He answered sadly: ‘It’s no use screaming. He’s abducted her, he’s dishonoured her. The best thing is to give her to him. If we go about it right, no one will know about this business.’
Overcome by an appalling feeling, she repeated: ‘Never! He’ll never have Suzanne! I’ll never consent!’
Walter muttered despondently: ‘But he’s got her. It’s done. And he’ll keep her and hide her for as long as we refuse to give in. So, to avoid scandal, we must give in immediately.’
His wife, tortured by a pain she could not acknowledge, said again: ‘No, no, I’ll never consent!’
Losing patience, he continued: ‘But there’s nothing to discuss. We must agree. Ah, the rogue, how he deceived us!… All the same, he’s strong. We could have found someone of much better social standing, but nobody more intelligent or with better prospects. He’s a man with a future. He’ll be a deputy, and a minister.’
Mme Walter declared, with a wild determination: ‘I’ll never let him marry Suzanne… Do you hear me… never!’
In the end he grew angry, and being a practical man, began to defend Bel-Ami.
‘Oh, do be quiet… I keep telling you we must, we absolutely must. And who knows? Perhaps we won’t regret it. With people of that kind, you never know what may happen. You saw how he destroyed that idiot Laroche-Mathieu with three articles, and how he did it in a dignified way, which, given his position as husband, was horribly difficult. Well, we’ll see. The fact remains we’re caught. We can’t get out of it.’
She wanted to scream, to roll about on the ground, to tear out her hair. She declared once more, in a furious voice: ‘He won’t get her… I… won’t… have… it!’
Walter rose, picked up his lamp, and continued: ‘Goodness me, you are stupid, like all women. You never act unless it’s out of passion. You don’t know how to yield to circumstances… you’re all stupid! I’m telling you that he’ll marry her… he must.’
He went out, shuffling along in his slippers. A comic ghost in a nightshirt, he crossed the broad corridor of the vast mansion and noiselessly returned to his bedroom.
Mme Walter remained standing, torn apart by an unendurable pain. Moreover she did not yet fully understand. She was simply suffering. Then it seemed to her that she could not stay where she was, motionless, until daybreak. She felt in herself a violent need to escape, to run, to get away, to seek aid, to be helped.
She tried to think whom she could turn to for help. Who was there? She could think of no one! A priest! Yes, a priest! She would throw herself at his feet, tell him everything, confess her sin and her despair. He would understand that that wretch could not marry Suzanne, and he would prevent it.
She needed a priest, straight away! But where could she find one? Where could she go? Yet she could not remain like this. Then, like a vision, the serene image of Jesus walking on the waves appeared before her eyes. She saw him just the way she saw him when she looked at the painting. So, he was summoning her. He was telling her: ‘Come to me. Come and kneel at my feet. I will comfort you, and I will reveal to you what you should do.’
Taking her candle, she left, and went down to the conservatory. The painting of Christ was at the far end, in a small room closed off by a glass-panelled door, so that the humidity of the soil would not damage the picture. It made a kind of chapel, in a forest of strange trees.
When Mme Walter walked into the winter garden, which she had never seen other than full of light, she was startled by its total darkness. The atmosphere was heavy with the oppressive breath of the massive plants from tropical countries. And, since the doors were no longer open, the air in that strange grove, enclosed within its dome of glass, was hard to breathe, making her feel dizzy and a little drunk, causing pleasure and pain, and producing in her body a vague sensation of enervating voluptuousness, and of death.
The poor woman walked softly, disturbed by the shadows in which, by her candle’s wavering light, could be seen outrageous plants shaped like monsters or weirdly deformed human beings.
Suddenly, she caught sight of the figure of Christ. Opening the door that separated him from her, she fell to her knees.
At first she prayed to him frantically, stammering out words of love, ardent, desperate appeals. Then, when her passionate outburst subsided, she raised her eyes to him, and was overwhelmed with anguish. By the flickering light of the single candle illuminating him dimly from below, he looked so very like Bel-Ami that it was no longer God, but her lover who was gazing at her. Those were his eyes, his forehead, the expression on his face, his cold, proud air!
