A Love Crime

A LOVE CRIME

BY

PAUL BOURGET

Author of a "CRUEL ENIGMA."

LONDON

W. W. GIBBINGS, 18 BURY STREET W.C.

1892.

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[CHAPTER XI]

DEDICATION.

TO GASTON CRÉHANGE.

Many days have elapsed, my dear friend, since our childhood, but they have passed away without effecting any alteration in the affectionate feelings we then entertained. In memory of an intimacy of heart and mind which has never known a cloud, it is very pleasant to me to write your name at the beginning of that one of my books which you preferred to all the rest. It is further the book in which I have stated with most sincerity what I think concerning some of the essential problems of the modern life of our day. May this complete sincerity, by which you, the truest and most loyal being I know, have doubtless been attracted, plead in favour of the work with readers who would otherwise be startled by a certain boldness of depicture and cruelty of analysis!

For the rest, whatever may be the verdict of public opinion respecting "A Love Crime," as I have called this minute diagnostic of a certain distemper of the soul, it will always be possessed of one great merit in my eyes, for it will have pleased you, and have enabled me once more to subscribe myself, my dear Gaston, your ever faithful friend,

PAUL BOURGET.

A LOVE CRIME

[CHAPTER I]

The little drawing-room was illuminated by the soft light of three lamps—tall lamps standing on Japanese vases and bearing globes upon which rested flexible shades of a pale blue tint. The door was hidden by a piece of tapestry; two walls were hung with another piece, which was covered with large figures. Both windows were draped with curtains—drawn just now—of deep red colour and heavy of fold.

The apartment thus closed in had a homelike air, which was heightened by the profusion of small articles scattered over the furniture: photographs set in frames, lacquered boxes, old-fashioned cases, a few Saxon statuettes, books stitched in covers of antique stuff, such as were coming into fashion in the year 1883. The wreathing foliage of an evergreen plant showed in one corner. Close beside it, an open piano displayed its white keys. An English screen with coloured glass and a shelf on which tea-cups, books, or work might be laid, stood in folds on one side of the fire-place. The fire burned with a peaceful crackling noise which formed an accompaniment to the sound proceeding from the tea-pot as the latter received the caresses from the flame of its lamp on the low table designed for such service.

The furniture of the somewhat crowded drawing-room presented that composite appearance which is characteristic of our time, together with the peculiarity that everything in it seemed to be almost too new. At a first glance, certain slight indications would have seemed to show that its Parisian aspect had been voluntarily aimed at. Objects were contrasted here and there; there were, for instance, little old-fashioned silver spoons; on the walls were two excellent copies of small religious pictures, to which memories of childhood were certainly linked, and which could have come only from an old country house. The photographs, also, witnessed, by the dress and demeanour of the relatives or friends represented, to altogether provincial relationships. The feeling of contrast would have become still more perceptible to one visiting the other rooms and finding everywhere evident tokens that the persons dwelling in them had lived but a very short time at Paris.

This small-sized drawing-room belonged to a small-sized house situated at No. 3½, Rue de La Rochefoucauld. The lower part of this street, which descends in a very steep slope to the Rue Saint-Lazare, comprises several private houses of very varied build, and a few retired dwellings surrounded by gardens. The house containing the little drawing-room was built for an actress by a celebrated financier under the Empire, at a period when the Rue de la Tour des Dames harboured many princes and princesses of the footlights. Too small to suit a wealthy family, too inconvenient, owing to certain deficiencies in accommodation, for tenants accustomed to the completeness of English comfort, it must have proved quite seductive to persons accustomed to a semi-country life by its attraction as a "home," as well as by the quiet pervading the end of the street, which is rarely affronted by vehicles on account of the difficulty of the ascent.

During this November evening, although the windows of the little drawing-room looked upon the courtyard, and the latter opened upon the street, only a dim and distant murmuring penetrated from without, broken by occasional gusts of the north wind. Judging by the whistling of this north wind the night must have been a cold one. So, at least, opined a fairly young man, one of the three persons assembled in the drawing-room, as he rose from his chair, set down his empty cup on the tea-tray with a sigh, and looked at the time-piece.

"Ten o'clock. Must I really go to see the Malhoures this evening? What a disaster it is to have a sensible wife who thinks about your future! Never get married, Armand. Listen to that wind! I was so comfortable here with you. Look here, Helen," he went on, leaning on the back of the easy-chair in which his wife was seated, "what will happen if I do not put in an appearance this evening?"

"We shall be discourteous to some very kind people, who have always behaved perfectly towards us since we came to Paris a year ago," replied the young woman; she stretched out to the fire her slender feet, in the pretty patent leather shoes and mauve stockings, the latter being of the same colour as her dress. "If I had not my neuralgia!" she added, putting her fingers to her temple. "You will make all my excuses to them. Come, my poor Alfred, courage!"

She rose and held out her hand to her husband, who drew her to him in order to give her a kiss. Visible pain was depicted on Helen's handsome face for a minute, during which she was constrained to submit to this caress. Standing thus, in her mauve-coloured, lace-trimmed dress, the contrast between the elegance of her entire person and the clumsiness of the man whose name she bore was still more striking.

She was tall, slender, and supple. The delicacy with which her hand joined the arm which the sleeve of her dress left half uncovered, the fulness of this arm, on which shone the gold of a bracelet, the roundness of her dainty waist, the grace of her youthful figure,—all revealed in her the blooming of a bodily beauty in harmony with the beauty of her head. Her bright chestnut hair, parted simply in the centre, half concealed a forehead that was almost too high—a probable sign that with her feeling predominated over judgment. She had brown eyes, in a fair complexion, such eyes as become hazel or black according as the pupil contracts or dilates; and everything in the face declared passion, energy, and pride, from the rather too pronounced line of the oval, indicating the firm structure of the lower part of the head, to the mouth, which was strongly outlined, and from the chin, which was worthy of an ancient medal, to the nose, which was nearly straight, and was united to the forehead by a noble attachment.

The pure and living quality of her beauty fully justified the fervour depicted on the face of her husband while he was kissing his wife, just as the evident aversion of the young woman was explained by the unpleasing aspect of her lord and master. They were not creatures of the same breed. Alfred Chazel presented the regular type of a middle-class Frenchman, who has had to work too diligently, to prepare for too many examinations, to spend too many hours over papers or before a desk, at an age when the body is developing.

Although he was scarcely thirty-two, the first tokens of physical wear and tear were abundant with him. His hair was thin, his complexion looked impoverished, his shoulders were both broad and bony, and there was an angularity in his gestures as well as an awkwardness about his entire person. His tall figure, his big bones, and his large hand suggested a disparity between the initial constitution, which must have been robust, and the education, which must have been reducing. Chazel carried an eye-glass, which he was always letting fall, for he was clumsy with his long, thin hands, as was attested by the tying of the white evening cravat, so badly adjusted round his already crumpled collar. But when the eye-glass fell, the blue colour of his eyes was the better seen—a blue so open, so fresh, so childlike, that the most ill-disposed persons would have found it hard to attribute this man's weariness to any excess save that of thought.

His still very youthful smile, displaying white teeth beneath a fair beard, which Alfred wore in its entirety, harmonised with this childlike frankness of look. And, in fact, Chazel's life had been passed in continuous, absorbing work, and in an absolute inexperience of what was not "his business," as he used to say. Son of a modest professor of chemistry, and grandson of a peasant, Alfred, having inherited aptitude for the sciences from his father, and tenacity of purpose from his grandfather, had, by dint of energy, and with but moderate abilities, been one of the first at the entrance to that École Polytechnique which, in the estimation of many excellent intellects, exercises, by its overloaded and precocious examinations, a murderous influence upon the development of the middle-class youth of our country.

At twenty-two, Chazel passed out twelfth, and three years later first from the School of Roads and Bridges. Sent to Bourges, he fell in love with Mademoiselle de Vaivre, whose father, having married a second time, could give her only a very slender dowry. The unexpected death, first of Monsieur de Vaivre, then of his second wife and of their child, suddenly enriched the young household. Appointed the preceding year to a municipal post at Paris, the engineer found that he had realised a hundredfold the most ambitious hopes of his youth. His wife's fortune amounted to about nine hundred thousand francs, to the returns from which were added the ten thousand francs of his own salary and the small income which had been left by his father. But this competency, instead of blunting the young man's activity, stimulated it to the ambition of compensating in honour for the inequality of position between himself and his wife. He had, accordingly, gone back to mathematical labours with fresh ardour. Admission to the Institute shone on the horizon of his dreams, like a sort of final apotheosis to a destiny, the happiness of which he modestly referred to his father's wise maxim: "To keep to the high road."

Add to this that a son had been born to him, in whom he already discerned a reflection of his own disposition, and it cannot fail to be understood how this man would congratulate himself daily for having taken life, as he had done, with complete submission to all the average conditions of the social class in which he had been born.

Did these various reflections pass through the mind of the third individual—the man whom Alfred Chazel had called Armand, as he contemplated the conjugal tableau through the smoke from a Russian cigarette which he had just lighted—a liberty which revealed the extent of his intimacy with the family? The same contrast which separated Alfred from Helen separated him also from Armand. The latter looked at first younger than his age, though he too had passed his thirty-second year. If Alfred's carelessly-worn coat revealed rather the leanness and disproportion of his body, the frock of the Baron de Querne—such was Armand's family-name—fitted close to the shoulders and bust of a man, small but robust, and evidently devoted to fencing, riding, tennis, and all the sporting habits which the youths of the richer classes have contracted in imitation of the English, now that political careers—diplomacy, the Council of State, and the Audit Office—are denied them by their real or assumed opinions.

The quiet jewellery with which the young baron was adorned, the delicacy of his hands and feet, and everything in his appearance, from his cravat and his collar to the curls in his dark hair, and to the turn of his moustache, drawn out over a somewhat contemptuous lip, disclosed that deep attention to the toilet which assumes the lengthened leisure of an idle life. But what preserved De Querne from the commonplaceness usual to men who are visibly occupied with the trifles of masculine fashion was a look, in a generally immovable face, of peculiar keenness and unrest. This look, which was not at all like that of a young man, contradicted the remainder of his person to the extent of imparting an appearance of strangeness to one who looked in this way, although a desire to evade remark, and to be above all things correct, evidently influenced his mode of dress.

Just as Chazel seemed to have remained quite young at heart, in spite of the failure of constitution, so the other, if only in the expression of his eyes, which were very dark ones, appeared to have undergone a premature aging of soul and intellect, in spite of the energy maintained by his physical machine. The face was somewhat long and somewhat browned, like that of one in whom bile would prevail some day, the forehead without a wrinkle, the nose very refined; a slight dimple was impressed upon the square chin. It would have been impossible to assign any profession or even occupation to this man, and yet there was something superior in his nature which seemed irreconcilable with the emptiness of an absolutely idle life, as well, too, as lines of melancholy about the mouth which banished the idea of a life of nothing but pleasure.

Meanwhile he continued to smoke with perfect calmness, showing every time that he rejected the smoke small, close teeth, the lower ones being set in an irregular fashion, which is, people say, a probable indication of fierceness. He watched Chazel kiss his wife on the temple, while she lowered her eyelids without venturing to look at Armand; and yet, had the dark eyes of the young man been encountered by her own, she would not have surprised any trace of sorrow, but an indefinable blending of irony and curiosity.

"Yes," said Alfred, replying thus to the mute reproach which Helen's countenance seemed to make to him, "it is bad form to love one's wife in public, but Armand will forgive me. Well, goodbye," he went on, holding out his hand to his friend, "I shall not be away for more than an hour. I shall find you here again, shall I not?"

