At that moment, Laurent was the better and more sincere of the two, for he had spontaneous impulses which redeemed all his faults. He opened his arms, and embraced Palmer effusively, making no effort to conceal his tears, which were beginning to suffocate him.
"What is all this?" said Palmer, glancing at Thérèse.
"I do not know," she replied, firmly; "I have just told him that we are going to America to be married. It causes him some grief. He apparently thinks that we are going to forget him. Tell him, Palmer, we shall always love him, at a distance as well as near at hand."
"He is a spoiled child!" rejoined Palmer. "He must know that I have but one word, and that I desire your happiness before everything. Must we take him to America, to make him cease grieving and causing you to weep, Thérèse?"
These words were uttered in a tone impossible to describe. It was a tone of paternal affection, blended with an indefinable flavor of profound and unconquerable bitterness.
Thérèse understood. She asked for her hat and shawl, saying to Palmer:
"We will go to dine at a restaurant. Catherine expected nobody but me, and there is not enough dinner in the house for us both."
"You mean for us three," rejoined Palmer, still half-bitter and half-loving.
"But I cannot dine with you," said Laurent, understanding at last what was going on in Palmer's mind. "I must leave you; I will come again to say adieu. What day do you start?"
"In four days," said Thérèse.
"At least!" added Palmer, looking at her with a strange expression; "but that is no reason why we three should not dine together to-day. Do me this favor, Laurent. We will go to theFrères Provençaux, and after that we will take a drive in the Bois de Boulogne. That will remind us of Florence and theCascines. Come, I beg you."
"I am engaged," said Laurent.
"Oh! well, break your engagement," said Palmer. "Here are paper and pens! Write, write, I beg you!"
Palmer spoke in such a decided tone that there was no denying him. Laurent remembered vaguely that it was his old-time peremptory tone. Thérèse wanted him to refuse, and she could have made him understand it with a glance; but Palmer did not take his eyes from her face, and he seemed in a mood to interpret everything in an unfavorable light.
Laurent was very sincere. When he lied, he was the first person deceived. He deemed himself strong enough to face that delicate situation, and it was his straightforward, generous purpose to restore Palmer's former confidence. Unluckily, when the human mind, borne onward by vigorous aspirations, has climbed certain lofty summits, if it is attacked with vertigo, it does not descend gradually, but plunges recklessly down. That is what happened to Palmer. Although the most noble-hearted and loyal of men, he had aspired to control the emotions aroused by a too delicate situation. His strength had betrayed him; who could blame him for it? And he plunged into the abyss, dragging Thérèse and Laurent himself with him. Who would not pity them—all three? All three had dreamed of scaling heaven and of reaching those serene regions where passions have naught of earthliness; but it is not given to man to reach that height; it is much for him to deem himself for an instant capable of loving without doubt or distrust.
The dinner was mortally dismal; although Palmer, who had assumed the rôle of host, made it a point to set before his guests the daintiest dishes and choicest wines, everything had a bitter taste to them, and Laurent, after vain efforts to recover the frame of mind which he had found so delightful during his relations with those two at Florence immediately after his illness, refused to accompany them to the Bois de Boulogne. Palmer, who had drunk a trifle more than usual in order to forget himself, insisted in a way that annoyed Thérèse.
"Come, come," she said, "don't be so persistent. Laurent is right to refuse; in the Bois de Boulogne, in your open carriage, we shall be very conspicuous, and we may meet people whom we know. We can't expect them to know what an exceptional position we three occupy with respect to each other; and they may well draw some very unpleasant conclusions regarding all of us."
"Very well, then let us return to your house," said Palmer; "then I will go and take a walk alone; I need a bit of fresh air."
Laurent made his escape when he saw that Palmer had determined to leave him alone with Thérèse, apparently for the purpose of watching them or surprising them. He returned to his own quarters very much depressed, saying to himself that perhaps Thérèse was not happy, and involuntarily deriving some satisfaction from the thought that Palmer was not superior to the weakness of human nature, as he had imagined, and as Thérèse had represented him in her letters.
We will pass rapidly over the ensuing week, a week during which the heroic romance of which the three ill-fated friends had dreamed more or less vividly, faded from hour to hour. Thérèse clung to her illusions more persistently than the others, because, after such far-seeing apprehensions and precautions, she had determined that she would risk her whole life, and that however unjust Palmer might be, she ought to, and would, keep her word to him.
Palmer released her from it at one stroke, after a succession of suspicions more aggravating, because they were unexpressed in words, than all Laurent's insults had been.
One morning, after passing the night concealed in Thérèse's garden, Palmer was about to retire when she appeared near the gate and detained him.
"Well," she said, "you have been watching here six hours; I saw you from my room. Are you convinced that no one came to see me last night?"
Thérèse was angry, and yet, by forcing the explanation Palmer wished to avoid, she hoped to lead him back to confidence in her; but he thought otherwise.
"I see, Thérèse," he said, "that you are tired of me, since you demand a confession after which I should be contemptible in your eyes. And yet it would not have cost you much to close them to a weakness with which I have not annoyed you overmuch. Why do you not let me suffer in silence? Have I insulted you and pursued you with bitter sarcasms? Have I written you volumes of insults, only to come the next day and weep at your feet and make frantic protestations of repentance, reserving the right to begin anew to torture you the next day? Did I ever so much as ask you an indiscreet question? Why could you not sleep quietly last night while I sat on yonder bench, not disturbing your repose by shrieks and tears? Can you not forgive a suffering for which I blush, perhaps, and which, at all events, I have the pride to wish to conceal and know how to? You have forgiven much more in the case of one who had not so much courage."
"I have forgiven him nothing, Palmer, for I have parted from him irrevocably. As for this suffering which you avow, and which you think that you conceal so perfectly, let me tell you that it is as clear as daylight to my eyes, and that I suffer more from it than you do yourself. Understand that it humiliates me profoundly, and that, coming from a strong and thoughtful man like you, it wounds me a hundred times more deeply than the insults of an excited child."
"Yes, yes, of course," rejoined Palmer. "So you are wounded by my fault, and angry with me forever! Well, Thérèse, everything is at an end between us. Do for me what you have done for Laurent: continue to be my friend."
"So you mean to leave me?"
"Yes, Thérèse; but I do not forget that, when you deigned to give me your word, I placed my name, my fortune, and my worldly station at your feet. I have but one word, and I will keep my promise to you; let us be married here, quietly and joylessly, accept my name and half of my income, and then——"
"And then?" echoed Thérèse.
"Then I will go home, I will go to embrace my mother, and you will be free!"
"Is this a threat of suicide?"
"No, on my honor! Suicide is rank cowardice, especially when one has a mother like mine. I will travel, I will start around the world again, and you will hear no more of me!"
Thérèse was shocked by such a proposition.
"This would seem to me a wretched joke, Palmer," she said, "if I did not know you to be a serious man. I prefer to believe that you do not deem me capable of accepting this name and this money which you offer me as the solution of a case of conscience. Never recur to such a suggestion; I should feel insulted."
"Thérèse! Thérèse!" cried Palmer, violently, squeezing her arm until he bruised the skin, "swear to me, by the memory of the child you lost, that you no longer love Laurent; I will kneel at your feet and implore you to forgive my injustice."
Thérèse withdrew her wounded arm, and gazed at him in silence. She was outraged to the very bottom of her soul that he should exact such an oath from her, and his words seemed to her even more cruel and brutal than the physical pain she had undergone.
