* * *—Toward which I was advancing, but not without hesitations and glances back. One cannot quickly or entirely throw off a past in which one has securely attained, in spite of oneself, to some marvellous state of sweetness, rectitude and cheer. The most diverse sentiments, far from excluding each other, often exist quietly side by side, preserving that fatal ignorance that shall finally rend us in twain.If, during that time, I resumed my interest in work, which I had too long neglected, I owe it to Raymonde and her influence. The new life upon which I had entered demanded that I should not be content even with happy idleness. In order that the harmony created by our love continue, all our faculties must be employed, our entire personality must develop in right directions. A single love, if it aspires to be lasting, if it wishes to be definitive, considers the balance in our natures, prevents us from scattering our forces and restores them rather to our command.By a gift of happy flattery Raymonde impelled me to make use of gifts which she recognised in me. I collected my notes of a journey I had once made through Northern India. I published them, and expressed a desire to dedicate them to her; but she could not bear the idea of having her name in print.“It would be an invasion of our privacy,” she objected quite obstinately.I also modelled a few statuettes: a Group of Girls Announcing Spring, and a Young Girl at the Fountain, inspired by my engagement and that lost fountain in the forest which the autumn leaves had covered.It often happens that our most disinterested and normal resolutions turn, against us. My work, which was also hers, was destined to be harmful to her. People gave my modelling unmerited praise. Criticism willingly caresses geniuses whom it believes to be short-lived: they can not be a burden; their course will soon be run, and consequently they may be praised without fear. A reputation at the Salons was bestowed upon me at once, and I was too sensible of the advantages which renown brings not to accept it with alacrity.Deceived by myself, I was astonished that Raymonde did not exhibit more satisfaction. Our first disagreement came from the offer of an illustrated magazine which, following a small exhibition where only amateurs of art could have seen it, asked permission to reproduce the Young Girl at the Fountain. Radiant with delight, I informed my wife, and was surprised at her repugnance to the idea.“One would think you were displeased,” I said.“Refuse permission: I beg you to,” was her reply.“But why?”“Did I not pose for the statue?” she demanded.“Of course.”“Don’t you see then it’s impossible?”“But I don’t understand, Raymonde,” I said.“Keep me all for yourself. Don’t share me with the world. I submitted to your exhibiting my statue. Was not that enough?”However that was not the sole reason for her protest, that sense of modesty. With unfailing intuition she fathomed too the limitations of my ability. Her love warned her not to allow me to seek that more extensive reputation which requires, besides enthusiasm, a daily perseverance and obstinacy. Later I realised better the thorough preparation and almost superhuman energy required by art, if the artist aspires to conquer time. And having realised them I gave up my art.But now this publicity attracted and fascinated me, and I considered my wife’s susceptibility singularly retrograde, absurd even. Should one not obey the conventions? Nowadays fashion has its laws and its rites. A politician, a writer, an artist belongs to the public, which is no longer content with dancers and actresses. And not only do the notabilities of to-day belong to the public in their official capacity; in their private life also, together with their wives and children, cats and dogs, country homes too if they have any, are they public property. They are seen spread out in magazines, in all forms, alone and with their families. Their poses are accompanied with captions for which a new style has been created, a style uniformly conventional. Their privacy is taken by assault. They consent to it willingly when they do not hunt for it from vanity or self-advertisement. They even appear regularly on commercial posters destined to advertise one or another of our modern industrial products.I was now to have an opportunity for free advertisement, and should I give it up for the fancy of a too scrupulous woman? Was it reasonable? Who would do it in my place? I reserved my reply, and a day or two later reopened the subject.“The magazines insist on having that photograph. Are you still so opposed to my giving it?” I began.As a matter of fact I did not need her consent, and yet I asked her for it. Was it for the purpose of giving her proof of my affection and condescension? Or was it, rather, to oblige her to give in? She gave in, and fifty thousand copies of “The Young Girl at the Fountain” were printed. I distributed some of them myself. Mme. de Saunois had one, and so did Mme. de H— whose opinion, of course in lyric form, created much talk.I had made that statue for Raymonde and for her alone. How many times, while she gently encouraged me, during its execution, had I told her so? And yet I did not know how to resist the first temptation to make it public.I remembered reading of the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti that when he lost his wife he placed beside her in the coffin the manuscript of the poems that she had inspired, but later did not hesitate to violate her grave to get them back and publish them. How many artists pluck out their tenderest memories to offer them to the crowd! They invoke glory, but vanity more often is the spirit that leads them.Vanity, vanity! It is the motive of so many lives! I too chose it rather than the greatest love. There is the whole story.A little later I had a chance to compare my attitude with Raymonde’s. A series of old French dances was arranged by Mme. de Saunois. Against her wishes, but upon my insisting, she had figured in a gavotte. A society journal asked permission to photograph her.“If she agrees,” I thought, “that will be my revenge.”At bottom I was certain that she would refuse, which she did, much to the chagrin of the other dancers, who could not forgive her for depriving the public of their simperings. The gavotte, in the journal, was replaced by a minuet, which admitted of but two persons, and no more; and people avoided thereafter giving her a part in any presentation for fear she might stand in the way of that publicity that was so useful, they assured themselves, to their charity.As for myself I saw in it another failure.* * *At that time, I was interested in the first experiments in aviation, still of questionable success, just as I had formerly been enamoured of automobiling. She would not have selected this field for me, but at the same time she refused to turn me aside from it. She saw that it appealed strongly to my activities, which in-door work could not satisfy and which needed some out-door strife more closely allied to sport.“If I fly,” I said to her, “you will not be afraid?”“Oh, yes, I shall.”“Ought I to give it up then?”“Oh, no, indeed. Your work is your glory. I shall be afraid, but I shall pray. A woman can fear—”However, I soon abandoned my studies because they seemed too problematical, and would not have been productive of immediate visible prestige. I was not to take them up again until much later.* * *One makes mistakes: I was mistaken in my belief of Raymonde’s lowly origin. I prided myself that I had raised her to my rank, by magnificent generosity, without seeking to divine how such tact and moral culture as hers had come about without the slow formation of time. The chance discovery of some legal document one day informed me of the great age and secular distinction of her family, which reverses had forced to take up service in almost the same place where it had once enjoyed its fortune. This discovery seemed a blow at my superiority. Pride kept me from mentioning it.* * *One evening we came home and found that her maid was not there for us. I made the occasion an excuse for reprimands.“You do not know how to give your orders,” I said.“I did not want her to wait up for me.”“That is a mistake,” I said.“I can wait on myself.”She did not think it right that she should oblige a servant to wait up for her pleasure. She preferred to arrange her beautiful hair for the night herself.* * *I had noticed the time she spent each day in going over her accounts. It seemed that she always had too much money at her disposal. I was not accustomed to such saving. I attributed to a narrow education that admirable sense of economy which is one of the superiorities of the French woman, expert in thrift and housekeeping, knowing how to be unostentatiously charitable as well, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan crowd encamped among us with its dissipations and luxuries.“Leave that,” I assured her, “you do not know how to spend money.”“I need nothing now.”“But that is the point, you should want all sorts of things.”“Why should I?”“Why not, since we can afford them.”She made me share her charities with her, which were numerous, but she resisted all entreaties to personal luxuries, with a gentleness and disinterestedness which offended me. I unceasingly suggested changes of toilette, and was irritated by the resistance which I encountered, unexpected in any woman, much less in the wife of the millionaire Cernay.“Do you find no pleasure in being more fashionable than the others, better dressed and more noticed?”“None, I assure you.”“I want every one to mark your appearance as soon as you enter a salon. I want all the men to admire you and all the women to envy you. That is an artistic pleasure. But you are insensible to everything. You like nothing.”“Oh, but I do like so many things.”“What, for instance?”“I need not tell you.”I did not yet understand the tenderness of her feeling toward me. However, it was hardly like the sentiments I held toward her, and I ceased presently to compare them.It was her greatest pleasure to remain at home, to play with Dilette, who laughed and appreciated her little mother always; or to read some “Introduction to a Devoted Life,” or “The Letters of Saint Francis of Sales to Mme. de Chanta” (in which he urges her to light her own fire in the morning rather than make her chambermaid rise before her); or perhaps some other pious work, or some fairy tales and legends, as if she were preparing herself for maternal instruction generally. She delighted too in such simple tales of good folk as gave them the air of having really lived. “Mireille” enchanted her, and “Genevieve, or the Story of a Servant,” and “Dominique” and “Ramuntcho,” and “Nerte,” in which she had underlined these four lines of a benediction which the Pope, traversing a path through the ripe grain, addresses to some workmen in the field:Search peace in field and home—It is the better part;And drops from labour’s browLike pearls shall deck the heart.Such an attitude toward life as hers has gone out of style. Nowadays, all women, young and old alike, leave their homes as soon as they are rigged out, fleeing from their firesides as from a pest. They hurry their automobiles in all directions; to teas, to bridge-parties, to soirées that are like exhibitions, to fashionable weddings that seem like parades of the most enterprising dressmakers, to lectures where art and history are popularised; even to the hospitals, where they learn how to care for other people’s children while their own, supposing they have deigned to bear any, are abandoned in the nursery.I urged her to follow their example!