He himself rang the doorbell; after a short while, the door opened; Buivres held out his hand to Honoré, who bade him a mechanical farewell, went in, suddenly felt possessed by an insane need to go out again, but found the door had closed heavily behind him; and apart from his candle waiting for him, burning impatiently at the foot of the stairs, there was no other light. He did not dare awaken the concierge to open the door for him, and he went up to his room.
2
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
– Beaumont and Fletcher*
Life had changed considerably for Honoré ever since the day when M. de Buivres had, among so many others, made certain remarks to him – remarks similar to those which Honoré himself had listened to or uttered so many times with complete indifference – but which he could on longer get out of his head, either during the daytime when he was alone, or through the long night. He had immediately asked Françoise a few questions: she loved him too much and suffered too much at his pain to dream of taking offence; she had sworn to him that she had never deceived him and never would deceive him.
When he was with her, when he was holding her little hands and saying to them, quoting Verlaine’s line:
“Oh lovely little hands that will close my eyes,”*
when he heard her saying to him, “My brother, my country, my beloved,” and her voice aroused prolonged echoes in his heart with all the sweetness of the church bells in one’s place of birth, he believed her; and even though he did not feel quite as happy as he had before, at least it did not seem to him impossible that his convalescent heart might one day rediscover happiness. But when he was far away from Françoise, and even sometimes when he was near her and noticed her eyes gleaming with a fire that he immediately imagined had been kindled elsewhere – who knows, yesterday, perhaps, and again the day after – kindled by another man; when, having yielded to the purely physical desire for another woman and recalling how many times he had so yielded and managed to lie about it to Françoise without ceasing to love her, he no longer found it absurd to suppose that she too was lying to him, that it was not even necessary for her not to love him if she were to lie to him, and that before knowing him she had thrown herself on other men with the same ardour that now consumed him – an ardour that appeared to him more terrible than the ardour that he inspired in her appeared sweet, since he saw it with the eyes of imagination that magnifies everything.
Then he tried to tell her that he had deceived her; he conducted this experiment not out of vengeance or any need to make her suffer in the same way that he did, but so that she would reciprocate by telling him the truth as well, and above all so that he would no longer sense the lie within him, and to expiate the misdeeds of his sensuality, since in order to create an object for his jealousy it seemed to him at times that it was his own lie and his own sensuality that he was projecting onto Françoise.
It was one evening, as he was taking a walk along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, that he tried to tell her that he had deceived her. He was alarmed to see her grow pale and sit down suddenly on a bench, overcome; and all the more alarmed when she pushed away, without anger and even with gentleness, in her sincere and heart-stricken despondency, the hand he was stretching out towards her. For two days he thought he had lost her or rather that he had found her again. But this involuntary, spectacular and melancholy proof of love that she had just given him was not enough for Honoré. Even if he had gained the impossible certainty that she had only ever belonged to him, the unprecedented suffering that his heart had first experienced on the night when M. de Buivres had taken him back to his house – not a similar suffering, or the memory of that suffering, but that very same suffering – would never have ceased to afflict him, even if it could have been demonstrated to him that it was without foundation. Thus it is that we still tremble on awakening at the memory of the murderer whom we have already recognized to be the illusion caused by a dream; thus it is that amputees suffer throughout their lives in the leg that they have lost.
In vain he had spent the day walking, worn himself out on horseback, on his bicycle, fencing; in vain he had met Françoise, taken her back to her home and, in the evening, gathered from her hands, her forehead and her eyes the trust and peace, as sweet as honey, with which he returned home, calmed and enriched with their sweet-smelling store; hardly was he back home than he started to worry, slipped quickly into bed so as to get off to sleep before anything happened to his happiness that, carefully embalmed in that fresh and recent tenderness only one hour old would travel through the night until the next day, intact and glorious like a prince of Egypt; but it seemed that Buivres’s words, or one of the innumerable images he had since formed in his thoughts, were on the point of appearing to his mind’s eye, and then there would be no prospect of sleep. That image had still not appeared, but he sensed it lying in wait and, stiffening his resolve against it, he would relight his candle, read and endeavour to cram his brain mercilessly full of the meaning of the sentences he was reading, not leaving a single gap, so as to prevent that dread image from having a single moment or the tiniest little place to slip in.
