THE BLUE DUCHESS

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Paul Bourget

THE

Blue Duchess

By

PAUL BOURGET

Translated by

ERNEST TRISTAN

London: GREENING & CO.

New York: BRENTANO’S

PREFACE

Paul Bourget was born in the cathedral city of Amiens about fifty years ago, but there are a number of other interesting things to say about him. Like so many famous authors, he began, in 1873, with verse. Probably the verse did not bring him the instant fame that we all desire with our first book, for he soon turned to prose, which of course as Saltus has hinted, is more difficult. Again, it is probable that verse and prose are not really so very far apart, but are related, as an angel is related to a saint, or a lovely sister to her handsome but very masculine brother. Essays followed Bourget’s lyrics, then a triumphal procession of novels and travels, till, in 1904, he became a poet again by wearing the blue and gold costume of the French Academy.

For about ten years now the writings of Paul Bourget have had great success in London’s capitol, Mayfair, among a certain set or circle of ladies whose minds are as carefully tended as are their beautiful bodies. They have read him, even as they have read Anatole France and Marcel Prévost, because of notes of distinction in the writings, the lack of discord, the evidences of balanced, graceful, well-valeted life. Bourget belongs to the group of writers who are sometimes termed Salon-writers. I imagine it is a German classification; it brings before the vision one writing with a gold pen using a silver standish upon a table of sycamore. Perhaps if we say in English “the kid-glove school” the phrase will describe, if it does not please. This note of refinement in style, distinction in utterance, is certainly represented best in France by Bourget, in Italy by D’Annunzio, in Holland by Couperus, in America by Saltus. Of course other countries have claims too. There has been very little written about Bourget in English, not because he writes French, but because he writes. In a conte charmingly named A Bouquet of Illusions Bourget himself is one of the characters, the protagonist part in fact. The conte is written by Saltus and is worthy of both novelists.

G. F. MONKSHOOD.

London,

1908.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Not long ago I assisted at the unexpected end of an adventure, which, after it had just missed being a tragedy, concluded in an almost comic fashion. Although I was only cast for a very small part, as a simple spectator, my heart was too much mixed up in it for me to-day not to feel in similar circumstances the bitter sensation of the irony of things, which may be either cruel or beneficial. It is the chill of the steel which cuts you, though it cures you too. It has occurred to me to make the adventure into a story. Obviously it would be more reasonable to go on with one of my unfinished pictures, “The Pardon of Psyche,” for instance, which has been standing on the easel for years, or one of those inanimate objects: old furniture, silver, and books, which will comprise the series called “Humble Friends.”

“A painter,” my master, Miraut, used to say, “should only think brush in hand.” It is my opinion, from numerous illustrious examples including Miraut himself, that he should not think at all. But I know only too well, I am but half a painter, an artist in intention rather than in temperament, the outline of a Fromentin of the twelfth rank. That is a singular feeling of sadness too: the feeling that one is but an inferior double of another, a small and poor proof of a block already printed, a sample of humanity in the likeness of a model who has already lived, and in whose destiny it is possible to read beforehand one’s own destiny! But not all one’s own destiny! For I am only too well aware that I suffer from the same failings as Fromentin without possessing his brilliance. But the brush was not sufficient for this complex and elaborate master. He wanted, with the nervous hand which transmitted colours to canvas, to put ink upon paper, and what was the result? We other painters said his painting was too literary, and literary men said his literature was too technical, too pictorial, and not intellectual enough.

In my own case at each exhibition of my work for years past my fellow-painters’ reserve, and their praise particularly, have signified to me that I lack a real artist’s original and visionary nature. But I do not require my fellow artists’ judgment; what does my own conscience say? If I really expressed myself with my brush alone, should I have brought back from Spain, Morocco, Italy and Egypt as many pages of notes as sketches? I have for fifteen years, wandered between numberless contradictory forms of art and mind. I have wandered from country to country seeking the sun and health; from museum to museum seeking æsthetic revelations, and later from art school to art school seeking an artist’s creed, and from dream to dream in search of a love. My affairs of the heart have all been incipient and abortive for the same reason as my affairs of the mind: my irremediable incapacity to make up my mind and stand firm, in which to-day I recognize the strange originality of my character.

When we see with what infrangible conditions nature surrounds us, is it not best to accept them? At least, I have made up my mind upon an essential point, my work. That is something. I have promised myself to fret no more over vain ambitions. I will be a mediocre painter; that is all. In that case why should I deny myself the pleasure of writing, a thing which formerly discipline forbade? As it is certain that the name of M. Vincent la Croix will never shine in the sky of glory with the names of Gustave Moreau, of Puvis de Chavannes, and of Burne-Jones, why should M. Vincent la Croix deprive himself of this compensation: wasting his time after his own fashion, like the rich amateur, the dilettante and the critic he is? That is the reason why, when about to live over again in thought the episodes of a real little romance, into which chance introduced me, I have prepared paper, a pen, and ink. Here is a fresh proof that I shall always lack spontaneous and gushing geniality; I have gone out of my way to explain my motives at the beginning of this story, instead of starting it simply and boldly. I can see its most minute details before me, so what need have I of excusing in my own eyes a work which tempts me? I shall be at liberty to destroy it if I am too ashamed of it when it is finished. Many a time have I painted out a canvas which I considered bad! This time two logs in the fireplace and a match will suffice. That is one of the unspeakable superiorities of literature over painting.

CHAPTER I

The reason I can clearly recollect the exact date of the beginning of the adventure I am about to relate, is that it was my thirty-sixth birthday. That is twenty-nine months ago. That anniversary found me more melancholy than usual. The reason of it was still the same: the feeling that my faculties were at the same time unemployed and limited, and that the boundary of my talent was continually being reached. The pretext? I smile at the pretext. But what imaginative man has not had in his youth childish and heroic determinations? What artist has not fixed beforehand the stages in his glorious career, comparing himself to some illustrious person? Caesar, who was as good as most people, said: “At my age Alexander had conquered the world.” That is an heroic cry when the pride of a still unknown power palpitates in it, but it is harrowing when the conviction of definitive impuissance utters this useless sigh towards triumph. I am not Caesar, but all my diaries—and I have many—abound in dates which were rendezvous given by me to Fame, but which she failed to keep.

On my thirty-seventh birthday I had, as my custom was, been looking through my papers and reflecting that I was still as little known to fame as I had been in my youth, still as lacking in glorious works, great actions, and grand passions, and my hope was gradually departing. That morning, too, an agency to which I was foolish enough to subscribe, had sent me two newspaper cuttings mentioning my name and making unfriendly comments upon my work. A fresh wave of discouragement swept over me, paralyzing the creative energy of the soul, and clearly demonstrating to me my own shortcomings. My communion with my thoughts on that darkening autumn afternoon frightened me, and I took refuge in a means of distraction which was usually successful, a visit to the School of Arms in the Rue Boissy d’Anglais. There I overcame my nerves by a series of exercises performed with all the vigour of which I was capable. A cold bath and a rub down followed by dinner in congenial company and a rubber used to pass the evening. Towards eleven o’clock I could return home without much risk of insomnia. I had carried out the first part of this programme on the first evening of my thirty-seventh year and should have completed it if I had not, on entering the dining-room of my club, met perhaps the oldest of my Parisian comrades, an old school-fellow too, the celebrated novelist and dramatic author, Jacques Molan.

“Will you come and dine?” he asked me. “I have a table, do dine with me.”

Under any other circumstances, in spite of our long friendship, I should have excused myself. Few personalities weary me so quickly as Jacques. He has combined with faults I detest the quality most lacking in me: the power to impose himself, the audacity of mind, the productive virility, and the self-confidence without which a man is not a great artist. Do the great virtues of genius of necessity bring with them an abuse of the “I,” of which this writer was an extraordinary example?

The two other men of letters I knew best, Julien Dorsenne and Claude Larcher, were most certainly not tainted with egotism. They were modest violets, holy and timid violets, small and humble in the grass by the side of Jacques. “His” books, “his” plays, “his” enemies, “his” plans, “his” profits, “his” mistresses, “his” health, existed for himself alone, and he talked of no one but himself. That was the reason Claude said: “How can you ever expect Molan to be sad? Every morning he gazes at himself in the looking-glass and thinks: 'How happy I am to dress as the first author of the day!’” But Claude was slightly envious of Jacques, and that was one of the latter’s superiorities; through his self-conceit he was ignorant of any feeling like envy. He did not prefer himself to others, he ignored them. The explanation of this mystery was: with his almost unhealthy vanity only equalled by his insensibility, this fellow had only to sit down with paper in front of him, and beneath his pen came and went, spoke and acted, enjoyed and suffered passionate and eloquent beings, creatures of flesh and blood full of love and hate—in a word, real men and women. A whole world was produced, so real, so intense, so amusing, or so moving in turn, that even I am filled with admiration every time I read his books. But I know it is only illusion, only magic, only a sleight-of-hand trick; I know that the spiritual father of these heroes and heroines is a perfect literary monster, with a flask of ink in the place of a heart. I am wrong. He still has there the passionate love of success. What marvellous tact, what fingering in the playing upon that surprising organ, public taste!

Jacques is the accomplished type of what we call in studio slang a “profiteur,” the artist who excels in appropriating another’s work, and displaying it to the best advantage! For example, at the period of his rise, Naturalism was in the ascendant. Zola’s admirable Assommoir had just appeared, and almost immediately came the extraordinary studies of peasants and girls which revealed to the world of letters the name of the unhappy Maupassant. Jacques realized that no great success was possible in any other form of novel, and at the same time he divined that after these two masters he must not touch trivial and popular environment. The reader was satiated with that. Molan then conceived the idea, which amounted to genius, of applying to high life the results of the bitter observation and brutal realism so popular then. His four first volumes of novels and short stories were thus, the description being bestowed upon them on their first appearance, pomaded with Zola and perfumed with Maupassant. Epigrams are epigrams, and success is success. Molan’s success was very rapid, it may be remembered.

Soon after, certain indications made him realize that the reader’s taste was changing again, that it was turning in the direction of analysis and psychological study. Then he abruptly changed his methods and we had the three books which have done most for his reputation: Martyre Intime, Cœur Brisé and Anciennes Amours. In them he preserved the faults usual in imitators: long dissertations, the philosophic treatment of little love adventures, and particularly, the abuse of worldly adornment. He had originated naturalism in high life. He introduced analysis of the poor, humble and middle classes. Afterwards, when virtue suddenly appeared to be the order of the day, we had from his pen the only novel of the period which rivalled in honest success, L’abbé Constantin. It was Blanche Comme Un Lys.

When social problems became the critic’s copy, Molan once more changed his methods and wrote the novel on a working-class family called Une Épopée de ce temps, a work of imagination in two volumes, of which 65,000 copies were sold. See the vanity of æsthetic theories! All these books were conceived with different principles of art. Through them we could follow the history of the variations of fashion. Not one of them is sincere in the real sense of the word, and all of them have in an equal degree that colour of human truth which seems in this wayward writer an unconscious gift. The same gift he displayed, when fearing to weary his readers by an abuse of the novel, he began to write plays. He wrote Adéle, a great success at the Français; La Vaincue, at the Odéon was another, and the newspapers had informed me of his fresh success at the Vaudeville, with an enigmatically entitled comedy, La Duchesse Blue.

Now the fact that we were at school together proves that this enormous output: ten volumes of fiction, two of short stories, a collection of verses, and three plays was produced in sixteen years. Jacques, too, lived while he worked like this. He had mistresses, made necessary journeys which allowed him to truthfully write in his prefaces sentences like this: “When I picked anemones in the gardens of the Villa Pamphili!” or like this: “I, too, offered up my prayer on the Acropolis”; or again: “Like the bull I saw kneel down to die in the bull ring at Seville.” I have quoted these phrases from memory. Besides all this, the animal looked after his relatives and his investments, and preserved his gaiety and youthful appetite. I had proof of that the evening I mechanically dined with him; in spite of my secret antipathy dominated by the suggestion of vitality emanating from every one of his gestures. We were no sooner seated than he asked me—

“What wine do you prefer, champagne or Burgundy? They are both very good here.”

“I think that Eau de Vals will do for me,” I replied.

“Have you not a good digestion?” he asked with a laugh; “I don’t know that I have a stomach. Then I will have extra dry champagne.” His egoism was of a convenient kind, as he never discussed other people’s caprices, nor allowed them to discuss his. He ordered the dinner and asked me if I had seen his play at the Vaudeville, what I thought of it, and whether it was not the best thing he had done.

“You know,” I replied in some embarrassment, “I hardly ever go to the theatre.”

“What luck!” he went on good-humouredly. “I will take you this evening. I shall find out your first impression of it. Will you be frank with me? You will see that it is not so bitter as Adéle, nor quite so eloquent as La Vaincue. But the way to succeed is to baffle expectations; never, never repeat oneself! Those who reproached me with lack of brain and ignorance of my business, have had to acknowledge their mistake. You know me. I say out loud what I think. When I published Tendres Nuances, last year, you remember what I said to you: 'It is not worth the trouble of reading’; but La Duchesse Blue is different. The public is of the same opinion as myself.”

“But where do you find your titles?” I asked.

“What!” he cried; “you, a painter, ask me that question? Don’t you know Gainsborough’s 'Blue Boy’ in the gallery of Grosvenor House in London? My play has for its heroine a woman whom one of your colleagues, better informed than yourself in English manners, has painted in a harmony of blue tints as the Gainsborough boy. This woman, being a Duchess, has been nicknamed in her set the Little Blue Duchess, because of the portrait. With my dialogue and little Favier!”

“Who is little Favier?” I asked.

“What!” he cried, “don’t you know little Favier? You pretend to live in Paris! Not that I blame you for not frequenting the theatres. Seeing the kind of plays usually put on, I think it was high time they gave us young ones a chance.”

“That does not tell me about little Favier,” I insisted.

“Well! Camille Favier is the Blue Duchess. She acts with talent, fantasy and grace! I discovered her. A year ago she was at the Conservatoire. I saw her there and recognized her talent, and when I sent my play to the Vaudeville, I told them I wanted her to take the part. They engaged her, and now she is famous. My luck is contagious. But you must do her portrait for me as she is in the play, a symphony in blue major! It will be a fine subject for you for the next Salon. I repeat I am very lucky. Then what a head she has for you: twenty-two years old, a complexion like a tea-rose, a mouth sad in repose and tender when smiling, blue eyes to complete the symphony, pale, pale, pale blue with a black point in the middle, which sometimes increases in size; her hair is the colour of oriental tobacco, and she is slender, supple and young. She lives with her mother in a third floor in the Rue de la Barcuellére, in your neighbourhood. That detail is good as a human document. People talk of the theatre’s corruption: nine hundred francs rent, one servant, and an outlook on a convent garden! She believes in her art, and in authors! She believes too much in them.”

