Kitabı oku: «A LOVE CRIME», sayfa 3

blows from butt-ends of guns; the splashes of blood, that feel sticky

beneath the soles of our boots; the flames of the conflagrations in the

distant sky; and on the footpath, lying on the same straw, and sleeping

like wearied brutes, the little chasseurs who have taken the quarter.

_Homo homini lupior lupis._"

"DIEPPE, _July_ 1874.

"The daughter resembles the mother. She is only twelve years old, and

already I can catch the coquetry, the glances, the premonition of the

woman in the presence of the man; and it will end as it did with her

mother, in a marriage of convenience, first acts of thoughtlessness, a

first lover, then a series of lovers down to some young Baron de Querne,

whom there will be an attempt to persuade that none was ever loved but

he; and, more foolish or more intelligent than myself, he will perhaps

believe it.

"Yes, more intelligent; for in love the great thing is to have as much

emotion as possible; and the real deception is to paralyse one's heart

by clear-sightedness. Whether was it Valmont in the 'Liaisons'--dear

Valmont--or the President's wife that was deceived? She who felt or he

who calculated? Whether was it Elvire or Don Juan, who does not

understand that Elvire, seeing that she has been able to intoxicate

herself with love, is alone to be envied, while he himself is not? I

know all this, but the inward demon is the stronger, and as soon as I

begin to pay my addresses to a woman I am at pains to procure all such

information concerning her as can render me incapable of loving her.

"At my age, ought I not to write in this book: 'O divine fate! that has

caused me so speedily to light upon the unique, the ideal woman, the

sister-soul,' &c. (It would call for some of Gounod's music). Not

exactly, Monsieur de Querne, but rather a lady of experience, who has

had five or six lovers, who has retained sufficient taste to give the

title of 'sentiment' to what belongs to fair and fitting and the most

brutal sensation; a lady of tact, who has given herself a good deal of

trouble to persuade you that you have seduced her. And the deuce take me

if I am angry with her for such charming hypocrisy! Besides, what is the

good of being angry with anyone for anything? Every human being is a

pretentious little watch, which, seeing its hands go round, fancies that

it is itself the cause of the motion. Foolishness and vanity! There is a

delicate mechanism inside, and this mechanism has it that Madame ----

shall be a sentimental prostitute, her daughter a future quean, and I a

mirthless debauchee, who parch my soul by setting forth all this instead

of enjoying what is granted to me."

"PARIS, _22nd May_ 1877.

"An evening of folly yesterday and debauchery, but debauchery that was

gay and healthy which is undoubtedly the truth. Nothing but this remains

to me that does not leave disgust behind.

"I went to see Duret, the painter, with that sad dog René W----, who

first stopped in the Rue de la Tour-Auvergne to ask for Marie, a tall

brunette.

"I have a Marie here," said the doorkeeper, "but she is a tall blonde,

red even," and in fact at a window in the first floor I saw a head of

warm, golden hair, a dress of clear, bright blue, and a made complexion

as extravagantly pink as a doll's. In my dark hours I have had

sufficient knowledge of the degrading and consolatory fascination of

these painted charms, of these slain bodies, of these ringed eyes, of

all this lying!

"At Duret's found Léonie, the model who stood to him for his _Delilah_

in the last Salon: a somewhat wearied face, with a refined and arched

nose, eyes of gleaming blackness, a strongly marked chin, with a

slightly masculine appearance in the profile--the masculine appearance

of theatrical women who act in burlesque--and a long countenance. But

that is but the skeleton of the face. The slight moustache was tinged

with black, the patch on the cheek underlined with black, the eyes made

still larger with black, the complexion covered with powder, and the

powder blending with the pale pink of the blood gave the woman an

extravagant and sophisticated look which was completed by the

brilliantly nacreous teeth that twinkled with the splendour of moist

imitation pearls.