“You are not seen about at all. You never go out,” I said. “Do you not care to go out?”“With you? With Dilette?”“No, alone.”She suggested walks in the Bois, which she knew better than the rest of Paris. At first, when Spring came, we had ourselves taken there almost every day. When I gave up going she went with Dilette. She preferred those paths which lead from the lakes to St. James Pond and are never crowded. It was not the Sleeping Woods, but at least there were trees.“Why do we know so many people?” she sighed one day, as she was putting on her hat, vainly hoping that I would forego my plan of sending her out.“It is not your fault if we keep them,” I replied impatiently.At that she departed as quickly as possible, in order to please me. And yet, whenever I returned before she did I was impatient at not finding her there.It was not only at Mme. de Saunois’ first reception that Raymonde failed of sufficiently enthusiastic formulæ for amateur singers and elocutionists. Even on occasions when she was genuinely stirred, the exaggerated congratulations of those about her arrested her enthusiasm. Her lips would half open to express a compliment, but if she deemed it insufficient she would blush and remain silent after all. I believe it was a physical impossibility for her to conceal her thoughts. People complained of her disdain, her coldness, but never of her candour. And I was distressed by this silence that other people took for hostility.“You do not talk. One must talk,” I told her.“I do not dare,” she answered.“Say anything, no matter what.”“It is just that kind of thing I dare not say.”Indeed she could neither speak nor understand those little nothings which pretty lips can utter with so much assurance.I made some pretence of teaching hey how to converse: I led her to those places where one selects subjects of conversation like cakes at the baker’s—such as art exhibitions and first nights. She felt out of her element in the company of those painted, enamelled women, versed in all the arts and graces of Parisian life, who, though they may please separately, in an assemblage strike one with a sort of solemn horror, with their perfume of withered flowers. I brought her into the midst of this and tolerated the insult of this impure air. Stiff, and a little stilted, slender and distant, she retired within herself like a sensitive plant. Those others, large and many-decked ships, fast-sailing torpedo-boats, old hulks from the waters of the theatre or of gallantry, all artifice and rouge, backed by their husbands or protectors, had the air of setting victoriously out to sea to capture public opinion. Vaguely they would announce success or failure. And I was disposed to accept their judgment as to Raymonde, never questioning if it were not as false as their faces.The day after a new play, Paris would learn from such as these whether or not the presentation deserved success: they made or unmade reputations. When we attended the theatre, Raymonde would sit motionless in the corner of the box. Occasionally she fell back—recoiling as if from some insupportable contact—though she herself was all the time unconscious of her instinctive movements.“What is the matter?” I asked once.“Nothing.”“You do not look as if you were enjoying yourself.”“To be truthful with you, I am not.”“This play displeases you?”“Oh, how could it please me?”“But there is nothing but enthusiasm in the lobby between the acts. Every one is delighted with it,” I argued.“I do not share every one’s opinion. You must excuse me.”How often our dialogue ran like that! The drama or the comedy changed, but our words were usually the same. I can still see her mechanical gesture. Before us, on the stage, a woman would torment and harass her husband with her sensual love; another, virtuous all her life to that time, surrender at last to an unknown blackguard; a third stole money to buy beautiful gowns in which to excite her husband’s waning desire for her; all, shedding an odour of the alcove upon the audience, represented to us as heroines of love; and upon that basis applauded frantically by the public, its nerves shaken.“They love; that is all,” was the general comment all about us.Raymonde shook her head, as if that were not all. One evening, aroused by the general acclamation, unable to resist that magnetic current which comes from an electrified crowd, I insisted on sustaining the popular theories regarding a play in which the heroine, a young girl, gave herself up in a burst of passion to her sister’s husband.“Love, true love, disregards morals, tramples upon suffering, takes no account of anything outside of itself. That has its beauty, don’t you think so?”“That is not loving,” she murmured.I continued my panegyric.“Love, true love, in its splendid violence, does not stop at a fault, or even a crime.”“That isn’t loving,” she repeated.“What then does love mean, according to your idea?” I demanded, surprised at her resistance.“According to my idea? Oh, I don’t know. Don’t ask me that.”“Yes, you must acquire the habit of being able to express what you feel, Raymonde. That is the whole art of conversation.”She hesitated: I saw her lips open and tremble a little. She shook her head, and then suddenly made up her mind:“Do you remember going into a little chapel one evening?”“Yes, with you.”“A dark chapel, lighted only by the altar lamp? It seems to me that one’s heart is like that.”“One’s heart?”“Yes, the heart is in darkness, unknown. But the lamp which shines in the sanctuary is our love. It is there, watching and praying. To love is to understand oneself more clearly, to take one’s impulses and thoughts out of the shadow. We do not take faults and crimes out of the shadow. And since love is light, it is also the desire to make ourselves better.” And then very low, as if to herself, she added:“As for myself, the more I love, the less I can do evil.”But when would she have done so? When had she not loved?She rarely expressed herself at so great length. The flame which watches and prays shone from her eyes all over her face; carried away by her subject her every feature reflected the light of which she had spoken. Had I been away from the theatre, the world, and its false conception of life, I might have adored her for her simple lesson of love, her ineffable avowal of tenderness. The air of the Sleeping Woods suddenly refreshed me. I drank from those springs of youth and felt their purifying virtue.The curtain rose again. And once more the great wave of sophisms and errors, of erratic folly and passional disorder, surged up, rolled over the public and submerged it. I believe that in the whole theatre there was only this young woman against whom it struck and broke in vain. I did not realise the beauty of the spectacle.“She is sweet,” I thought, in a moment of gentleness, “but still a little childish. She does not understand these devastating passions which sweep away everything. One should be able to comprehend what one has not experienced even; she goes through life with blinders on her eyes; she does not wish to see anything outside of her own narrow little life, straight ahead of her.”In good faith, I dared to think: “her little life—”* * *That very evening, or on another like it, as we were driving home from the theatre in our automobile, she asked me suddenly:“Is it true?”“Is what true?”“That there are women and young girls like those whom we saw on the stage?”“Of course there are, many like them, and many worse. What a child you are.”“Ah!” she murmured.She said no more, but the electric light which shone upon her showed me her look of pain. She felt a deep sadness at learning of the existence of so many guilty women.* * *The popular books of the day, which I purposely placed about her, thinking to tempt her into reading, usually inspired her with the same repulsion. She did not retain the names of the authors,—they were destined to be forgotten. Their literary beauty could not, for her, be separated from the beauty of the matter. Those charming modern books in which youth is presented to us as an animal at liberty, through which pleasure runs fearless of the attacks of time and death, in which the mind even has become sensual,—she only opened and began: she never finished them.“Why do you not go on with them?” I asked.“My heart isn’t in them.”“But the author cannot always paint one’s own heart.”“But it is so difficult to read a book in which you find nothing of yourself.”I picked up one of the rejected books on her centre table.“Listen to these beautiful sentences,” I began.“Oh!” she replied, “a mannequin, too, wears beautiful clothes. I prefer something living underneath. Do you remember my wedding gown? It did not become me any too well. But I loved you so much—”* * *At that time, a foreign woman was being tried in Paris. She had driven her lover to kill her husband, and had then denounced him in order to rid herself of him and begin life anew with another. A veritable halo of fatality encircled her, for to know her was to love her, and to love her was to lose all honour and regard for humanity. Above all she had very beautiful hands, their beauty shining all the more clear when they were examined for any traces of guilty blood. She appeared before her judges with the grace and prattle of an artless child, charming everybody. Before testifying each day she would remove her gloves. It was the fashion to go to court and submit to the enchantment of her voice, her face whose very blemishes were thought of as the ravages of love or amorous decorations—to give our nerves their daily wrenching. The evening following the announcement of the verdict, we dined with Mme. de Saunois. The accused was the sole topic of conversation. Mme. de H— summed her up and conferred the following degree upon her:“She is such an exceptional creature, so seductive. She rises above our common measure with such ease. Even her wickedness is attractive.”Every one was approving this opinion, when it occurred to one guest to ask Raymonde, who was seated next him:“What is your idea, Madame?”“I hope she is only a monster.”All the women at the table looked toward me. They visibly pitied me for having cast my lot with a person capable of so narrow and prejudiced an opinion.And I could not help an irritation at this blame that society put upon me through her.From seeing her continually rebel against our forms of art and all our prevailing ideas, I became accustomed to thinking her callous. That was indeed the general impression of her. Her reading was too different from that recommended by success to attach any importance to it. At the theatre, nothing, or almost nothing, succeeded in pleasing her. The splendour of an unusual interpretation caused me to take her one evening to see “Polyeucte.” I was not thinking so much of the play itself, as of the actors. Is not that usual? Do not the names of the players, inscribed in letters of fire on the front of our theatres, eclipse those of the authors and even of the play?In our box, as I called her attention to the acting of the old and eminent actor who played Polyeucte, I was surprised to have no reply. I looked at her more attentively: the tears coursed down her cheeks, though she did not know that she was crying. I had surprised her once before like this in the Coliseum in Rome, when the guide pointed out the gate of the dead. Pauline threw away Severus’s love and her own. Pauline received with open heart the divine spark of the faith. All the pathos of the ardent masterpiece condensed and spiritualised itself on my wife’s face, pale with the force of her emotion.As the curtain fell, I offered explanations of her exaltation.