ROMAIN ROLLAND (continued 5)

She returned to Marc and told him the truth. It was not news to him. He did not seem very much moved; he was afraid of his emotion and was anxious to keep his air of assurance. He should not have been obliged to speak, for as soon as he opened his mouth his voice began to tremble; he ran and hid himself in his room to cry. Annette perceived with a mother's insight the anguish of this childish heart in its first encounter with death, and she avoided speaking of the redoubtable subject; but she took him on her knees as she had done when he was a baby. And he, with no thought of complaining at being treated as a baby, took refuge in the warmth of her breast. After they had calmed each other, lulling their fear to sleep and feeling that there were two of them to protect each other, she put him to bed and begged him to be a brave little man, not to be frightened if she had to go out and leave him alone for a part of the night. He understood and promised.

She set out through the dark for the house of tragedy. She wanted to watch by the dead child. Sylvie had emerged from her dejected insensibility. She had not returned to her first furious despair, but the spectacle was not less painful. Her mind was a little unbalanced. Annette saw a smile on her lips. Sylvie raised her eyes as she heard her coming in, looked at her, went to her and said, "She is sleeping."

She took her hand and drew her over to the bed. "See how beautiful she is!"

Her face lighted up, but Annette saw a shadow of anxiety passing over her brow; and when, after a moment, Sylvie repeated in an undertone, "She is sleeping well, isn't she?" Annette met the feverish glance that was waiting for her to say, "She is sleeping. Yes." She said it.

They went and sat down in the adjoining room. The husband was there with one of the workers. They forced themselves to talk in order to occupy their attention. But Sylvie's wounded mind was running away from itself, leaping from one subject to another, without stopping. She had taken up some work which at every moment she threw down again; she took it up and threw it down to listen for sounds from the sleeper's room. Again she said, "How she sleeps!"—her eye wandering over the others in order to convince them, to convince herself. Once she returned to the little bed, and, leaning over the child, uttered endearing words to it. This was cruel for Annette. She wished Sylvie would be silent. Leopold, in a low voice, implored her not to disturb the illusion.

The illusion fell of itself. Sylvie, coming back to her place, took up her work and did not speak again. The others were talking around her, but she no longer heard them. They in turn became silent. A sombre hush hovered over them. Suddenly Sylvie cried out. Without words. A long cry. Throwing herself down on the table, she struck her head against it. Hurriedly they removed the needles and the scissors. When her speech came back to her, it was to curse God: she did not believe in Him, but she had to have someone against whom to avenge herself! Her eyes blazed, and she hurled vulgar oaths at him.

Exhaustion followed. They carried her to bed. She did not stir again. Annette remained beside her until she was unconscious.

Then she went home again, utterly worn out. The streets were pale with early dawn. Marc had not slept. She lay down shivering. But just as she was about to get into bed—it was too much, all she had suffered and had to repress during the last twelve hours!—she ran in her nightgown and bare feet into her son's room and passionately kissed his mouth, his eyes, his ears, his neck, his arms, his hands. "My dear, my dear little boy," she said. "You, you are not going to leave me?"

He was very much upset, disturbed, frightened. He wept with her, more for himself than for the others, though he wept for the others too. He realized now what he had lost; he wept over the affection he had never desired. He remembered the evening when he had been ill and Odette had come in to see him. He was stricken with affection and sorrow. But he thought, "I'm still alive anyway!"

Annette trembled at the thought of beginning another day like the last. Her strength was not equal to it. But the day that followed did not have the terrifying violence of the previous hours. Human suffering, when it reaches its zenith, must descend again. One dies or becomes used to it.

Sylvie had recovered her self-possession. She was livid, with hard lines about her nostrils and lips which later, as they grew fainter, left scars behind. But she was calm, active, busy, with her workers, cutting and sewing her mourning clothes. She gave orders, oversaw things, worked; and her hands, like her expression, were sure and precise. She fitted Annette's dress. Annette was afraid to utter a word that would recall the funeral. But Sylvie spoke of it coldly. She would not leave the details to anyone else. She decided everything. She preserved her unnatural calm to the very end of the ceremony, but with a cold and concentrated rage she had set herself against any religious service. She could not forgive! . . . Till then she had been vaguely sceptical, indifferent, not hostile; and while she laughed at it a little, she had been moved without confessing it on the day when she had seen her beautiful little girl dressed in white for her first communion. . . . Exactly! She had been tricked. . . . That dastardly God! She could never forgive him.

Annette was expecting that the inhuman constraint which Sylvie had imposed upon herself would be paid for by a fresh crisis when they returned to the house. But she was not allowed to stay with her sister. Sylvie harshly forbade it. Annette's presence was intolerable to her. . . . Annette had her son!

On the following day the anxious husband came to tell Annette that Sylvie had not gone to bed. She had not wept, she had not groaned, she was eating her heart out in silence. She had relentlessly resumed her work in the shop, a mechanical duty that was more imperative than life. No one would have perceived her state of mind except for certain accidents, errors that had never happened before. She cut a gown wrongly and afterwards destroyed it without a word, and she hurt her fingers with her scissors. They induced her to go to bed at night, but she remained sitting upright without sleeping, and she did not reply when they spoke to her. And every morning, before appearing in the workroom, she made a visit to the cemetery.

This went on for fifteen days. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, she disappeared. Customers came in and waited. At supper-time she had not returned. Ten, eleven o'clock passed. Her husband feared that something desperate had happened. Towards one o'clock she came in, and that night she slept. No one could find out anything from her. But the next evening she vanished again, and on the two following days she did the same thing. She talked now; she seemed to have relaxed. But she did not say where she had gone. The workers gossiped. Her good husband shrugged his shoulders with pity and said to Annette, "If she is deceiving me I can't be angry with her. She has suffered too much. . . . And besides, if it can only save her from her obsession, well, all right!"

Annette succeeded in catching Sylvie as she was going out, and she tactfully made her understand the anxiety, the suspicion, the pain, which her wanderings caused. Sylvie, who did not want to be stopped at first, seemed to be indifferent to what people might think, but she was touched by her husband's kindness; and, as if she felt a sudden need of unbosoming herself, she led Annette into her room and shut the door. She sat down close beside her and in a low, mysterious voice, with shining eyes, confessed that she went every evening to a circle of initiates who gathered about a table in order to talk with her little girl. Annette listened, horrified, without daring to betray her feelings, while Sylvie, in a soft voice, recounted the child's replies. There was no longer any need to urge her to talk; she delighted in the joy of repeating to herself out loud the puerile words into which she had transfused all the blood of her heart. Annette could not destroy an illusion that gave her sister life. Leopold was ready to encourage her: for his sound common sense this was as good as any other religion. Annette asked the advice of the doctor, who told her to let the sorrow wear itself out.

Sylvie was radiant now. Annette asked herself if she would not have preferred a noble despair to this preposterous joy that profaned death. In the workroom Sylvie no longer concealed her relations with the world beyond the grave; the workers made her describe the séances; it gave them all the shivering pleasure of a popular novel. When Annette came in, she heard them mingling their lively reflexions with the account of the last conversation Sylvie had had with Odette; one apprentice was laughing at it behind the material she was folding up; and Sylvie, so lately an expert in the handling of irony, saw nothing as she babbled away, absorbed in her phantasmagory.

She did not stop there. One evening, without saying anything to Annette, she took Marc with her. She had come to feel once more an exalted affection for him. The moment she saw him her face lighted up. Annette, not finding Marc in the house, guessed what had happened. But she took care not to make him tell her about it when he came in, very late, depressed and unnerved. The child cried in his dreams. Annette lifted him up, calmed him, stroked his head with her tender hands.

In the morning she severely demanded an explanation from Sylvie. Her son was involved, and she spoke directly to the point. This time she did not conceal her disgust and aversion for these dangerous follies, and she angrily forbade her sister to mix the little boy up in them. Sylvie, who, at other times, would have replied in the same tone, bowed her head with an equivocal smile, avoiding Annette's furious look; she did not feel instinctively sure enough of her revelations to expose them to her sister's passionate criticism. She would discuss nothing, she promised nothing; she had a sly, wheedling manner, like that of a scolded cat that still means to do just what it chooses.

