume and causing his hand to tremble as he copied on the fly-sheet of the book the two verses which kind Madame Ethorel had called a sonnet:
The phantom of a day long deadAppeared, with hand stretched out to showA fair white rose whose bloom was fled,And in my ear it whispered low,'Where is thy heart of long ago?Where is that hope thy fond heart choseSo like this rose in days of yore?Dear was the hope and dear the rose:How sweet their perfume heretoforeWhen once they bloomed! They bloom no more.
The phantom of a day long deadAppeared, with hand stretched out to showA fair white rose whose bloom was fled,And in my ear it whispered low,'Where is thy heart of long ago?Where is that hope thy fond heart choseSo like this rose in days of yore?Dear was the hope and dear the rose:How sweet their perfume heretoforeWhen once they bloomed! They bloom no more.
When he had finished writing Madame Moraines took the book from his hands, and, standing behind him, recited the verses in a low, almost inaudible, voice, as if to herself. She added no word of praise or criticism, but, after having read out the lines with a sigh, remained standing there as though their music lent an infinitely tender tone to her reverie.
René gazed at her almost wild with emotion. How could he have resisted such sweet and supreme flattery as that which she had just employed to captivate him, appealing, as it did, both to his vanity as an artist and to his highest conceptions of beauty? And, indeed, she had managed to fall into a splendidposewhilst reading. She knew how charming she looked with half-averted face and eyes cast down. But suddenly she turned these glorious eyes, now eloquent with the feelings inspired by his lines, full upon the poet, and almost asked pardon for her temporary abstraction.
She seemed to step out of her poetic visions as though she were afraid of profaning them, and with a curiosity this time as real as her artificial emotion was apparent, she said: 'I am sure you did not write these lines for your play?'
'That is true,' replied René, with another blush. He had scruples about lying to this woman, even to please her. But how could he tell her the sad and wretched story which, with a poet's touch, he had transformed into a romantic idyll?
'Ah! you men!' she went on, without waiting for further reply—'how full your life is, and how free! But you must not think I am complaining. We Christian wives know our duty, and a beautiful one it is—obedience.' After a moment's silence she added: 'Alas! we do not always choose our master,' and then, in a tone of mingled resignation and pride that both suggested and forbade further speculation, 'I am sorry I have not been able to introduce you to Monsieur Moraines yet I hope you will like him. He is not much interested in art, but he is a very clever man in business. Unfortunately we live in an age when one must be born in Israel to get on well.'
As may be imagined, there was not the slightest anti-Semitic feeling in Suzanne, who was always very glad to receive invitations to dine at two or three Jewish houses of princely hospitality, but it had struck her that these words would intensify the halo of piety with which she had endeavoured to invest herself in the poet's eyes. 'You will find my husband somewhat reserved at first,' she continued; 'it was my ambition to make my drawing-room a rendez-vous of writers and artists, but you know that business men are a little jealous of you all, and then Monsieur Moraines doesn't care for society much. He was not at Madame Komof's the other night; he likes to move just in a small circle, and have only well-known faces about him.'
She spoke with an air of constraint, as if she meant to say, 'You must excuse me if I cannot ask you to come and see me here as I should like.' This constrained air also meant that this lovely woman must have been sacrificed (not that she was ever heard to complain) to cold social considerations which take no account whatever of sentiment. Already, in René's imagination, Paul Moraines, that amiable and jovial fellow, had become a crotchety and bad-tempered husband, to whom this creature of a superior race was bound by the terrible chains of duty. In addition to the passion that animated him, he felt for her that pity which the less a woman deserves it the more she loves to inspire.
Tempering the pointedness of his reply by the generality in which he clothed it, he made bold to say, 'I wish I could tell you how often, when I have wandered as far as the Champs-Elysées, I have longed to know the secret of the sadness I imagined I saw on certain faces. It has always seemed to me that the troubles of the wealthy are the worst, and that mental anguish in the midst of material well-being is most to be pitied.'
She looked at him as if his words surprised her. In her eyes was that look of rapt and involuntary astonishment worn by a woman when she suddenly discovers in a man a shade of sentimentalism which she believed to be restricted to her own sex.
'I think we shall soon become friends,' she said, 'for there is much in our hearts that is similar. Are you like me? I believe in sympathy and antipathy by sheer instinct, and I think I can also feel when people don't like me. Now—perhaps I am wrong in telling you this, but I speak to you in confidence, as if I had known you a long time—there is your friend Monsieur Larcher; I am sure that he doesn't like me.'
She was really agitated as she said this, for she was now about to learn for certain, not whether Claude had been speaking ill of her—she knew he had not by René's face—but whether the poet could hold his tongue. She was well aware that in a love affair the dangerous time for imprudent confidences lies at the beginning and the end. Your only sure men are those who can keep their peace when their hearts are overflowing with hope or bitterness. By René's reply she would be able to judge an important trait in his character, and one that was a principal factor in the plan that she had madly and rapidly evolved. It was only natural that he should have confided his passion to Claude on the very day of its birth—and he would have done so, too, had it not been for Colette's presence. This detail was, of course, unknown to Suzanne, and René's silence was a promise of prudence that set her heart beating.
'We have never mentioned your name,' said the poet; 'but, as you remarked only too justly the other evening, he has always been particularly unfortunate in his love affairs, and he cannot shake his troubles off. If you could but see how he carries on with the woman he is miserably in love with at the present moment!'
'That is no reason,' said Suzanne, 'why he should revenge himself by forcing his attentions upon any woman chance throws in his way. I got quite angry one day when he was seated next to me at table. I heard, too, that he had been speaking ill of me, but I have forgiven him.'
'And now Claude may say what he likes,' she thought when René had gone after promising to come again in three days' time and to bring his collection of unpublished poems. Then she looked at herself in the glass with unfeigned satisfaction. The interview had been a success; she had made the poet understand that she could not receive him in the ordinary way; she had put him on his guard against his best friend, and she had completed her capture of his heart.
'He is mine,' she cried, and this time her joy was sincere and deep.
Suzanne thought she was very clever—and not without reason; but by being too clever people often defeat their own ends. Accustomed to confound love and mere gallantry, she knew nothing of the generous expansion of feeling to be found in one so young as the object of her semi-romantic, semi-sensual caprice. She presumed that the insidious accusation she had thrown out against Claude would put René on his guard. It resulted, however, in giving the poet an irresistible desire to talk to Larcher. It grieved him to think that the latter should entertain a false opinion of Madame Moraines. Which of us, at twenty-five, has not felt a desire that our dearest friend should reserve a special place in his esteem for the woman we loved? It is as strong then as is at forty the wise desire to hide ourselves most of all from that same friend.
