The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  He had come to raise her from penury, from some crabbed post in a crabbed house. In full armor, ready to slay the dragon—and now the damsel had broken all the rules. No chains, no sobs, no beseeching hands. He was the man who appears at a formal soiree under the impression it was to be a fancy dress ball.

  “He knows you are not married?”

  “I pass as a widow.”

  His next question was clumsy; but he had lost all tact.

  “I believe his wife is dead?”

  “She is dead. But not in his heart.”

  “He has not remarried?”

  “He shares this house with his brother.” Then she added the name of another person who lived there, as if to imply that Charles’s scarcely concealed fears were, under this evidence of population, groundless. But the name she added was the one most calculated to make any respectable Victorian of the late 1860s stiffen with disapproval. The horror evoked by his poetry had been publicly expressed by John Morley, one of those worthies born to be spokesmen (i.e., empty facades) for their age. Charles remembered the quintessential phrase of his condemnation: “the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs.” And the master of the house himself! Had he not heard that he took opium? A vision of some orgiastic menage a quatre—a cinq if one counted the girl who had shown him up—rose in his mind. But there was nothing orgiastic about Sarah’s appearance; to advance the poet as a reference even argued a certain innocence; and what should the famous lecturer and critic glimpsed through the door, a man of somewhat exaggerated ideas, certainly, but widely respected and admired, be doing in such a den of iniquity?

  I am overemphasizing the worse, that is the time-serving, Morleyish half of Charles’s mind; his better self, that self that once before had enabled him to see immediately through the malice of Lyme to her real nature, fought hard to dismiss his suspicions.

  He began to explain himself in a quiet voice; with another voice in his mind that cursed his formality, that barrier in him that could not tell of the countless lonely days, lonely nights, her spirit beside him, over him, before him… tears, and he did not know how to say tears. He told her of what had happened that night in Exeter. Of his decision; of Sam’s gross betrayal.

  He had hoped she might turn. But she remained staring, her face hidden from him, down into the greenery below. Somewhere there, children played. He fell silent, then moved close behind her.

  “What I say means nothing to you?”

  “It means very much to me. So much I…”

  He said gently, “I beg you to continue.”

  “I am at a loss for words.”

  And she moved away, as if she could not look at him when close. Only when she was beside the easel did she venture to do so.

  She murmured, “I do not know what to say.”

  Yet she said it without emotion, without any of the dawning gratitude he so desperately sought; with no more, in cruel truth, than a baffled simplicity.

  “You told me you loved me. You gave me the greatest proof a woman can that… that what possessed us was no ordinary degree of mutual sympathy and attraction.”

  “I do not deny that.”

  There was a flash of hurt resentment in his eyes. She looked down before them. Silence flowed back into the room, and now Charles turned to the window.

  “But you have found newer and more pressing affections.”

  “I did not think ever to see you again.”

  “That does not answer my question.”

  “I have forbidden myself to regret the impossible.”

  “That still does not—”

  “Mr. Smithson, I am not his mistress. If you knew him, if you knew the tragedy of his private life… you could not for a moment be so…” But she fell silent. He had gone too far; and now he stood with rapped knuckles and red cheeks. Silence again; and then she said evenly, “I have found new affections. But they are not of the kind you suggest.”

  “Then I don’t know how I am to interpret your very evident embarrassment at seeing you again.” She said nothing.

  “Though I can readily imagine you now have… friends who are far more interesting and amusing than I could ever pretend to be.” But he added quickly, “You force me to express myself in a way that I abhor.” Still she said nothing. He turned on her with a bitter small smile. “I see how it is. It is I who have become the misanthropist.”

  That honesty did better for him. She gave him a quick look, one not without concern. She hesitated, then came to a decision.

  “I did not mean to make you so. I meant to do what was best. I had abused your trust, your generosity, I, yes, I had thrown myself at you, forced myself upon you, knowing very well that you had other obligations. A madness was in me at that time. I did not see it clearly till that day in Exeter. The worst you thought of me then was nothing but the truth.” She paused, he waited. “I have since seen artists destroy work that might to the amateur seem perfectly good. I remonstrated once. I was told that if an artist is not his own sternest judge he is not fit to be an artist. I believe that is right. I believe I was right to destroy what had begun between us. There was a falsehood in it, a—”

  “I was not to blame for that,”

  “No, you were not to blame.” She paused, then went on in a gentler tone. “Mr. Smithson, I remarked a phrase of Mr. Ruskin’s recently. He wrote of an inconsistency of conception. He meant that the natural had been adulterated by the artificial, the pure by the impure. I think that is what happened two years ago.” She said in a lower voice, “And I know but too well which part I contributed.”