She stammered: ‘Jesus!… Jesus!… Jesus!’ And the word ‘Georges’ came to her lips. Suddenly, she thought that at this very moment, perhaps, Georges was making love to her daughter. He was alone with her somewhere, in a bedroom. Georges, with Suzanne!
She kept saying: ‘Jesus!… Jesus!’ But she was thinking of them… of her daughter and her lover! They were alone, in a bedroom… and it was nighttime. She could see them. She could see them so clearly that they appeared before her, instead of the painting. They were smiling at one another, they were kissing. The room was dark, the bed turned back. She rose to approach them, to take her daughter by the hair and tear her from this embrace. She was going to seize her by the throat and strangle her, her daughter whom she loathed, her daughter who was giving herself to this man. She was touching her… and her hands encountered the painting. She was clutching at the feet of Christ.
She gave a great cry, and fell on her back. Her candle overturned, and went out.
What happened after that? She dreamt for a long time of strange, frightening things. Georges and Suzanne passed constantly before her eyes, entwined with Jesus, who was blessing their odious love.
She was vaguely aware that she was not in her own room. She wanted to get to her feet and leave, but could not. She was overcome by a kind of inertia which fettered her limbs and left only her mind alert, although this was haunted and tormented by frightful, unreal, fanciful images, lost in a noxious dream, the strange, sometimes deadly dream produced in the human brain by the soporific plants of hot climates, with their bizarre shapes and heavy perfumes.
In the morning Mme Walter was found lying unconscious, almost suffocating, in front of Jesus Walking on the Water. She was so ill that they feared for her life. Not until the following day did she regain the full use of her faculties. Then she began to weep.
To explain Suzanne’s disappearance, the servants were told that she had been sent, at very short notice, to a convent. And M. Walter replied to a long letter from Du Roy, granting him the hand of his daughter.
Bel-Ami had posted this letter just as he was leaving Paris, for he had prepared it in advance the evening of his departure. In it he stated, in respectful terms, that he had loved the young girl for a long time, that this had never been planned, but that when she came to him of her own free will to say: ‘I will be your wife,’ he considered himself justified in keeping her, even in hiding her, until he had received a reply from her parents, whose legal agreement was of less importance to him than the wishes of his fiancee. He asked M. Walter to reply poste restante, since a friend would forward the letter to him.
When he had obtained what he wanted, he brought Suzanne back to Paris and returned her to her parents’ home, refraining from appearing there himself for some time.
They had spent six days on the banks of the Seine, at La Roche-Guyon.*
Never had the young girl enjoyed herself so much. She’d played at being a country maid. Since he was passing her off as his sister, they lived in an intimacy that was free and chaste, a kind of amorous comradeship. He judged it wise not to take advantage of her. The morning after their arrival, she bought a peasant girl’s linen and clothing, and settled down to fishing with rod and line, her head covered by an enormous straw hat decorated with wild flowers. She thought the area delightful. There was an old tower, and an old castle where some splendid tapestries were on display.
Geor
ges, wearing a smock he bought ready-made at a local store, took Suzanne out, either for walks on the river banks, or in a boat. Trembling, they kissed one another all the time, she innocently, he on the point of succumbing. But he knew how to control himself; and when he said to her: ‘Tomorrow we’re returning to Paris, your father’s granted me your hand…’ she murmured naïvely: ‘So soon? I was so enjoying being your wife!’
CHAPTER 10
The small apartment in the Rue de Constantinople was in darkness, for Georges Du Roy and Clotilde de Marelle, after meeting at the door, had entered immediately and she had said to him, without giving him time to open the shutters:
‘So, you’re marrying Suzanne Walter?’
He quietly admitted it, and added:
‘Didn’t you know that?’