René's first act on leaving Suzanne was to proceed at once to the Rue de Varenne. He had not been to see Claude since the day when he had met Colette in his rooms, and as he passed through the gateway and made his way across the spacious courtyard he could not help comparing this visit with his last. They were separated by a very few hours only, but yet by what a gulf! The poet was a prey to that fever of delight which makes reasoning impossible. He did not reflect that his Madonna had been wonderfully clever in bringing matters to such a pass so soon. The amazing rapidity with which his hopes were being realised only delighted him, and showed him how strong his love really was. He felt so light and happy that he bounded up the old staircase two steps at a time, just as he used to do when as a boy he came home from school after reaching the top of the class. To-day Larcher's man admitted him without the slightest hesitation, but he wore such a long face that René asked him what was the matter.
'It isn't right, sir,' sighed Ferdinand, shaking his head. 'Master has been at it now for forty-eight hours—writing, writing, writing—and with only about six hours' sleep altogether. You ought really to tell him, sir, that he'll damage his constitution. Why can't he get into a nice, comfortable habit of working a little every day, like everybody else?'
The man's wise remonstrances prepared René for the sight that he knew so well—the 'den' in which he had seen Colette enthroned turned into a writer's workshop. He went in. The broad leather-covered couch on which the graceful but frivolous actress had reclined was now covered with sheets of paper flung down and covered with great straggling characters written in haste; similar sheets, all torn or crumpled, being strewn about the floor, and the chimney-piece encumbered with half-opened bundles of proofs.
Larcher, with a beard of three days' growth and unkempt hair, was seated at his writing-table, dressed like a beggar, in a dirty coat devoid of a single button, a pair of worn-out slippers on his feet, and a silk handkerchief tied in a knot round his neck. The real Bohemian, utterly regardless of appearance from his earliest youth, came to the surface every time the would-be swell was obliged to step out of his part and put his shoulder to the wheel. And this he was obliged to do pretty frequently. Like all literary workers whose time is their sole capital, and who, therefore, lead most irregular lives, Claude was always behindhand with his work and short of money, especially since his relations with Colette had involved him in that most ruinous expense of all—the expense incurred by a young man for a woman he does not keep. Besides the salary she drew from the theatre, the actress had an income of twenty thousand francs, left her by an old admirer, a Russian noble who was killed at Plevna; but what with riding about and dining out with his mistress, and buying her heaps of flowers and presents, Claude had to find many a bank-note. The proceeds of the two plays being long spent, the writer was forced to earn these wretched notes by overworking his brain in the intervals of his enervating debauches.
'At it again!' he cried, looking up with his pale face and clasping René's hand in his feverish grasp. 'Fifteen chapters to be delivered at once. A splendid stroke of business with theChronique Parisienne, the new eight-page paper financed by Audry. They came and asked me for a story the other day to run as afeuilletonfor a fortnight. A franc a line. I told them I had one ready—only wanted copying. My dear fellow—hadn't got a word written—not that! But I had an idea. Re-write "Adolphe" up to date in our jargon, and put in our local colouring. It will be a beastly hash, but all that's nothing. Do you know what it means to sit down and write while your heart is being tortured by jealousy? I am here at my table, scribbling a phrase; an idea occurs to me, and I want to hold it. Now for it, I think. Suddenly a voice within me says: "What is Colette doing now?" And I put down my pen as the pain—ah! such terrible pain!—comes over me. Balzac used to say that he had discovered how much brain matter was wasted in a night's debauch: half a volume; and he used to add, "There is not a woman breathing worth two volumes a year." What nonsense! It isn't love that wears out an artist, but the continual worry of some fixed idea causing one long heart-ache. Is it possible to think and feel at the same time? We must choose one or the other. Victor Hugo never felt anything—nor did Balzac. If he had really loved his Madame Hanska he would have run after her all over Europe, and would have cared for his "Comédie humaine" as much as I do for this rubbish. Ah! my dear René,' he continued with an air of dejection as he gathered up the sheets scattered all over his desk, 'keep to your simple mode of life. I hope you have not been weak enough to accept the invitations of any of the sharks you met at Madame Komof's.'
'I have only paid one visit,' replied René, 'and that was to Madame Moraines.' He could scarcely control himself as he pronounced her name. Then, with the involuntary impetuosity of a lover who, though come expressly to speak of his mistress, is afraid of criticism, and staves off the reply as he would thrust aside the point of a dagger, he added, 'Isn't she sweetly pretty and graceful? And what lofty ideas she has! Do you think ill of her too?'
'Bah!' exclaimed Claude, too full of his own sufferings to pay much heed to René's words, 'I dare say we could find something ugly in her past or her present if we tried. All women have within them the toad that springs from the mouth of the princess in the fairy tale.'
'Is there anything you know about her?' asked the poet.
'AnythingIknow!' replied Claude, struck by the strange tone of his friend's voice. He looked at René and saw how matters stood.
Mixing as he did in Parisian society, he was well acquainted with the rumours concerning Suzanne and Baron Desforges, and with the easy-going—though sometimes mistaken—credulity of a misanthrope to whom every infamy seems probable because possible, he believed them. For a moment he was tempted to inform René of these rumours, but he held his tongue. Was it from motives of prudence, and in order not to make an enemy of Desforges, in case Suzanne should get to know what he had said, and tell the Baron? Was it out of pity for the grief his words would cause René? Was it for the cruel delight of having a companion in his torture—for how much better was Suzanne than Colette? Was he impelled by the curiosity of an analyst and the desire to witness another's passion? Who shall determine the exact point of departure of so many and such complex motives as go to make up a sudden resolve?
Claude paused for a moment, as if to ransack his memory, and then repeated his friend's question. 'Is there anything I know about her? Nothing at all. I am aprofessional woman-hater, as the English say. I only know the woman through having met her here and there, and I thought her a little less foolish than most of her kind. It's true she is very pretty!' And then, either out of malice or in order to sound René's heart, he added, 'Allow me to congratulate you!'
'You talk as though I were in love with her,' replied René, growing red with shame. He had come there with the intention of singing Suzanne's praises, and now Claude's bantering tone caused his confidences to freeze upon his lips.
