* * *Nevertheless the first months of our marriage flowed on like a limpid stream that seems motionless. Our days slipped by without our being aware of them. I was amazed at the intimate peace I breathed; it did not seem consistent with the passion I wished to feel again. In time I came to ask myself whether I was really sufficiently in love. I looked for disturbances, outbreaks, storms, a great thirst for life, and around me, within me, I found only simplicity and clearness. Thus I grew distrustful of the new order that was making over my heart.I had been accustomed to think of love as a combat, and victory appeared to me to be filled with idleness. I began to scorn the harmony which was for her the summit of love, which united her by a thousand secret bonds to artistic perfection.I was afraid of monotony, even though I had not known it, I attained it very soon through the bitterness I mingled with Raymonde’s pure offerings.* * *Among the books and the guides that I had selected in order to give her what I called, pretentiously enough, “intellectual culture,” were included some extracts from Chateaubriand, compositions that conjured up ruins, prose nothings that accompanied admirable descriptions throbbing with the soul of Rome, After a visit to the church of Saint Louis-des-Français, in which Chateaubriand had erected the tomb of Pauline de Beaumont—she is reclining on a couch, one arm hanging down and the other folded, in a mournful attitude that is much too beautiful—I read aloud the passage from the “Memoirs,” in which her lover tells of alms that he had condescended to bestow upon one in agony.“I observed that until her last breath, Mme. de Beaumont did not doubt the truth of my attachment to her; she did not cease to show her surprise at it, and she seemed to die both disconsolate and overjoyed. She had believed that she was a burden to me, and she had wished to go away in order to rid me of her.”With what sadness these sentences were later to come back to us!I turned to Raymonde to note the effect upon her of such magnanimity.“How is it possible,” she said, “to write things like that if one is really in love. And if one is not in love, what an abominable farce!”All her simplicity and frankness was opposed to the sentimental buffoonery which is so widespread in our society, and from which she herself was shortly to suffer in her inability to accommodate herself to it.* * *When my thoughts are turned toward Rome by these moving memories, whose sweetness—which happily I did not succeed in utterly spoiling—I can better appreciate at a distance, I recall particularly two or three pilgrimages that drew me closer to her. In my thoughts I return alone to places where we had been together.We were standing at the edge of the first of the basins that occupy to-day the site of the palace of the Vestals. It was in the beginning of Spring, and some newly blown red roses were reflected in the water. Behind her stood the three remaining columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, their marble shining with the caress of the sun. Around her there was nothing but ancient debris, mutilated statues, and these flowers. As at the end of autumn in the Sleeping Woods, she stood quite congruously in this past of more than two thousand years ago.Again, we were at the Coliseum, the arena already plunged into shadow, while the upper part of the huge wall, completely covered with gillyflowers, was still lighted by the rays of the setting sun. A guide had shown us the door through which they carried the dead bodies of the Christians that had been sacrificed to the wild beasts. Long shudders shook her whole body, and suddenly two tears, which she tried too long to keep back, fell from her eyes.“Why do you weep?” I asked.“It was here,” she murmured.What was the use of asking the cause of her emotion? The fire of sacrifice was burning her. I had before me a young martyr in the making. And then again I recall the cloister of St. John Lateran, a quiet corner, where one inhales with the perfume of roses the unchanging charm of Rome. We were there alone one sunny afternoon. The recollection of the roses growing among the palms in the little central garden about the wall fixes the time for me as again the beginning of Spring, doubtless a short time before our departure. She was at a little distance from me, standing between two of those slender columns which support the cloister and seem as transparent as alabaster in the sunlight. She was dressed in white; she smiled. I have never since seen so perfect an image of peace.* * *Her catholic heart rejoiced in the city of three hundred and fifty churches, eighty of which are dedicated to the Virgin. And here her knowledge surpassed mine. She gave me brief accounts of the lives of Saint Cecilia, Saint Agnes and Saint Catherine of Siena, of whom I knew nothing. The places which their deaths have sanctified derived all their meaning from these narratives. At the church of Santa Maria Maggiore she told me of the miracle of the snow which fell in the month of August, to point out to the Pope the site of the basilica. I grieved her with my ironies and doubts, whereas the miracle of her charm should have watered the barrenness of my mind like that cool snowfall itself. Then, having amused myself with the religious instruction of which she gave me the benefit, little by little I began to be annoyed by it. It seemed to me that I was reduced to second place. My vanity could not endure it. In consequence, for several days I systematically selected for the object of our walks those ancient ruins wherein I had the advantage of her.However, I did go with her sometimes to service at Santa Maria del Popolo, and the Trinità dei Monte, which, being near the Piazza di Spagna, where we were living, were her particular churches. For Trinity, whose rose-coloured bell towers at the alluring hour of the Benediction, are beautified by the evening light, we had only to mount the staircase, from the flower market at the bottom. It is on the Road to the Pincio, where we went later.But instead of admiring this elevation of spirit I derived bitterness from it. Did I not wish to confiscate all her powers of feeling to the profit of my love alone?“A moment ago,” I protested once, “you were praying, and I was not in your thoughts.”She was much surprised at my remark.“You are always in my thoughts when I pray,” she replied. “How could it be otherwise?”I was struggling against a happiness the perfection of which I was incapable of understanding. My wife charmed and at the same time bewildered me. I had thought to find her a docile pupil and yet sometimes my teachings seemed vain, useless and absurd, sometimes in advance of her age and preparation. I had at times, in the bottom of my heart, the instinctive feeling that she surpassed me, and perhaps without self-love I might have bowed to her nobility. But what man ever renounces his self-love? Instead of renouncing mine I hastened to pronounce her childish.* * *I recall one more incident at Rome in which I find our differences revealed.The night before our departure, we had climbed to the garden of the Pincio. After sunset, which one watches from the terrace as if it were a play, we walked on in the direction of the Villa Borghese. On our right, a lawn sloped down to a small wood of pine trees, on the outskirts of which a group of seminary students, in their red robes, were walking up and down, reciting their breviary. A bareheaded young girl of the people ran past us. I noticed her erect carriage, her black hair, the beads of perspiration on her neck. Presently she lay down on the grass, drawing up her dress round her for a rug. A young man who had followed her approached her from behind. He had plucked several clusters from a border of flowering acacias, and began to throw them at her laughingly. She did not move. Then he came nearer, and, stooping, kissed her on the neck in the spot where I had seen the bead of perspiration. Even pleasure did not change her motionless attitude.“Look,” I said to Raymonde, “is that not as beautiful as an antique marble?”But she stood still, her ear strained, her arm a little raised.“Listen,” she murmured.Answering each other the bells of countless churches announced theAngelus. Their chimes came faintly up the slope to us, but she was familiar with several and recognised them. For the last time, religious Rome was speaking to her.I was jealous of her diverted attention; that hour of peace, which the voices of the evening, the twilight, and the realisation of our love combined to make sacred, I spoiled by a wish to oppose my companion, to humiliate her, to bruise her.I was tormented by restlessness and sensuality instead of yielding myself to the beneficent tranquillity which sprang naturally from her love.* * *When we returned from Italy, the springtime which we had left in full blossom in the Roman campagna, where the grain was already tall and ripening, had hardly begun to make our woods verdant again.M. and Mme. Mairieux awaited us.“My little one,” stammered her father on seeing us.He, ordinarily so calm and self-controlled, was greatly moved now, showing openly the emotion that gripped him. He had grown older, and stooped; and for the first time I thought his demonstrations of fatherly affection overdone. After loving and almost minute scrutiny of his daughter, he turned to me and took my hand:“Thank you,” he said.He gave me the credit for Raymonde’s good health, and assured me of his confidence in me at the very moment when I was thinking how to get away, astonished at this excess of gratitude.Mme. Mairieux was never weary of admiring us. Sometimes she made a special point of calling me by my first name; and again she abandoned these happy advances as if she feared their boldness. She gloried in the length of our journey, the importance of our hotels, and even in the beauty of Rome. It was all part of the new and longed-for luxury which I gave my wife, the mere announcement of which pleased her like a coloured poster.One day, when Raymonde was a little later than usual, I had an opportunity to watch from my window the manœuvres of her father, who rode up for the express purpose of waiting for her at the threshold. It was very natural, yet instead of sympathising with his expectation I felt only impatience at it.My wife came in after the luncheon bell had sounded.“Where have you been?” I asked quite unfairly.“Down there.”“I suppose so. Are you not always thrusting yourself in there?”Unquestionably she was about to say: “I am their only child, and they love to see me,” but instead she looked at me with her clear glance and kept silent.That was my first direct blow at the ideal which, she had formed of me. My opinions on our journey, my restlessness, my strange curiosity, had made her uneasy, but she had kept her faith intact. Now, in the way she looked at me, I read her distress at seeing me reveal this petty jealousy. Tears rose in her eyes, but she restrained them. Irritated with myself and angry with her as well, instead of restoring my lost tenderness, I permitted the sense of my injustice to drop into her heart, to grow there as the circles from a falling stone in a quiet lake widen until they reach the shore.Next day, timid and bashful, she asked me if I objected to her going to the lodge.