Standing before him, furious, indignant, she went on: ‘You’re marrying Suzanne Walter! It’s too much! Too much! For the last three months you’ve been stringing me along so I wouldn’t find out. Everybody knows, except me. It was my husband who told me!’
Du Roy began to grin, but he was, all the same, somewhat embarrassed; he put his hat on a corner of the mantelpiece and sat down in an armchair.
She looked him straight in the face and said, in a low, angry voice: ‘You’ve been working on this ever since you left your wife, and you very kindly kept me on as your mistress, to tide you over? What a bastard you are!’
He asked: ‘Why so? I had a wife who was deceiving me. I caught her at it, I’ve obtained a divorce, and I’m marrying someone else. What could be simpler?’
Trembling, she murmured: ‘Oh, how cunning you are, how dangerous!’
He began smiling again: ‘What of it? Half-wits and fools are invariably taken in!’
But, still following her train of thought, she said: ‘I really ought to have guessed what you were up to right at the start. But no, I couldn’t believe you’d be such a shit as that.’
With an air of dignity, he said: ‘Please be more careful of your language.’
His righteous indignation infuriated her: ‘What! Now you want me to watch my language when I speak to you! You’ve treated me vilely ever since I’ve known you, and you expect me not to tell you so? You deceive everyone, you exploit everyone, you take your pleasure and pick up your money anywhere, and you want me to treat you like a gentleman?’
He stood up, and said with trembling lips: ‘Shut up, or I’ll throw you out.’
She stuttered: ‘Throw me out… throw me out… You’d throw me out of here… you… you?’
She could no longer speak, so choked was she with anger, and suddenly, as though the floodgates of her rage had been breached, she exploded:
‘Throw me out? So you’ve forgotten that I’m the one who’s been paying for it, this flat, ever since the beginning! Oh, yes, you did take it on from time to time. But who was it that rented it?… Me… Who was it that kept it?… Me… And now you want to throw me out of here… So just shut up, you good-for-nothing! D’you think I don’t know that you robbed Madeleine of half Vaudrec’s legacy? D’you think I don’t know that you slept with Suzanne so as to force her to marry you…’
Seizing her by the shoulders, he was shaking her with both his hands: ‘Don’t say a word about her! I forbid you to!’
She cried: ‘You slept with her, I know you did.’
He would have tolerated just about anything, but this lie was too much. The home truths that she had screamed into his face just now had sent shivers of rage right through him, but this lie about the young girl who was to be his wife aroused, in the palm of his hand, a desperate craving to hit Clotilde.
He said again: ‘Shut up… be careful… shut up…’ And he was shaking her the way you shake a branch to make the fruit fall off.
Her hair dishevelled, her mouth gaping open, her eyes demented, she bawled: ‘You slept with her…’
Letting go of her, he gave her such a slap in the face that she fell against the wall. But she turned towards him and, raising herself up on her wrists, shouted once again: ‘You slept with her!’
He threw himself upon her and, holding her beneath him, hit her as if he were striking a man.
She suddenly fell silent, then began moaning under the blows. She was no longer moving. She had hidden her face in the corner between the floor and the wall, and kept uttering plaintive cries.
He stopped hitting her, and stood up. Then, after walking round the room a bit to regain his equanimity, he had an idea, went into the bedroom, filled the basin with cold water, and dipped his head into it. Next he washed his hands, and, while carefully drying his fingers, came back to see what she was doing.
She had not moved. She was lying stretched out on the floor, crying quietly.
He asked: ‘How much longer are you going to go on snivelling?’
She did not reply. So then he remained standing in the middle of the room, a little embarrassed, a little ashamed, in the presence of this body lying there in front of him.
Abruptly making up his mind, he took his hat from the mantelpiece: ‘Goodbye. Give the key to the concierge when you’re ready. I’m not going to wait about at your convenience.’
He walked out, closed the door, went into the porter’s office and said to him: ‘Madame is still here. She’ll be leaving soon. Tell the proprietor that I’m giving notice for the 1st of October. Today’s the 16th of August, so I’m within my rights.’