'So you are not in love with her!' cried Larcher, with his most horribly cynical laugh. Then, with one of those generous impulses in which his better and truer nature revealed itself, he took his friend's hand and begged his pardon. Seeing in René's eyes that this was about to provoke a fresh outburst, he stopped him. 'Don't tell me anything. You'd only hate me for it afterwards. I'm not fit to listen to you to-day. I am enduring torture, and that makes me cruel.'
So it happened that even Suzanne's clumsy manœuvring turned out favourably for her plan of capture. The only man whose hostility she had to fear had voluntarily imposed silence upon himself. Since René was in absolute need of a confidante to receive the overflow of his feelings, it was to Emilie that he turned, and poor Emilie, out of sheer sisterly vanity, was already the abettor of the unknown lady whom she had seen through her brother's eyes encircled with a halo of aristocracy.
The very next morning after thesoiréeat Madame Komof's she had guessed from René's words that Madame Moraines was the only woman he had met there whom he really liked, and the only one, too, upon whom he had made any strong impression. Mothers and sisters possess some peculiar sense for perceiving these shades of feeling. For the next few days after making her discovery René's restlessness was very plain to Emilie. Bound to him by the double bond of affection and moral affinity, no feeling could traverse her brother's heart without finding an echo in her own. She knew that René was in love as well as if she had been present in the spirit during the two meetings in the Rue Murillo. She felt delighted, too, without being at all jealous, though her brother's attachment to Rosalie had caused her not only jealousy, but anxiety. With peculiarly feminine logic, she thought it but natural that the poet should enter upon an intrigue with a woman who was not free. She recognised that exceptional men require a mode of life and a standard of morality as exceptional as themselves, and she felt that this love of René's for a grand lady, whilst realising the proud dreams she had formed for her idol, would not rob her of a jot of affection.
His passion for Rosalie, on the contrary, she had regarded as an infringement upon her rights. This was because Rosalie resembled her, and was of her world, and because René's attachment to her could only result in marriage and the setting up of another home. It was therefore with secret joy that she beheld the birth of a fresh passion in her brother. She would have been glad if he had taken her further into his confidence, and so completed the confession he had made on awakening only a few hours after thesoiréeat Madame Komof's. But this he had not done, neither had she led him on to do so, her instinct telling her that René's confidences would only be the more complete for being spontaneous. So she waited, watching his eyes, whose every look she knew so well, for that expression of supreme joy which is the fever of happiness. Her silence was also to a great extent due to the fact that she only saw René when Fresneau was present. With that natural cowardice begotten of certain false positions, the poet left the house as soon as he was up and returned only in time for lunch. Then he again took himself off until dinner, going out immediately after, in order to avoid meeting Rosalie. The professor's abstraction was so great that he did not even notice this change in René's habits. Such, however, was not the case with Madame Offarel. Having come on two consecutive evenings with her two daughters and seen nothing of him whom she already looked upon as her son-in-law, she did not hesitate to remark upon his unwonted absence.
'Does Monsieur Larcher present Monsieur René to a fresh comtesse every evening that we never see him here now, nor at our house either?'
'It's true,' observed Fresneau, 'I never see him now. Where does he get to?'
'He has set to work again upon his "Savonarola,"' replied Emilie, 'and he spends his evenings at the Bibliothèque.'
Early on the morning after this conversation, which was also the morrow of René's second visit to Suzanne, Emilie entered her brother's room to give him a full account of what had been said. She found him getting out a few sheets of fine note-paper—some that she had bought for him—on which he was about to copy, in his best handwriting, the verses he was to read to Madame Moraines. The table was covered with sheet upon sheet of his poems, from which he had already made a selection.
When Emilie told him of her innocent fib he kissed her, and exclaimed, with a laugh, 'How clever you are!'
'There is nothing clever in it,' she replied; 'I am your sister, and I love you.' Then, taking up some of the papers scattered about, she asked, 'Do you really think of getting on with your book?'
'No,' answered René, 'but I have promised to read a few of my verses to some one.'
'To Madame Moraines?' exclaimed his sister.
'You have guessed it,' replied the poet, looking slightly confused. 'Ah! if you only knew!'
And then the pent-up confidence burst forth. Emilie had to listen to an enthusiastic eulogy of Suzanne and all that concerned her. In the same breath René spoke of the lofty nobility of this woman's ideas and of the shape of her shoes, of her marvellous intelligence and of the figured velvet oh her blotting-book. That childish astonishment at these luxurious details should be united to the more poetic fancies in the fabric of love did not surprise Emilie. Had she herself in her love for René not always associated petty desires with boundless ambition? She wished, for instance, with almost equal fervour, that he might have genius and horses, that he might write another 'Childe Harold,' and possess Byron's income of four thousand a year. In this she was as ingenuously plebeian as he himself, confounding—in excusable fashion, after all—real aristocracy of sentiment with that aristocracy expressed by outer and worldly forms. Those who come of a family in which the struggle for bread has lowered the tone of thought easily mistake the second of these aristocracies for a condition inseparable from the first.
Those words, therefore, which might have led an unkind listener to think that René loved Suzanne for her surroundings, and not for herself, charmed Emilie instead of shocking her, and she had so fully entered into her brother's infatuation that on leaving him she said: 'You are not at home to anyone—I'll see that no one comes in. You must show me your verses when you have written them—mind you choose them well.'
The task of making this selection cheated the poet's ardour, and he was able to await the day fixed for his next visit to the paradise in the Rue Murillo without much impatience. The hours of solitude, broken only by his talks with Emilie, passed by in alternate fits of happiness and melancholy. Often a delightful vision of Suzanne would rise up before him. He would then lay down his pen, and all the objects about him would melt away, as if by magic. Instead of the red hangings of his room, it was the littlesalonof Madame Moraines that he saw; gone were his dear Albert Dürers, his Gustave Moreaus, his Goyas, his small library on whose shelves the 'Imitatio' rubbed shoulders with 'Madame Bovary'—gone were the two leafless trees that stood out black against a light blue sky. But in their place he could see Suzanne, her dainty ways, the poise of her head, the peculiar golden tint of her hair, and the transparent pink of her lovely complexion.
This apparition, which had nothing of a pale or shadowy phantom about it, appealed to René's senses in a way that ought to have made him understand that Madame Moraines' attitudes did but mask the true woman, the voluptuous though refined courtesan. But of this he took no note, and, whilst madly desirous to possess her, he believed that his worship of her was of the most ethereal kind. This mirage of sentiment is a phenomenon frequently observed in men who lead chaste lives, and one which renders them the defenceless prey of the most barefaced hypocrisy. The inability to understand their own feelings makes them still more incapable of analysing the tricks of the women who arouse in them the accumulated passion of a lifetime. The poet, however, became perfectly lucid as soon as Suzanne's image made way for that of Rosalie. On going through his papers he was continually coming across some page headed, in boyish fashion, 'For my flower;' that was the name he had given Rosalie in the heyday of his love, when he had written her a fresh poem almost every morning.