"My child," she cried, stifling her sobs, "I swear to you, to you who are in heaven, that no man shall ever debase your poor mother again!"
She rose, went to her room, and locked herself in. She felt so entirely innocent with respect to Palmer, that she could not endure the idea of descending to self-justification like a guilty woman. Moreover, she anticipated a horrible future with a man who could brood so long over a deep-rooted jealousy, and who, after he had twice provoked what he thought to be a serious danger for her, attributed his own imprudence to her as a crime. She thought of her mother's ghastly life with a husband who was jealous of the past, and she said to herself, justly enough, that, after she had had the misfortune to be subjected to a passion like Laurent's, she had been insane to believe in the possibility of happiness with another man.
Palmer had a reserve store of good sense and pride which did not allow him to hope to make Thérèse happy after such a scene as had just occurred. He felt that his jealousy would never be cured, and he persisted in believing that it was well-founded. He wrote to Thérèse:
"Forgive me, my friend, if I have pained you; but it is impossible for me not to realize that I was about to drag you down into an abyss of despair. You love Laurent, you have always loved him in spite of yourself, and in all probability you will always love him. It is your destiny. I tried to relieve you from it; you tried with me. I also realize that in accepting my love you were sincere, and that you did your utmost to respond to it. I indulged in many illusions, but I have felt them slipping from me every day since we left Florence. If he had persisted in being ungrateful, I should have been saved; but his repentance and gratitude touched your heart. I myself was touched by them, and yet I strove to believe that I was perfectly calm. It was of no avail. Thenceforth there were between you, because of me, sorrows of which you never told me, but which I divined. He recurred to his former love for you, and you, although you fought against the feeling, regretted that you belonged to me. Alas! Thérèse, that was the time when you should have retracted your promise. I was ready to give it back to you. I left you at liberty to go with him from Spezzia: why did you not do it?"Forgive me; I rebuke you for having suffered terribly to make me happy and to become attached to me. I have fought hard, too, I promise you! And now, if you care to accept my devotion, I am ready to struggle and suffer anew. Tell me if you are yourself willing to suffer, and if, by going with me to America, you hope to be cured of this wretched passion which threatens you with a pitiable future. I am ready to take you with me; but let us say no more of Laurent, I implore you, and do not look upon it as a crime on my part to have guessed the truth. Let us remain friends, come and live with my mother, and if, a few years hence, you find me not unworthy of you, accept my name and a permanent home in America, with no thought of ever returning to France."I will wait in Paris a week for your reply."RICHARD."
"Forgive me, my friend, if I have pained you; but it is impossible for me not to realize that I was about to drag you down into an abyss of despair. You love Laurent, you have always loved him in spite of yourself, and in all probability you will always love him. It is your destiny. I tried to relieve you from it; you tried with me. I also realize that in accepting my love you were sincere, and that you did your utmost to respond to it. I indulged in many illusions, but I have felt them slipping from me every day since we left Florence. If he had persisted in being ungrateful, I should have been saved; but his repentance and gratitude touched your heart. I myself was touched by them, and yet I strove to believe that I was perfectly calm. It was of no avail. Thenceforth there were between you, because of me, sorrows of which you never told me, but which I divined. He recurred to his former love for you, and you, although you fought against the feeling, regretted that you belonged to me. Alas! Thérèse, that was the time when you should have retracted your promise. I was ready to give it back to you. I left you at liberty to go with him from Spezzia: why did you not do it?
"Forgive me; I rebuke you for having suffered terribly to make me happy and to become attached to me. I have fought hard, too, I promise you! And now, if you care to accept my devotion, I am ready to struggle and suffer anew. Tell me if you are yourself willing to suffer, and if, by going with me to America, you hope to be cured of this wretched passion which threatens you with a pitiable future. I am ready to take you with me; but let us say no more of Laurent, I implore you, and do not look upon it as a crime on my part to have guessed the truth. Let us remain friends, come and live with my mother, and if, a few years hence, you find me not unworthy of you, accept my name and a permanent home in America, with no thought of ever returning to France.
"I will wait in Paris a week for your reply.
"RICHARD."
Thérèse rejected an offer which wounded her pride. She still loved Palmer, and yet she felt so insulted by the offer to take her as a favor when she had no reason to reproach herself, that she concealed the pain that tore her heart. She felt, too, that she could not resume any sort of connection with him without prolonging a torture which he no longer had the strength to dissemble, and that their life thenceforth would be a constant struggle or constant misery. She left Paris with Catherine, telling no one where she was going, and hid herself in a small country-house in the provinces, which she hired for three months.
Palmer sailed for America, bearing with dignity a very deep wound, but utterly unable to admit that he had been mistaken. He had an obstinate streak in his mind, which sometimes reacted upon his disposition, but only to make him do this or that thing with resolution, not to make him persist in a painful and really difficult undertaking. He had believed that he was capable of curing Thérèse of her fatal love, and he had performed that miracle by his enthusiastic and, if you please, imprudent faith; but he lost the fruit just as he was on the point of plucking it, because, when the last test came, his faith failed him.
It should be said also, that, in establishing a genuine, serious connection between two persons, nothing can be more unfortunate than an attempt to take possession too quickly of a heart that has been broken. The dawn of such a connection is attended by the noblest illusions; but jealousy of the past is an incurable disease, and stirs up storms which even old age does not always dispel.
If Palmer had been a really strong man, or if his strength had been calmer and less unreasoning, he might have saved Thérèse from the disasters that he foresaw for her. It was his duty to do it, perhaps, for she had confided herself to him with a sincerity and disinterestedness worthy of solicitude and respect; but many who aspire to strength of character and believe that they possess it possess nothing more than energy, and Palmer was one of those as to whom one may be mistaken for a long while. Such as he was, he surely deserved Thérèse's regrets. We shall see ere long that he was capable of the noblest impulses and the bravest deeds. His whole mistake consisted in believing in the unassailable duration of that which in him was simply a spontaneous effort of the will.
Laurent knew nothing at first of Palmer's departure for America; he was dismayed to find that Thérèse, too, had gone away without bidding him adieu. He had received from her only these few words:
"You are the only person in France who knew of my projected marriage to Palmer. The marriage is broken off. Keep our secret. I am going away."
"You are the only person in France who knew of my projected marriage to Palmer. The marriage is broken off. Keep our secret. I am going away."
As she wrote these ice-cold words to Laurent, Thérèse was conscious of a bitter feeling toward him. Was not that fatal child the cause of all the misfortunes and all the sorrows of her life?
She soon felt, however, that this time her irritation was unjust. Laurent had behaved admirably toward both Palmer and herself during that wretched week which had ruined everything. After the first outburst, he had accepted the situation with perfect good faith, and had done his utmost not to give offence to Palmer. He had not once sought to take advantage with Thérèse of her fiancé's unjust suspicions. He had never failed to speak of him with respect and affection. By a strange concatenation of circumstances, it was he who had the dignified rôle during that week. And Thérèse could not help realizing that, although Laurent was sometimes insane to the point of downright atrocity, his mind was never open to any base or despicable thought.