"The toilet completed the woman. She had some black, gauzy material

round her neck, a hat trimmed with gauze and flowers, a dress of

variegated and friezed material, with a huge, red rose blooming on her

left breast.

"'She's a luxurious woman,' said René ironically, and, indeed, with the

material of her dress, her gauze and her flower, she looked like a

creature that lived on nothing but superfluity. I paid my addresses to

her, pleased her, and did not leave her house until this morning.

"O enchantment of the senses when the surcharge of thought comes not to

mar physical intoxication! O enchantment of prostitutes, seen thus as

dispensers of pleasure free from disquiet of heart! No asking whether or

how one loves or is loved, no measuring of sensation with an ideal type

of feeling that is perceived, and striven after, and that never can be

felt! I write these lines, and see! already my enjoyment has evaporated.

I write these lines and yet would that on a solitary terrace fronting a

landscape of trees and waters a woman might appear having the eyes of

which I long have dreamed--eyes which I know without having ever met

them--and might swear to me that this life has been nothing but an evil

dream! And she should tell me _all_, and by that all be made the dearer

to me;--and then I should love!"

"PARIS, _June_ 1879.

"Luncheons and dinners; dinners and luncheons. Assignations and evening

parties. Ah! how empty my life is! I do nothing that I like; nothing;

for I like nothing.

"In presence of the living creature, nothing at heart but pity for him

who suffers, if he does suffer--who will suffer since he endures the

evil of existence.

"If death, inevitable death, were neither physically painful in the

passage thither from life, nor terrible in its sequel to our imagining,

ah! how I would seek that which has prompted thoughts to mar my life!

"We live on--and why? We think--and why? Why between two glasses of

delicate wine and amid naked shoulders does there come to me ceaselessly

at table the image of the grave, and the insoluble question concerning

the meaning of this deadly farce of nature, and the world, and life?

"I muse on the sweets of mutual love, an absurd dream that civilisation

grafts upon the simple need of coupling. Ah! for a simple passion that

might apply my entire sensibility to another being, like wet paper

against a window-pane.

"And all this declamatory philosophy due to the fact that yesterday I

saw Madame de Rugle again at the Théâtre Français, and that the sight

did not move me one whit. What does logic say? That a man should not

force himself to tenderness when his lack of feeling is self-admitted,

but turn on his heel, whistling that polonaise of Chopin's which she

used to play to me sometimes in the evening with so much intention and

sentimentality. And of that passion this is all that is left."

"PARIS, _January_ 1881.

"I am aware that I have become horribly, fiercely egoistic, and the

external manifestations of this egoism are now offensive to me, whereas

formerly I used to surrender myself to it without scruple, at a time,

however, when I was of more worth than I am now by reason of the dream

that I cherished concerning myself.

"Philosophising truthfully about oneself is as great a relief as the

vomiting of bile. I look for the history of my temperament from the days

of my childhood. I see that my imagination has been excessive,

destroying my sensibility by raising a fore-fashioned idea between

myself and reality. I expected to feel in a certain way--and then, I

never did so. This same imagination, darkened by my uncle's harsh

treatment, has turned also to mistrust. I have always dreaded every

creature. The loss of my father and mother prevented the correction of

this early fault. College life and modern literature stained my thought

before I had lived. The same literature separated me from religion at

fifteen. Impiety, to my shame, acted like refinement to seduce me! The

massacres of the Commune showed me the true nature of man, and the

intrigues of the ensuing years the true nature of politics. I longed to

link myself to some great idea--but to which? When quite young I had

measured the wretchedness of an artist's existence. There must be genius

or far better leave it alone. To rank as fiftieth among writers or

musicians--thank you, no. My fortune exempted me from the necessity of a

profession. Enter a Council of State for foreign affairs, or a public

office--and why? There are only too many officials already. Get married?

The thought of chaining down my life never tempted me. I should have

done the same as B---- who, on the day of his wedding, took train to

return no more.

