Singular Amours

by Edmond Thiaudière

  Madame de Framée and Madame d’Ingrande were walking a few paces ahead of us. I made Madame d’Ingrande turn round by tugging lightly on her arm. Then, when we were next to the ladies, I threw my arms around Madame d’Ingrande’s neck, saying to Monsieur d’Ingrande: “Do likewise to my mother.”

  How naïve and confident I was then!

  Throughout the time of our engagement—which lasted four or five months—Monsieur d’Ingrande’s character always remained the same: noble, good and generous. At least, he appeared so to me. I was proud to love him. I did not believe that it was possible to encounter a man more worthy of love.

  My mother had gained all my affection, not only because she lent her hand to a marriage of which I had dreamed, but also because she began to show affection toward me, and God knows that she had not spoiled me with affection.

  Less than eighteen years old when I married, my heart was too honest and pure to suspect anything in the three individuals surrounding me—my mother, Madame d’Ingrande and her son—except that they desired my happiness. My extreme youth maintained me in that illusion marvelously. To suppose evil, especially certain complicated infamies, it is necessary already to have observed and seen a great deal.

  My mother and my husband treated me a little like a child, and I had felt several times that the household was governed almost entirely in accordance with my mother’s will, even though she did not live with us, rarely in accordance with my husband’s and never in accordance with mine—which, to tell the truth, was not very definite.

  Naturally mild and submissive, I adapted well enough to the humble situation that was made for me, and I was so far from seeing it as a real humiliation that I joked about it with my husband

  “A sort of military hierarchy rules here,” I said to him. “My mother is the captain; you, Léon, are her lieutenant, and your mother and I are simple soldiers.”

  “Madame de Framée is an intelligent woman,” he replied, “and we don’t do badly in listening to her.”

  Sometimes they teased one another in a fashion that denoted a perfect understanding and the greatest familiarity. Between my husband and me that would have appeared charming; between my mother and him it irritated me a little, but without my seeing anything absolutely reprehensible about it. They seemed to be taking me as a referee. That was the role that my mother ought to have played.

  I strove to laugh when they laughed; I certainly did not do so wholeheartedly. Those scenes not only happened before me but also before strangers. A lady who had witnessed some said to me one day, with a malicious smile that chilled me:

  “How lucky you are, dear child. Your pretty maman and your husband offer a very touching spectacle. I’ve never seen a son-in-law and mother-in-law get on so well. One would think that they were made for one another. How rare that is! In that fashion you can’t fear that your household will be troubled. Oh, you ought to be very happy!”

  I was so happy that when that accursed woman had gone, I began to weep, to weep all the tears I had. Léon incessantly had my mother’s name on his lips, Madame de Framée this and Madame de Framée that. One day, there was even her forename, which was even stranger, and when talking to me, instead of calling me Julie he sometimes called me Hortense. I had understood perfectly, but I made a semblance of not understanding, or at least not attaching any importance to the lapse.

  A horrible doubt came to my soul, however. My love for Léon received a cruel blow, and I was jealous of my mother. Every time my husband went out I was no longer alive. Where is he? What is he doing?

  The state of pregnancy in which I then found myself must certainly have contributed to aggravating my nerves. That state served as an ostensible motive for all my ill humor and sadness.

  It was in vain that I did not allow the anxiety and jealousy that obsessed me to show; I did not succeed any better in keeping my husband beside me than if I had revealed them. He neglected me a great deal and I no longer recognized in him the man of the first months of our marriage.

  My mother-in-law lived with us. By contrast with what happens more frequently, there was a perfect harmony between her and me, and I can say that her amiable society was my consolation on many occasions.

  Fundamentally, I am sure that she had for me all the sympathy that she showed and that it was painful for her to see her son so different from what I would have wished. I even believe that she often made him observations and remonstrations. But with regard to me, although I carefully refrained from accusing him, she had the art of making him appear as white as snow, and it was all the easier to convince me because I desired to be convinced.