The young Baron and Madame Chazel thus remained alone. They were silent for a few minutes, both keeping the positions in which Alfred had left them, she standing, but this time with her eyes raised towards Armand, and the latter answering her look with a smile while he continued to wrap himself in a cloud of smoke. She breathed in the slight acridity of the smoke, half opening her fresh lips. The sound of carriage wheels became audible beneath the windows. It was the rolling of the cab that was taking Chazel away.

Helen slowly advanced to the easy chair in which Armand was sitting; with a pretty gesture she took the cigarette and threw it into the fire, then knelt before the young man, encircled his head with her arms, and, seeking his lips, kissed him; it looked as though she wished to destroy immediately the painful impression which her husband's attitude might have left on the man she loved, and in a clear tone of voice, the liveliness of which discovered a free expansiveness after a lengthened constraint, she said:

"How do you do, Armand. Are you in love with me to-day?"

"And yourself," he questioned, "are you in love with me?"

He was caressing the hand of the young woman who had thrown herself upon the ground, and with her head resting on her lover's knees, was looking at him in a fever of ecstasy.

"Ah! you flirt," she returned, "I have no need to tell you so to have you believe it."

"No," he replied, "I know that you love me—much—though not enough to go all lengths with the feeling."

The tone in which he uttered this sentence was marked with an irony which made it palpably an epigram. It was an allusion to oft-stated complaints. Helen, however, received the derisive utterance with the smile of a woman who has her answer ready.

"So you will always have the same distrust," she said, and although she was very happy, as her eyes sufficiently testified, a shadow of melancholy passed into those soft eyes when she added: "So you cannot believe in my feelings without this last proof?"

"Proof," said Armand, "you call that a proof! Why the unqualified gift of the person is not a proof of love, it is love itself. It is true," he went on with a more gloomy air, "so long as you refuse to be entirely mine I shall suspect—not your sincerity, for I think that you think you love me, but the truth of this love. Too often people imagine that they have feelings which they have not. Ah! if you loved me, as you say, and as you think, would you deny me yourself as you do? Would you refuse me the meeting that I have asked of you more than twenty times? Why you would grant it as much for your own sake as for mine."

"Armand—" she began thus, then stopped, blushing.

She had risen and was walking about the room without looking at her lover, her arms apart from her body with the backs of her hands laid on her hips, as was usual with her at moments of intense thought. Since she had begun to love, and had acknowledged her feelings to Monsieur de Querne she was quite aware that she must some day give up her beautiful dream of an attachment which, though forbidden, should remain pure. Yes, she knew that she must give her entire self after giving her heart, and become the mistress of the man whom she had suffered to say to her: "I love you." She knew it, and she had found strength for the prolonging of her resistance to that day, not in coquetry—no woman was less capable of speculating with a man's ungratified desire in order to kindle his passion—but in the persistence of the duty-sense within her.

Where is the married woman who has not fondled this chimera of a reconciliation between the infidelity of heart and the faith sworn to her husband? The renunciation of the delights of complete love seems at first to her a sufficient expiation. She engages in adultery believing that she will not pass beyond a certain limit, and she does in fact keep within it a longer or a shorter time according to the disposition of the man she loves. But the inflexible logic that governs life resumes its rights. Soul and body do not separate, and love admits of no other law than itself.

Yes, the fatal hour had struck for Helen, and she felt it. How many times during the last fortnight had she had this horrible discussion with Armand, who always ended by requiring from her this last token of love? She was sensible that after each of these scenes she had been lessened in the eyes of this man. A few more, and he would lose completely his faith in the feeling which she entertained towards him, a feeling that was absolute and unreasoned; for she loved him, as women alone are capable of loving, with such a love as is almost in the nature of a bewitchment, and is the outcome of an irresistible longing to afford happiness to the person who is thus loved. She loved him and she loved to love him. Pain in those beloved eyes was physically intolerable to her, and intolerable also mistrust, which betokened the shrinking back of his soul.

She had taken account of all this, she had looked the necessity for her guilt in the face, and she had resolved to offer herself to her "beloved," as in her letters she always called him, because "friend" was too cold, and the word "lover" purpled her heart with shame,—yes, to offer him the supreme proof of tenderness that he asked for, and now, when on the point of consenting, she was impotent. Her will was failing at the last moment. Was she going again to begin what she used to call, when she thought about it, a hateful contract? Ah! why was she not free—free, that is, from duties towards her child, the only being whom she could not sacrifice to him whom she loved—free to offer this man not a clandestine interview but a flight together, a complete sacrifice of her entire life.

All these thoughts came and went in her poor head while she herself was walking to and fro in the room. She looked again at her lover. She fancied she could see a change come over the features of the countenance she idolised.

"Armand," she resumed, "do not be sad. I consent to all that you wish."

These words, which were uttered in the deep voice of a woman probing to the inmost chamber of her heart, appeared to astonish the young man even more than they moved him. He wrapped Helen in his strange gaze. If the poor woman had had strength enough to observe him she would not have encountered in those keen eyes the divine emotion which atones for the guilt of the mistress by the happiness of the lover. It was just the same gaze, at once contemptuous and inquisitive, with which he had lately contemplated the group formed by Alfred and Helen. But the latter was too much confused by what she had just said to keep cool enough for observing anything.

Then, as she had come back and was crouching on Armand's knees, and pressing against his breast, a fresh expression, that, namely, of almost intoxicated desire, was depicted on the young man's face. He felt close to him the beauty of this yielding body, he held in his arms those charming shoulders of which he had knowledge from having seen them in the ball-room, he drank in that indefinable aroma which lingers about every woman, and he pressed his lips upon those eyelids, which he could feel quivering beneath his kiss.

"You will at least be happy?" she asked him in a sort of anguish between two caresses.

"What a question! Why, you have never looked at yourself," he said, and he began to extol to her all the exquisiteness of her face. "You have never looked at your eyes"—and he again drew his lips across them—"your pink cheek"—and he stroked it with his hand—"your soft hair"—and he inhaled it like a flower—"your sweet mouth"—and he laid his own upon it.

What answer could she have given to this worship of her beauty? She lent herself to it with a half-frightened smile, surrendering to these endearments and to these words as to music. They caused something so deep and withal so vague to vibrate throughout her being that she came forth half crushed from these embraces, like one dead. It was not for the first time that she was thus abandoning herself to Armand's kisses. But no matter how sweet, how intoxicating these kisses, which she found it impossible to resist, she had on each occasion been strong enough to escape from bolder caresses.

No, never, never would she have consented, even had there existed no danger of a surprise, to yield thus in the little drawing-room, where the portraits of her mother, her husband, and her son reminded her of what she was nevertheless ready to sacrifice. Ah! not like that! And again at this moment, when she saw on Armand's face a certain expression of which she had so deep a dread, she found courage to escape, seated herself once more in another easy chair, and opening and shutting a fan which she had taken up in her quivering hands, replied:

"I will be yours to-morrow, if you wish."

Armand seemed to rouse himself from the sweep of passion in which he had just been tossing. He looked at her, and she again experienced the sensation which had already caused her so much pain, and which was that of a veil drawn suddenly between herself and him. Yet, what could she have said to displease him? She thought that he was wounded by the fact of her shrinking from him, for was not the uttering of the words that she had just uttered equivalent to giving herself to him beforehand, and how could he be vexed with her for desiring that their happiness might have another setting than that of her every-day life? But he had already answered her by the following question:

"Where would you like me to meet you? At my own house? I can send away my servant for the whole of the afternoon."

"Oh, no!" she replied hastily, "not at your own home."

The vision had just come to her that other women had visited Armand, those other women whom a new mistress always finds between herself and the man she loves, like the menace of a fatal comparison, like an anticipated discrediting of her own caresses, since love is always similar to itself; in its outward forms.

"At least," she thought to herself, "let it not be amid the same furniture."

"Would you like me to request one of my friends to lend me his rooms?" Armand asked.

She shook her head as she had done just before. She could hear by anticipation the conversation of the two men. She was a woman, and hitherto had been a virtuous one. She was only too well aware that the manner in which she regarded her own love would have little resemblance to that of the unknown friend to whom Armand would apply. In her own eyes passion sanctified everything, even the worst errors; spiritualised everything, even the most vehement voluptuousness. But he, this stranger, what would he see in the affair but an intrigue to afford matter for jesting. A shudder shook her, and she looked again at Armand. Ah! how her lover's thoughts would have horrified her had she been able to read them. It was very far from being De Querne's first affair of the sort, nor did he believe that it was a first act of weakness on her part. She had, indeed, told him that he was her first lover, and it was true.

But what proof could be given of the truth of such vows? The young man had himself deceived and been deceived too often for distrust not to be the most natural of his feelings. He had provoked this odious discussion concerning their place of meeting only for the purpose of studying in Helen's replies the traces left by the amorous experiences through which she had passed, and mere curiosity led him to dwell upon a subject which at that moment was stifling the young woman with shame. The scruples that she displayed about not yielding to him in her own house seemed to him a calculation due to voluptuousness; those about not yielding to him at his house, a calculation due to prudence. When she refused to go to the rooms of a friend: "She is afraid of my confiding in some one," he said to himself, "but what does she want?"

"Suppose I furnished a little suite of rooms?" he said.

She shook her head, though this had been her secret dream, but she was afraid that he would see in her acceptance nothing but a desire to gain time, and then—the necessity, if their meetings occurred always in the same place, of enduring the notice of the people of the house, the thought of being the veiled lady whose arrival is watched! Nevertheless, although such a contrivance also involved a question of outlay which horrified her, she would have consented to it had she not had another feeling, the only one which, shaking her head with its rising fever, she uttered aloud.

"Do not misjudge me, Armand; rather understand me. I should like to be yours in a place of which nothing would remain afterwards. What would become of the rooms you furnished for me if ever you ceased to love me? Why, I cannot endure the thought of it, even now. Do not wrong me, dear; only understand me."

Thus did she speak, laying bare the profoundly romantic side of her nature, as also her heart's secret wound. Although she did not account fully to herself for Armand's character—a character frightful in aridity beneath loving externals, for in this man there was an absolute divorce between imagination and heart—she perceived only too clearly that he was inclined to misinterpret the slightest indications. She saw that distrust was springing up in him with an almost unhealthy suddenness. She had been quite aware that he suspected her, but she had believed that this doubt proceeded solely from her refusals to belong to him.

It was on this account that she was consenting to give him this last proof. "He will doubt no longer," she thought to herself, and the mere idea of this warmed her whole heart. If only he did not give a guilty construction to her replies? She rose to go to him, and leaning over the back of his arm-chair, encircled his forehead with her hands.

"Ah!" she said with a sigh, "if I could know what is going on in here. It is such a little space, and it is in this little space that all my happiness and my misfortune are contained."

"If you were able to read in it," the young man replied, "you would see only your own image."

"I shall read in it to-morrow," she said subtly.

"To-morrow," he returned with a smile; "but what about the place of our meeting? There is nothing left but furnished rooms or a hotel."

Furnished rooms! A hotel! These words made Helen shudder. All the shames of adultery appeared to her to be comprised in their syllables. There was the hiring of a cab, with the driver's cunning smile; there was the entry into one of those houses, whose thresholds have seen the passage of so many furtive, quivering women; and, as a setting for her divine passion, there was the furniture that had, perhaps, been utilised for similar scenes. Yes, but there was also an element of anonymity, of impersonality, of never-ending strangeness. And since all was pollution, the former of the two alternatives carried with it the least. She was too certain of Armand's refinement to think that he might take her to a place which he had visited with others. She would have to endure personal loathing, but nothing that would touch the very essence of her feeling. It was accordingly with courageous resolution that she replied to her lover.

"Will you have time enough to find them in one morning?"