During the three months which followed Palmer's departure, Laurent continued to show that he was worthy of Thérèse's friendship. He had succeeded in discovering her retreat, and he did nothing to disturb her tranquillity. He wrote to her, complaining mildly of the coldness of her adieu, and reproaching her for not having confidence in him in her sorrows, for not treating him like a brother; "was he not created and brought into the world to serve her, to console her, to avenge her at need?" Then followed questions to which Thérèse was forced to reply. Had Palmer insulted her? Should he go to him and demand satisfaction? Did I do anything imprudent, which wounded you? Have you any reproach to bring against me? God knows, I did not think it! If I am the cause of your suffering, scold me, and if I am not the cause of it, tell me that you will allow me to weep with you.
Thérèse justified Richard without entering into any explanations. She forbade Laurent to mention his name to her. In her generous determination to leave no stain on her fiancé's memory, she allowed him to believe that she alone was responsible for the rupture. Perhaps the result was to revive in Laurent's heart hopes which she had no purpose of reviving; but there are situations in which one bungles, whatever one may do, and rushes onward, impelled by fatality, to one's destruction.
Laurent's letters were infinitely gentle and affectionate. He wrote without art, without pretension in the way of style, and often in bad taste and incorrectly. He was sometimes honestly emphatic, and sometimes childish without prudery. With all their defects, his letters were dictated by a depth of conviction which made them irresistibly persuasive, and one could feel in every word the fire of youth and the effervescent energy of an artist of genius.
Moreover, Laurent began to work with great ardor, thoroughly resolved never to return to his former dissolute habits. His heart bled at the thought of the privations Thérèse had imposed upon herself in order to provide him with the variety, the bracing air, and the renewed health of the journey to Switzerland. He had determined to pay his debt at the earliest possible moment.
Thérèse soon began to feel that the affection of herpoor child, as he still called himself, was very pleasant to her, and that, if it could continue as it was, it would be the best and purest sentiment of his life.
She encouraged him by motherly replies to persevere in the path of toil to which he said that he had returned forever. Her letters were sweet, resigned, and breathed a chaste affection; but Laurent soon detected a strain of mortal sadness in them. Thérèse admitted that she was slightly ill, and she sometimes had thoughts of death at which she laughed with heart-rending melancholy. She was really ill. Without love and without work,ennuiwas consuming her. She had carried with her a small sum of money, which was all that remained of what she had earned at Genoa, and she used it with the strictest economy, in order to remain in the country as long as possible. She had conceived a horror of Paris. And then it is possible that there had gradually stolen over her a longing and at the same time a sort of dread to see Laurent once more, changed, resigned, and improved in every way, as his letters showed him to be.
She hoped that he would marry; as he had once had an inclination in that direction, that excellent plan might occur to him again. She encouraged him to do it. He said sometimesyesand sometimesno. Thérèse constantly anticipated that some trace of the old love would appear in Laurent's letters: it did crop out a little now and then, but always with exquisite delicacy; and the prevailing characteristic of these veiled references to ill-disguised sentiment was a delightful tenderness, an effusive sensibility, a sort of ardent filial devotion.
When the winter arrived, Thérèse, finding that she had come to the end of her resources, was obliged to return to Paris, where her patrons were and her duties to herself. She concealed her return from Laurent, preferring not to see him again too soon; but, impelled by some mysterious power of divination, he passed through the unfrequented street on which the little house stood. He saw that the shutters were down, and he went in, drunk with joy. It was an ingenuous, almost child-like joy, which would have made a suspicious, reserved attitude utterly ridiculous and prudish. He left Thérèse to dine alone, begging her to come in the evening to his studio, to see a picture which he had just finished and upon which he was absolutely determined to have her opinion before sending it away. It was sold and paid for; but, if she had any criticism to make upon it, he would work at it a few days more. The deplorable days had passed when Thérèse "was no connoisseur, when she had the narrow, realistic judgment peculiar to portrait-painters, when she was incapable of comprehending a work of the imagination," etc. Now she was "his muse and his inspiration. Without the aid of her divine breath, he could do nothing. With her advice and encouragement, his talent would fulfil all its promises."
Thérèse forgot the past, and, while she was not too much bewildered by the present, she did not think that she ought to refuse what an artist never refuses a fellow-artist. After dinner, she took a cab and went to Laurent's studio.
She found the studio illuminated, and the picture in a magnificent light. It was a most excellent and beautiful picture. That peculiar genius had the faculty of making, while in repose, more rapid progress than is always attained by those who work most persistently. As a result of his travelling and his illness, there had been a gap of a year in his work, and it seemed that, by reflection simply, he had thrown off the defects of his earlier exuberance of fancy. At the same time, he had acquired new qualities which one would hardly have deemed consistent with his nature—accuracy of drawing, more agreeable choice of subjects, charm of execution—everything that was likely to please the public without lowering him in the estimation of artists.
Thérèse was touched and enchanted. She expressed her admiration in the warmest terms. She said to him everything that she deemed best adapted to make the noble pride of talent vanquish all the wretched enthusiasms of the past. She found nothing to criticise, and even forbade him to retouch any part of it.
Laurent, albeit modest in manners and language, had more pride than Thérèse gave him credit for. In the depth of his heart he was enraptured by her praise. He had a feeling that she was the shrewdest and most conscientious of all those who were capable of appreciating him. He felt, too, a violent recrudescence of the old longing for her to share his artistic joys and sorrows, and that hope of becoming a master, that is to say, a man, which she only could revive in his moments of weakness.
When Thérèse had gazed a long while at the picture, she turned to look at a figure as to which Laurent desired her opinion, saying that she would be even more pleased with it; but, instead of a canvas, Thérèse saw her mother, with smiling face, standing in the doorway of Laurent's chamber.
Madame C—— had come to Paris, not knowing just what day Thérèse would return. This visit was occasioned by serious business: her son was to be married, and Monsieur C—— himself had been in Paris for some time. Thérèse's mother having learned from her that she had renewed her correspondence with Laurent, and dreading the future, had called upon him unexpectedly to say to him all that a mother can say to a man, to prevent his making her daughter unhappy.
Laurent was gifted with eloquence of the heart. He had reassured this poor mother, and had detained her, saying:
"Thérèse is coming here, and I propose to swear to her at your feet that I will always be to her whichever she may choose, her brother or her husband, but in any event her slave."
It was a very pleasant surprise for Thérèse to find her mother there, for she did not expect to see her so soon. They embraced with tears of joy. Laurent led them to a small salon filled with flowers, where tea was served in sumptuous fashion. Laurent was rich, he had just earned ten thousand francs. He was proud and happy to be able to repay Thérèse all that she had expended for him. He was adorable that evening; he won the daughter's heart and the mother's confidence, and yet he had the delicacy not to say a word of love to Thérèse. Far from that, as he kissed the clasped hands of the two women, he exclaimed with absolute sincerity that that was the loveliest day of his life, and that never had he felt so happy and so self-contented when he and Thérèse were alone.
Madame C—— first broached the subject of marriage to Thérèse some days later. That poor woman, who had sacrificed everything to external appearances, who, despite her domestic sorrows, believed that she had done well, could not endure the idea of her daughter being cast off by Palmer, and she thought that Thérèse might set herself right in the eyes of the world by making another choice. Laurent was famous and much in vogue. Never could there be a better assorted marriage. The young but great artist had reformed. Thérèse possessed an influence over him which had dominated the most violent crisis of his painful transformation. He had an unconquerable attachment for her. It had become a duty on the part of both of them to weld anew and forever a chain which had never been completely severed, and which could never be, strive as hard as they might.