She did not venture, however, to carry Marc off again. But she did confide to him what she had heard in her séances; and it was very difficult to prevent their meetings, which Marc distrustfully kept as secret as his aunt. Sylvie told Marc that Odette spoke of him. It was this that bound her to the young boy: Odette had bequeathed him to her. She transmitted messages between the two children. Marc did not really believe in all this; the critical sense of his grandfather defended him against these absurdities, but his imagination was stirred. He listened, interested, repelled. Even while he lent himself to this unwholesome game, he condemned Sylvie severely; and he extended his condemnation to women in general. But this atmosphere of the grave was poisonous for a boy of his age. The horrible buffoonery of life and death gave him a precocious, haunting obsession. He felt surrounded by an odor of decayed flesh. He had moments of suffocation; and, as his mind was not yet strong enough to defend him, his feverish, preadolescent vitality reacted by taking refuge in his troubled instincts, which roved about like animals in the night. A redoubtable flock they were! It seems as if, by a sort of embryogenesis, the psychic organism passes in its evolution through the whole series of animal forms—has to pass through the most bestial stages before it reaches the point where they can be sublimated by intelligence and human will. Fortunately, this return to our savage origins is brief; it is a procession of spectres, and the best thing is to stand aside and let them pass as quickly as possible, doing nothing to arouse their shadowy consciousness. But this hour is not without its dangers, and the most loving watchfulness cannot protect the child from them. For this little Macbeth is the only one who sees the spectres. For the others, those who are closest to him, Banquo's seat remains empty; they perceive the fresh voice, the pure features of the child, but they do not see the formidable shadows that pass in the depths of its limpid eyes. The curious spectator himself hardly sees them. How can he recognize them, since they issue from a world in which he was not born, these instincts of possession, violence and even crime? There is no perverse thought that he does not touch, that he does not taste with the tip of his tongue. Neither of the two women who petted Marc dreamed what a little monster it was they held so close to them.

Little by little Sylvie grew calm. The accounts of her séances ceased to have a mysterious character; she spoke of them unfeelingly, hurriedly. She did not care to dwell on them. Soon she even ceased to mention them except with a certain constraint. And suddenly she stopped speaking of them altogether; she no longer replied to questions. Had she met with some disillusionment she did not wish to acknowledge? Or was she tired of them? She told no one. But in the long conversations she continued to have with Marc the occult world held less and less of a place, and it ended by disappearing. She seemed to have recovered her equilibrium. The passing of the ordeal was only evident to those about her by the appearance of a slight change in her age, an expression that was not more refined through suffering, but rather more material, by features that were a little heavier and a somewhat fuller figure. She still had the same grace, and she was brighter than ever. The powerful need to live avenges itself for the agony that has been endured. And new pains and new pleasures, the leaves of the falling days, the dust of the road, little by little covered the grave in her heart.

XXXI

A deceptive appearance.

Life began again in the Rivière household. But the catastrophe had made a breach in their souls.

The disappearance of a child is a very small event in the general order of things. We are surrounded by death; it should never surprise us. From the moment when we begin to look about us, we see it at work and grow accustomed to it. We think we grow accustomed to it. We know that some day it will come and work its will in our own homes, and we foresee our misery. But there is so much more than misery! Let each one look into his own heart! There are few who will not recognize the revolution that a death has produced in their whole existence. It marks a change of eras . . . Ante, Post Mortem. . . . A being has disappeared. Life in its entirety is affected, a whole kingdom of beings, yesterday the kingdom of the day and to-day that of the shadow. If this little stone, this one stone, falls from the vault, the whole vault falls. Nothingness has no measure. If this little I is nothing, no I is anything. What I love is nothing; I who love am nothing. For I only exist because I love. The unreality of everything that breathes becomes suddenly apparent. And everyone is aware of this, though not in the same fashion, everyone, with all his organs, his instinct, his intelligence, whether he faces it directly or averts his eyes and flees from it.

On the family tree from which the little branch of Odette had been broken off the other branches continued to grow. But the development of three at least of the four was altered.

The least affected was the father. On the day of the funeral his grief was painful; his throat and his chest panted like those of a fallen horse. But a fortnight later he was already caught up again by his business and the powerful demands of his physical life; he was working, eating twice as much as ever, travelling, forgetting.

Of the two women Annette seemed to be the real mother. She could not be consoled. Her grief became all the more bitter the more the traces of the little girl were obliterated. Odette for her was like a chosen child, a child created not of her flesh, but of her need of affection, more hers than Sylvie's, more hers than her son. She accused herself of not having loved her enough, of having begrudged the caresses of which this eager little heart had never had enough. And she persuaded herself that she alone preserved the memory of the child to which the others were false.

Sylvie exhibited now a strange, busy, agitated gaiety. She talked in a high voice, with a wearisome flow of words, flashes of jocularity, harsh tittle-tattle that made her little group of workers burst out laughing. Marc quietly drank it all in when he happened to be there and heard it flying about him. He too had relaxed; he was working less, loafing, running about the streets, always looking for opportunities to do nothing and laugh. His organism was shielding itself against the terror within. . . . What outsider could have suspected it? We are impenetrable to one another; we seem indifferent; we want to unbosom ourselves and we cannot do so. . . . "There is no communion possible in suffering."

But Annette, whose intense devotion to the dead child made her unjust to the living, saw only their egoism. In every way it was trying to return to life and let the stone of memory drop to the bottom; and she was angry with them.

One day, however, one Sunday when Marc had gone out with Leopold to a ball-game, Annette, arriving at Sylvie's, found the door of the apartment open. She went in and heard a long, heavy groan. Sylvie, alone in her closed room, was talking and moaning. Annette withdrew on tiptoe; she reclosed the door on the landing and rang. Sylvie came and opened it; her eyes were red; she said it was a cold and talked with a noisy, rather vulgar animation. She began to tell one of those eternal indecent stories of which she seemed to have an endless supply. Annette's heart sank. Was it possible she was pretending? She was only half pretending. It was herself, far more than others, whom she wished to deceive. An utter despair, without a gleam or an outlet, had brought her to a sort of jocose contempt for life. If she did not want to die, there was no other alternative but forgetfulness and this mask of careless cynicism which had ended by replacing the features of the true face. Nothing meant anything. Nothing was worth the trouble. Propriety, honor, were all humbug! Nothing was worth taking seriously. Laugh at life! Enjoy yourself! Work alone continued to exist, for work was a necessity, and one couldn't get along without it.

Many other things continued to exist beneath all this devastation. Instinct in Sylvie was sounder than thought, and when she threw away everything else Annette and her son remained in her flesh and blood. They were only one person, these three! But this instinctive, almost material, love did not prevent her from cherishing bad feeling. Sylvie had no more tenderness for Annette than she had for herself. She was aggressive and full of mockery in her attitude to her sister, whose earnestness and silent sadness, heavy with memories, irritated her like an unspoken reproach.

A reproach indeed. Annette did not have the charity to spare her. She saw clearly, however, that Sylvie was fleeing from her misery as a hunted animal flees from a dog, and she pitied her. She pitied the misery of human nature, but she despised it for seeking safety at the expense of its dearest treasures, for being always ready to betray its sacred affections in order to elude the savage pursuit of suffering. She was embittered by this; for in her own heart she heard the call of this cowardice in the presence of life, and she scourged it.

Consequently, during these months that followed the disaster, she imposed upon herself an austere discipline of the heart, a proud, pessimistic restraint that concealed her wounded love.

After the dark winter Easter had come. That Sunday morning Annette was wandering about Paris. The sky had blossomed again; the air was motionless. With her soul wrapped in its mourning, she heard the nostalgic calls of the church-bells; and their sonorous net caught her up in its meshes, drew her outside the flood of this indifferent age to the beach where the dead God lay. She entered a church. She had scarcely taken two or three steps before she was stifled by her tears; she had repressed them so long, and they were flowing again. On her knees, with bowed head, in a corner of a chapel, she let them flow. Never had she felt as now the tragedy of this day. She listened to the organ, to the hymns, the hymns of joy. . . . Joy! . . . Sylvie's laughter, with her soul weeping in its depths. . . . Ah, she realized it so clearly to-day: there was no resurrection for the poor dead! And the despairing love for one's own, that age-old love, wearing itself out denying their death. . . . How much more grand and religious this poignant verity was than an illusory resurrection! That passionate self-deception, that heart-breaking self-deception, which could not consent to losing one's beloved ones.

She could not share her thoughts with anyone. Shut up in herself, with the little dead girl, she defended her against the second, the most terrible, of deaths, oblivion. She reacted harshly against herself and against the others. And as every reaction against a way of thinking leads by its recoil to a contrary reaction, her attitude of reproach provoked those who felt themselves hurt by it to exaggerate their own. And the breach widened.

It became almost complete between the mother and the son. Marc grew further and further away from Annette. For years the antagonism had been growing more evident, but until these latter days it had remained, on the child's side, veiled, hidden, cautious. During the long period when he had lived so intimately with Annette, he had been very careful not to fall into any argument with her; he would have been no match for her, and above everything else he wanted peace. He let his mother talk. Thus, one by one, she revealed her weaknesses to him, while he revealed nothing. But now that he had found an ally in his aunt, he no longer concealed his hand. How many times in the past his mother, losing patience with this little mollusc, who drew his mind back into his shell when she wanted to reach it, had said to him, "Come out of your hole! Let's have a glimpse of your head. Don't you know how to talk?"