  My mother talked about going to Vichy for her health. Léon, who sometimes complained of gastralgia, wanted to go with her. I was in my seventh month; all travel was forbidden to me. I wanted to accompany him anyway. He opposed it. I hoped then that he would stay. He did not. His mother intervened in vain.

  As for my mother, she said “that she would not get involved in our affairs.”

  The combined departure of my mother and my husband threw me into a profound affliction. In addition, it was to bring us misfortune. Twenty days later, one afternoon, my mother-in-law was brought home dead. She had collapsed in the street under the influence of a cerebral congestion. The abruptness of that event, for which nothing had prepared me, and the idea that I had to face it alone, caused me a crisis from which I nearly died.

  When my husband and my mother arrived, summoned by telegram, they found two cadavers, that on Madame d’Ingrande and that of a poor little creature that had been killed in my womb.

  For myself, I was not entirely dead, but it would not have taken much. I was delirious, I did not recognize them.

  As soon as I recovered my senses, I represented to myself the sad road that I had followed since my marriage. As if the latest ordeals had suddenly matured me, as if they had shown me things in a clearer light, I judged with horror, thanks to certain memories that became precise in my mind for the first time, that my husband had been my mother’s lover before my marriage and had remained so afterwards.

  But why, then, had Monsieur d’Ingrande married me? I did not understand it then; later, I did. First of all, I was rich, and if, on the one hand, my fortune had tempted Monsieur d’Ingrande, on the other, my mother must have found it more convenient to render the accounts of her guardianship to her lover than to a stranger. Secondly, I was pretty enough for him to desire me without loving me. Finally, for a wretchedly libertine nature, there could have been I know not what crapulous satisfaction in deceiving a daughter with her mother.

  To see those two individuals at my beside, to be cared for by them, what a torture! At every instant my heart urged me to sit up in my bed of suffering and cry to them: “But it’s infamous! But I’m the stake in an execrable game! But you’re committing a permanent crime!”

  I would have liked to succumb to my malady, and I don’t know why I got better. It was by a miracle, so many thoughts assailed me, adding to the illness, should have rendered to incurable.

  The illness disappeared, however; the thoughts remained. My husband and my mother became odious to me. I required a proof to crush them under the shame of their relationship. I waited for it; I sought it.

  An anonymous letter that revealed everything to me arrived conveniently—not that I was able to consider it as proof, but it was because of it that I obtained the most conclusive of all, a confession.

  My first impulse was to confront my husband and interrogate him proudly, that letter in hand. My second was less noble, I confess, but at least it was more ingenious. I set my face straight; I hid my emotion with extreme care, and, to put it simply, with the skill appropriate to a woman.

  “My dear friend,” I said to my husband, handing him the letter, “someone who thinks that they are giving me great pain tells me that you have been and still are my mother’s lover. They don’t suspect that I’ve known it for a long time.”

  Those last words, spoken with a slight sm
ile, did not astonish my husband; they stupefied him. He stood before me, his gaze fixed and bewildered, without saying anything.

  I went on: “Between ourselves, I’m not annoyed by that letter, because it serves as a pretext for me to talk to you about something of which you were wrong to make a mystery.”

  “Julie,” he murmured, “What is this comedy? I don’t understand.”

  “Get away!” I said, laughing, and gently taking him by the beard in order to kiss him. “Big baby! You understand marvelously. I can see what’s stopping you. You’re afraid that I’ll hold it against you. I’m not a woman as vulgar as that, thank God.”

  “Julie, are you mad?”

  “Truly, no, I’m not mad; but on the other hand, admit it, you’re quite disconcerted. You’d have liked it if, like a petty bourgeois wife, I was red with anger. Why get annoyed? Any other mistress than my mother, I wouldn’t have forgiven you, but my mother…!