“Of course not,” I answered crossly. “Have I ever hindered your liberty?”Again an opportunity offered itself to make amends, and again I did not avail myself of it.She went to the lodge, but shortened her visit. After her return, the promptness of which I refrained from mentioning, M. Mairieux appeared more than once at the doorstep, wandering about like a soul in pain in the avenue leading up to the chateau. I saw him take up several pieces of work only to abandon them again, passing confusedly from one thing to another. Something was missing in his day: the smile of his daughter, of which I had deprived him. He continually approached the door and then withdrew again. I should have called to him, “She is here, come in,” and instead I contented myself with watching him. My apprenticeship of cruelty was beginning already. Raymonde saw him too, but she did not move. She was waiting for my decision, resolved not to thwart me, and hoping everything from my tenderness. Hating the wrong I did, I none the less accentuated it, and thus, without benefit to myself, I impaired a source of joy.The following day Mme. Mairieux invaded our apartment. She came to make certain on the spot of the happiness of her daughter. Raymonde would have liked to spare me these interminable and noisy visits, which my coldness could not shorten. She knew how impatient I was after them. I was growing tired of the Sleeping Woods; she knew it and mourned for it, and, thinking only of me, blamed herself for it.* * *Almost immediately after our return to the chateau Raymonde’s condition necessitated our giving up our horseback rides.“Let us walk,” she said, “we can see better when we go slowly, and one hears the life in the trees better, too, and the stirring of the little blades of grass. Shan’t we?”In the early morning, especially when the air is keen and freshened by the dew, these slow strolls under the trees should have been exquisite. The leaves were not yet thick enough to keep the sun from filtering through the branches and throwing its gold on the footpaths, but they had already that effect of young verdure that is so delightful. The paths were carpeted with grass, and, since our footfalls made no sound upon it, we were often surprised by almost touching a woodpecker or a chaffinch, who, believing himself master in his own house, flew off in safe and leisurely flight. Oftentimes a hare crossed the avenue in front of us with little bounds.Yes, these strolls would have been exquisite but for the skill I employed to spoil them! As I had tormented Raymonde about her parents, so now I tormented her about the hope that filled her with a joy that was all but sacred. She saw in it the continuation of our cherished love, the palpable thrill of our union, the living bond of our united bodies and souls. I saw only the inconvenience, and I showed my irritation and nervousness over it. I appreciate to-day that this new affection which preceded its object, far from diminishing it, broadened, strengthened and extended her love as a wife. I did not recognise it then, and I spurred myself on to detect in her beforehand some cause of estrangement.When I was silent too long, she would say to me with an adorable flush of colour:“Let us talk abouthim.”And then, correcting herself, in order not to be unfair, she would add:“Or, ofher.”She pictured it as an image of our happiness that we should see grow, whose youth, one day, should prolong ours in its decline. She smiled as she thought of him and saw him. These first maternal smiles, bestowed on one who does not yet exist, seem to give a woman the sweetness, freshness and purity of a young girl again. Barren love is ignorant of many forms of beauty. The madonnas have a deeper beauty, but not less innocent, not less melodious than the young maid who carries in herself the Springtime. But these first smiles, whose charm I understand so well now, I questioned then, as I remember, in jealousy, not in admiration. So new were they to me that I did not know how to gather them. Thus we permit the simple emotions that are the ornament of life to escape from it because we seek our happiness in ourselves instead of finding it on the faces of others. While I made our love complicated by trying to confine it to my personal satisfactions, Raymonde gave to it quite naturally her primitive capacity for acceptation, her radiance, her creative splendour.“Hewill look like you,” she assured me.“How can we tell?”“Why should he not look like you? My child is my thought, and my thought is you.”She wished us to give him a name, and wanted, herself, that of her father, but she dared not suggest it. I often changed the conversation, yet what more beautiful topic can there be than the certainty that the future is holding for us the continuation of our race?My wife remarked my coldness and lack of enthusiasm. She talked less to me in consequence of that which constantly preoccupied her. And then, with an effort which I now understand, she spoke again to me of it. Already forgetful of herself, she was willing to make herself less agreeable to me if in that way she could induce me to bestow a little of my love on the one who was to come, who was beginning to live within her.However, her lassitude and the change in her figure increased. It all seemed to threaten blows at my pleasure, attacks on her beauty,—I saw this in it instead of the patience and gentle pity and sense of protection which ennoble a woman’s love. I did not altogether conceal my boredom. One evening, as we were returning from the woods a little later than usual, where I had been for a part of the way inattentive, she stopped, very weary, before passing through the gate.“I am afraid,” she said.I looked about us; there was no noise, no movement to cause her fear. I thought that perhaps the shadows and the silence had affected her.“There is nothing, Raymonde.”“No,” she agreed, “there is nothing.”I let the matter drop, satisfied. I did not understand that she needed to be reassured. Her fear was not of external things; those she understood and trusted. Already, her fear was of me.* * *During my previous visits in the Sleeping Woods, I had had scarcely a word to say to the farmers and workmen whom I met on my estate. They were my superintendent’s affair, not mine; such people were total strangers to me. During our engagement, I had been much surprised at the looks of understanding exchanged between them and Raymonde when I accompanied her. Later, love traced around us its circle of isolation and no one addressed us, but through its social aspect, marriage made us more accessible. On our return from Italy, the tenants and day labourers whom we encountered, never failed to salute my wife. They called her “Our Lady.” She was “Our Lady of the Woods,” and at first it amused me. But they told her of the deaths and the births, obscure stories of the village or the household, bad crops, or the sickness of the live stock, and I saw myself put aside. They consulted her and let me alone.“But here is your Master,” she objected, pointing to me, and entrenching herself behind my authority.“Yes, but you are our lady.”Instead of rejoicing in this, at last I became offended.“Speak to them,” she advised me. “Are you not their master?”“I do not know them,” I answered.“Exactly, but you will know them.”“They bore me,” I replied.“Give them a little friendship, and they will cease to weary you.”“I don’t find it easy,” I said.“There is poor Fannette, the washerwoman: her hands are covered with cracks and chilblains. Then there is Pierre, the deaf man, who works in our garden.”“If he is deaf, it would be useless to talk to him.”“Oh, but one can speak to him with a hearty laugh, or a handshake, or a finger showing him a flower bed. That is the language which he understands. He has never forgotten to bring me a bouquet on my birthday.”She was teaching me a little humanity, after all the art that I had thought to teach her! I did not care for it at all, and profited very little from her lessons. It is the same with most of those who screen themselves behind agents in the administration of their estates: they ignore the sweat and labour which all production exacts, and the money which labour makes for them, so far from putting them in contact with other men, only succeeds in keeping them apart.The sovereignty which Raymonde exercised on my estate made me uneasy. Of a certainty, I refused to confess it to myself, but was not the sympathy she showed and inspired in all these worthy people in itself a criticism of my disdain and indifference? With the intuition which she possessed for my slightest, my most secret annoyances, she perceived my state of mind. Thereafter she cut short her conversations with these people, contenting herself for the most part with a courteous greeting from a distance, which yet managed to cheer them, even if they hoped for more.And so again, without benefit to myself, I turned aside a source of joy.Our daughter Odette, whom we afterwards called Dilette, was born in October.In the face of Raymonde’s sufferings I was less courageous than she. And if I dare confess the whole truth to myself, a horror of anything which attacked the ordering of my life mingled with the compassion which I felt for her.After the birth of the child, when my own nerves were shattered, I was surprised at the long shudder which shook the mother. She suffered no more, but trembled before the life which she had brought into the world. It was the mysterious prelude to maternal love.* * *The autumn advanced. Tired of “the desert” of the Sleeping Woods, and of the incessant attention which a new-born baby demands, deprived by my own act of the strong ties which bound us to a region where we directed the labour and endeavoured to create prosperity, I was eager to return to Paris after so long an absence. Our apartment in the Avenue du Bois was in readiness for us. We had nothing to do but depart.“Whenever you wish,” consented Raymonde.We arranged our departure for the first of December. The baby could travel then without danger. The milk of her nurse agreed with her wonderfully. For a child of two months, she showed good strength.Raymonde suggested a last walk, and a pale, cold sun enticed us. It scarcely melted the white frost in the fields and on the weed-grown paths. The grass crackled under our steps as we entered the woods. We went deep into them. Along the edge, the leaves more exposed to the wind had already fallen. Deeper within there were still a few, especially on the oaks and maples. Copper-coloured or golden, they clung stiffly to the branches, and with the least breath of wind sounded like toy bells. At the Green Fountain, where our horses had drunk that day, they nearly stopped the basin.Beside me, enveloped in a white cloak and hood, my wife gazed absorbedly, her eyes dim with tears. I was astonished, and even somewhat annoyed by such emotion. Was I not sufficient for her happiness? Why should a mere change of environment, one at which, indeed, she ought to have rejoiced, since I was offering her Paris and its gaieties, have so affected her?