He knew, Annette could have her satisfaction. He talked now. . . . It would have been better if he had continued to be silent! . . . What a little wrangler! Ah, he no longer hesitated to contradict her. He allowed nothing to pass from his mother's mouth without obstinately cavilling at it. And in what an impertinent tone!

This had happened all of a sudden; and no doubt Sylvie, by maliciously encouraging this warfare, was partly responsible for it. But the real cause lay deeper. This change of attitude corresponded with a change of nature, for the crisis of puberty was approaching. The child was transformed. In a few months he had assumed another character, and his rude and crotchety ways were interspersed with returns of his old taciturnity. There was nothing left of the polite, conciliatory, rather crafty silence of the child who wanted to give pleasure; one felt now something hostile and bristling in him. . . . His brusque, off-hand manner, his flagrant impoliteness, the inexplicable harshness with which he responded to affectionate advances, made Annette's sensibility bleed. Sufficiently armed against the world, she was not at all so against those whom she loved; a single rude word from her son wounded her to tears. She did not show this, but he was not unaware of it. He went on; he seemed to be seeking for things that might be unpleasant to his mother.

He would have been ashamed to behave so with people for whom he cared nothing. But to her he was certainly not indifferent. He clung to her. How? Like the living fruit which, when the hour has come, breaks away from the mother's womb. He was made of her flesh, and to make this flesh his own he tore it.

Marc had many elements that belonged by nature to another race than his mother's. But, strangely enough, it was not through these different elements that he most came into conflict with his mother: it was through those he had in common with her. For his jealous desire for independence was not yet in possession of a personality that properly belonged to him, and every resemblance to his mother seemed to him a sort of threat of annexation. So, to defend himself, he tried to be different. Whatever she said, whatever she did, he was the opposite. Because she was loving, he was insensible; because she was confiding, he shut himself up; because she was passionate, he was cold and cutting. And everything that she fought, everything that was repugnant to Annette's nature—ah, how well he knew these things!—became attractive to him, and he made haste to let Annette know it. Because she cared about her morality, the wilful child considered it the proper thing to regard himself as unmoral and made a point of proclaiming, "Morality is all fiction."

So he declared to his mother, and the credulous Annette took it seriously. She attributed it to the deplorable influence of Sylvie, who amused herself by casting disorder into the little soberly cultivated brain. . . . There they go into the flower-beds, a handful of wild seeds! And she raked the smooth paths the wrong way. She had plenty of good reasons for persuading herself that she was acting in the interest of the child. "That poor little fellow, shut up in a greenhouse, kept locked up in a box! We're going to take him out of his flower-pot!" Even while she loved her sister, she took a lively and cruel pleasure in stealing away from her this heart that was a slip of her own.

The shrewd self-interest of the child in everything that concerned him had perceived the duel that was being waged between the two sisters, and naturally he exploited it. He cunningly kept his favors for Sylvie, and he was much pleased by the jealousy which he aroused in his mother. Annette no longer concealed this. She justified it, with more reason than Sylvie, as being in Marc's interest. Sylvie loved the child and she had plenty of common sense. Her light wisdom was just as good as the weightier wisdom of some other people, but it was not suitable for a boy of thirteen, and the good he got from it was dangerous. If she sharpened in him the appetite for life, she did not give him respect for it; and when respect vanishes too early, look out for a smash! Sylvie was no person to form Marc's taste, except in the matter of clothes. She took him to silly movies and music-halls from which he brought back bewildering songs and images that left little room for serious thoughts, and his work showed the effects of it. Annette was angry and forbade Sylvie to take Marc out. This was a good way of sealing the alliance of the nephew and the aunt. Marc felt that he was persecuted; he discovered that, in our time, the profession of being an oppressed people is remunerative; and Annette learned, to her cost, that of the oppressor is not all tranquillity.

On every occasion Marc now made her feel that he was a victim and that she abused her strength. Well, so be it! She would abuse it to keep him in line. She would not tolerate the frivolity of his language, the unseemly habit he had picked up of making fun of everything, his impertinent blague. To subdue it she opposed him with her severe principles. He had a fine blow to give her in return. For a long time he had been waiting for the chance.

One day when he was finding support in his aunt's words against some prohibition of his mother's, Annette impatiently told him that Sylvie had the right to say and do what she wanted; one couldn't condemn her, but what was good for her was not good for him. He was not to take her as a model. "She is not to be imitated in everything."

Marc listened to the tirade and said carelessly, "Yes, but she has a husband."

Annette could not reply at first; she did not want to understand. What had he said? No, it wasn't possible! And then a blush spread over her forehead. Sitting there, with her hands motionless over her work, she did not stir. Nor did he make any further movement. He was not very proud of what he had said, of what was about to happen. The silence continued a long time. A flood of anger rose in Annette's vehement heart. She let it pass. Pity, irony, took its place. She sighed contemptuously. "Little wretch!" she thought. And at last, as her fingers resumed their task, she said, "And no doubt you consider that a woman without a husband who works to support her child is less worthy of respect?"

Marc lost his poise. He did not reply. He did not excuse himself. He was mortified.

That night Annette did not sleep. So she had sacrificed herself in vain! That the world should blame her was in the order of things. But he to whom she had given everything! How had he known? Who had breathed this thought into his ear? She could not be angry with him, but she was overwhelmed.

Marc slept peacefully. He was not free from remorse, but the sleep was stronger than the remorse. After a good night he would have forgotten it if he had not encountered it again in his mother's anxious look. It annoyed him that his mother had not forgotten as he had. He was sorry, but he could not make up his mind to say so; and, since he was uncomfortable, his childish logic made him angry with his mother.

They did not allude to the scene. But after it things were no longer as they had been before. They were constrained when they kissed each other. Annette no longer treated him wholly as a child.

How had he known? Conversations at school had made him reflect on the name he bore, which was that of his mother. Old allusions, picked up as they had passed in old days in the workshop, which he had not understood, became clear now. Some imprudent words of Sylvie to her sister, in the child's presence. And the enigma this mother was for him, at once irritating and fascinating him, through the aura of passions which, without the power to discern them, his puppy-instinct had scented. Over it all he had built a strange, vague fairy-tale which did not hang together very closely. His birth puzzled him. How could he find out about it? The reply that hurt his mother was partly a trap he was setting for her. In his heart there was a mingled curiosity and bitterness in regard to what had happened, about which he knew nothing. He had never dared to question Sylvie on the subject, for he was proud on his mother's behalf and he suspected that she had been wronged. But he thought he had the right to be angry with her because of the important secret she was hiding from him. This secret stood like a stranger between herself and him.

A stranger indeed. Marc never suspected that at moments he invoked before his mother's eyes the stranger, his father, and, even worse, the other Brissots. For in the secret warfare that went on henceforth between the mother and the young boy the latter instinctively armed himself with everything he could find, in his own nature, that was opposed to Annette. Thus, without knowing it, he sometimes disinterred and used against her various traits he had inherited from his Brissot ancestry: the famous condescending smile, the self-satisfaction, the waggish philistinism the hostile certitude of which nothing could shake. A shadow, a reflexion on the water. Annette recognized them and thought, "They have caught me!"

Was he really a stranger? No, he was not. The weapon, the inherited traits, yes; but the hand that held it was of Annette's substance. And that rebellious hand was clenched in that opposition between two beings who were too closely related, too much akin, which was only one of the thousand tricks of Love and Destiny.

XXXII

He had no friends. This boy of thirteen, who spent every morning and afternoon in a class with thirty other children, was isolated from his comrades. When he was smaller, he had enjoyed chattering, playing, running, shouting. For a year or two now, he had had fits of speechlessness, a sudden hunger for solitude. This did not mean that he had ceased to feel the need of companions. He may even have needed them more than before. Exactly! He needed them too much; he expected too much and he had too much to give. And there were bristles everywhere in this spring thicket. A bridling self-esteem. A mere nothing wounded it, and he was afraid of being wounded and especially of showing it. That was a weakness, and he had to take care not to give the enemy a hold over him. (There is an enemy in every friend.)

What he had grasped, or rather imagined, regarding his civil status, his mother's past, kept him in an absurd, ridiculous, towering state of torment. His reading contributed to this; he was convinced that he was a "natural" child. (His romantic books called him by a harsher name.) He found a way of taking pride in this. He almost went so far as to catch in the archaic insult the wild, musty scent of nobility. He considered himself interesting, different from other people, solitary, just a little damned. It would not have displeased him to find himself among the Satanic bastards of Schiller and Shakespeare. This would have given him the right to despise the world, with lofty tirades—in secret.