He said these words with a smile, the meaning of which was unmistakable. His remarks had been accompanied by an insolent and sensual look, gleaming and self-satisfied. I had no doubt as to the feeling the pretty actress inspired in him. He told me about these private matters in a very loud voice, with that apparent indiscretion which implies thoughtlessness and so well conceals design. But this sort of gossip always has a prudent limit. Besides, the diners at the next table were three retired generals, to interrupt whose conversation then gun-shot would have been required. The noises made by the thirty or forty persons dining were sufficient to drown even Jacques’ most distinct phrases. So there was really no reason for my companion to speak in low tones, as I did in questioning him. But what a symbol of our two destinies! I instinctively experienced, before even knowing Mademoiselle Favier, the shameful timidity of the sentiment of which Jacques experienced the joy.

“You are paying court to her, that is what you mean?” I asked him.

“No, she is courting me,” he said with a laugh, “or rather has been doing so. But why should I not tell you, for if I introduce you to her, she will tell you everything in five minutes? In fact, she is my mistress. With my reputation, my investments, my books, I can marry whom I please; and there is plenty of time. The pear is ripe. But if we were always reasonable, we should be only common people, should not we? She began it. If you had seen, at rehearsal, how she stealthily devoured me with her eyes! I took good care not to notice her. She is a coquette and a half. An author who has a mistress at the theatre when he does not act himself, is responsible for a serious orthographical error. You know the proverb: the architect does not hobnob with the mason. But after the first performance, after the battle was won, I let myself go. Here is another human document: little Favier had gone through the Conservatoire, had been on the stage, and my dear fellow she was still virtuous, perfectly virtuous. Do you understand me?”

“Poor girl!” I cried involuntarily.

“No, no!” Jacques replied shrugging his shoulders. “Some lover must be first, and it is better to have a Jacques Molan than a pupil of the Conservatoire, or, as is usually the case, one of the professors there, is it not? But I am her poesy, her real romance to tell her friends. I have been kind to her. She desired our love concealed from her mother and we did so. She desired meetings in cemeteries at the graves of great men and I have gone there. Can you imagine me, at my age, with a bunch of violets in my hand, waiting for a friend with my elbows sentimentally resting upon the tomb of Alfred de Musset, a poet whom I detest? Quite a student’s idyll, is it not? I repeat it is very foolish, but I found her so amiable and so fresh the first time. She 'rested me’ from this Paris in which everything is vanity.”

“And now?” I asked.

“Now?” he repeated, and the insolent and sensual expression came into his eyes once more. “You want me to confess? That is two months ago, and a two months’ idyll is a little less fresh, amiable and restful.” Then in a lower and more confidential tone he asked: “Do you know pretty Madam Pierre de Bonnivet?”

“You still seem to forget that I am not a fashionable painter,” I replied, “that I have not a little house on the Monceau Plain, that I do not ride in the Bois, and frequent the noble Faubourg though I live there.”

“Don’t let us mix up our localities,” he replied with his usual assurance. “The Monceau Plain and the Bois have nothing in common with the Faubourg and the nobility, nor has the charming person to whom I am referring, anything in common, except her name, with the real Bonnivet descended from the constable or admiral, the friend of Francis I.”

“There is one less imbecile among her ancestors then,” I interrupted. “That is one of the advantages the false nobility sometimes has over the true nobility.”

“Good,” Jacques said, shrugging his shoulders at the sally with which I had satisfied my ill-humour against her pretensions. “You remind me of Giboyer. You are a pedant, sir. But I shall not defend what you call the noble Faubourg against your attacks. I have seen enough of it to never wish to set foot in it again. There is too much fashion about it for me. Grand drawing-rooms are not in my line. I have nothing to do with aristocratic ladies. One-twentieth of the women in Paris, some young, some not, some titled, some not, have pretensions to be literary, political, or æsthetic, but they are all brainy and intellectual, and they are not courtesans. My pleasure is to turn them into courtesans when it is worth the trouble. If I ever show you Bonnivet, you will agree that she is worth the trouble. Besides there is at her house lively conversation and good food. Don’t look so disgusted. After ten years in Paris even with my stomach, dinner in town becomes a terrible bore. At her house dinner is a feast, the table exquisite and the cellar marvellous. Father Bonnivet has made ten or twelve million francs out of flour. It is not sufficient for his wife for the celebrated men about whom she is curious to honour her drawing-room with their presence. They have to fall in love with her as well, and I believe they have all done so, till now.”

I urged him to continue his story, though his cynicism made me shudder, his loquacity exasperated me, and I was horrified at his sentiments, which were so brutally plebeian in their dilettante disguise, for I was greatly interested in his confidences. He gladly opened his heart to me as I listened to him, though he actually liked me no more than I did him. He instinctively felt the fascination he exercised over me and it pleased him. We were at college together, and that strange bond would unite us till death in spite of everything. He went on—

“There is nothing to tell you except that for some time Queen Anne, as her intimate friends call her, absolutely refused to be introduced to me. In parenthesis, I wonder if this name Anne has been selected as coquettishly heraldic? I sometimes dine at the house of Madam Éthorel, her cousin, whom she detests. I met her there, and I also pretended to avoid her. She told any one who would listen to her that I had no talent, and that my books either bored or repelled her, that being the classic method of a fashionable woman who wishes to pique a famous man by not appearing to join the throng of his admirers. Kind friends always let one know of this amiability. La Duchesse Blue was produced with some success, as I have told you, and then, I don’t know how or why, there came an entire change of front. One of her beaters—she has beaters, just like a sportsman, whom she recruits from her most ardent admirers—Senneterre, whom you know well; the old blond who sometimes takes the bank here, and is a great admirer of mine. Generally we merely exchanged greetings, but instead of that he showered compliments upon me and finished up by inviting me to dine at the Club in the room reserved for fashionable ladies. That is five weeks ago. 'How are they going to make use of me?’ I thought as I went up the stairs. The first person I met in the anteroom, one of the prettiest, most elegant corners in Paris, was Madam Pierre de Bonnivet.”

“She was just like little Favier,” I interposed, “a coquette and a half. Ever since I have known you your stories have always been the same: they consist of playing with the women who have the least heart, and you always win.”

“It is not quite as simple as all that,” he replied without getting angry; “I amused myself with Queen Anne, but not in the way you think. The beater placed us side by side at the table. I should like you to have been there in hiding listening to us. The conversation was sweet, simple, friendly and melting, the meeting of two beautiful souls. She spoke well of all the women we knew, and I spoke well of all my colleagues. We declared in agreement that the great awkward Madam de Sauve has never had a lover, and that Dorsenne’s novels are his masterpieces, that the demon Madam Moraines is an angel of disinterestedness, and that the noodle, René Vincy is a great poet. Judge of our sincerity. It was as if neither she nor I had ever suspected that one writer could slander another, that a woman of the world could commit adultery. We have taken our revenge since, and we are at this moment in that state of bitter warfare which is disguised by the pretty name of flirtation. I spare you the details. It is sufficient to know that she is aware that little Favier is my mistress; she thinks I am madly in love with her, and her sole aim is to steal me from her. Accustomed as she is to masculine ruses, she has laid the snare which has always been successful since the earth has revolved around the sun: there is no virtue like the sensation of stealing a love from another woman. The most curious thing is that Queen Anne might easily have been virtuous. Oh, she is very fast. But I should not be surprised to hear that she has never had a real lover. Besides, if she had had twenty-five lovers her scheme would still have succeeded. I would wager that in the earthly paradise the serpent only told our mother Eve that he was about to pluck the apple for the female of his own species.”

“But what of Camille Favier?” I asked.

“Naturally she guessed or else I told her—I don’t know how to lie—so she is no less jealous of Bonnivet than Bonnivet is of her. I have not been bored for the last week or two I can assure you. Things have moved quickly, and the rapid are just as successful in gallantry as in everything else.”

We were having dessert, and he was balancing a piece of pear on the end of his dessert fork as he concluded his confidence with this brutal cruelty which made me say—

“You are between two women again? You are playing a dangerous game.”

“Dangerous?” he interrupted with his confident joviality. “To whom? To me? Happily or unhappily, I am insured against these fires. To Madam de Bonnivet? If she does not love me, what risk does she run? If she loves me, she will be grateful. Suffering requires feeling, and to women of this kind that is everything. But I think she is as hard as I am. As for Camille, it will develop her talent.”

“Suppose one of the lady admirers of the novels of your second period, Anciennes Amours or Martyre Intime, were to hear you now?” I said to him. “For this is quite the reverse of what you put in those two books.”

“Ah!” he said. “If one lived one’s books, there would be no trouble in writing them. Come. Let us go down quickly and have coffee. I want you to see the beginning of the first act. I have only one quality, but that is a strong one. I can compose. A play or novel of mine is compact, there is nothing useless in it. The first and third acts are the best in the play. Madam de Bonnivet prefers the second and Camille the fourth. All tastes are suited. Waiter, bring two cups of coffee and two fine cigars at once. Give me just time to cast my eye down the closing prices on the Stock Exchange and I am at your service. Good. My gold mine shares are going up. I am about three thousand francs to the good. How is your money invested?”

“I have not invested it,” I said sadly, “it stays where it is and brings in from two and a half to three per cent.”

“That is absurd!” Jacques said as he lit a cigar. “I will advise you. I have good friends, one of the Mosé among others, who keep me well informed. I know as much as they do, and if I were not a literary man, I should like to be a financier. But we must hurry. Queen Anne may be at the theatre this evening, though she has already seen the play four times. If she is there, you will see two comedies instead of one. But I am very glad to have met you this evening.”

CHAPTER II

This author who could when he liked depict with the greatest subtlety was no fit person to preside over a temperance society. When we reached the little theatre where La Duchesse Blue was being performed he was a little more jolly than the beautiful women who drove up in their carriages from all corners of fashionable Paris, suspected. I still felt the inexplicable attraction, a mixture of antipathy and admiration, of which I have spoken. I listened to Jacques as he told me his plans for new works, and I forgot his horrible failings of heart and character in my admiration for the imagination from which ideas spurted, as I had seen the lava in the crater of Vesuvius do, while fiery stones of the size of a man shot into the air with a report like a cannon. There the atmosphere is suffocating and full of stench. The sulphur smokes beneath your feet and burns them. Tears trickle from your eyes. Your breath fails. It is unbearable. But this brutal outburst of the forces of nature keeps you there, hypnotizes you.

Jacques, too, in his way is a force of nature. His artistic vitality will always overwhelm me, and it did so this evening in proportion with such a hypnotism. For between the formidable exterminating monster which waves its column of smoke above the devastated Pompeii, and the inoffensive cerebral volcano whose smoky eruptions overflow into yellow volumes, or crystallize into three, four or five act plays, the difference is really very great. Without ironical extenuation such a comparison would be rather comic. Whether justified or not, I gave myself up to this sensation without discussion. Wearied as I was by my day of moral lassitude, was not this way of spending my evening an unexpected pleasure? The comedy might interest me, for this foppish egoist had great talent. The actress might be pretty, although doubtless Jacques’ fatuity had transformed for my astonishment a Conservatoire fool into a bird of paradise. I had too often accompanied Claude Larcher into Colette Rigaud’s dressing-room not to know these footlight-mistresses and their vulgarity. But there are always exceptions, and Madam Pierre de Bonnivet might be an exception to her class, although a rich woman who collects celebrities was hardly likely to please me. In any case, it was worth the trouble of accompanying Molan to the Vaudeville simply to have the pleasure of seeing him enter the theatre.

“We will go in by the stage door,” he said “in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. It is very charming here in the two little stage boxes, and upon the stage behind the curtain. We can get to the boxes through the wings, if either of them is vacant.”

He got out of the carriage before me as he said this; he greeted the door-keeper and went through a doorway and up a staircase with the gait which is unique in the world: that of the fashionable author visiting his paper, his editor, or his theatre. Every gesture seemed to say, “The house belongs to me”; his foot was lighter, his cane waved in his hand, and his shoulders involuntarily swaggered. These things are in themselves of no importance, but we painters who have studied portraiture make it our business to seize upon these trifles. The theatre staff, when they saw “their author” pass, displayed inexpressible and unconscious respect. How I should like to inspire some picture dealer with like respect! When shall I have in displaying my pictures to a friend, the peaceful and innocently puerile pride which Jacques displayed in opening for me the door of one of the stage boxes, fortunately unoccupied, where we sat down while he whispered to me—

“The first act has been in progress for five minutes. You will follow it directly. A former mistress of the Duke’s is trying to make the Duchess jealous. Was I lying to you when I said that little Favier is pretty? She has caught sight of me. Fortunately she has nothing to say for a minute or two, or she would have forgotten her lines. She is looking at you. You interest her. She knows the three or four friends I usually bring. Now hear her speak. Is not the timbre, the music of her voice, exquisite? Listen to what she is saying.”

I have heard La Duchesse Blue many times since till I know by heart every phrase. It is a fine delicate play in spite of the affectation of the title. It contains an extremely good study of a rare but very human jealousy. It is the story of a friend who is amorous of his friend’s wife, and who remains faithful to his friendship in his love. He never mentioned his feelings to the woman. He has never admitted it to himself, and he cannot bear any one else to pay court to this young woman. He ends by saving her from a irreparable mistake, without her knowing the reason or who he is. The first scene in which the childish Duchess confides in her husband’s former mistress, without suspecting the recollections she is awakening by the avowal of her own joys, is a marvel of moving, vibrating analysis, which might be called tenderly cruel. This play is a little masterpiece of to-day by Marivaux—a Marivaux whose airy gaiety would be like lace upon a wound. But I did not perceive the real value of the comedy on this first evening; although Molan was present to comment upon its smallest details. The painter in me was too keenly attracted by the extraordinary appearance of this Camille Favier, whom my friend had so carelessly called his mistress. The box being almost on the stage allowed me to follow the smallest movements of her face, her most furtive winks, and the most rapid knitting of her brows. I could see the layers of cream and rouge unequally distributed on her face, and the lengthening of her lashes with black crayon. Even made up in this way she realized in an extraordinary way the ideal type created by the most refined English artists: Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris. Her fine features were almost too slight for the perspective of the stage. Her large, slightly convex forehead seemed clouded with dreams. The elongated oval of her face made her smile float into her cheeks. Her straight nose, rather short, ennobled her profile. Her full lips drooped at the corners and were at the same time sad and sensual, voluptuous, and bitter. This make up even gave to her beauty a particular charm, which touched me strangely in its mixture of the real and the artificial. Her rosy cheeks were visible through her rouge, the fringe of her long lashes beneath the crayon, the fresh purple of her lips through the carmine, just as in her playing of the part she represented; a true, sincere and tender woman, was visible or seemed to be visible.