“What troubles you, my dear?” I asked her.“I have been so happy here,” she replied.“But we shall be happy in Paris.”“Here my trees help me. Everything helps me. I feel myself at ease and protected. Yonder I shall be alone.”“You will be with me. Is not that enough?” I asked.“Alone to keep your love, which I am so afraid of losing.”“But that is absurd.”Why did she doubt herself? In the clear light of the winter sun, which filled the woods, she was resplendent with youth; or rather not youth, but almost childish beauty. Maternity had restored to her that air of extreme purity that one sees in young novices. I looked at her, all in white, so sweet and so gentle, and then round us again at the familiar forest which contented her.“My love,” I said, with condescending protection, “I will watch over you.”Oh, the smile with which she rewarded this promise that I was to keep so badly!* * *A day or two after our arrival in Paris I surprised her leaning against the window of her room overlooking the Avenue du Bois. She was so absorbed that she did not hear me come in. I approached her. It was of course the novelty of the sight that held her prisoner.A beautiful winter morning had drawn all the idle world of Paris to a promenade before luncheon. Men and women on horseback, riding at a walk or a quiet canter, crowded the beaten earth of the bridle path. The roadway was devoted to a few surviving carriages, whose ancient steeds seemed hardly able to move their thin legs, and above all to many motors, which, under less restraint than in the crowded city, passed by at full speed, as though revenging themselves with absolute license in the country. On the broad pavement by the side of the grass plots pedestrians were taking their constitutionals among the nurses and children scattered about in pursuit of hoops and balloons. The bluish haze of the clear day softened the outlines of the Arch of Triumph and the light, entering it from all sides, seemingly, increased the height of its arch and columns. At the other end of the Avenue, the Bois slept.“I am sure you love Paris already,” I said.Much to her astonishment, I had ceased in Paris calling her “thou,” on account of the custom in society, of which I had already begun to think, and she had obediently imitated me, without asking any explanation. Now, not knowing that I was near, she gave a slight start when she heard my voice.“Oh, no,” she answered. “There are too many houses and too many people.”“What were you looking at?”“I was looking yonder for the forest of the Maiden and the lodge at the gate.”“That is the Porte Dauphine and the Chinese Pavilion.”“I did not know it. I imagined that we were at home.”I had thought this procession that our apartment commanded would have attracted and captivated the love of elegance latent in every woman, that Paris would not have failed to awaken it in her; and behold, the nook where she was born, the country of her love, was sufficient for her. She did not see beyond it; or rather she saw it everywhere.“You will come to love it,” I continued, with a gesture toward the city. “At your age Paris is irresistible, above all when you will be one of its queens.”“Oh, one of its queens? You are laughing at me.”At that moment, attentive and interested, her blond hair caressed by a ray of sunlight, she was at the same time so sensible and so fascinating that I felt I could hope everything for her.“I am not joking,” I said. “You do not know my power.”“Do you dare say that?”“Well, I will make you a queen.”“Again?”“That is to say, a woman of fashion.”Before this prospect she opened her large eyes like a child who is taken to the zoological gardens for the first time and introduced to unknown and strange animals, ostriches, giraffes, or delicate and impossible-looking pink flamingoes. She repeated my phrase, uttering the words as if they hurt her.“A woman of fashion.”It meant nothing to her. There had never been any question of it at the Sleeping Woods, and in Rome we lived as strangers, apart from the regular social hierarchy and absolutely at liberty to do as we wished. Now, however, this was the goal that I proposed for her. Already Paris had begun to claim me once again. I breathed its atmosphere, laden with envy and vanity and artificial charms, the more eagerly because for a time it had ceased to intoxicate me and I brought to it new appetite. I had not retained that which my love had given me—regeneration and peace of heart. On the contrary, I wished to force upon her my own habits of life. Face to face with this child, I became aware of the absurdity of my desire. I became aware of it, but I did not abandon it on that account. I wished the world to appreciate and to envy me the treasure that I possessed. In order to be in the fashion, my happiness required publicity.She turned her head:“It is impossible,” she said. “I should not know how.”“Yes, yes,” I insisted, not without a little impatience. “You will learn. You can learn everything.”“Dost thou wish it?” and then, correcting herself, “Do you wish it?” she asked.“Certainly.”“Then I will obey you to the best of my ability.”That evening, when the nurse did not succeed in quieting Dilette, who was for some reason out of sorts, Raymonde insisted on putting the baby to sleep herself, a privilege which she had always enjoyed at the chateau. As a lullaby she sang in a low voice, to the tune of “Malbrough,” a romance of Chérubin. When she came to the stanza:There, by a fountain green,O, my heart, my heart, it grieves!There had my lover been,And my tears were full, I ween.And my grief believes.whether it was because of the contagious sadness of the verses, the memory of our own Green Fountain, or a presentiment of the dangers that threw their shadows across our love, I do not know, but she stopped. I was in the next room and the curtains between us were drawn back. I heard what sounded like a stifled sigh. Awakened by the silence, Dilette began to cry again, and my wife slowly continued her song.* * *The occasion I had chosen for presenting her to society was a reception given one evening by Madame de Saunois, at whose house in the old days I was a frequent guest. Mme. de Saunois is a lady who has attained the summit of that social elegance which springs from exquisite dressing, novel entertainment, clever conversation and the careful cultivation of every natural and artificial charm. Though her age may be subject to some debate, her name and fortune admit of no discussion. Her visiting list is restricted and select, and her invitations are proportionately sought for. Outwardly manners and taste are the same at her house as anywhere else but she would regard herself as old-fashioned if she were thought for one moment to set any limit to liberty of conduct or opinion. She accepts every irregularity of mind or heart if only it is perpetrated by one of the socially elect. According to my ideas at that time her drawing-room was just the one in which I could count upon a gratifying reception for Raymonde.Promptly upon our arrival in Paris I besought my wife to put herself in the hands of one of the big dressmakers. As she seemed almost averse to this idea I myself looked over her wardrobe with her before we started out to order anything new.“What’s this?” I asked, picking up a cheap looking woollen skirt. I did not recognise the little wedding dress that had produced such a sweet and simple effect in the Sleeping Woods. Alas, effects change with place and mood: in Paris the little dress was not the same at all.Guessing my thoughts she said with a blush, “I shall never wear it again, you may be sure.”“Why not give it away to some poor girl to whom it would be of some use?” I said, with the best intentions in the world.Raymonde’s flush, which I did not yet understand, faded suddenly. I saw her cheek whiten.“I was a poor girl once,” she said.“Oh, but you must forget that.”“No, let me have my memories. If ever I am tempted to become proud some day, they will keep me humble.”I understood, then, the wound I had given, but instead of asking her pardon, I said nothing.To me nothing seemed too sumptuous and elaborate for her, while her one desire was to pass unnoticed. She “set no store” by success: she wished only to please me. But must she not please the whole world, to please me? As to the clothes, she had her way more than I, and I had to be content with a lace robe that suited marvellously her air of candour. All the time the fittings and appraising looks of the tailors, the insulting physical evaluations as of professional buyers, positively affronted her. Again and again she turned toward me eyes that besought mercy like the tender eyes of a hunted doe! But I held to my conquest with an unpitying tenacity.When she had tried on the skirt and waist, that brought out and moulded her body under the vapory lightness of the material, leaving no outline unseen, and displaying the bare expanse of her throat, she was ashamed at the sight of herself in the mirror.“Is it possible,” she protested, “that you can wish me to appear like this?”“Why not?” said I. “You are beautiful.”“But every one will see me,” she objected.It began to seem laughable to me, her idea of reserving her beauty for me alone.The evening upon which we made our first appearance in the drawing-room of Madame de Saunois I felt a curious diminution in my proprietary satisfaction. My too long absence had allowed people to recover from their concern with me, and become indifferent. Paris avenges herself upon those who scorn her. Pierre Ducal was there, informing every one of my marriage. I thought I heard whispered as we passed: “The daughter of his superintendent.” When one is conscious of ill-will one is prompt to imagine hostile remarks, and it seemed to me that every one there was spying jealously upon my wife. The sharp contrast of her youth and bloom with the maturer charms of the other women made instant enemies of them, enemies fully accoutred in the art of feminine war. There were young girls there crowned with name and fortune any one of whom I might have married. Not that I had any regret, but I committed the indelicacy of remembering the advantages I had let slip. There was indeed one woman there, not a stranger to me, whose presence should have been very painful to me, since I especially watched for her opinion of my wife and hoped it would be favourable. Such is the host of petty infamies a man can harbour in his heart when he surrenders himself to vanity.At my wedding in the Sleeping Woods it was the presence of Pierre Ducal that had been the cause of my noticing the cut of my bride’s wedding gown. To-night Raymonde was in faultless toilette, though timidity and reserve and half fright, made her seem full of awkwardness. Her modest embarrassment under the steady gaze of so many people became ridiculous constraint, and instead of encouraging her I too became ill at ease and caught some of her discomfort.My friend Pierre Ducal came forward to speak to us. He was cordial in his greeting, but my wife did not remember him.