But when he found himself in the world again—in his class at school, among his comrades—he was intimidated, weighed down by his secret, suspicious that they might guess it. His strange ways, his fated look, the thin voice that was beginning to break, his pretty girlishness, blushing, yet insolent as a young cock, excited the attention and the ill-will of his companions and even exposed him to the shameful advances of one of those little scamps who persecuted him with his half-comic, half-serious, proposals. He was completely upset by this; that night he was sick with revolt and disgust. He did not want to go back to school again, and he could not tell his mother the reasons; he had to win respect for himself unaided. He said to himself, "I shall kill him."

His riotous mind was excited by a deep ground-swell.

He had reached the time when the reproductive forces awaken. They fascinated him and terrified him. The strange innocence of his mother existed there beside him without seeing or suspecting anything. He would have died of shame if she had seen or suspected. And alone, despising himself, he surrendered frantically to the terrible solicitations of the degrading instinct. . . . But what could the child do, a poor child delivered over to these mad forces? This monstrous nature puts into a thirteen-year-old body the brutal fire which for want of nourishment devours it. There are natures which find salvation in throwing themselves wholly, through a contrary excess, into an ascetic exaltation of the spirit which often entails physical ruin. The young people of our time, more fortunate than their elders, have begun to practise the virile discipline of athletics. Marc would have asked nothing better than this, but there again nature was against him. He was not strong enough. Ah, how he envied the strong! How jealously he loved their beauty! . . . So much that he hated it. . . . He would never be like them.

Desires, all the desires, pure, impure, a chaos! . . . All the hostile demons! He would have been the plaything of chance—nothing could have helped him—had it not been for a basis of moral health and decency—rather, the grandeur that is unaware of its own capabilities, that divine something, the result of the sufferings, the valor, and the long patience of the best of the race, which will not endure the shame of defilement, the disgrace of falling, which has an anxious instinct for what is vile and cowardly, which follows its trail inward, into all the sinuosities of one's thought, which does not always escape stains, but never fails to condemn them, to condemn oneself, to brand oneself and punish oneself.

Pride! All praise to pride! Sanctus . . . In childish natures like this pride is health. It is the affirmation of the divine in the mire, the principle of salvation. In a solitude without love who would struggle without pride? Why struggle, if one does not believe one has supreme blessings to defend, and that for them one must conquer or die! . . .

Marc was determined to conquer. Conquer what he understood and what he did not understand. Conquer what he was ignorant of and what was repugnant to him. Conquer the enigma of the world and his own baseness. Ah, here as elsewhere, he was incessantly conquered. In his effort to work, to read, to concentrate, he slipped beyond his own control, he found himself out of hand. He always lacked the strength. . . . It was there, but it was hardly formed, unequal to the task and the demands of the will. He was devoured by desires and curiosities, healthy, unhealthy, that plagued him on all sides, weltering as he was in torpor, incapable of doing anything or determining anything. He wasted his time, and he was always in a hurry. Already his future filled his mind, the choice of a career; for he knew that it would be necessary for him to decide early, and he had no grounds for deciding; he floated through everything, equally interested and indifferent, attracted and disgusted. He wanted and he did not want; he was not even capable of wishing or of not wishing. The machine was not running aright. It would bound forward and suddenly stop, and he would find himself sprawling on the ground.

Then he looked around him. And this child who was suffering and devouring himself was quicker than anyone else to perceive the emptiness and the ennui of an age that had begun its journey to destruction. He had a keen sense of the abyss.

But his mother saw none of all this. She saw a sulky, overweening, rebellious, childish boy, morbidly susceptible, grandiloquent, always making trouble, who sometimes took delight in uttering obscenities, and at other moments was shocked at a mere free expression. Above all, she was irritated by his sneers. She had no suspicion of his feeling of bitterness, still less of his defiance of an evil fate. He felt cruelly the injustice of his lot; he was (or thought himself) without strength, without beauty, without talent, good for nothing; he ended by swamping himself, adding to his real defects others that he imagined; he conspired with all the outward signs that were able to humiliate him. . . . Those two little working-girls who laughed as they passed him were laughing, he thought, at him; he did not suspect that they were laughing just to arouse his interest, that they rather liked his blushing, shyly girlish air. He thought he saw in the eyes of his teachers a contemptuous pity for his mediocrity. He thought his more robust comrades despised his weakness and were showing up his cowardice; for since he was excessively nervous, he had his moments of pusillanimity; and, as he was sincere, he confessed this to himself and felt that he was dishonored. As a means of self-punishment, he secretly compelled himself to commit dangerously imprudent acts that brought the cold sweat to his brow and rehabilitated him a little—so little!—in his own eyes. It was at himself, often, that this little Nicodemus was sneering, at himself and his own weaknesses. But he was angry with the world that had made him what he was, and especially with his mother.

She did not understand his hostile air. . . . What an egoist he was! He thought only of himself.

He thought only of himself? What would have become of him if he had not thought of himself? If he had not helped himself, who would have helped him?

They remained alone, walled up, side by side. The day of confidences was past. Annette was beginning to repeat the lamentation of mothers, "How much more loving he was when he was younger!"

And he was saying to himself that mothers only love their children for their own amusement. No one loves anyone but himself.

No, everyone wants to love the other person. But when one is in danger one must think of oneself. One will think of the other afterward. How can one save the other if one hasn't saved oneself? And how can one save oneself if one lets the other hang about one's neck?

XXXIII

Annette, pushed aside by her son, became as hard as he. When the heart is deliberately closed to love, the mind, freed by the absence of the object that nourishes its affection, is driven to satisfy its intellectual hunger and its need of action. She worked all day, read in the evening, and at night slept soundly. Marc spitefully envied and despised the health of this vigorous woman, the faculty she seemed to have for escaping self-torment.

Annette, however, suffered from the privation of not being able to share her thoughts with a companion. She filled the void by work, by actively forgetting. . . . But work for work's sake is itself so empty! . . . And upon whom can one spend those unused forces one feels in oneself?

Sacrifice! . . . That need of sacrifice! . . . Annette found it everywhere about her, often pathetic, sometimes absurd. For as a good observer she incessantly explored faces and souls every day and all day long; she distracted herself from her own troubles by throwing herself into those of others. Perhaps curiosity prevailed over pity during this period when her heart was petrified (as she thought) by the spectacle of so much suffering, and especially so many defeats and abdications.

Among women who are struggling as she was to wrest from society the means of existence, how many are broken, far less by the harshness of things than by their own weakness and abnegation! Almost all are exploited by some affection and cannot exist without being exploited. One would say that this is their only reason for living—the reason for which they die. . . .

One of them sacrifices herself to an old mother or an egotistical father. Another, to a vulgar husband or some man who deceives her. Another, another—myself!—to a child who does not love her, who will forget her, who will betray her to-morrow perhaps. . . . Well, what does it matter? If I find a joy in being betrayed by him, imposed upon, forgotten? "If it pleases me to be beaten!" Ah, derision, trickery! . . . And the others envy you, those who have no one to whom to sacrifice themselves! They marry a dog, a cat, a bird. Each one has her idol. If you must have one at any price, God would serve better. He, at least, amounts to something. . . . I too have my God, my unknown God, my hidden truth, and this passion that drives me on to seek it. . . . Deceptive, perhaps, like the others. But I shall not know it till I have reached it. And if this is deceptive, at least it is elevated and worth the trouble.

Annette revolted against the absurdity of some sacrifices. No, nature does not wish the best to be sacrificed to the most unworthy. And if she did wish it, why should I submit to it? But she does not wish it! She wishes one to sacrifice oneself to the best, to the grandest, to the strongest.

Sacrifice at any price, to the worst as to the best, perhaps even to the worst by preference, because the sacrifice is thus most complete, sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice—yes, that is conformable enough to the idea people have of God . . . Credo quia absurdum . . . Like master, like man! This God is indeed he who rests on the Seventh Day, finding that which he has made is well made. If one had listened to him, the chariot of man would have stopped at the first turn of the wheel. All the progress of the world is made against his will . . . Fiat! We shall drive the chariot on. It may crush us, but at least we wish it to go forward.

XXXIV

A tragic incident increased Annette's aversion to these immolations that seemed to her so pointless—immolations of those who were worth more to those who were worthless.

She had recently been in competition, for a course for foreigners at an institution at Neuilly, with a young woman whose strong-willed rustic face had attracted her. She tried to strike up a conversation with her. But she was suspicious and could think of nothing but getting Annette out of the way. At that time Annette, who was still unused to these struggles that repelled her, had held up her own end badly; indeed, through her desire to make a friend, she had withdrawn in the interest of her rival. The latter had shown her no gratitude for this. Nothing counted for her but her own advantage. An ant eagerly hastening to heap up her gains. Annette did not interest her.

Annette had lost sight of her, and when, six years later, chance brought them again into one another's presence, they had both changed. Annette was no longer disposed to be generous, or rather fastidious. . . . Life is as it is. . . . I am not able to modify it. I want to live. You must take second place.