'O Rose of candour and sincerity!' were the terms in which he addressed her at the end of one of these effusions. When his eyes fell upon such lines he was again obliged to lay down his pen, and once more his surroundings would melt away, but this time to make room for a vision of torture. The rooms occupied by the Offarels lay before him, cold and silent. The old woman was busy with her cats. Angélique was turning over the leaves of an English dictionary, and Rosalie was looking at him, René—looking at him through an ocean of space with eyes in which he read no reproach, but only deep distress. He knew as well as if he were there, near her, that she had guessed his secret, and that she was suffering the pangs of jealousy. If such were not the case would he have been so terribly afraid to meet the girl's eyes? Would that he could go to her and say, 'Let us be only friends!' It was his duty to do so. The only means of preserving one's self-esteem is by acting with absolute loyalty in these subsidings of love, which are like fraudulent bankruptcies of the heart. But that loyalty was thrust aside by weakness in which both egoism and pity were equally represented. He took up his pen again, and saying, as on the first day, 'We shall see—later on,' he tried to work. Soon he had to stop once more as his mind reverted to Rosalie's sufferings. He thought of the long nights she would spend in tears, knowing as he did every trifling habit of the simple creature who had given him her heart. She had often told him that the only time she could indulge in her own grief was at night. Then he hid his face in his hands and waited till the vision had passed, meanwhile saying to himself, 'Is it my fault?'
A law in our nature bids our passions grow stronger in proportion to the number of obstacles to be overcome, so that the remorse of his infidelity to poor Rosalie resulted in making René's heart beat faster as the time fixed by Madame Moraines for their next meeting drew near. She, on her side, awaited him with an almost feverish impatience that astonished even herself. She had looked out for the young poet whenever she had been in the street, and again at the Opera when Friday came round. Had she seen his eyes fixed upon her in that simple adoration which is as compromising as a declaration, she would have said, 'How imprudent!' Not to see him, however, gave her a slight fit of doubt, which brought her caprice to its climax. She looked forward to this visit all the more anxiously because she considered it decisive. It was the third time René visited her, and, out of these three times, twice unknown to her husband. Further than that she could not go, on account of the servants. A day or two back Paul, meaning no harm, had said to her at dinner, 'I was talking to Desforges about René Vincy. He doesn't seem to have made a good impression on the Baron. It is decidedly better not to see the authors too closely whose works we admire.'
If the servant who had announced the poet had been in the dining-room at the moment these words were uttered Suzanne would have had to speak. The same thing might happen the next or any other day. She was therefore determined to find a peg in her conversation with René on which to hang an appointment elsewhere. An idea suddenly occurred to her of going somewhere with the poet under pretence of curiosity—a meeting in Notre Dame, for instance, or in some old church sufficiently distant from the fashionable quarter of Paris to be beyond the risk of danger, and she relied upon one or other of René's poems to furnish her with an opportunity of making such an appointment.
On this occasion she once more wore a walking-dress, for, having attended a marriage ceremony in the morning, she had kept on the rather smart mauve gown in which her shapely figure, elegant shoulders, and slim waist were so well set off. Thus attired, and lounging back in a low arm-chair—an attitude that marked the adorable outlines of her body—she begged the poet, after the usual commonplaces had passed, to commence his reading. She listened to his poetry without betraying any surprise at the peculiar drawl with which even the best scholars intone their verses, her great intelligent eyes and the repose of her face seeming to indicate the closest attention. At rare intervals she would venture upon some apparently involuntary exclamation, such as: 'How beautiful that is!' or, 'Will you repeat those lines?—I like them so much!'
In reality, she cared little for the poet's verses, and understood them less. To comprehend even superficially the work of a modern artist—in whom there is always a critic and a scholar—requires such mental development as is only met with in a small number of Society women, sufficiently interested in culture to read much and to think more in the midst of a life entirely opposed to all kind of study and reflection. What made Suzanne's pretty face and big blue eyes look so pensive was the desire not to let the important word slip by upon which to hang her project. But line came after line, stanzas succeeded sonnets, and yet she had not been able to seize upon anything which could reasonably be made to give the conversation the turn she wanted. What a pity it was! For René's eyes, that continually wandered from the page; his voice, that shook occasionally as he read; his hands, that trembled as he turned the leaves—all showed that her pretended admiration had completely intoxicated the Trissotin that lurks in every author.
And now there was only one piece left! This the poet had purposely kept to the last; it was his favourite, and bore a title which was a revelation to Suzanne, 'The Eyes of the Gioconda.' It was rather a long poem, half metaphysical, half descriptive, in which the writer had striven to collect and reproduce in sonorous verse all the opinions of the modern school of critics concerning Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece. In this portrait of an Italian woman we ought, perhaps, to see nothing beyond a study of the purest and most technical naturalism, one of those struggles against conventionality in art in which the great painter appears to have been so frequently engaged. Can it not have been an attempt of the master to seize the unseizable—the play of a face, and to paint the fleeting expression on the lips as they pass from repose to a smile? In his poem René, who took a childish pride in the fact that his family name resembled that of the village which lends its appellation to the most subtle master of the Renaissance, had condensed into thirty verses an entire system of natural and historical philosophy. He valued this symbolical medley higher than the 'Sigisbée,' which contained only what was natural and appertaining to the passions—two qualities fit only for the vulgar herd.
What then was his delight to hear Madame Moraines say, 'If I might be allowed to express any preference, I would say that this is the piece which pleases me most. How well you understand true art! To see the great masterpieces with you must be a revelation! I am sure that if I visited the Louvre under your guidance you would explain to me so much that I see in the pictures but cannot understand. I have often wandered about there, but quite alone!'
She waited. As soon as René had started reading this last poem she had said to herself, 'How foolish of me not to have thought of that before!' closing her eyes for a moment as if to retain some beautiful dream. At the finish she had purposely used such words as would give him an opportunity of seeing her again. He would propose a visit together to the Louvre, to which she would accede, after having cleverly raised just sufficient difficulties. She saw the suggestion trembling on his lips, but he had not the courage to make it. She was therefore compelled to do so herself.