"Yes," he said, after a moment's reflection. "I have in my mind a very convenient house, where one of my English friends always used to stay. See," he went on, "between eleven and twelve o'clock I will send you some books and a note. I will give you the address of the house and the number of the room, just as though you had asked me for the address for one of your country friends. Don't let that prevent you, however, from burning the note immediately. You will come at whatever hour you can; I will spend the whole afternoon waiting for you, and, if you do not come, I shall not be put out; I shall think that you have not been able."

She listened to him with a mingling of pain and enchantment—pain, because it would cost her so dear to keep her promise; and enchantment, because all the trouble that he took to point out these details to her, instead of enlightening her concerning the man's heart, appeared to her a sign of his love, and their talk proceeded in the quiet drawing-room, in front of the expiring fire, until the stopping of a carriage at the door announced Alfred's return.

"Good-bye, my love," said Helen, taking Armand's hand and kissing it, as she sometimes did with sweet coaxing; and she had already begun a piece of work when Chazel came in, with a cheery "Well!" He looked at once towards his wife with his loyal, honest gaze.

How well Armand knew that gaze, one which had not altered from the days of their childhood, when they were both at the Institution Vanaboste, whence they followed the courses of study in the Lycée Henri IV.! The establishment stood yonder behind the Panthéon, at the corner of the Rue du Puits-qui-Parle, now the Rue Amyot. Yet it was not remorse for deceiving the man whom he had known from quite a child that suddenly made De Querne feel uncomfortable. It was the thought that Helen was deceiving this confiding nature. Masculine egotism has such monstrous ingenuousness. A seducer engaged in enticing a woman, despises the woman for yielding to him, and forgets to despise himself for seducing her. Meanwhile Alfred had taken Helen's hands.

"I have bored myself conscientiously this evening; what will you give me in reward?" he asked.

How his familiarity hurt her! How willingly would she have cried to this unsuspecting husband:

"Do you not see that I love another? Let me go away. I do not want to lie to you any more."

But two rooms farther off stood a little bed, beneath the white curtains of which slept her son, her little Henry. Why was it that the picture of this curly head was something too weak to arrest her on the fatal high road to adultery, and yet strong enough to prevent her from seeing her passion through to the end. She had a glimpse of the child while her husband was speaking to her. It did not occur to her to scorn Armand for having gained her love, although she was the wife of his friend. She scorned herself for not loving him enough, since she did not love the sufferings of which he was the cause, and, sustained by the thought that she was doing it for him, it was with something like an impulse of pride that she held out her forehead to her husband's kiss, and said gracefully:

"That's just like men; they must be paid, and immediately too, for doing their duty."

[CHAPTER II]

It was half-past eleven o'clock when Armand de Querne left the house in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. The wind had swept away all the clouds, and the sky was filled with stars. "What a beautiful night!" said Armand to himself; "I shall walk home." It was a long way, for he lived in the Rue Lincoln, in the upper part of the Champs-Élysées. Here, on the second floor of a wing projecting upon a garden, he had rooms which he had once amused himself with furnishing in quaint and exquisite fashion with all kinds of old-fashioned trifles. But how long had he ceased to spend the evening in this "home?"

He was following the pavement of the Rue St.-Lazare, which, after quite a narrow and slender beginning, suddenly, like a river swelled by tributaries, widens after the Place de la Trinité, when it receives, one after the other, the flood of passengers and vehicles drifting through the Rue de Chateaudun, the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and the Rue de Londres. Cabs were plying, omnibuses were changing horses, the crowd was surging. Sometimes a girl came out from the corner of a doorway, and with obscene speech accosted the young man, who put her away gently with his hand.

Was it the contrast between the intimacy of the little drawing-room and the swarming infamy of the pavement? Armand felt deeply melancholy. He could not help seeing Alfred's face again in thought, with Helen's close beside it. Yet, was he jealous? No. Pictures of childhood came back to him as they had done just before, but with increased precision, showing him Chazel dressed in the uniform of the "Vanabosteans"—a small jacket similar to that of the Barbistes. They always went side by side in the ranks. Poor Chazel! he was not rich. The head of the establishment had taken him as a foundationer, with a view, to making a show-pupil of him—a machine for winning prizes in competitions. How many times had Armand paid for him at the little wicket, when the porter sold to the pupils sweetmeats, fragments of iced chestnuts, cakes, and Parisian creams—tablets of chocolate having a thick and oversweet liquid inside!

They had gone through all their classes together from the fourth up, and had together passed through the evil days of the Commune, when, on returning both of them from the country, after the siege, they found themselves blockaded in Paris. Alfred had afterwards entered the École Polytechnique. And when he came on Wednesdays and Sundays to visit his old schoolfellow, who had already crossed the Seine and begun to lead the life of a rich and idle young man, how ludicrous he was in his military dress, embarrassed by his sword, not knowing how to set his hat upon his head, and invariably scarred with clumsy razor-cuts!

While Alfred was at the School of Bridges, Armand was travelling. He had gone round the world in the society of an amateur artist. On his return he found that his friend was no longer at Paris. The letters passing between them became rare. Could they have told why? Armand perhaps might. There was only one point left in common between Alfred's life and his own. Alfred had married Mademoiselle de Vaivre. They had made a trip to Paris, and Armand well remembered how he had been deliciously surprised by Helen's distinguished demeanour, when he had expected to find her awkward, pretentious, and a fright. But at this period he was taken up with another woman, little Aline, a mistress of his for whom he had cherished the only genuine passion of which he was capable—painful jealousy blended with delirium of the senses.

Later on, some one had spoken to him of Helen Chazel, and told him ugly stories about her. And who was it that had done so? Another school-fellow—big Lucien Rieume, who had been educated at the Vanaboste establishment like Alfred and himself—during one of these tête-à-tête luncheons when an opening of the heart usually accompanies that of the oysters between two college companions; and Lucien—cordial, indiscreet, intolerable—had talked a great deal, pouring out pell-mell whatever he knew concerning former friends. Armand could again hear him chuckle, leaning forward somewhat with kindled eye and humid lip:

"Poor Chazel, he hadn't a head worth a fig! It seems that his wife is tricking him. I heard the gentleman's name: Marades, Tarades—just wait a moment—yes, De Varades, an artillery officer. It was the talk of Bourges. He was never out of the house."

It was an unfortunate trait in Armand's character that he was unable to withstand the tempting of mistrust. When evil was asserted to him, he preserved an indelible impression of it. He did not altogether believe in it, and yet he believed in it sufficiently for a suspicion, and a busy suspicion, to be planted within him. When the Chazels had come to settle in Paris, ten months previously, and Armand had begun to interest himself in Helen, the scruples of an old friendship might perhaps have been stronger than his freak of curiosity if big Rieume's words had not risen before his recollection.

"Really," he had said to himself, "it would be too foolish,"—a criminal phrase which serves men for the justification of many a dastardly action. Helen had not been slow in displaying towards him a kind of passion which he had attributed to the natural exaltation of a provincial. "I am the first Parisian who has paid her attentions," he had said again to himself, and as she possessed charming gracefulness of gesture, so sweet an expression of countenance and such an air of complete refinement and nobility about her entire personality, he had taken a pleasure in completing her education in elegance, thinking to himself that she would be a delightful mistress.

But for many days she had refused really to become his mistress, and her resistance had made him obstinate. He had become bent upon overcoming her, recollecting the officer and telling himself that the officer had not been the only one. A few skilful conversations with Alfred had taught him that at one time Varades had really been a constant guest at the house; was he not the same year's student at the École Polytechnique as Alfred himself? Armand had lost his doubts, and in Helen's refusals to be his, he had seen nothing but coquetry. Now, in this respect like all men who hold the strange ethics of seducers, Querne considered coquetry in a women a justification for the worst behaviour. At last the long siege was about to issue in the coveted result. Madame Chazel had granted him an appointment for the following day. Twenty-four hours more and he would have a new mistress, as desirable and as pretty as those whose memory was the most flattering to the pride of his recollection. Why then did he, instead of being happy, feel so deeply melancholy. Was it remorse for the treason to his friend?

His friend? Was Alfred really his friend? Yes, that was understood between themselves, as well as in the eyes of others. But a friend is a man who knows you and whom you know, to whom you show your heart and who shows you his. Would he ever bring the tale of one of his hopes, his joys, his sadnesses, to the calculating machine that bore the name of Chazel? Had the latter ever confided a secret to him? So much the better, too, for the ideas of this worthy schoolboy who seemed to look upon life as the prolongation of a college task, must be silly enough. It was their college life that continued to link them together, and the recollections of their childhood. Their childhood? Turning down the Rue Royale and arriving at the Champs Élysées, Armand suddenly recalled the ranks of Vanaboste's school, on Thursdays, as they walked three and three under the superintendence of a poor wretch of an usher who strove to hide himself among the groups of people, so as to seem a passer-by like the rest and not a watch-dog charged with the duty of looking after a flock of schoolboys.

And what a flock it was! The majority had pale complexions, hollow eyes, an enervated exhaustion of the whole being that spoke of secret excesses. How much ignominy and baseness was there in that community, the eldest in which were nineteen years of age and the youngest eight! Within the walls of their prison, as within the walls of the great Lycée to which they repaired twice a day, nothing was thought of but the infamous amours existing between the elder boys and their juniors. Of these unnatural loves, some were partly sensual, and had for their theatre all the deserted corners in the house, from the dormitories to the infirmary. And of the French youth confined within similar colleges, how many were participators in this lewdness, while the rest defiled their imaginations, although they repelled it! Among these college boys there were also elevated and chaste connexions. The perusal of a certain eclogue of Virgil's, a dialogue of Plato's, and a few of Shakespeare's sonnets had excited the more literary of them, and Alfred Chazel, being then in the third class, had one day received a piece of poetry written by a sixth-form boy, beginning with the following astonishing line, which had made them laugh like mad creatures:

"Alfred, my pale Alfred, my love, my sweet."

"Ah! what a horrible, horrible, place!" thought the young man, as he recalled this blending of turpitude and puerility.

Alfred and he had belonged to the small number of those who had remained untouched by the infection. But to him at least, all the advantage due to this disgust was that it had led him when quite young to the pursuit of women, and his initiation into natural pleasure had been effected in the most degraded prostitution.

"And these are the youthful recollections that I should respect," said Armand to himself. "What duty do I owe him because we were galley slaves together?"

No, a hundred times no, it was not on Alfred's account that he felt so melancholy as he hastened his steps and, this time with semi-brutality, repulsed the love-beggars who accosted him with their unvarying phrases. Ah! he knew this unconquerable melancholy only too well. Only too often had it visited him, gnawing him in the diseased portion of his heart, from the time that the income of thirty thousand francs coming to him at his majority had permitted him to live according to his fancy; and this fancy had immediately taken the direction of sentimental experiences. Such melancholy, sharp and severe, he had experienced, even when quite a youth, every time that he had found himself on the eve of a first love-meeting with a new mistress, even though she had been the most coveted. It was like an anguish-stricken apprehension—a dull, dim agony of soul.

At first he had attributed this strange phenomenon alternately to physical timidity, to remorse at his own unworthiness of the feelings that he might inspire, and to hankerings after purity. Now he knew the true explanation of these momentary sorrows, these keener crises of the great sorrow which formed the gloomy background of his life. It was, alas! the more present and palpable certainty of his impotence to love. At this very moment he was asking himself:

"Am I really in love with Helen?"

He gathered and heaped together the whole of his inmost sensibility, like a physician seeking with his fingers for the painful spot of a diseased limb. But the spot of love, which it would have given him such sweet pain to meet with, Armand could not discover.

