PART II AND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES (continued 2)

I had closed my Book of Hours. The thoughts which came to me were as refreshing as the living waters. I felt a kind of ecstasy. We were on our knees, and my bride signed to me to rise with her. I embraced her with my look, as though she were an object of infinite value, of which the internal charm exceeds by a thousand times the visible beauty. She smiled at me with perfect confidence, and at this moment we exchanged the mystic promise which includes in anticipation the sacramental “Yes.”

A slight movement brought Pierre Ducal within my range of vision. I knew well the subtle smile which hollowed his cheeks. He was amusing himself, collecting anecdotes, already preparing an interesting story in which I was to figure as a first communicant. I felt it intuitively. Seized suddenly by fear of becoming ridiculous, I studied my actions. The ecstasy did not return. I placed the wedding ring on my bride’s finger with the indifference of some trivial mechanical duty.

After luncheon Ducal asked me to lend him my automobile, for he wished to return to Paris that night. His many trunks, for which he had had no use, were placed on the machine, and after he had disappeared around the curve in the road, the wheels of the car crushing the fir boughs that had not yet been picked up, I breathed more easily, in fact I was conscious of a distinct sense of relief. Raymonde noticed the change at once.

“Why were you not like this a little while ago?” she asked. “During the service you changed completely. Did you regret anything?”

“Oh, Raymonde, what could I have regretted?”

“Listen, I think I have guessed it,” she said. “You were looking at my white gown. Perhaps it did not become me very well.”

“But, it did, I assure you.”

“No, no, I know it,” she said. “But I should have grieved my little dressmaker in the village too much if I had given the order to any one else. What does a bad pleat amount to? But in the midst of happiness, to be neglectful of others, you agree with me that that would have been wicked?”

I agreed with her, and moreover I did not discover the bad pleat again. It was as if it had disappeared with Pierre Ducal.

Mme. Mairieux, to whom Col. Briare was telling stories of hunting in the forest of Fontainebleau, had followed the course of our conversation and now began to excuse her daughter.

“I scolded her,” she said. “She is lacking in elegance. You will know how to give it to her.”

“Is it necessary?” asked Raymonde, laughing.

“Of course it is, in the world to which your husband is going to take you. You will be gowned by the great dressmakers. Isn’t she fortunate, Colonel?”

She spoke to every one of the luck of Mme. Cernay. These two words, “Madame Cernay,” assumed in her mouth majestic importance. Our marriage flattered her as though it were a personal triumph. The lack of guests, however, appeared to her unreasonable, harmful, and distressing. One had to talk continually to the same people. For lack of anything better, want of better guests, she gave orders that every peasant who passed the gate that day should receive entertainment.

When the evening came, and I was leading my wife away, Mme. Mairieux, at the moment of parting, looked at her daughter in admiration before kissing her, like a commander embracing a newly decorated soldier. The chateau represented in her eyes the Promised Land.

Her husband expressed his emotion differently:

“She is my only child,” he said to me. “Take care of her.”

Fearing lest he might break down, he dared not say more. In the midst of our little group, swayed by such different sentiments, Raymonde preserved her face of peace.

We had only to walk the length of the avenue, and we were at home. After the fir branches which carpeted the space in front of the lodge, we found the ground hard, and it crackled under our feet, for it was freezing. The night was not dark. In the depths of the sky, between the chestnut trees whose branches stood out black and bare, and the oaks with their dry, shrivelled leaves, shone thousands of stars, that almost touched each other, and seemed to be in motion like a swarm of bees. Certainly this sense of throbbing has remained in my memory. Have I since seen similar nights? Did I dream of that one? I do not know now.

The cold was stinging.

“Suppose we run?” I suggested.

“Come,” she answered.

She picked up the train of her wedding dress and darted off. Practice in the woods had made her agile, and I still see clearly before me this flight in the shadow, the bare trees, the lawn and the empty urns. Oh! it was a wonderful night, a holy night, when in the majestic silence I heard her two little shoes striking the ground.

I stopped, and then at last I pursued her. She was the first to gain the arches of the cloister. Without doubt the apparent life in the sky had struck her too, for when I rejoined her, she pointed it out to me with these words:

“There are no falling stars to-night. Do you still want something more?”

“No, Raymonde,” I said. “Nothing more.”

I might have added: “Not even you.” No, not even her! Beyond desire, I was experiencing that kind of love, which one enjoys in moments of ecstatic adoration, when the blood flows gently not to thwart the rush of the spirit, when life means sweetness, goodness, joy, light, serenity—

* * *

“Let us go in,” I said, “you will catch cold.”

“Listen,” she replied.

The branches nearest to the cloister cracked with the frost. And from the forest, of which we could distinguish only a vague outline, a confused murmur came to us.

“The night sings,” said I.

“The night is praying,” she replied, and again she raised her head to the stars.

“How many there are! How many there are!”

She named some of the constellations. Cygnus, the most beautiful, appeared to be on the wing like a diamond-shaped flock of birds. I took Raymonde’s hand in mine so that she would look at me.

“Now,” I said, “there is no one in the world but you and me. I shall love you all my life.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “that is not sufficient.”

“What must you have?”

“Our life—that is not enough. It will end. I wish a love which will never end. Never. Never.”

“Is that possible?”

“Of course, since there is Eternity.”

At that moment her faith was contagious, enlarging and consecrating our love.

* * *

At the chateau we found a large fire burning in the little salon, which I had refurnished for her. She looked at the furniture, the pictures and the hangings, and then at me with a smile that was a little sad. Did she have a presentiment of the future? Now that I am able to interpret truly the past, I recall having seen, one morning when I was out shooting, a young hind stop at the entrance to a wood, where I was hiding. She inhaled the fresh breeze and then hesitated in fear. Finally she came on in my direction.

“You are in your own home, Raymonde,” I said.

“Oh! it is very beautiful, but I am not accustomed to it.”

“You will become so soon.”

“Of course, I must.”

To her the new luxury was a burden. Otherwise it meant nothing. The only effect of this change of conditions for her was one of restraint.

She left me to change her gown. When she reappeared, she came over and clung to me.

“My love,” she said.

And as I held her to my heart, so young, so pure and so confiding, I felt two tears fill my eyes. Raising her head a little she saw them.

“What troubles you?” she asked anxiously. “Are you weeping?”

I am proud now to remember those tears, the quivering of my love and the obscure confession of my own unworthiness. Through them Raymonde recognised the upheaval that I felt before the perfection of her love. Later they unquestionably helped her to endure my cruelty and to forgive it.

I was silent.

“Dear,” she repeated, “why do you weep?”

“No doubt because I love you too much,” I managed to say at last, in an attempt to play with my emotion.

“That is so simple,” she answered.

Our happiness was indeed so simple that I could not believe that it was happiness. Until then I had sought it in the artificialities and complexities of pleasure. My engagement and marriage had restored it to me in its integrity and fulness, and I was astonished that it was serene.

She took down her hair, and it spread over her shoulders and breast, even more golden at the ends than on top. The various shades of gold blended to frame the whiteness of her face and neck. She had chosen the white woollen dress which she had worn on the day I had asked for her hand. I felt that this act brought her closer to me, and that I shared in the radiance which emanated from her.

We did not touch the supper which had been prepared. The chateau was asleep, and when we were silent there was nothing but the solemn silence of the country night. There was no one but us in the world; only us and love that was stronger than we.

“It is late,” she murmured, and it was like a prayer. “Don’t you want me to retire? I am tired.”

She leaned toward me and my mouth touched her forehead. Then I let her go. The peace that was in her dominated my love.

I sat long before the open fire—how long, I cannot say—and my heart opened to all the sweetness of life.

When I rejoined her she was sleeping. I did not waken her.

Second Note Book

November 19—

As we were nearing Rome, I pointed out to Raymonde the Sabine mountains, already covered with snow. But she only saw a rainbow, trembling in the golden haze which the setting sun, reappearing after the rain, drew from the damp soil. She derived from it a happy omen.

Then she compared the dome of St. Peter’s, which one sees first of all, to a rick in the field. Later, was she not to compare the Eternal City, upon which the centuries have left their imprint, to her forest, with its centenarian trees covered with moss, ivy, and mistletoe? One thinks that one will always remain bewildered, and soon things become so familiar, although imposing, that one speaks and listens to them. Her forest had prepared her. The shafts of the trees formed innumerable arches as at St. Paul’s outside the Walls; on the old trunks new stems grew, and the fallen leaves composed the soil which nourished the roots. Thus the continuity of historic Rome, which allowed Christian churches to flourish on the sites of pagan temples, did not astonish her.