“Monroy was sublime,” I said. Had we not come only to see that great actor?“Which rôle did he play?” she asked. “I didn’t know.”Completely given up to the tragedy she had quite simply relegated the actor to his proper place.* * *One Good Friday she took me to Notre Dame to hear the sermon on the Passion.Spring had come in April. The moon when we arrived was mounting toward the open sky just above the towers of the old cathedral, bathed in the blue of the pure night. Inside, the crowd was so great that we could not reach a church-warden’s pew, and with great difficulty I got a chair for her at the back, in the midst of the throng.The voice of the preacher, which had sounded thin to me as we entered, reached us, distinct, insistent and powerful. It carried with it the generosity of a heart that gives itself until it is exhausted. It filled the immense edifice to the very shadows at the back, shadows which covered also the transepts and the upper vaulting, making the lighted portions of the church seem menaced by it on all sides.We heard the story of the Mount of Olives. The Disciples went to sleep while Jesus was enduring His agony. Likewise, about us and within us, the moral life of others and ourselves suffers while we sleep. Later, too late, when I awakened from my cruel sleep, I was destined to recall with bitterness that warning which I had not heeded. We saw about us all the visible and varied forms of cowardice, the cowardice of the official, of the judge, of the crowd, of friends. All the truth of human character shines out in the Gospel. In this series of denials, one can see his own denying, just as one instinctively feels his pockets when he hears the cry of “Thief.” I alone, perhaps, of those present, gave the ceremony the interest of the mere amateur.Next to us, an old news man, who had stopped his shouting only at the door, crowding in through several rows of chairs, stood still, suddenly captive, with his pile of papers under his arm. It was the death of Righteousness. He uttered a long sob of indignation and pity, like a half-uttered howl, held out his free arm before him in an involuntary gesture, and then went away again upon his route. Outside once more he tried to cry his papers, but emotion still gripped his throat. For an instant he had offered himself to God. I have never known that instant; I have never made that offering. It was now I who was callous.When we left, the moon, detached from the towers, was sailing through the open sky. The clear night, so blue and pure, enveloped the sombre cathedral. Ranged along one side of the square the waiting automobiles quivered incongruously at the foot of the old black building.At last, we found our carriage. “Was it not beautiful?” Raymonde asked immediately.I agreed without interest, from courtesy, instead of giving way to my emotions as I had been invited to do. For a second short space of time, I surprised her in the act of trembling. Still, I continued to believe in her apathy, her reputation for it was so well established. When one holds to the judgment of the world one can not appreciate his own fireside.* * *These discords, these difficulties that come between two people when one aspires only to success and the attractions of fashionable life, while the other keeps intact her native and religious sensibility, do not necessarily prevent that kind of understanding which is possible in our flexible modern life to people of fortune. So many husbands and wives, for instance, if they should stop to think, would be surprised by the amount of their incompatibilities. They are content with approximate congeniality, in willing ignorance. But one cannot lay bare the roots of a tree and have it grow and live. The denial of its proper nourishment does not kill it at once: for a short time it may continue to blossom and to flower. At last, however, it falls before some severe storm, like a disabled ship which breasts the gale as long as possible and in the end surrenders to the elements. So I laid bare the roots of our love; little by little, I deprived it of its necessary protection, and finally crushed it utterly by one severe blow.These apparently trifling details, which I have enumerated, before coming exactly to the real outbreak, by degrees alienated Raymonde from me. It was indeed a gradual uprooting. So completely given up to this imperious desire to shine that I was intolerant of any encroachments upon it by the intimacies of our life together, entirely subordinated to that state of mind in which one seeks applause, I turned more and more from Raymonde and her influence, which I thought narrow and old-fashioned.She went with me uncomplainingly, wherever I suggested. I imposed on her immodest spectacles and degrading associates, such as our society supports, when she did not desire them: still she was not what I wanted to make her, a woman of the world.It was not in her. A stirring conflict was waged within her, between her love for me and her upright nature, incapable of bending itself to the manners of our day. I helped to create the problem, but did not attempt to aid her in its solution. Her struggle even began to undermine her health, though she showed no outward trace of the exhaustion she felt, excepting perhaps a loss of weight. But thinness was very fashionable at this time! Ah! those people whose daily acts are regulated by a definite code of morals, to whom faith and love are as necessary as food and respiration—they have a presentiment of death when once that faith is shaken; they have no powers of resistance when their ideals are finally shattered.The first effect in Raymonde was a loss of cheerfulness. I did not notice it then, yet I recall it clearly now. There is in our past always something which we would forget, but which does not permit itself to be forgotten. There was a time when her laughter was spontaneous, with her little girl, in carelessness and innocence of heart. When she held her child upon her knee, and lavished her enticement on her, she resembled those madonnas which have altogether the air of elder sisters. Little by little this clear, charming laughter became less frequent, diminished, was shattered! Even Dilette perceived it. And I did not fail to notice that the poor little one missed, as she might her broken or lost toys, these tokens of joyousness.Raymonde enjoyed only the simple pleasures of life, of which I had none to offer her. Into the simplest of them I had injected, like a secret passion, this perverse desire for sensation, filling with astonishment, torment and pained shame, a heart simple and ingenuous, ignorant of the intricacy of our life.The expression which I had seen in her face on that first day in May, when I met her in the wood and when my unexpected presence made her retrace her road, or when I had made my avowal of love at the chateau, or on the evening of one of our last walks before the birth of our child, this look of fear,—here, I saw it again, like a ghost, upon her face. But I attached no importance to it.* * *She told me once later, that during all this time she was trying to conform to my tastes, she never paid one of those visits to which I attached such importance, without reciting a little prayer to God, on the staircase or in the ante-chamber, for courage. And it was the same thing when we received. It was absolute torture for her to endure the custom of kissing the hand which had recently come again into vogue. Her arms hung at her sides and one had always to search for her hand there. She never submitted without a shudder, which, though she did her best to suppress it, she never entirely succeeded in concealing—above all, at home, when she wore no gloves.* * *We had reached that point, she in her isolation and growing unhappiness, I in that state of nervous irritation where my baffled worldly ambitions and the substitution of my personal life for our common life had thrown me, when my hopes were revived by a sudden and unexpected change.* * *Pierre Ducal, who in the old days had taught me the art of moving with ease in the most dissimilar salons, Pierre Ducal, whose support the negligence of my wife had diverted and I had counted too much on, sought again evidently to get into touch with us. He had then attained the summit of the only glory he had ever really desired. Slender of figure, graceful, his clean-shaven face sallow of tint but passing at night for interesting pallor, erect in carriage, affected in his wit, of dashing demeanour, he aspired now all the more to fascinate because he was pursued by the terror of old age. A time—not far distant—would come when he would have to take his place in the faded and worn-out category of old beaux, old fellows who had been handsome once, who continued to dress and carry themselves as if they still were so, touching knight-errants, a little comical, following that lost cause, their youth. Being discerning, he foresaw the end that awaited him. But this foresight diminished in proportion as the danger increased, or rather, the threat was already put into execution while he continued to believe it hanging over him. In the face of this shipwreck he turned to account with agonising haste all the possible pleasures of life. Never more than at this time had I seen him so engaging and so brilliant. Never had he enjoyed such prestige, never had his clever sayings, his judgments, his ironies been so much in demand, nor exercised so much effect.I attribute the happy change in Ducal’s attitude to his regret that he had allowed our old friendship to lapse. He became our most intimate associate. He accompanied us to the races, and the theatres; we commenced to meet him in the society which we frequented, which was less riotous, more dignified than that which he effected. In spite of myself, I had submitted, in the choice of our associates, to the guidance of Raymonde. However, I was apprehensive as to the effect which my wife’s old-fashioned views could not fail to produce on our worldly companion. The first time this apprehension put me in torture. I was soon reassured. Pierre Ducal marvelled at her great originality, which Paris had not shaken. Far from being amused, as I feared, he invited comments which disconcerted him, but which he did not ridicule. He even tried to understand them. This new interest which he took in Raymonde’s reserved conversation was of great benefit to her. The world was not slow to amend the reputation it had given her for shyness and provincialism. I heard favourable echoes around me; the opinion of Pierre Ducal weighed so heavily.“We see your friend very often,” my wife observed one day.I expressed my contentment at this, but after she had made the remark she seemed to me, when Ducal was present, more reserved and distant than ever:—so much so, that I showed my displeasure and surprise.