"No," he answered himself with terrible sadness, yet courageously—for, with all his failings, he had energy enough to venture upon self-knowledge—"no, I am not in love with Helen. I desire her because she is beautiful; I have paid my addresses to her because I feel bored; I have grown obstinate about it because she denied me. Pride, sensuality, and romantic twaddle—that's the top and bottom of the whole affair. Then what is the good of it? What is the good? Why renew such an intrigue as that with Madame de Rugle?"

And all the amours into which his depraved liking for seduction—the fatal vice of his youth—had impelled him, came back into his memory, with the monotony of their pleasures, the bitterness of their ruptures, the sickening void of their duration. What was the good of this one or of that? What was the good a year or two ago of amusing himself by winning the love of Juliet, governess to the children of a house at which he was received? What was the good of that comedy played to little Maud, the pretty Englishwoman whom he had met at a watering-place?

"I dreamed of being a man of gallantry—a Don Juan. It looks as though fate punishes us for the evil dreams of our youth by bringing them to pass. I have had intrigues that might flatter my foolish vanity—and what wretchedness!"

Among all the women whose faces and kisses he distinguished in his thought, there was not one who had made him happy, even for a single day, and—strange anomaly of a distempered heart—there was not one who had not in some sort made him suffer. Through what moral disorder did it come to pass that he was devoted to this continual inward calamity—to the endurance of all the tortures of love: the jealousy of the present, the intolerable loathing for the past, the bitter vision of the treacheries of the future, and never, never, aught but physical intoxication, without that ecstacy of soul which, notwithstanding, existed, for he had seen with envy the heavenly expression due to it on the countenances of a few of his mistresses?

One especially came before him—one whose conquest had not been effected for the flattering of his fatuity, for she was but a girl was Aline, who had died of consumption in the autumn of 1880. He could again see her with her hollow eyes, her delicate cheek, and the blending of native purity and corruption that was in her. He could see her nursing a little sister whom she had taken to be with her, a child four years of age. What affecting kindliness in vice, and what innocence in infamy! Yes, Aline loved him, although she had three or four other lovers at the same time as himself. His chief pleasure used to consist in taking this pretty, ruined creature into the country to enjoy the childish outbreaks of rusticity that prompted her to pick flowers, to listen to the birds, to lean upon his arm, as though she had never exercised her hideous profession.

What a mysterious thing is memory! He was on the eve of his first assignation with Helen, and here he was growing tender over poor Aline, evoking her as she was when he had so often sought her in her rooms in the Rue de Moscow; as she was at certain moments when he had loved or nearly loved her—on a summer evening, for instance, when she was seated in the stern of a boat rowed on the Seine by four oarsmen of their acquaintance. Yes, she was seated in a bright dress, looking at him over the heads of the youths as they alternately stooped and rose. A stillness was falling upon the river. A fine of orange was trailing along the margin of the sky. What unspeakable emotion had bathed his soul as he was sensible of the passing hour, the quivering water, the living creature, and the dying light!

He ascended his staircase with these thoughts. Why this fatal incompleteness in all his passions? Why was he incapable of attaining to that absolute of tenderness which he conceived, of which he had glimpses, towards which he sprang at every new intrigue? And then—nothing! And yet how many chances had been combined for him; and while his servant was relieving him of his overcoat, and he was passing into the drawing-room, in which he often read at night before going to bed, he mentally enumerated these chances: a fortune which enabled him to pursue his fancies without much need of calculation; a genuine and ancient title; ability to maintain a position in society that pleased him; a robustness of health that could not recall a week of sickness; a taste for intellectual things just sufficient to occupy his attention without annoyance, for, absolutely free from personal ambition, he had never ceased to be interested as an amateur by the attractions of literature and art.

Added to all this, he had an appointment for the following day with a charming woman whom he desired, and the fire of sense had not been slackened within him by the excesses of his life. Why, then, was it inevitable that the perception of an indefinable insufficiency in his life should make him so melancholy just at this moment? He put on a lounging jacket, dismissed his servant, and settled himself beside the fire in his drawing-room. He again evoked Helen with an exactitude of recollection which made her present to him from her mauve stockings to that little mark which she had there at the right corner of her mouth. Well! he did not love her, and he would never love her. If he had hoped to experience at last, through her, that supreme surprise of the heart which continually eluded him, he might tell himself that this hope was abortive like the rest.

Like the rest! He felt a desire to convince himself that it had always been so with him. He went and opened a box, in which were piled six or seven note-books of different sizes. Some were made of sheets of school paper. There were two of Japanese paper. These note-books were journals of his life taken up repeatedly at unequal periods. In them he came upon pages scrawled on the desk of the study-room at school, pages blackened on the sides of boats, in hotel rooms, in this very drawing-room. He took up these note-books, and began to turn over the leaves, finding in them a former ego perfectly similar to the present ego in premature misanthropy, sudden and fleeting ardours of sensuality, murderous analysis, impotent hankering after unattainable delight, indolent languor and incapacity ever fully to feel anything, whether real or ideal.

The whole had combined to make of him a sort of child of the century, of the year 1883, but without elegy, a Nihilist of gallantry and without declamation.

The following is one of the pieces which his eyes, now gloomy and dull, dwelt upon, and which would have broken Helen's heart if, gifted with the magic faculty of second sight, she had discovered the melancholy torpor which even the gift of her person, following upon the gift of her entire soul, was inadequate to disturb.

"PARIS, May 1871.

"Terrible days. Vanaboste comes and tells us yesterday, at one o'clock, that we must get ready to leave, and that the pupils at Sainte Barbe have gone already with their head. The Panthéon is full of powder, and will soon blow up. Since morning the firing had been slowly, slowly drawing nearer—a strange noise! It was as though some one had shaken millions of nuts over the town in a gigantic cloth. Alfred and I spent the morning in the attic watching the flames of the conflagrations writhing against the sky. He was quite depressed, and I fiercely gay, with a nervous gaiety that forced me to the utterance of outrageous paradoxes—but were they paradoxes?—concerning the fine theories of our professor of philosophy last week. O vision of fate! His last lesson turned upon progress!

"We are packing up hastily in order to leave, when one of the masters comes in a state of terror through the little door opening upon the Rue Tournefort, which he bolts behind him. He tells us that the federates would not allow anyone to pass their barricades. It was with great difficulty that he himself has been able to return. We were a long way from the good-natured National Guardsman who said to us on Monday, at the doors of the Lycée: Shout "Long live the Commune!" boys, and you are free." Vanaboste was as white as my paper when he heard this news. The usher hit on the plan of having mattresses spread over the middle of the courtyard, so that if the Panthéon blew up we should fall with less violence. We remained for about two hours in this distress, we pupils fourteen in number, the two assistant masters, and the head master. Alfred and I, who, by an odd contradiction, were almost calm, talking together in a corner.

"In spite of the firing, which was constantly drawing nearer, and the bullets cracking against the walls, perhaps a hundred paces off, we had neither of us a perception of reality; the danger appeared to us to be something distant, dim, almost abstract. And we were talking—of what? Of our childhood. 'It has been a happy one,' he said to me, 'even here.' For once I emptied my heart to him, and let him see what I thought of the scholastic lupanar in which, owing to my guardian's selfishness, I have been obliged to grow up. After all, I prefer even this bagnio to his house.

"Through this useless talking the firing can be heard coming nearer. The Panthéon does not blow up. Suddenly a loud shout comes down from one of ourselves in the upper story, where, at the risk of receiving a bullet, he had stationed himself at the window. 'The Chasseurs are at the end of the street.' That was the most trying moment. My heart beat as though it would burst, my throat was choking in the expectation of what was going to happen. Undefined danger had left me calm. Exact, brutal, and present fact affected me unpleasantly. Some shots are fired quite close, then furious summonses with the butt-ends of guns shake the gate. The same usher who had shown his coolness in conceiving the precautionary measure of the mattresses, rushes forward in time to strike up the levelled guns of two chasseurs, who, blackened with powder, and with eyes gleaming in frenzy, would have fired at random into the crowd of us if the other had not been there. A lieutenant comes up, a little man in yellow boots, with strap on chin and pistol in fist. Vanaboste speaks to him, and we are saved.

"All this was yesterday. To-day we are again at our studies, a symbol of our childish life in the midst of this tumult of action. I turn over the leaves of an old book of spiritual philosophy with the pleasure of contempt, and after reading official phrases about God, the immortal soul, refinement of manners, moral liberty and innate reason, I close my eyes and see the Square of the Panthéon as it was last night: the dead lying with naked feet, because their shoes have been stolen; and with battered skulls, because their deaths have just been made sure, of by blows from butt-ends of guns; the splashes of blood, that feel sticky beneath the soles of our boots; the flames of the conflagrations in the distant sky; and on the footpath, lying on the same straw, and sleeping like wearied brutes, the little chasseurs who have taken the quarter. Homo homini lupior lupis."

"DIEPPE, July 1874.

"The daughter resembles the mother. She is only twelve years old, and already I can catch the coquetry, the glances, the premonition of the woman in the presence of the man; and it will end as it did with her mother, in a marriage of convenience, first acts of thoughtlessness, a first lover, then a series of lovers down to some young Baron de Querne, whom there will be an attempt to persuade that none was ever loved but he; and, more foolish or more intelligent than myself, he will perhaps believe it.

"Yes, more intelligent; for in love the great thing is to have as much emotion as possible; and the real deception is to paralyse one's heart by clear-sightedness. Whether was it Valmont in the 'Liaisons'—dear Valmont—or the President's wife that was deceived? She who felt or he who calculated? Whether was it Elvire or Don Juan, who does not understand that Elvire, seeing that she has been able to intoxicate herself with love, is alone to be envied, while he himself is not? I know all this, but the inward demon is the stronger, and as soon as I begin to pay my addresses to a woman I am at pains to procure all such information concerning her as can render me incapable of loving her.

"At my age, ought I not to write in this book: 'O divine fate! that has caused me so speedily to light upon the unique, the ideal woman, the sister-soul,' &c. (It would call for some of Gounod's music). Not exactly, Monsieur de Querne, but rather a lady of experience, who has had five or six lovers, who has retained sufficient taste to give the title of 'sentiment' to what belongs to fair and fitting and the most brutal sensation; a lady of tact, who has given herself a good deal of trouble to persuade you that you have seduced her. And the deuce take me if I am angry with her for such charming hypocrisy! Besides, what is the good of being angry with anyone for anything? Every human being is a pretentious little watch, which, seeing its hands go round, fancies that it is itself the cause of the motion. Foolishness and vanity! There is a delicate mechanism inside, and this mechanism has it that Madame —— shall be a sentimental prostitute, her daughter a future quean, and I a mirthless debauchee, who parch my soul by setting forth all this instead of enjoying what is granted to me."

"PARIS, 22nd May 1877.

"An evening of folly yesterday and debauchery, but debauchery that was gay and healthy which is undoubtedly the truth. Nothing but this remains to me that does not leave disgust behind.

"I went to see Duret, the painter, with that sad dog René W——, who first stopped in the Rue de la Tour-Auvergne to ask for Marie, a tall brunette.

"I have a Marie here," said the doorkeeper, "but she is a tall blonde, red even," and in fact at a window in the first floor I saw a head of warm, golden hair, a dress of clear, bright blue, and a made complexion as extravagantly pink as a doll's. In my dark hours I have had sufficient knowledge of the degrading and consolatory fascination of these painted charms, of these slain bodies, of these ringed eyes, of all this lying!