“It is the thunder-clap,” he said, “you have just felt! You can listen, too. Your sublimes will amalgate, as Saint Simon said of some one. But now turn and look with your glasses in the fourth box of the first tier on the left. You see a woman in white, fanning herself with a fan, with silk muslin flounces, white too, and an invention of her own? That is Madam Pierre de Bonnivet. What do you think of her? It is amusing, is it not, to play the game of love and hazard with these two pretty creatures as partners?”

I looked in the direction Jacques indicated, and I soon had my glasses fixed on the fashionable rival of the Bohemian Camille Favier.

The fatuous insolence which my comrade affected then appeared to me justified, and more than justified, by the beauty of this elegant female who coquetted with him, as he told me. I knew he was too daring a fellow not to go on quickly from liberty to liberty. If Camille recalled, even with her rouge and patches, the Psyches and Galateas of the most suave of the Pre-raphaelite Brothers, Madam Pierre de Bonnivet, with her arched nose, her wilful chin, the fine line of the cheek, her elegant haughty mouth, had beauty enough to justify the most aristocratic pretensions. How, coming of a poor family—I have found out since that she was a Taraval—she inevitably recalled one of those princesses so dear to Van Dyck, that incomplete master, whom no other has equalled, in the art of portraying breeding, and the indomitable pride and heroic energy concealed beneath the fragility of feminine grace. The habits of wealth for two or three generations produce these mirages.

It is certain that the painter of the divine Marquise Paola Brignole, of the Red Palace at Genoa, never found a model more suited to his genius. His brush alone could have properly reproduced the glory of that tint whose dead white was not anæmic—the red lips told that—with the cloud of blonde hair which paled in the light. The simple sight of the thick rolls of golden hair lying upon her neck, when she turned her head, betokened that physiological vitality of one of those slender persons who conceal beneath the tenderness of a siren the courage of a captain of dragoons. Her neck, though a little long, was well developed, and the fingers of her nervous hands were a little long also; her bust, which was outlined at each movement by her supple white corsage, was so young, so elegant, and so full. But the most significant thing to me about this creature of luxury was her blue eyes, as blue as those of the other woman, with this difference, that the blue of Camille Favier’s eyes recalled the blue of the petals of a flower; while Madam de Bonnivet’s eyes were the azure of metal or precious stone. They gave one the idea of something implacable, in spite of their charm, something hard and frigidly dangerous in their magnetism. To complete this singular sensation of graceful cruelty, when the young woman laughed her lips were raised a little too much at the corners displaying sharp white teeth close together, almost too small, like those of a precious animal of the chase.

In to-day trying to exactly reproduce the impressions, which I felt in the presence of Jacques Molan’s two partners in his favourite game of heartless love, I am taking into account that my actual knowledge of their characters influences my recollection of this first meeting. I do not think I am giving too powerful a touch to this souvenir. I can still hear myself say, while applause was being showered upon little Favier, to Jacques—

“You make a good choice, when you like.”

“I do what I can,” he said as he nodded his head.

“I am asking myself,” I continued, “with mistresses of such beauty——”

“One mistress,” he corrected me. “Madam de Bonnivet is not my mistress.”

“It comes to the same thing, as far as it concerns what I am going to say. I am asking myself, how you manage to escape scandal.”

“I am like Proudhon,” he replied with a laugh, “whom Hugo pretended had the skin of a toad in his pocket. It appears that this charm protects one from every danger.”

“Do you think your luck will hold? Then what of the women themselves?”

“Larcher has an axiom: 'a woman is the best antidote against another woman.’”

“But the result of that is spiteful vengeance, vitriol, and the revolver. One of these two women, I should not trust.”

As I said that, I pointed with my cane to Madam Bonnivet.

“Really! beautiful Queen Anne gives you the impression, also, of a coquettish bird of prey, of a little spitfire of a falcon, whom it is not wise to tease. Ah, well! If you like,” he went on as he got up, “the act is over, I will present you to one or the other of them. It is very funny. Would you believe that in my stories I have always more or less need of a looker-on; when we think that there are people foolish enough to criticize the classic tragedies on this account? In my opinion there is no more natural person.”

He took my arm as he said this, assigning me the part of witness, of satellite borne along in the orbit of its sun. It is a strange thing that I am really made for those secondary parts, Pylades to an Orestes, Horatio to Hamlet; and his coolness did not wound me. Alas! it has been decreed that I should be, like Horatio, always and everywhere an unsuccessful man. What irony to have as my Hamlet the implacable egotist who was showing me the way to little Favier’s dressing-room! I followed him behind the scenes, up a staircase crowded with dressers and supernumeraries, and along corridors full of doors from behind which came the sounds of laughter, singing, argument, and of expressions used at a card-party.

Previously, I had only been behind the scenes at the Comédie Française of the famous theatres; where I often accompanied the unfortunate Claude. At that theatre, was to be found the correct and conventional respectability, which too often spoils the acting of members of the company of that famous house. My horror of pretentiousness has always made me dislike the Comédie, with its elegant appearance, its secular portraits, its venerable busts, and its elegant green room. There, more than elsewhere I have experienced the disenchantment of the contrast between the play and the back of the stage, between theatrical prestige and its kitchen. On the contrary, behind the scenes of the smaller theatres, where my friends have taken me, the Varieties, the Gymnase and the Vaudeville on that evening, I have felt the picturesque antitheses, the supple improvization, the animal energy which constitute an actor’s business. Chance willed that in the company of Jacques Molan, after being a prey to impuissance for the entire day, I should find a complete cure for my vitality. Did we not hear, as we knocked at the door of Mademoiselle Favier’s dressing-room, the following dialogue exchanged by two actors playing the piece, the famous Bressoré, and a gentleman in a frock coat and tall hat, whose clean-shaven face and bluish cheeks showed he was an actor of this or some other company.

“I was not up to much in my new part,” the latter asked, “was I? Tell me the truth.”

“You were very good,” Bressoré replied, “but you have one failing.”

“What is that?”

“You don’t stand firm and look the audience straight in the face.”

“That fellow has just mentioned the secret of success in the arts,” Jacques Molan said to me with a laugh; “between ourselves as friends, you are a little lacking in assurance yourself. If I met you more often I would give you——”

In saying this he did not suspect how gaily and hardly he was touching a sore in my artistic conscience; and I did not give him the answer which rose to my lips. “That simply proves the baseness and brutality of success, and that the artist who succeeds is often a charlatan in disguise.”

He had just knocked at the dressing-room door. A voice had answered, “Who is there?” then without waiting for a reply the door opened and Camille Favier appeared with a smile of happiness upon her pretty face which changed into a constrained expression when she saw that her lover was not alone.

“Ah!” she said, slightly confused, “I did not think you would bring any one, and my dressing-room is untidy.”

“That does not matter,” said Jacques as he gently pushed her back into the room with one hand and introduced me with the other. “My friend is no one of importance as you think he is, little Blue Duchess. He is a very old friend of mine and a painter, a very great painter, you understand. All our friends are great men. He is used to disorder in his own studio, so make your mind easy. He asked to be introduced to you because he has long wished to paint your portrait.” He nudged me with his elbow to warn me not to contradict his delicate handling of the truth. “I forgot to mention his name, M. Vincent la Croix. Do not say you have seen his work, for he shows very little. He belongs to the timid school. You are warned. Now the ice is broken let us sit down.”

“You can do so,” the young woman said with a laugh. My companion’s banter, though not very flattering to me, had already transformed her. “You will allow me to tidy up a little?” she went on as with almost incredible rapidity she spread a clean towel over a basin of soapy water in which she had just washed her hands. She rolled up and threw under the dressing-table several other dirty towels. She put the lids on three or four boxes of pomade, and hung a red wrapper over a chair, on which I had noticed a well worn pair of common corsets, which she generally wore for economy’s sake. She did all this with a smile, and then noticed a pair of pale green stockings which she wore upon the stage. These she picked up with wonderful quickness, and I thought I could detect a tremor of shame in her as she did so. Those silk stockings which still displayed the shape of her fine leg and tiny foot were a small part of her nudity. She concealed them in the first object which came to hand, and it turned out to be a hat-box. “That is all,” she said as she turned to Jacques. “Do you think I anticipated your visit and changed my costume in ten minutes, watch in hand? You will not have to endure the presence of my dresser, who, poor woman, displeases you.” She went on in a caressing and frightened tone: “Were you satisfied with me this evening? Did I play my great scene well?”

If she had seduced me the moment I saw her on the stage by her charming finesse and ingenuous grace, how the charm worked with more powerful magic in these common surroundings still more unworthy of her! This simple dressing-room, so untidy, so lacking in embroidery and ornaments, where everything seemed a makeshift for the sake of economy, recalled to me by its contrast the sumptuousness and luxury of the dressing-room where Colette Regaud reigned at the Français. Ah, if Colette had only had for Claude, when I accompanied that unfortunate fellow to her dressing-room, the evident love which the Blue Duchess showed for Jacques Molan even in the tones of her most ordinary conversation, the ardour of her most fleeting glances, and the fever of her smallest gestures! She was a delightful child, who loved as she gave herself, with her whole being, naturally and spontaneously. What divine tenderness my companion enjoyed simply out of vanity! I felt how delighted he was while talking to his mistress, at directing this little performance! His eyes became shining instead of tender. I could see that he was studying me in a mirror in front of us, instead of looking at the love-sick girl as he answered her—

“You were exquisite as you always are. Ask Vincent if I did not say so?”

“Is that true?” she asked.

“Quite true,” I replied.

“He echoed my remarks too, I assure you,” Jacques continued.

“Then I really acted my scene well,” she said, with a naïve gleam of contentment in her eyes; then she knitted her brows and nodding her pretty head said: “ah, well, I am surprised at it.”

“Why?” I asked her in my turn.

“You ought not to ask her that,” Jacques said, with a laugh. “I know beforehand what her answer will be.”

“No,” she said quickly, and her mobile mouth assumed the bitter curve it had in repose. “Do not listen to him, sir. His is going to tease me, and it is very unkind of him, about one of the nervous impressions which we all have—you two as well. Do you not sometimes experience a shudder of antipathy in the company of certain people, whose presence alone freezes you and takes away all at once your memory, your power, and your mind? Their presence alone produces a feeling that one cannot breathe the same air as them without being stifled.”

“Yes, I do know those antipathies!” I cried. “I feel them for people I meet by chance, whom I have never seen before, who are nothing to me, but their approach is quite intolerable to me, just as if they were my avowed enemies. Once I used to try and resist this instinctive feeling of repulsion. I found from experience that I was always wrong not to yield to it, and I am sure to-day that an antipathy of this kind, either strong or slight, is nature’s second sight, and an infallible warning that a danger threatens us through the being whose existence annoys us thus.”

“You see,” Camille said turning to Molan, “I am not so ridiculous after all.”

I had at once guessed the name of the person whose presence in the theatre so disconcerted this frail Burne-Jones nymph, transformed by the bad fairy presiding over her destiny into a poor devil of an actress in love with the writer in Paris the most incapable of love. If I had not guessed the name Jacques would not have left me in ignorance of it for long. He is no worse than any one else. I have heard of his good actions and seen his generosity. To my knowledge he has put his purse at the disposal of colleagues whom he had more or less slandered. It is difficult to reconcile that, for example, with the indelicate unkindness which made him name his mistress’ rival at a time when he saw the pretty child was so troubled. The explanation, however, is quite simple. Such a thing as good or evil, unkindness or generosity, never entered into his calculations. He always played to the gallery, and a single spectator sufficed to compose this gallery, which in turn made him perform the best or worst actions, and made him magnanimous or mean. While playing the part of looker-on for him I realized how correct are the casuists who pretend that our actions are nothing, but our motives everything. His motives I could see as distinctly as the movement of a watch in a glass case.

“She talks to you in enigmas,” he said to me with a gleam in his eyes which meant: “You shall see if my diagnosis is correct and if she loves me.” How could this Tussolin Don Juan resist the chance of satisfying two vanities at the same time, that of the observer and that of the seducer? He went on: “I am going to amuse you with the name of the member of the audience who so troubles her this evening. She is not so complex as you are, and it is simply a woman who gives her this feeling of annoyance.”

“Jacques!” the actress cried in a supplicating voice, without noticing that the use of his Christian name betrayed their secret even more than her lover’s odious teasing.

“I warn you that Vincent is one of her admirers,” the latter insisted in spite of this appeal.

“Ah!” Camille said, looking at me with a sudden feeling of distrust; “does he know her?”

“He is teasing you, mademoiselle; I have seen in the theatre no face to which I could give a name.”

“Then I am a liar,” Molan went on, “and you did not say just now that Madam Pierre de Bonnivet was a Van Dyck who had stepped out of a picture just as, according to you, the Blue Duchess has stepped from a picture by Burne-Jones. There is no need to be surprised, Camille. Comparison with pictures is a mania with painters. To them a woman or a landscape is only a bit of canvas without a frame. This little infirmity is to their mind what an ink stain is to us authors, and he displayed, in spite of his elegant attire as a man about town, a slight black stain upon the middle finger of his right hand where he held his pen. That is just like the rouge upon the actress’ face, the little professional mark. Yes or no, did you say that about Madam de Bonnivet?”

“It is quite right I said that,” I quickly replied, “but mention the fact that it was you who pointed this woman out to me, and that I have not been introduced to her. I told you, too, that I could see in her eyes a frightfully hard and bitter look. In spite of her beauty, elegance, and slenderness to me she seems almost ugly, and more than that—repulsive; I can quite understand Mademoiselle Favier’s impression.”

The look of gratitude which the actress threw me was a fresh admission of her liaison with my friend. Besides she no more thought of concealing it than he did, though for a different reason. She could not conceal it because she was so much in love, while he paraded the intrigue because he was not in love at all. He caught her look and resumed in his bantering tone—

“Ah, well, Camille, see how good I am. I have brought you some one to talk to you. He understands you already. Think what it will be when he has painted your portrait! For he is going to do so for me! Are you agreeable?”