“I looked at him so little,” she explained to me later, by way of apology. “And how should I have seen him? It was our wedding day!”Nothing is more offensive to a man who prides himself on the number of hearts he has broken, than the knowledge that he has left absolutely no impression on a young woman’s mind. Ducal turned coldly away to pay his homages elsewhere and make his scathing comments; and as I had no doubt of his pique nor of the vengeance he was taking, Raymonde’s maladroitness gave me fresh cause for irritation. The very man upon whom I had counted as an ally she had succeeded in offending.Mme. de Saunois being asked—asked, it must be confessed, without much eagerness—consented to give us a romance by Duparc, which no doubt she would follow with one or two others, perhaps three, if she found herself in voice or were sufficiently encouraged. Singing was her passion, a perfect mania, indeed. She had a thread of a voice, which she eked out with a pantomime meant to suggest unbounded temperament. Her pretensions to artistic ability were inordinate. She allowed herself to be called a great society singer in the newspaper paragraphs. People laughed heartily about it all behind her back, but in her presence restrained their amusement as best they could, so that she was doomed never to know the real impression she created.After her first selection, the last note of it still hanging on her lips, her guests rushed to her from all sides, at the risk of stifling her, and let loose upon her an avalanche of compliments and appreciation. They compared her, without shame, to this or that celebrity, preferably foreigners, who are more apt to pass current without the stamp of critical approval. Being unable to praise the volume of her voice, they made up by praising its timbre, and above all, her spirit, as being something less definite and discernible and so a safer basis of compliment.Raymonde alone kept her place, motionless, a slender isle of truth in the midst of this sea of falsehood. Mme. de Saunois, after her last grand aria, with unrestrained enthusiasm in her wake, passed in front of us.“Well, Madame, have I your approval?” she inquired. Apparently she had not yet her fill of praise: she must have something from Raymonde too, all the more delicious because it was kept back by some resisting scruple.I listened anxiously for Raymonde’s reply.“The music is new to me,” murmured my wife. “I think I shall like it when I know it better.”“Yes, isn’t it, and so suggestive! It has to be well interpreted,” said Mme. de Saunois.Clearly enough it was not a question of the romance but of its interpreter.“I am not accustomed to it,” answered Raymonde. “But perhaps that will come later,” she added, poor little one, calling to her aid her most gracious smile.Instead of being pleased with the charming sight of so much sincerity in the midst of these conventional praises, I anxiously followed Mme. de Saunois in her further majestic progress.“She knows nothing of music,” I heard some one reassure her.Later in the evening, a young professional pianist, of considerable though as yet unrecognised talent, began to play Mozart’s sonata in F, that one whose yielding rhythm expresses so much fresh and wholesome joy, touched here and there by the melancholy of youth. Every one in the drawing-room chattered, because this time there was no need to compliment, but Raymonde, attentive, forgotten and forgetful, listened gravely to the divine poem of youth.The people near her were talking aloud. Suddenly she seemed to awaken from her dream and I saw her quickly change her seat. What remarks I wondered had provoked her confusion and flight? Instead of being drawn toward her protection, I blamed her for holding such scruples about insignificant things. In short everything turned against her at this gathering, where I had expected to exhibit her proudly and obtain the approbation of the world. Soon people began to avoid her. Hostesses do not squander their energies at receptions or put themselves to any trouble for the entertainment of their guests nowadays as they used to do: they merely give them a chance to amuse themselves or be bored as they may see fit.In the hubbub which the end of the selection had called forth, she found herself alone, while all the others surrounded a woman—young?—whom I had not specially noticed, but whose evident fame now attracted my attention and took possession of me. I asked Mme. de Saunois about her as she was passing.“You do not know her? Why, she is famous. Mme. de H—, the author of ‘The Open Garden.’ A new muse.”There are so many of these nowadays that only the specialists can enumerate them: I confessed my ignorance, which amused my hostess.“You will know her very soon,” she added. “For she is going to recite some verses for us. She has a prodigious memory—for her own works. She has never been known to forget a single one of them—fortunately for us.”I confessed in the same tone of badinage my satisfaction at the prospect in store for me, remarking that the muse was already interesting to look at.This drew from Madame de Saunois the comment, “In what respect?”“In her colouring—that dark skin and red hair.”“It is dyed.”“Her pale face and those blood-red lips.”“Paint.”“Listen to her. She speaks our language with a singing accent. It sounds foreign and has a charm.”“Her mother is an Italian and her father a Pole. In her writing she expresses the soul of France. Her husband, that very excellent H—, brought her back from somewhere. But she is well connected. I have made inquiries. But what of that? With her here any drawing-room will be like a public garden, and the invasion will begin.”“What invasion?”“The foreign invasion. Go and make love to her. She is as contagious as the whooping cough with you men.”“Indeed!”“Oh, don’t boast. You will go the way of all the others. She makes the necessary concessions.”A call for silence interrupted us. Mme. de H—, with a queenly gesture, enlarged the circle about her; then, with an apparent inward search for inspiration, began her recitation.I am not expert enough in poetry to decide on the merit of her poem; besides, too many conflicting impressions affected my judgment. In her verses deified nature took human shape, the better to offer herself to our comprehension. Once more the Bacchantes, after having killed Orpheus, substituted for his sacred rhythms their wild fanatic dances and disorderly rounds. In the tone of her warm, flexible, and sonorous voice and the harmonious gestures with which she accompanied her poem, in the whole dashing movement of her lithe body, which appeared to be burning with earnestness, there was a certain sensual appeal which disturbed one’s nerves. It was the return to primitive instincts, to the cult of force and desire. Yet no one, except Raymonde, who preserved her calm in the midst of the general emotion, thought of being surprised at hearing such ideas exploited in the most refined salon in Paris by a woman whose face was rouged and whose youth was already a thing of the past.Mme. de Saunois had evidently known what was coming. As for me, I was eager to be presented to Mme. de H—, the beautiful Nacha she was familiarly called by those about me, like an established celebrity. She barely deigned to acknowledge my compliments by a movement of her head. The rouge and powder, at close range, did not seem to detract from her beauty.“What did I say?” whispered Mme. de Saunois, with the air of improving her prediction. For the success of another was hardly pleasing to her.Raymonde did not consent to manifest any sort of approval, although Mme. de H— regarded her fixedly. What was the matter with them that they all wanted the approbation which she could not give? Is a single reproach, probably justified, more important than an outburst of acclamations?In the carriage in which we drove away, my wife and I exchanged only the vaguest remarks. But when we were at home and she was removing her cloak, I noticed that she was on the verge of tears.“Did you not enjoy yourself?” I asked, hypocritically.“Oh, I didn’t go for that purpose,” she answered, naively.“Why, then?”“So that you might be pleased with me. And you are not.”“Oh, yes, I am.”I could not deceive her by my weak protestations.“No, you’re not. You can’t be. And I shall never know how to please you.”I condescendingly consoled her. I promised to direct and form her. And when I questioned her (what made me do it?) about the impression which Mme. de H— had produced on her, I received, after a moment’s hesitation, this abrupt reply:“She is indecent. Don’t you think so?”Frankness pleases us so little when it is at variance with our concealed views and inclinations that I was offended by her remark. As the result of this first contact with a sphere which love had temporarily abolished, was I beginning to lose or even reject the sweet simplicity which had been poured into my heart by the little maiden of the Sleeping Woods?If the most insignificant details and conversations of that evening come back to me, it is because in reality nothing happened that was not important. Memory does not encumber itself with frivolities: that which is of no value it lets escape as water flows through one’s fingers. What stays, one may often undervalue, but the day comes at length when it is perceived to be of real worth.Raymonde’s unsuccessful effort, and even more her fear, which wounded me sensibly; the many moments when I turned from her and her truthful face for some tangle of youth and beauty, some fabric of bleached hair and painted lips and assumed merriment, some embodiment of all the usual artful powers of feminine enslavement;—in a single evening, in a single place, I saw these things grouped before me, calling up visions of my errors and the distant but certain causes of the misfortune or the crime toward which I was advancing—
* * *
Nevertheless the first months of our marriage flowed on like a limpid stream that seems motionless. Our days slipped by without our being aware of them. I was amazed at the intimate peace I breathed; it did not seem consistent with the passion I wished to feel again. In time I came to ask myself whether I was really sufficiently in love. I looked for disturbances, outbreaks, storms, a great thirst for life, and around me, within me, I found only simplicity and clearness. Thus I grew distrustful of the new order that was making over my heart.
