CHAPTER XIX.
A BITTER-SWEET REUNION.
He travelled.
He realised the melancholy associated with packet-boats, the chill onefeels on waking up under tents, the dizzy effect of landscapes andruins, and the bitterness of ruptured sympathies.
He returned home.
He mingled in society, and he conceived attachments to other women. Butthe constant recollection of his first love made these appear insipid;and besides the vehemence of desire, the bloom of the sensation hadvanished. In like manner, his intellectual ambitions had grown weaker.Years passed; and he was forced to support the burthen of a life inwhich his mind was unoccupied and his heart devoid of energy.
Towards the end of March, 1867, just as it was getting dark, oneevening, he was sitting all alone in his study, when a woman suddenlycame in.
"Madame Arnoux!"
"Frederick!"
She caught hold of his hands, and drew him gently towards the window,and, as she gazed into his face, she kept repeating:
"'Tis he! Yes, indeed--'tis he!"
In the growing shadows of the twilight, he could see only her eyes underthe black lace veil that hid her face.
When she had laid down on the edge of the mantelpiece a littlepocket-book bound in garnet velvet, she seated herself in front of him,and they both remained silent, unable to utter a word, smiling at oneanother.
At last he asked her a number of questions about herself and herhusband.
They had gone to live in a remote part of Brittany for the sake ofeconomy, so as to be able to pay their debts. Arnoux, now almost achronic invalid, seemed to have become quite an old man. Her daughterhad been married and was living at Bordeaux, and her son was in garrisonat Mostaganem.
Then she raised her head to look at him again:
"But I see you once more! I am happy!"
He did not fail to let her know that, as soon as he heard of theirmisfortune, he had hastened to their house.
"I was fully aware of it!"
"How?"
She had seen him in the street outside the house, and had hiddenherself.
"Why did you do that?"
Then, in a trembling voice, and with long pauses between her words:
"I was afraid! Yes--afraid of you and of myself!"
This disclosure gave him, as it were, a shock of voluptuous joy. Hisheart began to throb wildly. She went on:
"Excuse me for not having come sooner." And, pointing towards the littlepocket-book covered with golden palm-branches:
"I embroidered it on your account expressly. It contains the amount forwhich the Belleville property was given as security."
Frederick thanked her for letting him have the money, while chiding herat the same time for having given herself any trouble about it.
"No! 'tis not for this I came! I was determined to pay you thisvisit--then I would go back there again."
And she spoke about the place where they had taken up their abode.
It was a low-built house of only one story; and there was a gardenattached to it full of huge box-trees, and a double avenue ofchestnut-trees, reaching up to the top of the hill, from which there wasa view of the sea.
"I go there and sit down on a bench, which I have called 'Frederick'sbench.'"
Then she proceeded to fix her gaze on the furniture, the objects ofvirtu, the pictures, with eager intentness, so that she might be able tocarry away the impressions of them in her memory. The Marechale'sportrait was half-hidden behind a curtain. But the gilding and the whitespaces of the picture, which showed their outlines through the midst ofthe surrounding darkness, attracted her attention.
"It seems to me I knew that woman?"
"Impossible!" said Frederick. "It is an old Italian painting."
She confessed that she would like to take a walk through the streets onhis arm.
They went out.
The light from the shop-windows fell, every now and then, on her paleprofile; then once more she was wrapped in shadow, and in the midst ofthe carriages, the crowd, and the din, they walked on without paying anyheed to what was happening around them, without hearing anything, likethose who make their way across the fields over beds of dead leaves.
They talked about the days which they had formerly spent in each other'ssociety, the dinners at the time when _L'Art Industriel_ flourished,Arnoux's fads, his habit of drawing up the ends of his collar and ofsqueezing cosmetic over his moustache, and other matters of a moreintimate and serious character. What delight he experienced on the firstoccasion when he heard her singing! How lovely she looked on herfeast-day at Saint-Cloud! He recalled to her memory the little garden atAuteuil, evenings at the theatre, a chance meeting on the boulevard, andsome of her old servants, including the negress.
She was astonished at his vivid recollection of these things.