“Perhaps your friend has not the time just now!”

“Did not I tell you that was the reason of our visit?” he replied. I myself was rather afraid that this project would fall through. “But time is up, you must be on the stage when the curtain rises,” I said. “Good-bye, mademoiselle.”

“No,” he continued, “good-bye till presently. Is it not so, Camille?”

“Certainly,” she said with a laugh. I saw by her eyes that she was experiencing a little emotion. “Allow me to say a word to your friend?” she added turning to me.

“Good!” I thought. “She is going to reproach him, and she will be right.” I fell into a melancholy reverie which contrasted with the place where I was, at least as much as did the delicate sensibility revealed by each of the young actress’ gestures and words. We had only been with her a quarter of an hour, and in that time the appearance of the corridor had changed. Feverish haste now betokened the approaching rise of the curtain and the fear of being too late. The call-boy went along knocking at a door here and there. Visitors hurriedly departed. The game of bezique went on in a neighbouring dressing-room, that of an actress who only appeared in the last act.

“Here I am,” Jacques said, interrupting my meditation by touching me on the shoulder, “let us get back to our box at once. If Camille does not see me when she appears on the stage, she will look for me in Madam de Bonnivet’s box and lose her power.”

“Why do you amuse yourself by exciting her jealousy?” I replied. “How can you be so hardhearted? You pained her just now. She was angry.”

“Angry?” he cried, “angry? Why she has just asked me to see her home to-night. Her mother is not coming for her. Angry? Why women love teasing. It troubles them at first, but then they are like all vicious animals, they can only be subdued by hurting them. I want you now to see her rival. About the middle of the act Favier goes off the stage, and I will go to Madam de Bonnivet’s box and ask permission to present you. You shall see what a different woman she is.”

CHAPTER III

To-day as I pass in detail these recollections, just as one inks over a half-effaced pencil route upon a map, I clearly understand a truth which escaped me at the time. I had fallen in love with Camille Favier the moment I saw her on the stage with her fine beautiful face so like the art type of a master whom I have studied much. This little actress, of whom I knew nothing, except that she spoke well and was the mistress of a fashionable author, had at once touched one of the most vibrating fibres in my heart. In spite of Molan’s boasting, in spite of the childish grace of her reception, she might be a profligate or a schemer. Certainly she was a very cunning innocent, since by my companion’s confession the siege of her virtue had nothing in common, either in length or in difficulty, with the siege of Troy or even the siege of Paris. A person does not reflect much when his heart is captivated as mine was.

This child already occupied such a prominent place in my feelings, that the idea of her leaving the theatre with Molan that evening gave me a strange feeling of sadness. Now that the time is past I can explain these impressions; then, I contented myself with feeling them. Seated in the box, opera glass in hand, I thought in good faith that this sadness proceeded to establish that commonplace and discouraging statement, that the most beloved of men are those who love the least. Then neither use nor age have hardened me concerning disloyalty in love. I never could lie to a mistress, even one engaged like an extra cook for a week. Actually I have not known many of that sort. My caprices have lasted for eight years, and I have experienced deception which ought to make me indulgent where the ruses of men against women are concerned. People like Jacques Molan revenge us others who have never made ourselves loved, simply because we love. Perhaps I ought to have experienced in this box at the Vaudeville on this strange evening that not very delicate but very natural feeling, the joy of the avenged company, if the victim of that vengeance had not been the little Blue Duchess. When she appeared on the stage, I was seized with pity at noticing the happier look in her eyes, the more joyful fire of her acting, and the visible tremors in her supple and nervous person, of a lover who believes herself loved. When she disappeared into the wings, my pity grew and changed into indignation. My friend got up with a malicious look upon his face. As I watched him in the distance enter Madam de Bonnivet’s box I said to myself not without bitterness—

“Why can one only please a woman by being as womanish as herself in the worst sense of the word? The charming Camille is happy now. She is undressing and dressing with the gaiety of a brave creature who has been under fire and won a battle for the man she loves. She has acted so well in this scene. Hardly is her back turned when he deceives her. This treachery doubles the pleasure he experiences in manœuvring with the other woman. No coquette ever had her eyes so lit with desire to please as the famous author then. He is cordially shaking hands with the two men who are with the lady! One of them probably is her husband and the other a rival. Good, he is talking of me, for her wicked blue eyes had fixed me with the aid of glasses. Let me follow the play. It will be more worthy and more agreeable.”

Was I talking to myself quite frankly? No, alas, I vaguely felt I was not. Molan’s perfidy, and it alone, would not have disgusted me like this. Had it been applied to any other person than the little Burne-Jones girl of the Vaudeville, I should have found it amusing enough. Particularly I should have been diverted by his somewhat sheepish look when he got back to our box.

“You have not quite the air of triumph I expected, but everything seemed to go on well from the distance.”

“Very well,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Madam de Bonnivet has invited me to supper with her after the performance.”

“But what of little Favier?” I asked.

“You have put your finger on the sore,” he replied. “I have promised to see her home. I cannot desert her at the last moment.”

“Ah, well!” I said, “desert Madam de Bonnivet. She does not play in the piece, and as you admitted just now, is a coquette and a half. She will invite you again.”

“In the meantime, I have accepted,” he interrupted, “that was the coquettish thing to do. Playing with women would be very simple if it only consisted of feigning coldness. There are times when one has to take a high hand with them, while at others one must obey their lightest caprice. So I repeat I have accepted. I must find a way of getting rid of Camille. Good,” he said after a moment’s silence; “I think I have it, if you will help me. I will present you to Madam de Bonnivet. She will invite you to supper; she is a woman of that sort. You will refuse.”

“I should refuse in any case,” I replied. “But I do not understand your scheme.”

“You will see later,” he said, his eyes again expressing the joy he felt in performing before a sympathetic audience of one; “give me the pleasure of scheming and promise to do something else for me. Oh, it is nothing wrong, noble person. This is the interval. Before going to see Queen Anne, we will go and see Camille again. It is all in the scheme. What a good house there is to-night!”

The curtain had fallen amid enthusiastic applause and frequent calls, while Jacques associated me, almost without my consent, with his trickery. I had a good mind to refuse, for it was scarcely in accordance with my recent indignation. My scruples gave way to my curiosity to know how this M. Célemére of literature would escape from the snare in which he had entangled himself. At least that was the excuse I found for myself. To-day I think I yielded simply on account of the attraction the pretty actress had for me. A person should never be too severe about another’s deceit. The most scrupulous are ready to accept and aid their schemes, when they are in accordance with their own secret desires. The real cynical truth was that we went into the wings to reach the retreat where the pseudo-Burne-Jones was waiting for us, as an actress waits. Though the actress’ affection for her lover was sincere, she was none the less the fashionable comédienne who had to humour her admirers, and she could not even keep the seclusion of her modest dressing-room intact. Voices were audible as we approached it. Jacques listened to them for a moment with a nervous expression of face which made me forgive him for much. If he was teasing it was because he was jealous. Consequently his unconcerned mockery was a pretence. I learned once more from his example that there is not necessarily any connexion between jealousy and love.

“Camille is not alone,” he said.

“Then we will return later,” I replied. “She will prefer to talk to you more privately, and it is better, too, seeing what you say to her.”

“On the contrary,” he replied with a sudden gay smile in a low tones, “I can recognize the two voices, they belong to Tournade and Figon. You don’t know them, do you? Figon is wonderful; you shall see him. He is a very fine specimen of a snob, a disgusting helot of vanity. Tournade is the son of the great candle maker; everybody burns Tournade candles. Of course he is worth millions of francs, and I am inclined to think he is willing to lay a few at Camille’s feet. Ah,” he went on still more maliciously, “you are going to lose the flower of your first impression. The little woman has a heart and more delicacy than her profession allows, but a person is not at the theatre for nothing, and she does not always take the same tone she did with us just now. Come along, be brave!”

He knocked at the door with his cane in a way which somewhat contradicted his words. There was a certain amount of authority combined with nervousness in his knock. “Decidedly there is more in it than he is willing to admit,” I said to myself while the door was opening. Two lamps and several candles all lighted had made the atmosphere of the narrow room stifling, and there were in it besides the actress and her dresser, the persons Jacques had mentioned.

I recognized at once the two types of fast men so wonderfully drawn by Forain. One, whom I guessed by his looks to be Tournade, had a fat red face, like that of an overfed coachman, with a heavy and ignoble mouth, brutal, sly and satiated eyes, an incipient baldness, short red whiskers, and the shoulders of a professional boxer. He had a hand, with long fat fingers covered with big rings with large stones in them. Some greedy peasant lives over again in people of this kind, and they bring to a life of elegant debauchery the ignobly positive soul of a usurer’s son with a porter’s temperament. The other one, Figon, was thin and weak, with a never-ending nose, and every tooth in his head was a masterpiece of gold stopping. His eyes were green and twinkling. His sparse hair, narrow shoulders, and worn-out spine were a fine example of the exhaustion found in every race which would justify the anger of the workers against the middle classes if they themselves, who are nourished and corroded by the same vices, were not still less worthy. Both the obese Tournade and the skinny Figon had that way of wearing evening dress, the large gilt buttons on the front, the button-hole, and the hat on the back of the head, all of which constitute the uniform of foolishness or infamy, which the genial caricaturist of the Doux Pays—that jeering Goya of the dismal revels of Paris—has illustrated in his legends, in which its correctness makes its baseness more apparent.

Lighted by the rough lights of the little dressing-room, these two visitors were standing leaning against the wall, handling their canes in a brutish way, and watching the little actress who was at her toilette with a wrapper round her shoulders. She was making up her face for the next act in which she had to appear in disguise, in the costume of the picture after which the play was called, all in blue from the satin of her shoes to the ribbon in her hair. The only long chair and couch had a dress and cloak spread out on them. Evidently the persons had intruded upon her, had not been asked to sit down, and she was about to dismiss them. This sign of her independence caused me keen pleasure. I conceived for these young fellows a violent antipathy—after that how could I doubt presentiments?—especially for the candle maker’s heir, who exchanged a brief greeting with Jacques. Figon made use, to the fashionable author, of all the usual “dear masters,” and eulogies of the piece which were imbecile platitudes.

Jacques received these compliments with his mouth pursed up. Incense is always agreeable however common it may be, even when it is in the vulgar form of tobacco smoke. He nodded his head as Figon concluded.

“You are my two favourite authors, you and——” I will not repeat here the name of the obscene and outrageously mediocre writer with whom the fool associated poor Jacques. The latter gave a start which almost made me burst out laughing, while the actress interrupted—

“Are you going to be quiet?” she said. “I have already told you that I would put up with you if you never spoke of books or the theatre.” When she addressed the young man, he looked at her grinning with stupidity, and she continued: “If Molan does not bring you into his next play, he will be good to you. What do you think he has just told me, Jacques, about Gladys, his old mistress; you know her, the woman you called the 'Gothen du Gotha,’ because of her love affairs with smart people. She left him for a counter-jumper; and now she has left the counter-jumper to live with a lord, so we can recognize her again, M. de Figon says.”

“Come,” Tournade interposed with the air of authority of a smart man who does not wish another man of his own set to be treated with a lack of respect in the presence of ordinary literary men or painters; “you know very well that Louis was joking, and it is not kind of you to chaff him. You would be the first to grieve if you saw his name in some newspaper.”

“First of all,” she replied turning to him, “these gentlemen are not journalists; find out to whom you are talking, my boy. For a day when you have not been drinking, you are missing a fine opportunity for silence. Besides if you are not satisfied you know this is my dressing-room.” She had such an ugly look as she uttered, with increasing bitterness in her voice, these insolent remarks, and her intention of getting rid of these two young men was so obvious, that I had a feeling of shame and almost pity for them, and especially for Tournade, who though he looked like a brutal and vulgar man, had some pride and blood in his veins. He contented himself with answering by a laugh as common as himself and a shrug of the shoulders, while Jacques said—

“We came to pay our compliments to you, little Duchess, but it does not appear to be the evening for politeness.”

“It is always so for you and your friend,” she said, turning to us her face which had become tender once more, and her shining eyes which uttered, proclaimed, and cried aloud this phrase: “Here is my lover whom I love, and I am proud of him; I want you to know him, to quote him; I want the whole world to know him.”

“Thank you,” said Jacques. Without doubt his fatuity had been sufficiently fed. It displeased him to triumph too openly over a Tournade or a Figon, for he went on: “Allow me just a little criticism?”

Camille cast a fresh glance at him now, somewhat uneasily, as she went on putting the rouge on her face, and he began to quote two insignificant remarks I had made concerning the excessive emphasis at two places in her part. One of them concerned the manner in which the actress had to say to a friend, “I do not want him,” speaking of the husband she loved; the other was a gesture on recognizing the writing on the address of a letter.

I could not help admiring the change of look and voice in both of them in the course of this little discussion. The sudden seriousness of their faces showed how, in spite of his vanity in himself, and his passion for her, the reality of their personality was there in the technicality of their art. They had forgotten the existence of Tournade, Figon, and myself. On their part the two men about town pretended to talk of things which interested them, which we could not understand. I heard the names of horses, no doubt famous at that time, mentioned: Farfadet, Shannon, Little Duck and Fichue Rosse, alternating with the professional phrases of the author and the actress. Ah, how quickly the shrewd Molan had appropriated the two poor ideas I had given him without mentioning their origin! His sole consideration for my feelings was to call me to support his thesis!

“Ask Vincent, for he has studied faces.”

“Ah, well!” he said to me a few minutes later as we were leaving before Tournade and Figon, “we will leave her a prey to the beasts, like a Christian martyr, though she may be neither a Christian nor a martyr. You saw that she conceals a little roughness under her pre-Raphaelite profile, like many of her fellows. Now we have gone, those two funny fellows will occupy her attention. What a singular machine a woman is! You would think that a watertight bulkhead separated the lover from the ordinary woman.”

“Does she often lose her temper like that?” I asked him; “and why do those two fellows put up with such treatment?”

“Bah!” he replied with his habitual modesty, “she would have said much more to them to prove that I was the only person she loved. For between ourselves I know that Tournade is courting her. Do you think that in their eyes the pleasure of saying while they are standing at a bar about midnight imbibing a drink through a straw, ‘We were with little Favier just now, how quaint she is?’ counts for nothing.” Then as we reached our box and I made as if to enter he said: “No! no! you forget we must first pay Madam de Bonnivet a visit.”