"Then what? Nothing. I have not even grown old of heart; I am abortive.

My sentimental adventures, which have been pursued in spite of

everything, for women are even yet what is least indifferent to me,

have, alas, convinced me that there are no kisses that do not resemble

those already given and received. It is all so short, and superficial,

and vain. How desperate I should be rendered by the thoughts of

myself--of that self which I shall never be able completely to

renounce--did I often indulge in them! What else but the damnation of

the mystics is _non-love_?"

Such were a few of the pages among many others, and the abominable

monograph of a secret disease of soul was continued in hundreds of

similar confidences. Often simply the date was written, together with

two or three facts: Rode, paid visits, went to the club, the theatre in

the evening, or a party, or ball, and then came a single word like a

refrain--_Spleen._ At the beginning of the last of these note-books,

Armand, when he had closed it, could read a list of all the years of his

life since 1860, and after each date he had scrawled--_Torture_, and at

the end, these words:

"I did not ask for life. If I have committed faults, frightful ones, too,

I have also known sufferings such as, set over against the others, might

say to the inconceivable Power that has created and that sustains me, if

such a Power possess a heart: 'Have pity upon me!'"

The young man thrust away with his hand the heap of papers wherein he

encountered so faithful an image of his present moral aridity. Slowly he

began to walk about the room. Everywhere in it he recognised the same

tokens of his inward nihilism. The low bookcase contained but those few

books which he still liked: novels of withering analysis--"Dangerous

Liaisons," "Adolphus," "Affinities"--moralists of keen and self-centred

misanthropy, and memoirs. The photographs scattered over the walls

reminded him of his travels--those useless travels during which he had

failed to beguile his weariness. On the chimney-piece, between the

likenesses of two dead friends, he kept an enigmatic portrait,

representing two women, with the head of the one resting upon the

shoulder of the other. It was the present, life-like remembrance of a

terrible story--the story of the bitterest faithlessness he had ever

endured. He had been cynical or artificial enough to laugh over it

formerly with the two heroines, but he had laughed with death in his

heart.

At the sight of all these objects witnessing to the manner of his life,

he was so completely sensible of his emotional wretchedness that he

wrung his hands, saying quite aloud: "What a life! Good God! what a

life!" It was owing to experiences such as these that his lips and eyes

preserved that expression of silent melancholy to which he had perhaps

owed Helen's love. It is their pity that leads to the capture of the

noblest women. But these crises did not last long with Armand. In his

case muscles were stronger than nerves. He took up his journals, and

threw them, rather than put them, away in the box.

"That's a rational sort of occupation," he thought to himself, "for the

night before an assignation."

Immediately, his thoughts turned again to Helen. The charming air of

distinction that she possessed returned to his recollection, and

suddenly softened him to an extraordinary degree.

"Why have I entered into her life," he said, "since I do not love her?

For eleven little months she did not know me, and she was at peace.

There would still be time enough to act the part of an honest man."

He was seized by the temptation to do what he had done once already--to

renounce, before any irrevocable step had been taken, an intrigue in

which he ran the risk of taking another's heart without giving his own

in return.

"Perhaps she loves me," he said to himself; and he sat down at his

table, and even got ready a sheet of paper in order to write to her.

Then, leaning back in his easy chair, he reflected. The recollection of

Varades suddenly beset him, as also of the serenity with which Helen had

deceived her husband that evening. "Innocent child," he said aloud,

speaking to himself, "if it were not I, it would be someone else. When a

fast woman meets with a libertine, they form a pair."

He began to laugh in a nervous fashion, and recalled the boundless

contempt with which he had formerly been covered by the lady whom his

scruples had led him to give up. She was the only enemy that he had kept

among all the women with whom he had had to do. The clock struck.

"Two o'clock," he said, "and I have to get up early in order to visit

worthy Madame Palmyre, and reserve one of her little suites, as in

Madame de Rugle's days. I shall be tired. Monsieur de Varades will be

missed."