'If I were not afraid of wasting your time——?' Then, with a sigh, 'But we have not been acquainted long enough.'
'Oh; madame!' cried René, 'it seems to me as if I had been your friend for years!'
'That is because you feel I am sincere in what I say,' she replied, with a frank and open smile. 'And I am going to prove it to you once more. Will you show me the Louvre one day next week?'
An appointment had been made for eleven o'clock on the following Tuesday, in the Salon Carré of the Louvre. Whilst Suzanne was being driven to the old palace in a cab she was counting up for the tenth time the dangers of her matutinal escapade. 'No, it's not a very wise thing to do,' she thought; 'and suppose Desforges discovers I've been out? Well, there's the dentist. And what if I meet some one I know? It's very improbable, but in that case I would tell them just as much of the truth as was absolutely necessary.'
That was one of her great maxims—to tell as few lies as possible, to maintain a discreet silence about most things, and never to deny established facts. She was therefore ready to say to her husband, and to the Baron as well, if necessary, 'I went into the Louvre this morning as I passed. I was lucky enough to find Madame Komof's little poet there, and he showed me through a few of the rooms. Yes,' she said to herself, 'that will do for once. But it would be madness to try it on often.'
Her mind then became occupied with other thoughts of less positive purport. The uncertainty of what would take place in this interview with René caused her greater agitation than she cared for. She had played the part of a Madonna before him, and the time had now come to get down from the altar upon which she had been so piously adored. Her feminine tact had hit upon a bold plan—lead the poet to a declaration, reply by a confession of her own feelings, then flee from him as if in remorse, and so leave the way open for any step she might afterwards care to take. Whilst playing havoc with René's heart, this plan would suspend his judgment of her acts and absolve her of any follies she might commit. It was bold but clever, and, above all, simple. There were, nevertheless, a few real dangers connected with it. Let the poet entertain distrust but for one moment and all was lost. Suzanne's heart beat faster at the thought. How many women there are who have been similarly situated, and who, after having reared a most elaborate fabric of falsehoods, have been compelled to continue theirrôlein order to obtain satisfaction for the true feelings that originally actuated them! When the men on whose account such women as these have played their hypocriticalrôlesdiscover the lie palmed off upon them, their indignation and contempt abundantly prove how important a factor vanity is in all affection.
'Come, come,' exclaimed Suzanne, 'here am I trembling like a school-girl!' She smiled indulgently as she uttered the words, because they proved once more the sincerity of her feelings, and again she smiled when, on alighting from her cab and crossing the courtyard, she saw that she was there to the minute. 'Still a school-girl!' she repeated to herself. A momentary fear came over her at the thought that if René happened to arrive just after her he would see her obliged to ask one of the attendants for the entrance to the galleries—she who had boasted of having been there so often. She had not been in the place three times in her life, though to-day her little feet trotted across the spacious courtyard in their dainty laced boots as confidently as though they performed the journey daily. 'What a child I am!' said the inner voice once more—the voice of the Baron's pupil, who had acquired as deep a knowledge of life as any hoary diplomat. 'He has been waiting for me upstairs for the last half-hour!' Still she could not refrain from looking anxiously about her as she asked her way of one of the attendants. But her worldly knowledge had not deceived her, for no sooner had she reached the doorway between the Galerie d'Apollon and the Salon Carré than she saw René; he was leaning against the iron railing, just underneath the noble work by Veronese, representing Mary Magdalene washing our Saviour's feet, and opposite the famous Noces de Cana.
In his boyish timidity the poor fellow had considered it his duty to put on his very best clothes in coming to meet one who, besides being a Madonna in his eyes, was a 'Society woman'—that vague and fanciful entity which exists in the brain of so many youngbourgeois, and is a curious medley of their most erroneous impressions. He was attired in a smart-fitting frock coat, and, although the morning was a cold one, he wore nothing over it. He possessed only one overcoat, and that, having been made at the beginning of the winter, did not come from the tailor to whom he had been introduced by his friend Larcher. With his brand-new chimney-pot hat, his new gloves, and his new boots, he almost looked as though he had stepped out of a fashion plate, though his dress contrasted strangely with his artistic face. If he had made himself appear still more ridiculous, Suzanne would have found still more reasons for growing fonder of him. Such is the way of women in love.
She understood at once that he had been afraid he would not look nice enough to please her, and she stood in the doorway for a few seconds in order to enjoy the anxiety that was depicted on the poet's face. When he saw her there was a sudden rush of blood to his cheeks, though the blush soon died away beneath the gold of his fair silken beard. What a flash, too, lit up those dark blue eyes, dispelling the look of anguish they contained! 'It is lucky there is no one here to see our meeting,' she thought, for the pale light that came through the glass roof fell only upon a few painters setting up their easels and upon a few tourists wandering about, guide-book in hand.
Suzanne, who had taken all this in at a glance, could therefore abandon herself to the pleasure which René's agitation afforded her; as he came towards her he said, in a voice trembling with emotion, 'I hardly dared to hope that you would come.'
'Why not?' she replied, with an air of candid astonishment. 'Do you really think I cannot get up early? Why, when I go and visit my poor I am up and dressed at eight.' And in what a tone of voice it was that she said this! A pleasant, modest tone—like that in which a hero would tell of something extraordinary he had done without seeing anything in it himself—the tone in which an officer would say, 'As we were charging the enemy!' The joke of it was that she had never ventured even to set her foot in a poor man's dwelling. She had as great a horror of poverty as of sickness or of old age, and to her selfish nature charity was a thing almost unknown. But at that moment René would have looked upon anyone who dared charge her with selfishness as guilty of the most infamous blasphemy. After having uttered her well-chosen words this novel Sister of Mercy stopped for a moment in order to enjoy their effect. In René's eyes shone that look of blind faith which these pretty hypocrites are so accustomed to regard as their due that they charge all who refuse it them with heartlessness. Then, as if to evade an admiration that embarrassed her modesty, she went on, 'You forget that you are my guide to-day. I will pretend I know nothing of any of these pictures; I shall then be able to see whether we have the same tastes.'
'Mon Dieu!' thought René, 'I must take care not to show her anything that might give her a bad opinion of me!' The most commonplace women can, when they choose, inspire a man who is vastly superior to them with this sensation of utter inferiority.