"Sometimes your words come back to me like a distant echo, like thesound of a bell carried on by the wind, and when I read passages aboutlove in books, it seems to me that it is about you I am reading."
"All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction youhave made me feel," said Frederick. "I can understand Werther, who feltno disgust at his Charlotte for eating bread and butter."
"Poor, dear friend!"
She heaved a sigh; and, after a prolonged silence:
"No matter; we shall have loved each other truly!"
"And still without having ever belonged to each other!"
"This perhaps is all the better," she replied.
"No, no! What happiness we might have enjoyed!"
"Oh, I am sure of it with a love like yours!"
And it must have been very strong to endure after such a longseparation.
Frederick wished to know from her how she first discovered that he lovedher.
"It was when you kissed my wrist one evening between the glove and thecuff. I said to myself, 'Ah! yes, he loves me--he loves me;'nevertheless, I was afraid of being assured of it. So charming was yourreserve, that I felt myself the object, as it were, of an involuntaryand continuous homage."
He regretted nothing now. He was compensated for all he had suffered inthe past.
When they came back to the house, Madame Arnoux took off her bonnet. Thelamp, placed on a bracket, threw its light on her white hair. Frederickfelt as if some one had given him a blow in the middle of the chest.
In order to conceal from her his sense of disillusion, he flung himselfon the floor at her feet, and seizing her hands, began to whisper in herear words of tenderness:
"Your person, your slightest movements, seemed to me to have a more thanhuman importance in the world. My heart was like dust under your feet.You produced on me the effect of moonlight on a summer's night, whenaround us we find nothing but perfumes, soft shadows, gleams ofwhiteness, infinity; and all the delights of the flesh and of the spiritwere for me embodied in your name, which I kept repeating to myselfwhile I tried to kiss it with my lips. I thought of nothing further. Itwas Madame Arnoux such as you were with your two children, tender,grave, dazzlingly beautiful, and yet so good! This image effaced everyother. Did I not think of it alone? for I had always in the very depthsof my soul the music of your voice and the brightness of your eyes!"
She accepted with transports of joy these tributes of adoration to thewoman whom she could no longer claim to be. Frederick, becomingintoxicated with his own words, came to believe himself in the realityof what he said. Madame Arnoux, with her back turned to the light of thelamp, stooped towards him. He felt the caress of her breath on hisforehead, and the undefined touch of her entire body through thegarments that kept them apart. Their hands were clasped; the tip of herboot peeped out from beneath her gown, and he said to her, as if readyto faint:
"The sight of your foot makes me lose my self-possession."
An impulse of modesty made her rise. Then, without any further movement,she said, with the strange intonation of a somnambulist:
"At my age!--he--Frederick! Ah! no woman has ever b
een loved as I havebeen. No! Where is the use in being young? What do I care about them,indeed? I despise them--all those women who come here!"
"Oh! very few women come to this place," he returned, in a complaisantfashion.
Her face brightened up, and then she asked him whether he meant to bemarried.
He swore that he never would.
"Are you perfectly sure? Why should you not?"
"'Tis on your account!" said Frederick, clasping her in his arms.
She remained thus pressed to his heart, with her head thrown back, herlips parted, and her eyes raised. Suddenly she pushed him away from herwith a look of despair, and when he implored of her to say something tohim in reply, she bent forward and whispered:
"I would have liked to make you happy!"
Frederick had a suspicion that Madame Arnoux had come to offer herselfto him, and once more he was seized with a desire to possessher--stronger, fiercer, more desperate than he had ever experiencedbefore. And yet he felt, the next moment, an unaccountable repugnance tothe thought of such a thing, and, as it were, a dread of incurring theguilt of incest. Another fear, too, had a different effect on him--lestdisgust might afterwards take possession of him. Besides, howembarrassing it would be!--and, abandoning the idea, partly throughprudence, and partly through a resolve not to degrade his ideal, heturned on his heel and proceeded to roll a cigarette between hisfingers.
She watched him with admiration.
"How dainty you are! There is no one like you! There is no one likeyou!"
It struck eleven.