And off he went at a great pace, for he had urgent business to complete in connection with the final purchases for the bride’s wedding gift.
The wedding was fixed for the 20th of October,* after the start of the new parliamentary session. It was to be solemnized in the Church of the Madeleine. There had been a lot of gossip about it without anyone knowing the precise truth. All sorts of stories were going around. It was rumoured that an abduction had taken place, but nothing was known for certain.
According to the servants, Mme Walter, who no longer spoke to her future son-in-law, had made herself ill with rage the evening this marriage had been decided upon, after having had her daughter taken to a convent, at midnight.
She had been at death’s door when she was found. She would certainly never recover her health. She looked like an old woman now; her hair was turning completely grey; and she had thrown herself into religion, taking communion every Sunday.
Early in September, La Vie française announced that the Baron Du Roy de Cantel was to be its chief editor, with M. Walter keeping the title of Director. A host of well-known reporters, gossip writers, political correspondents, and art and drama critics, were then appointed, lured away by money from the great newspapers, the powerful, established papers.
Veteran journalists, sober, respectable journalists, no longer shrugged their shoulders when they spoke of La Vie française. Its rapid and complete success had wiped out the disdain which serious writers had felt for this newspaper when it began.
The marriage of its chief editor was what you could call a Parisian event, for Georges Du Roy and the Walters had excited considerable curiosity for some time. All those whose names featured in the gossip columns were determined to be present.
This event took place on a bright autumn day.
By eight in the morning, all the workmen of the Madeleine were busy laying a broad red carpet on the steps leading down from the entrance to this church which overlooks the Rue Royale. Their activity brought passers-by to a halt, and proclaimed to the inhabitants of the city that an important ceremony was about to occur.
Clerks on their way to the office, little working girls, delivery boys, all stopped, gazed and thought vaguely about rich people who spent so much money in order to mate.
By about ten, sightseers began to collect. They would stand about for a few moments, hoping that perhaps something would begin immediately, and then leave.
At eleven, some detachments of police arrived, and almost immediately began to move the crowd on, for bystanders were gathering into groups all the time.
> Soon the first guests appeared, those who wanted to be well placed so that they could see everything. They took the aisle seats, along the central nave.
Little by little others came, women who moved with a rustling of fabric, a rustling of silk, and stern-looking men, almost all of them bald, who, in that setting, walked with a worldly decorum even more than usually solemn.
The church was slowly filling up. A stream of sunlight, entering through the immense open door, lit up the front rows of guests. In the choir, which was rather dark, the altar, covered in candles, glowed with a yellow light that seemed humble and wan by contrast with the patch of radiance of the great door.
People were spotting one another, and beckoning to one another, and gathering into groups. The literary fraternity, less respectful than the society figures, conversed in audible voices. They were studying the women.
Norbert de Varenne, on the look-out for a friend, caught sight of Jacques Rival near the middle of the rows of chairs, and joined him.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘It’s the devil that wins the day!’
The other, who was not envious, replied: ‘Good luck to him. He’s made for life.’ And they began identifying the faces they could see.
Rival enquired: ‘Do you know what’s become of his wife?’
The poet smiled: ‘Yes and no. She’s living very quietly, I’ve been told, in Montmartre. But… and there is a but… for some time I’ve been reading, in La Plume, political articles that are terribly similar to those of Forestier and Du Roy. They’re by a Jean Le Dol, a young man, good-looking, intelligent, who’s of the same breed as our friend Georges, and who has made the acquaintance of his former wife. From which I’ve deduced that she likes beginners, and will always like them. Incidentally, she’s rich. It wasn’t for nothing that Vaudrec and Laroche-Mathieu were regular visitors to the house.’
Rival declared: ‘She’s not bad, that little Madeleine. Very shrewd, very cunning! Between the sheets, she must be charming. But, tell me, how can Du Roy be getting married in church after being divorced?’
Bel-Ami (Oxford World's Classics) Page 40