The struggle began. It did not last long. At the first blow the rival was knocked out. How she had aged! Annette was struck by her ravaged look. She had remembered her as a brunette with ruddy cheeks marked with two or three little black dots like raisins in bread, a solid peasant girl, short-waisted, thick-set, a face with fine, dry features, which, if it had not been so sullen, would not have lacked a certain grace—a stubborn brow, abrupt, always hurried movements. She saw now a thin, shrivelled face, a hard glance, a bitter mouth, hollow cheeks, young but blighted like scorched grass.

The disputed situation was that of secretary to an engineer: it required only two mornings of attendance each week to go through the business correspondence and receive visitors. Annette encountered Ruth Guillon in the antechamber, and their hostile eyes met.

"You have come for this place," said Ruth Guillon. "It has been promised to me."

"It has not been promised to me," said Annette. "But I have come for this place."

"No use, it's going to be given to me."

"Whether it's useless or not, I've come. It belongs to the one who gets it."

A moment later Annette was called into the engineer's office and chosen. She was known as an accurate, intelligent worker.

As she came out she ran into Ruth and passed her coldly. Ruth stopped her and asked, "You are going to have it?"

"I have it."

She saw the other's forehead redden strangely. She was expecting some violent remark, but Ruth said nothing. Annette continued on her way, and the other followed her. They descended the stairs. As she reached the street, Annette, turning round, threw a rapid glance towards her defeated rival, and Ruth's dejected air touched her. In spite of her resolution to be hard, she went back and said to her, "I'm sorry. One has to live."

"Oh, I'm quite aware of that," said the other. "Some have all the luck. I never have any."

Her tone had entirely changed. Dejection without animosity. Annette made a movement to take her hand, but Ruth drew back her own.

"Come, don't feel badly! One day one of us loses; another day it will be the other."

"It's every day with me."

Annette recalled their first encounter when Ruth had succeeded in getting the place. Ruth did not reply and walked along dejectedly beside Annette.

"Couldn't I help you?" said Annette.

The blush overspread her forehead again. Wounded pride, emotion? Ruth said dryly, "No!"

"It would give me pleasure to do so," Annette insisted.

And with a familiar gesture she seized her arm. Ruth was surprised and pressed Annette's hand nervously under her arm, and, turning her head, she bit her lip. Then she tore herself away in irritation and walked off.

Annette let her go, following her with her eyes. She understood her: yes, one has no right to offer one's pity to one who does not ask for it.

A few days later, entering a dairy, she saw Ruth making some purchases. She held out her hand to her. This time Ruth took it, but with an icy air. She made an effort, however, to appear less sullen; she uttered a few common-place words, and Annette, satisfied with this ungenerous advance, replied. The two women discussed the prices of the things they had bought. Annette, though she did not show it, was astonished that Ruth spent more than she on fresh eggs and special milk. Ruth was a little ostentatious in paying in front of her. As they went out, Annette said, "How much it costs to live!" She almost excused herself for the eggs she had bought, saying, "They're for my child."

Ruth, with a lofty air, remarked, "Mine are for my husband."

Annette knew nothing about the other's life. "Is he ill?" she asked.

"No, but he is very delicate."

She spoke proudly of the care that his health required. Annette, who knew how touchy Ruth was, did not ask her any questions, but waited for her to speak. Ruth said nothing more and they were about to separate when Annette remembered. . . . She offered Ruth a job—the revision of some work by a foreigner—which had been offered to her and which she did not have time to undertake. Ruth at once showed the liveliest gratitude: money played in her life a capital rôle. Annette asked for her address in case she had other orders to pass on to her. Ruth hesitated and replied evasively.

"It's only to be of service to you," said Annette impatiently. "In any case, I live myself—" And she gave her address.

Ruth reluctantly gave her own. Annette felt rebuffed and decided to think no more about her.

But Ruth came and looked her up a few weeks later. She excused herself for having seemed so unfriendly. And this time she confided to her a little, not much, about her life. Born of a family of rich farmers, she had quarrelled with her father because she had wanted to come to Paris and teach. Her father had wounded her pride and she had sworn never to accept anything from him. She wanted to earn her own living. She had worn herself out. In spite of her energy, thinking was too much for her; she labored at her books like an animal at the plough; the blood swelled her temples; she was obliged to stop in a state of congestion. An incipient neurasthenia forced her to give up the examinations she was just ready to pass. She fell back upon giving private lessons. She was succeeding, with difficulty, in earning her living when she fell in love with a man whom she married and who became simply one burden the more. But this she did not say; Annette learned it elsewhere. She was acute enough to divine a part of the truth in the course of the discreet questions she asked her new friend. She saw that the husband had no occupation: he was an "intellectual," an "artist," a "writer." And she did not have to go very far to find what he wrote. Verses! . . .

Ruth had no more taste than any other little provincial soul. But the poetry overawed her.

She was in no haste to introduce her "artist." She kept him at home. But from this time forward she saw Annette more often—too often. She ended by overwhelming her with testimonials of friendship, flowers, attentions that were seldom very well inspired and only irritated Annette. She had no middle way: it was all or nothing with this passionate soul. She had never had a woman friend; she had never confided in anyone. From the moment when she made up her mind to like Annette she monopolized her. Annette was bored to death by this affection, and she realized that the husband would not find it easy to bear.

At last she succeeded in surprising and catching a glimpse of the precious bird: a dull, insignificant man with vague blue eyes who gave the impression that he was a secret devotee of absinthe. Very vain and far from sure of himself, utterly mediocre, he was anxious for Annette's good opinion. He did not love his wife, but he found it convenient to be pampered by her and assumed languishing, piteous, sad airs in the name of his health, his unrecognized talents and the envy of his fellow-writers. Annette pierced him through and through with her clear eyes. He was cautious with her and moderated the jeremiads for which the silent irony of his listener was waiting. But Ruth swallowed everything whole; she was incapable of judging and as proud as Artaban. . . . "Let her keep her illusions. She needs some one to love, a man to protect. She has a passionately domestic soul. She would lie down under his feet. . . ." But sometimes she quarrelled with him bitterly. Once, as Annette was climbing the stairs, she heard the "poet" bawling and whining. Ruth was slapping her husband.

Annette no longer had any doubt that the best part of Ruth's money was spent for José's loafing and absinthe. He played the races also. Ruth never complained: she struggled to save up enough for him to publish a volume of his poems. But he was in no hurry to write them. And when, one day, she went over her accounts she discovered that he had stolen three-quarters of the money: he had robbed himself!

That day, with her pride utterly broken, she confessed her misery to Annette. She would not have spoken if it had concerned herself alone. But for years she had been wearing herself out for him—"for his glory," as she said. And he had destroyed it himself!

One confidence leads to another. Annette ended by learning almost all of Ruth's sufferings. Her health was ruined. She was growing weaker every day and less able to restrain her thoughts. As death approached her eyes were opened and she realized the inanity of this man and his lack of affection. José was hardly ever at home any more. He would steal away, finding no pleasure in the society of a sick, disappointed wife.

When her last days came, Ruth had no illusions left. She declared, however, with sincere pride, that she regretted nothing and that she would do it all over again.

"That has killed me. But I have lived by it."

She did not believe in anything; she expected nothing, either in this world or in the other. . . .

Annette was alone with her when she lay on her deathbed. A hemorrhage of the brain had struck her down.

José, who had fled at the approach of death, showed his timorous face a few moments afterwards. He had a brief moment of feeling. After he had wept, his first words were, "But what in heaven's name is to become of me?"

"You'll find someone else to support you," said Annette.

He threw her a spiteful glance. And he let Annette pay the funeral expenses.

"There you are!" Annette thought, by the bedside of the dead woman. "She was a tower of pride, will, ascetic devotion. . . . What good did it all do? What a mess! Giving oneself to a dog! Poor Ruth was hard. She was not hard enough. One must be harder still."

XXXV

Reaction against the deception of the heart—my accursed heart which is only there to delude me. My head and my senses will and know. My heart is blind. It is my business to direct it. Reaction against love, and against sacrifice, and against goodness.

In everyone's life, as in the life of society, there are phases of feeling that succeed one another without resembling one another. Their first law, indeed, is not to resemble one another. While one phase is in the ascendant, everyone shares in it with complete seriousness, feeling nothing but contempt for the ridiculousness of the phases that have passed out of date and convinced that his phase is and will always be the best. . . . Annette passed in this way through a phase of hardness.

But whatever one's garment may be, the human being remains the same. One cannot get along without others. The proudest needs his share of affection; and the more circumstances oblige one to shut oneself in, the more one's treacherous mind conspires to betray one.

Annette felt very strong. Strong in her experience and her intelligence, firm, practical, disillusioned. She was sure now that she could live by her will—of course, by working, but the work too was her will. She did not fear any lack of this. She did not need anyone's help. Nor was she going to put herself out either to please or to displease.