I had been accustomed to think of love as a combat, and victory appeared to me to be filled with idleness. I began to scorn the harmony which was for her the summit of love, which united her by a thousand secret bonds to artistic perfection.
I was afraid of monotony, even though I had not known it, I attained it very soon through the bitterness I mingled with Raymonde’s pure offerings.
* * *
Among the books and the guides that I had selected in order to give her what I called, pretentiously enough, “intellectual culture,” were included some extracts from Chateaubriand, compositions that conjured up ruins, prose nothings that accompanied admirable descriptions throbbing with the soul of Rome, After a visit to the church of Saint Louis-des-Français, in which Chateaubriand had erected the tomb of Pauline de Beaumont—she is reclining on a couch, one arm hanging down and the other folded, in a mournful attitude that is much too beautiful—I read aloud the passage from the “Memoirs,” in which her lover tells of alms that he had condescended to bestow upon one in agony.
“I observed that until her last breath, Mme. de Beaumont did not doubt the truth of my attachment to her; she did not cease to show her surprise at it, and she seemed to die both disconsolate and overjoyed. She had believed that she was a burden to me, and she had wished to go away in order to rid me of her.”
With what sadness these sentences were later to come back to us!
I turned to Raymonde to note the effect upon her of such magnanimity.
“How is it possible,” she said, “to write things like that if one is really in love. And if one is not in love, what an abominable farce!”
All her simplicity and frankness was opposed to the sentimental buffoonery which is so widespread in our society, and from which she herself was shortly to suffer in her inability to accommodate herself to it.
* * *
When my thoughts are turned toward Rome by these moving memories, whose sweetness—which happily I did not succeed in utterly spoiling—I can better appreciate at a distance, I recall particularly two or three pilgrimages that drew me closer to her. In my thoughts I return alone to places where we had been together.
We were standing at the edge of the first of the basins that occupy to-day the site of the palace of the Vestals. It was in the beginning of Spring, and some newly blown red roses were reflected in the water. Behind her stood the three remaining columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, their marble shining with the caress of the sun. Around her there was nothing but ancient debris, mutilated statues, and these flowers. As at the end of autumn in the Sleeping Woods, she stood quite congruously in this past of more than two thousand years ago.
Again, we were at the Coliseum, the arena already plunged into shadow, while the upper part of the huge wall, completely covered with gillyflowers, was still lighted by the rays of the setting sun. A guide had shown us the door through which they carried the dead bodies of the Christians that had been sacrificed to the wild beasts. Long shudders shook her whole body, and suddenly two tears, which she tried too long to keep back, fell from her eyes.
“Why do you weep?” I asked.
“It was here,” she murmured.
What was the use of asking the cause of her emotion? The fire of sacrifice was burning her. I had before me a young martyr in the making. And then again I recall the cloister of St. John Lateran, a quiet corner, where one inhales with the perfume of roses the unchanging charm of Rome. We were there alone one sunny afternoon. The recollection of the roses growing among the palms in the little central garden about the wall fixes the time for me as again the beginning of Spring, doubtless a short time before our departure. She was at a little distance from me, standing between two of those slender columns which support the cloister and seem as transparent as alabaster in the sunlight. She was dressed in white; she smiled. I have never since seen so perfect an image of peace.
* * *
Her catholic heart rejoiced in the city of three hundred and fifty churches, eighty of which are dedicated to the Virgin. And here her knowledge surpassed mine. She gave me brief accounts of the lives of Saint Cecilia, Saint Agnes and Saint Catherine of Siena, of whom I knew nothing. The places which their deaths have sanctified derived all their meaning from these narratives. At the church of Santa Maria Maggiore she told me of the miracle of the snow which fell in the month of August, to point out to the Pope the site of the basilica. I grieved her with my ironies and doubts, whereas the miracle of her charm should have watered the barrenness of my mind like that cool snowfall itself. Then, having amused myself with the religious instruction of which she gave me the benefit, little by little I began to be annoyed by it. It seemed to me that I was reduced to second place. My vanity could not endure it. In consequence, for several days I systematically selected for the object of our walks those ancient ruins wherein I had the advantage of her.
However, I did go with her sometimes to service at Santa Maria del Popolo, and the Trinità dei Monte, which, being near the Piazza di Spagna, where we were living, were her particular churches. For Trinity, whose rose-coloured bell towers at the alluring hour of the Benediction, are beautified by the evening light, we had only to mount the staircase, from the flower market at the bottom. It is on the Road to the Pincio, where we went later.
But instead of admiring this elevation of spirit I derived bitterness from it. Did I not wish to confiscate all her powers of feeling to the profit of my love alone?
“A moment ago,” I protested once, “you were praying, and I was not in your thoughts.”
She was much surprised at my remark.
“You are always in my thoughts when I pray,” she replied. “How could it be otherwise?”
I was struggling against a happiness the perfection of which I was incapable of understanding. My wife charmed and at the same time bewildered me. I had thought to find her a docile pupil and yet sometimes my teachings seemed vain, useless and absurd, sometimes in advance of her age and preparation. I had at times, in the bottom of my heart, the instinctive feeling that she surpassed me, and perhaps without self-love I might have bowed to her nobility. But what man ever renounces his self-love? Instead of renouncing mine I hastened to pronounce her childish.
* * *
I recall one more incident at Rome in which I find our differences revealed.
The night before our departure, we had climbed to the garden of the Pincio. After sunset, which one watches from the terrace as if it were a play, we walked on in the direction of the Villa Borghese. On our right, a lawn sloped down to a small wood of pine trees, on the outskirts of which a group of seminary students, in their red robes, were walking up and down, reciting their breviary. A bareheaded young girl of the people ran past us. I noticed her erect carriage, her black hair, the beads of perspiration on her neck. Presently she lay down on the grass, drawing up her dress round her for a rug. A young man who had followed her approached her from behind. He had plucked several clusters from a border of flowering acacias, and began to throw them at her laughingly. She did not move. Then he came nearer, and, stooping, kissed her on the neck in the spot where I had seen the bead of perspiration. Even pleasure did not change her motionless attitude.
“Look,” I said to Raymonde, “is that not as beautiful as an antique marble?”
But she stood still, her ear strained, her arm a little raised.
“Listen,” she murmured.
Answering each other the bells of countless churches announced theAngelus. Their chimes came faintly up the slope to us, but she was familiar with several and recognised them. For the last time, religious Rome was speaking to her.
I was jealous of her diverted attention; that hour of peace, which the voices of the evening, the twilight, and the realisation of our love combined to make sacred, I spoiled by a wish to oppose my companion, to humiliate her, to bruise her.
I was tormented by restlessness and sensuality instead of yielding myself to the beneficent tranquillity which sprang naturally from her love.
* * *
When we returned from Italy, the springtime which we had left in full blossom in the Roman campagna, where the grain was already tall and ripening, had hardly begun to make our woods verdant again.
M. and Mme. Mairieux awaited us.
“My little one,” stammered her father on seeing us.
He, ordinarily so calm and self-controlled, was greatly moved now, showing openly the emotion that gripped him. He had grown older, and stooped; and for the first time I thought his demonstrations of fatherly affection overdone. After loving and almost minute scrutiny of his daughter, he turned to me and took my hand:
“Thank you,” he said.
He gave me the credit for Raymonde’s good health, and assured me of his confidence in me at the very moment when I was thinking how to get away, astonished at this excess of gratitude.
Mme. Mairieux was never weary of admiring us. Sometimes she made a special point of calling me by my first name; and again she abandoned these happy advances as if she feared their boldness. She gloried in the length of our journey, the importance of our hotels, and even in the beauty of Rome. It was all part of the new and longed-for luxury which I gave my wife, the mere announcement of which pleased her like a coloured poster.
One day, when Raymonde was a little later than usual, I had an opportunity to watch from my window the manœuvres of her father, who rode up for the express purpose of waiting for her at the threshold. It was very natural, yet instead of sympathising with his expectation I felt only impatience at it.
My wife came in after the luncheon bell had sounded.
“Where have you been?” I asked quite unfairly.
“Down there.”
“I suppose so. Are you not always thrusting yourself in there?”
Unquestionably she was about to say: “I am their only child, and they love to see me,” but instead she looked at me with her clear glance and kept silent.
That was my first direct blow at the ideal which, she had formed of me. My opinions on our journey, my restlessness, my strange curiosity, had made her uneasy, but she had kept her faith intact. Now, in the way she looked at me, I read her distress at seeing me reveal this petty jealousy. Tears rose in her eyes, but she restrained them. Irritated with myself and angry with her as well, instead of restoring my lost tenderness, I permitted the sense of my injustice to drop into her heart, to grow there as the circles from a falling stone in a quiet lake widen until they reach the shore.
Next day, timid and bashful, she asked me if I objected to her going to the lodge.
“Of course not,” I answered crossly. “Have I ever hindered your liberty?”