Laurent excused his past offences by very specious reasoning. Thérèse, he said, had spoiled him at the outset by too great gentleness and resignation. If, at the time of his first ingratitude, she had shown that she was offended, she would have corrected his wretched habit, contracted with low women, of yielding to his impulses and his caprices. She would have taught him the respect a man owes to the woman who has given herself to him through love.
Another consideration, too, which Laurent made the most of in his defence, and which seemed more weighty, was this, which he had already suggested in his letters.
"Probably," he said to her, "I was ill, although I did not know it, when I wronged you the first time. A brain-fever seems to strike you like the lightning, and yet it is impossible to believe that in a young, strong man there has not taken place, perhaps long beforehand, a terrible revolution by which his reason has already been disturbed, and under which his will has been unable to react. Is not that just what took place in me, my poor Thérèse, when that sickness was coming on which nearly killed me? Neither you nor I could understand it; and, as for myself, it often happened that I woke in the morning and thought of your grief of the preceding day, unable to distinguish between the dreams I had just dreamed and the reality. You know that I could not work, that the place where we were aroused an unhealthy aversion in my mind, that I had had an extraordinary hallucination in the forest of ——; and that, when you gently reproached me for certain cruel words and certain unjust accusations, I listened to you with a dazed air, thinking that you were the one who had dreamed it all. Poor woman! I accused you of being mad! You must see thatIwas mad, and can you not forgive involuntary offences? Compare my conduct after my illness with what it was before! Was it not like a reawakening of my heart? Did you not suddenly find me as trustful, as submissive, as devoted, as I had been cynical, irritable, and selfish, before that crisis which restored me to my senses? And have you had any reason to reproach me from that moment? Did I not bow to your marriage to Palmer as a punishment I had earned? You saw me almost dead with grief at the thought that I was going to lose you forever: did I say a word against your fiancé? If you had bade me run after him, and even to blow out my own brains in order to bring him back to you, I would have done it, so absolutely do my heart and my life belong to you! Do you want me to do it now? If my existence embarrasses you or makes you unhappy, say but a word, I am ready to put an end to it. Say a word, Thérèse, and you will never again hear the name of this wretched creature, who has no other desire than to live or die for you."
Thérèse's character had grown weaker in this twofold love, which, in fact, had been simply two acts of the same drama; except for that outraged, shattered passion, Palmer would never have thought of marrying her, and the effort that she had made to pledge herself to him was, perhaps, nothing more than the reaction of despair. Laurent had never disappeared from her life, since Palmer's constant argument, in seeking to convince her, had been to refer to the deplorable results of that liaison which he wished to make her forget and which he seemed fatally impelled to recall to her mind over and over again.
And then the renewal of friendship after the rupture had been, so far as Laurent was concerned, a genuine renewal of passion; whereas, to Thérèse, it had been a new phase of devotion, more refined and more touching than love itself. She had suffered from Palmer's desertion, but not in a cowardly way. She still had strength to meet injustice; indeed, we may say that was her whole strength. She was not one of those women who are everlastingly suffering and complaining, overflowing with useless regrets and insatiable longings. A violent reaction was taking place in her, and her intelligence, which was abundantly developed, naturally helped it on. She conceived an exalted idea of moral liberty, and when another's love and faith failed her, she had the righteous pride not to dispute the tattered compact, shred by shred. She even took pleasure in the idea of restoring freedom and repose, generously and without reproach, to whoever reclaimed them.
But she had become much weaker than in her earlier womanhood, in the sense that she had recovered the craving to love and to have faith, which had been long benumbed by a disaster of exceptional severity. She had fancied for a long time that she could live thus, and that art would be her only passion. She had made a mistake, and she could no longer indulge in any illusions concerning the future. It was necessary for her to love, and her greatest misfortune was that it was necessary for her to love gently and self-sacrificingly, and to satisfy at any price the maternal impulse which was, as it were, a fatal element of her nature and her life. She had become accustomed to suffering for some one, she longed to suffer still, and if that longing, strange, it is true, but well characterized in certain women, and in certain men as well, had made her less merciful to Palmer than to Laurent, it was because Palmer had seemed to her too strong himself to need her devotion. So that Palmer had erred in offering her support and consolation. Thérèse had missed the feeling that she was necessary to that man, who wished her to think of no one but herself.
Laurent, who was more ingenuous, had that peculiar charm of which she was fatally enamored—weakness! He made no secret of it, he proclaimed that touching infirmity of his genius with transports of sincerity and inexhaustible emotion. Alas! he, too, erred. He was not really weak, any more than Palmer was really strong. He had his hours, he always talked like a child of heaven, and as soon as his weakness had won the day, he recovered his strength to make others suffer, as is the wont of all the children whom we adore.
Laurent was in the clutches of an inexorable fatality. He said so himself in his lucid moments. It seemed as if, born of the intercourse of two angels, he had nursed at the breast of a Fury, and had retained in his blood a leaven of frenzy and despair. He was one of those persons, more plentiful than is generally supposed in the human race, in both sexes, who, although endowed with all sublimity of thought and all the noble impulses of the heart, never attain the full extent of their faculties without falling at once into a sort of intellectual epilepsy.
And then, too, he was, like Palmer, inclined to undertake the impossible, which is to try to graft happiness upon despair, and to taste the divine joys of conjugal faith and of sacred friendship upon the ruins of a newly devastated past. Those two hearts, bleeding from the wounds they had received, were sadly in need of repose: Thérèse implored it with the sorrow born of a ghastly presentiment; but Laurent fancied that he had lived ten centuries during the ten months of their separation, and he became ill with the exuberance of a desire of the heart, which should have terrified Thérèse more than a desire of the senses.
Unfortunately, she allowed herself to be reassured by the nature of that desire. Laurent seemed to be so far regenerated as to have restored moral love to the place it should occupy in the front rank, and he was once more alone with Thérèse, but did not worry her as before by his outbreaks of frenzy. He was able to talk with her for hours at a time with the most sublime affection—he who had long believed that he was dumb, he said, and who at last felt his genius spreading its wings and taking its flight to a loftier realm! He made himself a part of Thérèse's future by constantly pointing out to her that she had a sacred duty to perform toward him, the duty of sheltering him from the mad impulses of youth, from the unworthy ambitions of middle life, and the depraved selfishness of old age. He talked to her of himself, always of himself. Why not? He talked so well! Through her means, he would be a great artist, a great heart, a great man; she owed him that, because she had saved his life! And Thérèse, with the fatal simplicity of loving hearts, came at last to look upon this reasoning as irrefutable, and to regard as a duty what she had at first been implored to grant as a proof of forgiveness.
So Thérèse at last consented to weld anew that fatal chain; but she was happily inspired to postpone the marriage, desiring to test Laurent's resolution on that point, and fearing an irrevocable engagement for his sake. If her own happiness alone had been involved, the imprudent creature would have bound herself forever.
Thérèse's first happiness did not lasta whole week, as a merry ballad sadly says; the second did not last twenty-four hours. Laurent's reactions were sudden and violent, in proportion to the intensity of his enjoyment. We say his reactions, Thérèse said hisretractations, and that was the more accurate word. He obeyed that inexorable longing which some young men feel to kill or destroy anything that arouses their passions. These cruel instincts have been observed in men of widely varying natures, and history has stigmatized them as perverse instincts; it would be more just to describe them as instincts perverted either by a disease of the brain contracted amid the surroundings in which the men in question were born, or by the impunity, fatal to the reason, which certain conditions assured them from their first steps in life. We have heard of young kings murdering fawns to which they seemed to be much attached, solely for the pleasure of seeing their entrails quiver. Men of genius, too, are kings in the environment in which they mature; indeed, they are absolute kings, who are intoxicated by their power. There are some who are tormented by the thirst for domination, and whose joy, when their domination is assured, excites them to frenzy.