“Whose invitation I will refuse. That is agreed.” He took my arm and one of the staff opened most respectfully for us the communicating door between the stage and the auditorium. As we mounted the staircase my friend continued: “As a recompense to you, I will let you into one of the details of the plan which will enable me to get rid of Camille this evening. You will see what a good idea it is. With women, especially actresses, I believe in tremendous untruths. Remember the receipt. They are the only sort which succeed, because they do not believe any one would have the audacity to invent such stories. Presently during the last act I shall have a letter brought to me which I shall pretend to read. You are there! I shall display great astonishment and scribble a few words upon my card which I leave with you. Then I shall go out. Camille will have seen it all and will be uneasy. She will play her great scene with nervous force. That is what is required. Afterwards you will take my card to her, on which I shall explain that Fomberteau—you know him well, don’t you? No. He is one of the few critics who has not picked holes in the Duchess, and on that account Camille loves him—that Fomberteau has had this evening an altercation with a colleague and wants to see me so that I may act on his behalf. I shall not be able to refuse. You will confirm the story. She believes you and the feat will be accomplished. But Madam de Bonnivet’s box is 32, and we have passed it. Good, here it is.”

He knocked at the door as he said this, but the knock was more deferential than the one just before had been at the dressing-room door.

A man in a black coat opened the door to us with a smile, greeted us and disappeared. It was Bonnivet to whom I was introduced, then I was presented to Madam de Bonnivet, and then to the Vicomte de Senneterre, who was the “beater.” I was soon sitting upon one of the chairs vacated by one of these gentlemen. The lady was picking bits of frosted raisin from a box with a pair of golden tongs. She ate them, showing her small white teeth as she did so with a sort of sensual cruelty.

“Are you going to paint little Favier’s portrait, M. la Croix? Molan told me you were,” she asked. “She is a pretty girl. I hope you will give her another expression though. If the dear master were not here I would say that when she is not talking she is like the classic cow watching the train pass.”

She looked at the man of letters whom she called “dear master” as she spoke with sovereign impertinence. Knowing him to be the lover of this woman to whom she applied this vulgar epigram, what impertinence this was with a harsh laugh as its accompaniment! Her laughter, the voice of her eyes, was pretty but metallic, clear but implacable, a gay laugh which sounded frightfully brutal to me! If one could not—I repeat this as it was the striking impression of this first meeting—imagine real warm tears from those eyes of stony blue, neither could one imagine her stifling a sigh, nor imagine music in her voice, nor indulgence in her gaiety. But that which at once made her distasteful to me was not her words—the meanness of a jealous woman was their justification—it was a curious trait in her personality.

How can I find words for the indefinable shades of expression on her face which three pencil lines and two touches of colour would clearly reproduce How can I explain that something about her which was at the same time insensible and enervated, glacial and crazy, and so plain in the contrast between her banter and her fine aristocratic profile, which was almost ideal: between her jeering laugh and her fine mouth, between the disdainful carriage of her neck and her willingly familiar manners? This pretty delicate head, with its haughty and fragile grace, which had at once evoked in me the image of a queen of elfs with its blonde hair and flowerlike complexion, was, I have since understood, the victim of the most terrible ennui in the world, that which absolute insensibility in the midst of all the good things of the world, and the radical incapacity of enjoying anything when one possesses all one desires, inflicts upon us. Since then, I have thought the “dear master” was very greatly mistaken on his own account, that this ennui, so like that of a man of the world growing old, perhaps came from abuse, and that there was a blasé woman in this weary one. I guessed that she had dared many things with singular intrepidity. But there was no need for these hypotheses upon the secrets of her life for uneasiness to overcome me. The direct way in which she questioned me, who cannot bear questioning, gave me a feeling of insecurity.

“Have you known Molan long?” she asked me.

“About fifteen years,” I replied.

“Have you ever seen him in love except in his books?”

“You will at once intimidate him, madam,” my friend replied for me. “He is not used to your imperial manner.”

She went on, still keeping her eyes fixed on Molan, though addressing me—

“Has little Favier any brains?”

“Oh, yes!” he replied quickly and in good faith. I should have made the same answer to this creature whose accent alone was sufficient to irritate me. I then began an enthusiastic eulogy of the poor girl I hardly knew, and who had surprised me by her sudden vulgarity. Jacques listened to me as I sang the praises of his mistress in a stupor which Madam de Bonnivet construed into a sense of umbrage. She was not the woman to neglect this opportunity of sowing the seeds of discord between two friends. It is my test for all feminine or masculine natures, this instinctive tremor of sympathy or antipathy before the sentiments of others. It was sufficient for Madam de Bonnivet to believe that Jacques and I were united by sincere comradeship, for the temptation to sever this friendship to seize her.

“Stop,” she said; “should the painter be so amorous of his model?” She laughed her wicked laugh. Then suddenly she turned her head and said to her husband: “Pierre, you don’t take enough exercise, you are getting fat. It makes you look ten years older than you really are. You should take Senneterre as your example.” This evening the “beater” was polished and fastened together like an old piece of furniture, so that this praise of his apparent youth was fearful irony. “Come,” she concluded, “don’t get angry, but have some raisins, they are exquisite.”

“What an amiable child!” I said to myself as she offered us the box of fruit in a peevish way. “What time is she put to bed?” Her character, which had no inner truth, was ceaselessly dominated by a double need in which two moral miseries were manifest: the unhealthy appetite for producing an effect developed in her by the abuse of worldly success, the even more unhealthy appetite for emotion at all costs, the result of secret licentiousness, which had made her blasé, and her lack of heart. Have I mentioned that she was a mother, and that she did not love her child, who had been at a boarding school for years? She could not dispense with astonishment, and she had that strange taste for fear, that singular pleasure of provoking man’s anger, that joy of feeling that she was threatened with brutality which is the great sign of woman in her natural state. Except on serious occasions the most childish things were good enough to procure for her these two emotions: such as dazzling a poor devil of a painter by ways so contrary to her social pretensions, and lighting in her husband’s eyes, without any cause, the light of anger which I had just seen there.

Senneterre and Bonnivet began to laugh a similar laugh to that of Tournade and Figon in little Favier’s dressing-room. The comparison struck me at once, as it has done under different conditions when I have skirted “High Society.” The actress and the woman of the world had exactly the same bad tone. Only the bad tone of the delicate Burne-Jones girl betrayed a depth of passionate soul, and an extraordinary facility for allurement, while in the case of Madam de Bonnivet it was the intolerable and fantastic caprice of the spoilt child; but it was very fine, for no shade of feeling escaped her, not even the antipathy of an unimportant person like myself, nor the ill-humour of her husband disguised by his laughter.

“My dear Senneterre,” Bonnivet had simply said, “we are done with. But an old husband and an old friend are umbrellas upon which much rain has fallen!”

There was in these few words a strange mixture of irony with regard to the two artists, new-comers into their circle, to whom the young woman was talking, and a deep irritation which no doubt procured for her the little tremor of fear she loved to feel. She gave her husband, whom she had so saucily braved, a coquettish glance almost tender, while the glance she gave me was indignant, and rather exciting than provoking. I had irritated her curiosity by being refractory to her seductiveness. Then, changing her conversation, and almost her accent, with a prodigious suddenness, she asked me in the most simple way possible a question about the school of painting to which I belonged. It was a starting point for her to talk of my art, without much knowledge, but strange to say with as much intelligence and good sense as before she had displayed lack of it in her jeering chaff. She talked of the danger to us artists in going much into society, and she spoke according to my idea, with a perfectly accurate view of the failings of vanity and charlatanism which the society of the idle induces. It was as if another person had replaced the original woman. They resembled one another in one point. It was the production of an effect upon a new-comer. Only this time she had divined the precise words it was necessary to use. Cold-blooded coquettes have these intuitions which take the place of knowledge concerning their adorers. I was already too much on my guard to be the dupe of this manœuvre and not to discern its artifice. But still, how could I help admiring her versatility?

“Is not my little Bonnivet clever?” Jacques Molan said after we had taken our departure; “she understands everything before it is said. But why did she not invite you to supper? For she is interested in you. You could see that by Senneterre’s ill-humour. He hardly returned your greeting.” The game he did not bring was not to his liking, nor was the man who brought it. “Yes,” he went on in the tones of a man playing a very careful game and watching every detail of his opponent’s play, “why did she not invite you to supper?”

“Why should she invite me?” I asked.

“Obviously to make you talk about Camille and myself,” he said.

“After my eulogy of little Favier,” I replied, “she had very little to ask me. It did not please her. That is an excellent sign for you, and a sufficient reason for not wishing to hear it again.”

“Possibly,” he said. “But what do you think of the husband?”

“Weak to allow himself to be spoken to like that, and I am astonished that he does so on account of his broad shoulders. He might well reply with an evil look. But he is weak, I repeat, very weak.”

“Yes,” Jacques went on, “their relations are stranger than you would think. Bonnivet, you see, is a Parisian husband like many others, who by himself would not move in any circle of society, and who owes his whole position to his wife’s coquetry. Husbands of this kind do not always do this by design. But they profit by it and can be divided into three groups: the noodles, who are persuaded against the weight of evidence that this coquetry is innocent; the philosophic ones, who have made up their minds never to find out how far this coquetry goes; and the jealous ones, who wish to profit by this coquetry to have a full drawing-room and elegant dinners. Besides, they go into a cold sweat at the thought that their wife might take a lover. That was Bonnivet’s case. He accepted all the flirtations of Queen Anne with a good grace. He shook my hand. He assisted in silence like the most complaisant of men his better half’s manœuvres. Very well, I am of opinion that if he suspected this woman of the least physical familiarity beyond this moral familiarity, he would kill her on the spot like a rabbit. She knows it and is afraid, and that is the reason that she prefers him in her heart to us all, and that in my humble opinion she has not yet deceived him. But she loves to brave his anger in her moments of nerves. She has one of them every hour. Camille is too pretty. Between ourselves that was the origin of the supper: she does not want the little Blue Duchess to be in her admirer’s company this evening. I think, too, that was the reason she did not invite you. She hopes you will profit by my absence. It is high comedy. Moliére, where is your pen?”

“But,” I said to him, as I thought of the two half-mute persons whose rather tragic picture he was painting to me, “if that is your opinion of M. de Bonnivet, it is not reassuring for you when you become his wife’s lover.”

“If,” he answered shrugging his shoulders. “My dear fellow, I have calculated. To take any woman at all as your mistress is to always run the same number of risks of meeting face to face some one who will kill. It is just like travelling in a carriage or on the railway, or drinking a glass of fresh water which chemists declare is infested with microbes. I brave the dangers, railway accidents, runaway horses, typhoid fevers, and jealous husbands because I love to travel quickly, to refresh and amuse myself. Then Madam de Bonnivet knows her tyrant, her Pierre, who rejoices in the idyllic names of Pierre Amédié Placidi; she knows of what he is capable. She amuses herself by exciting him just far enough to procure for herself that little tremor of fear. When she wants to overstep the mark, she will do it like the reasonable creature she is. Suspicious husbands are like vicious animals. They are ridden more safely after they have been carefully studied and their peculiarities discovered. But now have you a pencil? Good. I will scribble on my card in the box. While we are waiting, let me arrange with the attendant about the letter I want brought to me.”

We were at the door of our box. He stopped and exchanged a few words with the attendant, and I saw him hand her a letter which he took from his pocket-book. At this moment his face assumed its real expression, that of a beast of prey, feline and supple, and his fashionable elegance became almost repulsive.

“That is it,” he said, “and now we are going to applaud our friend as if we were not the author and his friend. We owe that to her, poor little girl! She will be so disappointed! Write me a line to-morrow or come and see me to let me know how she takes it. I am not at all uneasy as to the result. A woman who loves never suspects the truth. She swallows the most improbable things like a carp does the hook and a yard of string as well.”

“But if she guesses that I am lying?” I interrupted. This trick which made me his accomplice weighed upon my conscience, and I was upon the point of refusing my assistance. But if I refused it I should not see Camille again that evening.

“She will not guess,” he replied.

“But if she insists and demands my word of honour?”

“Give it to her. In the case of women false oaths are permissible. But she will not ask you. Here she is! Are we not like two conspirators. How pretty she is! To think that if I might have——But no, there is an old French saying, that the woman a man adores is not the one he possesses, but one he has not yet possessed. You must admit that these words contain more truth than all the works of our analytical friends the hair splitters, Claude Larcher and Julien Dorsenne?”

Camille Favier had reappeared upon the stage. She had begun to act with a happy grace which was changed into nervousness when the attendant brought, according to the plan, into our box the sham letter from Fomberteau. The actress missed her cue when she saw Jacques take a pencil from his pocket, scribble a few words upon a card, then hand it to me and leave the box. But the impostor was right. Her trouble as a woman only intensified her playing as an actress. She suddenly ceased to look in the direction of the box which her lover had left. The entire strength of her being appeared to be concentrated in her part, and in the great final scene very ingeniously borrowed from La Princesse Georges, she displayed a power of pathos which roused the audience to a delirium of enthusiasm. Only when she was recalled by an enthusiastic audience and returned to bow did her eyes again turn to the box in which I sat alone. She expressed in her look her pretty regret at being unable to offer this triumph to her lord and master. As far as I was concerned it was an artist’s pride in an artist. But her look was a supplication to me not to go without speaking to her, and when the curtain fell for the last time she came towards me without troubling about being seen by her colleagues.

“What has happened?” she asked. “Where is Jacques gone?”

“He has left this card for you,” I answered evasively.

“Come into my dressing-room,” she said after looking at the card, “I want to speak to you.” Her impatience was so keen that I found her waiting on the stairs for me. She seized my arm at once.

“Is it true?” she asked me point-blank. “Is Fomberteau going to fight? With whom? Why?”

“I don’t know any more than you do,” I replied still with the same indefiniteness.

“Did he know that Jacques was at the theatre this evening? Had they an appointment? Why did he not tell me about it? He knows how interested I am in his friends, especially Fomberteau. He is such a loyal comrade and so bravely defended 'Adéle’ and 'La Duchesse’! Don’t you see how strange it seems to me?”

“But Jacques seemed as surprised as you are,” I murmured.

“Ah!” she said as she gripped my arm more lightly, “you are an honourable man. You cannot lie very well.” Then in emotional tones she said: “But you would not give your friend away; I know him too.” And after a short silence she continued: “You live in the same direction as myself, Jacques told me; will you wait for me and see me home?”