  He had a reawoken sense of that strange assumption of intellectual equality in her. He saw, too, what had always been dissonant between them: the formality of his language—seen at its worst in the love letter she had never received—and the directness of hers. Two languages, betraying on the one side a hollowness, a foolish constraint—but she had just said it, an artificiality of conception—and on the other a substance and purity of thought and judgment; the difference between a simple colophon, say, and some page decorated by Noel Humphreys, all scrollwork, elaboration, rococo horror of void. That was the true inconsistency between them, though her kindness—or her anxiety to be rid of him—tried to conceal it.

  “May I pursue the metaphor? Cannot what you call the natural and pure part of the conception be redeemed—be taken up again?”

  “I fear not.”

  But she would not look at him as she said that.

  “I was four thousand miles from here when the news that you had been found came to me. That was a month ago. I have not passed an hour since then without thinking of this conversation. You… you cannot answer me with observations, however apposite, on art.”

  “They were intended to apply to life as well.”

  “Then what you are saying is that you never loved me.”

  “I could not say that.”

  She had turned from him. He went behind her again.

  “But you must say that! You must say, ‘I was totally evil, I never saw in him other than an instrument I could use, a destruction I could encompass. For now I don’t care that he still loves me, that in all his travels he has not seen a woman to compare with me, that he is a ghost, a shadow, a half-being for as long as he remains separated from me.’” She had bowed her head. He lowered his voice. “You must say, ‘I do not care that his crime was to have shown a few hours’ indecision, I don’t care that he has expiated it by sacrificing his good name, his…’ not that that matters, I would sacrifice everything I possess a hundred times again if I could but know… my dearest Sarah, I…”

  He had brought himself perilously near tears. He reached his hand tentatively towards her shoulder, touched it; but no sooner touched it than some imperceptible stiffening of her stance made him let it fall.

  “There is another.”

  “Yes. There is another.”

  He threw her averted face an outraged look, took a deep breath, then strode towards the door.

&n
bsp; “I beg you. There is something else I must say.”

  “You have said the one thing that matters.”

  “The other is not what you think!”

  Her tone was so new, so intense, that he arrested his movement towards his hat. He glanced back at her. He saw a split being: the old, accusing Sarah and one who begged him to listen. He stared at the ground.

  “There is another in the sense that you mean. He is… an artist I have met here. He wishes to marry me. I admire him, I respect him both as man and as artist. But I shall never marry him. If I were forced this moment to choose between Mr…. between him and yourself, you would not leave this house the unhappier. I beg you to believe that.” She had come a little towards him, her eyes on his, at their most direct; and he had to believe her. He looked down again. “The rival you both share is myself. I do not wish to marry. I do not wish to marry because… first, because of my past, which habituated me to loneliness. I had always thought that I hated it. I now live in a world where loneliness is most easy to avoid. And I have found that I treasure it. I do not want to share my life. I wish to be what I am, not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent, must expect me to become in marriage.”

  “And your second reason?”

  “My second reason is my present. I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find myself happy where I am situated now. I have varied and congenial work—work so pleasant that I no longer think of it as such. I am admitted to the daily conversation of genius. Such men have their faults. Their vices. But they are not those the world chooses to imagine. The persons I have met here have let me see a community of honorable endeavor, of noble purpose, I had not till now known existed in this world.” She turned away towards the easel. “Mr. Smithson, I am happy, I am at last arrived, or so it seems to me, where I belong. I say that most humbly. I have no genius myself, I have no more than the capacity to aid genius in very small and humble ways. You may think I have been very fortunate. No one knows it better than myself. But I believe I owe a debt to my good fortune. I am not to seek it elsewhere. I am to see it as precarious, as a thing of which I must not allow myself to be bereft.” She paused again, then faced him. “You may think what you will of me, but I cannot wish my life other than it is at the moment. And not even when I am besought by a man I esteem, who touches me more than I show, from whom I do not deserve such a faithful generosity of affection.” She lowered her eyes. “And whom I beg to comprehend me.”

  There had been several points where Charles would have liked to interrupt this credo. Its contentions seemed all heresy to him; yet deep inside him his admiration for the heretic grew. She was like no other; more than ever like no other. He saw London, her new life, had subtly altered her; had refined her vocabulary and accent, had articulated intuition, had deepened her clarity of insight; had now anchored her, where before had been a far less secure mooring, to her basic conception of life and her role in it. Her bright clothes had misled him at first. But he began to perceive they were no more than a factor of her new self-knowledge and self-possession; she no longer needed an outward uniform. He saw it; yet would not see it. He came back a little way into the center of the room.

  “But you cannot reject the purpose for which woman was brought into creation. And for what? I say nothing against Mr.…” he gestured at the painting on the easel “… and his circle. But you cannot place serving them above the natural law.” He pressed his advantage. “I too have changed. I have learned much of myself, of what was previously false in me. I make no conditions. All that Miss Sarah Woodruff is, Mrs. Charles Smithson may continue to be. I would not ban you your new world or your continuing pleasure in it. I offer no more than an enlargement of your present happiness.”