Such was Laurent, in whom two entirely distinct natures struggled for mastery. One would have said that two souls, having fought for the privilege of vivifying his body, were engaged in a desperate conflict to drive each other out. Between those contrary impulsions the poor wretch lost his free will, and fell exhausted every day after the victory of the angel or the demon who fought over his body.
And when he analyzed himself, it seemed to him sometimes that he was reading in a book of magic, and could discern with marvellous and appalling lucidity the key to the mysterious spells of which he was the victim.
"Yes," he said to Thérèse, "I am undergoing the phenomenon which the thaumaturgists calledpossession. Two spirits have acquired mastery over me. Is one of them really a good and one an evil spirit? No, I do not think so: the one who terrifies you, the sceptical, violent, frantic one, does ill only because he is not able to do good as he understands it. He would like to be calm, philosophical, playful, tolerant;the otherdoes not choose that he shall be so. He wishes to play his part of good angel; he seeks to be fervent, enthusiastic, single-hearted, devoted; and as his adversary mocks at him, denies him, and insults him, he becomes morose and cruel in his turn, so that the two angels together bring forth a demon."
And Laurent said and wrote to Thérèse on this strange subject sentences no less beautiful than appalling, which seemed to be true and to add further privileges to the impunity he had apparently arrogated to himself with respect to her.
All that Thérèse had feared that she would suffer on Laurent's account if she became Palmer's wife, she suffered on Palmer's account when she became for the second time Laurent's companion. Ghastly retrospective jealousy, the worst of all forms of jealousy, because it takes offence at everything and can be sure of nothing, gnawed the unhappy artist's heart and sowed madness in his brain. The memory of Palmer became a spectre, a vampire to him. He obstinately insisted that Thérèse should tell him all the details of her life at Genoa and Porto Venere, and, as she refused, he accused her of having tried todeceive him! Forgetting that at that time Thérèse had written to him:I love Palmer, and that a little later she had written to him:I am going to marry him, he reproached her with having always held in a firm and treacherous hand the chain of hope and desire which bound him to her. Thérèse placed all their correspondence before him, and he admitted that she had said to him all that loyalty called upon her to say to cut him loose from her. He became calmer, and agreed that she had handled his half-extinct passion with excessive delicacy, telling him the whole truth little by little, as he showed a disposition to receive it without pain, and also as she gained confidence in the future toward which Palmer was leading her. He admitted that she had never told him anything resembling a falsehood, even when she had refused to explain herself, and that immediately after his illness, when he was still deluding himself with the idea of a possible reconciliation, she had said to him: "All is at an end between us. What I have determined upon and accepted for myself is my secret, and you have no right to question me."
"Yes, yes; you are right!" cried Laurent. "I was unjust, and my fatal curiosity is a torment which it is a veritable crime for me to seek to make you share. Yes, dear Thérèse, I subject you to humiliating questions, you who owed me nothing more than oblivion, and who generously granted me a full pardon! I have changed rôles; I draw an indictment against you, forgetting that I am the culprit and the condemned! I try to tear away with an impious hand the veils of modesty in which your heart is entitled, and doubtless in duty bound, to envelop itself touching all that concerns your relations with Palmer. I thank you for your proud silence. I esteem you all the more for it. It proves to me that you never allowed Palmer to question you touching the mysteries of our sorrows and our joys. And now I understand that not only does a woman not owe these private confidences to her lover, but it is her duty to refuse them. The man who asks for them degrades the woman he loves. He calls upon her to do a dastardly thing, at the same time that he debases her in his mind, by associating her image with those of all the phantoms that beset him. Yes, Thérèse, you are right; one must work on his own account to maintain the purity of his ideal; and I am forever straining every nerve to profane it and cast it forth from the temple I had built for it!"
It would seem that after such protestations, and when Laurent declared his readiness to sign them with his blood and his tears, tranquillity should have been restored and happiness have begun. But such was not the case. Laurent, consumed by secret rage, returned the next day to his questions, his insults, his sarcasms. Whole nights were passed in deplorable disputes, in which it seemed that he had an absolute craving to work upon his own genius with the lash, to wound it and torture it, in order to make it fruitful in abusive language of truly appalling eloquence, and to drive both Thérèse and himself to the uttermost limits of despair. After these hurricanes, there seemed to be nothing left for them to do but to kill themselves together. Thérèse constantly expected it and was always ready, for life was horrible to her; but Laurent had not as yet had that thought. Exhausted by fatigue he would fall asleep, and his good angel seemed to return to watch over his slumber and bring to his face the divine smile of celestial visions.
It was an incredible, but fixed and invariable, rule of that strange character, that sleep changed all his resolutions. If he fell asleep with his heart overflowing with affection, he was sure to wake with his mind eager for battle and murder; and on the other hand, if he had gone away cursing the night before, he would return in the morning to bless.
Three times Thérèse left him and fled from Paris; three times he went after her and forced her to forgive his despair; for as soon as he had lost her he adored her, and began anew to implore her with all the tears of exalted repentance.
Thérèse was at once miserable and sublime in that hell into which she had plunged the second time, closing her eyes and sacrificing her life. She carried devotion to the point of acts of self-immolation which made her friends shudder, and which sometimes brought upon her the blame, almost the scorn, of certain proud and virtuous people who did not know what it is to love.
Moreover, this love of Thérèse for Laurent was incomprehensible to herself. She was not drawn on by her passions, for Laurent, besmirched by the debauchery into which he plunged anew to kill a love which he could not destroy by his will, had become a more disgusting object than a dead body to her. She no longer had any caresses for him, and he no longer dared ask her for them. She was no longer vanquished and swayed by the charm of his eloquence and the child-like grace of his penitence. She could no longer believe in the morrow; and the superb outbursts of emotion, which had reconciled them so many times, were no longer anything more in her eyes than alarming symptoms of storm and shipwreck.
What attached her to him was that all-embracing compassion which one inevitably acquires as a habit toward those to whom one has forgiven much. Pardon seems to engender pardon even to satiety, to foolish weakness. When a mother has said to herself that her child is incorrigible, and that he must either die or kill some one, there is nothing left for her to do except to abandon him or to accept him as he is. Thérèse had been mistaken every time that she had thought to cure Laurent by abandoning him. It is very true that he seemed to improve at such times, but only because he hoped to obtain his pardon. When he ceased to hope, he plunged recklessly into dissipation and idleness. Then she returned to rescue him, and succeeded in making him work for a few days. But how dearly she had to pay for the little good she succeeded in doing him! When he became disgusted once more with a regular life, he could not find enough invectives with which to reproach her for trying to make of him "what her patron saint Thérèse Levasseur had made of Jean-Jacques," that is to say, according to him, "an idiot and a maniac."
And yet there was in this pity, which he implored so fervently only to insult it as soon as she had given it back to him, an enthusiastic, perhaps a slightly fanatical respect for his genius as an artist. That woman, whom he accused of being commonplace and lacking in intelligence, when he saw her working for his well-being with simple-hearted perseverance, was superbly artistic, in her love at least, since she accepted Laurent's tyranny as a matter of divine right, and sacrificed to him her own pride, her own labor, and what another less self-sacrificing than she might have called her own glory.