"At Duret's found Léonie, the model who stood to him for his Delilah in the last Salon: a somewhat wearied face, with a refined and arched nose, eyes of gleaming blackness, a strongly marked chin, with a slightly masculine appearance in the profile—the masculine appearance of theatrical women who act in burlesque—and a long countenance. But that is but the skeleton of the face. The slight moustache was tinged with black, the patch on the cheek underlined with black, the eyes made still larger with black, the complexion covered with powder, and the powder blending with the pale pink of the blood gave the woman an extravagant and sophisticated look which was completed by the brilliantly nacreous teeth that twinkled with the splendour of moist imitation pearls.

"The toilet completed the woman. She had some black, gauzy material round her neck, a hat trimmed with gauze and flowers, a dress of variegated and friezed material, with a huge, red rose blooming on her left breast.

"'She's a luxurious woman,' said René ironically, and, indeed, with the material of her dress, her gauze and her flower, she looked like a creature that lived on nothing but superfluity. I paid my addresses to her, pleased her, and did not leave her house until this morning.

"O enchantment of the senses when the surcharge of thought comes not to mar physical intoxication! O enchantment of prostitutes, seen thus as dispensers of pleasure free from disquiet of heart! No asking whether or how one loves or is loved, no measuring of sensation with an ideal type of feeling that is perceived, and striven after, and that never can be felt! I write these lines, and see! already my enjoyment has evaporated. I write these lines and yet would that on a solitary terrace fronting a landscape of trees and waters a woman might appear having the eyes of which I long have dreamed—eyes which I know without having ever met them—and might swear to me that this life has been nothing but an evil dream! And she should tell me all, and by that all be made the dearer to me;—and then I should love!"

"PARIS, June 1879.

"Luncheons and dinners; dinners and luncheons. Assignations and evening parties. Ah! how empty my life is! I do nothing that I like; nothing; for I like nothing.

"In presence of the living creature, nothing at heart but pity for him who suffers, if he does suffer—who will suffer since he endures the evil of existence.

"If death, inevitable death, were neither physically painful in the passage thither from life, nor terrible in its sequel to our imagining, ah! how I would seek that which has prompted thoughts to mar my life!

"We live on—and why? We think—and why? Why between two glasses of delicate wine and amid naked shoulders does there come to me ceaselessly at table the image of the grave, and the insoluble question concerning the meaning of this deadly farce of nature, and the world, and life?

"I muse on the sweets of mutual love, an absurd dream that civilisation grafts upon the simple need of coupling. Ah! for a simple passion that might apply my entire sensibility to another being, like wet paper against a window-pane.

"And all this declamatory philosophy due to the fact that yesterday I saw Madame de Rugle again at the Théâtre Français, and that the sight did not move me one whit. What does logic say? That a man should not force himself to tenderness when his lack of feeling is self-admitted, but turn on his heel, whistling that polonaise of Chopin's which she used to play to me sometimes in the evening with so much intention and sentimentality. And of that passion this is all that is left."

"PARIS, January 1881.

"I am aware that I have become horribly, fiercely egoistic, and the external manifestations of this egoism are now offensive to me, whereas formerly I used to surrender myself to it without scruple, at a time, however, when I was of more worth than I am now by reason of the dream that I cherished concerning myself.

"Philosophising truthfully about oneself is as great a relief as the vomiting of bile. I look for the history of my temperament from the days of my childhood. I see that my imagination has been excessive, destroying my sensibility by raising a fore-fashioned idea between myself and reality. I expected to feel in a certain way—and then, I never did so. This same imagination, darkened by my uncle's harsh treatment, has turned also to mistrust. I have always dreaded every creature. The loss of my father and mother prevented the correction of this early fault. College life and modern literature stained my thought before I had lived. The same literature separated me from religion at fifteen. Impiety, to my shame, acted like refinement to seduce me! The massacres of the Commune showed me the true nature of man, and the intrigues of the ensuing years the true nature of politics. I longed to link myself to some great idea—but to which? When quite young I had measured the wretchedness of an artist's existence. There must be genius or far better leave it alone. To rank as fiftieth among writers or musicians—thank you, no. My fortune exempted me from the necessity of a profession. Enter a Council of State for foreign affairs, or a public office—and why? There are only too many officials already. Get married? The thought of chaining down my life never tempted me. I should have done the same as B—— who, on the day of his wedding, took train to return no more.

"Then what? Nothing. I have not even grown old of heart; I am abortive. My sentimental adventures, which have been pursued in spite of everything, for women are even yet what is least indifferent to me, have, alas, convinced me that there are no kisses that do not resemble those already given and received. It is all so short, and superficial, and vain. How desperate I should be rendered by the thoughts of myself—of that self which I shall never be able completely to renounce—did I often indulge in them! What else but the damnation of the mystics is non-love?"

Such were a few of the pages among many others, and the abominable monograph of a secret disease of soul was continued in hundreds of similar confidences. Often simply the date was written, together with two or three facts: Rode, paid visits, went to the club, the theatre in the evening, or a party, or ball, and then came a single word like a refrain—Spleen. At the beginning of the last of these note-books, Armand, when he had closed it, could read a list of all the years of his life since 1860, and after each date he had scrawled—Torture, and at the end, these words:

"I did not ask for life. If I have committed faults, frightful ones, too, I have also known sufferings such as, set over against the others, might say to the inconceivable Power that has created and that sustains me, if such a Power possess a heart: 'Have pity upon me!'"

The young man thrust away with his hand the heap of papers wherein he encountered so faithful an image of his present moral aridity. Slowly he began to walk about the room. Everywhere in it he recognised the same tokens of his inward nihilism. The low bookcase contained but those few books which he still liked: novels of withering analysis—"Dangerous Liaisons," "Adolphus," "Affinities"—moralists of keen and self-centred misanthropy, and memoirs. The photographs scattered over the walls reminded him of his travels—those useless travels during which he had failed to beguile his weariness. On the chimney-piece, between the likenesses of two dead friends, he kept an enigmatic portrait, representing two women, with the head of the one resting upon the shoulder of the other. It was the present, life-like remembrance of a terrible story—the story of the bitterest faithlessness he had ever endured. He had been cynical or artificial enough to laugh over it formerly with the two heroines, but he had laughed with death in his heart.

At the sight of all these objects witnessing to the manner of his life, he was so completely sensible of his emotional wretchedness that he wrung his hands, saying quite aloud: "What a life! Good God! what a life!" It was owing to experiences such as these that his lips and eyes preserved that expression of silent melancholy to which he had perhaps owed Helen's love. It is their pity that leads to the capture of the noblest women. But these crises did not last long with Armand. In his case muscles were stronger than nerves. He took up his journals, and threw them, rather than put them, away in the box.

"That's a rational sort of occupation," he thought to himself, "for the night before an assignation."

Immediately, his thoughts turned again to Helen. The charming air of distinction that she possessed returned to his recollection, and suddenly softened him to an extraordinary degree.

"Why have I entered into her life," he said, "since I do not love her? For eleven little months she did not know me, and she was at peace. There would still be time enough to act the part of an honest man."

He was seized by the temptation to do what he had done once already—to renounce, before any irrevocable step had been taken, an intrigue in which he ran the risk of taking another's heart without giving his own in return.

"Perhaps she loves me," he said to himself; and he sat down at his table, and even got ready a sheet of paper in order to write to her. Then, leaning back in his easy chair, he reflected. The recollection of Varades suddenly beset him, as also of the serenity with which Helen had deceived her husband that evening. "Innocent child," he said aloud, speaking to himself, "if it were not I, it would be someone else. When a fast woman meets with a libertine, they form a pair."

He began to laugh in a nervous fashion, and recalled the boundless contempt with which he had formerly been covered by the lady whom his scruples had led him to give up. She was the only enemy that he had kept among all the women with whom he had had to do. The clock struck.

"Two o'clock," he said, "and I have to get up early in order to visit worthy Madame Palmyre, and reserve one of her little suites, as in Madame de Rugle's days. I shall be tired. Monsieur de Varades will be missed."

Half-an-hour later he was in bed, and, head on arm, sleeping that infantine sleep which, in spite of his life, had still been left to him. So he was represented in a drawing by his father, which hung on one of the walls of his bed-room. Ah! if the dead ones, whose son he was, had been able to see him, would they have condemned him? Would they have pitied him?

[CHAPTER III]

It was about half-past ten in the morning when Madame Chazel received a small packet from the Baron de Querne. It contained two books—two new novels—and a letter, the last being similar to all those that a man of the world may write to a woman with whom he is on friendly terms. But the postscript pressed as with a hand upon her heart. It ran as follows:

"If your country friend decides to come to Paris, the best furnished apartments that I have seen are at 16, Rue de Stockholm. They are on the second floor, to the right."

Yes, Helen was seized with inward trepidation on reading these simple lines. In proportion as her action drew closer to her—the action that would for ever separate her future and her past—the fever which had been preying upon her since the previous evening had increased still more. She had just left her bath, and, wrapped in a dressing-gown of pure white, was crouched on a low chair beside the fire, her naked feet in slippers, her form unconstrained by the flexible material, and her hair rolled in a great twist about her neck. She shivered in her wool-lined robe, and, with Armand's letter in her fingers, gazed now at the paper, the mere touch of which overwhelmed her, and now around the room—a refuge which she preferred even to the little drawing-room, as enabling her to retire into a domain that was all her own.

She had been so pleased at the time of their settling in Paris to obtain this room all to herself! She had during so many nights known the torture of sleeping beside a man whom she did not love, and if sleeping side by side, almost breath to breath, forms the delight of blissful passion, physical aversion, on the other hand, is augmented by such intimacy, until it becomes a species of animal hatred. Alfred's movements, the sound of his breathing, the mere existence of his person, angered her and hurt her, in the hours that she spent thus beside him, when silence hung heavy upon their rest, and she lay awake quivering and in revolt. When requesting this separation of rooms she certainly had not foreseen that the solitude of her couch would one day avail her as a weapon against material partition, that terrible ransom for adultery which prudent women accept as a security. It is a rare thing for those who deceive their husbands to sleep apart from them. They would rather not have to carry with them to their lover the anxiety due to a watchfulness but little reconcilable with complete pleasure.

But Helen was not capable of such calculations. The most charming trait in her character was a spontaneity that might draw her into very great perils, but that at least always preserved her from a foulness which is more degrading than anything else—reflection in the midst of error. At this very moment, as she sat crouching upon her low chair, she did not think about the consequences of her approaching action, nor did she reason—she felt. The presence of Armand's letter caused her to be visited with excessive emotion. She scarcely so much as listened to the noise that her little boy made in playing beside her bed. The child was shaking his flaxen ringlets, and shouting and running about. He had set two chairs beside each other, and was creeping between them, pretending that he was a railway train passing through a tunnel.

Since she had been in love with Armand, Helen had experienced strange feelings of sadness in the presence of her little Henry, and she had reproached herself for them as for a lack of tenderness, attributing them to remorse. In reality, her sorrow was due to the discovery in her son of an astonishing likeness to her husband. Even in his games the child recalled the conversation of the father, who from principle gave him for books nothing but scientific works, and then he had Alfred Chazel's eyes and his awkwardness in using his hands, and had only his mother's mouth and forehead. She spoiled him all the more for her consciousness of what she had taken from him to give to another! The child continued to play, looking sometimes towards his mother. The latter, at one moment, heaving a deep sigh, crumpled up the paper that she held in her hand, and flung it into the fire.

The note had grown intolerable to her. She told herself, indeed, that it was more prudent on her lover's part to write to her in this tone of formal politeness, but it was such prudence as freezes, and in Helen's then unnerved condition she had need of a letter whose every phrase acts upon the reader's heart like invisible and caressing lips. The crumpled paper, letter and envelope together, rolled into the fire, and the child left the two chairs with which he was playing to come to his mother's side and watch it burn.