  “It’s not possible, you’re making fun of me,” he said—and then, squeezing my wrist convulsively, he added: “Or you have infamies to be forgiven yourself.”

  “Let’s be reasonable,” I said, with a sang-froid of which I truly did not think myself capable. “You knew my mother before knowing me. She was and still is a very seductive, very coquettish woman. There’s nothing strange in your becoming amorous; nothing strange in her yielding to you. Then, as you wanted to marry, you found what you needed in me; nothing strange, either, in that you married me, that you and my mother made your arrangements to render me happy without harming your own happiness. As for me, I repeat, that appears quite natural.”

  “Well, since you take that tone, you don’t merit being spared. Yes, I was your mother’s lover before our marriage, and I still am. I had a few scruples about that; you’ve removed them; thank you. There’s more indignity on your part in not suffering from the fact that your mother and I entertain such relations than ours in entertaining them. You’re judged by that: you’re worth less than others.”

  “It’s you who are judged!” I cried, becoming truly myself again. “You’re nothing but a wretch. Not content with committing one of the most ignoble acts that a man can commit, you’ve dreamed of making it a torture for me, and when I retain my cries of agony, when I stifle them under a feigned indifference, you don’t like it any longer, you lack something. Don’t worry, it’s there. Your ferocity has nothing to regret. For as long as I live, there’ll be a bloody wound in my heart.”

  With that, my emotion burst forth, all the more forcefully for having been held back. I fell into an armchair and dissolved in tears.

  He threw himself at my knees.

  “Julie, Julie, forgive me,” he said. “I’m greatly culpable, I know, but I love you, I assure you that I love you...”

  “I don’t believe any of it,” I replied. “Absolutely none. But if you love me, so much the worse for you—you’ll be unhappy.”

  “Why did you set a trap for me?” he murmured. “Why did you set a trap? If I hadn’t confessed…for, after all, you didn’t know for sure. There would still have been good days for us. I’ve said to your mother: ‘Julie is an angel, I want to be entirely hers...’”

  As he said that he tried to take my hands and kiss them.

  “Leave me alone,” I cried, sharply. “Don’t add the insult of your caresses to your other insults. Henceforth we’ll live as if we were strangers to one another, and don’t imagine that I’m speaking under the empire of an anger that will pass. I’m full of sang-froid; I’m very resolute. It’s no longer a child that you’re dealing with, it’s a woman. And you know that when a woman sets out to resist something, her resistance is insurmountable.

  In fact, from that day on, whatever means my husband tried to get back into my good graces, he could not do it. Tenderness, please, even tears—for he wept—were all futile.

  He had begun to love me when I had made him sense that his sins would not be forgiven; and the rigor with which I kept my promise was to exasperate his amour fatally and render it malevolent. So that man, although well brought up, was brought by rage to treat me in the harshest and most brutal manner. That was what I wanted. Several times I attempted to separate myself from him amicably. He used his authority to prevent me from doing so. Finally, the separation was imposed on him by our judge. I thought myself liberated from him. I was mistaken. He did not cease to pursue me, for two years, with his letters and his person.

  *

  In vain I had searched for a residence in a quarter very different from his; in vain a summoned from La Puisaye an old friend of my father’s, an honorable artisan, Baptiste, in order for him to serve as my protector. In vain I took the greatest care to vary the times when I went out. Either Monsieur d’Ingrande came to my home—without Baptiste letting him in—or he followed me

  I learned that he had broken with my mother, as I had myself, and in his letters, and in the few words he succeeded in saying to me in person, he tried to weigh upon her all the responsibility for what he called “our misfortune.”

  One day he said to me: “To be as insensible as you are to my repentance and the memory of your former love for me, you must have a lover. If I knew him, I would kill him. As I don’t know him, I’ll take it out on you.”

  “I have nothing for which to reproach myself,” I told him, “and I’m not afraid of you.”