Her divine ignorance preserved her miraculously from that insincere admiration which the sanctity of established reputations imposes upon most of us. She delighted in art as she breathed the morning air in the woods, of which one knows neither where it comes from nor why it leaves upon the lips so agreeable a flavour. With sure taste she walked through the midst of statues and pictures as through a garden pointing out to me her favourites. Invariably these were works of calmness and serenity, in which the old masters represented life either with all its natural joy or with religious acceptation,—the draped Muses of the Vatican, that veiled woman on one of the sides of the throne of the goddess in the “Thermos” Museum who keeps alive the sacred fire on the hearth,—what others shall I name, a young Madonna by Fra Angelico; Raphael’s Parnassus; or Michelangelo’s sublime creation of the first man. By instinct she turned to them as to old friends. I never caught her in a mistake. Like the doves of the Villa Adrien who stoop on the basin and then lift their throats swelled with water, she was drinking in the masterpieces, in her appreciation of which I might well have tried to imitate her.

However, I did not accept this unexpected superiority, this straightforward impulse of a young and unspoiled sensitiveness. I paraded my learning, I imposed on her my instruction. Her assurance disconcerted me, at the same time that her willing attention did not prevent her from confusing the different schools and classifications I tried to teach her. I corrected and scolded her, and she apologized and made more mistakes—except in the selection of her favourites.

Through a spirit of contradiction in which vanity played the chief part, I turned her attention to works palpitating with unrest, misery, passion or sensuality. The contortions of a Laocoön, the “Dying Gladiator” crushed to the ground, Apollo darting forward with a theatrical gesture, Venus bowed under the weight of her own beauty and not like a Diana free in her movements,—these satisfied me but offended her. She did not respond to my enthusiasms, surmising perhaps that they were forced, and inwardly I reproached her for not understanding, for not knowing.

“She knows nothing,” I thought, “of the passion that disfigures, the jealousy that twists, the doubt that convulses these countenances and permits them no peace. For the moment she and I are far apart.”

And I prided myself on the discovery.

All this she was to learn one day through me without permitting any alteration in her features to reveal it, merely becoming whiter and more distant as my cruelty increased and she grew nearer to death, death which writes for us our definitive expression, her own too pure and too noble to lower itself to complaints.

These differences, which I considered insignificant and which were in fact hardly perceptible, were they not already part of a more profound discord?

* * *

Nevertheless the first months of our marriage flowed on like a limpid stream that seems motionless. Our days slipped by without our being aware of them. I was amazed at the intimate peace I breathed; it did not seem consistent with the passion I wished to feel again. In time I came to ask myself whether I was really sufficiently in love. I looked for disturbances, outbreaks, storms, a great thirst for life, and around me, within me, I found only simplicity and clearness. Thus I grew distrustful of the new order that was making over my heart.

I had been accustomed to think of love as a combat, and victory appeared to me to be filled with idleness. I began to scorn the harmony which was for her the summit of love, which united her by a thousand secret bonds to artistic perfection.

I was afraid of monotony, even though I had not known it, I attained it very soon through the bitterness I mingled with Raymonde’s pure offerings.

* * *

Among the books and the guides that I had selected in order to give her what I called, pretentiously enough, “intellectual culture,” were included some extracts from Chateaubriand, compositions that conjured up ruins, prose nothings that accompanied admirable descriptions throbbing with the soul of Rome, After a visit to the church of Saint Louis-des-Français, in which Chateaubriand had erected the tomb of Pauline de Beaumont—she is reclining on a couch, one arm hanging down and the other folded, in a mournful attitude that is much too beautiful—I read aloud the passage from the “Memoirs,” in which her lover tells of alms that he had condescended to bestow upon one in agony.

“I observed that until her last breath, Mme. de Beaumont did not doubt the truth of my attachment to her; she did not cease to show her surprise at it, and she seemed to die both disconsolate and overjoyed. She had believed that she was a burden to me, and she had wished to go away in order to rid me of her.”

With what sadness these sentences were later to come back to us!

I turned to Raymonde to note the effect upon her of such magnanimity.

“How is it possible,” she said, “to write things like that if one is really in love. And if one is not in love, what an abominable farce!”

All her simplicity and frankness was opposed to the sentimental buffoonery which is so widespread in our society, and from which she herself was shortly to suffer in her inability to accommodate herself to it.

* * *

When my thoughts are turned toward Rome by these moving memories, whose sweetness—which happily I did not succeed in utterly spoiling—I can better appreciate at a distance, I recall particularly two or three pilgrimages that drew me closer to her. In my thoughts I return alone to places where we had been together.

We were standing at the edge of the first of the basins that occupy to-day the site of the palace of the Vestals. It was in the beginning of Spring, and some newly blown red roses were reflected in the water. Behind her stood the three remaining columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, their marble shining with the caress of the sun. Around her there was nothing but ancient debris, mutilated statues, and these flowers. As at the end of autumn in the Sleeping Woods, she stood quite congruously in this past of more than two thousand years ago.

Again, we were at the Coliseum, the arena already plunged into shadow, while the upper part of the huge wall, completely covered with gillyflowers, was still lighted by the rays of the setting sun. A guide had shown us the door through which they carried the dead bodies of the Christians that had been sacrificed to the wild beasts. Long shudders shook her whole body, and suddenly two tears, which she tried too long to keep back, fell from her eyes.

“Why do you weep?” I asked.

“It was here,” she murmured.

What was the use of asking the cause of her emotion? The fire of sacrifice was burning her. I had before me a young martyr in the making. And then again I recall the cloister of St. John Lateran, a quiet corner, where one inhales with the perfume of roses the unchanging charm of Rome. We were there alone one sunny afternoon. The recollection of the roses growing among the palms in the little central garden about the wall fixes the time for me as again the beginning of Spring, doubtless a short time before our departure. She was at a little distance from me, standing between two of those slender columns which support the cloister and seem as transparent as alabaster in the sunlight. She was dressed in white; she smiled. I have never since seen so perfect an image of peace.

* * *

Her catholic heart rejoiced in the city of three hundred and fifty churches, eighty of which are dedicated to the Virgin. And here her knowledge surpassed mine. She gave me brief accounts of the lives of Saint Cecilia, Saint Agnes and Saint Catherine of Siena, of whom I knew nothing. The places which their deaths have sanctified derived all their meaning from these narratives. At the church of Santa Maria Maggiore she told me of the miracle of the snow which fell in the month of August, to point out to the Pope the site of the basilica. I grieved her with my ironies and doubts, whereas the miracle of her charm should have watered the barrenness of my mind like that cool snowfall itself. Then, having amused myself with the religious instruction of which she gave me the benefit, little by little I began to be annoyed by it. It seemed to me that I was reduced to second place. My vanity could not endure it. In consequence, for several days I systematically selected for the object of our walks those ancient ruins wherein I had the advantage of her.

However, I did go with her sometimes to service at Santa Maria del Popolo, and the Trinità dei Monte, which, being near the Piazza di Spagna, where we were living, were her particular churches. For Trinity, whose rose-coloured bell towers at the alluring hour of the Benediction, are beautified by the evening light, we had only to mount the staircase, from the flower market at the bottom. It is on the Road to the Pincio, where we went later.

But instead of admiring this elevation of spirit I derived bitterness from it. Did I not wish to confiscate all her powers of feeling to the profit of my love alone?

“A moment ago,” I protested once, “you were praying, and I was not in your thoughts.”

She was much surprised at my remark.

“You are always in my thoughts when I pray,” she replied. “How could it be otherwise?”

I was struggling against a happiness the perfection of which I was incapable of understanding. My wife charmed and at the same time bewildered me. I had thought to find her a docile pupil and yet sometimes my teachings seemed vain, useless and absurd, sometimes in advance of her age and preparation. I had at times, in the bottom of my heart, the instinctive feeling that she surpassed me, and perhaps without self-love I might have bowed to her nobility. But what man ever renounces his self-love? Instead of renouncing mine I hastened to pronounce her childish.

* * *

I recall one more incident at Rome in which I find our differences revealed.

The night before our departure, we had climbed to the garden of the Pincio. After sunset, which one watches from the terrace as if it were a play, we walked on in the direction of the Villa Borghese. On our right, a lawn sloped down to a small wood of pine trees, on the outskirts of which a group of seminary students, in their red robes, were walking up and down, reciting their breviary. A bareheaded young girl of the people ran past us. I noticed her erect carriage, her black hair, the beads of perspiration on her neck. Presently she lay down on the grass, drawing up her dress round her for a rug. A young man who had followed her approached her from behind. He had plucked several clusters from a border of flowering acacias, and began to throw them at her laughingly. She did not move. Then he came nearer, and, stooping, kissed her on the neck in the spot where I had seen the bead of perspiration. Even pleasure did not change her motionless attitude.

“Look,” I said to Raymonde, “is that not as beautiful as an antique marble?”

But she stood still, her ear strained, her arm a little raised.

“Listen,” she murmured.

Answering each other the bells of countless churches announced the Angelus. Their chimes came faintly up the slope to us, but she was familiar with several and recognised them. For the last time, religious Rome was speaking to her.

I was jealous of her diverted attention; that hour of peace, which the voices of the evening, the twilight, and the realisation of our love combined to make sacred, I spoiled by a wish to oppose my companion, to humiliate her, to bruise her.

I was tormented by restlessness and sensuality instead of yielding myself to the beneficent tranquillity which sprang naturally from her love.

* * *

When we returned from Italy, the springtime which we had left in full blossom in the Roman campagna, where the grain was already tall and ripening, had hardly begun to make our woods verdant again.

