took himself off until dinner, going out immediately after, in order to
avoid meeting Rosalie. The professor's abstraction was so great that he
did not even notice this change in René's habits. Such, however, was
not the case with Madame Offarel. Having come on two consecutive
evenings with her two daughters and seen nothing of him whom she already
looked upon as her son-in-law, she did not hesitate to remark upon his
unwonted absence.

'Does Monsieur Larcher present Monsieur René to a fresh comtesse every
evening that we never see him here now, nor at our house either?'

'It's true,' observed Fresneau, 'I never see him now. Where does he get
to?'

'He has set to work again upon his "Savonarola,"' replied Emilie, 'and
he spends his evenings at the Bibliothèque.'

Early on the morning after this conversation, which was also the morrow
of René's second visit to Suzanne, Emilie entered her brother's room to
give him a full account of what had been said. She found him getting out
a few sheets of fine note-paper--some that she had bought for him--on
which he was about to copy, in his best handwriting, the verses he was
to read to Madame Moraines. The table was covered with sheet upon sheet
of his poems, from which he had already made a selection.

When Emilie told him of her innocent fib he kissed her, and exclaimed,
with a laugh, 'How clever you are!'

'There is nothing clever in it,' she replied; 'I am your sister, and I
love you.' Then, taking up some of the papers scattered about, she
asked, 'Do you really think of getting on with your book?'

'No,' answered René, 'but I have promised to read a few of my verses to
some one.'

'To Madame Moraines?' exclaimed his sister.

'You have guessed it,' replied the poet, looking slightly confused. 'Ah!
if you only knew!'

And then the pent-up confidence burst forth. Emilie had to listen to an
enthusiastic eulogy of Suzanne and all that concerned her. In the same
breath René spoke of the lofty nobility of this woman's ideas and of
the shape of her shoes, of her marvellous intelligence and of the
figured velvet oh her blotting-book. That childish astonishment at these
luxurious details should be united to the more poetic fancies in the
fabric of love did not surprise Emilie. Had she herself in her love for
René not always associated petty desires with boundless ambition? She
wished, for instance, with almost equal fervour, that he might have
genius and horses, that he might write another 'Childe Harold,' and
possess Byron's income of four thousand a year. In this she was as
ingenuously plebeian as he himself, confounding--in excusable fashion,
after all--real aristocracy of sentiment with that aristocracy expressed
by outer and worldly forms. Those who come of a family in which the
struggle for bread has lowered the tone of thought easily mistake the
second of these aristocracies for a condition inseparable from the
first.

Those words, therefore, which might have led an unkind listener to think
that René loved Suzanne for her surroundings, and not for herself,
charmed Emilie instead of shocking her, and she had so fully entered
into her brother's infatuation that on leaving him she said: 'You are
not at home to anyone--I'll see that no one comes in. You must show me
your verses when you have written them--mind you choose them well.'

The task of making this selection cheated the poet's ardour, and he was
able to await the day fixed for his next visit to the paradise in the
Rue Murillo without much impatience. The hours of solitude, broken only
by his talks with Emilie, passed by in alternate fits of happiness and
melancholy. Often a delightful vision of Suzanne would rise up before
him. He would then lay down his pen, and all the objects about him would
melt away, as if by magic. Instead of the red hangings of his room, it
was the little _salon_ of Madame Moraines that he saw; gone were his
dear Albert Dürers, his Gustave Moreaus, his Goyas, his small library
on whose shelves the 'Imitatio' rubbed shoulders with 'Madame
Bovary'--gone were the two leafless trees that stood out black against a
light blue sky. But in their place he could see Suzanne, her dainty
ways, the poise of her head, the peculiar golden tint of her hair, and
the transparent pink of her lovely complexion.

This apparition, which had nothing of a pale or shadowy phantom about
it, appealed to René's senses in a way that ought to have made him
understand that Madame Moraines' attitudes did but mask the true woman,
the voluptuous though refined courtesan. But of this he took no note,
and, whilst madly desirous to possess her, he believed that his worship
of her was of the most ethereal kind. This mirage of sentiment is a
phenomenon frequently observed in men who lead chaste lives, and one
which renders them the defenceless prey of the most barefaced hypocrisy.
The inability to understand their own feelings makes them still more
incapable of analysing the tricks of the women who arouse in them the
accumulated passion of a lifetime. The poet, however, became perfectly
lucid as soon as Suzanne's image made way for that of Rosalie. On going
through his papers he was continually coming across some page headed, in
boyish fashion, 'For my flower;' that was the name he had given Rosalie
in the heyday of his love, when he had written her a fresh poem almost
every morning.

'O Rose of candour and sincerity!' were the terms in which he addressed
her at the end of one of these effusions. When his eyes fell upon such
lines he was again obliged to lay down his pen, and once more his
surroundings would melt away, but this time to make room for a vision of
torture. The rooms occupied by the Offarels lay before him, cold and
silent. The old woman was busy with her cats. Angélique was turning
over the leaves of an English dictionary, and Rosalie was looking at
him, René--looking at him through an ocean of space with eyes in which
he read no reproach, but only deep distress. He knew as well as if he
were there, near her, that she had guessed his secret, and that she was
suffering the pangs of jealousy. If such were not the case would he have
been so terribly afraid to meet the girl's eyes? Would that he could go
to her and say, 'Let us be only friends!' It was his duty to do so. The
only means of preserving one's self-esteem is by acting with absolute
loyalty in these subsidings of love, which are like fraudulent
bankruptcies of the heart. But that loyalty was thrust aside by weakness
in which both egoism and pity were equally represented. He took up his
pen again, and saying, as on the first day, 'We shall see--later on,' he
tried to work. Soon he had to stop once more as his mind reverted to
Rosalie's sufferings. He thought of the long nights she would spend in
tears, knowing as he did every trifling habit of the simple creature who
had given him her heart. She had often told him that the only time she
could indulge in her own grief was at night. Then he hid his face in his
hands and waited till the vision had passed, meanwhile saying to
himself, 'Is it my fault?'

A law in our nature bids our passions grow stronger in proportion to the
number of obstacles to be overcome, so that the remorse of his
infidelity to poor Rosalie resulted in making René's heart beat faster
as the time fixed by Madame Moraines for their next meeting drew near.
She, on her side, awaited him with an almost feverish impatience that
astonished even herself. She had looked out for the young poet whenever
she had been in the street, and again at the Opera when Friday came
round. Had she seen his eyes fixed upon her in that simple adoration
which is as compromising as a declaration, she would have said, 'How
imprudent!' Not to see him, however, gave her a slight fit of doubt,
which brought her caprice to its climax. She looked forward to this
visit all the more anxiously because she considered it decisive. It was
the third time René visited her, and, out of these three times, twice
unknown to her husband. Further than that she could not go, on account
of the servants. A day or two back Paul, meaning no harm, had said to
her at dinner, 'I was talking to Desforges about René Vincy. He doesn't
seem to have made a good impression on the Baron. It is decidedly better
not to see the authors too closely whose works we admire.'

If the servant who had announced the poet had been in the dining-room at
the moment these words were uttered Suzanne would have had to speak. The
same thing might happen the next or any other day. She was therefore
determined to find a peg in her conversation with René on which to hang
an appointment elsewhere. An idea suddenly occurred to her of going
somewhere with the poet under pretence of curiosity--a meeting in Notre
Dame, for instance, or in some old church sufficiently distant from the
fashionable quarter of Paris to be beyond the risk of danger, and she
relied upon one or other of René's poems to furnish her with an
opportunity of making such an appointment.

On this occasion she once more wore a walking-dress, for, having
attended a marriage ceremony in the morning, she had kept on the rather
smart mauve gown in which her shapely figure, elegant shoulders, and
slim waist were so well set off. Thus attired, and lounging back in a
low arm-chair--an attitude that marked the adorable outlines of her
body--she begged the poet, after the usual commonplaces had passed, to
commence his reading. She listened to his poetry without betraying any
surprise at the peculiar drawl with which even the best scholars intone
their verses, her great intelligent eyes and the repose of her face
seeming to indicate the closest attention. At rare intervals she would
venture upon some apparently involuntary exclamation, such as: 'How
beautiful that is!' or, 'Will you repeat those lines?--I like them so
much!'

In reality, she cared little for the poet's verses, and understood them
less. To comprehend even superficially the work of a modern artist--in
whom there is always a critic and a scholar--requires such mental
development as is only met with in a small number of Society women,
sufficiently interested in culture to read much and to think more in the
midst of a life entirely opposed to all kind of study and reflection.
What made Suzanne's pretty face and big blue eyes look so pensive was
the desire not to let the important word slip by upon which to hang her
project. But line came after line, stanzas succeeded sonnets, and yet
she had not been able to seize upon anything which could reasonably be
made to give the conversation the turn she wanted. What a pity it was!
For René's eyes, that continually wandered from the page; his voice,
that shook occasionally as he read; his hands, that trembled as he
turned the leaves--all showed that her pretended admiration had
completely intoxicated the Trissotin that lurks in every author.

And now there was only one piece left! This the poet had purposely kept
to the last; it was his favourite, and bore a title which was a
revelation to Suzanne, 'The Eyes of the Gioconda.' It was rather a long
poem, half metaphysical, half descriptive, in which the writer had
striven to collect and reproduce in sonorous verse all the opinions of
the modern school of critics concerning Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece.
In this portrait of an Italian woman we ought, perhaps, to see nothing
beyond a study of the purest and most technical naturalism, one of those
struggles against conventionality in art in which the great painter
appears to have been so frequently engaged. Can it not have been an
attempt of the master to seize the unseizable--the play of a face, and
to paint the fleeting expression on the lips as they pass from repose to
a smile? In his poem René, who took a childish pride in the fact that
his family name resembled that of the village which lends its
appellation to the most subtle master of the Renaissance, had condensed
into thirty verses an entire system of natural and historical
philosophy. He valued this symbolical medley higher than the
'Sigisbée,' which contained only what was natural and appertaining to
the passions--two qualities fit only for the vulgar herd.

What then was his delight to hear Madame Moraines say, 'If I might be
allowed to express any preference, I would say that this is the piece
which pleases me most. How well you understand true art! To see the
great masterpieces with you must be a revelation! I am sure that if I
visited the Louvre under your guidance you would explain to me so much
that I see in the pictures but cannot understand. I have often wandered
about there, but quite alone!'

She waited. As soon as René had started reading this last poem she had
said to herself, 'How foolish of me not to have thought of that before!'
closing her eyes for a moment as if to retain some beautiful dream. At
the finish she had purposely used such words as would give him an
opportunity of seeing her again. He would propose a visit together to
the Louvre, to which she would accede, after having cleverly raised just
sufficient difficulties. She saw the suggestion trembling on his lips,
but he had not the courage to make it. She was therefore compelled to do
so herself.

'If I were not afraid of wasting your time----?' Then, with a sigh, 'But
we have not been acquainted long enough.'

'Oh; madame!' cried René, 'it seems to me as if I had been your friend
for years!'

'That is because you feel I am sincere in what I say,' she replied, with
a frank and open smile. 'And I am going to prove it to you once more.
Will you show me the Louvre one day next week?'

CHAPTER XI

DECLARATIONS

An appointment had been made for eleven o'clock on the following
Tuesday, in the Salon Carré of the Louvre. Whilst Suzanne was being
driven to the old palace in a cab she was counting up for the tenth time
the dangers of her matutinal escapade. 'No, it's not a very wise thing
to do,' she thought; 'and suppose Desforges discovers I've been out?
Well, there's the dentist. And what if I meet some one I know? It's very
improbable, but in that case I would tell them just as much of the truth
as was absolutely necessary.'

That was one of her great maxims--to tell as few lies as possible, to
maintain a discreet silence about most things, and never to deny
established facts. She was therefore ready to say to her husband, and to
the Baron as well, if necessary, 'I went into the Louvre this morning as
I passed. I was lucky enough to find Madame Komof's little poet there,
and he showed me through a few of the rooms. Yes,' she said to herself,
'that will do for once. But it would be madness to try it on often.'

Her mind then became occupied with other thoughts of less positive
purport. The uncertainty of what would take place in this interview with
René caused her greater agitation than she cared for. She had played
the part of a Madonna before him, and the time had now come to get down
from the altar upon which she had been so piously adored. Her feminine
tact had hit upon a bold plan--lead the poet to a declaration, reply by
a confession of her own feelings, then flee from him as if in remorse,
and so leave the way open for any step she might afterwards care to
take. Whilst playing havoc with René's heart, this plan would suspend
his judgment of her acts and absolve her of any follies she might
commit. It was bold but clever, and, above all, simple. There were,
nevertheless, a few real dangers connected with it. Let the poet
entertain distrust but for one moment and all was lost. Suzanne's heart
beat faster at the thought. How many women there are who have been
similarly situated, and who, after having reared a most elaborate fabric
of falsehoods, have been compelled to continue their _rôle_ in order to
obtain satisfaction for the true feelings that originally actuated them!
When the men on whose account such women as these have played their
hypocritical _rôles_ discover the lie palmed off upon them, their
indignation and contempt abundantly prove how important a factor vanity
is in all affection.