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

"At the nuns, mamma," he replied. So he called the luminous dots that run across the black surface of paper consumed by fire. These dots were in his eyes nuns distractedly traversing their burnt cloister. "How they hurry," he said; "how frightened they are! Oh! that one, mamma, look at that one! The convent is falling down. They are all dead."

Madame Chazel felt herself incapable of enduring this merriment. The whole odious nature of her moral situation had just been rendered palpable to her by a petty, insignificant fact, that of her son making a plaything of the letter in which her lover made an appointment with her for their first secret meeting. She would have been so glad to have held her home life, the maternal obligations of which she would fulfil to the utmost, distinct from the other, from that life of passion upon which she was entering, carried away by something stronger than her reason, something so obscure to herself and yet so real. Was this distinction, then, altogether impossible, seeing that on the very first day all that she would have wished apart were being blended together?

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

Miette was the little boy's nurse. A lady's maid, a cook, and a man-servant completed the personnel of the household. Miette, who had come from the country with her employers, had taken care of Henry from his earliest infancy. At night, to send him to sleep, she used to sing canticles to him, one especially of which delighted and terrified him:

"Come, divine Messiah."

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

"He is Antichrist," she used to reply.

"When will He come?" asked the child.

"At the end of the world."

"In how many years?"

"Seven," said the nurse.

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

This astonishing prediction had so struck him the night before, that at the mere mention of his nurse's name, he began to tell it to his mother. At any other time this confidence would have amused her, but while speaking he had in his bright grey eyes a look that the young woman knew only too well.

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

The little boy cast a glance at the fire where the black residue alone marked the site of the burnt convent; at the chairs whose backs were no longer the walls of a deep tunnel; at his mother, to know whether he might not remain. Unconsciously he was affected by the sadness overspreading her face. By one of those almost animal intuitions peculiar to extremely sensitive children, he discerned that his presence was vexing to his mother. He kissed her hand, and then suddenly burst into tears.

"What is the matter, my angel, what is the matter?" said Helen, pressing him in her arms and covering him with kisses.

"I thought you were angry with me," he said. Then, warmed by her caresses, he said: "I am going, mamma; I will be good."

"Have children presentiments?" Helen asked of herself when she was left alone. "One would think he were conscious that something unusual is taking place." And with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting upon her closed hands, she relapsed into the state of fever that had kept her awake the whole night. The nacreous bruise that encircled her eyes too clearly revealed this sleeplessness. On rising, she had looked at herself in the glass, and said to herself:

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

What had been preying upon her had been neither prudish reasoning nor moral reflection. It was a sort of ardent languor. She could see Armand in her thought, and as it were a wave of blood, but having greater heat, surged to her heart, her throat choked a little, and her will tottered. It was not only her first intrigue, in the sense in which the world understands the term, but it was her first love. Helen Chazel, while still Mademoiselle de Vaivre, had endured one of the most painful trials that can weigh upon youth. She had been persecuted by a step-mother who hated her, while believing that she was only bringing her up well and correcting her. The De Vaivres lived in a kind of château, four miles from Bourges, and this had been a prison to the young girl. The father, a weak man, who cherished an innocent mania for an archaeological collection, patiently and complacently gathered together, had never suspected the mute drama played between step-mother and step-daughter for twelve years.

Madame de Vaivre loved her husband, and, without herself comprehending as much, was jealous of the dead wife, that first wife whose grace she saw renewed in the features of the child, in her smiles and in her gestures. Nothing is so dangerous as an evil feeling of the existence of which we are not quite aware. To gratify it we discover all kinds of excuses which enable us to feed our hatred without losing our self-esteem. It was thus that Madame de Vaivre, having taken Helen's education in hand, made every lesson and every admonition a means for torture.

This woman, pretty and refined, but unfeeling, very solicitous about propriety in consequence of the lengthened sojournings at Paris with her father, who had been an official deputy under the July monarchy, was withal minutely devout, and instinctively unkind, like all persons who are accustomed never to admit the just sensibilities of others. When Alfred Chazel had come to be intimate with Monsieur de Vaivre, owing to their common taste for excavations and antiquities, she had with joy perceived that he was falling in love with Helen. It afforded her a secret pleasure to marry her step-daughter to a man who had no fortune, and, the dowry being very small, to condemn her for years to a middling existence. Death, which takes as little account of our evil calculations as of our great intentions, had taken in hand to render abortive this woman's hateful anticipation, through which poor Helen had seen no more clearly than Monsieur de Vaivre himself.

All that the young girl understood on the day that Chazel asked her in marriage was that she would be free from her step-mother's tyranny. She had a plain perception of that from which she was escaping. As to marriage and its physical realities, what could she have known of them? Thus, on leaving the church, she found herself in a moral situation that was full of peril. Her childhood, spent, as it had been, beneath continual oppression, had to an excessive degree developed within her a taste for the romantic—a power, that is, of fashioning beforehand an image of life with which the reality is subsequently compared. Through her joy at deliverance, her future marriage showed to her like a paradise of delight.

Misfortune had it that Alfred Chazel should be one of those men who, with all kindness, all delicacy even, at the bottom of their hearts, are for ever ignorant of a woman's nature. The consummation of the marriage was to Helen something as hateful as it had been unexpected—like a tribute paid to clumsy brutality. The result was that she received her husband's endearments with a repugnance that was imperfectly dissembled, and that added to the timidity of a man already timid by nature and awkwardly impassioned, as those who have not slackened the initial ardour of their youth in facile intrigues often are. Alfred was secretly afraid of showing his tenderness to his wife, and he concealed from her the intensity of a love that would perhaps have touched her had she been able to perceive it.

Moral divorce between husband and wife has nearly always physiological divorce for its first and hidden cause. If community in voluptuousness is the most powerful agent for the fusion of temperaments, the torturing possession of a woman by a man remains the certain origin of unconquerable antipathy. It came to pass in the Chazel household, as in all similar households, that this first antipathy was heightened from week to week by reason of the fact that two beings, condemned to live side by side, unceasingly afford each other grounds for more love or greater hatred. Do not all the petty events of life render them every minute more present to each other? The divergence in tastes, ideas, and habits that parted Alfred from Helen, would have provided the latter, had she loved her husband, with pretexts for a loving education. Not loving him, she found in them only reasons for separating from him still more.

Alfred Chazel was in fact a son of the people, and in spite of the intellectual refinement of two generations, his peasant origin showed itself again in him in clumsiness of gesture and attitude. He was not vulgar, and at the same time he was lacking in manner. Helen, on the contrary, came of a noble family, and her step-mother's continual superintendence had developed to an extreme in her a sense of detailed particularity concerning her person and everything about her. Her husband's manner of eating shocked her; his manner of going and coming and sitting down—a certain slowness in grasping all that constituted the material side of life. When it was needful to accomplish a rapid and precise movement, during a walk, or at table, or in a shop, he would pause for a moment, with lips slightly gaping, and with a startled demeanour, like a peasant passing through a terminus in a large town.

Alfred, moreover, was fond of saying that he was an absent man, and that the external world had no existence for him; and it was true, for two influences had contributed to uproot him from the said external world—the sudden transition of his family from one social class into another, and the nature of his mathematical studies. His wife had never been able to ensure that the cord of his eyeglass should not be broken, and then knotted in several places, that the collar of his overcoat should be kept down, his silk hat brushed, and his cravat properly tied. The carelessness characteristic of men of thought was visible in his entire person.

Helen would have blushed with indignation and shame had she been told of the part played by these trifles in her conjugal aversion. But is not the life of the heart, like physical life, a summing of the infinitely little? Moreover, these minute facts, which formed a mass in their totality, symbolised an essential ground for dissociation between the husband and wife, namely, the absolute distinction between the minds of both. Helen's instruction had not been of a very solid kind; she had not been fortified by that sum of positive learning which alone is able to balance intense development of thought. Thus, all her reading as a girl and as a young woman had been directed towards those works of imagination for which Alfred professed the innocent contempt of a scientist whose literary culture is almost non-existent. It appeared extraordinary to him, and he used ingenuously to say so, that in an age of chemistry, steam, and electricity, intelligent beings should occupy themselves with the composition of such trash. Hence, in conversation, husband and wife had not a single opinion in common. Alfred was quite sensible that an abyss, growing constantly more impassable, was yawning between Helen and himself, and he was pained by it, but in the way that he would have been pained by an incomprehensible misfortune.

"What does she want to make her happy?" he would ask himself, and then he would in thought draw up a list of the conditions for happiness that were realised about his wife: "We have money, and a dear child; she wished to live in Paris, and here we are; I give her every freedom; I have the most absolute confidence in her; I do her honour by my position; everything smiles upon us and flatters us—and she is not happy!"

No, Helen had not been happy, and on the morning of this winter day, which was to prove to her a date that could never be forgotten, she felt her whole melancholy past surging back upon her. A thousand scenes showed themselves, and she discerned that through them all she had been advancing towards the hour at which, as she believed, her true life would begin. Often at Bourges, while walking with her husband along the Seraucourt promenade, she had asked herself whether she should ever, ever be acquainted with happiness, with the warm radiancy within her of a light that might illumine the cold darkness in which she languished. Her husband conversed with her about his plans, his college life, and his companions, with the calmness which he displayed in all matters, holding it a principle that a man should look at life on its good side, should be submissive, and accept.

These talks prostrated her with sadness. She sighed vaguely after an infinitude of emotion which she conceived to be possible, and the tokens, the reflection of which she discovered in a few phrases in the novels of her reading when they treated of love. Of all the emotions of life this was the only one with which she was unacquainted. She had been a daughter, and had loved her father, but her affection had been cruelly deceived. She had been a sister, but little Adèle, Monsieur de Vaivre's daughter by his second marriage, resembled her mother, and Helen had never been able to become unreservedly attached to her. She had had friends, but it had always seemed to her that these friends did not feel as she did, and she had never ventured to speak to them of what touched her most closely, of what was dearest to her heart. She would have been pious had not the sight of her step-mother's piety given her an aversion to religious practices which, as she saw only too clearly, might be made a justification for the worst egotism. She was a mother, and she loved her son; but, as formerly, in the case of her little sister, a resemblance checked her in her feeling. Little Henry recalled Alfred too much at certain moments.

Then it was, when she had fathomed the bankruptcy of her first youth, that her imagination pictured to her the dawn of a reparative feeling; and what could this mysterious feeling be if it were not that one with which she was unacquainted, and the sweetness, power and happiness of which were celebrated by all?

"But no," she said to herself, "it is a crime to love when one is not free."

Then she recalled conversations heard on her friends' "days" at Bourges, and the manner in which people spoke of a doctor's wife who had eloped with a young Conseiller de Préfecture. And then she met with men who had so little resemblance to the image that she had formed of him whom she might have loved! She remembered the painful surprise which had been caused her by that very Monsieur de Varades, of whom De Querne had heard. She had believed in the genuineness of his sympathy. He came to see her. They used to have a little music together. Then, had he not offered violence to her one evening when they were alone in the house? She had said nothing to her husband from dread of a scandal and a duel; but she had never received the young officer again when alone. She did not suspect that he had revenged himself upon her by saying that she had been his mistress.

By what familiarities had she challenged the audacity of this garrison Don Juan? Yet she was not a coquette. The feeling that sprang up within her in the presence of a stranger was rather an apprehension of offence than a desire to please. She had been as little of a coquette with Armand de Querne. If there was a man whom she would have refrained from approaching with a desire to seduce, it was assuredly he. Her husband had so often extolled him to her.

"When we were at college, Armand and I," or, "Armand used to say to me," or, "Armand wrote to me." And so on.