M. and Mme. Mairieux awaited us.

“My little one,” stammered her father on seeing us.

He, ordinarily so calm and self-controlled, was greatly moved now, showing openly the emotion that gripped him. He had grown older, and stooped; and for the first time I thought his demonstrations of fatherly affection overdone. After loving and almost minute scrutiny of his daughter, he turned to me and took my hand:

“Thank you,” he said.

He gave me the credit for Raymonde’s good health, and assured me of his confidence in me at the very moment when I was thinking how to get away, astonished at this excess of gratitude.

Mme. Mairieux was never weary of admiring us. Sometimes she made a special point of calling me by my first name; and again she abandoned these happy advances as if she feared their boldness. She gloried in the length of our journey, the importance of our hotels, and even in the beauty of Rome. It was all part of the new and longed-for luxury which I gave my wife, the mere announcement of which pleased her like a coloured poster.

One day, when Raymonde was a little later than usual, I had an opportunity to watch from my window the manœuvres of her father, who rode up for the express purpose of waiting for her at the threshold. It was very natural, yet instead of sympathising with his expectation I felt only impatience at it.

My wife came in after the luncheon bell had sounded.

“Where have you been?” I asked quite unfairly.

“Down there.”

“I suppose so. Are you not always thrusting yourself in there?”

Unquestionably she was about to say: “I am their only child, and they love to see me,” but instead she looked at me with her clear glance and kept silent.

That was my first direct blow at the ideal which, she had formed of me. My opinions on our journey, my restlessness, my strange curiosity, had made her uneasy, but she had kept her faith intact. Now, in the way she looked at me, I read her distress at seeing me reveal this petty jealousy. Tears rose in her eyes, but she restrained them. Irritated with myself and angry with her as well, instead of restoring my lost tenderness, I permitted the sense of my injustice to drop into her heart, to grow there as the circles from a falling stone in a quiet lake widen until they reach the shore.

Next day, timid and bashful, she asked me if I objected to her going to the lodge.

“Of course not,” I answered crossly. “Have I ever hindered your liberty?”

Again an opportunity offered itself to make amends, and again I did not avail myself of it.

She went to the lodge, but shortened her visit. After her return, the promptness of which I refrained from mentioning, M. Mairieux appeared more than once at the doorstep, wandering about like a soul in pain in the avenue leading up to the chateau. I saw him take up several pieces of work only to abandon them again, passing confusedly from one thing to another. Something was missing in his day: the smile of his daughter, of which I had deprived him. He continually approached the door and then withdrew again. I should have called to him, “She is here, come in,” and instead I contented myself with watching him. My apprenticeship of cruelty was beginning already. Raymonde saw him too, but she did not move. She was waiting for my decision, resolved not to thwart me, and hoping everything from my tenderness. Hating the wrong I did, I none the less accentuated it, and thus, without benefit to myself, I impaired a source of joy.

The following day Mme. Mairieux invaded our apartment. She came to make certain on the spot of the happiness of her daughter. Raymonde would have liked to spare me these interminable and noisy visits, which my coldness could not shorten. She knew how impatient I was after them. I was growing tired of the Sleeping Woods; she knew it and mourned for it, and, thinking only of me, blamed herself for it.

* * *

Almost immediately after our return to the chateau Raymonde’s condition necessitated our giving up our horseback rides.

“Let us walk,” she said, “we can see better when we go slowly, and one hears the life in the trees better, too, and the stirring of the little blades of grass. Shan’t we?”

In the early morning, especially when the air is keen and freshened by the dew, these slow strolls under the trees should have been exquisite. The leaves were not yet thick enough to keep the sun from filtering through the branches and throwing its gold on the footpaths, but they had already that effect of young verdure that is so delightful. The paths were carpeted with grass, and, since our footfalls made no sound upon it, we were often surprised by almost touching a woodpecker or a chaffinch, who, believing himself master in his own house, flew off in safe and leisurely flight. Oftentimes a hare crossed the avenue in front of us with little bounds.

Yes, these strolls would have been exquisite but for the skill I employed to spoil them! As I had tormented Raymonde about her parents, so now I tormented her about the hope that filled her with a joy that was all but sacred. She saw in it the continuation of our cherished love, the palpable thrill of our union, the living bond of our united bodies and souls. I saw only the inconvenience, and I showed my irritation and nervousness over it. I appreciate to-day that this new affection which preceded its object, far from diminishing it, broadened, strengthened and extended her love as a wife. I did not recognise it then, and I spurred myself on to detect in her beforehand some cause of estrangement.

When I was silent too long, she would say to me with an adorable flush of colour:

“Let us talk about him.”

And then, correcting herself, in order not to be unfair, she would add:

“Or, of her.”

She pictured it as an image of our happiness that we should see grow, whose youth, one day, should prolong ours in its decline. She smiled as she thought of him and saw him. These first maternal smiles, bestowed on one who does not yet exist, seem to give a woman the sweetness, freshness and purity of a young girl again. Barren love is ignorant of many forms of beauty. The madonnas have a deeper beauty, but not less innocent, not less melodious than the young maid who carries in herself the Springtime. But these first smiles, whose charm I understand so well now, I questioned then, as I remember, in jealousy, not in admiration. So new were they to me that I did not know how to gather them. Thus we permit the simple emotions that are the ornament of life to escape from it because we seek our happiness in ourselves instead of finding it on the faces of others. While I made our love complicated by trying to confine it to my personal satisfactions, Raymonde gave to it quite naturally her primitive capacity for acceptation, her radiance, her creative splendour.

“He will look like you,” she assured me.

“How can we tell?”

“Why should he not look like you? My child is my thought, and my thought is you.”

She wished us to give him a name, and wanted, herself, that of her father, but she dared not suggest it. I often changed the conversation, yet what more beautiful topic can there be than the certainty that the future is holding for us the continuation of our race?

My wife remarked my coldness and lack of enthusiasm. She talked less to me in consequence of that which constantly preoccupied her. And then, with an effort which I now understand, she spoke again to me of it. Already forgetful of herself, she was willing to make herself less agreeable to me if in that way she could induce me to bestow a little of my love on the one who was to come, who was beginning to live within her.

However, her lassitude and the change in her figure increased. It all seemed to threaten blows at my pleasure, attacks on her beauty,—I saw this in it instead of the patience and gentle pity and sense of protection which ennoble a woman’s love. I did not altogether conceal my boredom. One evening, as we were returning from the woods a little later than usual, where I had been for a part of the way inattentive, she stopped, very weary, before passing through the gate.

“I am afraid,” she said.

I looked about us; there was no noise, no movement to cause her fear. I thought that perhaps the shadows and the silence had affected her.

“There is nothing, Raymonde.”

“No,” she agreed, “there is nothing.”

I let the matter drop, satisfied. I did not understand that she needed to be reassured. Her fear was not of external things; those she understood and trusted. Already, her fear was of me.

* * *

During my previous visits in the Sleeping Woods, I had had scarcely a word to say to the farmers and workmen whom I met on my estate. They were my superintendent’s affair, not mine; such people were total strangers to me. During our engagement, I had been much surprised at the looks of understanding exchanged between them and Raymonde when I accompanied her. Later, love traced around us its circle of isolation and no one addressed us, but through its social aspect, marriage made us more accessible. On our return from Italy, the tenants and day labourers whom we encountered, never failed to salute my wife. They called her “Our Lady.” She was “Our Lady of the Woods,” and at first it amused me. But they told her of the deaths and the births, obscure stories of the village or the household, bad crops, or the sickness of the live stock, and I saw myself put aside. They consulted her and let me alone.

“But here is your Master,” she objected, pointing to me, and entrenching herself behind my authority.

“Yes, but you are our lady.”

Instead of rejoicing in this, at last I became offended.

“Speak to them,” she advised me. “Are you not their master?”

“I do not know them,” I answered.

“Exactly, but you will know them.”

“They bore me,” I replied.

“Give them a little friendship, and they will cease to weary you.”

“I don’t find it easy,” I said.

“There is poor Fannette, the washerwoman: her hands are covered with cracks and chilblains. Then there is Pierre, the deaf man, who works in our garden.”

“If he is deaf, it would be useless to talk to him.”

“Oh, but one can speak to him with a hearty laugh, or a handshake, or a finger showing him a flower bed. That is the language which he understands. He has never forgotten to bring me a bouquet on my birthday.”

She was teaching me a little humanity, after all the art that I had thought to teach her! I did not care for it at all, and profited very little from her lessons. It is the same with most of those who screen themselves behind agents in the administration of their estates: they ignore the sweat and labour which all production exacts, and the money which labour makes for them, so far from putting them in contact with other men, only succeeds in keeping them apart.

The sovereignty which Raymonde exercised on my estate made me uneasy. Of a certainty, I refused to confess it to myself, but was not the sympathy she showed and inspired in all these worthy people in itself a criticism of my disdain and indifference? With the intuition which she possessed for my slightest, my most secret annoyances, she perceived my state of mind. Thereafter she cut short her conversations with these people, contenting herself for the most part with a courteous greeting from a distance, which yet managed to cheer them, even if they hoped for more.