'Come, come,' exclaimed Suzanne, 'here am I trembling like a
school-girl!' She smiled indulgently as she uttered the words, because
they proved once more the sincerity of her feelings, and again she
smiled when, on alighting from her cab and crossing the courtyard, she
saw that she was there to the minute. 'Still a school-girl!' she
repeated to herself. A momentary fear came over her at the thought that
if René happened to arrive just after her he would see her obliged to
ask one of the attendants for the entrance to the galleries--she who had
boasted of having been there so often. She had not been in the place
three times in her life, though to-day her little feet trotted across
the spacious courtyard in their dainty laced boots as confidently as
though they performed the journey daily. 'What a child I am!' said the
inner voice once more--the voice of the Baron's pupil, who had acquired
as deep a knowledge of life as any hoary diplomat. 'He has been waiting
for me upstairs for the last half-hour!' Still she could not refrain
from looking anxiously about her as she asked her way of one of the
attendants. But her worldly knowledge had not deceived her, for no
sooner had she reached the doorway between the Galerie d'Apollon and the
Salon Carré than she saw René; he was leaning against the iron
railing, just underneath the noble work by Veronese, representing Mary
Magdalene washing our Saviour's feet, and opposite the famous Noces de
Cana.

In his boyish timidity the poor fellow had considered it his duty to put
on his very best clothes in coming to meet one who, besides being a
Madonna in his eyes, was a 'Society woman'--that vague and fanciful
entity which exists in the brain of so many young _bourgeois_, and is a
curious medley of their most erroneous impressions. He was attired in a
smart-fitting frock coat, and, although the morning was a cold one, he
wore nothing over it. He possessed only one overcoat, and that, having
been made at the beginning of the winter, did not come from the tailor
to whom he had been introduced by his friend Larcher. With his brand-new
chimney-pot hat, his new gloves, and his new boots, he almost looked as
though he had stepped out of a fashion plate, though his dress
contrasted strangely with his artistic face. If he had made himself
appear still more ridiculous, Suzanne would have found still more
reasons for growing fonder of him. Such is the way of women in love.

She understood at once that he had been afraid he would not look nice
enough to please her, and she stood in the doorway for a few seconds in
order to enjoy the anxiety that was depicted on the poet's face. When he
saw her there was a sudden rush of blood to his cheeks, though the blush
soon died away beneath the gold of his fair silken beard. What a flash,
too, lit up those dark blue eyes, dispelling the look of anguish they
contained! 'It is lucky there is no one here to see our meeting,' she
thought, for the pale light that came through the glass roof fell only
upon a few painters setting up their easels and upon a few tourists
wandering about, guide-book in hand.

Suzanne, who had taken all this in at a glance, could therefore abandon
herself to the pleasure which René's agitation afforded her; as he came
towards her he said, in a voice trembling with emotion, 'I hardly dared
to hope that you would come.'

'Why not?' she replied, with an air of candid astonishment. 'Do you
really think I cannot get up early? Why, when I go and visit my poor I
am up and dressed at eight.' And in what a tone of voice it was that she
said this! A pleasant, modest tone--like that in which a hero would tell
of something extraordinary he had done without seeing anything in it
himself--the tone in which an officer would say, 'As we were charging
the enemy!' The joke of it was that she had never ventured even to set
her foot in a poor man's dwelling. She had as great a horror of poverty
as of sickness or of old age, and to her selfish nature charity was a
thing almost unknown. But at that moment René would have looked upon
anyone who dared charge her with selfishness as guilty of the most
infamous blasphemy. After having uttered her well-chosen words this
novel Sister of Mercy stopped for a moment in order to enjoy their
effect. In René's eyes shone that look of blind faith which these
pretty hypocrites are so accustomed to regard as their due that they
charge all who refuse it them with heartlessness. Then, as if to evade
an admiration that embarrassed her modesty, she went on, 'You forget
that you are my guide to-day. I will pretend I know nothing of any of
these pictures; I shall then be able to see whether we have the same
tastes.'

'_Mon Dieu!_' thought René, 'I must take care not to show her anything
that might give her a bad opinion of me!' The most commonplace women
can, when they choose, inspire a man who is vastly superior to them with
this sensation of utter inferiority.

They had now commenced their tour, he leading her to those masterpieces
which he thought would please her. How well acquainted he was with all
the galleries of his dear Louvre! There was not one of these pictures
that did not recall the memory of some dream of his youth--a youth
entirely spent in adorning with beautiful images the shrine we all carry
within us before our twentieth year, but from which our passions soon
expel all but the image of Venus! These pale and noble frescoes of Luini
that hang in the narrow room to the right of the Salon Carré--how often
had he not come to gaze upon their pious scenes when he wished to lend
his poetry the soft charm, the broad and tender touch, of the old
Lombard master! He had feasted his eyes for whole hours upon the mighty
Crucifixion by Mantegna--a fragment of the magnificent painting in the
church of San Zeno at Verona--as well as upon that most glorious of
Raphaels, Saint George--an ideal hero dealing the dragon a furious
stroke of his sword whilst spurring his white charger in pink trappings
across the fresh greensward, symbolic of youth and hope. But it was more
especially the portraits which had been the objects of his most fervent
pilgrimages--from those of Holbein, Philippe de Champaigne, and Titian,
to that of the elegant and mysterious lady simply attributed in the
catalogue to the Venetian school, and bearing a cipher in her hair. He
loved to think, in company with a clever critic, that this cipher meant
Barbarelli and Cecilia--the name of the Giorgione and that of the
mistress for whom tradition says that this great master died. During a
visit he had once paid to the Louvre with Rosalie he had told her the
romantic and tragic story on this very spot and before this very
portrait. He now found himself repeating it to Suzanne, and in almost
the same words.

'The painter loved her, and she betrayed him for one of his friends. At
Vienna there is a picture painted by himself in which you see his sweet,
sad eyes resting upon his treacherous friend, who approaches him with a
gleaming dagger concealed behind his back.'

Yes--the same words! When Rosalie heard the story she had turned her
eyes upon him, and he had distinctly read the thoughts that filled her.
'How can any woman betray the man who loves her?' With her the question,
had remained a dumb one, but Suzanne, after having stared curiously at
the mysterious woman with the thin lips, gave expression to her thoughts
with a sigh and a shake of her fair head. 'And yet she looks so good. It
is terrible to think that a woman with a face like that could lie!'

As she spoke she too turned her eyes upon René; and, gazing into the
clear depths that presented such a contrast to Rosalie's dark orbs, he
felt a strange remorse. By one of those ironies of the inner life which
a comparison of consciences would often reveal, Suzanne, unspeakably
happy in strolling amidst these pictures, which she pretended to admire,
was keenly enjoying the impression that her beauty was making on her
companion, whilst the latter, a simple child, reproached himself with
the double treachery of leading this ideal creature through places that
he had once visited with another. The fatal comparison which, since his
first meeting with Madame Moraines, was effacing poor little Rosalie
from his mind was becoming more obtrusive than ever.

A vision of his betrothed floated before him, humble as she herself, but
beside him walked Suzanne, a living sister of the aristocratic beauties
the old masters had portrayed on their canvases. Her golden hair shone
brightly under her little bonnet; the short astracan jacket fitted her
like a glove, and her grey check skirt hung in graceful folds. In her
hand was a small muff, from which peeped out the corner of an
embroidered handkerchief; the muff matched her jacket, and every now and
then she would hold it up just above her eyes in order to get the right
light to see the pictures well. How could the present fail to conquer
the absent--an elegant woman fail to oust a simple, modest girl,
especially since in Suzanne all the refinement of an æsthetic soul
seemed allied to the most exquisite charm of external appearance and
attitude?

She who in her crass ignorance would have been unable to distinguish a
Rembrandt from a Perugino, or a Ribera from a Watteau, had a clever way
of listening to what René said, and of supporting the opinions he
expressed with an ingenuity that would have deceived men with more
experience of feminine duplicity than this young poet of twenty-five.
This meeting was to him a source of happiness so complete, such perfect
realisation of his most secret dreams, that he felt sad at the thought
of having attained his highest ambition. The time slipped by, and an
indescribable sensation invaded him; it was made up of the nervous
excitement that the sight of masterpieces always produces in an artist,
of the remorse he felt for his treachery in profaning the past by the
present and the present by the past, and finally of the knowledge of
Time's unrelenting flight. Yes, that delightful hour was slipping by, to
be followed by so many cold and empty ones--for never, no, never would
he dare to ask his adorable companion for another such meeting.

She, the sensual Epicurean, was only eager to prolong the delight of
mental possession. Voluptuously, carefully, and secretly did she watch
the poet from the corner of her blue eye that looked so modest beneath
its golden lashes. She was unable to take exact account of all the
changes of feeling he underwent, for although she was already well
acquainted with his inner nature, she was so entirely ignorant of all
the facts of his life that sometimes she would ask herself with a thrill
whether he had ever loved before. It was impossible to follow his
thoughts in detail, but it was not difficult to see that he was now
looking at her much more than at the pictures, and that his distress was
increasing every minute. She attributed this distress to a fit of
shyness--a shyness that delighted her, for it proved the presence of a
passionate longing tempered by respect. How pleased she was to be the
object of a desire that expressed itself with such modesty! It enabled
her to measure more correctly the gulf that separated her little
René--as she already called him in her thoughts--from the bold and
dangerous men with whom she usually mixed. His looks were full of love,
though devoid of insolence, and contained an amount of suffering that
finally decided her to lead him on to the declaration which she had
promised herself to provoke.

'_Mon Dieu!_' she suddenly cried, catching hold of the iron bar that
runs round the walls, and turning to René with a smile that was meant
to hide some sharp pain. 'It's nothing,' she added, in reply to the
poet's look of anxiety. 'I twisted my foot a little on this slippery
floor.' Then, standing on one leg, she put out the foot that she said
was hurt, and moved it about in the soft boot with a graceful effort.
'Ten minutes' rest and it will be all right, but you must be my crutch.'

As her pretty lips uttered this ugly word she took hold of René's arm,
the poet little thinking, as he almost piously helped her along, that
this imaginary accident was but one episode more in the comedy of love
in which he was playing so innocent a part. Taking care to throw her
whole weight upon him, she managed to redouble his passionate ardour and
to completely intoxicate him by the rhythmic and communicated movement
of her lithe and supple limbs. The trick succeeded only too well. He
could scarcely speak, overwhelmed as he was by the proximity of this
woman and penetrated by the subtle perfume she exhaled. It was as much
as he dared do to look at her, and then he found beside him a face both
proud and playful, a cheek of ideal colouring, and a pair of mobile
cherry lips upon which from time to time there hovered a sweet little
smile that meant mischief, though when their eyes met this smile would
change into an expression of such frank sympathy that it dispelled
René's timidity. This she knew by the greater assurance with which he
now supported her.

She had been careful to choose one of the most isolated rooms--the
_salle_ Lesueur--for acting the episode of her twisted foot. Arm-in-arm
they passed through a small passage, and, crossing one of the galleries
of the French school, entered a dark, deserted chamber in which were
then exhibited Lebrun's pictures representing the victories of Alexander
the Great. The Ingres and Delacroix gallery, by which this room is now
reached, was not yet opened, and in the centre of the floor stood a
large round ottoman covered in green velvet. Though in the very heart of
Paris, this spot was more secluded than a room in any provincial museum,
and there was no likelihood of being disturbed except by the attendant,
who was himself deep in conversation with his colleague in the next
apartment.

Suzanne took in the place at a glance, and, pointing to the ottoman,
said to René, 'Shall we sit down there for a few minutes? My foot is
much better already.'

A fresh silence fell upon them. Everything seemed to emphasise their
seclusion--from the noises in the Cour du Carrousel that came to them in
a dull murmur through the two high windows to the dim light in the room
itself. But this seclusion, instead of encouraging the poet to declare
his passion, only increased his distress. He said to himself, 'How
pretty she is, and how sweet! She will go, and I shall never see her
again. How stupid she must think me!--I feel quite paralysed near her
and incapable of speech.' 'I shall never have a better opportunity,'
thought Suzanne.

'You are very sad,' she said aloud, bestowing upon him a look of
affectionate and almost sisterly sympathy. 'I noticed it as soon as I
arrived,' she continued, 'but you do not trust me sufficiently to tell
me your troubles.'

'No,' replied René, 'I am not sad. Why should I be? I have everything
that can make me happy.'

She looked at him again with an expression of surprise and mute
interrogation that seemed to say, 'Tell me what you have to make you
happy?' René thought he saw that question in her eyes, but dared not
understand it so. He sincerely believed himself to be so inferior to
this woman that he had not the courage to disclose to her the depths of
his devotion. All Suzanne's delightful confidence, in which he could not
possibly detect any cold calculation, would be destroyed the moment he
spoke, and he therefore went on as if his words referred to the general
circumstances of life.

'Claude Larcher often tells me that I shall never be happier at any
period of my literary career. He maintains that there are four stages in
a writer's life--when he is unknown, when he is applauded by those who
wish to spite his elders, when he is maligned because he is successful,
and when he is forgiven because he is forgotten. I am so sorry you don't
know him better--I am sure you would like him. Literature is his
religion!'