Half-an-hour later he was in bed, and, head on arm, sleeping that

infantine sleep which, in spite of his life, had still been left to him.

So he was represented in a drawing by his father, which hung on one of

the walls of his bed-room. Ah! if the dead ones, whose son he was, had

been able to see him, would they have condemned him? Would they have

pitied him?

CHAPTER III

It was about half-past ten in the morning when Madame Chazel received a

small packet from the Baron de Querne. It contained two books--two new

novels--and a letter, the last being similar to all those that a man of

the world may write to a woman with whom he is on friendly terms. But

the postscript pressed as with a hand upon her heart. It ran as follows:

"If your country friend decides to come to Paris, the best furnished

apartments that I have seen are at 16, Rue de Stockholm. They are on the

second floor, to the right."

Yes, Helen was seized with inward trepidation on reading these simple

lines. In proportion as her action drew closer to her--the action that

would for ever separate her future and her past--the fever which had

been preying upon her since the previous evening had increased still

more. She had just left her bath, and, wrapped in a dressing-gown of

pure white, was crouched on a low chair beside the fire, her naked feet

in slippers, her form unconstrained by the flexible material, and her

hair rolled in a great twist about her neck. She shivered in her

wool-lined robe, and, with Armand's letter in her fingers, gazed now at

the paper, the mere touch of which overwhelmed her, and now around the

room--a refuge which she preferred even to the little drawing-room, as

enabling her to retire into a domain that was all her own.

She had been so pleased at the time of their settling in Paris to obtain

this room all to herself! She had during so many nights known the

torture of sleeping beside a man whom she did not love, and if sleeping

side by side, almost breath to breath, forms the delight of blissful

passion, physical aversion, on the other hand, is augmented by such

intimacy, until it becomes a species of animal hatred. Alfred's

movements, the sound of his breathing, the mere existence of his person,

angered her and hurt her, in the hours that she spent thus beside him,

when silence hung heavy upon their rest, and she lay awake quivering and

in revolt. When requesting this separation of rooms she certainly had

not foreseen that the solitude of her couch would one day avail her as a

weapon against material partition, that terrible ransom for adultery

which prudent women accept as a security. It is a rare thing for those

who deceive their husbands to sleep apart from them. They would rather

not have to carry with them to their lover the anxiety due to a

watchfulness but little reconcilable with complete pleasure.

But Helen was not capable of such calculations. The most charming trait

in her character was a spontaneity that might draw her into very great

perils, but that at least always preserved her from a foulness which is

more degrading than anything else--reflection in the midst of error. At

this very moment, as she sat crouching upon her low chair, she did not

think about the consequences of her approaching action, nor did she

reason--she felt. The presence of Armand's letter caused her to be

visited with excessive emotion. She scarcely so much as listened to the

noise that her little boy made in playing beside her bed. The child was

shaking his flaxen ringlets, and shouting and running about. He had set

two chairs beside each other, and was creeping between them, pretending

that he was a railway train passing through a tunnel.

Since she had been in love with Armand, Helen had experienced strange

feelings of sadness in the presence of her little Henry, and she had

reproached herself for them as for a lack of tenderness, attributing

them to remorse. In reality, her sorrow was due to the discovery in her

son of an astonishing likeness to her husband. Even in his games the

child recalled the conversation of the father, who from principle gave

him for books nothing but scientific works, and then he had Alfred

Chazel's eyes and his awkwardness in using his hands, and had only his

mother's mouth and forehead. She spoiled him all the more for her

consciousness of what she had taken from him to give to another! The

child continued to play, looking sometimes towards his mother. The

latter, at one moment, heaving a deep sigh, crumpled up the paper that

she held in her hand, and flung it into the fire.