“You are scarcely civil to him.”“Oh, do you think so? Why should I be more agreeable?”“He is my friend.”She was about to object, then reddened and kept silent.I had absolute confidence in her. Despite the obscure process which had little by little undermined my tenderness, I could not have touched her with a suspicion without despising myself. Above all she impressed me as being unable to appeal to or even to hold the interest of a man of the world like Pierre Ducal. I did not see—I could not see—in his attentions, anything but a chance opportunity for instruction to supplement mine when I had discontinued. At any rate, my friend, without doubt a little abashed, treated her with a respect and a deference which was in noticeable contrast to his usual insolent manner toward women. I was grateful to him for it, and at the same time amused.It was the time of year when the days are growing longer, and we enjoyed even our dinner by the light of the setting sun, the twilight being so beautiful that we deferred turning on the light as long as possible. On the evening of which I am writing, as I returned from my club, I was surprised not to see my wife in the salon. I called to her: she did not answer. Turning on the electric light I surprised her exhausted, stretched on a sofa, her head hidden in her hands, her body convulsed with sobs.“My God,” said I to her, “what is the matter?”She tried to put me off.“Nothing, nothing,” she insisted. “Do not look at me.”“I beg of you, I ought to know.”Brusquely, without raising her head, she replied:“I have dismissed M. Ducal.”“Dismissed Ducal,” I repeated in amazement, as if she had perpetrated a most daring outrage.I knew that her love for me, as well as her own inherent purity, was sufficient assurance that my honour could not have been compromised: therefore I felt that she must have exaggerated the importance of Pierre Ducal’s conduct. To me the circumstances indicated only an unforeseen destruction of carefully laid plans for increasing our prestige in society; if for a moment I had had cause to doubt Raymonde, then perhaps the worldly outcome might have meant less to me, but I realised only the fact that she had peremptorily sent Pierre Ducal away and that he would unquestionably seek revenge. He would make us the victims of his sarcasms and pointed remarks, which could destroy my reputation as an arrow wounds the flesh. He would use to advantage the observations he had made during our close intimacy. I was incensed by the thought of Raymonde’s having so needlessly exposed us to this danger through laying too much stress on a trivial incident. Had she not learned in our society that all women allow men to be attentive to them? Of what use were receptions, beautiful gowns, enticing conversation and the arts of coquetry, if not to call forth the very thing she had resented! Could she not have let Pierre Ducal know in a quiet, forceful manner that his advances annoyed her, without going to the extreme limit of causing a break in our friendship? Surely a woman’s greatest asset is the use of all her weapons of charm and fascination to the best possible advantage. What to Raymonde constituted an irreparable injury was to me only a source of great annoyance. And I took the thing very lightly.“Little one, little one, when will you learn to be reasonable?”She did not answer when I spoke to her. While I had been rapidly reviewing the situation, she had lain on the sofa, her face buried in her hands, completely crushed by the weight of her despair. I repeated my question and she looked up. Now at last I know the meaning of her every gesture and glance. I realised that she hid her face because she felt degraded for having even unknowingly appealed to the sensual nature of Pierre Ducal. The very fact of those words, which she had not invited, seemed to her to sully her purity. Even my presence was painful to her on that account. I can still see her large eyes fixed on me, those eyes so limpid, in which I could plainly read her terror.“What did you say?” she murmured. “I did not understand you—I did not understand.”For one brief moment I felt intuitively that I had not been fair to her. I went over to the couch, stooped, and would have taken her in my arms.“Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Do not touch me yet.”That one cry of fright was an expression of the repulsion she felt for herself. Her delicacy had been deeply wounded by the realisation that any other man had dared to think of her as only her husband had the right to do. But to my worldliness her terror had another significance, and it infuriated me.“He did not touch you, did he?” I cried.“Oh,” she cried, wringing her hands.The mere suspicion crushed her. I lacked fine feeling enough to give her comfort then and restore her self-respect, and so I assumed a fatherly air and lectured her for her foolish exaggeration of trifles.“But my dear,” I said, “it is not so dreadful. What crime has that tactless Ducal committed?”I thought the word “tactless” strong enough to designate his insult. She did not answer.“He—he dared—to tell me—”“What?” I asked impatiently. “Oh, yes, I can imagine—but what did he say to you?”“I do not know. He was talking generalities. I did not see where he wished to arrive. He said that one is so rarely happy, and that one can not be so if one is not loved.”The miserable wretch had artfully tried to explain her own state of mind to her before offering his sympathy. I have no doubt the knowledge that he perceived her secret suffering was as painful to her as the unmerited insult. Later, at least, I could understand that. My only aim then was to minimise the effect of an incident which I thought so little compromising.“Oh, come,” I said, in an easy manner, “it’s not worth being annoyed about. Pierre Ducal only acted like a man of the world, and very badly, since he put you in such a state. Would it not have sufficed to let him know that you realised his stupidity? He is a man of intelligence, and he would not have begun again. He is good company; one is never bored with him. Paris is not the Sleeping Woods. You seem to forget that. Life here is highly organised and civilised. You try to live in the city as you do in the solitude of the country. One can’t do that. You must learn to adapt yourself. Besides, a young woman has a thousand ways of protecting herself without struggling or screaming. All women know the art of listening graciously. One has not the air of listening. One jokes, one smiles, or one laughs frankly. One checks the indiscreet man with a word, a blow of the fan on the fingers. Men hardly ever insist. They do not carry on a hopeless siege, above all to-day, when one is so practical and so hurried. Deuce take it! One does not throw men out of the door, who, after all, do not wish you any harm. Whom would one receive, if one adopted such a system? I assure you, it is time you began to mature.”I was very proud of this improvised argument. It might have availed with women who do not fear to play with fire, or enjoy a flirtation if they know they are temptation-proof. It might not have jarred the finer sensibilities of that type of woman who enjoys a joke about such things with her intimates, as one is amused by a toy pistol that only looks real but is not really dangerous. To Raymonde it was absolutely unintelligible. Every word was a fresh wound, every thought disloyal and wicked.While I was speaking she looked and looked at me. Her great eyes, wide opened, burned with such an ardour that I felt them on me. I wished she would close them or look away, for her gaze embarrassed me. Little by little the colour faded from her cheeks, and when I finished speaking she was deathly pale. As she kept silence, I went on a little annoyed:“You seem to have nothing to say. I assure you Ducal will explain our strained relations to suit his own need. Why do you not answer?”“I am so fatigued,” she murmured; “let me go to my room, please.”“Do you want me to go with you?”“Thank you, I prefer to be alone.”She glided through the room like a shadow. At the door, she turned toward me and said brokenly:“If I was wrong in dismissing your friend, forgive me.”“No, no,” I said, “it is not that.”She disappeared, and I walked up and down, reviewing the whole unpleasant episode and its inevitable consequences. I was annoyed with myself for the unpleasant sensation I felt. It was something akin to that I felt when I asked the innocent young girl of the woods to come to Paris with me alone and she had willingly consented, not comprehending the significance of my invitation. Had I not nevertheless committed the cowardice of injuring the little creature who had entrusted herself to me and claimed protection? And as on that previous occasion, I recalled the bird which I had picked up in my hand, whose life, whose warm life, I felt slip away. Had I not held it too close instead of caressing it?I should have insisted on going with her,—I should not have left her alone. But I stayed there, unnerved and dissatisfied with myself.At dinner she occupied her place without a word of explanation. Any further expression of opinion would have been as the spade of earth that falls on a coffin. Neither she nor I reopened the subject. She retired early, and her absence was a distinct relief to me. The cigar which I was smoking was excellent. Out of doors, the mild evening air announced the spring-time.That night, I have since learned, was one of intense agony for her. How could she still love me? Had I not yet succeeded in destroying love in her? Love is not so dependent on its object as on the nature of the being in whose heart it dwells, and from which it receives its life and force. That of Raymonde was born immortal.A few days later, I met Pierre Ducal. I saw at a glance that he was master of the situation and had decided on his course of conduct. He came toward me, his hand extended. I had an impulse to refuse it—why did I not yield to it? I accepted that offered hand. The treason commenced was by that act consummated.Did he think I knew nothing of his conduct? He had arranged for leaving his cards and going away for a while, in order not to make our breach evident, and the bitter sarcasms which I had anticipated were never uttered. He continued to say only pleasant things about us, and it became a matter of general discussion that he had changed completely and was now inclined to enjoy solitude.How had it become possible for a worldly cynic of his stamp so suddenly to withdraw from society and gain opinions so radically different from those he had always held? I can now explain that mystery. My wife had given him a new vista of life when she made him realise for the first time what respect is due a woman. He had never before met a woman of such ideals. I feel a supreme shame in thinking that he was in advance of me, perhaps, in making the honourable reparation to Raymonde, the amend which I was destined to make only later.
* * *
—Toward which I was advancing, but not without hesitations and glances back. One cannot quickly or entirely throw off a past in which one has securely attained, in spite of oneself, to some marvellous state of sweetness, rectitude and cheer. The most diverse sentiments, far from excluding each other, often exist quietly side by side, preserving that fatal ignorance that shall finally rend us in twain.