'He is rather too artless, after all,' thought Suzanne, but she was too
interested in the result of this interview to give way to her
impatience. She seized upon the words René had just uttered and
interrupted his uncalled-for praises of Claude by saying, 'His religion!
It is true, that is just like you writers. I have a friend who is
undergoing the ordeal, and she is always telling me that a woman ought
to be careful not to bestow her affections upon an artist. He will never
love her as much as he loves his art.'

She repeated these supposititious words of her imaginary friend with a
look of pain upon her face; her cherry lips were parted by a
half-stifled sigh that hinted at heartrending confidences and a
presentiment of similar experiences in store for herself.

'Why, it is you who are sad,' observed René, struck by the sudden
change in her pretty face.

'Now for it!' she thought, and then replied, 'That doesn't matter. What
difference can it make to you whether I am sad or not?'

'Do you think that I take no interest in you?' rejoined René.

'A little, perhaps,' she replied, shrugging her shoulders; 'but when you
have left me will you think of me otherwise than as of some sympathetic
woman whom you have casually met and speedily forgotten?'

She had never looked so lovely in René's eyes as when she uttered these
words, which went as far as she dared go without jeopardising her game.
Her gloved hand rested on the green velvet sofa quite close to the poet,
and he was bold enough to take it. She did not draw it back. Her eyes
seemed fixed upon some vision far away, and it was doubtful whether she
had even noticed René's daring action. There are women who have a
delightful way of paying no heed to the familiarities which some people
_will_ take with them. René pressed her dainty hand, and, as she did
not resent it, he began to speak in a voice trembling with emotion:

'I have no right to be surprised at your thinking that of me. Why should
you think that my feelings towards you differ from those of other men
you meet? And yet if I told you that since the day when I first spoke to
you at Madame Komof's my life has changed for ever--ah! do not
smile--yes, for ever! If I told you that since then I have had but one
desire--to see you again; that I came to your house with a beating
heart; that every hour since then has increased my madness; that I came
here in a dream of rapture, and that I shall leave you in despair! I see
you do not believe me! People are willing to admit the existence of
these sudden and lifelong passions in novels, but do such things ever
happen in real life?'

He stopped, amazed at the boldness of his own words. As he finished
speaking there came over him that strange sensation that seizes us when
in our dreams we hear ourselves revealing some secret to the very person
from whom we ought most to hide it. She had listened to him with her
eyes still fixed on vacancy, and still wearing her look of abstraction.
But her eyelids quivered, her breath came short and quick, and her
little hand trembled as it lay in his. This was such a startling and
delightful surprise that it gave René courage to go on.

'Forgive me for talking to you like this! If you only knew--it may be
childish and silly--but when I saw you for the first time I seemed to
recognise you--you are so like the woman I have always dreamt of meeting
ever since I have had a heart. Before meeting you I only thought I
lived, I only thought I felt. What a fool I was! And what a fool I am! I
have gone and undone myself in your eyes. But at least I have told you
that I love you--you know it now. You can do with me as you will. My
God! how I love you, how I love you!'

As he gazed at her in rapt admiration and repeated the words that seemed
to relieve the feelings that raged within him he saw two great tears
fall from Suzanne's eyes and slowly make their way down her pink cheeks.
He did not know that most women can cry like that at will, especially if
they are at all nervous. These two wretched tears drove his delirium up
to its highest pitch.

'You are crying! he exclaimed; 'you----'

'Don't finish your sentence,' cried Suzanne, putting her hand on his
lips and then moving a little further off. Her eyes remained fixed upon
his face, and in them might be read both passion and a kind of startled
surprise. 'Yes, you have reached my heart. You have awakened feelings of
whose existence I had not the faintest suspicion. I am afraid--afraid of
you, afraid of myself, afraid of being here. We must never see each
other again. I am not free. I ought not even to have listened to your
words.' She stopped; then, taking his hand in hers this time, she went
on: 'Why should I deceive you? All that you feel perhaps I feel too, but
I swear to you that I did not know it until a moment ago. The feeling of
sympathy to which I yielded, and which made me come and join you here
this morning--my God!--I understand it now, I understand! Fool that I
was not to have known how easily the heart is ensnared!'

Fresh tears started from her eyes, and René was so agitated by all that
he had said and heard that he could only murmur, 'Tell me that you
forgive me!'

'Yes, I forgive you,' she replied, squeezing his hand so hard that she
hurt him. 'I feel that I love you too,' and then, as though suddenly
awakening from a dream, she added, 'Good-bye--I forbid you to follow me.
This is the last time we shall meet.'

She rose. Her face wore a threatening look, and it was clear that her
feelings of honour were now thoroughly roused. There was no longer any
thought of fatigue or of a sprained foot. She walked straight out, and
with such an angry mien that the poet, utterly crushed by what he had
undergone, saw her depart without doing anything to stop her. She had
been gone some minutes before he rushed off in the direction she had
taken. But he did not find her. Whilst he was trying first one staircase
and then another she had crossed the courtyard and jumped into a cab,
which rapidly bore her, exulting and in ecstasy, to the Rue Murillo.

Whilst René was employed in seeking means to get her to reconsider her
hasty decision he would have no time to reflect upon the rapidity with
which his Madonna had led him to make, and had herself made, a
declaration of love. So much for her exultation. The recollection of the
poet's words, of his face beaming with love, and his eyes eloquent with
passion, enchanted her as with a promise of most perfect happiness. So
much for her ecstasy. She was already drawing up her plans for the
future. He would write to her, of course--but to his first two letters
he would get no answer. On receipt of his third or fourth letter she
would pretend to believe in his threats of suicide and drop upon him at
home--to save him! Just as her thoughts had carried her as far as this,
chance, which is sometimes as sarcastic as an ill-tempered friend, made
her eyes fall upon Baron Desforges walking along the Boulevard
Haussmann. He was probably going to her house to ask her to lunch out
with him. She looked at the pretty little gold watch that hung from her
bracelet and saw that it was only twenty minutes past twelve. She would
be home in good time, and, thoroughly pleased with her morning's outing,
she took a keen delight in pulling down the little window-curtain as she
passed quite close to the Baron without being seen.

CHAPTER XII

CRUEL TO BE KIND

When René Vincy had got as far as the Museum gates without finding
Suzanne a crowd of contradictory ideas burst so suddenly upon him that
he was lifted, metaphorically speaking, off his feet. Suzanne had not
been mistaken in her calculations, the double blow she had dealt the
young poet paralysing all his powers of analysis and reflection. Had she
simply told him that she loved him he would probably have opened his
eyes and perceived the striking contrast between the angelic attitude
assumed by Suzanne and the bluntness of this declaration. He would have
had to acknowledge that the angel's wings were very loosely attached if
they could be so easily laid aside. But instead of committing the
mistake of laying them aside the angel had spread her bright pinions out
wide and disappeared. 'She loves me, and will never forgive me for
having dragged that confession from her,' said René to himself.

He fully believed that she had gone away resolved never to see him
again, and all his thoughts became concentrated upon that idea. How
could he hope to shake the resolution of a creature so sincere that she
had been unable to conceal her feelings, so saint-like that she had
immediately regarded her involuntary confession as a crime? And René
again saw her before him with terror written on her face and tears
starting from her eyes. Lost in these thoughts, he walked straight
before him, unable to bear the sight of a human being, even were it
Emilie, his dear confidante. Hailing a cab, he told the driver to take
him to Saint-Cloud. This was the first name that rose to his lips,
because Suzanne had described to him two _fêtes_ at which she had been
present in the palace when quite a girl. On getting out of the cab he
felt a savage delight in plunging into the denuded wood. A pale February
sun lit up the bleak wintry landscape and the dry leaves cracked under
his tread as he strode along. Now and then, through a network of
blackened trunks and naked branches, he could see the dreary ruins of
the old palace and the blue waters of the little lake upon which, in
bygone days, Madame Moraines had seen the unhappy Prince, since killed
at the Cape.

The impressions produced by his surroundings and by these memories of a
tragic past did not distract the poet's thoughts from the one idea that
hypnotised him, as it were--by what means he could conquer the will of
this woman whom he loved, who loved him in return, and whom he was
determined to see again at all costs. What was to be done? Call at her
house and demand admittance? Inflict his presence upon her by
frequenting the houses she visited? Waylay her at street corners and at
theatres? No--he felt that he could not do anything that might furnish
Suzanne with a single reason for loving him less. It was to her that he
looked for everything, even for the right of beholding her. The memory
of the ideals he had cherished in the first years of his manhood and the
purer years of his youth inspired him with serious thoughts of doing
absolutely nothing to approach her, of obeying her as Dante would have
obeyed Beatrice, Petrarch his Laura, Cino da Pistoia his Sylvia--those
noble poets of the ages of chivalry who gave voice to the lofty
conceptions of an imaginative and holy love full of ideal devotion. He
had so often dipped with delight into the _Vita Nuova_ and devoured the
sonnets these dreamers wrote their lady-loves. But how could such
literature, of almost ascetic purity, hold its own against the poison of
sensuous passion which, unknown to him, Suzanne's beauty and
surroundings had instilled into his blood? Obey her! No--that he could
not do. Fresh ideas welled up within him, and he sought to calm his
overwrought nerves by exercise, the only palliative for the terrible
mental agonies he was suffering.

Night fell--a wintry night preceded by a short, dismal twilight. Worn
out by the excess of emotion, René at last decided to adopt the only
course that could be put into immediate execution--that of writing to
Suzanne. On reaching the village of Saint-Cloud he entered a _café_,
and there, on a beer-stained blotting-pad, with a spluttering pen,
disgusted with the paper he used and the place he was in, disturbed by
the noise of billiard balls and blinded by the smoke of the players'
pipes, he wrote, under the insolent gaze of a dirty waiter, first one
letter, then another, and finally a third. How horrified he would have
been had Suzanne seen him sitting there! But, on the other hand, he felt
that he could not wait until he got home to tell her what he had to say,
and in the following terms, that would have greatly surprised Baron
Desforges had he read them and been told that they were addressed to his
Suzette of the Rue du Mont-Thabor, he gave vent to his excessive grief:

'I have written you several letters, madame, and torn them up, and I am
not sure that I shall send you this one, so great is my fear of
displeasing you by the crude expression of sentiments which I am sure
would not displease you if you really knew them. Alas! we cannot bare
our hearts, and will you believe me when I tell you that the feelings
which prompt me to write this letter have nothing in them that would
offend the most sensitive and pure-minded woman--not even yourself,
madame? But you know so little of me, and the feeling which, with the
divine sincerity of a soul that abhors concealment, you have permitted
me to see, has been such a surprise that, by the time I am writing these
lines, it has probably been already banished and effaced from your heart
for ever. If that be so, do not answer this letter--do not even read it.
I shall know what to make of your silence, and will bow to your
decision. I shall suffer cruelly, but my gratitude to you will be
eternal for having procured me the absolute and unalloyed delight of
seeing the Ideal of all my youthful dreams in the flesh. For such
happiness I can never be sufficiently grateful, even were I to die of
grief through having met you only to lose you. You crossed my path, and
by your existence alone you have proved that my ideal was no myth.
However hard my lot may one day be, this dear, divine memory will be to
me a talisman, a magic charm.

'But, unworthy as I am, should the feeling that I read in your eyes this
morning--how beautiful they were at that moment, and how I shall always
remember them!--should, I say, that feeling conquer your virtuous
indignation, should that sympathy with which you reproached yourself
still live in your heart, should you remain, in spite of yourself, the
woman who wept when she heard me confess my love and adoration--then I
conjure you, madame, to wrest some pity from that sympathy. Before
confirming the sentence to which I am quite ready to submit--that
terrible sentence never to see you more--let me ask you to put me to one
single proof. My request is so humble, and so subservient to your will.
Hear it, I beg. If I have guessed rightly from the all too short and
fleeting conversations we have had, your life, though apparently so
complete, is devoid of many things. Have you never felt the need of
having near you a friend to whom you could confide your troubles, a
friend who would never speak to you again as he once dared to do, but
who would be content to breathe the same air as yourself, and to share
your joys and sorrows--a friend on whom you could rely, whom you could
take or leave at your sweet will--in a word, a thing of your own, whose
very thoughts would be yours? Such a friend, with no desire beyond that
of serving you, regretting only that he has not always done so, and
entertaining no criminal hopes whatever, is what I dreamt of becoming
before that interview in which my feelings were stronger than my will.
And I feel that I love you sufficiently to realise that dream even now.
Nay, do not shake your head. I am sincere in my entreaties, sincere in
my determination never to utter a word which will make you repent your
forbearance if you decide to put me to this proof. Will it not be time
enough to banish me from your presence when you think me in danger of
breaking the promise I now make?

'My God! how empty my phrases seem! I tremble at the thought that you
will read these lines, and that is why I can scarcely write them. What
will your answer be? Will you call me back to that shrine in the Rue
Murillo where you have already been so kind and so full of indulgence
that the memory of the minutes spent there falls like balm upon my
aching heart? That poor heart beats only for you in obedient and humble
admiration. Say--oh! say that you forgive me. Say that you will let me
see you once more. Say that you will let us try to be friends. You would
say all this, I know, if you could read what is in my heart. And even if
you do not speak those blessed words, there shall be no murmuring, no
reproaches, nothing but eternal gratitude--gratitude as deep in
martyrdom as it would have been in ecstasy. I have learnt to-day how
sweet it is to suffer through those one loves!'