"Already!" she exclaimed; "at a quarter-past I must go."
She sat down again, but she kept looking at the clock, and he walked upand down the room, puffing at his cigarette. Neither of them could thinkof anything further to say to the other. There is a moment at the hourof parting when the person that we love is with us no longer.
At last, when the hands of the clock got past the twenty-five minutes,she slowly took up her bonnet, holding it by the strings.
"Good-bye, my friend--my dear friend! I shall never see you again! Thisis the closing page in my life as a woman. My soul shall remain with youeven when you see me no more. May all the blessings of Heaven be yours!"
And she kissed him on the forehead, like a mother.
But she appeared to be looking for something, and then she asked him fora pair of scissors.
She unfastened her comb, and all her white hair fell down.
With an abrupt movement of the scissors, she cut off a long lock fromthe roots.
"Keep it! Good-bye!"
When she was gone, Frederick rushed to the window and threw it open.There on the footpath he saw Madame Arnoux beckoning towards a passingcab. She stepped into it. The vehicle disappeared.
And this was all.
CHAPTER XX.
"WAIT TILL YOU COME TO FORTY YEAR."
About the beginning of this winter, Frederick and Deslauriers werechatting by the fireside, once more reconciled by the fatality of theirnature, which made them always reunite and be friends again.
Frederick briefly explained his quarrel with Madame Dambreuse, who hadmarried again, her second husband being an Englishman.
Deslauriers, without telling how he had come to marry MademoiselleRoque, related to his friend how his wife had one day eloped with asinger. In order to wipe away to some extent the ridicule that thisbrought upon him, he had compromised himself by an excess ofgovernmental zeal in the exercise of his functions as prefect. He hadbeen dismissed. After that, he had been an agent for colonisation inAlgeria, secretary to a pasha, editor of a newspaper, and canvasser foradvertisements, his latest employment being the office of settlingdisputed cases for a manufacturing company.
As for Frederick, having squandered two thirds of his means, he was nowliving like a citizen of comparatively humble rank.
Then they questioned each other about their friends.
Martinon was now a member of the Senate.
Hussonnet occupied a high position, in which he was fortunate enough tohave all the theatres and entire press dependent upon him.
Cisy, given up to religion, and the father of eight children, was livingin the chateau of his ancestors.
Pellerin, after turning his hand to Fourrierism, homoeopathy,table-turning, Gothic art, and humanitarian painting, had become aphotographer; and he was to be seen on every dead wall in Paris, wherehe was represented in a black coat with a very small body and a bighead.
"And what about your chum Senecal?" asked Frederick.
"Disappeared--I can't tell you where! And yourself--what about the womanyou were so passionately attached to, Madame Arnoux?"
"She is probably at Rome with her son, a lieutenant of chasseurs."
"And her husband?"
"He died a year ago."
"You don't say so?" exclaimed the advocate. Then, striking his forehead:
"Now that I think of it, the other day in a shop I met that worthyMarechale, holding by the hand a little boy whom she has adopted. She isthe widow of a certain M. Oudry, and is now enormously stout. What achange for the worse!--she who formerly had such a slender waist!"
Deslauriers did not deny that he had taken advantage of the other'sdespair to assure himself of that fact by personal experience.
"As you gave me permission, however."
This avowal was a compensation for the silence he had maintained withreference to his attempt with Madame Arnoux.
Frederick would have forgiven him, inasmuch as he had not succeeded inthe attempt.
Although a little annoyed at the discovery, he pretended to laugh at it;and the allusion to the Marechale brought back the Vatnaz to hisrecollection.
Deslauriers had never seen her any more than the others who used to cometo the Arnoux's house; but he remembered Regimbart perfectly.
"Is he still living?"
"He is barely alive. Every evening regularly he drags himself from theRue de Grammont to the Rue Montmartre, to the cafes, enfeebled, bent intwo, emaciated, a spectre!"
"Well, and what about Compain?"
Frederick uttered a cry of joy, and begged of the ex-delegate of theprovisional government to explain to him the mystery of the calf's head.