And so again, without benefit to myself, I turned aside a source of joy.

Our daughter Odette, whom we afterwards called Dilette, was born in October.

In the face of Raymonde’s sufferings I was less courageous than she. And if I dare confess the whole truth to myself, a horror of anything which attacked the ordering of my life mingled with the compassion which I felt for her.

After the birth of the child, when my own nerves were shattered, I was surprised at the long shudder which shook the mother. She suffered no more, but trembled before the life which she had brought into the world. It was the mysterious prelude to maternal love.

* * *

The autumn advanced. Tired of “the desert” of the Sleeping Woods, and of the incessant attention which a new-born baby demands, deprived by my own act of the strong ties which bound us to a region where we directed the labour and endeavoured to create prosperity, I was eager to return to Paris after so long an absence. Our apartment in the Avenue du Bois was in readiness for us. We had nothing to do but depart.

“Whenever you wish,” consented Raymonde.

We arranged our departure for the first of December. The baby could travel then without danger. The milk of her nurse agreed with her wonderfully. For a child of two months, she showed good strength.

Raymonde suggested a last walk, and a pale, cold sun enticed us. It scarcely melted the white frost in the fields and on the weed-grown paths. The grass crackled under our steps as we entered the woods. We went deep into them. Along the edge, the leaves more exposed to the wind had already fallen. Deeper within there were still a few, especially on the oaks and maples. Copper-coloured or golden, they clung stiffly to the branches, and with the least breath of wind sounded like toy bells. At the Green Fountain, where our horses had drunk that day, they nearly stopped the basin.

Beside me, enveloped in a white cloak and hood, my wife gazed absorbedly, her eyes dim with tears. I was astonished, and even somewhat annoyed by such emotion. Was I not sufficient for her happiness? Why should a mere change of environment, one at which, indeed, she ought to have rejoiced, since I was offering her Paris and its gaieties, have so affected her?

“What troubles you, my dear?” I asked her.

“I have been so happy here,” she replied.

“But we shall be happy in Paris.”

“Here my trees help me. Everything helps me. I feel myself at ease and protected. Yonder I shall be alone.”

“You will be with me. Is not that enough?” I asked.

“Alone to keep your love, which I am so afraid of losing.”

“But that is absurd.”

Why did she doubt herself? In the clear light of the winter sun, which filled the woods, she was resplendent with youth; or rather not youth, but almost childish beauty. Maternity had restored to her that air of extreme purity that one sees in young novices. I looked at her, all in white, so sweet and so gentle, and then round us again at the familiar forest which contented her.

“My love,” I said, with condescending protection, “I will watch over you.”

Oh, the smile with which she rewarded this promise that I was to keep so badly!

* * *

A day or two after our arrival in Paris I surprised her leaning against the window of her room overlooking the Avenue du Bois. She was so absorbed that she did not hear me come in. I approached her. It was of course the novelty of the sight that held her prisoner.

A beautiful winter morning had drawn all the idle world of Paris to a promenade before luncheon. Men and women on horseback, riding at a walk or a quiet canter, crowded the beaten earth of the bridle path. The roadway was devoted to a few surviving carriages, whose ancient steeds seemed hardly able to move their thin legs, and above all to many motors, which, under less restraint than in the crowded city, passed by at full speed, as though revenging themselves with absolute license in the country. On the broad pavement by the side of the grass plots pedestrians were taking their constitutionals among the nurses and children scattered about in pursuit of hoops and balloons. The bluish haze of the clear day softened the outlines of the Arch of Triumph and the light, entering it from all sides, seemingly, increased the height of its arch and columns. At the other end of the Avenue, the Bois slept.

“I am sure you love Paris already,” I said.

Much to her astonishment, I had ceased in Paris calling her “thou,” on account of the custom in society, of which I had already begun to think, and she had obediently imitated me, without asking any explanation. Now, not knowing that I was near, she gave a slight start when she heard my voice.

“Oh, no,” she answered. “There are too many houses and too many people.”

“What were you looking at?”

“I was looking yonder for the forest of the Maiden and the lodge at the gate.”

“That is the Porte Dauphine and the Chinese Pavilion.”

“I did not know it. I imagined that we were at home.”

I had thought this procession that our apartment commanded would have attracted and captivated the love of elegance latent in every woman, that Paris would not have failed to awaken it in her; and behold, the nook where she was born, the country of her love, was sufficient for her. She did not see beyond it; or rather she saw it everywhere.

“You will come to love it,” I continued, with a gesture toward the city. “At your age Paris is irresistible, above all when you will be one of its queens.”

“Oh, one of its queens? You are laughing at me.”

At that moment, attentive and interested, her blond hair caressed by a ray of sunlight, she was at the same time so sensible and so fascinating that I felt I could hope everything for her.

“I am not joking,” I said. “You do not know my power.”

“Do you dare say that?”

“Well, I will make you a queen.”

“Again?”

“That is to say, a woman of fashion.”

Before this prospect she opened her large eyes like a child who is taken to the zoological gardens for the first time and introduced to unknown and strange animals, ostriches, giraffes, or delicate and impossible-looking pink flamingoes. She repeated my phrase, uttering the words as if they hurt her.

“A woman of fashion.”

It meant nothing to her. There had never been any question of it at the Sleeping Woods, and in Rome we lived as strangers, apart from the regular social hierarchy and absolutely at liberty to do as we wished. Now, however, this was the goal that I proposed for her. Already Paris had begun to claim me once again. I breathed its atmosphere, laden with envy and vanity and artificial charms, the more eagerly because for a time it had ceased to intoxicate me and I brought to it new appetite. I had not retained that which my love had given me—regeneration and peace of heart. On the contrary, I wished to force upon her my own habits of life. Face to face with this child, I became aware of the absurdity of my desire. I became aware of it, but I did not abandon it on that account. I wished the world to appreciate and to envy me the treasure that I possessed. In order to be in the fashion, my happiness required publicity.

She turned her head:

“It is impossible,” she said. “I should not know how.”

“Yes, yes,” I insisted, not without a little impatience. “You will learn. You can learn everything.”

“Dost thou wish it?” and then, correcting herself, “Do you wish it?” she asked.

“Certainly.”

“Then I will obey you to the best of my ability.”

That evening, when the nurse did not succeed in quieting Dilette, who was for some reason out of sorts, Raymonde insisted on putting the baby to sleep herself, a privilege which she had always enjoyed at the chateau. As a lullaby she sang in a low voice, to the tune of “Malbrough,” a romance of Chérubin. When she came to the stanza:

whether it was because of the contagious sadness of the verses, the memory of our own Green Fountain, or a presentiment of the dangers that threw their shadows across our love, I do not know, but she stopped. I was in the next room and the curtains between us were drawn back. I heard what sounded like a stifled sigh. Awakened by the silence, Dilette began to cry again, and my wife slowly continued her song.

* * *

The occasion I had chosen for presenting her to society was a reception given one evening by Madame de Saunois, at whose house in the old days I was a frequent guest. Mme. de Saunois is a lady who has attained the summit of that social elegance which springs from exquisite dressing, novel entertainment, clever conversation and the careful cultivation of every natural and artificial charm. Though her age may be subject to some debate, her name and fortune admit of no discussion. Her visiting list is restricted and select, and her invitations are proportionately sought for. Outwardly manners and taste are the same at her house as anywhere else but she would regard herself as old-fashioned if she were thought for one moment to set any limit to liberty of conduct or opinion. She accepts every irregularity of mind or heart if only it is perpetrated by one of the socially elect. According to my ideas at that time her drawing-room was just the one in which I could count upon a gratifying reception for Raymonde.

Promptly upon our arrival in Paris I besought my wife to put herself in the hands of one of the big dressmakers. As she seemed almost averse to this idea I myself looked over her wardrobe with her before we started out to order anything new.

“What’s this?” I asked, picking up a cheap looking woollen skirt. I did not recognise the little wedding dress that had produced such a sweet and simple effect in the Sleeping Woods. Alas, effects change with place and mood: in Paris the little dress was not the same at all.

Guessing my thoughts she said with a blush, “I shall never wear it again, you may be sure.”

“Why not give it away to some poor girl to whom it would be of some use?” I said, with the best intentions in the world.

Raymonde’s flush, which I did not yet understand, faded suddenly. I saw her cheek whiten.

“I was a poor girl once,” she said.

“Oh, but you must forget that.”

“No, let me have my memories. If ever I am tempted to become proud some day, they will keep me humble.”

I understood, then, the wound I had given, but instead of asking her pardon, I said nothing.

To me nothing seemed too sumptuous and elaborate for her, while her one desire was to pass unnoticed. She “set no store” by success: she wished only to please me. But must she not please the whole world, to please me? As to the clothes, she had her way more than I, and I had to be content with a lace robe that suited marvellously her air of candour. All the time the fittings and appraising looks of the tailors, the insulting physical evaluations as of professional buyers, positively affronted her. Again and again she turned toward me eyes that besought mercy like the tender eyes of a hunted doe! But I held to my conquest with an unpitying tenacity.