Again an opportunity offered itself to make amends, and again I did not avail myself of it.
She went to the lodge, but shortened her visit. After her return, the promptness of which I refrained from mentioning, M. Mairieux appeared more than once at the doorstep, wandering about like a soul in pain in the avenue leading up to the chateau. I saw him take up several pieces of work only to abandon them again, passing confusedly from one thing to another. Something was missing in his day: the smile of his daughter, of which I had deprived him. He continually approached the door and then withdrew again. I should have called to him, “She is here, come in,” and instead I contented myself with watching him. My apprenticeship of cruelty was beginning already. Raymonde saw him too, but she did not move. She was waiting for my decision, resolved not to thwart me, and hoping everything from my tenderness. Hating the wrong I did, I none the less accentuated it, and thus, without benefit to myself, I impaired a source of joy.
The following day Mme. Mairieux invaded our apartment. She came to make certain on the spot of the happiness of her daughter. Raymonde would have liked to spare me these interminable and noisy visits, which my coldness could not shorten. She knew how impatient I was after them. I was growing tired of the Sleeping Woods; she knew it and mourned for it, and, thinking only of me, blamed herself for it.
* * *
Almost immediately after our return to the chateau Raymonde’s condition necessitated our giving up our horseback rides.
“Let us walk,” she said, “we can see better when we go slowly, and one hears the life in the trees better, too, and the stirring of the little blades of grass. Shan’t we?”
In the early morning, especially when the air is keen and freshened by the dew, these slow strolls under the trees should have been exquisite. The leaves were not yet thick enough to keep the sun from filtering through the branches and throwing its gold on the footpaths, but they had already that effect of young verdure that is so delightful. The paths were carpeted with grass, and, since our footfalls made no sound upon it, we were often surprised by almost touching a woodpecker or a chaffinch, who, believing himself master in his own house, flew off in safe and leisurely flight. Oftentimes a hare crossed the avenue in front of us with little bounds.
Yes, these strolls would have been exquisite but for the skill I employed to spoil them! As I had tormented Raymonde about her parents, so now I tormented her about the hope that filled her with a joy that was all but sacred. She saw in it the continuation of our cherished love, the palpable thrill of our union, the living bond of our united bodies and souls. I saw only the inconvenience, and I showed my irritation and nervousness over it. I appreciate to-day that this new affection which preceded its object, far from diminishing it, broadened, strengthened and extended her love as a wife. I did not recognise it then, and I spurred myself on to detect in her beforehand some cause of estrangement.
When I was silent too long, she would say to me with an adorable flush of colour:
“Let us talk abouthim.”
And then, correcting herself, in order not to be unfair, she would add:
“Or, ofher.”
She pictured it as an image of our happiness that we should see grow, whose youth, one day, should prolong ours in its decline. She smiled as she thought of him and saw him. These first maternal smiles, bestowed on one who does not yet exist, seem to give a woman the sweetness, freshness and purity of a young girl again. Barren love is ignorant of many forms of beauty. The madonnas have a deeper beauty, but not less innocent, not less melodious than the young maid who carries in herself the Springtime. But these first smiles, whose charm I understand so well now, I questioned then, as I remember, in jealousy, not in admiration. So new were they to me that I did not know how to gather them. Thus we permit the simple emotions that are the ornament of life to escape from it because we seek our happiness in ourselves instead of finding it on the faces of others. While I made our love complicated by trying to confine it to my personal satisfactions, Raymonde gave to it quite naturally her primitive capacity for acceptation, her radiance, her creative splendour.
“Hewill look like you,” she assured me.
“How can we tell?”
“Why should he not look like you? My child is my thought, and my thought is you.”
She wished us to give him a name, and wanted, herself, that of her father, but she dared not suggest it. I often changed the conversation, yet what more beautiful topic can there be than the certainty that the future is holding for us the continuation of our race?
My wife remarked my coldness and lack of enthusiasm. She talked less to me in consequence of that which constantly preoccupied her. And then, with an effort which I now understand, she spoke again to me of it. Already forgetful of herself, she was willing to make herself less agreeable to me if in that way she could induce me to bestow a little of my love on the one who was to come, who was beginning to live within her.
However, her lassitude and the change in her figure increased. It all seemed to threaten blows at my pleasure, attacks on her beauty,—I saw this in it instead of the patience and gentle pity and sense of protection which ennoble a woman’s love. I did not altogether conceal my boredom. One evening, as we were returning from the woods a little later than usual, where I had been for a part of the way inattentive, she stopped, very weary, before passing through the gate.
“I am afraid,” she said.
I looked about us; there was no noise, no movement to cause her fear. I thought that perhaps the shadows and the silence had affected her.
“There is nothing, Raymonde.”
“No,” she agreed, “there is nothing.”
I let the matter drop, satisfied. I did not understand that she needed to be reassured. Her fear was not of external things; those she understood and trusted. Already, her fear was of me.
* * *
During my previous visits in the Sleeping Woods, I had had scarcely a word to say to the farmers and workmen whom I met on my estate. They were my superintendent’s affair, not mine; such people were total strangers to me. During our engagement, I had been much surprised at the looks of understanding exchanged between them and Raymonde when I accompanied her. Later, love traced around us its circle of isolation and no one addressed us, but through its social aspect, marriage made us more accessible. On our return from Italy, the tenants and day labourers whom we encountered, never failed to salute my wife. They called her “Our Lady.” She was “Our Lady of the Woods,” and at first it amused me. But they told her of the deaths and the births, obscure stories of the village or the household, bad crops, or the sickness of the live stock, and I saw myself put aside. They consulted her and let me alone.
“But here is your Master,” she objected, pointing to me, and entrenching herself behind my authority.
“Yes, but you are our lady.”
Instead of rejoicing in this, at last I became offended.
“Speak to them,” she advised me. “Are you not their master?”
“I do not know them,” I answered.
“Exactly, but you will know them.”
“They bore me,” I replied.
“Give them a little friendship, and they will cease to weary you.”
“I don’t find it easy,” I said.
“There is poor Fannette, the washerwoman: her hands are covered with cracks and chilblains. Then there is Pierre, the deaf man, who works in our garden.”
“If he is deaf, it would be useless to talk to him.”
“Oh, but one can speak to him with a hearty laugh, or a handshake, or a finger showing him a flower bed. That is the language which he understands. He has never forgotten to bring me a bouquet on my birthday.”
She was teaching me a little humanity, after all the art that I had thought to teach her! I did not care for it at all, and profited very little from her lessons. It is the same with most of those who screen themselves behind agents in the administration of their estates: they ignore the sweat and labour which all production exacts, and the money which labour makes for them, so far from putting them in contact with other men, only succeeds in keeping them apart.
The sovereignty which Raymonde exercised on my estate made me uneasy. Of a certainty, I refused to confess it to myself, but was not the sympathy she showed and inspired in all these worthy people in itself a criticism of my disdain and indifference? With the intuition which she possessed for my slightest, my most secret annoyances, she perceived my state of mind. Thereafter she cut short her conversations with these people, contenting herself for the most part with a courteous greeting from a distance, which yet managed to cheer them, even if they hoped for more.
And so again, without benefit to myself, I turned aside a source of joy.
Our daughter Odette, whom we afterwards called Dilette, was born in October.
In the face of Raymonde’s sufferings I was less courageous than she. And if I dare confess the whole truth to myself, a horror of anything which attacked the ordering of my life mingled with the compassion which I felt for her.
After the birth of the child, when my own nerves were shattered, I was surprised at the long shudder which shook the mother. She suffered no more, but trembled before the life which she had brought into the world. It was the mysterious prelude to maternal love.
* * *
The autumn advanced. Tired of “the desert” of the Sleeping Woods, and of the incessant attention which a new-born baby demands, deprived by my own act of the strong ties which bound us to a region where we directed the labour and endeavoured to create prosperity, I was eager to return to Paris after so long an absence. Our apartment in the Avenue du Bois was in readiness for us. We had nothing to do but depart.
“Whenever you wish,” consented Raymonde.
We arranged our departure for the first of December. The baby could travel then without danger. The milk of her nurse agreed with her wonderfully. For a child of two months, she showed good strength.
Raymonde suggested a last walk, and a pale, cold sun enticed us. It scarcely melted the white frost in the fields and on the weed-grown paths. The grass crackled under our steps as we entered the woods. We went deep into them. Along the edge, the leaves more exposed to the wind had already fallen. Deeper within there were still a few, especially on the oaks and maples. Copper-coloured or golden, they clung stiffly to the branches, and with the least breath of wind sounded like toy bells. At the Green Fountain, where our horses had drunk that day, they nearly stopped the basin.
Beside me, enveloped in a white cloak and hood, my wife gazed absorbedly, her eyes dim with tears. I was astonished, and even somewhat annoyed by such emotion. Was I not sufficient for her happiness? Why should a mere change of environment, one at which, indeed, she ought to have rejoiced, since I was offering her Paris and its gaieties, have so affected her?