If, during that time, I resumed my interest in work, which I had too long neglected, I owe it to Raymonde and her influence. The new life upon which I had entered demanded that I should not be content even with happy idleness. In order that the harmony created by our love continue, all our faculties must be employed, our entire personality must develop in right directions. A single love, if it aspires to be lasting, if it wishes to be definitive, considers the balance in our natures, prevents us from scattering our forces and restores them rather to our command.
By a gift of happy flattery Raymonde impelled me to make use of gifts which she recognised in me. I collected my notes of a journey I had once made through Northern India. I published them, and expressed a desire to dedicate them to her; but she could not bear the idea of having her name in print.
“It would be an invasion of our privacy,” she objected quite obstinately.
I also modelled a few statuettes: a Group of Girls Announcing Spring, and a Young Girl at the Fountain, inspired by my engagement and that lost fountain in the forest which the autumn leaves had covered.
It often happens that our most disinterested and normal resolutions turn, against us. My work, which was also hers, was destined to be harmful to her. People gave my modelling unmerited praise. Criticism willingly caresses geniuses whom it believes to be short-lived: they can not be a burden; their course will soon be run, and consequently they may be praised without fear. A reputation at the Salons was bestowed upon me at once, and I was too sensible of the advantages which renown brings not to accept it with alacrity.
Deceived by myself, I was astonished that Raymonde did not exhibit more satisfaction. Our first disagreement came from the offer of an illustrated magazine which, following a small exhibition where only amateurs of art could have seen it, asked permission to reproduce the Young Girl at the Fountain. Radiant with delight, I informed my wife, and was surprised at her repugnance to the idea.
“One would think you were displeased,” I said.
“Refuse permission: I beg you to,” was her reply.
“But why?”
“Did I not pose for the statue?” she demanded.
“Of course.”
“Don’t you see then it’s impossible?”
“But I don’t understand, Raymonde,” I said.
“Keep me all for yourself. Don’t share me with the world. I submitted to your exhibiting my statue. Was not that enough?”
However that was not the sole reason for her protest, that sense of modesty. With unfailing intuition she fathomed too the limitations of my ability. Her love warned her not to allow me to seek that more extensive reputation which requires, besides enthusiasm, a daily perseverance and obstinacy. Later I realised better the thorough preparation and almost superhuman energy required by art, if the artist aspires to conquer time. And having realised them I gave up my art.
But now this publicity attracted and fascinated me, and I considered my wife’s susceptibility singularly retrograde, absurd even. Should one not obey the conventions? Nowadays fashion has its laws and its rites. A politician, a writer, an artist belongs to the public, which is no longer content with dancers and actresses. And not only do the notabilities of to-day belong to the public in their official capacity; in their private life also, together with their wives and children, cats and dogs, country homes too if they have any, are they public property. They are seen spread out in magazines, in all forms, alone and with their families. Their poses are accompanied with captions for which a new style has been created, a style uniformly conventional. Their privacy is taken by assault. They consent to it willingly when they do not hunt for it from vanity or self-advertisement. They even appear regularly on commercial posters destined to advertise one or another of our modern industrial products.
I was now to have an opportunity for free advertisement, and should I give it up for the fancy of a too scrupulous woman? Was it reasonable? Who would do it in my place? I reserved my reply, and a day or two later reopened the subject.
“The magazines insist on having that photograph. Are you still so opposed to my giving it?” I began.
As a matter of fact I did not need her consent, and yet I asked her for it. Was it for the purpose of giving her proof of my affection and condescension? Or was it, rather, to oblige her to give in? She gave in, and fifty thousand copies of “The Young Girl at the Fountain” were printed. I distributed some of them myself. Mme. de Saunois had one, and so did Mme. de H— whose opinion, of course in lyric form, created much talk.
I had made that statue for Raymonde and for her alone. How many times, while she gently encouraged me, during its execution, had I told her so? And yet I did not know how to resist the first temptation to make it public.
I remembered reading of the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti that when he lost his wife he placed beside her in the coffin the manuscript of the poems that she had inspired, but later did not hesitate to violate her grave to get them back and publish them. How many artists pluck out their tenderest memories to offer them to the crowd! They invoke glory, but vanity more often is the spirit that leads them.
Vanity, vanity! It is the motive of so many lives! I too chose it rather than the greatest love. There is the whole story.
A little later I had a chance to compare my attitude with Raymonde’s. A series of old French dances was arranged by Mme. de Saunois. Against her wishes, but upon my insisting, she had figured in a gavotte. A society journal asked permission to photograph her.
“If she agrees,” I thought, “that will be my revenge.”
At bottom I was certain that she would refuse, which she did, much to the chagrin of the other dancers, who could not forgive her for depriving the public of their simperings. The gavotte, in the journal, was replaced by a minuet, which admitted of but two persons, and no more; and people avoided thereafter giving her a part in any presentation for fear she might stand in the way of that publicity that was so useful, they assured themselves, to their charity.
As for myself I saw in it another failure.
* * *
At that time, I was interested in the first experiments in aviation, still of questionable success, just as I had formerly been enamoured of automobiling. She would not have selected this field for me, but at the same time she refused to turn me aside from it. She saw that it appealed strongly to my activities, which in-door work could not satisfy and which needed some out-door strife more closely allied to sport.
“If I fly,” I said to her, “you will not be afraid?”
“Oh, yes, I shall.”
“Ought I to give it up then?”
“Oh, no, indeed. Your work is your glory. I shall be afraid, but I shall pray. A woman can fear—”
However, I soon abandoned my studies because they seemed too problematical, and would not have been productive of immediate visible prestige. I was not to take them up again until much later.
* * *
One makes mistakes: I was mistaken in my belief of Raymonde’s lowly origin. I prided myself that I had raised her to my rank, by magnificent generosity, without seeking to divine how such tact and moral culture as hers had come about without the slow formation of time. The chance discovery of some legal document one day informed me of the great age and secular distinction of her family, which reverses had forced to take up service in almost the same place where it had once enjoyed its fortune. This discovery seemed a blow at my superiority. Pride kept me from mentioning it.
* * *
One evening we came home and found that her maid was not there for us. I made the occasion an excuse for reprimands.
“You do not know how to give your orders,” I said.
“I did not want her to wait up for me.”
“That is a mistake,” I said.
“I can wait on myself.”
She did not think it right that she should oblige a servant to wait up for her pleasure. She preferred to arrange her beautiful hair for the night herself.
* * *
I had noticed the time she spent each day in going over her accounts. It seemed that she always had too much money at her disposal. I was not accustomed to such saving. I attributed to a narrow education that admirable sense of economy which is one of the superiorities of the French woman, expert in thrift and housekeeping, knowing how to be unostentatiously charitable as well, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan crowd encamped among us with its dissipations and luxuries.
“Leave that,” I assured her, “you do not know how to spend money.”
“I need nothing now.”
“But that is the point, you should want all sorts of things.”
“Why should I?”
“Why not, since we can afford them.”
She made me share her charities with her, which were numerous, but she resisted all entreaties to personal luxuries, with a gentleness and disinterestedness which offended me. I unceasingly suggested changes of toilette, and was irritated by the resistance which I encountered, unexpected in any woman, much less in the wife of the millionaire Cernay.
“Do you find no pleasure in being more fashionable than the others, better dressed and more noticed?”
“None, I assure you.”
“I want every one to mark your appearance as soon as you enter a salon. I want all the men to admire you and all the women to envy you. That is an artistic pleasure. But you are insensible to everything. You like nothing.”
“Oh, but I do like so many things.”
“What, for instance?”
“I need not tell you.”
I did not yet understand the tenderness of her feeling toward me. However, it was hardly like the sentiments I held toward her, and I ceased presently to compare them.
It was her greatest pleasure to remain at home, to play with Dilette, who laughed and appreciated her little mother always; or to read some “Introduction to a Devoted Life,” or “The Letters of Saint Francis of Sales to Mme. de Chanta” (in which he urges her to light her own fire in the morning rather than make her chambermaid rise before her); or perhaps some other pious work, or some fairy tales and legends, as if she were preparing herself for maternal instruction generally. She delighted too in such simple tales of good folk as gave them the air of having really lived. “Mireille” enchanted her, and “Genevieve, or the Story of a Servant,” and “Dominique” and “Ramuntcho,” and “Nerte,” in which she had underlined these four lines of a benediction which the Pope, traversing a path through the ripe grain, addresses to some workmen in the field:
Search peace in field and home—It is the better part;And drops from labour’s browLike pearls shall deck the heart.
Search peace in field and home—It is the better part;And drops from labour’s browLike pearls shall deck the heart.
Search peace in field and home—It is the better part;And drops from labour’s browLike pearls shall deck the heart.
Search peace in field and home—
It is the better part;
And drops from labour’s brow
Like pearls shall deck the heart.