When she had tried on the skirt and waist, that brought out and moulded her body under the vapory lightness of the material, leaving no outline unseen, and displaying the bare expanse of her throat, she was ashamed at the sight of herself in the mirror.

“Is it possible,” she protested, “that you can wish me to appear like this?”

“Why not?” said I. “You are beautiful.”

“But every one will see me,” she objected.

It began to seem laughable to me, her idea of reserving her beauty for me alone.

The evening upon which we made our first appearance in the drawing-room of Madame de Saunois I felt a curious diminution in my proprietary satisfaction. My too long absence had allowed people to recover from their concern with me, and become indifferent. Paris avenges herself upon those who scorn her. Pierre Ducal was there, informing every one of my marriage. I thought I heard whispered as we passed: “The daughter of his superintendent.” When one is conscious of ill-will one is prompt to imagine hostile remarks, and it seemed to me that every one there was spying jealously upon my wife. The sharp contrast of her youth and bloom with the maturer charms of the other women made instant enemies of them, enemies fully accoutred in the art of feminine war. There were young girls there crowned with name and fortune any one of whom I might have married. Not that I had any regret, but I committed the indelicacy of remembering the advantages I had let slip. There was indeed one woman there, not a stranger to me, whose presence should have been very painful to me, since I especially watched for her opinion of my wife and hoped it would be favourable. Such is the host of petty infamies a man can harbour in his heart when he surrenders himself to vanity.

At my wedding in the Sleeping Woods it was the presence of Pierre Ducal that had been the cause of my noticing the cut of my bride’s wedding gown. To-night Raymonde was in faultless toilette, though timidity and reserve and half fright, made her seem full of awkwardness. Her modest embarrassment under the steady gaze of so many people became ridiculous constraint, and instead of encouraging her I too became ill at ease and caught some of her discomfort.

My friend Pierre Ducal came forward to speak to us. He was cordial in his greeting, but my wife did not remember him.

“I looked at him so little,” she explained to me later, by way of apology. “And how should I have seen him? It was our wedding day!”

Nothing is more offensive to a man who prides himself on the number of hearts he has broken, than the knowledge that he has left absolutely no impression on a young woman’s mind. Ducal turned coldly away to pay his homages elsewhere and make his scathing comments; and as I had no doubt of his pique nor of the vengeance he was taking, Raymonde’s maladroitness gave me fresh cause for irritation. The very man upon whom I had counted as an ally she had succeeded in offending.

Mme. de Saunois being asked—asked, it must be confessed, without much eagerness—consented to give us a romance by Duparc, which no doubt she would follow with one or two others, perhaps three, if she found herself in voice or were sufficiently encouraged. Singing was her passion, a perfect mania, indeed. She had a thread of a voice, which she eked out with a pantomime meant to suggest unbounded temperament. Her pretensions to artistic ability were inordinate. She allowed herself to be called a great society singer in the newspaper paragraphs. People laughed heartily about it all behind her back, but in her presence restrained their amusement as best they could, so that she was doomed never to know the real impression she created.

After her first selection, the last note of it still hanging on her lips, her guests rushed to her from all sides, at the risk of stifling her, and let loose upon her an avalanche of compliments and appreciation. They compared her, without shame, to this or that celebrity, preferably foreigners, who are more apt to pass current without the stamp of critical approval. Being unable to praise the volume of her voice, they made up by praising its timbre, and above all, her spirit, as being something less definite and discernible and so a safer basis of compliment.

Raymonde alone kept her place, motionless, a slender isle of truth in the midst of this sea of falsehood. Mme. de Saunois, after her last grand aria, with unrestrained enthusiasm in her wake, passed in front of us.

“Well, Madame, have I your approval?” she inquired. Apparently she had not yet her fill of praise: she must have something from Raymonde too, all the more delicious because it was kept back by some resisting scruple.

I listened anxiously for Raymonde’s reply.

“The music is new to me,” murmured my wife. “I think I shall like it when I know it better.”

“Yes, isn’t it, and so suggestive! It has to be well interpreted,” said Mme. de Saunois.

Clearly enough it was not a question of the romance but of its interpreter.

“I am not accustomed to it,” answered Raymonde. “But perhaps that will come later,” she added, poor little one, calling to her aid her most gracious smile.

Instead of being pleased with the charming sight of so much sincerity in the midst of these conventional praises, I anxiously followed Mme. de Saunois in her further majestic progress.

“She knows nothing of music,” I heard some one reassure her.

Later in the evening, a young professional pianist, of considerable though as yet unrecognised talent, began to play Mozart’s sonata in F, that one whose yielding rhythm expresses so much fresh and wholesome joy, touched here and there by the melancholy of youth. Every one in the drawing-room chattered, because this time there was no need to compliment, but Raymonde, attentive, forgotten and forgetful, listened gravely to the divine poem of youth.

The people near her were talking aloud. Suddenly she seemed to awaken from her dream and I saw her quickly change her seat. What remarks I wondered had provoked her confusion and flight? Instead of being drawn toward her protection, I blamed her for holding such scruples about insignificant things. In short everything turned against her at this gathering, where I had expected to exhibit her proudly and obtain the approbation of the world. Soon people began to avoid her. Hostesses do not squander their energies at receptions or put themselves to any trouble for the entertainment of their guests nowadays as they used to do: they merely give them a chance to amuse themselves or be bored as they may see fit.

In the hubbub which the end of the selection had called forth, she found herself alone, while all the others surrounded a woman—young?—whom I had not specially noticed, but whose evident fame now attracted my attention and took possession of me. I asked Mme. de Saunois about her as she was passing.

“You do not know her? Why, she is famous. Mme. de H—, the author of ‘The Open Garden.’ A new muse.”

There are so many of these nowadays that only the specialists can enumerate them: I confessed my ignorance, which amused my hostess.

“You will know her very soon,” she added. “For she is going to recite some verses for us. She has a prodigious memory—for her own works. She has never been known to forget a single one of them—fortunately for us.”

I confessed in the same tone of badinage my satisfaction at the prospect in store for me, remarking that the muse was already interesting to look at.

This drew from Madame de Saunois the comment, “In what respect?”

“In her colouring—that dark skin and red hair.”

“It is dyed.”

“Her pale face and those blood-red lips.”

“Paint.”

“Listen to her. She speaks our language with a singing accent. It sounds foreign and has a charm.”

“Her mother is an Italian and her father a Pole. In her writing she expresses the soul of France. Her husband, that very excellent H—, brought her back from somewhere. But she is well connected. I have made inquiries. But what of that? With her here any drawing-room will be like a public garden, and the invasion will begin.”

“What invasion?”

“The foreign invasion. Go and make love to her. She is as contagious as the whooping cough with you men.”

“Indeed!”

“Oh, don’t boast. You will go the way of all the others. She makes the necessary concessions.”

A call for silence interrupted us. Mme. de H—, with a queenly gesture, enlarged the circle about her; then, with an apparent inward search for inspiration, began her recitation.

I am not expert enough in poetry to decide on the merit of her poem; besides, too many conflicting impressions affected my judgment. In her verses deified nature took human shape, the better to offer herself to our comprehension. Once more the Bacchantes, after having killed Orpheus, substituted for his sacred rhythms their wild fanatic dances and disorderly rounds. In the tone of her warm, flexible, and sonorous voice and the harmonious gestures with which she accompanied her poem, in the whole dashing movement of her lithe body, which appeared to be burning with earnestness, there was a certain sensual appeal which disturbed one’s nerves. It was the return to primitive instincts, to the cult of force and desire. Yet no one, except Raymonde, who preserved her calm in the midst of the general emotion, thought of being surprised at hearing such ideas exploited in the most refined salon in Paris by a woman whose face was rouged and whose youth was already a thing of the past.

Mme. de Saunois had evidently known what was coming. As for me, I was eager to be presented to Mme. de H—, the beautiful Nacha she was familiarly called by those about me, like an established celebrity. She barely deigned to acknowledge my compliments by a movement of her head. The rouge and powder, at close range, did not seem to detract from her beauty.

“What did I say?” whispered Mme. de Saunois, with the air of improving her prediction. For the success of another was hardly pleasing to her.

Raymonde did not consent to manifest any sort of approval, although Mme. de H— regarded her fixedly. What was the matter with them that they all wanted the approbation which she could not give? Is a single reproach, probably justified, more important than an outburst of acclamations?

In the carriage in which we drove away, my wife and I exchanged only the vaguest remarks. But when we were at home and she was removing her cloak, I noticed that she was on the verge of tears.

“Did you not enjoy yourself?” I asked, hypocritically.

“Oh, I didn’t go for that purpose,” she answered, naively.

“Why, then?”

“So that you might be pleased with me. And you are not.”

“Oh, yes, I am.”

I could not deceive her by my weak protestations.

“No, you’re not. You can’t be. And I shall never know how to please you.”