“What troubles you, my dear?” I asked her.
“I have been so happy here,” she replied.
“But we shall be happy in Paris.”
“Here my trees help me. Everything helps me. I feel myself at ease and protected. Yonder I shall be alone.”
“You will be with me. Is not that enough?” I asked.
“Alone to keep your love, which I am so afraid of losing.”
“But that is absurd.”
Why did she doubt herself? In the clear light of the winter sun, which filled the woods, she was resplendent with youth; or rather not youth, but almost childish beauty. Maternity had restored to her that air of extreme purity that one sees in young novices. I looked at her, all in white, so sweet and so gentle, and then round us again at the familiar forest which contented her.
“My love,” I said, with condescending protection, “I will watch over you.”
Oh, the smile with which she rewarded this promise that I was to keep so badly!
* * *
A day or two after our arrival in Paris I surprised her leaning against the window of her room overlooking the Avenue du Bois. She was so absorbed that she did not hear me come in. I approached her. It was of course the novelty of the sight that held her prisoner.
A beautiful winter morning had drawn all the idle world of Paris to a promenade before luncheon. Men and women on horseback, riding at a walk or a quiet canter, crowded the beaten earth of the bridle path. The roadway was devoted to a few surviving carriages, whose ancient steeds seemed hardly able to move their thin legs, and above all to many motors, which, under less restraint than in the crowded city, passed by at full speed, as though revenging themselves with absolute license in the country. On the broad pavement by the side of the grass plots pedestrians were taking their constitutionals among the nurses and children scattered about in pursuit of hoops and balloons. The bluish haze of the clear day softened the outlines of the Arch of Triumph and the light, entering it from all sides, seemingly, increased the height of its arch and columns. At the other end of the Avenue, the Bois slept.
“I am sure you love Paris already,” I said.
Much to her astonishment, I had ceased in Paris calling her “thou,” on account of the custom in society, of which I had already begun to think, and she had obediently imitated me, without asking any explanation. Now, not knowing that I was near, she gave a slight start when she heard my voice.
“Oh, no,” she answered. “There are too many houses and too many people.”
“What were you looking at?”
“I was looking yonder for the forest of the Maiden and the lodge at the gate.”
“That is the Porte Dauphine and the Chinese Pavilion.”
“I did not know it. I imagined that we were at home.”
I had thought this procession that our apartment commanded would have attracted and captivated the love of elegance latent in every woman, that Paris would not have failed to awaken it in her; and behold, the nook where she was born, the country of her love, was sufficient for her. She did not see beyond it; or rather she saw it everywhere.
“You will come to love it,” I continued, with a gesture toward the city. “At your age Paris is irresistible, above all when you will be one of its queens.”
“Oh, one of its queens? You are laughing at me.”
At that moment, attentive and interested, her blond hair caressed by a ray of sunlight, she was at the same time so sensible and so fascinating that I felt I could hope everything for her.
“I am not joking,” I said. “You do not know my power.”
“Do you dare say that?”
“Well, I will make you a queen.”
“Again?”
“That is to say, a woman of fashion.”
Before this prospect she opened her large eyes like a child who is taken to the zoological gardens for the first time and introduced to unknown and strange animals, ostriches, giraffes, or delicate and impossible-looking pink flamingoes. She repeated my phrase, uttering the words as if they hurt her.
“A woman of fashion.”
It meant nothing to her. There had never been any question of it at the Sleeping Woods, and in Rome we lived as strangers, apart from the regular social hierarchy and absolutely at liberty to do as we wished. Now, however, this was the goal that I proposed for her. Already Paris had begun to claim me once again. I breathed its atmosphere, laden with envy and vanity and artificial charms, the more eagerly because for a time it had ceased to intoxicate me and I brought to it new appetite. I had not retained that which my love had given me—regeneration and peace of heart. On the contrary, I wished to force upon her my own habits of life. Face to face with this child, I became aware of the absurdity of my desire. I became aware of it, but I did not abandon it on that account. I wished the world to appreciate and to envy me the treasure that I possessed. In order to be in the fashion, my happiness required publicity.
She turned her head:
“It is impossible,” she said. “I should not know how.”
“Yes, yes,” I insisted, not without a little impatience. “You will learn. You can learn everything.”
“Dost thou wish it?” and then, correcting herself, “Do you wish it?” she asked.
“Certainly.”
“Then I will obey you to the best of my ability.”
That evening, when the nurse did not succeed in quieting Dilette, who was for some reason out of sorts, Raymonde insisted on putting the baby to sleep herself, a privilege which she had always enjoyed at the chateau. As a lullaby she sang in a low voice, to the tune of “Malbrough,” a romance of Chérubin. When she came to the stanza:
There, by a fountain green,O, my heart, my heart, it grieves!There had my lover been,And my tears were full, I ween.And my grief believes.
There, by a fountain green,O, my heart, my heart, it grieves!There had my lover been,And my tears were full, I ween.And my grief believes.
There, by a fountain green,O, my heart, my heart, it grieves!There had my lover been,And my tears were full, I ween.And my grief believes.
There, by a fountain green,
O, my heart, my heart, it grieves!
There had my lover been,
And my tears were full, I ween.
And my grief believes.
whether it was because of the contagious sadness of the verses, the memory of our own Green Fountain, or a presentiment of the dangers that threw their shadows across our love, I do not know, but she stopped. I was in the next room and the curtains between us were drawn back. I heard what sounded like a stifled sigh. Awakened by the silence, Dilette began to cry again, and my wife slowly continued her song.
* * *
The occasion I had chosen for presenting her to society was a reception given one evening by Madame de Saunois, at whose house in the old days I was a frequent guest. Mme. de Saunois is a lady who has attained the summit of that social elegance which springs from exquisite dressing, novel entertainment, clever conversation and the careful cultivation of every natural and artificial charm. Though her age may be subject to some debate, her name and fortune admit of no discussion. Her visiting list is restricted and select, and her invitations are proportionately sought for. Outwardly manners and taste are the same at her house as anywhere else but she would regard herself as old-fashioned if she were thought for one moment to set any limit to liberty of conduct or opinion. She accepts every irregularity of mind or heart if only it is perpetrated by one of the socially elect. According to my ideas at that time her drawing-room was just the one in which I could count upon a gratifying reception for Raymonde.
Promptly upon our arrival in Paris I besought my wife to put herself in the hands of one of the big dressmakers. As she seemed almost averse to this idea I myself looked over her wardrobe with her before we started out to order anything new.
“What’s this?” I asked, picking up a cheap looking woollen skirt. I did not recognise the little wedding dress that had produced such a sweet and simple effect in the Sleeping Woods. Alas, effects change with place and mood: in Paris the little dress was not the same at all.
Guessing my thoughts she said with a blush, “I shall never wear it again, you may be sure.”
“Why not give it away to some poor girl to whom it would be of some use?” I said, with the best intentions in the world.
Raymonde’s flush, which I did not yet understand, faded suddenly. I saw her cheek whiten.
“I was a poor girl once,” she said.
“Oh, but you must forget that.”
“No, let me have my memories. If ever I am tempted to become proud some day, they will keep me humble.”
I understood, then, the wound I had given, but instead of asking her pardon, I said nothing.
To me nothing seemed too sumptuous and elaborate for her, while her one desire was to pass unnoticed. She “set no store” by success: she wished only to please me. But must she not please the whole world, to please me? As to the clothes, she had her way more than I, and I had to be content with a lace robe that suited marvellously her air of candour. All the time the fittings and appraising looks of the tailors, the insulting physical evaluations as of professional buyers, positively affronted her. Again and again she turned toward me eyes that besought mercy like the tender eyes of a hunted doe! But I held to my conquest with an unpitying tenacity.
When she had tried on the skirt and waist, that brought out and moulded her body under the vapory lightness of the material, leaving no outline unseen, and displaying the bare expanse of her throat, she was ashamed at the sight of herself in the mirror.
“Is it possible,” she protested, “that you can wish me to appear like this?”
“Why not?” said I. “You are beautiful.”
“But every one will see me,” she objected.
It began to seem laughable to me, her idea of reserving her beauty for me alone.
The evening upon which we made our first appearance in the drawing-room of Madame de Saunois I felt a curious diminution in my proprietary satisfaction. My too long absence had allowed people to recover from their concern with me, and become indifferent. Paris avenges herself upon those who scorn her. Pierre Ducal was there, informing every one of my marriage. I thought I heard whispered as we passed: “The daughter of his superintendent.” When one is conscious of ill-will one is prompt to imagine hostile remarks, and it seemed to me that every one there was spying jealously upon my wife. The sharp contrast of her youth and bloom with the maturer charms of the other women made instant enemies of them, enemies fully accoutred in the art of feminine war. There were young girls there crowned with name and fortune any one of whom I might have married. Not that I had any regret, but I committed the indelicacy of remembering the advantages I had let slip. There was indeed one woman there, not a stranger to me, whose presence should have been very painful to me, since I especially watched for her opinion of my wife and hoped it would be favourable. Such is the host of petty infamies a man can harbour in his heart when he surrenders himself to vanity.