Such an attitude toward life as hers has gone out of style. Nowadays, all women, young and old alike, leave their homes as soon as they are rigged out, fleeing from their firesides as from a pest. They hurry their automobiles in all directions; to teas, to bridge-parties, to soirées that are like exhibitions, to fashionable weddings that seem like parades of the most enterprising dressmakers, to lectures where art and history are popularised; even to the hospitals, where they learn how to care for other people’s children while their own, supposing they have deigned to bear any, are abandoned in the nursery.
I urged her to follow their example!
“You are not seen about at all. You never go out,” I said. “Do you not care to go out?”
“With you? With Dilette?”
“No, alone.”
She suggested walks in the Bois, which she knew better than the rest of Paris. At first, when Spring came, we had ourselves taken there almost every day. When I gave up going she went with Dilette. She preferred those paths which lead from the lakes to St. James Pond and are never crowded. It was not the Sleeping Woods, but at least there were trees.
“Why do we know so many people?” she sighed one day, as she was putting on her hat, vainly hoping that I would forego my plan of sending her out.
“It is not your fault if we keep them,” I replied impatiently.
At that she departed as quickly as possible, in order to please me. And yet, whenever I returned before she did I was impatient at not finding her there.
It was not only at Mme. de Saunois’ first reception that Raymonde failed of sufficiently enthusiastic formulæ for amateur singers and elocutionists. Even on occasions when she was genuinely stirred, the exaggerated congratulations of those about her arrested her enthusiasm. Her lips would half open to express a compliment, but if she deemed it insufficient she would blush and remain silent after all. I believe it was a physical impossibility for her to conceal her thoughts. People complained of her disdain, her coldness, but never of her candour. And I was distressed by this silence that other people took for hostility.
“You do not talk. One must talk,” I told her.
“I do not dare,” she answered.
“Say anything, no matter what.”
“It is just that kind of thing I dare not say.”
Indeed she could neither speak nor understand those little nothings which pretty lips can utter with so much assurance.
I made some pretence of teaching hey how to converse: I led her to those places where one selects subjects of conversation like cakes at the baker’s—such as art exhibitions and first nights. She felt out of her element in the company of those painted, enamelled women, versed in all the arts and graces of Parisian life, who, though they may please separately, in an assemblage strike one with a sort of solemn horror, with their perfume of withered flowers. I brought her into the midst of this and tolerated the insult of this impure air. Stiff, and a little stilted, slender and distant, she retired within herself like a sensitive plant. Those others, large and many-decked ships, fast-sailing torpedo-boats, old hulks from the waters of the theatre or of gallantry, all artifice and rouge, backed by their husbands or protectors, had the air of setting victoriously out to sea to capture public opinion. Vaguely they would announce success or failure. And I was disposed to accept their judgment as to Raymonde, never questioning if it were not as false as their faces.
The day after a new play, Paris would learn from such as these whether or not the presentation deserved success: they made or unmade reputations. When we attended the theatre, Raymonde would sit motionless in the corner of the box. Occasionally she fell back—recoiling as if from some insupportable contact—though she herself was all the time unconscious of her instinctive movements.
“What is the matter?” I asked once.
“Nothing.”
“You do not look as if you were enjoying yourself.”
“To be truthful with you, I am not.”
“This play displeases you?”
“Oh, how could it please me?”
“But there is nothing but enthusiasm in the lobby between the acts. Every one is delighted with it,” I argued.
“I do not share every one’s opinion. You must excuse me.”
How often our dialogue ran like that! The drama or the comedy changed, but our words were usually the same. I can still see her mechanical gesture. Before us, on the stage, a woman would torment and harass her husband with her sensual love; another, virtuous all her life to that time, surrender at last to an unknown blackguard; a third stole money to buy beautiful gowns in which to excite her husband’s waning desire for her; all, shedding an odour of the alcove upon the audience, represented to us as heroines of love; and upon that basis applauded frantically by the public, its nerves shaken.
“They love; that is all,” was the general comment all about us.
Raymonde shook her head, as if that were not all. One evening, aroused by the general acclamation, unable to resist that magnetic current which comes from an electrified crowd, I insisted on sustaining the popular theories regarding a play in which the heroine, a young girl, gave herself up in a burst of passion to her sister’s husband.
“Love, true love, disregards morals, tramples upon suffering, takes no account of anything outside of itself. That has its beauty, don’t you think so?”
“That is not loving,” she murmured.
I continued my panegyric.
“Love, true love, in its splendid violence, does not stop at a fault, or even a crime.”
“That isn’t loving,” she repeated.
“What then does love mean, according to your idea?” I demanded, surprised at her resistance.
“According to my idea? Oh, I don’t know. Don’t ask me that.”
“Yes, you must acquire the habit of being able to express what you feel, Raymonde. That is the whole art of conversation.”
She hesitated: I saw her lips open and tremble a little. She shook her head, and then suddenly made up her mind:
“Do you remember going into a little chapel one evening?”
“Yes, with you.”
“A dark chapel, lighted only by the altar lamp? It seems to me that one’s heart is like that.”
“One’s heart?”
“Yes, the heart is in darkness, unknown. But the lamp which shines in the sanctuary is our love. It is there, watching and praying. To love is to understand oneself more clearly, to take one’s impulses and thoughts out of the shadow. We do not take faults and crimes out of the shadow. And since love is light, it is also the desire to make ourselves better.” And then very low, as if to herself, she added:
“As for myself, the more I love, the less I can do evil.”
But when would she have done so? When had she not loved?
She rarely expressed herself at so great length. The flame which watches and prays shone from her eyes all over her face; carried away by her subject her every feature reflected the light of which she had spoken. Had I been away from the theatre, the world, and its false conception of life, I might have adored her for her simple lesson of love, her ineffable avowal of tenderness. The air of the Sleeping Woods suddenly refreshed me. I drank from those springs of youth and felt their purifying virtue.
The curtain rose again. And once more the great wave of sophisms and errors, of erratic folly and passional disorder, surged up, rolled over the public and submerged it. I believe that in the whole theatre there was only this young woman against whom it struck and broke in vain. I did not realise the beauty of the spectacle.
“She is sweet,” I thought, in a moment of gentleness, “but still a little childish. She does not understand these devastating passions which sweep away everything. One should be able to comprehend what one has not experienced even; she goes through life with blinders on her eyes; she does not wish to see anything outside of her own narrow little life, straight ahead of her.”
In good faith, I dared to think: “her little life—”
* * *
That very evening, or on another like it, as we were driving home from the theatre in our automobile, she asked me suddenly:
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“That there are women and young girls like those whom we saw on the stage?”
“Of course there are, many like them, and many worse. What a child you are.”
“Ah!” she murmured.
She said no more, but the electric light which shone upon her showed me her look of pain. She felt a deep sadness at learning of the existence of so many guilty women.
* * *
The popular books of the day, which I purposely placed about her, thinking to tempt her into reading, usually inspired her with the same repulsion. She did not retain the names of the authors,—they were destined to be forgotten. Their literary beauty could not, for her, be separated from the beauty of the matter. Those charming modern books in which youth is presented to us as an animal at liberty, through which pleasure runs fearless of the attacks of time and death, in which the mind even has become sensual,—she only opened and began: she never finished them.
“Why do you not go on with them?” I asked.
“My heart isn’t in them.”
“But the author cannot always paint one’s own heart.”
“But it is so difficult to read a book in which you find nothing of yourself.”
I picked up one of the rejected books on her centre table.
“Listen to these beautiful sentences,” I began.
“Oh!” she replied, “a mannequin, too, wears beautiful clothes. I prefer something living underneath. Do you remember my wedding gown? It did not become me any too well. But I loved you so much—”
* * *
At that time, a foreign woman was being tried in Paris. She had driven her lover to kill her husband, and had then denounced him in order to rid herself of him and begin life anew with another. A veritable halo of fatality encircled her, for to know her was to love her, and to love her was to lose all honour and regard for humanity. Above all she had very beautiful hands, their beauty shining all the more clear when they were examined for any traces of guilty blood. She appeared before her judges with the grace and prattle of an artless child, charming everybody. Before testifying each day she would remove her gloves. It was the fashion to go to court and submit to the enchantment of her voice, her face whose very blemishes were thought of as the ravages of love or amorous decorations—to give our nerves their daily wrenching. The evening following the announcement of the verdict, we dined with Mme. de Saunois. The accused was the sole topic of conversation. Mme. de H— summed her up and conferred the following degree upon her:
“She is such an exceptional creature, so seductive. She rises above our common measure with such ease. Even her wickedness is attractive.”
Every one was approving this opinion, when it occurred to one guest to ask Raymonde, who was seated next him:
“What is your idea, Madame?”
“I hope she is only a monster.”
All the women at the table looked toward me. They visibly pitied me for having cast my lot with a person capable of so narrow and prejudiced an opinion.
And I could not help an irritation at this blame that society put upon me through her.
From seeing her continually rebel against our forms of art and all our prevailing ideas, I became accustomed to thinking her callous. That was indeed the general impression of her. Her reading was too different from that recommended by success to attach any importance to it. At the theatre, nothing, or almost nothing, succeeded in pleasing her. The splendour of an unusual interpretation caused me to take her one evening to see “Polyeucte.” I was not thinking so much of the play itself, as of the actors. Is not that usual? Do not the names of the players, inscribed in letters of fire on the front of our theatres, eclipse those of the authors and even of the play?