  “I hope you have nothing for which to reproach yourself, as you say,” he went on, “for the separation has not taken my name away from you and I don’t intend that it should be compromised by you.”

  “It has already been compromised sufficiently by you,” I replied, coldly, “and I wish to heaven that I no longer bore it.”

  “Do you wish my death, by chance?”

  “No, Monsieur, I will not do you that honor; I only want one thing, and that is no longer to encounter you incessantly every time I step out into the street.”

  “Adieu, Madame,” he said. “You will only encounter me once more.”

  The dry and incisive tone with which he accompanied those words, the emphasis that he gave them, and something precipitate about his retreat, caused me a spontaneous fear, And when I tried to analyze the words themselves: “You will only encounter me once more,” it did not seem to me that the song was any more reassuring than the tune.

  What would that final encounter produce? Since he announced it to me so solemnly, was it not because it would have, according to him, a very particular decisive character? But what? I lost myself I conjectures, and as usual, not one of those I formed was verified. Convinced, however, that I could expect nothing good, I no longer went out.

  I had been living as a recluse for three weeks when I received the following letter from my husband:

  Madame,

  I am leaving this evening on a voyage whose duration I cannot foresee. I would have liked to see you beforehand and to attempt once again to reconcile myself with you, but I see that any further step would be futile. You have determination, Madame, and you have my compliments for that. Personally, I am weak. The idea that I shall never see you again has entered into my mind and caused me an extreme disturbance. That I should disappear from your horizon once and for all is, on the contrary, of a nature to fill your mind with delight. That is exactly why I am in haste to communicate it to you. Will you say thereafter that I am wicked?

  Marquis d’Ingrande.

  Nothing tests human weakness like uncertainty and the contradiction of our sentiments. We do not know, three-quarters of the time, where our heart will take us. Will our justice prevail or our pity? Will we have implacability or indulgence? Such is the embarrassment. There is only one thing that is certain, and that is that whatever we do, we will be unhappy.

  Every time I encountered my husband it was a torture for me. It seems, therefore, that I ought to have applauded his going away. Not at all. I wept. And yet I did not feel drawn to reunite with him, and intimacy was impossible henceforth.

  Why was I weeping, then? Because there were sti
ll secret attachments between us; because beneath my present rancor there as my love of old.

  Alas, I did not take long to discover, and in the most horrible manner, the true sentiments that Monsieur d’Ingrande ought to have inspired in me.

  His letter was a trap, an ambush.

  A week later, at dusk. I was going out in order to go and dine in town. I had not taken ten steps along the sidewalk when someone touched me on the shoulder. I turned round.

  To recognize my husband, to feel a frightful pain in the face, to want to cry out but not to be able to do so, was the work of an instant. It was blinding.

  I rushed back inside. At the sight of my fear, and doubtless also of the state of my face, Baptiste uttered loud cries. I tried to tell him what had happened to me; it was impossible to articulate a word. I looked at myself in a mirror, and was horrorstruck.

  Disfigured and mute! Oh, great God!

  Although that first impression of my distress is already a year old, I cannot talk about it without my heart failing. I seem to experience again.

  Why did the wretch not kill me? I thought. It is infamous to let me live in these conditions. He had wanted to render me hideous by throwing his burning liquid in my face, at the same time he had taken away from me the use of speech, and I did not even have the consolation of lamenting.

  Baptiste had gone to find a physician, Dr.***, who found me in bed with an intense fever. I wrote down for him what had happened. He did not think that I had become mute by the effect of the seizure alone; he told me that it was a case of new mutism, that I would doubtless recover the power of speech in a short while, when the crisis was over, that I did not have to worry about that. As for the wounds on my face, he added that they were much slighter than I thought, that they would disappear entirely or only lave an insignificant trace. In sum, he did his best to restore my morale. I was not duped by those obliging—or, to put it better, skillful—procedures. I was very well aware that my beauty was lost forever, and if I hoped for anything, it was only not to remain mute forever.