They had now commenced their tour, he leading her to those masterpieces which he thought would please her. How well acquainted he was with all the galleries of his dear Louvre! There was not one of these pictures that did not recall the memory of some dream of his youth—a youth entirely spent in adorning with beautiful images the shrine we all carry within us before our twentieth year, but from which our passions soon expel all but the image of Venus! These pale and noble frescoes of Luini that hang in the narrow room to the right of the Salon Carré—how often had he not come to gaze upon their pious scenes when he wished to lend his poetry the soft charm, the broad and tender touch, of the old Lombard master! He had feasted his eyes for whole hours upon the mighty Crucifixion by Mantegna—a fragment of the magnificent painting in the church of San Zeno at Verona—as well as upon that most glorious of Raphaels, Saint George—an ideal hero dealing the dragon a furious stroke of his sword whilst spurring his white charger in pink trappings across the fresh greensward, symbolic of youth and hope. But it was more especially the portraits which had been the objects of his most fervent pilgrimages—from those of Holbein, Philippe de Champaigne, and Titian, to that of the elegant and mysterious lady simply attributed in the catalogue to the Venetian school, and bearing a cipher in her hair. He loved to think, in company with a clever critic, that this cipher meant Barbarelli and Cecilia—the name of the Giorgione and that of the mistress for whom tradition says that this great master died. During a visit he had once paid to the Louvre with Rosalie he had told her the romantic and tragic story on this very spot and before this very portrait. He now found himself repeating it to Suzanne, and in almost the same words.
'The painter loved her, and she betrayed him for one of his friends. At Vienna there is a picture painted by himself in which you see his sweet, sad eyes resting upon his treacherous friend, who approaches him with a gleaming dagger concealed behind his back.'
Yes—the same words! When Rosalie heard the story she had turned her eyes upon him, and he had distinctly read the thoughts that filled her. 'How can any woman betray the man who loves her?' With her the question, had remained a dumb one, but Suzanne, after having stared curiously at the mysterious woman with the thin lips, gave expression to her thoughts with a sigh and a shake of her fair head. 'And yet she looks so good. It is terrible to think that a woman with a face like that could lie!'
As she spoke she too turned her eyes upon René; and, gazing into the clear depths that presented such a contrast to Rosalie's dark orbs, he felt a strange remorse. By one of those ironies of the inner life which a comparison of consciences would often reveal, Suzanne, unspeakably happy in strolling amidst these pictures, which she pretended to admire, was keenly enjoying the impression that her beauty was making on her companion, whilst the latter, a simple child, reproached himself with the double treachery of leading this ideal creature through places that he had once visited with another. The fatal comparison which, since his first meeting with Madame Moraines, was effacing poor little Rosalie from his mind was becoming more obtrusive than ever.
A vision of his betrothed floated before him, humble as she herself, but beside him walked Suzanne, a living sister of the aristocratic beauties the old masters had portrayed on their canvases. Her golden hair shone brightly under her little bonnet; the short astracan jacket fitted her like a glove, and her grey check skirt hung in graceful folds. In her hand was a small muff, from which peeped out the corner of an embroidered handkerchief; the muff matched her jacket, and every now and then she would hold it up just above her eyes in order to get the right light to see the pictures well. How could the present fail to conquer the absent—an elegant woman fail to oust a simple, modest girl, especially since in Suzanne all the refinement of an æsthetic soul seemed allied to the most exquisite charm of external appearance and attitude?
She who in her crass ignorance would have been unable to distinguish a Rembrandt from a Perugino, or a Ribera from a Watteau, had a clever way of listening to what René said, and of supporting the opinions he expressed with an ingenuity that would have deceived men with more experience of feminine duplicity than this young poet of twenty-five. This meeting was to him a source of happiness so complete, such perfect realisation of his most secret dreams, that he felt sad at the thought of having attained his highest ambition. The time slipped by, and an indescribable sensation invaded him; it was made up of the nervous excitement that the sight of masterpieces always produces in an artist, of the remorse he felt for his treachery in profaning the past by the present and the present by the past, and finally of the knowledge of Time's unrelenting flight. Yes, that delightful hour was slipping by, to be followed by so many cold and empty ones—for never, no, never would he dare to ask his adorable companion for another such meeting.
She, the sensual Epicurean, was only eager to prolong the delight of mental possession. Voluptuously, carefully, and secretly did she watch the poet from the corner of her blue eye that looked so modest beneath its golden lashes. She was unable to take exact account of all the changes of feeling he underwent, for although she was already well acquainted with his inner nature, she was so entirely ignorant of all the facts of his life that sometimes she would ask herself with a thrill whether he had ever loved before. It was impossible to follow his thoughts in detail, but it was not difficult to see that he was now looking at her much more than at the pictures, and that his distress was increasing every minute. She attributed this distress to a fit of shyness—a shyness that delighted her, for it proved the presence of a passionate longing tempered by respect. How pleased she was to be the object of a desire that expressed itself with such modesty! It enabled her to measure more correctly the gulf that separated her little René—as she already called him in her thoughts—from the bold and dangerous men with whom she usually mixed. His looks were full of love, though devoid of insolence, and contained an amount of suffering that finally decided her to lead him on to the declaration which she had promised herself to provoke.
'Mon Dieu!' she suddenly cried, catching hold of the iron bar that runs round the walls, and turning to René with a smile that was meant to hide some sharp pain. 'It's nothing,' she added, in reply to the poet's look of anxiety. 'I twisted my foot a little on this slippery floor.' Then, standing on one leg, she put out the foot that she said was hurt, and moved it about in the soft boot with a graceful effort. 'Ten minutes' rest and it will be all right, but you must be my crutch.'
As her pretty lips uttered this ugly word she took hold of René's arm, the poet little thinking, as he almost piously helped her along, that this imaginary accident was but one episode more in the comedy of love in which he was playing so innocent a part. Taking care to throw her whole weight upon him, she managed to redouble his passionate ardour and to completely intoxicate him by the rhythmic and communicated movement of her lithe and supple limbs. The trick succeeded only too well. He could scarcely speak, overwhelmed as he was by the proximity of this woman and penetrated by the subtle perfume she exhaled. It was as much as he dared do to look at her, and then he found beside him a face both proud and playful, a cheek of ideal colouring, and a pair of mobile cherry lips upon which from time to time there hovered a sweet little smile that meant mischief, though when their eyes met this smile would change into an expression of such frank sympathy that it dispelled René's timidity. This she knew by the greater assurance with which he now supported her.