I condescendingly consoled her. I promised to direct and form her. And when I questioned her (what made me do it?) about the impression which Mme. de H— had produced on her, I received, after a moment’s hesitation, this abrupt reply:

“She is indecent. Don’t you think so?”

Frankness pleases us so little when it is at variance with our concealed views and inclinations that I was offended by her remark. As the result of this first contact with a sphere which love had temporarily abolished, was I beginning to lose or even reject the sweet simplicity which had been poured into my heart by the little maiden of the Sleeping Woods?

If the most insignificant details and conversations of that evening come back to me, it is because in reality nothing happened that was not important. Memory does not encumber itself with frivolities: that which is of no value it lets escape as water flows through one’s fingers. What stays, one may often undervalue, but the day comes at length when it is perceived to be of real worth.

Raymonde’s unsuccessful effort, and even more her fear, which wounded me sensibly; the many moments when I turned from her and her truthful face for some tangle of youth and beauty, some fabric of bleached hair and painted lips and assumed merriment, some embodiment of all the usual artful powers of feminine enslavement;—in a single evening, in a single place, I saw these things grouped before me, calling up visions of my errors and the distant but certain causes of the misfortune or the crime toward which I was advancing—

* * *

—Toward which I was advancing, but not without hesitations and glances back. One cannot quickly or entirely throw off a past in which one has securely attained, in spite of oneself, to some marvellous state of sweetness, rectitude and cheer. The most diverse sentiments, far from excluding each other, often exist quietly side by side, preserving that fatal ignorance that shall finally rend us in twain.

If, during that time, I resumed my interest in work, which I had too long neglected, I owe it to Raymonde and her influence. The new life upon which I had entered demanded that I should not be content even with happy idleness. In order that the harmony created by our love continue, all our faculties must be employed, our entire personality must develop in right directions. A single love, if it aspires to be lasting, if it wishes to be definitive, considers the balance in our natures, prevents us from scattering our forces and restores them rather to our command.

By a gift of happy flattery Raymonde impelled me to make use of gifts which she recognised in me. I collected my notes of a journey I had once made through Northern India. I published them, and expressed a desire to dedicate them to her; but she could not bear the idea of having her name in print.

“It would be an invasion of our privacy,” she objected quite obstinately.

I also modelled a few statuettes: a Group of Girls Announcing Spring, and a Young Girl at the Fountain, inspired by my engagement and that lost fountain in the forest which the autumn leaves had covered.

It often happens that our most disinterested and normal resolutions turn, against us. My work, which was also hers, was destined to be harmful to her. People gave my modelling unmerited praise. Criticism willingly caresses geniuses whom it believes to be short-lived: they can not be a burden; their course will soon be run, and consequently they may be praised without fear. A reputation at the Salons was bestowed upon me at once, and I was too sensible of the advantages which renown brings not to accept it with alacrity.

Deceived by myself, I was astonished that Raymonde did not exhibit more satisfaction. Our first disagreement came from the offer of an illustrated magazine which, following a small exhibition where only amateurs of art could have seen it, asked permission to reproduce the Young Girl at the Fountain. Radiant with delight, I informed my wife, and was surprised at her repugnance to the idea.

“One would think you were displeased,” I said.

“Refuse permission: I beg you to,” was her reply.

“But why?”

“Did I not pose for the statue?” she demanded.

“Of course.”

“Don’t you see then it’s impossible?”

“But I don’t understand, Raymonde,” I said.

“Keep me all for yourself. Don’t share me with the world. I submitted to your exhibiting my statue. Was not that enough?”

However that was not the sole reason for her protest, that sense of modesty. With unfailing intuition she fathomed too the limitations of my ability. Her love warned her not to allow me to seek that more extensive reputation which requires, besides enthusiasm, a daily perseverance and obstinacy. Later I realised better the thorough preparation and almost superhuman energy required by art, if the artist aspires to conquer time. And having realised them I gave up my art.

But now this publicity attracted and fascinated me, and I considered my wife’s susceptibility singularly retrograde, absurd even. Should one not obey the conventions? Nowadays fashion has its laws and its rites. A politician, a writer, an artist belongs to the public, which is no longer content with dancers and actresses. And not only do the notabilities of to-day belong to the public in their official capacity; in their private life also, together with their wives and children, cats and dogs, country homes too if they have any, are they public property. They are seen spread out in magazines, in all forms, alone and with their families. Their poses are accompanied with captions for which a new style has been created, a style uniformly conventional. Their privacy is taken by assault. They consent to it willingly when they do not hunt for it from vanity or self-advertisement. They even appear regularly on commercial posters destined to advertise one or another of our modern industrial products.

I was now to have an opportunity for free advertisement, and should I give it up for the fancy of a too scrupulous woman? Was it reasonable? Who would do it in my place? I reserved my reply, and a day or two later reopened the subject.

“The magazines insist on having that photograph. Are you still so opposed to my giving it?” I began.

As a matter of fact I did not need her consent, and yet I asked her for it. Was it for the purpose of giving her proof of my affection and condescension? Or was it, rather, to oblige her to give in? She gave in, and fifty thousand copies of “The Young Girl at the Fountain” were printed. I distributed some of them myself. Mme. de Saunois had one, and so did Mme. de H— whose opinion, of course in lyric form, created much talk.

I had made that statue for Raymonde and for her alone. How many times, while she gently encouraged me, during its execution, had I told her so? And yet I did not know how to resist the first temptation to make it public.

I remembered reading of the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti that when he lost his wife he placed beside her in the coffin the manuscript of the poems that she had inspired, but later did not hesitate to violate her grave to get them back and publish them. How many artists pluck out their tenderest memories to offer them to the crowd! They invoke glory, but vanity more often is the spirit that leads them.

Vanity, vanity! It is the motive of so many lives! I too chose it rather than the greatest love. There is the whole story.

A little later I had a chance to compare my attitude with Raymonde’s. A series of old French dances was arranged by Mme. de Saunois. Against her wishes, but upon my insisting, she had figured in a gavotte. A society journal asked permission to photograph her.

“If she agrees,” I thought, “that will be my revenge.”

At bottom I was certain that she would refuse, which she did, much to the chagrin of the other dancers, who could not forgive her for depriving the public of their simperings. The gavotte, in the journal, was replaced by a minuet, which admitted of but two persons, and no more; and people avoided thereafter giving her a part in any presentation for fear she might stand in the way of that publicity that was so useful, they assured themselves, to their charity.

As for myself I saw in it another failure.

* * *

At that time, I was interested in the first experiments in aviation, still of questionable success, just as I had formerly been enamoured of automobiling. She would not have selected this field for me, but at the same time she refused to turn me aside from it. She saw that it appealed strongly to my activities, which in-door work could not satisfy and which needed some out-door strife more closely allied to sport.

“If I fly,” I said to her, “you will not be afraid?”

“Oh, yes, I shall.”

“Ought I to give it up then?”

“Oh, no, indeed. Your work is your glory. I shall be afraid, but I shall pray. A woman can fear—”

However, I soon abandoned my studies because they seemed too problematical, and would not have been productive of immediate visible prestige. I was not to take them up again until much later.

* * *

One makes mistakes: I was mistaken in my belief of Raymonde’s lowly origin. I prided myself that I had raised her to my rank, by magnificent generosity, without seeking to divine how such tact and moral culture as hers had come about without the slow formation of time. The chance discovery of some legal document one day informed me of the great age and secular distinction of her family, which reverses had forced to take up service in almost the same place where it had once enjoyed its fortune. This discovery seemed a blow at my superiority. Pride kept me from mentioning it.

* * *

One evening we came home and found that her maid was not there for us. I made the occasion an excuse for reprimands.

“You do not know how to give your orders,” I said.

“I did not want her to wait up for me.”

“That is a mistake,” I said.

“I can wait on myself.”

She did not think it right that she should oblige a servant to wait up for her pleasure. She preferred to arrange her beautiful hair for the night herself.

* * *

I had noticed the time she spent each day in going over her accounts. It seemed that she always had too much money at her disposal. I was not accustomed to such saving. I attributed to a narrow education that admirable sense of economy which is one of the superiorities of the French woman, expert in thrift and housekeeping, knowing how to be unostentatiously charitable as well, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan crowd encamped among us with its dissipations and luxuries.

“Leave that,” I assured her, “you do not know how to spend money.”

“I need nothing now.”

“But that is the point, you should want all sorts of things.”

“Why should I?”

“Why not, since we can afford them.”

She made me share her charities with her, which were numerous, but she resisted all entreaties to personal luxuries, with a gentleness and disinterestedness which offended me. I unceasingly suggested changes of toilette, and was irritated by the resistance which I encountered, unexpected in any woman, much less in the wife of the millionaire Cernay.

“Do you find no pleasure in being more fashionable than the others, better dressed and more noticed?”

“None, I assure you.”

“I want every one to mark your appearance as soon as you enter a salon. I want all the men to admire you and all the women to envy you. That is an artistic pleasure. But you are insensible to everything. You like nothing.”

“Oh, but I do like so many things.”

“What, for instance?”

“I need not tell you.”