She had found herself in competition lately with a new kind of rival, men. She gave lessons to boys to prepare them for school and examinations. She was successful, but along with her success came the increasing animosity of those to whom she was preferred. They considered themselves thwarted. There was no question of gallantry any more. The most destitute of consideration were the married men: their wives spurred them on. They slandered Annette: what would they not insinuate in regard to the means by which she managed to reach the best places? Annette, with her hard, attractive smile on her lips, followed her own road, scornful of public opinion.

At bottom, however, there was the invisible stamp of the wear and tear exacted by these long years of merciless toil. Her fortieth year was approaching. Life had passed and she had not realized it. An obscure feeling of revolt was rising within her. All this lost life, this life without love, without action, without luxury, without any rich joy. . . . And all that she had missed she had been so completely fitted to enjoy!

What was the use of thinking of it? It was too late now!

Too late?

SUMMER

PART THREE

XXXVI

Solange had the small, well-rounded, rustic face of a Gothic Madonna, an oldish, infantile air, laughing, wrinkled eyes, a pretty nose, a delicate mouth, a rather heavy chin, fine skin and a ruddy complexion. She liked to discuss serious thoughts in a serious tone, very serious, contrasting comically with her kind, humorous face, which tried hard not to be so; but her words hurried along for fear of losing the thread of her sober ideas; and sometimes she actually did stop in mid-course with a void in her mind: "What was it I meant to say?"

Her auditors seldom whispered a reply, for they scarcely listened to her. But she did not irritate them, for Solange was not one of those people who hold forth and insist upon your following their insipid discourse. She had no pride and was ready to apologize affectionately for having bored you. But incapable as she was by nature of grasping an idea, she had a naïve aspiration for thought and an immense good will. Nothing very much came of it: her thoughts never quite arrived. The grave books, Plato, Guyau, Fouillée, yawned at the same page for weeks or months; and the great, beautiful projects, idealistic, altruistic—works of social aid or new systems of education—were intellectual toys that she soon forgot in their corners and under the furniture till the next chance brought them to her attention again. A good little bourgeoise, gentle, amiable, pretty, sensible, well-balanced, with a dash of pedantry, unconstrained, droll, who, without posing, imagined that she had intellectual needs and really had to talk about the ideal and many other things, all on the same plane, calm, tidy, well-dressed, polite, innocent and a nobody.

Younger than Annette by three or four years, she had once felt for her one of those paradoxical attractions that harmless natures feel for those that are dangerous. It is true that these phenomena usually manifest themselves at a distance. In fact, she had approached Annette very little at school, where they were in different classes. It was only because she saw her as she came and went and had picked up some echoes from the older girls that little Solange had conceived for her elder a timid fascination. Annette had had no suspicion of it; and since then Solange had completely forgotten her. She had married, and she was happy. Not to have been happy, she would have had to have a monster for a husband—or a passionate man. Victor Mouton-Chevallier was, heaven be praised, neither one nor the other. A sculptor by vocation, he was not tormented by inspiration, for he had an income and a rich placidity. He had no lack of taste, but he felt no pressing need of translating into his art anything different from what had already been done by this, that or the other of his illustrious confrères of all ages. And as he was innocent of ambition, as he was free from illiberal feelings (from others too, perhaps), he enjoyed an unmixed satisfaction in finding himself so well, so completely, expressed—at least, so he flattered himself in believing—by Michael Angelo, by Rodin, by Bourdelle, or by the smaller gentry; for he was eclectic and found his good things everywhere. In this happy state he would certainly not have made the effort to produce anything himself if this had not added to his pleasure one savor the more: the flattering illusion that he belonged to the family. He was willing to accept the tender respect that he felt called upon to show for the heroes of art and their misfortunes. He shared in these latter—from afar; and he forced his jovial face to assume an air of austere melancholy as he listened to his wife discreetly playing the Sonata Pathétique on the piano—for Beethoven also belonged to the family. Solange had fully responded to his domestic needs. A tranquil affection, an easy kindness, a gentle, uniform, complacent humor, an indoor idealism that did not risk itself outside when it was windy or muddy, a propensity for admiring that renders life so much more comfortable!—in short, in a word that says everything, security was their true unconfessed ideal. Their circumstances, both of fortune and of heart, permitted them to have this. They were sheltered from material cares, and there was no fear that they would introduce trouble into their household.

But they did introduce Annette. If they had known the elements this Frau Sorge carried within her, they would have been dreadfully upset. But they did not know. They were like innocent children playing with an explosive; they would have had an attack of nerves if they had guessed what they held in their hands. But guessing nothing, after having their own sport, they went and laid it down gently, without intending any harm, in the garden of a friend. . . . They laid Annette down in the garden of the Villards.

XXXVII

When Solange discovered Annette again, she also discovered in herself once more the old feeling she had had for her: she fell in love with her. Like everyone else, she knew about Annette's "irregular" life. But in her goodness—a goodness without depth, but also without prudery—she did not think any the worse of her. It must be said that she did not understand it very well. With her indulgent disposition, which was the most sympathetic side of her amiable nature, she supposed that Annette had undoubtedly been victimized, or perhaps that she had had her own serious reason for acting as she had done. In any case, it concerned only herself; and she was indignant at public opinion. After seeing her friend again, she made inquiries about her and learned of her courage and self-abnegation; she conceived the most exaggerated admiration for her. This was one of those periodic infatuations that left her, for a time, no room for any other feeling. Her husband, whom she fed with her enthusiasms, found in this one an opportunity for melting over Annette's nobility of heart, and that of his wife, and his own as well. (Is there anything that enables us to enjoy our own moral beauty more than to be stirred by that of a fellow-creature?) Husband and wife tried to outbid each other in their noble intentions towards Annette. They could not leave her alone, destitute of sympathy, that poor woman, the victim of social injustice! The Mouton-Chevalliers set out to find Annette, climbing all the way up to her fifth floor. They surprised her in the act of doing her housework. This struck them as all the more touching; and her coldness seemed to them an admirable dignity. They did not leave till they had won Annette's promise to come and dine with them with her little boy, en famille, the following evening.

Annette was not very much pleased by this renewed friendship. She saw how insipid it was. Her years of moral solitude had given her a savage instinct. It was not good to avoid people too much; one found it hard to get into touch with them again; one became aware of an odor of corruption under the flowers. In the quiet household of the Mouton-Chevalliers, Annette was not at her ease; their conjugal happiness did not make her envious. "Too mild, too mild, too mild!" as somebody says in Molière. "No, thank you! Not for me!". . . She had reached a time when she needed the harsh winds of life. . . .

Well, she ought to have been satisfied! The mild Solange was going to see that she got them.

XXXVIII

Annette was dressing to go out to dinner. This evening she was to meet at the Mouton-Chevalliers those friends of whom she was sick of hearing from Solange—Doctor Villard, a fashionable surgeon with a rather garish reputation, and his brilliant young wife. She was troubled. "What if I shouldn't go?" She half thought of sending a line to excuse herself. But Marc, who was bored with being alone with his mother, was delighted at any pretext for going out. Annette did not want to deprive him of this distraction. Besides, she knew she was absurd. "What's the matter? What's troubling you?". . . It was like a presentiment of evil. . . . Silly! The rational spirit that dwelt in her, side by side with the instincts that took no account of it, made her shrug her shoulders. She finished her toilet and, taking her son's arm, set out for Solange's.

The superstitious instinct was not long in taking its revenge. It is no miracle, indeed, when a presentiment is realized. A presentiment is a predisposition towards what one is afraid of feeling. Consequently, if it comes to pass, there is nothing magical about it. It is a sort of divining-rod; as it approaches a spring, a shiver warns it that the water is eating its way under the surface.

On the threshold of the drawing-room, Annette felt the warning; but she knit her brows, and as soon as she entered the room she was reassured. Even before Solange had presented him to her, she had made up her mind at a glance about Philippe Villard: he was antipathetic to her. She had a feeling of relief.

Philippe was not handsome. He was small, thick-set, with a brow that bulged above the eyes, a strong jaw, a short, pointed beard, a steely blue glance. Very much master of himself, he was cold in a courteous, commanding way. Seated beside Annette at table, he followed two conversations: the general discussion that Solange was carrying on in her desultory manner and that which, in the intervals, he held with his neighbor. In both he had the same brief, precise, trenchant way of talking. Never a hesitation, either for a word or an idea. The more Annette listened, the more hostile she felt towards him. She replied, concealing herself under a rather dry and distant indifference. He did not seem to attach great importance to what she said. No doubt he was judging her from the silly eulogies he had heard from Solange. He was barely polite. This did not surprise anyone: they were used to his abrupt ways. But it irritated Annette to have to endure them. She observed him beside her, without appearing to see him, feature by feature; and she could find nothing about him that pleased her. But the total impression was not the total of her impressions of details; and when, without difficulty, she reached the end of her examination, she felt uneasy again. A movement of the hand, a wrinkling of the face. . . . She was afraid of him. And she thought, "Above everything in the world, he mustn't see into me!"