It was six o'clock when René posted this letter. He gazed after it as
it disappeared in the box, and no sooner had it left his hand than he
began to regret having sent it, the anguish of suspense respecting the
result being greater than his sufferings of the afternoon. In his
disturbed state of mind he had entirely forgotten his daily habits and
the fact that he had never stayed from home a whole day without giving
some previous explanation. He sat down to dinner in the first restaurant
he came across, without a thought of his people at home, and completely
absorbed in speculations as to what Suzanne would do after reading his
effusion. The first thing that awoke him from his state of
semi-somnambulism was the exclamation of Françoise when, having reached
home on foot about half-past nine, he opened the door and found himself
face to face with the big, clumsy maid, who nearly dropped the lamp with
fright.

'Oh! sir,' she cried; 'if you only knew how uneasy you've made Madame
Fresneau--it's sent her into fits.'

As Emilie ran out into the passage to meet him René said, 'You don't
mean to say that you've been upset by my not coming home? I couldn't
help it,' he added in an undertone as he kissed her; 'it was on _her_
account.'

Emilie, who had really spent a most wretched evening, looked at her
brother. She saw that he too had been greatly agitated, and that his
eyes were burning feverishly; she had not the courage to reproach him
with selfishness in paying no regard to her own unreasonable
susceptibilities--though he knew them so well--and replied in a whisper,
as she pointed to the half-open door of the dining-room: 'The Offarels
are here.'

These simple words sufficed to give a sudden turn to René's feelings.
His fever of suspense was dispelled by a more pressing fear. During the
sweetest moments of his walk through the Louvre that morning the memory
of Rosalie had been able to give him pain--even when he was with
Suzanne! And now he was obliged to unexpectedly face--not a vision--but
the girl herself, to meet those eyes which he had avoided in such
cowardly fashion for days past, to gaze upon that pallor which he
himself had caused. A sense of his treachery once more came over him,
but this time it was more painful and acute than ever. He had spoken
words of love to another woman before breaking off his engagement with
her whom he justly regarded as his betrothed.

He entered the dining-room as if he were walking to the scaffold, and
had no sooner come under the full light of the lamp than he saw by the
look in Rosalie's eyes that she read his heart like an open book. She
was seated between Fresneau and Madame Offarel, working as usual, her
feet resting on the supports of an empty chair upon which she had placed
her ball of wool and her father's hat; this, as René knew well enough,
was only an innocent ruse to get him to sit near her when he came home.
She and her mother were knitting some long mittens for old Offarel, who
had now got hold of an idea that he was going to have gout in his
wrists. Her fanciful parent was there, too, drinking, in spite of his
imaginary ills, a glass of good strong grog and playing piquet with the
professor. It was Emilie who had proposed the game in order to
discourage general conversation, and so be able to give herself up to
thoughts of her absent brother, whilst Angélique Offarel had been
helping her to unravel some skeins of silk. A soft light illumined this
quiet, peaceful scene, symbolical, in the poet's eyes, of all that had
so long constituted his happiness, and which he had now given up for
ever. Fortunately for him the professor immediately made his loud voice
heard, and so put an end to his further reflections.

'Young man,' cried Fresneau, 'you can boast of having a sister who
thinks something of you, I can tell you! She was actually proposing to
sit up all night! "Something must have happened to him. He would have
sent a wire." For two pins she would have sent me off to the Morgue. It
was no use my suggesting that some one had kept you to dinner. Come,
Offarel, it's your deal.'

'I had to go into the country,' replied René, 'and I lost the train.'

'How badly he tells them!' thought Emilie, admiring her brother as much
for his unskilfulness, which in this case was a sign of honesty, as she
would have admired him for Machiavelian cleverness.

'You look rather pale,' observed Madame Offarel aggressively, 'aren't
you well?'

'Shall I make room for you here, Monsieur René?' asked Rosalie, with a
timid smile; 'I'll take away papa's hat.'

'Give it to me,' said old Offarel, perceiving a place for it on the
sideboard; 'it will be safer here. It's my Number One, and mamma would
scold me if any harm came to it.'

'It's been Number One for such a long time,' cried Angélique, with a
laugh. 'Look here, papa, here's a real Number One,' she added, holding
up René's hat under the lamp-light and comparing its glossy nap with the
shabby silk and old-fashioned shape of her father's headgear, much to
the latter's disadvantage.

'But nothing is too good for Monsieur René now,' observed Madame
Offarel with her usual acrimony, venting the rest of her displeasure
upon Angélique, whose action had annoyed her. 'You'll be lucky if your
husband is always as well dressed as your father.'

René was seated by Rosalie's side, and let the epigram of the terrible
_bourgeoise_ pass unnoticed, taking no part either in the rest of the
conversation, which Emilie wisely led round to cookery topics. Madame
Offarel was almost as keen on this subject as she was on that of her
feline pets. Not content with having recipes of her own for all kinds of
dishes, such as _coulis d'écrevisses_, her triumph, and _canard sauce
Offarel_, as she had proudly named it, she also kept a list of addresses
where specialities might be obtained. Treating Paris like Robinson
Crusoe treated his island, she would, from time to time, start out on a
foraging expedition to the most remote quarters of the capital, going to
some particular shop for her coffee and to another for her _pâtes
d'Italie._ She knew the exact date on which a certain man received his
consignment of Bologna sausages, and when another got his Spanish olives
in.

The slightest incidents of these excursions were magnified by her into
events. Sometimes she would go on foot, and then her comments on the
improvements she had noticed, on the increase in the traffic, and on the
superiority of the air in the Rue de Bagneux were inexhaustible. At
other times she would go by omnibus, and then her fellow-passengers
formed the subject of her remarks. She had met a very nice woman who was
very fat, or a young man who was very impertinent; the conductor had
recognised her and said good morning; the 'bus had nearly been upset
three times; an old gentleman--'decorated'--had had some trouble in
alighting. 'I really thought he would fall, poor, dear old man!'

The insignificant and superfluous details upon which it pleased the poor
woman's simple mind to dilate generally amused René, for the
_bourgeoise_ sometimes hit upon some curious figures of speech in her
flow of words. She would say, for instance, when speaking of a
fellow-passenger who was paying attentions to a cook laden with
provisions, 'Some people like their pockets greasy,' or of two persons
quarrelling, 'They fought like Darnajats'--a mysterious expression which
she had always refused to translate.

But that evening there was too pronounced a contrast between the state
of romantic excitement into which his interview with Suzanne had thrown
the poet and the meanness of the surroundings in which he had been born.
He did not stop to think that similar contrasts are to be found in every
form of life, and that the substrata of the fashionable world are
composed of mean rivalries, of disgusting attempts to keep up illusory
appearances, and of compromises of conscience compared with which the
narrow-mindedness of the middle classes is a proof of the most
delightful simplicity.

He looked at Rosalie, and the resemblance between the girl and her
mother struck him most forcibly. She was pretty, for all that. Her oval
face, pale with evident grief, had an ivory tint as she bent down over
her knitting in the lamp-light, and when she raised her eyes to his the
sincerity of the passion that animated her shone forth from beneath her
long lashes. But why were her eyes of precisely the same shade of colour
as her mother's? Why, with twenty-four years between them, had they the
same shape of brow, the same cut of the chin, and the same lines of the
mouth? But how unjust to blame this innocent child for that resemblance,
for that pallor, for that grief, and even for the silence in which she
wrapped herself! Alas! that it should be so, but when we have wronged a
woman it is easy enough to find an inexhaustible source of unjust
complaints against her.

Rosalie had unwittingly committed the crime of adding remorse to the
feelings brought into play by René's fresh passion. She represented
that past which we never forgive if it becomes an obstacle between us
and our future. False as most women are in matters of love, their
perfidy can never sufficiently punish the secret selfishness of the
majority of men. If René had had the sorry courage of his friend Claude
Larcher, and looked himself straight in the face, he would have had to
confess that the real cause of his irritation lay in the fact that he
had deceived Rosalie. But he was a poet, and one who was an adept at
throwing a veil over the ugly parts of his soul.

He therefore compelled himself to think of Suzanne, and of the noble
love which had sprung up and was burning within him; for the first time
he succeeded in forming a resolve to break definitely with Rosalie,
saying to himself, 'I will be worthy of _her!_' _She_ was the lying
wanton who, with her luxurious surroundings, her rare science of dress,
her incomparable power of aping sentiment, and her seductive,
soul-troubling beauty, had such immense advantages over sweet,
simple-hearted Rosalie. Her beauty once more rose up before René's
enslaved imagination just as old Offarel was giving the signal for
departure by rising and saying to Fresneau, 'I've won fourteen _sous_
from you--ha! ha! that'll keep me in cigars for a week. Come,' he added,
turning to his wife, 'are you ladies ready?'

'Since we are all here,' replied Madame Offarel, emphasising the word
'all' by darting a look at René. 'When are you coming to dinner? Would
Saturday suit you? That's M. Fresneau's best day, I believe?' The
professor replying in the affirmative, she now addressed herself to the
poet direct, 'Will that suit you, René? You'll be more comfortable at
our place, I can assure you, than amongst all those grand people on whom
your friend Larcher goes sponging.'

'But, Madame----' exclaimed the poet.

'Oh--that's enough!' cried the old lady; 'I always remember what my dear
mother used to say: a crust of bread at home is better than a stuffed
turkey at another's table.'

Although this epigram of Rosalie's mother was simply nonsense when
applied to the unhappy Claude, whose acute dyspepsia seldom permitted
him to drink even a glass of wine, it wounded René as deeply as if it
had been thoroughly deserved. This was because he saw in it yet another
sign of deep and ever-increasing hostility between his old associations
and the new life for which since that morning he so eagerly and ardently
longed. These people had a right to him--a fuller right than Madame
Offarel knew, for was he not bound to Rosalie by a secret understanding?
A fresh fit of irritation against this poor child came over him, and he
said to himself more firmly than before, 'I shall break it off.'

Having arrived at that decision, he went to bed, but could not sleep.
The current of his ideas had changed. He was now thinking of his letter.
It must have reached Suzanne by this, and a series of unforeseen dangers
spread itself out before his imagination. Suppose her husband were to
intercept the letter? A thrill ran through him as he thought of the
misery his imprudence might bring down upon this poor woman, in the
power of a tyrant whose brutality he could well imagine. And then, even
if the letter reached Suzanne safely, what if it displeased her? And he
was sure that such would be the case. He tried to remember the words he
had written. 'How can I have been such a fool as to write like that?' he
asked himself, and hoped that the letter might miscarry. He knew that
such things happened sometimes when people wished the contrary. Why
should it not happen now that he expressly desired it? He grew quite
ashamed of his childishness, and attributing it to the nervous
excitement of the evening, began once more to curse Madame Offarel's
mean-spirited remarks. His irritability against the mother paralysed all
pity for the daughter. He passed the night in this fashion, tossed
between two kinds of tortures, until he fell into that deep morning
sleep which is more tiring than refreshing; on awaking, the first
thought that occurred to him was his desire, stronger than ever, to
break off his engagement.

What means could he employ? A very simple expedient presented itself to
his mind at once--ask the girl to make an appointment. It was so easy,
too! How many times had she not let him know when Madame Offarel would
be out, so that he could come to the Rue Bagneux sure of finding her
alone with Angélique; and how considerate the latter had always been in
leaving the two lovers together and in peace! This was undoubtedly the
most loyal means to adopt. But the poet could not even bear to think of
such an interview.

In such crises we are sometimes assailed by a contemptible form of pity
that consists in unwillingness to look upon the sufferings we have
caused. We do not mind inflicting torture upon the woman we cast off,
but we do not care to see her tears. It was only natural that René
should try to spare himself this insufferable pain by writing--the
resource of the weak in every kind of rupture. Paper can stand a good
deal, people say. He got out of bed and commenced to write--but the
words would not flow easily, and he was obliged to stop. Meanwhile the
hour for the postman's first call was drawing near. Although it was
perfect madness to expect Suzanne's reply by that delivery, the lover's
heart beat faster when Emilie entered the room with his letters and the
newspaper, as was her wont when she knew he was awake. How happy would
he have been had one of the three envelopes she brought him borne that
long, elegant hand which, though seen but once, he would have recognised
amongst a hundred others! No--these were only business letters, which he
tossed aside so petulantly that his sister stared at him in surprise.

'Are you in trouble, René?' she asked, and as she put the question
there was a look of such intense devotion and love in her eyes that she
appeared to her brother like a guardian angel come to save him from the
troubles of that cruel night. Why should he not charge Emilie with the
utterance of those words he dared not formulate himself, and which he
could not manage to put into writing? He had no sooner conceived this
plan of getting over the difficulty than he hastened to carry it out
with the impetuosity common to all weak minds, and with tears in his
eyes he began to disclose the unfortunate plight he was in with regard
to Rosalie.