At my wedding in the Sleeping Woods it was the presence of Pierre Ducal that had been the cause of my noticing the cut of my bride’s wedding gown. To-night Raymonde was in faultless toilette, though timidity and reserve and half fright, made her seem full of awkwardness. Her modest embarrassment under the steady gaze of so many people became ridiculous constraint, and instead of encouraging her I too became ill at ease and caught some of her discomfort.
My friend Pierre Ducal came forward to speak to us. He was cordial in his greeting, but my wife did not remember him.
“I looked at him so little,” she explained to me later, by way of apology. “And how should I have seen him? It was our wedding day!”
Nothing is more offensive to a man who prides himself on the number of hearts he has broken, than the knowledge that he has left absolutely no impression on a young woman’s mind. Ducal turned coldly away to pay his homages elsewhere and make his scathing comments; and as I had no doubt of his pique nor of the vengeance he was taking, Raymonde’s maladroitness gave me fresh cause for irritation. The very man upon whom I had counted as an ally she had succeeded in offending.
Mme. de Saunois being asked—asked, it must be confessed, without much eagerness—consented to give us a romance by Duparc, which no doubt she would follow with one or two others, perhaps three, if she found herself in voice or were sufficiently encouraged. Singing was her passion, a perfect mania, indeed. She had a thread of a voice, which she eked out with a pantomime meant to suggest unbounded temperament. Her pretensions to artistic ability were inordinate. She allowed herself to be called a great society singer in the newspaper paragraphs. People laughed heartily about it all behind her back, but in her presence restrained their amusement as best they could, so that she was doomed never to know the real impression she created.
After her first selection, the last note of it still hanging on her lips, her guests rushed to her from all sides, at the risk of stifling her, and let loose upon her an avalanche of compliments and appreciation. They compared her, without shame, to this or that celebrity, preferably foreigners, who are more apt to pass current without the stamp of critical approval. Being unable to praise the volume of her voice, they made up by praising its timbre, and above all, her spirit, as being something less definite and discernible and so a safer basis of compliment.
Raymonde alone kept her place, motionless, a slender isle of truth in the midst of this sea of falsehood. Mme. de Saunois, after her last grand aria, with unrestrained enthusiasm in her wake, passed in front of us.
“Well, Madame, have I your approval?” she inquired. Apparently she had not yet her fill of praise: she must have something from Raymonde too, all the more delicious because it was kept back by some resisting scruple.
I listened anxiously for Raymonde’s reply.
“The music is new to me,” murmured my wife. “I think I shall like it when I know it better.”
“Yes, isn’t it, and so suggestive! It has to be well interpreted,” said Mme. de Saunois.
Clearly enough it was not a question of the romance but of its interpreter.
“I am not accustomed to it,” answered Raymonde. “But perhaps that will come later,” she added, poor little one, calling to her aid her most gracious smile.
Instead of being pleased with the charming sight of so much sincerity in the midst of these conventional praises, I anxiously followed Mme. de Saunois in her further majestic progress.
“She knows nothing of music,” I heard some one reassure her.
Later in the evening, a young professional pianist, of considerable though as yet unrecognised talent, began to play Mozart’s sonata in F, that one whose yielding rhythm expresses so much fresh and wholesome joy, touched here and there by the melancholy of youth. Every one in the drawing-room chattered, because this time there was no need to compliment, but Raymonde, attentive, forgotten and forgetful, listened gravely to the divine poem of youth.
The people near her were talking aloud. Suddenly she seemed to awaken from her dream and I saw her quickly change her seat. What remarks I wondered had provoked her confusion and flight? Instead of being drawn toward her protection, I blamed her for holding such scruples about insignificant things. In short everything turned against her at this gathering, where I had expected to exhibit her proudly and obtain the approbation of the world. Soon people began to avoid her. Hostesses do not squander their energies at receptions or put themselves to any trouble for the entertainment of their guests nowadays as they used to do: they merely give them a chance to amuse themselves or be bored as they may see fit.
In the hubbub which the end of the selection had called forth, she found herself alone, while all the others surrounded a woman—young?—whom I had not specially noticed, but whose evident fame now attracted my attention and took possession of me. I asked Mme. de Saunois about her as she was passing.
“You do not know her? Why, she is famous. Mme. de H—, the author of ‘The Open Garden.’ A new muse.”
There are so many of these nowadays that only the specialists can enumerate them: I confessed my ignorance, which amused my hostess.
“You will know her very soon,” she added. “For she is going to recite some verses for us. She has a prodigious memory—for her own works. She has never been known to forget a single one of them—fortunately for us.”
I confessed in the same tone of badinage my satisfaction at the prospect in store for me, remarking that the muse was already interesting to look at.
This drew from Madame de Saunois the comment, “In what respect?”
“In her colouring—that dark skin and red hair.”
“It is dyed.”
“Her pale face and those blood-red lips.”
“Paint.”
“Listen to her. She speaks our language with a singing accent. It sounds foreign and has a charm.”
“Her mother is an Italian and her father a Pole. In her writing she expresses the soul of France. Her husband, that very excellent H—, brought her back from somewhere. But she is well connected. I have made inquiries. But what of that? With her here any drawing-room will be like a public garden, and the invasion will begin.”
“What invasion?”
“The foreign invasion. Go and make love to her. She is as contagious as the whooping cough with you men.”
“Indeed!”
“Oh, don’t boast. You will go the way of all the others. She makes the necessary concessions.”
A call for silence interrupted us. Mme. de H—, with a queenly gesture, enlarged the circle about her; then, with an apparent inward search for inspiration, began her recitation.
I am not expert enough in poetry to decide on the merit of her poem; besides, too many conflicting impressions affected my judgment. In her verses deified nature took human shape, the better to offer herself to our comprehension. Once more the Bacchantes, after having killed Orpheus, substituted for his sacred rhythms their wild fanatic dances and disorderly rounds. In the tone of her warm, flexible, and sonorous voice and the harmonious gestures with which she accompanied her poem, in the whole dashing movement of her lithe body, which appeared to be burning with earnestness, there was a certain sensual appeal which disturbed one’s nerves. It was the return to primitive instincts, to the cult of force and desire. Yet no one, except Raymonde, who preserved her calm in the midst of the general emotion, thought of being surprised at hearing such ideas exploited in the most refined salon in Paris by a woman whose face was rouged and whose youth was already a thing of the past.
Mme. de Saunois had evidently known what was coming. As for me, I was eager to be presented to Mme. de H—, the beautiful Nacha she was familiarly called by those about me, like an established celebrity. She barely deigned to acknowledge my compliments by a movement of her head. The rouge and powder, at close range, did not seem to detract from her beauty.
“What did I say?” whispered Mme. de Saunois, with the air of improving her prediction. For the success of another was hardly pleasing to her.
Raymonde did not consent to manifest any sort of approval, although Mme. de H— regarded her fixedly. What was the matter with them that they all wanted the approbation which she could not give? Is a single reproach, probably justified, more important than an outburst of acclamations?
In the carriage in which we drove away, my wife and I exchanged only the vaguest remarks. But when we were at home and she was removing her cloak, I noticed that she was on the verge of tears.
“Did you not enjoy yourself?” I asked, hypocritically.
“Oh, I didn’t go for that purpose,” she answered, naively.
“Why, then?”
“So that you might be pleased with me. And you are not.”
“Oh, yes, I am.”
I could not deceive her by my weak protestations.
“No, you’re not. You can’t be. And I shall never know how to please you.”
I condescendingly consoled her. I promised to direct and form her. And when I questioned her (what made me do it?) about the impression which Mme. de H— had produced on her, I received, after a moment’s hesitation, this abrupt reply:
“She is indecent. Don’t you think so?”
Frankness pleases us so little when it is at variance with our concealed views and inclinations that I was offended by her remark. As the result of this first contact with a sphere which love had temporarily abolished, was I beginning to lose or even reject the sweet simplicity which had been poured into my heart by the little maiden of the Sleeping Woods?
If the most insignificant details and conversations of that evening come back to me, it is because in reality nothing happened that was not important. Memory does not encumber itself with frivolities: that which is of no value it lets escape as water flows through one’s fingers. What stays, one may often undervalue, but the day comes at length when it is perceived to be of real worth.
Raymonde’s unsuccessful effort, and even more her fear, which wounded me sensibly; the many moments when I turned from her and her truthful face for some tangle of youth and beauty, some fabric of bleached hair and painted lips and assumed merriment, some embodiment of all the usual artful powers of feminine enslavement;—in a single evening, in a single place, I saw these things grouped before me, calling up visions of my errors and the distant but certain causes of the misfortune or the crime toward which I was advancing—