Solange spoke of an author who, she said, had the gift of tears.

"A pretty gift!" said Philippe. "Tears in life are not worth much. But in art I know nothing more disgusting than to collect them in a bottle."

The ladies cried out at this. Madame Villard said that tears were one of the pleasures of life, and Solange said they were an ornament of the soul.

"Well, how about you, don't you protest?" he asked Annette. "Do you too get your supplies from the property-man?"

"I have enough of my own," she said. "I have no need of other people's."

"You live on your capital?"

"Can you suggest any way for me to get rid of them?"

"Be hard!"

"I'm learning," she replied.

He threw her a brief sidelong glance.

The others continued to unbosom themselves.

"Look over there," said Philippe to Annette. "There's a good chap who ought to be taught it."

With a corner of his eye he indicated Marc, whose mobile face was naïvely betraying the various emotions which the pretty Madame Villard, sitting beside him, stirred in him.

"I'm afraid," said Annette, "that he already has too much of a tendency that way."

"All the better!"

"All the better for those who meet him along the way?"

"Let him walk over them!"

"That's easy for you to say."

"You have only to step aside yourself."

"That would be against nature."

"Oh, no, the thing that's against nature is to love too much."

"One's own child?"

"Anyone, one's own child especially."

"He needs me."

"Look at him! Is he thinking of you? He would disown you for a crumb from my wife's hand."

Annette's fingers clenched on the tablecloth. . . . Ah, how she hated him! . . . He had seen her fingers. "I didn't create him just to give him up."

"You didn't create him at all," he replied. "Nature created him. She uses you and casts you aside afterward."

"I shall not let myself be cast aside."

"A battle, then?"

"A battle!"

He looked her in the face, "You will be beaten," he said.

"I know it. One always is. But what's the difference? One fights just the same."

Under the cold mask her eyes smiled defiantly. But the blue gaze of the other penetrated her like a stab. She had given herself away.

Philippe was a forceful man. His force was part of his genius. He carried it as much into his clinic, in his terrible diagnostics and the sureness of his hand, into the operating-room, as into the acts of his life and his decisions. Accustomed to reading at a glance the depths of human bodies, he had understood Annette completely at once—Annette, her passions, her pride and her troubles, her temperament and her strong nature. And Annette felt that she had been caught. With her helmet fallen so soon, her visor broken, furiously angry, she betrayed henceforth to the eyes of her adversary only an icy armor. In the constriction at her heart, she knew now that the enemy had come. The enemy? Yes, love. . . . (Ah, that insipid word, so far from the cruel force itself! . . .) To the sudden awakening of interest which she had perceived in him, she opposed an ironical inflexibility that very inadequately concealed the hostility she felt. It only completed her self-betrayal. She was too genuine, too passionate. She could not pretend. Her very animosity revealed the depths of her being. Philippe was the only one to see this. He did not attempt to revive the conversation again; he had learned enough, and, with a detached air, recounting to the company one of those bitter, amusing stories that were stamped with his own harsh experience, he measured with his eye the woman he intended to capture.

None of the others who were present had observed anything. The Mouton-Chevalliers were regretfully convinced that Annette and Philippe were unsympathetic to each other: between their two characters there was nothing in common. However, in bringing Annette and the Villards together, they had hoped that Annette and Mme. Villard would become friends. "They were made for each other." And so far as that was concerned, they had the pleasure of seeing that they were not mistaken.

Noémi Villard was a delightful Creole, with small bones, plump flesh gilded like a roast pigeon, the eyes of a roe, a fine nose, spare cheeks, a prominent little mouth that always seemed to be ready to snap something up; round, innocent, youthful breasts, generously revealed, frail arms, a slender waist, small feet, delicate legs. She played the part of a child-woman, with her infatuations, her languors, her enthusiasms, her laughs and tears and lisping words. She seemed to be a fragile creature, expansive, sensitive, not too intelligent. In reality she was just the opposite. With plenty of brains, sensual, dry and passionate, observing everything, calculating everything, unweariable, unbreakable, fragile, yes, like a willow that bends and—bing!—comes lashing back, made of solid cement under the friable enamel. She alone could have told how much energy this delicate enamel cost. As for intelligence, she had enough of it and to spare: she kept it in the bank, but she utilized it only for the object that interested her, her husband, whom she held jealously. Theirs had been, on both sides, a passionate marriage of the head and the senses—passionate in its pleasures and its vanity. Noémi's decision had long preceded Philippe's choice, and even his attention. This man who, after the example of his illustrious Parisian confrères, carried on with equal ardor his crushing professional activity and a ceaseless social life, had found the time to indulge in many love affairs. His triumphant reputation had had a good deal to do with Noémi's mad love and her determined desire to capture him, for herself alone, and keep him. Philippe cared nothing about intelligence in women. He wanted them to be well-made, healthy, elegant and stupid. He went so far as to say that a woman could never be stupid enough. Noémi certainly was not, but that made no difference. A woman who desires a man can assume, before her mirror, the mind as well as the eyes that he likes. She intoxicated Philippe with her youthful body and her idolatry. She absorbed him greedily.

But the career of a mistress is not a sinecure. It requires the expenditure of a kind of genius. And there is never a moment of rest! After a long period of mutual amorous servitude Philippe was beginning to grow weary. Noémi, marvellously prompt in perceiving in the heart of her husband-lover the least signs of a veering of the wind, slept with one eye open; always jealously on the watch, while Philippe was unaware of it, she was able to turn danger aside with one stroke and entrap again, by the allurement of the senses and her subtle wit, the man who was about to escape her. It was a game at first, but not for long. Still more than Philippe she had to watch herself, to be always attentive, always ready to ward off the unexpected ravages of the perfidious minutes, the infallible ravages of the days and the years. Noémi no longer had all her first freshness; her complexion was mottled; the fineness of her face was turning to dryness, her throat was growing heavy, and the pure cords of her neck were menaced. Art flew to the aid of the endangered masterpiece and even added a few additional charms. But what tension this always meant! The least moment of abandon would have betrayed the secret to the keen eye of the master, who would not have forgotten it. Never to allow oneself to be taken unawares! . . . What a tragedy one morning when one of the little upper incisors broke! Noémi had remained half the day invisible at the dentist's, for if, on her return, Philippe had not seen her exhibit her impeccable smile, he would have had suspicions into which jealousy did not enter. (Though even jealousy is less terrible than a broken tooth!) She had to play a fast game. Philippe was not one of those husbands whom one can easily deceive in regard to the quality of one's physical wares. He belonged to that trade himself. Noémi always felt her heart beat a little when he turned on her one of those "X-Ray" glances (as she called them, laughing, to put him on the wrong scent) with which he made her undergo a visit of inspection. "Does he see?" she would, wonder. He saw, but he did not show it. Noémi's art seemed to him a part of nature; and so long as the effect pleased him everything went well. But look out for the day when the effect might fail! . . . She could not sleep two nights running on her laurels. She had to win them anew every morrow morning. And she was not permitted to appear anxious. To please the master she had to seem always gay, young, radiant. It was crushing at times. In moments of weariness, when she knew she was not being seen, she slid down in the hollow of a divan, with a hard wrinkle between her eyes, a shrivelled smile, her carmine lips bleeding. . . . But the attack of weakness never lasted more than a minute or two. She had to set out again. And she did set out. Young, gay, radiant. . . . Why not? She was so. And she did not slacken. . . . Besides, there are ways of avenging oneself against, a tyrant whom one cannot do without and who abuses one. Enough! She had her secrets. . . . We shall speak of them presently if she is willing. For the moment she laughs, not merely with her lips; she is satisfied with herself and with him, she is sure, she has kept him! . . . And naturally this is the hour when he escapes from her. . . . In vain all her talent! All this trouble in vain! There always comes a moment when the attention is relaxed. Even Argus slept. And the caged animal, the heart of the chambered lover, regains its liberty.

Through one of those aberrations to which nature is accustomed, which the good mediator finds to her advantage, Noémi, for once, saw a woman without distrust. And that woman was Annette.