She had disappeared into her dressing-room and closed the door before I could find an answer for her. How displeased I felt with myself! What contradictory sentiments I experienced in the theatre lobby, which was filled to overflowing with the departing audience! One must be twenty-three and have a romantically tortured soul as Camille’s eyes showed she had to add to the exhausting emotions of the stage those of the conversation she was prepared to have with me. How I feared that talk! How I regretted not making some excuse and leaving her! How sure I was, in spite of her words upon the duty of friendship, that this passionate child would try to make me say something I did not want and ought not say! It would have been better perhaps if this fear had been verified and the profligate had appeared in her at once beneath the lover. But do I sincerely regret the strange minutes of that night? Do I regret that walk beneath the cold and starry January sky, unexpected as it was, for at seven o’clock that evening I did not know this young woman even by name; it was so innocent, almost foolish, too, since I was the extemporized diversion of her love for another; it was so short, too, as the walk from the Vaudeville to the Rue de la Bareuillére does not take more than three quarters of an hour. Those three quarters of an hour count for me among the rare gleams of light in my dark and sorrowful life. Nothing but evoking its last charm would be worth the trouble of beginning the tale of this long and monotonous suffering.

Although I was quite sure that Camille had not kept me to play the scene between La Camargo and the priest in Les Marrons du Feu, by the wonderful Musset, described so foolishly by Molan as a bad poet, my heart beat faster than usual when the dressing-room door opened. The actress reappeared enveloped in a large black cloak with a big cape at the shoulders. A thick black silk ruff was around her neck, and her head, on which she wore a dark blue bonnet, looked almost too small as it emerged from her heavy wrap. She appeared to me to be taller and younger. I could at once see by her eyes that she had been crying, and I could tell that she was nervous by the way in which she said good night to her dresser. Then, as she leant upon my arm to descend the staircase, I asked her, thinking I might cheer her by this kindly pleasantry—

“Are you not afraid of being talked about, leaving the theatre like this with a gentleman?”

“Being talked about!” she said with a shrug of her fine shoulders. “That does not worry me. Everybody at the theatre knows that I am Jacques’ mistress. I do not conceal the fact, neither does he. He has told you, has he not? Confess!”

“He told me he loved you,” I replied.

“No,” she said with a pretty, sad smile, which displayed her fine mouth and made a dimple in her pale cheek, “I know him too well to think that. He told you that I loved him, and he was right. All the same, it is good of you to want me to think that he speaks tenderly of me. I repeat to you that I shall be very quiet. I shall not try to question you. After all, this story about Fomberteau is not an impossible one. It would have been very simple though for him to have wished me good-bye first. I had looked forward so to his escort this evening.”

We were in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin when she said this, and it was followed by a long silence. Women who love are unconsciously cruel. But how could I expect her not to regret her lover to me when all her charm was in her spontaneity and the untouched ingenuousness of her nature? Then I began to be in love with her, and this conversation, seen when talking of some one else, enfolded me and intoxicated me with that enchantment of the beloved presence which is in itself a pleasure. The warmth of her arm in mine made my blood flow to my heart. In what a discreet pose this pretty arm leant upon mine, but with a reserve so different from the abandon of love! But her step instinctively kept time with mine. We kept in step as we walked, and this fusion of our movements, by making me feel the light rhythm of her body, revealed to me, too, that though she knew very little of me, she had perfect confidence in me. I experienced extreme pleasure at the sudden intimacy, so complete and so devoid of coquetry; my self-respect had one more idea of humiliation than hers had of pretence over her relations with my comrade. By what mysterious magic of second sight had she divined at once that I would be for her with Molan precisely the advocate she needed, and also that she could express her feelings in my presence in full sincerity?

It is a fact that, in our walk, first along the crowded Boulevards, then through streets becoming quieter and quieter, till we reached the deserted avenues of the Invalides and Montparnasse, our conversation was that of two beings deeply, definitely, and absolutely sure of one another. I will not try to explain this first strangeness, the prelude and omen of relations in which everything would be anomalous. I, who am as reluctant to receive confidences as to give them, listened to this actress with a passionate insatiable avidity to hear the story of her life. Though her confidences were very singular when addressed to a stranger almost an unknown, I did not think of doubting them, nor of rating them as impudence or acting. But time goes backward and the months which separate us from that hour disappear. The sky of that winter’s night again palpitates with its crowd of stars. Our steps, which seem almost joined together, sound upon the empty pavements. Her voice rises and falls in turn with its tender tones. I can hear the music of her voice still. I can feel again the trouble which was at the same time delicious and grievous, with which each of her words filled me: they appeared to me so touching when that dear voice pronounced them. To-day they seem to me cruelly ironical. How life, cruel life, has frozen the fresh sweet flowers of sentiment which opened in this young heart, and how my heart falters when I recall her eyes, her gestures, her smile, and the pretty way she nodded her head as she said—

“Yes, when I can go home with him like this in the evening he knows that I am happy. He knows, too, what it costs me to procure this liberty. Usually mother comes to meet me. Poor mother! If she suspected! Jacques knows how painful it is to me to lie about little things, more so perhaps than about important matters. The meanness of certain tricks makes one understand better how ugly and wretched deception is. I have to say that my cousin comes to meet me, and tell my cousin too. No, I was not born for this trickery. I love to say what I think and what I feel. At first I did not blush at my life. But for Jacques I should have told my mother everything.”

“Does she really suspect nothing?” I asked her.

“No,” she said with profound bitterness, “she believes in me. I am the revenge of her life, you see. We were not always as we are now. I can recollect a time when we had a house, carriages and horses, though I was only a little girl then. My father was a business man, one of the largest outside brokers in Paris. You know better than I do what happened: an unfortunate speculation and we were ruined. My stage name is not my father’s name, but my mother’s maiden name.”

“But Jacques has not told me that,” I said in such an astonished way that she shrugged her fine shoulders. What disillusion there was already in that sad and gentle gesture which indicated that she clearly judged the man whom she continued to love so much.

“The story was without doubt not sufficiently interesting for him to recollect. It is so commonplace, comprising as it does the death of the unfortunate man who killed himself in a fit of despair. The least commonplace part of the story is that mother sacrificed her fortune to preserve my father’s honour. It is true it was a fortune he had settled upon her and it had come from him. That makes no difference. There are not many women in the world of wealth which Jacques loves so dearly, who would do that, are there? Every debt was paid, and we are left with an income of 7,000 francs, on which we lived till last year, when I appeared at the Vaudeville.”

“How did the idea of going on the stage enter your mind?” I asked.

“You want a confession,” she said, “and you shall have one. Is it possible to say why one’s existence turns in this or that direction? A person would not go out in the street but for the thought of events which lead to a meeting.” She smiled as she uttered this phrase which awakened in me a very clear echo. I realized that it was one of those chances which had made me acquainted with her, for the destruction of my peace of mind. She went on—

“If I believe in anything, you see, it is in destiny. Among the few persons we continued to meet was a friend of my father’s, a great lover of the theatre. He is dead now. He listened to me one day, without my knowing it, reciting a piece of poetry I had learnt by heart. Our old friend spoke to me of his memory, which was failing him. He advised me to cultivate mine. This little chance shaped my life. He realized that I recited those few verses well. For amusement he gave me others to learn. I was fifteen years old, and he treated me without any more ceremony than he would his own niece. After my second effort at reciting he had a long conversation with mother. We were poor. We might become worse off still. We had nothing to expect from our relatives, who had been very hard on my poor father. A talent is a livelihood, and to-day the stage is a career like painting and literature. The days of prejudice are past. You can imagine the arguments of the old Parisian and my mother’s objections. But the latter could not outweigh the authority our friend had acquired over us by remaining faithful to us. We had been so utterly deserted by our other friends, though perhaps it was partly our own fault. Mother was so proud! The joy I displayed when I was consulted was what finally convinced mother. That was how I first went to a professor and then to the Conservatoire, which I left three years ago with two first prizes. An engagement at the Odéon was followed directly by one at the Vaudeville; and now you know as much as I do about Camille Favier.”

“About Mademoiselle Favier,” I corrected her, “but not about Camille.”

“Ah, Camille!” she replied, releasing my arm as if an irresistible instinct made her recoil. “Camille is a person who has never had much good sense, and now she has still less than she used to have,” she added with a melancholy and arch nod of the head, a gesture I always noticed her make in times of emotion.

“Without a doubt I take after my dear father who had no good sense at all, I have been told, for he married mother for love, and that his brothers, sisters and cousins never forgave. Poor father and poor Camille! But you can see”—she said this with a smile—“that I have no good sense at all by my telling you this after an acquaintance of two hours. I have a theory, however, that friendship is like love, it either comes all at once or not at all.”

“In my case you have realized that it has come?” I said to her.

“Yes,” she said with almost grave simplicity as she took my arm again and pressed it against her own. “You would like to ask me about my feelings for Jacques? I guessed as much, and you dare not. I should like to explain to you, but I don’t know how. As I have begun to tell you everything, I will try. It seems to me that you will not think so badly of me afterwards, and I don’t want you to think badly of me. I must go back to the beginning again. I have told you how and why I entered the Conservatoire. It is a curious but not very well-known place where there is everything, from the very good to the very bad, corruption and artlessness, intrigues, youth, exasperated vanity, and enthusiasm. During the years I spent there, this enthusiasm for the stage was my romance. Yes, I had the frenzy and fever for being one day a great actress, and I worked. How I worked! Then as one does not reach the age of eighteen without dreaming, without ears to hear and eyes to see, on the day I left there, you can understand, if I was virtuous it was not the virtue of ignorance. I had seen, I think, as many ugly happenings as I shall see in the course of my life. I shall not be courted more brutally than I was by some of my companions, nor more hypocritically than by some of the professors. I shall not receive more depraved advice than I did then from some of my friends, nor less enchanting confidences. But my environment has never had much influence over me. What I was told went in at one ear and out of the other. I listen to the little inner voice of conscience which speaks to me when I am alone. It was this little voice which whispered to me 'yes’ at once when our old friend spoke of the stage. It was the little voice which prevented me succumbing to the temptations by which I was surrounded. Don’t you think the counsels of this little voice were very good ones? Think what a task it was for a girl of my age: always repeating words of love, putting the accents of love into my voice, and giving to my face and gestures the expressions of love. At this acting, a woman ends by catching the fever of the parts she plays. A wish to taste on one’s own account the sentiments one has tried so often to depict arises. I cannot explain that to you, but without a doubt I was born for the stage, where I cannot play a part without almost becoming that person I represent, and when I have to say to another character

'I feel that I love you.’

you don’t know how I sometimes desire to say this sweet caressing phrase on my own account.”

“Alas!” I answered her when she was silent, “that is our story to every one. We read of this feeling in books. There is something contagious in a poet’s suffering. We imitate them unconsciously, and we are sincere in this imitation. All this once more proves that the heart is a very complicated machine.”

“More complicated than you think,” she said with a knowing smile, “when it concerns a girl who lives as I lived. I have told you that I was madly enthusiastic over my art. Why did I decide, in my own poor head, that this art is not compatible with the middle-class respectability of a regular existence, and that prosaic and monotonous virtue is the enemy of talent? I don’t know how to explain it to you, but it is like this. I was convinced that no one could be a great artiste without passion. Even now I don’t think I was wrong. This evening, for example, I acted my last scene as I have never done before. There was nervousness in all my words and gestures. I gave myself up to my part madly! Why? Because I had seen Jacques leave your box and I did not understand. If you only knew what anguish I suffered at the moment I looked at that frightful Madam de Bonnivet’s box! How I hate that woman! She is my bad genius and that of Jacques as well. You see, if she had left the theatre before the end of the play with her fool of a husband, I should have thought that she and Jacques had gone away together; I should have fallen down on the stage. Forgive me, I will go on with my story if it does not weary you. All these romantic, confused and vague sentiments which moved in me while I worked hard at my studies on leaving the Conservatoire, are summed up in a dream at which I beg you not to laugh too much. Yes, all the sorrows and joys of love, all the emotions which must exalt the artiste and make me into a rival of Rachel, Desclée, Sarah Bernhardt and Julia Bartet, I desired to feel for some one whom they would exalt while they exalted me, for a man of genius whom I would inspire in inspiring myself, and who would write sublime plays which I should afterwards act with a genius equal to his own. How difficult it is to clearly describe what one feels! I am searching for a name in the history of the theatre which will explain to you these chimeras more clearly than my poor gossip.”

“You would have liked to be a Champmeslé; to meet Racine and create for him 'Phédre’ after posing to him,” I interrupted.

“That is it,” she said quickly. “That is it. Yes, Champmeslé and Racine; or Rachel and Alfred de Musset, the Rachel of the supper if she had loved him. Yes. To meet a writer, a poet, who needed to feel before he could write, to make him feel, to feel with him, to incarnate the creations of his talent on the stage, and thus go through the world together, and attain glory together in a legend of love, that was my dream. Do you think there can be blue enough for the heavens and your pictures in the head of a little actress, who rehearses her part in an old street in the Faubourg Saint Germain by her old mother’s side, with imagination as her only stage property? Such a desire is an absurdity, a chimera, a folly. But I thought I could grasp this chimera and realize this folly when chance threw me in the path of Jacques. I should realize it, if he only loved me;” and in a deeply moved voice, with a sigh, she repeated, “if he loved me!”

“But he does love you,” I answered her. “If you had heard him speak of you this evening.”

“Do not hope to mislead me,” she said seriously and sadly. “I know very well that he does not love me. He loves the love I have for him, but how long will it last?”

CHAPTER IV

How distinct the least important words of this conversation have remained in my memory with their gay or sad, sentimental or bantering, disabused or tender intonation! I could continue to note down pages and pages of details without weariness. It seems to me, while writing this upon cold mute paper, that the clock has gone backwards and it is once more the time when the conversation ended, too soon for my liking, and we reached the house in the Rue de la Barouillére. I can see myself saying good-bye to Camille before the massive door which a sleepy porter was very slow in opening. I think I can hear the sound of the bell and feel the warmth of her little feverish hand in mine, while I wished her good-bye and she appeared to me, in the light of the moon, like an adorable phantom ever disappearing. She half closes her fine eyes which were heavy with sleep, she bows her head with a smile, she puts her finger to her mouth with a malicious gesture, to remind me to be discreet over the confidences she had entrusted to me. Her little head and long cloak disappeared in the darkness and the door closed with a dull sound.