The note had grown intolerable to her. She told herself, indeed, that it

was more prudent on her lover's part to write to her in this tone of

formal politeness, but it was such prudence as freezes, and in Helen's

then unnerved condition she had need of a letter whose every phrase acts

upon the reader's heart like invisible and caressing lips. The crumpled

paper, letter and envelope together, rolled into the fire, and the child

left the two chairs with which he was playing to come to his mother's

side and watch it burn.

"What are you looking at there, darling?" Helen said to him.

"At the nuns, mamma," he replied. So he called the luminous dots that

run across the black surface of paper consumed by fire. These dots were

in his eyes nuns distractedly traversing their burnt cloister. "How they

hurry," he said; "how frightened they are! Oh! that one, mamma, look at

that one! The convent is falling down. They are all dead."

Madame Chazel felt herself incapable of enduring this merriment. The

whole odious nature of her moral situation had just been rendered

palpable to her by a petty, insignificant fact, that of her son making a

plaything of the letter in which her lover made an appointment with her

for their first secret meeting. She would have been so glad to have held

her home life, the maternal obligations of which she would fulfil to the

utmost, distinct from the other, from that life of passion upon which

she was entering, carried away by something stronger than her reason,

something so obscure to herself and yet so real. Was this distinction,

then, altogether impossible, seeing that on the very first day all that

she would have wished apart were being blended together?

"Go and play with Miette," she said to her son, "I have a slight

headache."

Miette was the little boy's nurse. A lady's maid, a cook, and a

man-servant completed the _personnel_ of the household. Miette, who had

come from the country with her employers, had taken care of Henry from

his earliest infancy. At night, to send him to sleep, she used to sing

canticles to him, one especially of which delighted and terrified him:

"Come, divine Messiah."

"What is Messiah?" he would ask his nurse.

"He is Antichrist," she used to reply.

"When will He come?" asked the child.

"At the end of the world."

"In how many years?"

"Seven," said the nurse.

"Then I shall be twelve years old," Henry would calculate.

This astonishing prediction had so struck him the night before, that at

the mere mention of his nurse's name, he began to tell it to his mother.

At any other time this confidence would have amused her, but while

speaking he had in his bright grey eyes a look that the young woman knew

only too well.

"Don't be frightened," she said, "for you are good, and go and play."

The little boy cast a glance at the fire where the black residue alone

marked the site of the burnt convent; at the chairs whose backs were no

longer the walls of a deep tunnel; at his mother, to know whether he

might not remain. Unconsciously he was affected by the sadness

overspreading her face. By one of those almost animal intuitions

peculiar to extremely sensitive children, he discerned that his presence

was vexing to his mother. He kissed her hand, and then suddenly burst

into tears.

"What is the matter, my angel, what is the matter?" said Helen, pressing

him in her arms and covering him with kisses.

"I thought you were angry with me," he said. Then, warmed by her

caresses, he said: "I am going, mamma; I will be good."

"Have children presentiments?" Helen asked of herself when she was left

alone. "One would think he were conscious that something unusual is

taking place." And with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting

upon her closed hands, she relapsed into the state of fever that had

kept her awake the whole night. The nacreous bruise that encircled her

eyes too clearly revealed this sleeplessness. On rising, she had looked

at herself in the glass, and said to herself:

"I am not pretty--I shall not please him."

What had been preying upon her had been neither prudish reasoning nor

moral reflection. It was a sort of ardent languor. She could see Armand

in her thought, and as it were a wave of blood, but having greater heat,

surged to her heart, her throat choked a little, and her will tottered.

It was not only her first intrigue, in the sense in which the world

understands the term, but it was her first love. Helen Chazel, while

still Mademoiselle de Vaivre, had endured one of the most painful trials

that can weigh upon youth. She had been persecuted by a step-mother who

hated her, while believing that she was only bringing her up well and

correcting her. The De Vaivres lived in a kind of château, four miles

from Bourges, and this had been a prison to the young girl. The father,

a weak man, who cherished an innocent mania for an archaeological

collection, patiently and complacently gathered together, had never

suspected the mute drama played between step-mother and step-daughter

for twelve years.