She was relying on the deceptive assurance that Philippe abhorred intellectual women. Annette was the last one to cause her any uneasiness. From the physical portrait of her rivals in the past, from her own portrait, Noémi had made an image of the woman who might steal her husband away from her. She saw her as small, like herself, rather dark, pretty, of course, delicately made, coquettish, knowing how to make the best of her advantages. Philippe professed the humorous opinion that woman, being exclusively made for the service of man, should, in modern life, be an extremely finished drawing-room trinket, but one that was easy to handle—that, without taking up too much space, she should agreeably furnish the drawing-room and bedroom. He did not like large women and valued grace more highly than beauty. As for the qualities of the mind, he said that, when he needed them, he found them in men, and that the only mind he demanded of a woman was the "mind of the body." Noémi did not contradict him in this: she corresponded with the portrait. Annette did not correspond with it at all. Large and strong, with a heavy beauty, in repose, when nothing animated her, and (when she did not wish to have it) without grace. A Juno-heifer slumbering in a meadow—so Noémi judged her reassuringly; and the fact that Annette appeared so frigid with Philippe made her attractive. On her side, Annette, who was very susceptible to prettiness in women, and inclined to like what did not resemble herself, was charmed by Noémi; in talking with her she showed that she too, when she wished, had an enchanting smile. Philippe lost nothing of this; and his new-born flame blazed up for this Annette with her two masks, one of which was not for him. (Wasn't it for him? The love one repulses has such clever ways of re-entering the place from which it has been expelled!) At the same time that Annette was preventing Philippe from scrutinizing her mind and intrenching herself behind her most unattractive manner, she was not displeased that he should see her most captivating expression over the wall. . . . Yes, he had seen it clearly. From the opposite corner of the drawing-room, as he was describing to his hosts some recent experience, he observed his wife, who was working for him unawares. Annette and Noémi were lavishing on each other all the little graces with which Noémi was always well supplied, inspiring in Annette a complex feeling from which the uneasy thought of Philippe was not absent. And her ear followed, from the opposite corner of the room, the derisive voice that knew it was being listened to.

She hated him, she hated him. . . . He represented the deepest part of her repressed nature, the nature she wished to repress, the good and the bad, the hard, commanding pride, the need of dominating, the demands of the will, those of the intelligence, of a sensual, violent body, passion without love, stronger than love. And as she hated this faun of the soul, hated it in herself, she hated it in him. But this was to engage in an unequal combat. There were two against her—he and her own self.

XXXIX

Philippe Villard came from the small, independent merchant class.

His father, a printer in a little town, active, bustling, bold, had at once the energy and the freedom from scruple that are necessary for success on a vaster scene; but he did not succeed, because for success there is a line of audacity that one must be able to reach and not go beyond, and he had always gone beyond it. Managing a local newspaper that swam on the troubled waters of politics, a Gambettist republican, a tireless anti-clerical, a great hand at elections, he once exceeded the limits of libel and blackmailing that are authorized by the law (no, by custom!) and was condemned and dropped by those whom he had served. Ill in addition, he saw that he was ruined; his plant was sold and all the local hatreds were unmuzzled, now that he no longer had the means to make himself useful or feared. He fought furiously, like a wolf, against illness, poverty and misfortune. The exasperation made his condition worse, and he died, expressing with his last breath his implacable bitterness against the treason of his old companions. The son was ten years old; and none of these imprecations was lost on him.

His mother, a proud peasant woman from the slopes of the Jura mountains, accustomed to struggling with an ungrateful soil that was bitten by a harsh wind, went out by the day as a washerwoman in the canal and undertook the roughest work. She was as strong as a Percheron mare, attacking her work with her four limbs and her iron frame, greedy for gain, but painstaking, honest, hard on herself and close-fisted; she was feared and sought after; she had a redoubtable tongue, which she restrained, and people knew that, through her husband's death, she was the mistress of many family secrets. She made no use of these, but she possessed them, and it was more prudent to pay for her services than to do without them. She had no intellectual scruples and was rigorously active, rather sombre (for in this race Spain has left its blood), with a limitless passion of energy which, mingled with Gallic disillusionment, believes in nothing and yet acts as if salvation or damnation were awaiting it. She loved nothing but her son. She was ferocious in her love. She did not conceal from him any of the things about which she held her tongue with other people; she treated him as a partner. Ambitious for him alone, she sacrificed herself, and he was going to sacrifice himself—for whom? For her revenge. (Hers? Yes, her own, that of the son, that of the mother—all the same thing!) No tenderness, no indulgence—above all, no whimpering. "Go without things! You will gloat over it later." When he came home from school—heaven knew by what efforts of work and diplomacy she obtained for him a scholarship in the town grammar-school, then at the lycée in the county-town!—when he came home, thrashed and humiliated by the little bourgeois boys, the fool-hardy heirs of the hidden spite of their fathers, she said to him, "You will be stronger than they are later. They will kiss your feet. Rely on yourself! Don't rely on anyone else!"

He did not rely on anyone else, and he soon made it clear that they would have to reckon with him. She succeeded in clinging to life until her son's studies were brilliantly finished and he had taken his first term in medicine in Paris. He was in the midst of an examination when she had to take to her bed with an inflammation of the chest. She did not want to disturb him before he had finished. She died without him. In her rude handwriting, twisted like the claws of the vine in spring, with all the dots and accents well marked and in their places, she wrote to him on a blank sheet carefully cut from a letter from her son, who was reckless with his paper, "I am going. My boy, keep strong. Do not give way."

He had not given way. Returning to the country to bury his mother, he found a small sum of money, collected from day to day, which enabled him to pay his way for another year. Then, thrown upon himself, he spent half his days and sometimes his nights earning what the other half demanded for his subsistence. No task was too much for him. He worked at natural history for a taxidermist, he served as a sculptor's model, as an extra boy on Sundays in suburban cafés, or on Saturday nights at wedding-parties in restaurants. In winter, when he was hungry one morning, he even took a job under the sewerage commission in a gang of snow-sweepers. He did not hesitate to have recourse to bold-faced begging, to charity societies, to accepting humiliating loans which he could not pay back and which gave mean souls the right to treat him without consideration for a five-franc piece. . . . (The blackguards! They didn't try it again after the look he gave them! But then, since they could not repay themselves with scorn, they did so with hatred, prudently behind his back: they slandered him.) During a few months of desperate labor, he went so far as to accept the money that a girl of the neighborhood offered him. He did not blush at this, for it was not for himself (he was killing himself with privations), it was for his success. Of course he had needs! He wanted to take everything, but he repressed his desire. Later on! He must conquer first. And to conquer he must live. Live by every means. Victory cleanses everything. And it was his due. He felt he was a genius.

He attracted the attention of his masters, his comrades. He was given work to do that was signed by men at the top after they had made a pretence of touching it up a little. He allowed himself to be exploited so as to acquire a hold over those who barred the gates to new-comers. They were in no great hurry to let him in. They respected him, and respect is a kind of money that enables one to dispense with other kinds. They appreciated him, oh, yes. But he did not grow fat on this. In spite of his native strength, the strength of his mother's Jura mountains, he was on the point of going under from fatigue and malnutrition when Solange happened upon him. It was at one of those many charities which she patronized with a sincere though intermittent generosity, with her heart and her money; a children's clinic. Solange saw Philippe there, devoting himself with a rage—that rage he felt to conquer, whenever there was the least chance of it—at the beds of the little patients who were apparently doomed. He spent nights there and came away from these battles looking worn and debilitated, but with eyes flaming with fever and genius. When he had conquered he was almost handsome and seemed more than good as he sat by the little sufferer whom he had just saved. Did he love him? It was possible, not certain. But he had got the best of the disease.

Solange, when she saw Philippe's situation, passed through one of those periodical crises of "patheticness" in which her whole horizon was filled by a single object. Whoever wished to profit by this had to lose no time. Philippe did not lose it. This drowning man grasped the hand that was held out to him. He even took the arm with it, and he would have taken the rest if he had not perceived that Solange, in her infatuation, had no thought of an amorous relation. She loved to feel exalted, but this in no way disturbed her tranquillity. Philippe had never seen a woman who was interested in him without being in pursuit of some interest of her own. The good Solange found her pleasure in herself. All she asked of others was that they should not gainsay the image she had formed of them. At heart she did not really want to know them. She took pains not to see anything in the other person that might displease her, saying to herself that this was not his "real nature"; and she accepted as real only what resembled herself. Thus she succeeded in creating in her own mind a whole universe composed of good, comfortable souls after her own pattern. Philippe let her go her own way with a little contempt and a little respect. He did not like stupid people; and he regarded as such those who did not see the world as it was; but a goodness that does the good of which it speaks was for him no everyday spectacle. Whatever their value might be, moral or immoral, the essential thing was that such people counted. Solange's goodness was not fictitious. Since she had become aware of Philippe's destitution and toil, she gave him a pension till he finished his years of study; she provided him with leisure so that he might work in peace. She did more: she made use of her extensive relations to interest one of the influential masters of the Faculty in him, or rather, since this cautious man had not failed to observe the restless power of the hungry young wolf, to so arrange things that his interest should not remain confined intus et in cute, but should show itself in the open. In the end she brought him into touch with an American oil-king who wanted to immortalize himself vicariously and opened for him a rapid path to fame. He laid the foundation of this across the ocean by his audacious feats of surgery in a palatial hospital founded by this Pharaoh.