I did not yet understand the tenderness of her feeling toward me. However, it was hardly like the sentiments I held toward her, and I ceased presently to compare them.

It was her greatest pleasure to remain at home, to play with Dilette, who laughed and appreciated her little mother always; or to read some “Introduction to a Devoted Life,” or “The Letters of Saint Francis of Sales to Mme. de Chanta” (in which he urges her to light her own fire in the morning rather than make her chambermaid rise before her); or perhaps some other pious work, or some fairy tales and legends, as if she were preparing herself for maternal instruction generally. She delighted too in such simple tales of good folk as gave them the air of having really lived. “Mireille” enchanted her, and “Genevieve, or the Story of a Servant,” and “Dominique” and “Ramuntcho,” and “Nerte,” in which she had underlined these four lines of a benediction which the Pope, traversing a path through the ripe grain, addresses to some workmen in the field:

Such an attitude toward life as hers has gone out of style. Nowadays, all women, young and old alike, leave their homes as soon as they are rigged out, fleeing from their firesides as from a pest. They hurry their automobiles in all directions; to teas, to bridge-parties, to soirées that are like exhibitions, to fashionable weddings that seem like parades of the most enterprising dressmakers, to lectures where art and history are popularised; even to the hospitals, where they learn how to care for other people’s children while their own, supposing they have deigned to bear any, are abandoned in the nursery.

I urged her to follow their example!

“You are not seen about at all. You never go out,” I said. “Do you not care to go out?”

“With you? With Dilette?”

“No, alone.”

She suggested walks in the Bois, which she knew better than the rest of Paris. At first, when Spring came, we had ourselves taken there almost every day. When I gave up going she went with Dilette. She preferred those paths which lead from the lakes to St. James Pond and are never crowded. It was not the Sleeping Woods, but at least there were trees.

“Why do we know so many people?” she sighed one day, as she was putting on her hat, vainly hoping that I would forego my plan of sending her out.

“It is not your fault if we keep them,” I replied impatiently.

At that she departed as quickly as possible, in order to please me. And yet, whenever I returned before she did I was impatient at not finding her there.

It was not only at Mme. de Saunois’ first reception that Raymonde failed of sufficiently enthusiastic formulæ for amateur singers and elocutionists. Even on occasions when she was genuinely stirred, the exaggerated congratulations of those about her arrested her enthusiasm. Her lips would half open to express a compliment, but if she deemed it insufficient she would blush and remain silent after all. I believe it was a physical impossibility for her to conceal her thoughts. People complained of her disdain, her coldness, but never of her candour. And I was distressed by this silence that other people took for hostility.

“You do not talk. One must talk,” I told her.

“I do not dare,” she answered.

“Say anything, no matter what.”

“It is just that kind of thing I dare not say.”

Indeed she could neither speak nor understand those little nothings which pretty lips can utter with so much assurance.

I made some pretence of teaching hey how to converse: I led her to those places where one selects subjects of conversation like cakes at the baker’s—such as art exhibitions and first nights. She felt out of her element in the company of those painted, enamelled women, versed in all the arts and graces of Parisian life, who, though they may please separately, in an assemblage strike one with a sort of solemn horror, with their perfume of withered flowers. I brought her into the midst of this and tolerated the insult of this impure air. Stiff, and a little stilted, slender and distant, she retired within herself like a sensitive plant. Those others, large and many-decked ships, fast-sailing torpedo-boats, old hulks from the waters of the theatre or of gallantry, all artifice and rouge, backed by their husbands or protectors, had the air of setting victoriously out to sea to capture public opinion. Vaguely they would announce success or failure. And I was disposed to accept their judgment as to Raymonde, never questioning if it were not as false as their faces.

The day after a new play, Paris would learn from such as these whether or not the presentation deserved success: they made or unmade reputations. When we attended the theatre, Raymonde would sit motionless in the corner of the box. Occasionally she fell back—recoiling as if from some insupportable contact—though she herself was all the time unconscious of her instinctive movements.

“What is the matter?” I asked once.

“Nothing.”

“You do not look as if you were enjoying yourself.”

“To be truthful with you, I am not.”

“This play displeases you?”

“Oh, how could it please me?”

“But there is nothing but enthusiasm in the lobby between the acts. Every one is delighted with it,” I argued.

“I do not share every one’s opinion. You must excuse me.”

How often our dialogue ran like that! The drama or the comedy changed, but our words were usually the same. I can still see her mechanical gesture. Before us, on the stage, a woman would torment and harass her husband with her sensual love; another, virtuous all her life to that time, surrender at last to an unknown blackguard; a third stole money to buy beautiful gowns in which to excite her husband’s waning desire for her; all, shedding an odour of the alcove upon the audience, represented to us as heroines of love; and upon that basis applauded frantically by the public, its nerves shaken.

“They love; that is all,” was the general comment all about us.

Raymonde shook her head, as if that were not all. One evening, aroused by the general acclamation, unable to resist that magnetic current which comes from an electrified crowd, I insisted on sustaining the popular theories regarding a play in which the heroine, a young girl, gave herself up in a burst of passion to her sister’s husband.

“Love, true love, disregards morals, tramples upon suffering, takes no account of anything outside of itself. That has its beauty, don’t you think so?”

“That is not loving,” she murmured.

I continued my panegyric.

“Love, true love, in its splendid violence, does not stop at a fault, or even a crime.”

“That isn’t loving,” she repeated.

“What then does love mean, according to your idea?” I demanded, surprised at her resistance.

“According to my idea? Oh, I don’t know. Don’t ask me that.”

“Yes, you must acquire the habit of being able to express what you feel, Raymonde. That is the whole art of conversation.”

She hesitated: I saw her lips open and tremble a little. She shook her head, and then suddenly made up her mind:

“Do you remember going into a little chapel one evening?”

“Yes, with you.”

“A dark chapel, lighted only by the altar lamp? It seems to me that one’s heart is like that.”

“One’s heart?”

“Yes, the heart is in darkness, unknown. But the lamp which shines in the sanctuary is our love. It is there, watching and praying. To love is to understand oneself more clearly, to take one’s impulses and thoughts out of the shadow. We do not take faults and crimes out of the shadow. And since love is light, it is also the desire to make ourselves better.” And then very low, as if to herself, she added:

“As for myself, the more I love, the less I can do evil.”

But when would she have done so? When had she not loved?

She rarely expressed herself at so great length. The flame which watches and prays shone from her eyes all over her face; carried away by her subject her every feature reflected the light of which she had spoken. Had I been away from the theatre, the world, and its false conception of life, I might have adored her for her simple lesson of love, her ineffable avowal of tenderness. The air of the Sleeping Woods suddenly refreshed me. I drank from those springs of youth and felt their purifying virtue.

The curtain rose again. And once more the great wave of sophisms and errors, of erratic folly and passional disorder, surged up, rolled over the public and submerged it. I believe that in the whole theatre there was only this young woman against whom it struck and broke in vain. I did not realise the beauty of the spectacle.

“She is sweet,” I thought, in a moment of gentleness, “but still a little childish. She does not understand these devastating passions which sweep away everything. One should be able to comprehend what one has not experienced even; she goes through life with blinders on her eyes; she does not wish to see anything outside of her own narrow little life, straight ahead of her.”

In good faith, I dared to think: “her little life—”

* * *

That very evening, or on another like it, as we were driving home from the theatre in our automobile, she asked me suddenly:

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That there are women and young girls like those whom we saw on the stage?”

“Of course there are, many like them, and many worse. What a child you are.”

“Ah!” she murmured.

She said no more, but the electric light which shone upon her showed me her look of pain. She felt a deep sadness at learning of the existence of so many guilty women.

* * *

The popular books of the day, which I purposely placed about her, thinking to tempt her into reading, usually inspired her with the same repulsion. She did not retain the names of the authors,—they were destined to be forgotten. Their literary beauty could not, for her, be separated from the beauty of the matter. Those charming modern books in which youth is presented to us as an animal at liberty, through which pleasure runs fearless of the attacks of time and death, in which the mind even has become sensual,—she only opened and began: she never finished them.

“Why do you not go on with them?” I asked.

“My heart isn’t in them.”

“But the author cannot always paint one’s own heart.”

“But it is so difficult to read a book in which you find nothing of yourself.”

I picked up one of the rejected books on her centre table.

“Listen to these beautiful sentences,” I began.

“Oh!” she replied, “a mannequin, too, wears beautiful clothes. I prefer something living underneath. Do you remember my wedding gown? It did not become me any too well. But I loved you so much—”

* * *

At that time, a foreign woman was being tried in Paris. She had driven her lover to kill her husband, and had then denounced him in order to rid herself of him and begin life anew with another. A veritable halo of fatality encircled her, for to know her was to love her, and to love her was to lose all honour and regard for humanity. Above all she had very beautiful hands, their beauty shining all the more clear when they were examined for any traces of guilty blood. She appeared before her judges with the grace and prattle of an artless child, charming everybody. Before testifying each day she would remove her gloves. It was the fashion to go to court and submit to the enchantment of her voice, her face whose very blemishes were thought of as the ravages of love or amorous decorations—to give our nerves their daily wrenching. The evening following the announcement of the verdict, we dined with Mme. de Saunois. The accused was the sole topic of conversation. Mme. de H— summed her up and conferred the following degree upon her:

“She is such an exceptional creature, so seductive. She rises above our common measure with such ease. Even her wickedness is attractive.”