"'Tis an English importation. In order to parody the ceremony which theRoyalists celebrated on the thirtieth of January, some Independentsfounded an annual banquet, at which they have been accustomed to eatcalves' heads, and at which they make it their business to drink redwine out of calves' skulls while giving toasts in favour of theextermination of the Stuarts. After Thermidor, the Terrorists organiseda brotherhood of a similar description, which proves how prolific follyis."
"You seem to me very dispassionate about politics?"
"Effect of age," said the advocate.
And then they each proceeded to summarise their lives.
They had both failed in their objects--the one who dreamed only of love,and the other of power.
What was the reason of this?
"'Tis perhaps from not having taken up the proper line," said Frederick.
"In your case that may be so. I, on the contrary, have sinned throughexcess of rectitude, without taking into account a thousand secondarythings more important than any. I had too much logic, and you too muchsentiment."
Then they blamed luck, circumstances, the epoch at which they were born.
Frederick went on:
"We have never done what we thought of doing long ago at Sens, when youwished to write a critical history of Philosophy and I a great mediaevalromance about Nogent, the subject of which I had found in Froissart:'How Messire Brokars de Fenestranges and the Archbishop of Troyesattacked Messire Eustache d'Ambrecicourt.' Do you remember?"
And, exhuming their youth with every sentence, they said to each other:
"Do you remember?"
They saw once more the college playground, the chapel, the parlour, thefencing-school at the bottom of the staircase, the faces of the ushersand of the pupils--one named Ang
elmare, from Versailles, who used to cutoff trousers-straps from old boots, M. Mirbal and his red whiskers, thetwo professors of linear drawing and large drawing, who were alwayswrangling, and the Pole, the fellow-countryman of Copernicus, with hisplanetary system on pasteboard, an itinerant astronomer whose lecturehad been paid for by a dinner in the refectory, then a terrible debauchwhile they were out on a walking excursion, the first pipes they hadsmoked, the distribution of prizes, and the delightful sensation ofgoing home for the holidays.
It was during the vacation of 1837 that they had called at the house ofthe Turkish woman.
This was the phrase used to designate a woman whose real name wasZoraide Turc; and many persons believed her to be a Mohammedan, a Turk,which added to the poetic character of her establishment, situated atthe water's edge behind the rampart. Even in the middle of summer therewas a shadow around her house, which could be recognised by a glass bowlof goldfish near a pot of mignonette at a window. Young ladies in whitenightdresses, with painted cheeks and long earrings, used to tap at thepanes as the students passed; and as it grew dark, their custom was tohum softly in their hoarse voices at the doorsteps.
This home of perdition spread its fantastic notoriety over all thearrondissement. Allusions were made to it in a circumlocutory style:"The place you know--a certain street--at the bottom of the Bridges." Itmade the farmers' wives of the district tremble for their husbands, andthe ladies grow apprehensive as to their servants' virtue, inasmuch asthe sub-prefect's cook had been caught there; and, to be sure, itexercised a fascination over the minds of all the young lads of theplace.
Now, one Sunday, during vesper-time, Frederick and Deslauriers, havingpreviously curled their hair, gathered some flowers in Madame Moreau'sgarden, then made their way out through the gate leading into thefields, and, after taking a wide sweep round the vineyards, came backthrough the Fishery, and stole into the Turkish woman's house with theirbig bouquets still in their hands.
Frederick presented his as a lover does to his betrothed. But the greatheat, the fear of the unknown, and even the very pleasure of seeing atone glance so many women placed at his disposal, excited him sostrangely that he turned exceedingly pale, and remained there withoutadvancing a single step or uttering a single word. All the girls burstout laughing, amused at his embarrassment. Fancying that they wereturning him into ridicule, he ran away; and, as Frederick had the money,Deslauriers was obliged to follow him.
They were seen leaving the house; and the episode furnished material fora bit of local gossip which was not forgotten three years later.
They related the story to each other in a prolix fashion, eachsupplementing the narrative where the other's memory failed; and, whenthey had finished the recital:
"That was the best time we ever had!" said Frederick.
"Yes, perhaps so, indeed! It was the best time we ever had," saidDeslauriers.
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