And he, poor wretch, saw and understood that devotion, and when he realized his ingratitude he was consumed by remorse which crushed him. He should have had a heedless, robust mistress, who would have laughed at his anger and his repentance alike, who would not have suffered because of anything he did, so long as she controlled him. Thérèse was not such a woman. She was dying of weariness and disappointment, and Laurent, seeing her fade away, sought momentary forgetfulness of his own tears in the suicide of his intelligence, in the poison of drunkenness.
One evening, he abused her so long and so incoherently that she ceased to listen to him, and dozed in her chair. After a few moments, a slight rustling made her open her eyes. Laurent convulsively threw on the floor something that gleamed: it was a dagger. Thérèse smiled, and closed her eyes again. She understood feebly, and as if through the haze of a dream, that he had thought of killing her. At that moment, Thérèse was utterly indifferent to everything. To rest from living and thinking, let that rest be sleep or death—she left the choice to destiny.
Death was what she despised. Laurent thought that it was he, and, as he despised himself, he left her at last.
Three days later, Thérèse, having decided to borrow a sum which would enable her to take a long journey, to leave Paris in earnest,—for such a succession of agitations and hurricanes was spoiling her work and her life,—went to the Quai aux Fleurs and bought a white rose-bush, which she sent to Laurent without giving her name to the messenger. It was her farewell. On returning home, she found there a white rose-bush, sent without a name: that was Laurent's farewell. They both intended to go away—they both remained. The incident of the white rose-bushes moved Laurent to tears. He hurried to Thérèse and found her finishing her packing. Her place was taken in the mail-coach for six o'clock that evening. Laurent's place also was taken in the same coach. Both had thought of visiting Italy again alone. "Well, let us go together!" he cried.
"No, I am not going," said she.
"Thérèse, it's of no use for us to plan! this horrible bond that connects us will never be broken. It is madness to think of it. My love has withstood everything that can crush a sentiment, everything that can break a heart. You must love me as I am, or else we must die together. Are you willing to love me?"
"It would be of no use for me to be willing to do it; I cannot," said Thérèse. "I feel that my heart is exhausted; I think that it is dead."
"Very well; are you willing to die?"
"It is a matter of indifference to me how soon I die, as you know; but I do not wish you to live or die with me."
"Ah! yes, you believe in the eternity of theego! You don't want to meet me again in the other life! Poor martyr! I can understand that."
"We shall not meet again, Laurent, I am sure. Each soul goes toward its centre of attraction. Repose summons me, while you will always and everywhere be attracted by the tempest."
"That is to say thatyouhave not earned hell!"
"Nor have you earned it. You will be in another heaven, that is all!"
"What is there left for me in this world, if you leave me?"
"Glory, when you no longer seek love."
Laurent became pensive. Several times he repeated mechanically: "Glory!"—then he knelt in front of the hearth, poking the fire as he was accustomed to do when he wished to be alone with himself. Thérèse went out to countermand the orders for her journey. She was well aware that Laurent would have followed her.
When she returned, she found him very calm and cheerful.
"This world is only a dull comedy," he said; "but why seek to rise above it, since we do not know what there may be higher up, or even if there is anything at all? Glory, at which you laugh in your sleeve, I know very well——"
"I do not laugh at other people's glory."
"What other people?"
"Those who believe in it and love it."
"God knows whether I believe in it, Thérèse, or whether I snap my fingers at it as a mere farce! But one can love a thing of which he knows the trifling value. You love a balky horse that breaks your neck, the tobacco that poisons you, a wretched play that makes you laugh, and glory, which is only a masquerade! Glory! what is glory to a living artist? Newspaper articles that tear you to pieces and make people talk about you, and laudatory articles that no one reads, for the public is amused only by bitter criticisms, and when its idol is praised to the skies it ceases to care for him at all. And then the groups that gather about a painted canvas, and the monumental orders which fill you with delight and ambition, and leave you half-dead with fatigue, with your ideal unrealized. And then—the Institute—a collection of men who detest you, and who themselves——"
Here Laurent indulged in the most intensely bitter sarcasms, and concluded his dithyramb by saying:
"No matter! such is the glory of this world! We spit upon it, but we cannot do without it, since there is nothing better!"
Their conversation was prolonged until evening, satirical, philosophical, and becoming gradually altogether impersonal. To look at them and listen to them, one would have said that they were two friends, naturally peaceable, who had never quarrelled. This strange situation had occurred several times in the midst of their fiercest storms: when their hearts were silent, their minds still understood each other and agreed.
Laurent was hungry, and asked Thérèse to give him some dinner.
"What about the coach?" she said. "It is almost time for it to start."
"But you are not going?"
"I shall go if you stay."
"Very well; then I will go, Thérèse. Adieu!"
He left the house abruptly, and returned an hour later.
"I missed the mail," he said; "I will go to-morrow. Haven't you dined yet?"
In her preoccupation Thérèse had forgotten her dinner, which was on the table.
"My dear Thérèse," he said, "grant me one last favor; come to dine somewhere with me, and let us go to some play this evening. I want to be your friend once more, just your friend. That will cure me and be the salvation of both of us. Try me. I will not be jealous, nor exacting, nor even amorous any more. Let me tell you—I have another mistress, a pretty little woman in society, as slender as a linnet, and as white and dainty as a sprig of lily of the valley. She is a married woman. I am a friend of her lover, whom I am playing false. I have two rivals, two deadly perils to defy every time that I obtain atête-à-tête. That is very exciting, and therein lies the whole secret of my love. Thus my passions and my imagination are satisfied there; my heart alone and a free exchange of ideas are what I offer you."
"I refuse them," said Thérèse.
"What! you are vain enough to be jealous of a man whom you no longer love?"
"Surely not! I no longer have my life to give, and I cannot understand such a friendship as you ask of me, without exclusive devotion. Come to see me as my other friends do, I am perfectly willing; but do not ask me for any further private intimacy, even apparent."
"I understand, Thérèse; you have another lover!"
Thérèse shrugged her shoulders and made no reply. He was dying to have her boast to him of some caprice, as he had just boasted to her. His shattered strength was reviving and longed for a fight. He awaited anxiously her response to his challenge, ready to overwhelm her with reproaches and disdain, and perhaps to inform her that he had invented that mistress of his to induce her to betray herself. He could not understand Thérèse's inertness. He preferred to think that she hated him and deceived him, rather than that he was simply annoying or indifferent to her.
She tired him out by her silence.
"Good-night," he said at last. "I am going to dine, and then to the Opera, if I am not too drunk."
Thérèse, left alone, explored for the thousandth time the fathomless depths of this mysterious destiny. What did it lack of being one of the most beautiful of human destinies? Reason.
"But what is reason?" Thérèse asked herself, "and how can genius exist without it? Is it because it is such a mighty force that it can kill reason and still survive it? Or is reason simply an isolated faculty, whose union with the other faculties is not always necessary?"
She fell into a sort of metaphysical reverie. It had always seemed to her that reason was an assemblage of ideas, and not a single detail; that all the faculties of a perfectly constituted being borrowed something from it and supplied something to it in turn; that it was at once the means and the end; that no masterpiece could evade its law, and that no man could have any real value after he had resolutely trampled reason under foot.