Unconsciously I listened for a moment longer. I stretched out my hand to clasp hers and felt instead a metal object, the lamp which was left for her every evening. A match was struck, a hasty step sounded, and another door, the staircase door, closed. That was all, so I went towards home in the pale moonlight along streets deserted except for a few stray cats and dogs, a few policemen on their beats, a belated cab, and a group of young artists just leaving a café in the Boulevard Saint Michel, which were the only things which testified to the existence of life in the great sleeping mansions, dark convents, the little houses with a single jet of gas burning, and the black, sinister-looking hospitals. This quarter is really one of the suburbs of Paris, though it is so near the densely populated Boulevards, just as Camille’s peaceful life with her mother is so near her passionate stage life.

It had only taken us three quarters of an hour to return from the theatre, though our pace was unequal, sometimes slow and sometimes rapid, as if we were hastening over our confidences. It took me less time to reach the little house on the Boulevard des Invalides where I live, though I wandered aimlessly in this deserted part overwhelmed by a trouble for which I could scarcely blame myself. That sudden burning of the inner being, that handling and interminable repetition of phrases which one has just heard, that obsession of thought at the same time pleasing and terrifying, that occupation as if by force by a creature to whom one was the previous evening and the same day a perfect stranger—these are the signs which denote the fatal fever, malaria of the soul, which takes longer to cure than other and more dangerous maladies.

“A good night’s sleep,” I said to myself, “and to-morrow these foolish ideas will be gone; besides she is a friend’s mistress. I know myself. The thought of their caresses simply would prevent me from becoming amorous of her, if I desired to. But I shall not have this desire. She has moved me this evening in her real life as she moved me at the theatre, as she would have moved me in a novel. But that is pure imagination. To-morrow I shall not think of her, and if I think of her, I shall not see her nor Molan again. That is all.”

Pure imagination is an expression easily used. But is there not a profound and very sensible point by which this imagination touches our heart, is our heart in fact? When a woman’s grace has wounded this point, we always discover motives why we should not remain faithful to the prudent programme of not seeing her again. The fact was, I began by not having the good night’s sleep I promised myself, and when I awakened from my morning doze I thought of Camille Favier with as much troubled interest as I had done the evening before. I at once found a pretext for breaking my good resolution not to see either her or Molan again. Had I not promised Jacques to inform him as to the success or otherwise of his scheme? All the same, it was not without remorse that about ten o’clock I set out to fulfil my strange mission.

I had forgotten the previous evening that I had a model coming at ten. A girl called Malvina came to pose for my never-ending “Psyché pardonnée.” When I sent her away I heard the little inner voice, of which on the previous evening Camille had prettily spoken, whisper: “Coward! Coward!” But even without the little voice, did not the presence of this creature demonstrate to me the absurdity of my incipient sentiment? Malvina had, too, like Camille, the ideal head for the primitive Madonna, and she was pleasure personified. Her mouth, which looked so beautiful in its silent smile, only opened to retail obscenity. What a good plan it is never to believe in the bewitching charm of a face! Fate has warnings like this for us which we disregard with an obscure feeling of the irreparable. After Malvina had gone I looked round my studio, at the unfinished canvas, my colour box, my palette, and I went out pursued by their mute reproach. Why did I not listen!

To reach the Rue Delaborde, where Jacques Molan lived, I had fortunately to traverse a nice part of Paris, of the sort to distract my attention. I know it so well from making numerous studies of it when I was preoccupied, as the critics say when they are looking on our pictures for an opportunity to theorize and be modern. That is finished as far as I am concerned. It has profited me all the same; for if I no longer think a picture ought to represent freaks of light without significance, or bodies of human life without essential value, I have kept for these studies a keener taste, a more refined sense of certain landscapes, those of the Seine, for example, the Tuileries, and the Place de la Concorde. I love them especially in their morning tints which give them a tender freshness, distinct water-colour transparencies, with a thrill of alert activity. That morning, though my nerves were still quivering with the intoxication of my new-born passion, the water of the river seemed to me fresher than ever; the grey-blue of the sky more delicate above the leafless trees; the water of the fountains more sparkling with a whiter and more noisy foam. My over-excited being more readily appreciated the charm of the trees, houses, and flowing water. I unconsciously forgot my wise resolution and my remorse at leaving my work, to picture to myself the renewal of the soul which a liaison such as the one satiated Jacques Molan held so cheaply would instil into me. Then the irresistible demon of irony took possession of me.

“Yes,” I actually or almost said to myself, “what a dream it would be to be loved by a woman like Camille! Just free enough to give long hours to her lover and not free enough to absorb his time; enough of an artist to understand the most delicate and subtle shades of impression; natural enough to be amused at the Bohemian caprices, which are so savoury when they are not accompanied by misery; enthusiastic enough for a constant encouragement to work to emanate from her, and too spontaneous, too sincere to ever drive you to that slavery to success, which is the fatal influence of so many mistresses and wives. And then what an adorable lover she would be! Was it a rare tint of soul, which the story she told me yesterday had, and was it different from the ones in the heads of her little friends? A rich protector and much advertisement is the usual ideal of such girls! The only actress who thinks differently must needs meet with Molan, the cold machine for producing prolific copy. But what is the use of my understanding and appreciating her like this, when I am on my way to contribute to the closeness of their intimacy? What absurd chance made me meet Jacques yesterday evening? That must happen to me: it is the symbol of our whole lives, his and mine. I am, or rather am ready to be, the man who really loves; he is the lover. I have the sensibility of a real artist, while he achieves works and reaps the glory of them. Meanwhile I am wasting a very clear morning and my picture is at a standstill. Ah, I shall soon be back and I will send for Malvina. I will work all the afternoon, I will make up for lost time. Directly my commission is executed I will hurry away. I am rather curious to see how the animal is lodged. He must be making just now from 80,000 to 100,000 francs a year, and it is a great change from his former position.”

It was a long time since I had called upon my old friend. While the lift-man whisked me up to the second floor, where he lived, of a large new house with bow windows of coloured glass, I recalled the numerous quarters where I had known this author, who was such a clever administrator of his wealth and talents, and ran over in my mind his rapid advance along the highway of Parisan glory. First of all on leaving college he had a little furnished room in the Rue Monsieur le Prince. A portrait of Baudelaire by Félicien Rops and a few bad medallions by David constituted the personal furniture of this retreat. The fastidious arrangement of the books, papers and pens on the table already testified to the worker’s strong will.

Jacques’ only resource then was a small income of 150 francs a month allowed him by his only relative, an old grandmother, who lived in the Provinces, and to whom he behaved like a grateful grandson. I saw him weep real tears when she died, and then he put her into a book. Strange to say, that was the only one of his books which was really bad. Could it be that talent of writing is only nourished by imaginative sensibility, which, to be realized, has need of expression, whereas real sensibility exhausts itself and comes to an end through its own reality? Happily for him, in the early years of his literary life he only depicted sentiments which he had not. His first volume, so elegant and yet so brutal, was, strange to say, scrawled in this Latin Quarter garret. His joining the staff of a Boulevard paper and a change of residence showed that the writer did not intend to vegetate in the same narrow circle. He took rooms in the Rue de Bellechasse still on the left bank of the river, but now very close to the right bank. The portrait of Baudelaire still remained, to proclaim his fidelity to his early artistic convictions; but now it was framed in velvet and hung upon red Adrianople tapestry, which gave to this retreat an air of a padded shelter. This counter-balanced the lack of artistic character in the furniture, which was on the hire system and very solid and commonplace, without any other pretension than the quality of its old oak. The noted trader in literary wares, which Molan was, betrayed himself by his choice of durable furniture and a well made desk never likely to need repair. His success still increased, and the period of the little house at Passy came, though directly afterwards the house became unsuitable.

Jacques had not been there eighteen months when the opulent and final abode of the successful man took its place. The anteroom where I was received by a little page in livery was sufficient to convince me. A commissionaire, whom I seemed to have seen stationed in my own neighbourhood, was in attendance. I was shown into a large smoking-room which adjoined a small study and contained a case full of rare curios, consisting of old Chinese lacquer-work, admirable sixteenth century bronzes, polished boxes, statuettes from Saxony, and old sweetmeat boxes. The dissimilarity of the objects expressed Molan’s utilitarian ideas. He studied the possibility of sale in case of misfortune. A few pictures decorated the walls, but they were all modern with the most excessive and extravagant modernity. Paintings by an obscure contemporary sometimes turn out a good investment, for he may be a Millet or a Corot. It is a ticket in a lottery, but the prize is a good one. Molan bought these pictures for a few pounds from young painters in distress, and received them as a return for a little advertisement.

But it was necessary to know him as I knew him to understand the use of this smoking-room, which was destined by the fashionable author for show, for interviews and receptions. Its significant feature was order, implacable, studied and fastidious order. Everything displayed this order, but most of all the arrangement of the books on the book-shelves. The books themselves were all the work of young colleagues, who would be flattered by seeing their works bound in colours appropriate to their talents, the colourists in red, the elegists in mauve, and the stylists in Japanese paper. The brilliant new silver articles, the freshness of the Havanna carpet and many other little things showed the eye of a master difficult to please, whose wishes extended to the smallest detail without ever being satisfied. The conversation that the author had with me the previous evening concerning his investments came back to my mind, and I thought he had told me the truth. He himself entered, manicured, shaved, with keen eyes, a fresh colour, and wearing the most delightful lounge coat that ever a tailor of genius had made for a man about town. He had in his hand a quill pen which he showed me before throwing it into the fire, saying—

“Have I kept you waiting? I had to finish my third page. If I do one page more by half-past twelve I shall have done my day’s work. Four pages a day, whether it is a novel or a play, is my method,” and pointing out to me a long row of books not so tastefully bound as the others: “And that is the result.”

“Can you leave and resume your work when you please?” I asked him.

“When I like. It is force of habit, you see. I have regulated my brain as a gas meter is regulated. Does the comparison scandalize you? You have, as I have done, meditated upon these words of a great master: 'Patience is that which in man most resembles the proceeding which nature employs in her creations.’ Almost automatic regularity is the secret of talent! But let us talk of your errand last evening to Camille. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, was there not?”

“Not at all,” I replied, rather pleased at being able to disconcert his fatuity; “she did not even question me in order not to make me tell lies.”

“Yes,” he said with a shrug of the shoulders, “that delicacy is just like her. We live in an amusing time. You meet with a woman of exquisite sentiment, and a delightfully fine heart. She turns out to be a poor little actress. Another woman with an income of 200,000 francs, coming of a good family, bearing a famous name, beautiful, and with a position in society, is a bad actress. But if the little one is romantic, she is shrewdly romantic. She had scruples about making you speak, so as not to ask you to betray a friend. Then she turned to the right place to learn the truth. She sent an express message to Fomberteau this morning.”

“Did you not foresee that?”

“I reckoned on calling upon her when I went out. She was too quick for me. Fomberteau sent her this reply,” and he took a piece of paper from his pocket. “Imagine Camille as she read this”—

“'Dear friend, I had no duel to fight. Your Jacques therefore was not my second. Except that, all the rest is true. Set your mind at rest regarding both of us, and as it is press day please excuse me from coming in person to thank you for your kind anxiety.’ To this Camille has added a postscript: 'As you gave me an explanation yesterday which was not true, I have the right to another one, the true one, and I am waiting for it.’”

“What time did you get this letter?” I asked him.

“About twenty-five minutes ago. The messenger is waiting. I wanted to see you and know what she said to you. She has lost nothing by waiting. I am going to reply to her in my best style.”

“I should be curious,” I said, “to know by what new scheme you will excuse yourself.”

“I!” he replied as he sat down at a little table and began to write, “by none. I am telling her that I have not the least explanation to give her, and I do not wish her to allow herself another time to play tricks upon me as she did when she sent to Fomberteau.”

“You will not do that,” I interrupted him quickly. “The poor girl loves you with all her heart. She could not bear the doubt. She thought you were lying to her and she wanted to know the truth. Come, is not that natural? Had she not the right? Be just. It is so simple to find another excuse. Rather tell her the truth as she asks for it; it will, too, be less trouble.”

“There is only one slight objection,” Jacques replied as he fastened the note, rang the electric bell to summon the messenger, and gave it to him, “and it is that I should be perfectly happy if Camille quarrelled with me. That is, too, another principle as absolute as the regularity of work. When a man wishes to break with his mistress, the more insignificant the motive the better. My progress is so good in the other direction that I don’t need her any longer to urge on her rival. As you are my 'beater,’ and I know that you are as silent as a tomb, I will tell you everything in spite of those noble phrases about discretion, more especially as up to the present this confidence only compromises me. Last evening I obtained an appointment from Madam de Bonnivet. You would never guess the place though, not in a thousand times. At Pére Lachaise, before the tomb of Musset like the other girl. You don’t think that is very grand, do you? From the cemetery to the carriage is like the sublime to the ridiculous, and it is only one step, and from the carriage to a place of my acquaintance is the programme and only another step. For you know one never ought to take a woman to one’s own home. Under these circumstances Camille quarrels with me, so much the better! But don’t look at me as if you would like to say: 'My dear Molan, you are a monster.’”

If I had still doubted the keen sentiment inspired in me by the charming Camille, the doubt would have been swept away by the cruel emotion I experienced at this cynical speech. I could see the reality of the drama in which I was concerned as a witness; as in some duels the sight of a life very dear to him in danger makes the second paler than the duellist, Little Favier’s passionate love served Jacques as an attack upon the vanity of the blasé woman of the world who was coquettish and coldly perverse without doubt, but also elegant, envied and rich, and afterwards whom his vanity and curiosity attracted. The heart of the poor little actress which had remained naïve and romantic in spite of his disenchanting existence, her true heart—which I had felt to be so true, which had opened with such spontaneity in an hour of inward suffering—was about to be broken, torn and crushed between two prides fighting one against the other—and what prides they were!

This most ferocious and implacable of all prides, that of an almost great lady and an almost great author, both gangrened with egoism by their habitual display, was withered by their constant and detestable study of the effect produced, without which a person does not retain the world’s uncertain prestige. By frightfully certain intuition, I at once measured the depth of the abyss in which my friend of the previous evening unknown to herself was plunged. The extreme clearness of this vision prevented me answering Jacques with indignation, as he no doubt expected and was prepared to amuse himself at my simplicity. He would have chaffed me, and that would have annoyed me. He would have told me in words what his enigmatic smile expressed. “If she pleases you so there is a place for you to take at once as her consoler.” I can give myself the credit for not using that ugly expression. But I lay claim to no other merit. Is there any merit in not profaning in oneself an image which only pleases when it is tender and pure? Strange though it may seem to apply this word to a girl whom I knew to be the mistress of one of my comrades, I respected in Camille that foolish illusion by which her twenty-two years risked on a single card their precious treasure of delicate dreams, naïve tenderness and noble chimeras. I respected in her the dream which she had already made me dream.