She had been careful to choose one of the most isolated rooms—thesalleLesueur—for acting the episode of her twisted foot. Arm-in-arm they passed through a small passage, and, crossing one of the galleries of the French school, entered a dark, deserted chamber in which were then exhibited Lebrun's pictures representing the victories of Alexander the Great. The Ingres and Delacroix gallery, by which this room is now reached, was not yet opened, and in the centre of the floor stood a large round ottoman covered in green velvet. Though in the very heart of Paris, this spot was more secluded than a room in any provincial museum, and there was no likelihood of being disturbed except by the attendant, who was himself deep in conversation with his colleague in the next apartment.
Suzanne took in the place at a glance, and, pointing to the ottoman, said to René, 'Shall we sit down there for a few minutes? My foot is much better already.'
A fresh silence fell upon them. Everything seemed to emphasise their seclusion—from the noises in the Cour du Carrousel that came to them in a dull murmur through the two high windows to the dim light in the room itself. But this seclusion, instead of encouraging the poet to declare his passion, only increased his distress. He said to himself, 'How pretty she is, and how sweet! She will go, and I shall never see her again. How stupid she must think me!—I feel quite paralysed near her and incapable of speech.' 'I shall never have a better opportunity,' thought Suzanne.
'You are very sad,' she said aloud, bestowing upon him a look of affectionate and almost sisterly sympathy. 'I noticed it as soon as I arrived,' she continued, 'but you do not trust me sufficiently to tell me your troubles.'
'No,' replied René, 'I am not sad. Why should I be? I have everything that can make me happy.'
She looked at him again with an expression of surprise and mute interrogation that seemed to say, 'Tell me what you have to make you happy?' René thought he saw that question in her eyes, but dared not understand it so. He sincerely believed himself to be so inferior to this woman that he had not the courage to disclose to her the depths of his devotion. All Suzanne's delightful confidence, in which he could not possibly detect any cold calculation, would be destroyed the moment he spoke, and he therefore went on as if his words referred to the general circumstances of life.
'Claude Larcher often tells me that I shall never be happier at any period of my literary career. He maintains that there are four stages in a writer's life—when he is unknown, when he is applauded by those who wish to spite his elders, when he is maligned because he is successful, and when he is forgiven because he is forgotten. I am so sorry you don't know him better—I am sure you would like him. Literature is his religion!'
'He is rather too artless, after all,' thought Suzanne, but she was too interested in the result of this interview to give way to her impatience. She seized upon the words René had just uttered and interrupted his uncalled-for praises of Claude by saying, 'His religion! It is true, that is just like you writers. I have a friend who is undergoing the ordeal, and she is always telling me that a woman ought to be careful not to bestow her affections upon an artist. He will never love her as much as he loves his art.'
She repeated these supposititious words of her imaginary friend with a look of pain upon her face; her cherry lips were parted by a half-stifled sigh that hinted at heartrending confidences and a presentiment of similar experiences in store for herself.
'Why, it is you who are sad,' observed René, struck by the sudden change in her pretty face.
'Now for it!' she thought, and then replied, 'That doesn't matter. What difference can it make to you whether I am sad or not?'
'Do you think that I take no interest in you?' rejoined René.
'A little, perhaps,' she replied, shrugging her shoulders; 'but when you have left me will you think of me otherwise than as of some sympathetic woman whom you have casually met and speedily forgotten?'
She had never looked so lovely in René's eyes as when she uttered these words, which went as far as she dared go without jeopardising her game. Her gloved hand rested on the green velvet sofa quite close to the poet, and he was bold enough to take it. She did not draw it back. Her eyes seemed fixed upon some vision far away, and it was doubtful whether she had even noticed René's daring action. There are women who have a delightful way of paying no heed to the familiarities which some peoplewilltake with them. René pressed her dainty hand, and, as she did not resent it, he began to speak in a voice trembling with emotion:
'I have no right to be surprised at your thinking that of me. Why should you think that my feelings towards you differ from those of other men you meet? And yet if I told you that since the day when I first spoke to you at Madame Komof's my life has changed for ever—ah! do not smile—yes, for ever! If I told you that since then I have had but one desire—to see you again; that I came to your house with a beating heart; that every hour since then has increased my madness; that I came here in a dream of rapture, and that I shall leave you in despair! I see you do not believe me! People are willing to admit the existence of these sudden and lifelong passions in novels, but do such things ever happen in real life?'
He stopped, amazed at the boldness of his own words. As he finished speaking there came over him that strange sensation that seizes us when in our dreams we hear ourselves revealing some secret to the very person from whom we ought most to hide it. She had listened to him with her eyes still fixed on vacancy, and still wearing her look of abstraction. But her eyelids quivered, her breath came short and quick, and her little hand trembled as it lay in his. This was such a startling and delightful surprise that it gave René courage to go on.
'Forgive me for talking to you like this! If you only knew—it may be childish and silly—but when I saw you for the first time I seemed to recognise you—you are so like the woman I have always dreamt of meeting ever since I have had a heart. Before meeting you I only thought I lived, I only thought I felt. What a fool I was! And what a fool I am! I have gone and undone myself in your eyes. But at least I have told you that I love you—you know it now. You can do with me as you will. My God! how I love you, how I love you!'
As he gazed at her in rapt admiration and repeated the words that seemed to relieve the feelings that raged within him he saw two great tears fall from Suzanne's eyes and slowly make their way down her pink cheeks. He did not know that most women can cry like that at will, especially if they are at all nervous. These two wretched tears drove his delirium up to its highest pitch.
'You are crying! he exclaimed; 'you——'
'Don't finish your sentence,' cried Suzanne, putting her hand on his lips and then moving a little further off. Her eyes remained fixed upon his face, and in them might be read both passion and a kind of startled surprise. 'Yes, you have reached my heart. You have awakened feelings of whose existence I had not the faintest suspicion. I am afraid—afraid of you, afraid of myself, afraid of being here. We must never see each other again. I am not free. I ought not even to have listened to your words.' She stopped; then, taking his hand in hers this time, she went on: 'Why should I deceive you? All that you feel perhaps I feel too, but I swear to you that I did not know it until a moment ago. The feeling of sympathy to which I yielded, and which made me come and join you here this morning—my God!—I understand it now, I understand! Fool that I was not to have known how easily the heart is ensnared!'
Fresh tears started from her eyes, and René was so agitated by all that he had said and heard that he could only murmur, 'Tell me that you forgive me!'
'Yes, I forgive you,' she replied, squeezing his hand so hard that she hurt him. 'I feel that I love you too,' and then, as though suddenly awakening from a dream, she added, 'Good-bye—I forbid you to follow me. This is the last time we shall meet.'