She reviewed in her mind her memories of the great artists of all time, and also of contemporary artists. Everywhere she saw the rigid rules of the true associated with the dream of the beautiful, and yet everywhere there were exceptions, terrifying anomalies, radiant yet blighted faces like Laurent's. Aspiration to the sublime was a disease of Thérèse's epoch and environment. It was a touch of fever which took possession of youth and caused it to despise the normal conditions of happiness as well as the ordinary duties of life. By the force of events, Thérèse was hurled, without desiring or anticipating it, into that awful circle of the human hell. She had become the companion, the intellectual half, of one of those sublime madmen, one of those unreasoning geniuses; she was a witness of the endless agony of Prometheus, of the recurrent frenzies of Orestes; she felt the recoil of those indescribable sufferings, with no comprehension of their cause, and with no power to find a remedy for them.
And yet God still dwelt in those rebellious, tormented souls, for Laurent became enthusiastic and kindly once more at certain hours, and the pure well-spring of sacred inspiration was not dried up; his talent was not exhausted, perhaps he still had a glorious future before him. Should such a man be abandoned to the assaults of delirium or to the stupor of fatigue?
Thérèse, we say, had skirted that abyss too often not to have been made giddy by it more than once. Her own talent as well as her own character had well-nigh become involved, without her knowledge, in that desperate path. She had known that exaltation of suffering which shows one the miseries of life on a large scale, and which hovers on the boundaries between the real and the imaginary; but, by virtue of a natural reaction, her mind aspired henceforth to thetrue, which is neither one nor the other, neither prosaic fact nor the uncurbed ideal. She felt that there the beautiful was to be found, and that, in order to resume the logical life of the soul, she must seek to live a simple and dignified material life. She reproached herself sternly for having been false to herself so long; and a moment later she reproached herself as sternly for thinking too much of her own lot, in face of the extreme peril by which Laurent was still threatened.
With all its voices, with the voice of friendship as well as that of public opinion, society called to her to rise and resume possession of herself. That was her duty, according to the world, a term which in such case is equivalent to general order, the interest of society: "Follow the straight road; let those perish who wander from it."—And religion added: "The virtuous and the good for everlasting salvation, the blind and the rebellious for hell!"—Does it matter little to the wise man, pray, that the fool perishes?
Thérèse was shocked at that conclusion.
"On the day that I deem myself the most perfect, the most useful and the best creature on earth," she said to herself, "I will consent to a sentence of death against all others; but if that day does not come, shall I not be more mad than all the other madmen? Back, madness of vanity, the mother of selfishness! Let us continue to suffer for others than ourselves!"
It was almost midnight when she rose from the chair upon which she had sunk, crushed and spiritless, four hours before. Someone rang. A messenger brought a box and a note. The box contained a domino and a black satin mask. The note contained these words in Laurent's handwriting:Senza veder, senza parlar.
Without seeing or speaking to each other!—What was the key to that enigma? Did it mean that she should go to the masked ball to amuse him by a commonplace intrigue? Did he mean to try to fall in love with her without knowing her? Was it the fancy of a poet, or the insult of a libertine?
Thérèse sent away the box, and fell back in her chair; but a feeling of uneasiness made it impossible for her to reflect. Ought she not to try every expedient to rescue that victim from his infernal aberrations?
"I will go," she said, "I will follow him step by step. I will see, I will listen to his life away from me, I will learn how much truth there is in the villainous stories he tells me, whether he loves evil innocently or with affectation, whether he really has depraved tastes or is only seeking to distract his thoughts. Knowing all that I have hitherto tried not to know of him and his vile associates, all that I have striven with disgust to keep from his memory and my imagination, perhaps I shall discover some weak spot, some pretext for curing him of this vertigo."
She remembered the domino Laurent had sent her, although she had barely glanced at it. It was of satin. She sent for one of Naples silk, donned a mask, carefully covered her hair, supplied herself plentifully with bows of ribbon, in order to change her appearance more completely in case Laurent should suspect her identity, and, sending for a carriage, she set out, alone and resolutely, for the Opera ball.
She had never attended one of those functions. The mask was stifling, intolerable to her. She had never tried to disguise her voice, yet she did not wish that her identity should be divined by any one. She glided silently through the corridors, seeking the deserted corners when she was tired of walking, but going on if any one was coming toward her, always pretending to have a definite goal, and succeeding better than she had hoped in remaining alone and unmolested in that hustling crowd.
It was the time when there was no dancing at the Opera ball, and when the only disguise admitted was the black domino. There was therefore a multitude, sombre and solemn in appearance, but probably intent for the most part upon intrigues as immoral as the bacchanalian revels of other functions of the sort, but of a most imposing aspect when seen as a whole from above. And at intervals a blaring orchestra would suddenly begin to play a frantic quadrille, as if the management, at odds with the police, wished to induce the public to disregard the prohibition; but no one seemed to think of such a thing. The black swarm continued to move slowly and whisper amid the uproar, which ended with a pistol-shot, a strange, fantastic finale, which seemed powerless to dispel the vision of that dismal festival.
For some moments Thérèse was so impressed by the spectacle that she forgot where she was, and fancied herself in the world of depressing dreams. She looked for Laurent, and did not find him.
She ventured into thefoyer, where the best-known men in Paris were gathered, without masks or other disguises, and, having made the circuit of the room, she was about to retire, when she heard her name mentioned in a corner. She turned and saw the man she had loved so well, seated between two masked damsels, whose voices and accent had that indefinable combination of limpness and sharpness which betrays exhaustion of the senses and bitterness of spirit.
"Well," said one of them, "so you have abandoned your famous Thérèse at last? It seems that she deceived you in Italy, and that you would not believe it."
"He began to suspect it," rejoined the other, "on the day that he succeeded in driving out his fortunate rival."
Thérèse was mortally wounded to see the painful romance of her life laid open to such interpretations, and even more to see Laurent smile, tell those creatures that they did not know what they were saying, and change the subject, with no trace of indignation and apparently without noticing or being disturbed by what he heard. Thérèse would never have believed that he was not even her friend. Now she was sure of it! She remained, and continued to listen; her mask was glued to her face by a cold perspiration.
And yet Laurent said nothing to those girls that all the world might not have overheard. He chattered away, amused by their prattle, and answered them like a well-bred man. They were empty-headed creatures, and more than once he yawned, making a slight effort to conceal it. Nevertheless, he remained there, caring little whether he was seen of all men in such company, letting them pay court to him, yawning with fatigue and not with realennui, absent-minded but affable, and talking to those chance companions as if they were women of the best society, almost dear and genuine friends, associated with pleasant memories of joys which one can avow.
This lasted fully a quarter of an hour. Thérèse still held her place. Laurent's back was turned to her. The bench on which he was sitting stood in the recess of a closed glass door. When the groups wandering along the outer corridors stopped against that door, the black coats and dominos made an opaque background and the glass became a sort of black mirror, in which Thérèse's face was reflected unknown to her. Laurent glanced at her several times without thinking of her; but eventually the immobility of that masked face made him uneasy, and he said to his companions, pointing her out to them in the black mirror:
"Don't you call that mask ghastly?"
"Do we frighten you, pray?"
"No, not you; I know what sort of a nose you have under that bit of satin; but to have a face that you can't divine, that you don't know, glaring at you like that! I am going away, I have had enough of it."
"That is to say," they retorted, "that you have had enough of us."
"No," he said, "I have had enough of the ball. It's stifling here. Don't you want to come to see the snow fall? I am going to the Bois de Boulogne."