Helen had anticipated another and a more pretentious Alfred. She had told herself that some day, if ever she left the country, she would be obliged to endure in her home the presence of this friend, who would be a hostile judge, and would raise fresh difficulties between her husband and herself. If they were separated for so many reasons the one from the other, her own reserve and Alfred's good nature at least prevented the separation from breaking out in scenes and disputes. What would be the outcome of the intrusion of Alfred's old chum into their home, she almost anxiously asked herself on the occasion of her first visit to Paris.

Her rapid interview with Monsieur de Querne had modified the colouring of these fears. He had come to take the Chazels to their hotel, and all three had dined together in a restaurant on the Boulevards. Helen had been surprised by Armand's outward appearance, and by the contrast that he presented to the carelessness of Alfred; but further, the young man's questions, his keen way of looking, the irony that tinted his slightest expressions, together with an indefinable shade of contempt for Alfred, which a woman's acuteness could not but remark, had disconcerted her, causing her a slight shiver of mistrust. She would have wished never to see the man again. She had been unable to refrain from mentioning this antipathy to her husband, and he had replied: "He looks like that, but he is such a good fellow, and then he has been so unfortunate." And he told his wife about Armand's childhood, his guardian's selfishness, his youthful melancholy, and he commiserated him for other mysterious sufferings.

"He has not understood life well. He was rich. He has not employed his fine powers. He has said nothing to me, but I always believed that he had experienced a deep passion."

Helen would have been much astonished if any one had revealed to her that the species of agony with which her thought rested upon the probable secret nature of this disquieting personage, comprised that form of anxiety which often precedes love. The settlement at Paris had taken place, and Armand had begun to visit them, at first in their furnished rooms, and then in the little house in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. It was he who had found it for them, he who courteously offered his assistance in the countless goings and comings necessitated by the furnishing of the new home. In the constant interviews thus brought about, whether in a shop, or while walking together from one tradesman's to another, or when driving in a carriage, as often happened, Helen learnt to know all the delightful outward qualities possessed by Armand. Unlike the men, all of them occupied with science or self-advancement, who met at her husband's house, he appeared to attach only a secondary importance to acquired merits or positive learning. Questions of feeling alone interested him.

In all the men that she had seen, Helen had encountered the same idea about love, namely, that it pertained to youth, was to be relegated to the background, and that rational people should never weigh it against family or professional interests. Her discussions with Armand revealed to her a man who had reflected a great deal about the mutual relations of the sexes. He possessed that imagination of heart which women so readily confuse with genuine sensibility, together with that experience of amorous life which lends to libertines their prestige even with the most virtuous. The expression of melancholy which was familiar to him seemed to say that this experience had been purchased at the cost of cruel deceptions. It was these unknown griefs that completed the work of seduction which had begun in timorous astonishment, and been continued in the admiration of the provincial for the Parisian; for the superiority of judgment concerning life which distinguished the young man, corresponded to too many stifled aspirations on Helen's part, to leave her indifferent to it. It was he whose taste she perceived scattered over the walls of her little drawing-room; he who had chosen that old tapestry and hung it in its corner; he who had chosen this piece of furniture or that piece of material from among several others. This softened admiration, which led her to say to herself: "What a happiness it would be to comfort him for all that he has suffered," had soon ended in the hope that her presence was really sweet to him, for he was occupied about her with visible sympathy.

At different times she had heard him tell her:

"I had an invitation to Madame So-and-so's this evening, but I broke my engagement in order to spend the evening with you."

One day, on the occasion of one of those insignificant events which in the heart's darkness are as tiny lights revealing an immense gulf, she had confessed to herself that she loved him. Armand, who was to have come to dinner in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, had sent a note of excuse to the effect that he was unwell. She had sent Alfred to see him, and Alfred had found nobody in the Rue Lincoln. By the sorrow that the young woman experienced, she recognised the extent of the interest that she took in Monsieur de Querne, and, to her misfortune, she recognised it at a moment when, upon one of those petty troubles, which are great disasters in love, she must inevitably doubt whether her feeling was returned. Instead of striving against this love, as she would have done had she believed herself loved, she said to herself:

"Why has he not kept his promise? With whom has he spent the evening?"

When she saw him again, he spoke somewhat hardly to her, and she suffered a disconcerted countenance to be seen. He gently took her hand, and she burst into tears. From that hour she ceased to be capable of concealing the disquiet with which the mere sight of Armand inspired her. She began to enter upon that stage wherein the soul finds itself ceaselessly divided between the sight of the direst misfortune and of the highest felicity. How is it possible to reason then? Armand, who knew love's halting-places too well not to perceive the progress that he was making in Helen's heart, was adroit enough to show her that he doubted her feelings towards himself, and that he was unhappy on account of this doubt.

He thus led her in succession to tell him that she loved him, to let him take her hands, her arms, her waist, and to lend her cheek, her eyes, her lips to kisses. Nothing could be more opposed than these progressive familiarities to the ideas that Helen entertained respecting the manner in which a woman ought to behave towards a man when she loves. She considered, as do all truly loyal natures, that a slight deception is morally equivalent to one that is complete. But she yielded to the faintest expression of pain in the young man's eyes with a weakness for which she reproached herself on each occasion, only to relapse once more.

"Ah! do not be pained; what does it matter if I ruin myself?" such was the translation of the poor woman's looks, the words that she uttered in a whisper.

She had not spoken falsely when putting to him the sorrowful question:

"You will at least be happy?"

And now, within a few hours of the moment when she would be entirely his, it was this hope and this uncertainty that floated above all else.

"Ah!" she thought, "if only I may see that light in his eyes! Afterwards I shall become what I may. What matter if I have given him that?"

She had reached this point in her reflections when a kiss made her start. Alfred had just come in to bid her good morning. Having gone out before eight o'clock he had not yet seen her, and finding her so pretty in the robe of soft material that showed the outline of her graceful shoulders, and bust, and the lines of her legs terminating in the white, blue-veined, naked feet in their black slippers, he could not refrain from approaching her and stealing a kiss from the sweet place on her neck, between the ear and nape. This was such a surprise to her on emerging from the universe of ideas in which she had just been absorbed, that she gave a slight scream.

"Lazy, chilly, timorous creature," said Chazel, who strove to jest in order to banish the angry expression which his caresses had just called up upon that charming face. "Do you know what o'clock it is? A quarter to twelve. You will never be ready for breakfast. What are you reading?" he continued, taking up the two volumes sent by Monsieur de Querne which were lying on the table; "more novels—but they are not cut. What have you been doing all the morning?"

"I have been settling papers and making up accounts."

How many of these little falsehoods her lips had uttered, and not one, even the slightest and most innocent of them, that did not cost her a cruel effort.

"Will you ring for Julia?" she resumed. "I am going to have my hair dressed, and I shall be ready in ten minutes."

"I am not in your way if I remain here?" he said.

"Not particularly—for the present," she replied, and already she had passed into her dressing-room. She had put on a light cambric wrapper, and was unfastening her beautiful chestnut hair, combing it herself. Alfred remained on his feet, leaning against one of the leaves of the door and reading a newspaper which he had taken out of his pocket. The mere rustling of the paper irritated Helen's nerves, because it recalled this man's presence to her, and his presence appeared at this moment a profanation. Ah! if Armand had been there instead of the other, how charming she would have found it to associate him thus with the coquettish portion of the mysterious attentions to her beauty. But such familiarity in one whom they do not love is so displeasing to women, that even prostitutes are pained by it. In all, whether virtuous or not, modesty is the beginning and the ending of love. Alfred had never understood this. He was still in love with Helen; and these sudden intrusions upon her privacy procured him a dumb happiness that was composed of timid desires and furtive contemplations. Over the top of his open newspaper he watched the white hands passing backwards and forwards among the yielding hair, and the graceful shape of the arms which the wide sleeves, when thrown back by certain movements, allowed to be seen.

How he would have liked to handle that hair which she always denied to him! And she too looked at her hair with happiness, in spite of the pain which her husband caused her by remaining there, for she perceived that it was as long and as wave-like as when she had been a young girl. Every time that she paid attention to her beauty now, she studied herself with childish anxiety, spying out the slightest wrinkle on her temples, about her lips, around her neck, asking herself whether she was still pretty enough to intoxicate the man she loved, and she smiled at herself in the glass as she twined her hair, and leaning forward a little she saw in a corner of the same glass the reflection of her husband's face with a blaze in his eyes—that swift gleam of desire which she knew and hated well. She shivered as though she had awoke to find herself exposed naked in a public square, blushed violently, and said:

"I do not know why Julia is not here. Ring again, please, and leave me."

She got up, pushed Alfred away, shut the door, and when alone, felt the tears come.

"Ah!" she said to herself; "I do not truly love him. Ought not these trifles to be sweet to me since I endure them for his sake?"

Such were her thoughts as she sat at the breakfast table, dressed now in a dark-coloured dress, and wearing boots—the boots in which she was presently, and in a very short time, for the time-piece hanging on the wall was pointing to thirty-five minutes past twelve—to walk to that Rue de Stockholm which she had not known even by name before receiving her lover's note. Where was it? What would the house look like? At the mere thought of it, an intoxicating, burning fluid seem to course through her veins. To remain quiet was a torture to her, and as for eating, she was unequal to it. It seemed to her that her throat was so choked that not even a piece of bread would pass through it. Little Henry was talking to his father, and the latter, on failing to receive even a reply from her to two or three questions, said:

"How strange you are to-day. Are you not well?"

"I?" she said. "Why I am as cheerful and merry as possible," and she began to laugh and to talk in a loud tone. "Can he suspect anything?" she asked herself; "but what matter if he does?"

"What are you going to do this afternoon?" asked Alfred again mechanically.

"Will you take me with you, mamma?" said Henry.

"No, darling," she replied, evading a reply to her husband, "you will go to the Champs-Élysées, and I will wish you good morning as I pass, perhaps. Is it fine to-day?" she went on, although she had watched both sky and pavement with impatient anxiety since early morning. And on his replying in the affirmative she said: "You can take the carriage; I will go on foot, it will do me good."

They had a brougham that was hired by the month, and that they used in turns, he for business expeditions, and she for paying visits.

"At last!" she sighed, when she found herself alone in the little drawing-room, Alfred having left for his office, and Henry for his walk; and the distresses of the morning were succeeded by a delicious feeling of relief.

Already even, in her drawing-room, which was filled with recollections of Armand, she was surrendered unreservedly to her love. The recovery of her freedom overwhelmed her with joy such as the vision of the future could no longer take from before her mind. She evoked in thought her lover's gaze, she kindled in it that gleam of felicity which was as the stars towards which her being was uplifted.

"I am sacrificing everything for him," she thought to herself, returning for a moment to the impressions of that painful morning; "but the more I sacrifice for him the more will he feel how much I love him. And how I love him! how I love him!" she repeated aloud in exultation. She looked at her watch. "It is past one o'clock. He is to wait for me from twelve. What a surprise for him if I arrive so soon. For he does not expect me immediately."

And she hastened to put on her hat, taking a thick veil with her at the bottom of her pocket to put over her face in the cab. He had the day before recommended her to do so. And now she was already passing down the Rue Saint-Lazare, like one walking in her sleep, not daring to look at anything around her. It seemed to her that everyone could see by her figure and gait where she was going, and her elation had given place to a sort of terror—but a resolute terror, like that of a man of courage when on the way to fight his first duel—when she ventured to hail a cab in the Place de la Trinité.

"The Rue de Stockholm," she said.

"What number?" asked the man.

"I will tell you when to stop," she replied.