She rose. Her face wore a threatening look, and it was clear that her feelings of honour were now thoroughly roused. There was no longer any thought of fatigue or of a sprained foot. She walked straight out, and with such an angry mien that the poet, utterly crushed by what he had undergone, saw her depart without doing anything to stop her. She had been gone some minutes before he rushed off in the direction she had taken. But he did not find her. Whilst he was trying first one staircase and then another she had crossed the courtyard and jumped into a cab, which rapidly bore her, exulting and in ecstasy, to the Rue Murillo.
Whilst René was employed in seeking means to get her to reconsider her hasty decision he would have no time to reflect upon the rapidity with which his Madonna had led him to make, and had herself made, a declaration of love. So much for her exultation. The recollection of the poet's words, of his face beaming with love, and his eyes eloquent with passion, enchanted her as with a promise of most perfect happiness. So much for her ecstasy. She was already drawing up her plans for the future. He would write to her, of course—but to his first two letters he would get no answer. On receipt of his third or fourth letter she would pretend to believe in his threats of suicide and drop upon him at home—to save him! Just as her thoughts had carried her as far as this, chance, which is sometimes as sarcastic as an ill-tempered friend, made her eyes fall upon Baron Desforges walking along the Boulevard Haussmann. He was probably going to her house to ask her to lunch out with him. She looked at the pretty little gold watch that hung from her bracelet and saw that it was only twenty minutes past twelve. She would be home in good time, and, thoroughly pleased with her morning's outing, she took a keen delight in pulling down the little window-curtain as she passed quite close to the Baron without being seen.
When René Vincy had got as far as the Museum gates without finding Suzanne a crowd of contradictory ideas burst so suddenly upon him that he was lifted, metaphorically speaking, off his feet. Suzanne had not been mistaken in her calculations, the double blow she had dealt the young poet paralysing all his powers of analysis and reflection. Had she simply told him that she loved him he would probably have opened his eyes and perceived the striking contrast between the angelic attitude assumed by Suzanne and the bluntness of this declaration. He would have had to acknowledge that the angel's wings were very loosely attached if they could be so easily laid aside. But instead of committing the mistake of laying them aside the angel had spread her bright pinions out wide and disappeared. 'She loves me, and will never forgive me for having dragged that confession from her,' said René to himself.
He fully believed that she had gone away resolved never to see him again, and all his thoughts became concentrated upon that idea. How could he hope to shake the resolution of a creature so sincere that she had been unable to conceal her feelings, so saint-like that she had immediately regarded her involuntary confession as a crime? And René again saw her before him with terror written on her face and tears starting from her eyes. Lost in these thoughts, he walked straight before him, unable to bear the sight of a human being, even were it Emilie, his dear confidante. Hailing a cab, he told the driver to take him to Saint-Cloud. This was the first name that rose to his lips, because Suzanne had described to him twofêtesat which she had been present in the palace when quite a girl. On getting out of the cab he felt a savage delight in plunging into the denuded wood. A pale February sun lit up the bleak wintry landscape and the dry leaves cracked under his tread as he strode along. Now and then, through a network of blackened trunks and naked branches, he could see the dreary ruins of the old palace and the blue waters of the little lake upon which, in bygone days, Madame Moraines had seen the unhappy Prince, since killed at the Cape.
The impressions produced by his surroundings and by these memories of a tragic past did not distract the poet's thoughts from the one idea that hypnotised him, as it were—by what means he could conquer the will of this woman whom he loved, who loved him in return, and whom he was determined to see again at all costs. What was to be done? Call at her house and demand admittance? Inflict his presence upon her by frequenting the houses she visited? Waylay her at street corners and at theatres? No—he felt that he could not do anything that might furnish Suzanne with a single reason for loving him less. It was to her that he looked for everything, even for the right of beholding her. The memory of the ideals he had cherished in the first years of his manhood and the purer years of his youth inspired him with serious thoughts of doing absolutely nothing to approach her, of obeying her as Dante would have obeyed Beatrice, Petrarch his Laura, Cino da Pistoia his Sylvia—those noble poets of the ages of chivalry who gave voice to the lofty conceptions of an imaginative and holy love full of ideal devotion. He had so often dipped with delight into theVita Nuovaand devoured the sonnets these dreamers wrote their lady-loves. But how could such literature, of almost ascetic purity, hold its own against the poison of sensuous passion which, unknown to him, Suzanne's beauty and surroundings had instilled into his blood? Obey her! No—that he could not do. Fresh ideas welled up within him, and he sought to calm his overwrought nerves by exercise, the only palliative for the terrible mental agonies he was suffering.
Night fell—a wintry night preceded by a short, dismal twilight. Worn out by the excess of emotion, René at last decided to adopt the only course that could be put into immediate execution—that of writing to Suzanne. On reaching the village of Saint-Cloud he entered acafé, and there, on a beer-stained blotting-pad, with a spluttering pen, disgusted with the paper he used and the place he was in, disturbed by the noise of billiard balls and blinded by the smoke of the players' pipes, he wrote, under the insolent gaze of a dirty waiter, first one letter, then another, and finally a third. How horrified he would have been had Suzanne seen him sitting there! But, on the other hand, he felt that he could not wait until he got home to tell her what he had to say, and in the following terms, that would have greatly surprised Baron Desforges had he read them and been told that they were addressed to his Suzette of the Rue du Mont-Thabor, he gave vent to his excessive grief:
'I have written you several letters, madame, and torn them up, and I am not sure that I shall send you this one, so great is my fear of displeasing you by the crude expression of sentiments which I am sure would not displease you if you really knew them. Alas! we cannot bare our hearts, and will you believe me when I tell you that the feelings which prompt me to write this letter have nothing in them that would offend the most sensitive and pure-minded woman—not even yourself, madame? But you know so little of me, and the feeling which, with the divine sincerity of a soul that abhors concealment, you have permitted me to see, has been such a surprise that, by the time I am writing these lines, it has probably been already banished and effaced from your heart for ever. If that be so, do not answer this letter—do not even read it. I shall know what to make of your silence, and will bow to your decision. I shall suffer cruelly, but my gratitude to you will be eternal for having procured me the absolute and unalloyed delight of seeing the Ideal of all my youthful dreams in the flesh. For such happiness I can never be sufficiently grateful, even were I to die of grief through having met you only to lose you. You crossed my path, and by your existence alone you have proved that my ideal was no myth. However hard my lot may one day be, this dear, divine memory will be to me a talisman, a magic charm.