He told his sister exactly how the whole matter stood. Whilst his mind
was in that state of excitement frequently caused by confessions, fresh
ideas originated within him and strengthened the resolve he had made.
They were, however, such as ought to have occurred to him at the time he
was entering into those relations which he now regarded as guilty ones.
When the intimacy had first sprung up between them--a purely innocent
but clandestine affair--he had not told himself that strict morality
forbids any secret engagement of this kind, and that to accustom a girl
to elude the watchfulness of her parents is a most reprehensible
proceeding. He had not told himself then that a man of honour has no
right to declare his love until he has satisfied himself as to its
stability, and that, although the ardour of passion excuses many
weaknesses, a mere desire for obtaining fresh emotions makes such
weakness sinful. These reproaches and many more were now in his mind and
on his lips, and as he looked in Emilie's face he plainly saw what pain
his conduct had caused his confiding sister. In a narrow home circle
such dissimulation is productive of much grief to those who have been
its victims. But though Madame Fresneau felt as though she had been
imposed upon, she vented all her anger upon the girl, and upon her
alone, exclaiming, after her brother had told her what he wanted her to
do, 'I never would have believed her so deceitful.'

'Don't blame her,' said René shamefacedly. If their relations had
remained hidden, whose fault was it? He therefore added: 'I am the
guilty one.'

'You!' cried Emilie, folding him in her arms. 'No, no; you are too good,
too loving. But I will do what you wish, and I promise you I'll be as
gentle as possible. It was the best thing you could have done to come to
me. We women know how to smooth things down. And then, you know, it is
only right that you should put an end to such a false position. The
sooner it's over the better, so I shall go to the Rue Bagneux this very
afternoon. If I can't see her alone I will ask her to meet me
somewhere.'

In spite of the confidence she had expressed in her own tact, Emilie
became so impressed with the difficulties of her mission that, during
lunch, she wore a look of anxiety that made her husband feel uneasy and
awakened in René feelings of remorse. In employing a third person to
tell Rosalie the truth was he not acting in a particularly cruel manner
and adding unnecessary humiliation to unavoidable pain? When his sister
came to him ready dressed, just before starting on her errand, he was on
the point of stopping her. There was still time--but he let her go. He
heard the door close. Emilie was in the street--now she was in the Rue
d'Assas--now in the Rue du Cherche-Midi.

But such thoughts as these were soon dispelled by the fever of anxiety
with which he awaited the arrival of the next post. Suzanne must have
had his letter that morning. If she had replied at once the answer would
come by the next delivery. This idea, and the approach of the moment in
which its correctness would be tested, at once cut short his pity for
the girl he had cast off. Complex as are the subtle workings of the
heart, love simplifies them wondrously. René was tortured by the
suspense felt by all lovers, from the simple soldier who expects an
ill-spelt letter from his sweetheart to the royal prince carrying on a
sentimental correspondence with the brightest and most heartless Court
beauty. The man wishes to go on with his usual occupations, but his mind
is on the alert, counting the minutes and unable to endure the torment
of waiting. He looks at the clock, and imagines all kinds of
possibilities. If he dared he would go twenty times an hour to the
person from whom he gets his letters, and ask whether there is nothing
for him. Such is the agony of waiting, with all its intense anxiety, its
mad conjectures, the burning fever of its illusions and disenchantments.
Every other feeling of the soul is burnt up and, consumed in this fire
of impatience. When Emilie came back, after having been gone an hour and
a half, René seemed to have entirely forgotten on what errand he had
sent her, but there was such a look of pain on his sister's face that it
quite startled him.

'Well?' he ejaculated, in a tone of suspense.

'It is all over,' she replied, almost in a whisper. 'Oh, René, how I
misjudged her!'

'What did she say?'

'Not a word of reproach. She only wept--but, oh, how bitterly! Her love
for you is greater than I thought. Her mother had gone out with
Angélique--how cruel it sounds!--to order the things for Saturday's
dinner. I, for one, am not going to that dinner. When Rosalie opened the
door, she turned so pale that I thought she was going to faint. She
guessed everything before I said a word. She is like I am with you--it
is a kind of second sight. She took me into her room. It is full of
you--of your portraits, of trifles that remind her of places you've been
to together, and of cuts from the illustrated papers about your play. I
began to deliver your message as gently as I could, but I give you my
word I was quite as upset as she was. She said, "It is so good of him to
have asked you to come. You at least will not think me foolish in loving
him as I do." And then she went on, "I have been expecting it for some
time. It seemed too good to be true. Ask him to let me keep his
letters." Oh, my God! I can't tell you any more about it now. I am so
afraid for you, my dear René; I am so afraid that her grief may bring
you ill luck.'

CHAPTER XIII

AT HOME

The letter posted by René at Saint-Cloud had duly reached its
destination on the morning of the day that was to complete poor
Rosalie's unhappiness. Suzanne had received it with the rest of her
correspondence a few minutes before her husband entered her room to get
his morning cup of tea, and she was just engaged in reading it when
Paul's kind and jovial face appeared in the doorway.

'_Bon jour_, Suzon,' he cried in his deep but cheery voice, adding, as
he sometimes did, 'my fair rose.' This allusion to de Musset's
well-known romance was always accompanied by a kiss. In Paul's eyes de
Musset was the embodiment of youth and love, with just a spice of
suggestiveness, and it was the favourite joke of this simple-hearted
fellow to look upon himself as Suzanne's lover, and not as a lawful
spouse. He was one of those strange husbands who say to you in
confidence, 'I have no secrets from my wife--that is the only way to
cure her of curiosity.' Meanwhile, he was as much in love with his 'fair
rose' as ever, and proved it by the manner in which he tenderly kissed
her on the neck.

But she checked further demonstrations of affection with the words, 'Get
along! See to the tea, and let me finish my letter.'

She knew that Paul would never ask her anything about her
correspondence, and it gave her such intense pleasure to read the poet's
ardent phrases that she was not satisfied with going over them once, but
read them a second time, and then, folding up the letter, slipped it
into her bodice. She looked so supremely happy as she sat down to the
table and took up the fine porcelain cup filled with fragrant tea that
Moraines, wishing to tease her, said, in a voice that was meant to be
gruff, 'If I were a jealous husband, I should think you had received a
letter from your sweetheart, you look so happy, madame. And if you knew
how nice you look like that,' he added, kissing her arm just above the
wrist, where the delicate pink skin, perfumed and warmed by her
luxurious bath, looked so inviting.

'Well, sir, you would be right,' she replied, with a roguish air. Women
take a divine pleasure in saying in fun things which, though true, will
not be believed. It procures them that mild sensation of danger which
titillates their nerves so delightfully.

'I hope this sweetheart of yours is a nice fellow?' asked Paul, quite
amused by what he considered a good joke.

'Very nice.'

'And may I know his name?'

'You are too inquisitive. Guess.'

'Bless me--no!' cried Paul. 'I should have too much to do. Ah! Suzanne,'
he added, suddenly changing his tone to one that betrayed deep feeling,
'what pain it must be to harbour suspicions! Just fancy me being jealous
of you, and having to sit in the office all day whilst my heart was
being torn by doubts! Ah! well,' this with a shrewd look, 'I would set
Desforges to watch you!'

'It's lucky there was no one to hear his "joke,"' thought Suzanne when
she was alone. 'He has a silly way of saying these things, too, when
he's out.' René's letter had, however, put her in such a good temper
that she forgot to get angry, as she would do when she thought her
husband too utterly simple. Such is the logic of these pretty and
light-hearted sinners; they will exercise all their wits in blindfolding
a man, and then blame him for stumbling. The fact of having deceived him
does not satisfy them--he must only be deceived up to a certain point.
If he goes beyond that it is too much--he makes them feel uneasy, and
they hate him for it--sincerely. Suzanne contented herself with a shrug
of her shoulders and a look of sweet pity. Then she took the letter from
its hiding-place and read it for the third time.

'It's quite true,' she said aloud; 'he is not like other men.'

Thereupon she fell into a deep reverie, in which she saw the poet as she
had seen him waiting for her at the Louvre, standing just under the
large Veronese canvas with his face turned a little to the right. How
agitated he had been when his eyes met hers! How young he was! How his
lips had trembled when he told her a little later that he loved
her--those full, fresh lips which she could have bitten like some fruit,
after having caressed his fair cheeks and the soft silken beard that
adorned his manly face. But the fruit was not yet ripe; she must learn
to wait. She sighed. Her calculation that the poet would write that very
letter, and so soon after their meeting, too, had proved correct. She
had made up her mind not to reply to it, nor yet to the second. For this
second letter she waited one, two, three days. Though her confidence in
the strength of the passion with which she had inspired René was
unshaken, she was somewhat startled when, on the afternoon of the third
day, just as her brougham was turning the corner of the Rue Murillo, she
saw him standing where she had seen him once before. She was very
careful to look as though she had not noticed him, and put on her
saddest expression, her most dreamy eyes and an air of sweet resignation
that would have moved a tiger. The comfortable brougham, furnished with
a number of dainty and useful knick-knacks, was immediately transformed
in René's eyes into a prison van containing a martyr--a martyr to her
husband, a martyr to her home, a martyr to her love, and a martyr to her
virtue.

She was not acting a very great lie, either, as she passed René. As she
saw the pallor on his cheeks, caused by three days' anguish, and the
look of despair in his eyes, she would have given much to be able to
stop the brougham, to get out or to make him get in, and to exclaim as
she carried him off, 'I love you as much as you love me!' Instead of
that she drove on to do her shopping and pay her calls, sure now that
the second letter so impatiently expected would not be long in coming.
It came the same afternoon, but just when its arrival presented most
danger. And for this reason. Having gone home immediately after meeting
Suzanne, René had written her four pages in feverish haste, and in
order that they might reach her sooner and more safely, he had sent them
about five o'clock by a commissionaire; the letter was therefore handed
to Suzanne by her manservant whilst Desforges was with her. He had come,
as he often did at that hour, with a dainty little present; this time it
was a pretty needle-case in old gold which he had picked up at a sale.

No sooner had she recognised the writing on the envelope than she said
to herself, 'The least sign of emotion and the Baron will smell a rat!'
As sometimes happens, the fear of betraying her agitation made it more
difficult for her to conceal it. She took the letter, looked at the
address as we do when trying to guess from whom a communication comes,
tore it open and skimmed its contents, after having first cast a glance
at the signature; then, getting up to place it amongst some others on
her desk, she said:

'Another, begging letter! It's astonishing how many I've had lately. How
do you manage with them, Frédéric?'

'I have a very simple plan,' replied the Baron. 'Fifty francs the first
time of asking, twenty francs the second, nothing the third. My
secretary has orders to that effect. That's one of the fads I don't
believe in--charity! Just as if it were through want of money that the
poor are poor! It's their disposition that has made them so, and that
you'll never change. Look here, take this person who is sponging on you
to-day; I'll bet twenty-five pounds that if you inquire about him you'll
find that fortune, or at least a competency, has been in his grasp ten
times during his life. If you were to set him up afresh he would be in
the same plight in a few years from now. Not that I mind giving, and as
much as people want--but as to believing that money so spent is of the
least use, that's a different thing altogether. And then these
benefactors and lady patronesses--I know them; it's all advertisement--a
means of making their way into Society and of getting hold of good
people.'

'That's enough,' said Suzanne, 'you are a terrible sceptic.' And with
that delicate irony that women sometimes use in avenging themselves upon
the man who compels them to lie, she added, 'You're not one to be easily
duped.'

The Baron accepted this flattery with a smile. Had his suspicions been
aroused, that phrase alone would have lulled them. The most cunning men
have that weak point by which they can always be conquered--vanity. But
suspicion of any kind had been far from the Baron's mind. Suzanne
deceived him as easily as René had deceived his sister. Those who see
us every day are the last to perceive what would be evident to the
merest stranger. That is because the stranger comes to us without any
preconceived idea, whilst our daily associates have formed an opinion
about us which they do not take the trouble to verify or change. The
Baron therefore did not remark that Suzanne was that afternoon a prey to
intense agitation, which lasted during the whole of his visit. He stayed
rather longer than usual, too, telling her all sorts of club stories,
while she pottered about in the room, under some pretence or other, with
one eye on her letter, seizing it once more with delight as soon as
Desforges had at last decided to go.

'He is an excellent fellow,' she said, 'but such a bore!' A fortnight's
passion had sufficed to bring her to this stage of ingratitude, and she
now found compensation for the restraint of the past hour in going over
each phrase and word of the poet's mad letter. This time it was an
ardent prayer--an appeal to a woman's love. He no longer spoke of
friendship. The air of melancholy she had assumed in the brougham had
told.

'Since you love me,' he said, 'have pity on yourself, if you have no
pity on me.' What would have appeared to Suzanne an intolerable piece of
conceit in anyone else touched her deeply as a mark of absolute
confidence in her love. She recognised it for what it really
was--worship so devout that it did not harbour a shadow of doubt. It
would have been so natural if René had accused her of having cruelly
trifled with his feelings, but such an hypothesis was far from the
poet's thoughts. 'Poor boy!' she said to herself, 'how he loves me!'
Then, thinking of Desforges by way of comparison, she added, 'It is the
best way to make sure of not being deceived!' She took the letter out
once more. Its language was so touching, and it was full of such sincere
grief; then, again, the cosy _salon_, just at that hour, reminded her so
forcibly of the poet and of his first visit, and she asked herself
whether she had not put him sufficiently to the proof. 'No,' she
concluded, 'not yet.'