In our box, as I called her attention to the acting of the old and eminent actor who played Polyeucte, I was surprised to have no reply. I looked at her more attentively: the tears coursed down her cheeks, though she did not know that she was crying. I had surprised her once before like this in the Coliseum in Rome, when the guide pointed out the gate of the dead. Pauline threw away Severus’s love and her own. Pauline received with open heart the divine spark of the faith. All the pathos of the ardent masterpiece condensed and spiritualised itself on my wife’s face, pale with the force of her emotion.
As the curtain fell, I offered explanations of her exaltation.
“Monroy was sublime,” I said. Had we not come only to see that great actor?
“Which rôle did he play?” she asked. “I didn’t know.”
Completely given up to the tragedy she had quite simply relegated the actor to his proper place.
* * *
One Good Friday she took me to Notre Dame to hear the sermon on the Passion.
Spring had come in April. The moon when we arrived was mounting toward the open sky just above the towers of the old cathedral, bathed in the blue of the pure night. Inside, the crowd was so great that we could not reach a church-warden’s pew, and with great difficulty I got a chair for her at the back, in the midst of the throng.
The voice of the preacher, which had sounded thin to me as we entered, reached us, distinct, insistent and powerful. It carried with it the generosity of a heart that gives itself until it is exhausted. It filled the immense edifice to the very shadows at the back, shadows which covered also the transepts and the upper vaulting, making the lighted portions of the church seem menaced by it on all sides.
We heard the story of the Mount of Olives. The Disciples went to sleep while Jesus was enduring His agony. Likewise, about us and within us, the moral life of others and ourselves suffers while we sleep. Later, too late, when I awakened from my cruel sleep, I was destined to recall with bitterness that warning which I had not heeded. We saw about us all the visible and varied forms of cowardice, the cowardice of the official, of the judge, of the crowd, of friends. All the truth of human character shines out in the Gospel. In this series of denials, one can see his own denying, just as one instinctively feels his pockets when he hears the cry of “Thief.” I alone, perhaps, of those present, gave the ceremony the interest of the mere amateur.
Next to us, an old news man, who had stopped his shouting only at the door, crowding in through several rows of chairs, stood still, suddenly captive, with his pile of papers under his arm. It was the death of Righteousness. He uttered a long sob of indignation and pity, like a half-uttered howl, held out his free arm before him in an involuntary gesture, and then went away again upon his route. Outside once more he tried to cry his papers, but emotion still gripped his throat. For an instant he had offered himself to God. I have never known that instant; I have never made that offering. It was now I who was callous.
When we left, the moon, detached from the towers, was sailing through the open sky. The clear night, so blue and pure, enveloped the sombre cathedral. Ranged along one side of the square the waiting automobiles quivered incongruously at the foot of the old black building.
At last, we found our carriage. “Was it not beautiful?” Raymonde asked immediately.
I agreed without interest, from courtesy, instead of giving way to my emotions as I had been invited to do. For a second short space of time, I surprised her in the act of trembling. Still, I continued to believe in her apathy, her reputation for it was so well established. When one holds to the judgment of the world one can not appreciate his own fireside.
* * *
These discords, these difficulties that come between two people when one aspires only to success and the attractions of fashionable life, while the other keeps intact her native and religious sensibility, do not necessarily prevent that kind of understanding which is possible in our flexible modern life to people of fortune. So many husbands and wives, for instance, if they should stop to think, would be surprised by the amount of their incompatibilities. They are content with approximate congeniality, in willing ignorance. But one cannot lay bare the roots of a tree and have it grow and live. The denial of its proper nourishment does not kill it at once: for a short time it may continue to blossom and to flower. At last, however, it falls before some severe storm, like a disabled ship which breasts the gale as long as possible and in the end surrenders to the elements. So I laid bare the roots of our love; little by little, I deprived it of its necessary protection, and finally crushed it utterly by one severe blow.
These apparently trifling details, which I have enumerated, before coming exactly to the real outbreak, by degrees alienated Raymonde from me. It was indeed a gradual uprooting. So completely given up to this imperious desire to shine that I was intolerant of any encroachments upon it by the intimacies of our life together, entirely subordinated to that state of mind in which one seeks applause, I turned more and more from Raymonde and her influence, which I thought narrow and old-fashioned.
She went with me uncomplainingly, wherever I suggested. I imposed on her immodest spectacles and degrading associates, such as our society supports, when she did not desire them: still she was not what I wanted to make her, a woman of the world.
It was not in her. A stirring conflict was waged within her, between her love for me and her upright nature, incapable of bending itself to the manners of our day. I helped to create the problem, but did not attempt to aid her in its solution. Her struggle even began to undermine her health, though she showed no outward trace of the exhaustion she felt, excepting perhaps a loss of weight. But thinness was very fashionable at this time! Ah! those people whose daily acts are regulated by a definite code of morals, to whom faith and love are as necessary as food and respiration—they have a presentiment of death when once that faith is shaken; they have no powers of resistance when their ideals are finally shattered.
The first effect in Raymonde was a loss of cheerfulness. I did not notice it then, yet I recall it clearly now. There is in our past always something which we would forget, but which does not permit itself to be forgotten. There was a time when her laughter was spontaneous, with her little girl, in carelessness and innocence of heart. When she held her child upon her knee, and lavished her enticement on her, she resembled those madonnas which have altogether the air of elder sisters. Little by little this clear, charming laughter became less frequent, diminished, was shattered! Even Dilette perceived it. And I did not fail to notice that the poor little one missed, as she might her broken or lost toys, these tokens of joyousness.
Raymonde enjoyed only the simple pleasures of life, of which I had none to offer her. Into the simplest of them I had injected, like a secret passion, this perverse desire for sensation, filling with astonishment, torment and pained shame, a heart simple and ingenuous, ignorant of the intricacy of our life.
The expression which I had seen in her face on that first day in May, when I met her in the wood and when my unexpected presence made her retrace her road, or when I had made my avowal of love at the chateau, or on the evening of one of our last walks before the birth of our child, this look of fear,—here, I saw it again, like a ghost, upon her face. But I attached no importance to it.
* * *
She told me once later, that during all this time she was trying to conform to my tastes, she never paid one of those visits to which I attached such importance, without reciting a little prayer to God, on the staircase or in the ante-chamber, for courage. And it was the same thing when we received. It was absolute torture for her to endure the custom of kissing the hand which had recently come again into vogue. Her arms hung at her sides and one had always to search for her hand there. She never submitted without a shudder, which, though she did her best to suppress it, she never entirely succeeded in concealing—above all, at home, when she wore no gloves.
* * *
We had reached that point, she in her isolation and growing unhappiness, I in that state of nervous irritation where my baffled worldly ambitions and the substitution of my personal life for our common life had thrown me, when my hopes were revived by a sudden and unexpected change.
* * *
Pierre Ducal, who in the old days had taught me the art of moving with ease in the most dissimilar salons, Pierre Ducal, whose support the negligence of my wife had diverted and I had counted too much on, sought again evidently to get into touch with us. He had then attained the summit of the only glory he had ever really desired. Slender of figure, graceful, his clean-shaven face sallow of tint but passing at night for interesting pallor, erect in carriage, affected in his wit, of dashing demeanour, he aspired now all the more to fascinate because he was pursued by the terror of old age. A time—not far distant—would come when he would have to take his place in the faded and worn-out category of old beaux, old fellows who had been handsome once, who continued to dress and carry themselves as if they still were so, touching knight-errants, a little comical, following that lost cause, their youth. Being discerning, he foresaw the end that awaited him. But this foresight diminished in proportion as the danger increased, or rather, the threat was already put into execution while he continued to believe it hanging over him. In the face of this shipwreck he turned to account with agonising haste all the possible pleasures of life. Never more than at this time had I seen him so engaging and so brilliant. Never had he enjoyed such prestige, never had his clever sayings, his judgments, his ironies been so much in demand, nor exercised so much effect.
I attribute the happy change in Ducal’s attitude to his regret that he had allowed our old friendship to lapse. He became our most intimate associate. He accompanied us to the races, and the theatres; we commenced to meet him in the society which we frequented, which was less riotous, more dignified than that which he effected. In spite of myself, I had submitted, in the choice of our associates, to the guidance of Raymonde. However, I was apprehensive as to the effect which my wife’s old-fashioned views could not fail to produce on our worldly companion. The first time this apprehension put me in torture. I was soon reassured. Pierre Ducal marvelled at her great originality, which Paris had not shaken. Far from being amused, as I feared, he invited comments which disconcerted him, but which he did not ridicule. He even tried to understand them. This new interest which he took in Raymonde’s reserved conversation was of great benefit to her. The world was not slow to amend the reputation it had given her for shyness and provincialism. I heard favourable echoes around me; the opinion of Pierre Ducal weighed so heavily.
“We see your friend very often,” my wife observed one day.