Every one was approving this opinion, when it occurred to one guest to ask Raymonde, who was seated next him:

“What is your idea, Madame?”

“I hope she is only a monster.”

All the women at the table looked toward me. They visibly pitied me for having cast my lot with a person capable of so narrow and prejudiced an opinion.

And I could not help an irritation at this blame that society put upon me through her.

From seeing her continually rebel against our forms of art and all our prevailing ideas, I became accustomed to thinking her callous. That was indeed the general impression of her. Her reading was too different from that recommended by success to attach any importance to it. At the theatre, nothing, or almost nothing, succeeded in pleasing her. The splendour of an unusual interpretation caused me to take her one evening to see “Polyeucte.” I was not thinking so much of the play itself, as of the actors. Is not that usual? Do not the names of the players, inscribed in letters of fire on the front of our theatres, eclipse those of the authors and even of the play?

In our box, as I called her attention to the acting of the old and eminent actor who played Polyeucte, I was surprised to have no reply. I looked at her more attentively: the tears coursed down her cheeks, though she did not know that she was crying. I had surprised her once before like this in the Coliseum in Rome, when the guide pointed out the gate of the dead. Pauline threw away Severus’s love and her own. Pauline received with open heart the divine spark of the faith. All the pathos of the ardent masterpiece condensed and spiritualised itself on my wife’s face, pale with the force of her emotion.

As the curtain fell, I offered explanations of her exaltation.

“Monroy was sublime,” I said. Had we not come only to see that great actor?

“Which rôle did he play?” she asked. “I didn’t know.”

Completely given up to the tragedy she had quite simply relegated the actor to his proper place.

* * *

One Good Friday she took me to Notre Dame to hear the sermon on the Passion.

Spring had come in April. The moon when we arrived was mounting toward the open sky just above the towers of the old cathedral, bathed in the blue of the pure night. Inside, the crowd was so great that we could not reach a church-warden’s pew, and with great difficulty I got a chair for her at the back, in the midst of the throng.

The voice of the preacher, which had sounded thin to me as we entered, reached us, distinct, insistent and powerful. It carried with it the generosity of a heart that gives itself until it is exhausted. It filled the immense edifice to the very shadows at the back, shadows which covered also the transepts and the upper vaulting, making the lighted portions of the church seem menaced by it on all sides.

We heard the story of the Mount of Olives. The Disciples went to sleep while Jesus was enduring His agony. Likewise, about us and within us, the moral life of others and ourselves suffers while we sleep. Later, too late, when I awakened from my cruel sleep, I was destined to recall with bitterness that warning which I had not heeded. We saw about us all the visible and varied forms of cowardice, the cowardice of the official, of the judge, of the crowd, of friends. All the truth of human character shines out in the Gospel. In this series of denials, one can see his own denying, just as one instinctively feels his pockets when he hears the cry of “Thief.” I alone, perhaps, of those present, gave the ceremony the interest of the mere amateur.

Next to us, an old news man, who had stopped his shouting only at the door, crowding in through several rows of chairs, stood still, suddenly captive, with his pile of papers under his arm. It was the death of Righteousness. He uttered a long sob of indignation and pity, like a half-uttered howl, held out his free arm before him in an involuntary gesture, and then went away again upon his route. Outside once more he tried to cry his papers, but emotion still gripped his throat. For an instant he had offered himself to God. I have never known that instant; I have never made that offering. It was now I who was callous.

When we left, the moon, detached from the towers, was sailing through the open sky. The clear night, so blue and pure, enveloped the sombre cathedral. Ranged along one side of the square the waiting automobiles quivered incongruously at the foot of the old black building.

At last, we found our carriage. “Was it not beautiful?” Raymonde asked immediately.

I agreed without interest, from courtesy, instead of giving way to my emotions as I had been invited to do. For a second short space of time, I surprised her in the act of trembling. Still, I continued to believe in her apathy, her reputation for it was so well established. When one holds to the judgment of the world one can not appreciate his own fireside.

* * *

These discords, these difficulties that come between two people when one aspires only to success and the attractions of fashionable life, while the other keeps intact her native and religious sensibility, do not necessarily prevent that kind of understanding which is possible in our flexible modern life to people of fortune. So many husbands and wives, for instance, if they should stop to think, would be surprised by the amount of their incompatibilities. They are content with approximate congeniality, in willing ignorance. But one cannot lay bare the roots of a tree and have it grow and live. The denial of its proper nourishment does not kill it at once: for a short time it may continue to blossom and to flower. At last, however, it falls before some severe storm, like a disabled ship which breasts the gale as long as possible and in the end surrenders to the elements. So I laid bare the roots of our love; little by little, I deprived it of its necessary protection, and finally crushed it utterly by one severe blow.

These apparently trifling details, which I have enumerated, before coming exactly to the real outbreak, by degrees alienated Raymonde from me. It was indeed a gradual uprooting. So completely given up to this imperious desire to shine that I was intolerant of any encroachments upon it by the intimacies of our life together, entirely subordinated to that state of mind in which one seeks applause, I turned more and more from Raymonde and her influence, which I thought narrow and old-fashioned.

She went with me uncomplainingly, wherever I suggested. I imposed on her immodest spectacles and degrading associates, such as our society supports, when she did not desire them: still she was not what I wanted to make her, a woman of the world.

It was not in her. A stirring conflict was waged within her, between her love for me and her upright nature, incapable of bending itself to the manners of our day. I helped to create the problem, but did not attempt to aid her in its solution. Her struggle even began to undermine her health, though she showed no outward trace of the exhaustion she felt, excepting perhaps a loss of weight. But thinness was very fashionable at this time! Ah! those people whose daily acts are regulated by a definite code of morals, to whom faith and love are as necessary as food and respiration—they have a presentiment of death when once that faith is shaken; they have no powers of resistance when their ideals are finally shattered.

The first effect in Raymonde was a loss of cheerfulness. I did not notice it then, yet I recall it clearly now. There is in our past always something which we would forget, but which does not permit itself to be forgotten. There was a time when her laughter was spontaneous, with her little girl, in carelessness and innocence of heart. When she held her child upon her knee, and lavished her enticement on her, she resembled those madonnas which have altogether the air of elder sisters. Little by little this clear, charming laughter became less frequent, diminished, was shattered! Even Dilette perceived it. And I did not fail to notice that the poor little one missed, as she might her broken or lost toys, these tokens of joyousness.

Raymonde enjoyed only the simple pleasures of life, of which I had none to offer her. Into the simplest of them I had injected, like a secret passion, this perverse desire for sensation, filling with astonishment, torment and pained shame, a heart simple and ingenuous, ignorant of the intricacy of our life.

The expression which I had seen in her face on that first day in May, when I met her in the wood and when my unexpected presence made her retrace her road, or when I had made my avowal of love at the chateau, or on the evening of one of our last walks before the birth of our child, this look of fear,—here, I saw it again, like a ghost, upon her face. But I attached no importance to it.

* * *

She told me once later, that during all this time she was trying to conform to my tastes, she never paid one of those visits to which I attached such importance, without reciting a little prayer to God, on the staircase or in the ante-chamber, for courage. And it was the same thing when we received. It was absolute torture for her to endure the custom of kissing the hand which had recently come again into vogue. Her arms hung at her sides and one had always to search for her hand there. She never submitted without a shudder, which, though she did her best to suppress it, she never entirely succeeded in concealing—above all, at home, when she wore no gloves.

* * *

We had reached that point, she in her isolation and growing unhappiness, I in that state of nervous irritation where my baffled worldly ambitions and the substitution of my personal life for our common life had thrown me, when my hopes were revived by a sudden and unexpected change.

* * *

Pierre Ducal, who in the old days had taught me the art of moving with ease in the most dissimilar salons, Pierre Ducal, whose support the negligence of my wife had diverted and I had counted too much on, sought again evidently to get into touch with us. He had then attained the summit of the only glory he had ever really desired. Slender of figure, graceful, his clean-shaven face sallow of tint but passing at night for interesting pallor, erect in carriage, affected in his wit, of dashing demeanour, he aspired now all the more to fascinate because he was pursued by the terror of old age. A time—not far distant—would come when he would have to take his place in the faded and worn-out category of old beaux, old fellows who had been handsome once, who continued to dress and carry themselves as if they still were so, touching knight-errants, a little comical, following that lost cause, their youth. Being discerning, he foresaw the end that awaited him. But this foresight diminished in proportion as the danger increased, or rather, the threat was already put into execution while he continued to believe it hanging over him. In the face of this shipwreck he turned to account with agonising haste all the possible pleasures of life. Never more than at this time had I seen him so engaging and so brilliant. Never had he enjoyed such prestige, never had his clever sayings, his judgments, his ironies been so much in demand, nor exercised so much effect.