During that conversation last evening, the inmost depths of my melancholy had trembled at the thought that had I met her a little sooner, before she gave herself to Molan, understood and pleased her, perhaps this unreasonable and touching child would have turned to me in her need to take up with another artist those ancient and ridiculed parts of muse and inspirer. What maker of beauty, however, has not sighed for the presence near him of a charming woman’s mind, of a dear and devoted face from which to drink in courage in times of lassitude, of two weak but steady hands to clasp in his own weary ones, or a faithful shoulder on which to rest his weary brow. It was enough to have associated this sigh of regret for some minutes with the name of Jacques’ mistress for the hope of a common and spiteful adventure with this poor girl not to need dismissing. But the fact of my not nourishing a dirty gallant project did not prevent my sympathy, which was already unhealthy, growing during this talk with my comrade. That is why instead of writing to Malvina the model, according to the wise plan formed a few hours before, I followed my illogical visit of the morning by one still more illogical in the afternoon, and that imprudent day terminated by a third also foolish visit. An attack of irrationality was beginning. It is not over yet as my pen trembled in my hand at recording Jacques’ brutal phrases. On the point of setting down the details of these two other episodes which finished the prologue of this private tragedy, I had to put down the pen. I had a pain in my memories, just as a person suffers from a badly-closed wound. Nevertheless, by a contradiction which I suffered without being able to explain, a charm arises from these sorrowful souvenirs, a magic and an attraction.

The second visit I paid was, as can easily be guessed, to the poor Blue Duchess herself, as I had begun to call her in my heart; and I forgot the pedantic reminiscence which had inspired Jacques Molan with this name, in making it convey the tender grace, and the fantastic melancholy of one of Watteau’s dreams which are chimerical and caressing, ideal and voluptuous. There was certainly no more difference between the sentimentalism which this pretty child had ingenuously confessed to me on the previous evening, and the practical materialism of her lover, than between the sumptuous new house in the Place Delaborde and the third floor in the modest Rue de la Barouillére where I rang about two o’clock. The faded tints of the badly painted front harmonized with the sordidness of the hall, and the glacial chill of the uncarpeted wooden staircase, the dirty stairs of which sloped towards the street. An air of shabby mediocrity extended over the old building, and the common visiting cards nailed to the doors, at which I was curious enough to look, revealed what sort of tenants dragged out their existence there. These poor houses abound in the old streets near the Faubourg Saint Germain, and as the highest rent is 1,200 francs they are the last haven open to all the waifs of humble middle-class virtue. While I listened to the bell and the sound of approaching footsteps all my impressions were moved at this evidence of sentimental analogy which touched me still more. I wished to discover in the fact that the already well-known actress continued to live here a proof that she had not lied to me when she spoke of her mother’s and her own peaceful life, an obvious sign of a total absence of vanity and an indisputable evidence of her pride. If she had ceased to be modest, she had not sold herself for luxury. She had given herself to love and adoration. Alas! I was very quickly to learn that the temptation for great Parisan elegance, too natural to a fine young creature when she has known and lost it, still composed one of the elements of the moral drama which was being enacted in her.

While these thoughts were in my mind the door opened. An old servant, very simply dressed, after some hesitation told me she would see if the ladies were at home and showed me into a little drawing-room. It was full of furniture, too full in fact. If I had raised the covers from the furniture I should have seen that the quality of the upholstery and the gilded wood betokened former opulence. A beautiful tapestry covered one of the walls. It had been necessary to double it up to adapt it to the size of the room, the ceiling of which I could almost reach with my cane. The grand piano, the great bronze clock, and the too lofty candelabra had also come from a financier’s mansion. These mute witnesses of vanished splendour told by their presence alone of the melancholy of the ruin with more eloquence than any phrases could do. Besides, I had scarcely time to meditate upon what Claude Larcher, in his evil days of pedantry, had called the psychology of this furniture before a woman of about fifty entered the drawing-room. I could see at a glance that she was Camille’s mother.

Madam Favier at an interval of a quarter of a century resembled her child with a similarity of features which became almost sad in its aging and deformation. There is something very sorrowful in finding oneself face to face with the anticipated spectre of a fine young beauty, whom one admires and is beginning to love. Still the mother’s and daughter’s expression were so different that the likeness was at once corrected. Just as Camille’s blue eyes, with their pupils in turn very clear or very dark, very animated and very languishing, revealed a passionate inequality of soul, and profound troubles, so did the peaceful and sluggish azure of Madam Favier’s eyes tell of passive serenity, resigned acceptance, and above all happiness. This woman, the widow of the stock-broker, whose life ended in a tragedy, was the image of internal peace. Seeing her as I saw her, a little fat, with the fresh colour of health in her full cheeks, and if not elegant at any rate very tasteful in a dress which was almost fashionable, it was impossible at first to imagine that this woman had endured the trials of a drama, of ruin and suicide, and that this tranquil and irreproachable dowager was simply an actress’ mother.

But we have changed all that, as my friend used to say. Did I myself look like a painter who believed in the ancient traditions, or did my comrades? Does the aspiring clubman, dressed like a tailor’s fashionplate as Jacques Molan, look any more like Henry Murger’s Bohemians? But do we not live in the days when a successful play brings in an income for years equal to the capital and revenue of a farm in Beauce, when the portrait of an American brings in 15,000, 20,000, or 30,000 francs, and when an associate of the Comédie Française draws the salary of an Ambassador before retiring with the red ribbon in his button-hole, while actresses on tour abroad are received at monarch’s receptions. The barrier of prejudices or principles which separated the artistic life from the world of society has been broken down, to the applause of the democrats and progressives? The example of Jacques and my studies have convinced me that it is on the contrary one of the worst errors of the period. The artist has always gained by being treated almost like an outcast. His natural taste for the brilliant, which is the inevitable ransom of his powers of imagination, so soon turns to vanity when it is the dupe of decorum, luxury and the praises of the smart woman in particular, which is also a flattery irresistible to his self-respect and senses! When he does not succumb to the temptation, he goes to the other excess, quite as natural to this irritable class and no less dangerous, that of revolted and misanthropic pride.

But I am falling into a great failing of mine, that of indefinite and never-ending reverie. Let us go back to that which remains the true corrective of all vices, intellectual and otherwise, “Reality.” So I was sitting facing the respectable Madam Favier, in the drawing-room with its covered up furniture, with a rather sheepish look at finding myself with the mother when I had come to see the daughter. The widow, however, soon reassured me as she entertained me with commonplace conversation suitable to her appearance and birth. I have found out since that she was the daughter of a small business man in the north, and had been married for her beauty by the romantic father of the romantic Camille after a chance meeting.

“Camille is coming directly,” she said to me. “The dressmaker is with her trying a dress on. The poor child is not very well to-day. Her profession, sir, is a very trying one, and she wants a rest already. We were wrong not to go to the seaside this year. Do you know Yport, sir? It is very pretty, and very quiet, but we have been there six summers. I like, when I go into the country, to go to a familiar place. You are so much better treated if you do, and feel more at home. When my dear husband was alive we spent two months every year in Switzerland. We always went on July 16 and came back on September 15. I have never been there since, for it would bring sad memories back to my mind. Have you come to talk to Camille about her portrait?”

“Has she spoken about it to you then? She has not forgotten?” I said.

“No, certainly not,” her mother answered, “and I was very pleased and astonished when she told me, for it is very difficult to get her to sit for her portrait. Did you think of showing Camille’s portrait at the annual exhibition of pictures? It will be an excellent thing, I think, for you, and not bad for her. We are waiting, before moving back to our old neighbourhood where we have a few friends, till Camille has signed a definite engagement. The Théâtre-Français has offered her one, but as they let her go after she had won two prizes, she has been advised to make them pay her a large salary now she is famous. I am willing for her to do so; but I tell her that the house of Moliére is to the other theatres what a great shop like the Louvre or the Bon Marché is to one belonging to a small retailer.”

I am not quite sure I am reproducing these phrases in their right order. But on looking at them I am very sure of their tenor, and more so still of the mind which inspired them, as well as the phrases which followed. Poor Madam Favier was so simple as to be sometimes almost common, and so trusting as to be almost loquacious. Her mind was a very solid and sensible one and that of a woman who had retained her good sense through her ruin. This phenomenon is rarer even than sentiment in an actress. Usually these sudden falls from the Olympus of opulence have as a result a moral bewilderment which last for the rest of life. Ruined people seem to lose with their money every faculty of adaptation to the narrow circle of activity in which their social downfall imprisons them. It is particularly so when their wealth has only been an episode between two periods of poverty.

This alternation of situations is like a phantasmagoria in which judgment is warped. To have withstood such a shock Madam Favier must have been absolutely, as her youthful smile, her fresh cheeks, and the harmonious lines of her face showed her to be, a simple creature tranquil in her positivism, and quite the opposite of this girl whose future she foresaw as she would have foreseen the future of a son who had joined the army. Her steps from the Conservatoire to the Odéon, Vaudeville and Comédie Française were fixed in this good woman’s mind with a regularity which was the more astonishing because her education had been such as to make her think of another type of destiny for a woman. How had such a revolution been accomplished in her mind? Is it necessary to explain that there are certain natures whose primordial instinct is to model themselves on circumstances, just as the instinct of others is to struggle and rebel against them? The latter case was that of the poor Blue Duchess. This essential difference between their two characters had prevented any real intimacy between the two women. They had not and could not have real intercourse. I realized this only too well when after ten minutes conversation with her mother, I saw Camille enter with a pale face and eyes red from weeping, for her trouble was so obvious, and yet her mother never even, suspected it!

“It is your turn to try on now, mother,” she said. “We will wait for you. M. la Croix has a few minutes to spare us I am sure.” But when the good lady had shut the door she said “Have you seen Jacques?”

“I called on him this morning,” I replied.

“Then you know that I am aware of everything?”

“I know you wrote to Fomberteau,” I replied evasively.

“You know, too, your friend’s answer, when I asked for an explanation of his deception? He has sent you to find out for him what impression his infamous note has produced upon me? Now, confess that is so, it will be more straightforward.”

“Why do you judge me to be like that, mademoiselle?” I said, displaying grief which she could see was sincere, for she looked at me in astonishment, while even I was surprised at my own words: “You were more just to me. You understand that sometimes silence is neither an approbation nor a complicity. It is true that Jacques did not conceal his sorry scheme nor his note from me. I did not hide from him what I thought of his harshness, and if I come here it is of my own accord, under the impulse of a sympathy which I admit I have no right to feel. We have only been friends for twenty-four hours and yet I feel that sympathy. You spoke to me with such a noble outpouring of the heart, with such touching confidence that henceforth, I thought, we cannot be strangers. I felt that you were unhappy and I came to you simply and naturally. If it was an indiscretion you have thoroughly punished me for it.”

“Forgive me,” she said in different tones with an altered look as she stretched out her little burning hand to me. “I am suffering and that makes me unjust. I, too, though I hardly know you, feel too keen a sympathy for you to doubt yours. But this note from Jacques has wounded me and he really has gone too far. He knows that I love him and he thinks he can do as he pleases with me. He is mistaken. He does not know where he is hurting me by playing with my heart in the way he is doing!”

“Do not be enraged at what is only a burst of anger in him,” I said, full of apprehension. “You wrote to Fomberteau. For the moment Jacques was wounded. He wrote most unkindly to you, but I am sure he regrets it by this time.”

“He?” she cried with a nasty laugh. “If you are saying what you think, you hardly know him. That which causes me the most pain, please understand me, is not what he has done to me, though that makes me suffer cruelly, it is what he pretends to himself to be from the idea I had of him. I put him so high, so high! I saw in him a being apart from others, some one rare, as rare as his talent! Yet I find him like the lovers of all my theatre companions, the worst of their lovers, those who have not even the courage of their infidelities and conceal them by girlish untruths, those to whom the love given to them is nothing more than vanity, a woman’s sentiment to be put in the button-hole like a flower. But come, my passion blinds me no longer. That rends me, and he, who is so intelligent, does not even suspect the nature of my suffering. Don’t you think that I guessed that creature Madam de Bonnivet invited him to supper last evening, or else to see her home, or worse still? We know what fashionable women are when they once begin. We have about us the same men as they do, and they tell us their stories. They are sometimes haughty wretches; and Jacques accepted her invitation because she has a house, horses, pictures, dresses by Worth, 50,000 franc necklaces, and 30,000 franc furs. But I, too, some day when I like, will have luxury since that is what pleases this great writer with the soul of a snob. I have only to accept Tournade as my lover, the big fellow with a face like a coachman whom you saw in my dressing-room, and I shall have a house as good as Madam Bonnivet’s barrack, diamonds, dresses by Worth, carriages and horses. I will have them, I will have them, and he shall know it. He will be the man who has turned me into a kept woman, a courtesan, and I will tell him so and shout it after him. Do you think I dare not?”

“No, you will not dare,” I replied; “even to say it raises a feeling of disgust in you.”

“No,” she replied in a dull voice, “you must not think me better than I really am. There are days when that glittering life tempts me. I have been rich, you see. Up to the age of twelve or thirteen I was surrounded by all the luxuries it was possible for a father making 100,000 francs a year on the Stock Exchange to give his only daughter. Ah well, at times I miss that luxury. The mediocrity of this drab, vulgar and commonplace existence disgusts and oppresses me. When I am waiting for a tram with a waterproof and overshoes to save a cab fare of 35 sous, I sometimes get impatient, and those tempting words, 'If you liked,’ come into my mind. Ah! when I have a soul full of happiness, when I can think that I love and am loved, that I am realizing and carrying out the romance of my youth, that Jacques clings to me as I do to him, and that I shall remain mingled in his life and work, then it is an intoxication to answer myself: 'If I liked? But I do not like.’ I smile at my beloved poverty because it is my beloved chimera. But when I have terrible evidence, as I did to-day, that I am the dupe of a mirage, that this man has no more heart than the wood of this furniture”—and she struck with her clenched fist the table upon which she was leaning while she talked to me—“then I make a different reply to the temptation. 'If I liked?’ I repeat and I reply: 'It is true, and I am very foolish not to like!’ I shall not always be so.”