"Why, that's enough to kill you!"
"Ah! yes. Is there such a thing as death? Are you coming?"
"Faith, no!"
"Who wants to go to the Bois de Boulogne in a domino with me?" he asked, raising his voice.
A group of black figures swooped down upon him like a flock of bats.
"How much is it worth?" said one.
"Will you paint my portrait?" said another.
"Are we to go on foot or on horseback?" queried a third.
"A hundred francs a head," he replied, "just to walk about in the snow by moonlight. I will follow you at a distance. I want to see the effect. How many of you are there?" he added, after a moment. "Ten! that's hardly enough. But no matter, off we go!"
Three remained behind, saying:
"He hasn't a sou. We shall get inflammation of the lungs, and that will be all."
"You stay behind?" he said. "Seven left! Bravo! a cabalistic number, the seven deadly sins!Vive Dieu! I was afraid I should be bored, but there's an idea that saves me."
"Bah!" said Thérèse, "a mere artist's whim! He remembers that he is a painter. Nothing is lost."
She followed the strange party as far as the peristyle, to make sure that the fantastic idea was carried out; but the cold made the most determined draw back, and Laurent allowed himself to be persuaded to abandon the plan. He was asked to substitute a supper for the party.
"Faith," he said, "you are nothing but timid, selfish creatures, just exactly like virtuous women. I am going back into respectable society. So much the worse for you."
But they led him back to thefoyer, and there ensued between him and other young men who were friends of his, and a party of shameless hussies, such a lively conversation, coupled with such fine projects, that Thérèse, overcome by disgust, withdrew, saying to herself that it was too late. Laurent loved vice; she could do nothing more for him.
Did Laurent really love vice? No: the slave does not love the yoke and the lash; but, when he is a slave through his own fault, when he has allowed his liberty to be stolen from him for lack of a day of courage or prudence, he becomes accustomed to slavery and all its sorrows: he justifies that profound saying of the ancients, that, when Jupiter reduces a man to that condition, he takes away half of his soul.
When bodily slavery was the awful fruit of victory, Heaven so ordained it in pity for the vanquished; but, when it is the mind that is subjected to the lamentable embrace of debauchery, the punishment is inflicted in its entirety. Laurent thoroughly deserved that punishment. He might have redeemed himself. Thérèse, too, had risked half of her soul: he had not profited by it.
As she entered the carriage to return home, a frantic man rushed after her. It was Laurent. He had recognized her, as she left thefoyer, by an involuntary gesture of horror of which she was unconscious.
"Thérèse, let us go back to the ball," he said. "I want to say to all those men: 'You are brutes!' to all those women: 'You are vile creatures!' I want to shout your name, your sacred name, to that idiotic crowd, to grovel at your feet and bite the dust, calling down upon myself all the scorn, all the insults, all the shame! I want to make my confession aloud in the midst of that vast masquerade, as the early Christians did in the heathen temples, which were suddenly purified by the tears of repentance, and washed clean by the blood of the martyrs."
This outbreak lasted until Thérèse had taken him to his door. She could not at all understand why and how that man, who was so little intoxicated, so self-controlled, so agreeably loquacious among the damsels of the masked ball, could become passionate to the point of frenzy as soon as she appeared.
"It is I who drive you mad," she said. "A moment ago, those women were talking about me as about any vile creature, and it did not even rouse you. I have become, so far as you are concerned, a sort of avenging spectre. That was not what I wanted. Let us part, therefore, since I can no longer do anything but harm."
They met again the next day, however. He begged her to give him one last day of fraternal conversation, and to take one last friendly, quiet,bourgeoiswalk with him. They went to the Jardin des Plantes, sat down under the great cedar, and visited the labyrinth. It was a mild day; there were no traces of the snow. The sun shone pale through the light-purple clouds. The buds were already bursting with sap. Laurent was a poet, a contemplative poet and artist, nothing else, that day: a profound, incredible tranquillity; no remorse, no desires, and no hopes; at intervals, flashes of ingenuous gaiety.
Thérèse, who watched him with amazement, could hardly believe that everything was at an end between them.
The next day, there was another terrible tempest, without cause or pretext, precisely as a storm gathers in the summer sky for no other reason than that it was fair the day before.
Then, from day to day, everything became darker and darker, and it was like the end of the world, like continual flashes of lightning in the darkness.
One night, he came to her house very late, in a completely dazed condition, and, having no idea where he was, without a word to her, threw himself on the sofa in the salon, and fell asleep.
Thérèse went into her studio, and prayed to God fervently and despairingly to deliver her from that torture. She was discouraged; her cup was full. She wept and prayed all night.
Day was just breaking when she heard the bell ring at her gate. Catherine was asleep, and Thérèse supposed that some belated passer-by had made a mistake in the house. The ring was repeated, once, twice. Thérèse looked out through the round window in the hall over the front door. She saw a child of ten or twelve years, whose clothes indicated that his family was well-to-do, and whose upturned face seemed like an angel's.
"What is it, my little friend?" she said; "have you lost your way?"
"No," he replied, "I was brought here; I am looking for a lady whose name is Mademoiselle Jacques."
Thérèse ran down, opened the door, and gazed at the child with extraordinary emotion. It seemed to her that she had seen him before, or that he resembled some one whom she knew and whose name she could not remember. The child also seemed confused and undecided.
She led him into the garden to question him; but, instead of answering her questions, he asked: "Are you Mademoiselle Thérèse?" while trembling from head to foot.
"I am, my child; what do you want with me? what can I do for you?"
"You must take me and keep me with you, if you will have me!"
"Who are you? Pray tell me!"
"I am the son of the Comte de ——"
Thérèse restrained a cry, and her first impulse was to spurn the child; but suddenly she was struck by his resemblance to a face she had recently painted, looking at it in a mirror, in order to send it to her mother; and that face was her own.
"Wait!" she cried, taking the boy in her arms with a convulsive movement. "What is your name?"
"Manuel."
"Oh!Mon Dieu! who is your mother?"
"She is—I was told not to tell you right away! My mother used to be the Comtesse de ——, at Havana; she didn't love me, and she used often to say to me: 'You are not my son, I am not obliged to love you.'—But my papa loved me, and he often said to me: 'You are all mine, you haven't any mother.'—Then he died a year and a half ago, and the countess said: 'You belong to me and you are going to stay with me.'—That was because my father left her some money on condition that I should always be known as their son. But she didn't love me any better, and I was very unhappy with her, when a gentleman from the United States, whose name is Monsieur Richard Palmer, came all of a sudden and asked for me. The countess said: 'No, I am not willing.'—Then Monsieur Palmer said to me: 'Do you want me to take you to your real mother, who thinks you are dead, and who will be very happy to see you again?'—I said: 'Yes, indeed I do!' Then Monsieur Palmer came at night in a boat, because we lived on the sea-shore, and I got up very softly, very softly, and we sailed together to a big ship, and then we crossed the great ocean, and here we are."
"Here you are!" said Thérèse, who held the child close to her heart, and, trembling with frantic joy, enveloped him in a single, fervent kiss while he was speaking; "where is Palmer?"
"I don't know," said the child. "He brought me to the door, and told me to ring; then I didn't see him again."
"Let us look for him," said Thérèse, rising; "he cannot be far away!"
She ran out with the child, and they found Palmer, who was waiting at a little distance, to make sure that the boy was recognized by his mother.