This burning letter could, indeed, have but one reply--to tell René to
come and see her there, and it was in his own home that she wanted to
see him, in the little room he had described to her. She would appear
before him in a state of distraction, and under pretence of saving him
from suicide. The third letter would undoubtedly furnish her with that
pretence, and she decided to await its coming, already enjoying in
anticipation the delight of seeing René once more. Amidst the whirl of
excitement that her sudden and unexpected appearance would cause the
poet there would be no room for reflection. All the hateful
preliminaries of a false step, impossible to discuss with a man so
inexperienced as he, would be dispensed with. It was true there was the
presence of the rest of the family to consider. Suzanne would not have
been the depraved woman she was, even in this crisis of true passion, if
this detail had not given her plans the charm of doubly forbidden fruit.

She waited for that third letter with intense longing. The time slipped
rapidly by. She dined out, went to the theatre, and paid calls, her mind
entirely absorbed in that one thought. As luck would have it, Desforges,
having no doubt been lectured by Doctor Noirot, had not asked for any
appointments in the Rue du Mont-Thabor that week. She knew that this was
merely a postponement. Even after becoming René's mistress she would
still have to continue her relations with the man who supplied so many
of her luxurious wants. This seemed to her as natural as the fact of
being Paul's wife. 'What does that matter, since you know I love only
you?' is what such a wife will say to her lover when he gets into one of
those ridiculous fits of jealousy that so ill become a man in that
position. And these women are never more sincere than in uttering that
phrase. They know full well that love is totally different from duty,
interest, or even pleasure. Though Suzanne saw nothing particularly
shocking in the plural life she was leading, she was glad that the
opportunity was afforded her of devoting herself entirely to her new
passion for a day or two. In all this, however, she was still the
courtesan, one of those creatures who, when they do fall in love, become
real artists of sentiment, feeling as delicately on certain points as
they are abominably wanton in others.

'What if he should really have taken it into his head to go away!' This
was the thought that struck her when she at last received the much
desired third letter, consisting of one long, heartrending
farewell--without a word of reproach.

She trembled lest René might have had recourse to the proceeding
counselled by Napoleon, who, with his imperial good sense, said, 'In
love the only victory is flight.' In behaving as she had done she had
staked all. Would she win? What she had foreseen had come to pass with a
precision that both delighted and frightened her. The third letter bore
the imprint of such deep despair that, on reading it a second time, this
subtle actress, with all her experience, was seized by a fresh fear more
terrible than the first--the fear that René might really have destroyed
himself. In vain did she argue with herself that if the poet had had
real intentions of going away he would have mentioned it in the letter,
and that a handsome young man of twenty-five does not kill himself on
account of the silence of a woman he believes to be in love with
him--her anguish was none the less real and intense when she reached the
Rue Coëtlogon a few hours after having received the letter.

It was two o'clock. She stopped for a moment at the corner of the
street, gazing in wonderment at this provincial corner of Paris, whose
picturesqueness had so charmed Claude Larcher on the evening our story
opens. The grey clouds hung low in the wintry sky, and the bare branches
of the trees stood out drearily against them. The cries of a few
children playing at soldiers amongst the ruins at the back alone broke
the silence. The strange appearance of the peaceful little street, the
perils attending the step she was about to take, and the uncertainty of
the result, all combined to bring Suzanne's excitement to its highest
pitch, though she smiled as she thought to herself that there was no
reason for believing René to be at home unless he were hopelessly
waiting for a reply to his last letter. But when the _concierge_ had
told her that M. René was in, and had pointed out the door, her wits at
once came back to her.

Like all strong-minded women, she possessed the characteristics of a man
of action. A plain and circumscribed course of events inspired her with
determination and courage to carry out her plans. She rang the bell.
Heavy footsteps were heard approaching, and the face of Françoise
appeared in the doorway. At any other time she would have smiled at the
look of amazement which the simple maid did not even try to conceal.
Colette Rigaud had once called upon the poet to get him to make some
slight alteration in her part, and Françoise, recovering somewhat from
her surprise, no doubt thought that this was a similar visit, for
Suzanne could hear her say, as she opened the last door on the right:
'Monsieur René, there's a lady asking for you. . . . A very pretty
woman--probably some actress.'

She saw the poet come out of his room and turn as pale as death on
recognising her. She glided quietly, along the passage which Raffet's
prints had turned into a small Napoleonic museum and entered René's
room. He was obliged to get out of the way to let her pass; the door
closed, and they were alone.

'You--you here!' cried René. He could only gaze at her as she stood
before him looking so slim and elegant in the dark costume she had
chosen for this visit, for he was in that state of speechless agitation
caused by some unexpected event that suddenly raises us from the depths
of despair to the height of bliss. At such moments we are assailed by a
whirlwind of ideas and sensations that threatens to turn our brain. Our
legs give way beneath us and our hands tremble. It is happiness, and it
gives pain. René was obliged to support himself against the wall, his
eyes still fixed upon that handsome face that he had despaired of ever
seeing again. A small detail completed the madness of his joy. He
noticed that Suzanne's hands trembled a little too, and, as it happened,
her emotion was sincere.

To the passionate feelings that inspired her there was now added the
fear of displeasing the man she was resolved to win. On entering this
chamber, where she was sure no woman had ever been before her, her plan
of action was as clearly traced as plans of that kind can be. Room must
always be left for the unforeseen. Suzanne felt that with René there
would be many difficulties which with others might have been lightly and
safely glided over. His simplicity both charmed and frightened her. In
him she could rely, it was true, upon the impulse of the passions--more
daring than cool calculation--but to arouse unnoticed that impulse in
the poet when she was herself suffering its tortures was no easy matter.

Whilst he stood gazing at her after the door had closed she felt a
momentary hesitation; then, almost forgetting her plans and her part,
she threw herself upon his neck and stammered out, 'I was in such
terrible fear. Your letter frightened me so that I could not help
coming. I have had an awful struggle, and could not hold out any longer.
My God, my God! What will you think of me?'

He held her in his arms, and a thrill ran through her. Then he lifted
her lovely head and commenced to kiss her, first on her eyes, those eyes
whose sadness had so touched him as she passed him in her brougham--next
on her cheeks, those cheeks whose ideal form had so charmed him from the
first--finally on her sweet mouth, which gave his kisses back. What did
he think of her? How could any idea shape itself in his mind, absorbed
as it was by that union of the lips which is in itself complete and
intoxicating possession? What delight, too, that embrace was to Suzanne!
Through all the horrible complexities of her feminine diplomacy one
sincere desire had grown stronger and stronger within her--that of
meeting with a fresh and spontaneous, natural and thrilling passion.
This passion she found in René's breath; it stirred the very depths of
her soul and made her almost faint with emotion. Ah! this was youth,
with its complete and absolute abandonment, expressing neither thought
nor word; oblivious of all, except the immediate present; effacing all,
except the fleeting sensation whose sweetness and whose very outlines
seem to lie in a kiss.

This woman, corrupted by the influence of a Parisian cynic of fifty and
degraded by that horrible venality which has not the excuse of
necessity--this Machiavelian courtesan, who had regulated her passion
for René like a game of chess--tasted for one second that divine joy.
The punishment of those who let calculation enter into their love lies
in the remembrance of their calculation in the moment of ecstasy. Though
intoxicated by the mad kisses she had given and received, Suzanne
clearly saw that she could not abandon herself at once to her lover's
arms. She therefore broke away from him and said, 'Let me go now that I
have seen you and now that I know you are alive. I beg you to let me go.
O René!'--she had never called him by this name before--'don't come
near me!'

'Suzanne,' replied the poet, maddened by the burning nectar he had found
on those lips--the certainty of being loved--'don't be afraid of me.
When shall we have another hour like this to ourselves? Let me beg of
you to stop. See,' he added, receding still farther from her, 'I will
obey you. I obeyed you even when I found it so very hard. Ah! you
believe me now!' he exclaimed, seeing that Suzanne's face no longer
expressed such intense fear. 'Will you be very nice?' he continued, in
that playful tone which takes so well with women, and which will make
any one of them, be she a lady of high degree or a simple girl, call a
man a 'darling.' 'Sit down there in that arm-chair, where I have so
often sat at work, and then be nicer still, and try to look as though
you were not on a visit.'

He had again come closer and had forced her into the chair; then he took
away her muff and began to unbutton her coat. She submitted to this with
a sad smile, like one who yields against her will. This smile was the
death agony of the Madonna, the last act in the comedy of the Ideal
performed by Suzanne. He also took off her bonnet, a _toque_ that
matched her coat. He was now kneeling before her and gazing at her with
that look of idolatry a woman is sure to provoke in her lover if she but
give him one of those proofs of affection that flatter a man's vanity
and love--the lower passions and the higher passions of the heart. The
poet said to, himself: 'How she must love me to have come here, she whom
I know to be so pure, so pious, and so devoted to her duty!'

All the lies she had so carefully told him came back to his mind like
further proofs of her sincerity as he said: 'How delighted I am to have
you here, and just now, too! Don't be afraid--we are quite alone. My
sister has gone out for the whole afternoon, and the slave'--this was
the name he gave Françoise, in order to amuse Suzanne--'the slave is
busy in the kitchen. And I have you here! You see, this is my own little
kingdom, this room--the place in which I have endured so much! There is
not one of these corners, not one of these objects that could not tell
you what I have suffered these past few days. My poor books'--and he
pointed to his low bookcase--'were left unopened. These dear old
engravings I scarcely looked at. The pen with which I had written to you
I never touched. I sat just where you are sitting now counting the hours
as they passed. God! what a week I have spent! But what does it all
matter now that you are here and I can gaze at you? It is happiness to
me to tell you even my troubles!'

She listened with half-closed eyes, giving herself up to the music of
his words, and following out her plan in spite of the passions that
welled up within her. Does the knowledge of danger as he faces his
adversary drive from the mind of a skilful swordsman the lessons he
learnt in the school? René's assurance that they were alone in the
house had sent a thrill of joy through Suzanne, and the glance she had
thrown round the little room, so neatly and carefully kept, had proved,
to her delight and satisfaction, that she had not been mistaken
concerning her lover's past. Everything here spoke of a studious and
secluded life, the pure and noble life of an artist who surrounds
himself with an atmosphere of beautiful dreams. Above all, the poet
himself pleased her, with his love-lit eyes and the playful way in which
he treated her, and she began to see that this exchange of confidences
respecting their mutual sufferings would lead her to her goal without
the least risk of diminishing her prestige in his eyes.

'And don't you think that I have suffered too?' she replied. 'Why should
I deny it? You speak of your letters--God knows that I did not want to
read them! I kept the first one in my pocket a whole day, having neither
the courage to tear it open nor to burn it. To read your words was to
hear you speak once more, and I had determined that it should not be! I
had prayed to my guardian angel so long and so fervently for strength to
forget you. How I struggled to do so!' Here the Madonna appeared for the
last time. She lifted her eyes to heaven--or rather to the ceiling, from
which hung two or three little Japanese dolls--and in her glorious orbs
were reflected the wings of her guardian angel as he flew far, far
away. . . .

Fixing her blue eyes once more on René, she sighed in that tone of
abandonment that proves a conquered heart: 'I am lost now, but what of
that? I love you so dearly that I do not care what happens--only I
cannot bear to picture you in distress.'

Here she broke down, her bosom racked with convulsive sobs, and as the
poet tenderly kissed her tears away her head once more fell upon his
breast. She lay there for a few moments listening to the wild beating of
his heart--then, like a tired child, she entwined her arms about his
neck, and heaved a sigh of peace.

CHAPTER XIV

HAPPY DAYS

When Suzanne left the house in the Rue Coëtlogon her next meeting with
René was already arranged. After taking a few steps down the little
street she stopped and turned her head, although it would have been more
prudent to walk straight on, as she always did in the Rue du
Mont-Thabor. But so firm a hold had passion obtained upon this usually
cold-blooded woman that she smiled and waved her hand at the poet as he
stood watching her from the window of the room in which she had enjoyed
such a triumph--for all her calculations had turned out perfectly
correct. Getting into a cab at the corner of the Rue d'Assas, she drove
to the Bon Marché, where she had ordered her carriage to meet her; on
the way the details of the conversation she had had with René recurred
to her, and, going over them again, she congratulated herself upon the
manner in which she had acquitted herself. As soon as the first real
step has been taken in an intrigue of this kind the discussion of
further arrangements becomes as easy and as delightful as it was before
hateful and difficult.

Suzanne had been the first to attack this delicate question. 'I want you
to promise me something. If you do not wish me to reproach myself with
this love as with a crime, promise me that you won't go out into Society
at all. You are not accustomed to that kind of life, and you ought to be
at work. You would fritter away your magnificent talents and genius in
idle nonsense, and I should look upon myself as the cause. Promise me
that you won't go and see anyone'--and in a whisper--'any of those women
who flocked round you the other night.'