Madame de Vaivre loved her husband, and, without herself comprehending

as much, was jealous of the dead wife, that first wife whose grace she

saw renewed in the features of the child, in her smiles and in her

gestures. Nothing is so dangerous as an evil feeling of the existence of

which we are not quite aware. To gratify it we discover all kinds of

excuses which enable us to feed our hatred without losing our

self-esteem. It was thus that Madame de Vaivre, having taken Helen's

education in hand, made every lesson and every admonition a means for

torture.

This woman, pretty and refined, but unfeeling, very solicitous about

propriety in consequence of the lengthened sojournings at Paris with her

father, who had been an official deputy under the July monarchy, was

withal minutely devout, and instinctively unkind, like all persons who

are accustomed never to admit the just sensibilities of others. When

Alfred Chazel had come to be intimate with Monsieur de Vaivre, owing to

their common taste for excavations and antiquities, she had with joy

perceived that he was falling in love with Helen. It afforded her a

secret pleasure to marry her step-daughter to a man who had no fortune,

and, the dowry being very small, to condemn her for years to a middling

existence. Death, which takes as little account of our evil calculations

as of our great intentions, had taken in hand to render abortive this

woman's hateful anticipation, through which poor Helen had seen no more

clearly than Monsieur de Vaivre himself.

All that the young girl understood on the day that Chazel asked her in

marriage was that she would be free from her step-mother's tyranny. She

had a plain perception of that from which she was escaping. As to

marriage and its physical realities, what could she have known of them?

Thus, on leaving the church, she found herself in a moral situation that

was full of peril. Her childhood, spent, as it had been, beneath

continual oppression, had to an excessive degree developed within her a

taste for the romantic--a power, that is, of fashioning beforehand an

image of life with which the reality is subsequently compared. Through

her joy at deliverance, her future marriage showed to her like a

paradise of delight.

Misfortune had it that Alfred Chazel should be one of those men who,

with all kindness, all delicacy even, at the bottom of their hearts, are

for ever ignorant of a woman's nature. The consummation of the marriage

was to Helen something as hateful as it had been unexpected--like a

tribute paid to clumsy brutality. The result was that she received her

husband's endearments with a repugnance that was imperfectly dissembled,

and that added to the timidity of a man already timid by nature and

awkwardly impassioned, as those who have not slackened the initial

ardour of their youth in facile intrigues often are. Alfred was secretly

afraid of showing his tenderness to his wife, and he concealed from her

the intensity of a love that would perhaps have touched her had she been

able to perceive it.

Moral divorce between husband and wife has nearly always physiological

divorce for its first and hidden cause. If community in voluptuousness

is the most powerful agent for the fusion of temperaments, the torturing

possession of a woman by a man remains the certain origin of

unconquerable antipathy. It came to pass in the Chazel household, as in

all similar households, that this first antipathy was heightened from

week to week by reason of the fact that two beings, condemned to live

side by side, unceasingly afford each other grounds for more love or

greater hatred. Do not all the petty events of life render them every

minute more present to each other? The divergence in tastes, ideas, and

habits that parted Alfred from Helen, would have provided the latter,

had she loved her husband, with pretexts for a loving education. Not

loving him, she found in them only reasons for separating from him still

more.

Alfred Chazel was in fact a son of the people, and in spite of the

intellectual refinement of two generations, his peasant origin showed

itself again in him in clumsiness of gesture and attitude. He was not

vulgar, and at the same time he was lacking in manner. Helen, on the

contrary, came of a noble family, and her step-mother's continual

superintendence had developed to an extreme in her a sense of detailed

particularity concerning her person and everything about her. Her

husband's manner of eating shocked her; his manner of going and coming

and sitting down--a certain slowness in grasping all that constituted

the material side of life. When it was needful to accomplish a rapid and