To get out of the cab in front of the house had just appeared to her suddenly as an impossibility. Her hands shook when she fastened on her double veil in the vehicle, which began to move forward, heavy and slow; at least it seemed to her that every revolution of the wheels lasted a minute. She looked at the shops in the Rue Saint-Lazare, as they filed past, then at the courtyard in front of the terminus, and the sight of a traveller paying his cabman set her searching in her muff in agony. What if she had forgotten her purse? No, she had forty francs, in small ten-franc pieces. So much the worse; she would give one to the man, for to wait for the change on the footpath would be too much for her.

All these emotions were painful to her feelings. She would willingly have fixed her imagination upon her lover—her lover, for she was going to be his mistress. How contemptuous the tones of her friends at Bourges used formerly to become when uttering these words in reference to some compromised woman! Then her nervous emotion proved the stronger.

"If only he does not guess what it has cost me! Ah, may my cowardly fears not spoil his happiness!"

The cab having meanwhile climbed the beginning of the ascent of the Rue de Rome, was turning down past the wall of a private garden which forms the corner of the Rue de Stockholm, and the driver leaned down from his seat to ask Helen where he was to stop.

"Here," she said.

She got out, and placed the small gold piece in the man's hand, saying to him:

"Keep it, keep it."

Then she was immediately afraid that he would guess why she did not wait for the change, and she stopped and busied herself with gazing, without reading it, at a placard affixed to the wall, until she heard the cab wheels rolling away. She followed the footpath, lifting her head with a throbbing of the heart which seemed to be driving her mad. Eight, ten—two numbers more, and she had reached the house mentioned in the note. She entered the gateway, seeing nothing. She passed in front of the porter thinking that her limbs would not support her. Her feet were giving way on the stair-carpet. One more effort, and she was at the door of the apartments on the second floor.

She leaned against this closed door. Not a sound was to be heard on the staircase; not a sound came up from the street. She could hear the beatings of her heart, and instead of ringing she remained where she was. She wanted to recover a little calmness before appearing in Armand's presence. Why had she come here? To make him happy! What, then, would be the good of letting him see how much she had suffered? Her heart beat less rapidly; she forced herself to smile; and the thought of the happiness she was about to give was already a happiness to her greater than her anguish had just been.

She at last made up her mind to ring. The tinkling was succeeded by the sound of footsteps, the key turned in the lock, and she sank upon Armand's bosom, and was immediately drawn into a little drawing-room furnished in blue. Flames were burning in the fire-place. At the first glance Helen saw that there was no bed in the apartment. She had so dreaded the sight of this on first entering that she felt an infinite gratitude to Armand for having selected their place of meeting in such a way as to spare her this initial shock. He, meanwhile, had unfastened both her veils, taken off her bonnet, compelled her to sit down in an arm-chair beside the fire, and, kneeling in front of her, was clasping her almost madly, repeating again and again:

"Ah, my love! how sweet of you to come!"

And he gazed at her with eyes made very loving with the joy of desire that is certain of its satisfaction—the joy of desire only, for on seeing her smile at him with that easy smile to which she had compelled her countenance, in order not to displease him, he had just told himself that it was not the first time that she had come to a like meeting, and a terrible duality had been set up within him between his sensations and his thoughts.

"She has a fancy for me," he reflected; "let us take advantage of it. But why have all women a mania for telling you that you are their first lover?"

His kisses were loosening the locks of her hair, which she tried to readjust above her forehead with her hand.

"Do not be afraid," he said to her; "I have thought of everything." And he led her through the bedroom to the door of a little dressing-room, on the table in which were arranged all the articles belonging to his travelling dressing-case.

"You will be able to comb your hair again," he said.

"Oh!" she said, blushing, "you make me ashamed."

Just then he had led her into the bedroom, and as he was taking off the jacket which she wore over her dress, a small object rolled out of her pocket. It was a pocket-comb of light tortoise-shell, which Helen had taken up unreflectingly before going out, as she often did.

"She remembered that, too," he thought.

Then with loving entreaty:

"Be mine," he asked of her.

"Nay, I am yours," she replied.

A twilight prevailed in the bedroom, for he had loosed the window-curtains, as also those of the bed—of that bed which she found strength to look at for the first time. How fain would she have bidden him leave her to herself! And she turned her eyes towards him. He had begun to unfasten the buttons of her dress, and she was about to say to him, "Go away!" when she saw in his eyes that expression of felicity of which she had so often dreamed, and she suffered him, with that divine weakness whose sublime flattery so few men understand.

If a woman who loves wishes to be loved in the same degree, is it then needful that she borrow something from the methods of those creatures devoid of true sensibility, to whom their persons are but instruments of supremacy, and who surrender themselves that they may the better possess? Helen did not suspect, while Armand, intoxicated with her beauty, was sweeping her away in his arms, after warming her feet with kisses and taking from her all her attire, from her bracelets to her hair-pins—no, Helen did not suspect that, at that very moment, this man had just found in the absolute submission to his desires that had cost the poor woman so dear, a reason for not believing in her.

"Are you happy?" she asked of him an hour later, lying on his heart, and giving herself up to the languid voluptuousness that succeeds caresses; "tell me, are you happy? You see, I am."

And it was true, for she had just for the first time felt an unfamiliar emotion waking in her beneath the caresses of the man she loved so dearly.

"Oh! very happy," replied Armand, and he spoke falsely, for reviewing in thought all the slight incidents of this first meeting—the smiling entry, the presence of the comb, the compliant disrobing, the burning susceptibility of his mistress—he said again to himself that he was certainly not Helen's first lover.

And then, he secretly despised her for not having denied herself in detail. The evident absence of remorse in the woman seemed to him a proof that she had no kind of moral sense. He did not tell himself that, if she had manifested remorse, he would have treated her as a hypocrite, and meanwhile she was speaking to him.

"See," she sighed, "as soon as I saw you, I loved you. I felt that you had not had your share of happiness here below, and it was my dream to impart it to you, and to do away with all your troubles. There is a wrinkle in your forehead which I cannot endure. When you asked me to be yours and I said no, I saw that wrinkle between your eyebrows, there," she said, kissing the spot, "and then, when I said yes, the wrinkle was gone. That is why I am here, and proud of being here, for I am so proud of loving you."

"How strange it is," thought Armand, "that no woman has conscience enough to say to herself: 'I am acting disgracefully, lying, betraying; it amuses me, but it is disgraceful.' The cloth on the communion-table and the sheet on the bed of a furnished room are all one to them. There, my angel, go on with your romances," and he closed her lips with kisses. "Ah!" he thought again, "she is very pretty. If only she had wit enough to hold her tongue!"

[CHAPTER IV]

The evening which succeeded to this day of fever, agony, and bliss, was spent by Helen in torturing and delicious yearning. Is not the regretting of one's happiness the thinking of it again? Why had she asked her lover not to come to the Rue de la Rochefoucauld that evening? When yonder, beside him, she had thought that to meet him again in her own home after an interval of so few hours, would be distressing to her. Now she said to herself, while working after dinner at her crochet in the little drawing-room, and seated in the arm-chair which Armand usually occupied—yes, she said to herself with melancholy that it would be very sweet if she had him there, close beside her.

She would touch her lover's hand sometimes with her own. She would breathe the faint aroma of the scent which she had asked him to use and which was the same as hers. In imagination she grasped that enjoyment at once severe and soothing to a woman's soul—the enjoyment of hearing the lips that have told you "I love you" between two kisses in the afternoon, employ "Madame" and similar formalities to you, so that the most insignificant phrase brings home the charm of the mystery that links you together. And Helen's delicate fingers continued their agile handling of the tortoise-shell crochet hook, while Alfred turned over the leaves of a book without speaking.

On her return, she had experienced a bitter moment when, meeting her son again, she had been forced to allow little Henry to give her kisses—which she had not returned. She had contented herself with embracing him, with resting the child's cheek against her own, and then she had felt that she loved him even more than before. All these different kinds of emotion had left their traces in her face, which, usually rosy, was on this evening strangely pale, but of that toned and shrouded paleness that succeeds to complete voluptuousness.

A halo of lassitude hovered about her eyes, a softness about her smile, an air of suppleness and languor about her entire person, and this lover-like appearance lent her such seductiveness as would have frightened her had she taken the trouble to watch Alfred. The latter never turned his eyes from her as she bent her tenderly wearied head over her work. Dressed in white, as was her custom, the faint brown tint of her eyelids was the better seen since she kept them downcast, apparently upon her wool, in reality upon the visions which were rekindling her soul. Alfred reflected with rapture that she was his wife—his wife.

He was more in love with her than ever. Only, ever since their settlement at Paris had brought with it a separation of rooms, he had felt himself seized, whenever he longed for her caresses, by an emotion which he could with difficulty subdue. He must ask his Helen to allow him to remain with her, or else enter her room when she was in bed. This need of acting, united to the torment of physical desire, is so painful to certain men, that timid youths experience an almost unbearable throbbing of the heart on merely crossing the threshold of those houses in which pleasure is sold ready-made. During the whole of this evening, Alfred, although he was satisfied of Helen's submission, endured that emotion which is not without sweetness, since it renders still more perceptible the keenness of desire. He looked at her, and the words which he was preparing beforehand to say to her, caused him a sinking of the heart. He kept silence with such persistency that the poor woman had almost forgotten his existence when she rose to go to her room and held out her forehead to him, with the words:

"Till to-morrow."

"Eh! what! till to-morrow?" he replied, trying to bring his kiss down to her eyes, and lower still. She shuddered, repulsed him abruptly, and looked at him. In the depths of her husband's eyes there was the same gleam of desire the reflection of which she had that morning surprised in her looking-glass, while combing her hair to surrender it to the hands of the other.

It was an abrupt awakening from the dreams of that whole evening. The palpable sensation of physical partition was present in all its hideousness, and as Alfred approached her with a smile, and the words, "My little Helen," she passed quickly to the other side of an easy-chair, and, separated from him, replied:

"Do you not see that I am quite ill this evening?"

She was so pale, and had such a ring of weariness about her eyes, that Alfred was moved by the sight.

"It is the last of my headache," she continued, touching her temple; "a good night's rest, and it will disappear. So, till to-morrow."

She smiled, made a graceful gesture with her hand, and left the drawing-room. Alfred, when alone, could hear her going and coming in the adjoining apartment, which was her own room. He himself occupied a room on the floor above, opening into his study.

"How delicate her health is," he thought tenderly to himself.

"No; never, never!" said Helen, speaking aloud to herself, when her maid had left her; and, leaping out of bed, she turned the key in both doors. Alfred, who was still in the drawing-room, seated before the fire, heard the sound of the key turning in the lock.

"She is afraid of me, then?" he asked himself with singular sadness; and meanwhile Helen, stretched in bed, was repeating half aloud:

"Never, never again will I give myself to that man."

The reality of the situation had just been impressed upon her with frightful clearness. She could foresee the daily strife, the dispute for her person night by night and hour by hour. If high life, as it is called, with its nightly engagements, its facilities for isolation in an immense house, and its social pleasures and duties, enables a husband and wife, not on good terms with each other, to live both side by side and yet apart, it is not so with those of the comfortable middle class. Conjugal interviews in private are there the rule, social engagements the exception, and husband and wife meet every moment, and in every detail of existence.

"Heavens, what can I do?" said Helen to herself. Then courageously: "I will find means. It will be so sweet to struggle for him."

Her soul became exalted by the impress of this thought, and suddenly she could again taste Armand's kisses upon her lips. All the circumstances of their interview showed themselves, from the anguish of arrival to that of departure. Ah, what a farewell! What a caress was that given on the threshold of the door before entering again upon life! Then, what a walk through the streets with its brutal tumult of passengers, vehicles, trains! Armand had remained alone in the little home. What had been his thoughts in presence of the bed which, with strange modesty, she had wished to remake herself?