How tenderly René had kissed her for those words, in which the author
could read a tribute of devotion paid to his future work and the lover a
delicate expression of secret jealousy. He asked a little timidly,
'Mayn't I come even to your house?'

'To mine least of all,' she replied. 'I could not bear to see you touch
my husband's hand now. You know what I mean,' she added, passing her
fingers caressingly through his hair. He was sitting at her feet, while
she was still in the arm-chair. She bent forward and hid her face on
René's shoulder. 'Don't make me say any more,' she sighed; then, after
a few minutes, 'What I should like to be to you is the friend who only
enters into a man's life to bring him the sweet and noble gifts of joy
and courage, the friend who loves and is beloved in secret, away from
the mocking world that sneers at the purest feelings of the soul. I have
committed a great sin as it is'--here she hid her face in her pretty
hands--'do not let it grow into that series of base and sordid acts
which fills me with such horror in others. Spare me this, René, if you
love me as you say you do . . . But tell me, do you really love me so
much?'

In delivering herself of this pretty batch of lies she had seen in the
face of her simple and romantic victim the rapturous joy with which
these beautiful sentiments inspired him. The Madonna resumed the halo
which she had temporarily laid aside. Then, by a skilful combination of
ruse and affection, by giving to cool calculation an appearance of
tenderest susceptibility, she had led him to agree to the following
convention as being the only one befitting the poetry of her love. He
was to look out for a small suite of rooms somewhere not very far from
the Rue Murillo; he would engage them in an assumed name, and they could
meet there two, three, or four times a week. She had suggested
Batignolles, but it was so cleverly done that he almost imagined he had
hit upon it himself, as indeed upon the rest of _her_ ideas. He was to
start out the very next day, and then write to her, _poste restante_, in
certain initials, at a certain office. All these unnecessary precautions
gave René an idea of the state of slavery in which his poor angel
lived--if such an existence could be called living! 'Poor angel' he had
called her, as she gave utterance to a half-stifled complaint concerning
her husband's despotism and compared herself to a hunted animal, 'how
you must have suffered!' And she had lifted her eyes to the ceiling with
such a well-feigned expression of grief that, years afterwards, the man
for whose benefit all this was done still asked, 'Was she not sincere?'

There was, however, no need for so much theatrical display to make René
joyfully accede to the plan proposed by the clever pupil of Desforges.
Simply out of love for her he would have agreed with pleasure and
alacrity to any kind of scheme she put forward. But the programme laid
before him corresponded well with the romantic side of his nature. It
enchanted the poet to dwell upon the idea of carrying such a delightful
secret with him through life, whilst the phraseology in which Suzanne
had posed as the patron saint of his work had flattered his vanity,
dreaming as he did of reconciling art and love, of uniting indulgence of
the baser passions with that independence and solitude his work
required.

And now René, after so many days of torture, felt as though both his
mind and his heart had wings. So great was his happiness that he did not
even notice the look of pained surprise that his sister wore during the
evening that followed Suzanne's visit. What had Françoise heard? What
had she told Madame Fresneau? That the latter was deeply agitated was
very evident. The profound ignorance of certain women who are both
romantic and pure exposes them to these rude surprises. They interest
themselves in love affairs because they are women, and assist in the
establishment of relations which they believe to be as innocent as they
are themselves. Then, when they see the brutal consequences to which
these relations almost necessarily lead, their surprise is so great that
but for its cruelty it would be comical.

According to the description given her by the servant, Emilie had no
doubt as to the identity of the visitor, and the mere idea of what might
have taken place there in her house filled the staid and pious matron
with horror. Her mind involuntarily reverted to the bitter tears she had
seen on Rosalie's pale cheeks, and as she thought, first of the poor
girl, of whose sincerity she was convinced, and then of the unknown
Society lady for whom in her simplicity she had taken sides, she said to
herself, 'What if René should be mistaken in this woman?'

But she was a sister too--a sister indulgent to a fault, and, after a
feeling of uneasiness which his evident distress had caused her during
the past week, she had not the courage to trouble her brother with
reproaches on seeing him look so happy. This mixture of conflicting
sentiments prevented her from provoking any fresh confidences, and René
was become too discreet to make them. It was impossible for him to speak
of Suzanne now; what he felt for her could not be expressed in words. He
had found suitable apartments almost immediately in a quiet street in
the centre of the Batignolles quarter, just where Suzanne had wanted
them; and almost immediately, too, chance had so willed it that he was
free to devote himself to her entirely. A week had scarcely passed since
Suzanne's appearance in the Rue Coëtlogon when Claude Larcher, the only
one of the poet's friends whom he visited at all often, suddenly left
Paris. He called on René, who had neglected him a little of late, about
half-past six one evening, in travelling garb, his face pale and
agitated. The family were just sitting down to dinner.

'I have only come to bid you good-bye,' said Claude without taking a
seat; 'I am going by the nine o'clock Mont Cenis express, and I shall
have to dine at the station.'

'Shall you be away long?' asked Emilie.

'_Chi lo sa?_' replied Claude, 'as they say in that beautiful land where
I shall be to-morrow.'

'Lucky fellow!' cried Fresneau, 'to be able to go and read Virgil in his
own country instead of teaching donkeys to translate him!'

'Very lucky, indeed!' said the writer with a forced laugh; but when he
took leave of René at the gate, where his cab laden with luggage
awaited him, he burst into sobs. 'It's that beast of a Colette!' he
cried. 'You remember that day you saw her in my rooms? God! how sweet
she looked! And do you remember what she said, as I thought, in a joke?
I can't even repeat it. . . . Well, things have come to such a pass that
life for me here is unbearable, and I must be off for a time. I had no
money, so I was forced to go to a usurer who lent me some at sixty per
cent. Terrible, isn't it? What with the usurer, my old aunt in the
country, to whom I was bad enough to write, my publisher, and the editor
of the "Revue parisienne"--who, by the way, has got me to sign a
contract for copy--I have six thousand francs. As the train carries me
along every turn of the wheel will seem to go over my heart, but at any
rate I shall be getting away from her; and when she gets my letter,
written from Milan, what a grand revenge it will be!' He rubbed his
hands with joy, then, shaking his head, said, 'It has been like Heine's
ballad of Count Olaf all along. You know how he talks of love to his
betrothed while the headsman stands at the door--that headsman has
always been at the door of Colette's chamber. But when he assumed the
form of a Sappho I could bear it no longer. Good-bye, René, you will
not see me back till I am cured.' Since then there had been no news from
the unhappy fellow, of whom René generally thought when comparing the
noble woman he idolised with the savage and dangerous actress. Claude's
absence was the reason why René never put in an appearance now at the
green-room of the Théâtre Français. Why should he expose himself to
the rancour of Colette's tongue, which no doubt wagged loudly enough
when on the subject of her fugitive lover? Thanks to this absence, too,
all bonds between the poet and the world into which Larcher had
introduced him were severed.

Under the influence of his growing passion for Suzanne, the author of
the 'Sigisbée' had ignored the most elementary rules of etiquette. Not
only had he neglected to call upon the different women who had so
graciously invited him, but he had not even paid Madame Komof his duty
visit. The Comtesse, who was large-minded enough to understand the
unconventional ways of genius, and kind enough to forgive such
irregularity, said to herself, 'He was probably bored here,' and, though
not angry with him, had not asked him again. She was busy, too, for the
moment in bringing out a Russian pianist who pretended that he was in
direct communication with the soul of Chopin. René, feeling safe in
that quarter, had heard with regret that Madame Offarel was greatly
offended that neither he nor Emilie had come to the famous dinner whose
ingredients it had taken her a week to collect from all parts of Paris.
Fresneau had gone all alone.

'A fine expedition you sent me on!' he said to his wife on his return.
'When I mentioned your headache the old woman gave a grunt that almost
knocked me down, and when I told her that René was gone to see a sick
friend--a very queer excuse, by the way, but let that pass--she said,
"In some palace, I suppose!" During dinner poor Claude was the only
topic of conversation. She pulled him to pieces till he hadn't a rag on
his back. "He is an egoist and an ill-mannered fellow, he is in bad
health and has no future!"--and goodness knows what she didn't say! If
it hadn't been for a game of piquet with Offarel--and even that the sly
old fox won. Oh!--Passart was there too. Remind me about recommending
him to the Abbé for the college. He's a nice young fellow. Between you
and me, I think Rosalie rather likes him.'

Emilie could not help smiling at her husband's marvellous perspicacity.
She had often heard Madame Offarel complain of the pressing attentions
of the young drawing-master, and she immediately understood that he had
been asked at the last minute to prove that, besides René, there were
other suitors on hand. Thereupon the Offarels, who had never allowed
four days to pass without coming in after dinner, had not set foot in
the Rue Coëtlogon for a fortnight. When they at last decided to resume
their visits, at their wonted hour, they were escorted by the
aforementioned Passart, a tall, fair, gawky lad in spectacles, with a
shy look on his freckled face. Emilie saw at once that their motive in
bringing him was to arouse her brother's jealousy, and the old lady was
not long in showing her hand.

'Monsieur Offarel is engaged this evening,' she said, 'so Monsieur
Passart was kind enough to bring us. Give Monsieur Jacques that seat
near you, Rosalie.'

Poor Rosalie had not seen René since receiving his cruel message
through Emilie. In passing from the Rue Bagneux to the Rue
Coëtlogon--in reality a short, but to her an interminable distance--she
had suffered agonies, and her heart beat fast as she entered the room.
She had, however, the courage to steal a glance at her old lover, as a
kind of protest that she was not responsible for her mother's mean
calculations, and the courage also to reply coldly, as she took a seat
in a corner and placed a chair before her, 'I want this chair to put my
wool on. I'm sure Monsieur Passart won't deprive me of it.'

'There's room here,' said Emilie, coming to the poor girl's aid, and
giving the young man a seat next to herself. Rosalie firmly refused to
play the _rôle_ marked out for her, although she well knew what a
terrible scene awaited her at home. And yet it would have been so
natural if spite had inspired her with that petty mode of revenge. But
women with truly delicate feeling, who know what real love is, are
strangers to such mean spite. To inspire a fickle lover with jealousy
would horrify them simply because it would mean flirting with another,
and such a proceeding is beneath them. Such scrupulous loyalty in spite
of all is a touching proof of love, and one which ensures a woman a
place in a man's regrets for ever.

For ever! But as far as regards the present hour and the immediate
result, these loyal hearts get left far behind, and the flirts win. When
the years have fled, and the lover, grown old, shall institute
comparisons, he will understand the unique position held by her who
would not cause him pain--even to win him back. Meanwhile he runs after
the jades who make him drink the bitter cup of that degrading but
intoxicating passion, jealousy. It is only fair to René to say that, in
sacrificing Rosalie for Suzanne, he believed that he was acting in the
interests of true love. When, next morning, his sister praised the
girl's noble behaviour, he was quite sincere too in his reply, smacking
as it did, though, of naïve self-conceit.

'What a pity that such fine feeling should be wasted!'

'Yes,' repeated Emilie with a sigh, 'what a pity!'

Had René had a thought for aught else than his love, the tone in which
his sister had uttered these words would no doubt have revealed to him
the change that her opinions had undergone with regard to Madame
Moraines. His love, however, entirely absorbed him. His days were now
parcelled out into two kinds--those on which he was to meet Suzanne and
those which he was to spend without seeing her. The latter, which were
by far the more numerous, were passed in the following manner. A great
part of the morning he spent in bed, dreaming, for he was already
beginning to feel a diminution of vital energy. Then he bestowed much
time upon his toilet, lavishing such attention on details as would
convince a woman of experience that a young man was beloved. His toilet
finished, he wrote to his Madonna. She had imposed upon him the sweet
task of sending her an account of all his thoughts day by day. As for
herself, he had not a line of her writing. She had said, 'I am so
watched, and never alone!' And he pitied her as he devoted himself to
compiling the detailed diary that she had demanded.

This pose of a sentimental Narcissus gazing incessantly upon himself and
his love was well in keeping with that deep-rooted vanity which he
possessed in common with nearly all writers. Suzanne had not
sufficiently reflected upon the anomalous nature of a man of letters to
have taken vanity into account. It pleased her to read René's words
when he was not there simply as a burning reminder of the kisses they
had exchanged. When the poet had paid his morning devotions to his
divinity in this fashion it was time for lunch. Immediately after that
he would go to the Bibliothèque in the Rue de Richelieu and work
unremittingly at the notes for his 'Savonarola,' which he had again
taken up, during the whole of the afternoon, and sometimes right on into
the evening. He worked now without ever having, as in writing the
'Sigisbée,' those flashes of talent which pass from the brain to the
pen, charging the memory with a flow of words and drawing the images
with such precision and life-like resemblance that the effort of
production becomes a strong but delightful intoxication that ends in a
state of agreeable exhaustion.

To build up the scenes of the drama he was now writing, René had to
keep his mind in a painful state of tension, and at a worse tension
still to turn his prose sketches into verse. His brain no longer served
him in making happy finds. For this there were several important and
distinct reasons. The first--a physical one--was the waste of vital
energy inseparable from all reciprocated passions; the second--a moral
one--the constant hold that Suzanne had upon his mind and the inability
to entirely forget her; the last--an intellectual and secret one, though
most powerful--was the deadening influence which success exercises upon
the greatest genius.