  She went to the window, and he advanced to the easel, his eyes on her. She half turned.

  “You do not understand. It is not your fault. You are very kind. But I am not to be understood.”

  “You forget you have said that to me before. I think you make it a matter of pride.”

  “I meant that I am not to be understood even by myself. And I can’t tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends on my not understanding.”

  Charles smiled, in spite of himself. “This is absurdity. You refuse to entertain my proposal because I might bring you to understand yourself.”

  “I refuse, as I refused the other gentleman, because you cannot understand that to me it is not an absurdity.”

  She had her back turned again; and he began to see a glimmer of hope, for she seemed to show, as she picked at something on the white transom before her, some of the telltale embarrassment of a willful child.

  “You shan’t escape there. You may reserve to yourself all the mystery you want. It shall remain sacrosanct to me.”

  “It is not you I fear. It is your love for me. I know only too well that nothing remains sacrosanct there.”

  He felt like someone denied a fortune by some trivial phrase in a legal document; the victim of a conquest of irrational law over rational intent. But she would not submit to reason; to sentiment she might lie more open. He hesitated, then went closer.

  “Have you thought much of me in my absence?”

  She looked at him then; a look that was almost dry, as if she had foreseen this new line of attack, and almost welcomed it. She turned away after a moment, and stared at the roofs of the houses across the gardens.

  “I thought much of you to begin with. I thought much of you some six months later, when I first saw one of the notices you had had put in—”

  “Then you did know!”

  But she went implacably on. “And which obliged me to change my lodgings and my name. I made inquiries. I knew then, but not before, that you had not married Miss Freeman.”

  He stood both frozen and incredulous for five long seconds; and then she threw him a little glance round. He thought he saw a faint exultation in it, a having always had this trump card ready—and worse, of having waited, to produce it, to see the full extent of his own hand. She moved quietly away, and there was more horror in the quietness, the apparent indifference, than in the movement. He followed her with his eyes. And perhaps he did at last begin to grasp her mystery. Some terrible perversion of human sexual destiny had begun; he was no more than a footsoldier, a pawn in a far vaster battle; and like all battles it was not about love, but about possession and territory. He saw deeper: it was not that she hated men, not that she materially despised him more than other men, but that her maneuvers were simply a part of her armory, mere instruments to a greater end. He saw deeper still: that her supposed present happiness was another lie. In her central being she suffered still, in the same old way; and that was the mystery she was truly and finally afraid he might discover.

  There was silence. “Then you have not only ruined my life. You have taken pleasure in doing so.”

  “I knew nothing but unhappiness could come from such a meeting as this.”

  “I think you lie. I think you reveled in the thought of my misery. And I think it was you who sent that letter to my solicitor.” She looked him a sharp denial, but he met her with a cold grimace. “You forget I already know, to my cost, what an accomplished actress you can be when it suits your purpose. I can guess why I am now summoned to be given the coup de grace. You have a new victim. I may slake your insatiable and unwomanly hatred of my sex one last time… and now I may be dismissed.”

  “You misjudge me.”

  But she said it far too calmly, as if she remained proof to all his accusations; even, deep in herself, perversely savored them. He gave a bitter shake of the head.

  “No. It is as I say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting it.” She stood now staring at him, as if against her will, but hypnotized, the defiant criminal awaiting sentence. He pronounced it. “A day will come when you shall be called to account for what you have done to me. And if there is justice in heaven—your punishment shall outlast eternity.”

  Mel
odramatic words; yet words sometimes matter less than the depth of feeling behind them—and these came out of Charles’s whole being and despair. What cried out behind them was not melodrama, but tragedy. For a long moment she continued to stare at him; something of the terrible outrage in his soul was reflected in her eyes. With an acute abruptness she lowered her head.

  He hesitated one last second; his face was like the poised-crumbling wall of a dam, so vast was the weight of anathema pressing to roar down. But as suddenly as she had looked guilty, he ground his jaws shut, turned on his heel and marched towards the door.

  Gathering her skirt in one hand, she ran after him. He spun round at the sound, she stood lost a moment. But before he could move on she had stepped swiftly past him to the door. He found his exit blocked.

  “I cannot let you go believing that.”

  Her breast rose, as if she were out of breath; her eyes on his, as if she put all reliance on stopping him in their directness. But when he made an angry gesture of his hand, she spoke.

  “There is a lady in this house who knows me, who understands me better than anyone else in the world. She wishes to see you. I beg you to let her do so. She will explain… my real nature far better than I can myself. She will explain that my conduct towards you is less blameworthy than you suppose.”

  His eyes blazed upon hers; as if he would now let that dam break. He made a visibly difficult effort to control himself; to lose the flames, regain the ice; and succeeded.

  “I am astounded that you should think a stranger to me could extenuate your behavior. And now—”

  “She is waiting. She knows you are here.”

  “I do not care if it is the Queen herself. I will not see her.”

  “I shall not be present.”