I expressed my contentment at this, but after she had made the remark she seemed to me, when Ducal was present, more reserved and distant than ever:—so much so, that I showed my displeasure and surprise.
“You are scarcely civil to him.”
“Oh, do you think so? Why should I be more agreeable?”
“He is my friend.”
She was about to object, then reddened and kept silent.
I had absolute confidence in her. Despite the obscure process which had little by little undermined my tenderness, I could not have touched her with a suspicion without despising myself. Above all she impressed me as being unable to appeal to or even to hold the interest of a man of the world like Pierre Ducal. I did not see—I could not see—in his attentions, anything but a chance opportunity for instruction to supplement mine when I had discontinued. At any rate, my friend, without doubt a little abashed, treated her with a respect and a deference which was in noticeable contrast to his usual insolent manner toward women. I was grateful to him for it, and at the same time amused.
It was the time of year when the days are growing longer, and we enjoyed even our dinner by the light of the setting sun, the twilight being so beautiful that we deferred turning on the light as long as possible. On the evening of which I am writing, as I returned from my club, I was surprised not to see my wife in the salon. I called to her: she did not answer. Turning on the electric light I surprised her exhausted, stretched on a sofa, her head hidden in her hands, her body convulsed with sobs.
“My God,” said I to her, “what is the matter?”
She tried to put me off.
“Nothing, nothing,” she insisted. “Do not look at me.”
“I beg of you, I ought to know.”
Brusquely, without raising her head, she replied:
“I have dismissed M. Ducal.”
“Dismissed Ducal,” I repeated in amazement, as if she had perpetrated a most daring outrage.
I knew that her love for me, as well as her own inherent purity, was sufficient assurance that my honour could not have been compromised: therefore I felt that she must have exaggerated the importance of Pierre Ducal’s conduct. To me the circumstances indicated only an unforeseen destruction of carefully laid plans for increasing our prestige in society; if for a moment I had had cause to doubt Raymonde, then perhaps the worldly outcome might have meant less to me, but I realised only the fact that she had peremptorily sent Pierre Ducal away and that he would unquestionably seek revenge. He would make us the victims of his sarcasms and pointed remarks, which could destroy my reputation as an arrow wounds the flesh. He would use to advantage the observations he had made during our close intimacy. I was incensed by the thought of Raymonde’s having so needlessly exposed us to this danger through laying too much stress on a trivial incident. Had she not learned in our society that all women allow men to be attentive to them? Of what use were receptions, beautiful gowns, enticing conversation and the arts of coquetry, if not to call forth the very thing she had resented! Could she not have let Pierre Ducal know in a quiet, forceful manner that his advances annoyed her, without going to the extreme limit of causing a break in our friendship? Surely a woman’s greatest asset is the use of all her weapons of charm and fascination to the best possible advantage. What to Raymonde constituted an irreparable injury was to me only a source of great annoyance. And I took the thing very lightly.
“Little one, little one, when will you learn to be reasonable?”
She did not answer when I spoke to her. While I had been rapidly reviewing the situation, she had lain on the sofa, her face buried in her hands, completely crushed by the weight of her despair. I repeated my question and she looked up. Now at last I know the meaning of her every gesture and glance. I realised that she hid her face because she felt degraded for having even unknowingly appealed to the sensual nature of Pierre Ducal. The very fact of those words, which she had not invited, seemed to her to sully her purity. Even my presence was painful to her on that account. I can still see her large eyes fixed on me, those eyes so limpid, in which I could plainly read her terror.
“What did you say?” she murmured. “I did not understand you—I did not understand.”
For one brief moment I felt intuitively that I had not been fair to her. I went over to the couch, stooped, and would have taken her in my arms.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Do not touch me yet.”
That one cry of fright was an expression of the repulsion she felt for herself. Her delicacy had been deeply wounded by the realisation that any other man had dared to think of her as only her husband had the right to do. But to my worldliness her terror had another significance, and it infuriated me.
“He did not touch you, did he?” I cried.
“Oh,” she cried, wringing her hands.
The mere suspicion crushed her. I lacked fine feeling enough to give her comfort then and restore her self-respect, and so I assumed a fatherly air and lectured her for her foolish exaggeration of trifles.
“But my dear,” I said, “it is not so dreadful. What crime has that tactless Ducal committed?”
I thought the word “tactless” strong enough to designate his insult. She did not answer.
“He—he dared—to tell me—”
“What?” I asked impatiently. “Oh, yes, I can imagine—but what did he say to you?”
“I do not know. He was talking generalities. I did not see where he wished to arrive. He said that one is so rarely happy, and that one can not be so if one is not loved.”
The miserable wretch had artfully tried to explain her own state of mind to her before offering his sympathy. I have no doubt the knowledge that he perceived her secret suffering was as painful to her as the unmerited insult. Later, at least, I could understand that. My only aim then was to minimise the effect of an incident which I thought so little compromising.
“Oh, come,” I said, in an easy manner, “it’s not worth being annoyed about. Pierre Ducal only acted like a man of the world, and very badly, since he put you in such a state. Would it not have sufficed to let him know that you realised his stupidity? He is a man of intelligence, and he would not have begun again. He is good company; one is never bored with him. Paris is not the Sleeping Woods. You seem to forget that. Life here is highly organised and civilised. You try to live in the city as you do in the solitude of the country. One can’t do that. You must learn to adapt yourself. Besides, a young woman has a thousand ways of protecting herself without struggling or screaming. All women know the art of listening graciously. One has not the air of listening. One jokes, one smiles, or one laughs frankly. One checks the indiscreet man with a word, a blow of the fan on the fingers. Men hardly ever insist. They do not carry on a hopeless siege, above all to-day, when one is so practical and so hurried. Deuce take it! One does not throw men out of the door, who, after all, do not wish you any harm. Whom would one receive, if one adopted such a system? I assure you, it is time you began to mature.”
I was very proud of this improvised argument. It might have availed with women who do not fear to play with fire, or enjoy a flirtation if they know they are temptation-proof. It might not have jarred the finer sensibilities of that type of woman who enjoys a joke about such things with her intimates, as one is amused by a toy pistol that only looks real but is not really dangerous. To Raymonde it was absolutely unintelligible. Every word was a fresh wound, every thought disloyal and wicked.
While I was speaking she looked and looked at me. Her great eyes, wide opened, burned with such an ardour that I felt them on me. I wished she would close them or look away, for her gaze embarrassed me. Little by little the colour faded from her cheeks, and when I finished speaking she was deathly pale. As she kept silence, I went on a little annoyed:
“You seem to have nothing to say. I assure you Ducal will explain our strained relations to suit his own need. Why do you not answer?”
“I am so fatigued,” she murmured; “let me go to my room, please.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“Thank you, I prefer to be alone.”
She glided through the room like a shadow. At the door, she turned toward me and said brokenly:
“If I was wrong in dismissing your friend, forgive me.”
“No, no,” I said, “it is not that.”
She disappeared, and I walked up and down, reviewing the whole unpleasant episode and its inevitable consequences. I was annoyed with myself for the unpleasant sensation I felt. It was something akin to that I felt when I asked the innocent young girl of the woods to come to Paris with me alone and she had willingly consented, not comprehending the significance of my invitation. Had I not nevertheless committed the cowardice of injuring the little creature who had entrusted herself to me and claimed protection? And as on that previous occasion, I recalled the bird which I had picked up in my hand, whose life, whose warm life, I felt slip away. Had I not held it too close instead of caressing it?
I should have insisted on going with her,—I should not have left her alone. But I stayed there, unnerved and dissatisfied with myself.
At dinner she occupied her place without a word of explanation. Any further expression of opinion would have been as the spade of earth that falls on a coffin. Neither she nor I reopened the subject. She retired early, and her absence was a distinct relief to me. The cigar which I was smoking was excellent. Out of doors, the mild evening air announced the spring-time.
That night, I have since learned, was one of intense agony for her. How could she still love me? Had I not yet succeeded in destroying love in her? Love is not so dependent on its object as on the nature of the being in whose heart it dwells, and from which it receives its life and force. That of Raymonde was born immortal.
A few days later, I met Pierre Ducal. I saw at a glance that he was master of the situation and had decided on his course of conduct. He came toward me, his hand extended. I had an impulse to refuse it—why did I not yield to it? I accepted that offered hand. The treason commenced was by that act consummated.
Did he think I knew nothing of his conduct? He had arranged for leaving his cards and going away for a while, in order not to make our breach evident, and the bitter sarcasms which I had anticipated were never uttered. He continued to say only pleasant things about us, and it became a matter of general discussion that he had changed completely and was now inclined to enjoy solitude.
How had it become possible for a worldly cynic of his stamp so suddenly to withdraw from society and gain opinions so radically different from those he had always held? I can now explain that mystery. My wife had given him a new vista of life when she made him realise for the first time what respect is due a woman. He had never before met a woman of such ideals. I feel a supreme shame in thinking that he was in advance of me, perhaps, in making the honourable reparation to Raymonde, the amend which I was destined to make only later.