Whilst conceiving and writing he was beginning to think of the public.
He saw before him the house on the first night, the critics in their
stalls, the fashionable people scattered here and there, and, seated in
a box, Madame Moraines. He already heard the shouts of applause, as
demoralising for a dramatic author as the number of editions is for a
novelist. The desire to produce a certain effect took the place of that
disinterested, natural, and irresistible impulse which is a necessary
condition in true art. Still too young to possess the skill with which
literary veterans can write impassioned phrases in cold blood, and even
well enough to deceive the best critics, René sought in himself that
source of ideas which he no longer found. His play would not take shape
in his mind in a natural and easy way. The goat-like features of the
Florentine monk and the tragic figures of the terrible pontiff Alexander
VI., the violent Michael Angelo, the sour Machiavelli, and the
formidable Cæsar Borgia would not clothe themselves in flesh and blood
before his eyes, in spite of the heaps of notes and documents he had
collected and the pages erased again and again. Frequently he would lay
down his pen and gaze up at the blue sky through the lace curtains of
his window; he would listen to the noises in the house--the closing of a
door, Constant playing, Françoise grumbling, Emilie passing quietly,
Fresneau walking heavily--and then find himself counting how many hours
he had still to wait before seeing Suzanne.

'How I love her! How I love her!' he would exclaim, increasing his
passion by the fervour with which he uttered these words. Again, he
would delight in conjuring up a vision of the room in which these
meetings, awaited with such feverish impatience, took place. He had been
more lucky in finding a suitable place than his inexperience had led
Suzanne to expect, It was a small suite consisting of three rooms,
rather prettily furnished by Malvina Raulet, a brunette of about
thirty-five, whose sweet voice, demure looks, and general air of
propriety had at once enchanted René. This lady, whose attire was
almost severe in its simplicity, gave herself out as a widow. She lived
ostensibly on a small income left her by the late M. Raulet, an
imaginary individual whose profession she defined in a vague way by
saying that 'he was in business.' As a matter of fact, the shrewd and
cunning landlady had never been married. She was, for the moment, being
'protected' by a respectable physician--a well-known man and the father
of a family--whom she had so thoroughly taken in by her fine manners
that she managed to get five hundred francs a month out of him,
regularly paid on the first, like the salary of a Civil Servant.

Being before all else a thrifty soul, she had conceived the idea of
increasing her monthly income by letting out three of the rooms she did
not want, and as there were two doors to her flat she was able to give
this small suite a separate entrance. The almost elegant furniture it
contained had come to her as a weird inheritance. For ten years she had
been the mistress of a madman, whose family, desiring for some reason to
keep this insanity secret, had paid her well. Upon her unhappy lover's
death, Malvina had, according to promise, received twenty thousand
francs and the contents of the house in which she had played such a
strange part. This woman's dark and hideous past René was never to
know. In that gay city, where clandestine attachments abound, how many
of the thoughtless youths who hire such places know aught of the history
of those who pander to their wants? Nor could the poet think for one
moment that this woman with the irreproachable manners had seen right
through his demands at the first glance. He had told her that he lived
in Versailles, and that he was obliged to come to Paris two or three
times a week. The name he gave her was that of his favourite hero--the
paradoxical d'Albert in 'Mademoiselle de Maupin;' but as he wrote it at
the bottom of the agreement which the careful Madame Raulet got him to
sign, he placed his hat on the table, and there the crafty landlady
could plainly read the real initials of her new lodger.

'If you would like my servant to undertake the cleaning of the rooms,'
she said, 'it will be fifty francs a month extra.'

This exorbitant demand was made in such a cool tone, and Madame Raulet,
moreover, looked so thoroughly respectable, that René dared not discuss
the amount. He could, however, not help eyeing her somewhat
distrustfully. Her appearance, it was true, disarmed all suspicion. She
wore a dark dress, well but simply made. Round her neck hung one of
those long gold chains so much worn at one time by the French
_bourgeoisie_--a chain which had no doubt once belonged to her sainted
mother. She wore her watch in her belt; a brooch containing a lock of
white hair--that of a beloved father, most probably--fastened her neat
lace collar, and through the meshes of the silk mittens that covered her
long hands might be seen her wedding ring.

As René was leaving, this virtuous creature remarked, 'The house is a
very quiet one, sir. You are a young man,' she added with a smile, 'and
you will not be offended if I make so bold as to say that the least
noise on the stairs at night, or anything like that, would be sufficient
reason for my asking you to leave.'

René felt himself blush as she spoke. In his excessive simplicity he
feared lest the worthy widow might give him notice after his first
meeting there with Suzanne. This ridiculous fear impelled him to visit
his landlady immediately Madame Moraines had gone under pretence of
speaking to her about some trifling matter he wanted done. She received
him with the polite air of a woman who knows nothing, understands
nothing, and has seen nothing, although she had been watching Suzanne's
departure from her window, and had, with the practised eye of a
Parisian, taken that lady's measure at a glance. Malvina now saw through
it all--her lodger's visitor was a woman in the first ranks of Society,
but he himself, although well dressed, showed by the cut of his beard,
his hair, his walk and his whole appearance that he belonged to a lower
station in life. The landlady thought that most probably the rent would
be paid by the mistress, and not by the lover, and she regretted not
having asked more than five hundred francs a month besides the fifty for
attendance. The whole of the flat cost her fourteen hundred francs a
year, and she paid her maid-of-all-work forty-five francs! No matter,
she would make up for it in the extras--in the firing, the washing, and
especially in the meals, if ever the young man asked her to provide
lunch, as she had offered to do.

'She is an excellent woman, and very attentive,' said René, when
Suzanne questioned him about Madame Raulet. Was the poet wrong in being
so trustful? Of what use would it have been to indulge, as Claude would
have done, in a pessimistic analysis of this woman's character, except
to conjure up thoughts of blackmail and other dangers, all entirely
imaginary, as it happened? For although Malvina was far from being a
saint, she was at the same time a _bourgeoise_ who had a sincere
hankering after respectability, and who proposed, as soon as she had
made her little pile, to return to her native town of Tournon, and lead
a life of absolute purity. The fear of seeing her name figure in the
report of some evil-smelling case was sufficient to deter her from
practising any pronounced form of imposition. So far did her love of
respectability carry her that she wove a complicated web of falsehoods
to the _concierge_ about her new lodger. She made out that Suzanne and
René were a happy couple who lived in the country all the year round,
and that they were distantly related to the late M. Raulet. Then, in
order that he should have nothing whatever to do with the said
_concierge_, she herself handed René two keys even before he had asked
for them.

What cared the poet for the real cause of her attentiveness? The young
have sense enough not to go into facts which lend themselves to the
gratification of their desires. This system sometimes leads them along
perilous paths, but they cull many a flower by the wayside and enjoy its
fragrance, nevertheless. When the poet walked across half Paris to reach
his little suite in the Rue des Dames there was a music in his heart
that shut out all dissonant voices of suspicion. His meetings with
Suzanne were generally in the morning. René had never asked himself why
that time of the day was most convenient to his beloved. As a matter of
fact it was the hour when she was most certain of escaping the
watchfulness of Desforges. In the forenoon the hygienic Baron devoted
himself to what was dearest to him on earth--his health. First he had a
bout of fencing, which he called his 'dose of exercise'; then he
galloped through the Bois, which was his 'air cure'; lastly he 'burnt
his acid,' a formula he owed to Doctor Noirot.

The double Madonna, who had studied her man thoroughly, knew that he was
as much a slave to these rules of health as Paul was to those of his
office. She therefore felt a secret pleasure in thinking of her husband
seated at his desk, of her 'excellent friend' bestriding an English
mare, and of her René entering a florist's to buy some flowers
wherewith to adorn the chapel of their love. Roses were his usual
choice, roses red as his darling's lips, roses fair as her blushing
cheeks, fresh and living blooms that filled the air with their sweet and
penetrating perfume. As she was borne towards the harbour of their love
she knew that René would be standing at the window listening to the
rattle of the cabs as they passed. How delighted he would be when hers
stopped before the house! She would ascend the stairs, and there he
would be waiting for her, having softly opened the door so as not to
lose one second of her sweet presence. Then he would hold her in his
arms devouring her with silent kisses that pierced the black lace veil
as they sought her fresh and mobile lips.

Suzanne's great triumph consisted in her ability to preserve her
innocent Madonna-like expression amidst all the madness of their love;
and, by a singular dispensation of nature, too, this strange creature
was entirely devoid of all sense of remorse. She belonged, no doubt by
heredity, being the daughter of a statesman, to the great race of active
beings whose dominant trait is a faculty for distributing their
energies. These beings have the power to make the most of the present
without allowing themselves to be troubled either by the past or the
future. In modern slang we find a pretty phrase to express this power of
temporary oblivion--it is called 'cutting the cord.' Suzanne had
parcelled out her life into three parts--one belonging to Paul, one to
Desforges, and one to René. During the time she devoted to each there
was such absolute suspension of the rest of her existence that she would
have had some difficulty in realising the extent of her duplicity had
she cared to probe her conscience--a proceeding she never dreamt of
whilst the opium of pleasure coursed through her brain. She generally
remained with René till about twelve o'clock, and when she was gone
Madame Raulet would send up his lunch; and he would stay in the rooms
for the rest of the day, ostensibly to work, for he had some of his
papers there, but really to gloat over the reminiscences that floated in
the very air he breathed. When night was beginning to fall he would wend
his way homewards, under the twinkling gas lamps that illumined his
route, possessed by a divine languor that seemed to combine and blend
into one harmonious whole all the delights of the day.

CHAPTER XV

COLETTE'S SPITE

This delightful existence had been going on for about two months with
nothing to break its sweet monotony but the pain of parting and the joy
of meeting when, one morning, just as René was about to proceed to the
Rue des Dames, Françoise handed him a letter that made him start, for
on it he recognised Claude Larcher's handwriting. By calling at
Larcher's rooms René had learnt from Ferdinand that the writer had
stopped at Florence and then at Pisa. He had even sent him a letter to
each of these towns addressed _poste restante_, but had received no
reply. He saw by the postmark that Claude was now in Venice, and with
feelings of intense curiosity he tore open the envelope, reading the
contents as he strolled down to the river through the quiet suburban
streets on this fair spring morn that was as fresh and bright as his own
love.

'Venice, Palais Dario: April, 1879.

'My DEAR RENÉ,--I am writing you these lines from your Venice--from
that Venice whence you evoked the cruel features of your Cœlia and the
sweet face of your Beatrice; and as this fairy-like city is, as it
always was, the land of improbabilities, the city of the Undines, which
on these Eastern shores are called sirens, I have, like Byron,
discovered a small furnished suite in a most delightful little palace on
the Grand Canal, a _palazzino_ with marble medallions on its façade,
all ornamented, carved, and engraved, and leaning as badly as I do on my
bad days. As I scribble this letter I have the blue waters of the Canal
Grande under my window and around me the peace of this great city--the
Cora Pearl of the Adriatic, a wretched play-writer would say--like the
silence of a dream. My dear fellow, why have I brought my battered old
heart here of all places--here, where I feel it beat louder and stronger
in the sweet stillness? I must tell you that it is two o'clock, that I
have just breakfasted at Florian's under the arcades after having been
to San Giorgio in Bragora to look at a divine Cima, that I am to dine
to-night with two ladies directly descended from the Doges--fair as the
creations of Veronese--and some Russians as amusing as our friend
Beyle's Korazoff, and that, instead of feeling elated, I have come home
to look at Her Portrait--with a capital H and a capital P--the portrait
of Colette! René, René, why am I not seated in my stall at the
Théâtre Français, gazing at her as Camille in "On ne badine pas avec
l'amour"--a divine play, as bitter as "Adolphe," yet as sweet as the
music of Mozart? Do you remember her smile as she holds her pretty head
on one side and says, "Are you sure that a woman lies with all her soul
when her tongue lies?" Do you remember Perdican and these words: "Pride,
thou most fatal of human counsellors, why art thou come between this
maid and me?" All my story--all our story lies in those few words. Only
it happens that I am the real Perdican of the play, having in my soul
that source of idealism and love, ever flowing in spite of experience,
ever pure in spite of so many sins! And she, my Camille, has been
stained by so much shame that nought can wash her clean! Alas! how sadly
the world treated my flower--when I wished to inhale its fragrance I
found instead a smell as of the grave.

'Come, come, it was not to write you such stuff that I sat down before
my balcony, through the carving of which I can see the gondolas pass.
They glide and slant and turn about, looking so pretty with their slim,
funereal shapes. If each of these floating biers carried away one of my
dead dreams, what an interminable procession there would be on the
dreary waters! Would that I were an etcher! I know what Dance of Death I
would engrave--a flight of these black barques in the twilight, with
white skeletons as gondoliers at the prow and poop, and a row of ruined
palaces for a background. Under it I should write: "Such is my heart!"
After a youth more down-trodden than the grapes in the wine-tubs, and
when I had just emerged from the miserable drudgery of my profession, it