But all at once, there it was: it had managed to get in, and now he could not get it out again; the door of his attention that he had been holding shut with all his might, exhausting himself in the effort, had been forced open; then it had shut again, and he was going to have to spend the night with this horrible companion. So there was no doubt about it, it was definite: this night like all the others he would not get a minute’s sleep; so off he went to get the bottle of Bromidia, swallowed three spoonfuls and, certain now that he would be able to sleep, and even alarmed at the thought that he would not be able to do anything but sleep, whatever happened, he started to think about Françoise again, with panic, with despair, with hatred. He wanted to take advantage of the fact that his affair with her was not common knowledge to make bets on her virtue with other men, to throw them at her, to see if she would yield, to try to discover something, to find out everything, to hide in a bedroom (he remembered doing so for fun when he was younger) and see it all. He would not hesitate at the thought of the other men, since he would have asked them to do it seemingly as a joke – otherwise, think of the scandal and the uproar! – but in particular because of her, to see if the next day when he asked her, “You’ve never deceived me?” she would reply, “Never,” with that same loving expression. Perhaps she would confess everything, and indeed would have yielded only as a result of his stratagems. And then it would have been the salutary operation after which his love would be cured of the malady that was killing him, just as the malady caused by a parasite kills the tree (he only needed to look at himself in the mirror, lit feebly as it was by his night-time candle, to be sure). But no – the image would always come back, and he did not even try to work out how much stronger it would be than the images formed by his imagination, and with what incalculable power it would strike down on his poor head.
Then, suddenly, he thought of her, her gentleness, her tenderness, her purity, and he felt like weeping at the outrage that for a second he had dreamt of inflicting on her. Just think: the very idea of suggesting it to his party friends!
Soon he sensed the general tremor and feeling of faintness that occurs a few minutes before Bromidia sends you to sleep. Suddenly, aware of nothing, not even a dream or a sensation, occurring between his last thought and his present reflections, he said to himself, “What, haven’t I been asleep yet?” But on seeing that it was broad daylight, he realized that for over six hours the sleep of Bromidia had possessed him without him actually enjoying it.
He waited for the restless movements in his head to calm down a little, then got up and tried in vain, with the help of cold water and walking up and down, to bring back some of the usual colour to his pale figure and his drawn and weary eyes, so that Françoise would not find him too ugly. On leaving
home, he went to church, and there, bent and tired, with all the last desperate strength of his broken body that wanted to stand up and grow young again, of his sick and ageing heart that wanted to get better, of his mind, mercilessly harassed and panting and longing for peace, he prayed to God – God to whom, barely two months earlier, he had asked for the grace to love Françoise for ever – he now prayed to this God with the same strength, the same strength of that love which in bygone days, sure it was going to die, had asked to live, and which now, frightened at having to live, begged for death – prayed to God to give him the grace not to love Françoise any more, not to love her for much longer, not to love her for ever, to ensure that he might at last imagine her in the arms of another man without suffering, since he could no longer imagine her except in the arms of another man. And perhaps he would no longer imagine her thus when he could imagine her without suffering.
Then he remembered how often he had been afraid he would not love her for ever, how deeply he had engraved in his memory, so that nothing would ever efface them from it, her cheeks always proffered to his lips, her forehead, her little hands, her grave eyes, her adored features. And suddenly, realizing they were awoken from their oh-so-sweet calm by the desire for another man, he tried not to think about them and saw all the more obstinately her proffered cheeks, her forehead, her little hands – oh! her little hands! those too! – her grave eyes, her detested features.
From this day onwards, at first horrified at the thought of entering on such a path, he never left Françoise, kept a close eye on her everyday life, accompanied her when she went out paying visits, following her when she went shopping, waiting a whole hour at shop doors for her. If he had been able to imagine that he was thus preventing her from deceiving him in the material sense, he would doubtless have abandoned the attempt, afraid lest she view him with horror; but she allowed him to do all this with so much joy at being able to have him near her the whole time that this joy little by little spread to him, and slowly filled him with a trust and certainty that no material proof could have given him, like those people in prey to a hallucination who are sometimes cured by making them touch the armchair or the living person occupying the place which they thought was occupied by a phantom, and thus chasing the phantom away from the real world by virtue of the very reality that will no longer afford it any room.
In this way Honoré, by shedding light on all of Françoise’s daytime activities and mentally filling them with definite occupations, managed to suppress those gaps and those shadows in which the evil spirits of jealousy and doubt that assailed him every evening came to lie in ambush. He could sleep again, his sufferings were more infrequent and shorter, and if he then summoned her over, a few moments of her presence could calm him down for an entire night.
3
The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.
– Emerson*
The salon of Madame Seaune, née the Princess of Galaise-Orlandes, of whom we have spoken in the first part of this narrative under her first name, Françoise, is even today one of the most sought-after salons in Paris. In a society where the title of Duchess would not have set her apart from a host of other women, her bourgeois name is as distinctive as a beauty spot on a face, and in exchange for the title she lost when she married M. Seaune, she has acquired the prestige of having voluntarily renounced such a lofty glory for a well-born imagination, white peacocks, black swans, white violets and captive queens.
Mme Seaune has held many receptions this year and last year, but her salon was closed for the three preceding years – those which followed the death of Honoré de Tenvres.
The friends of Honoré, who had rejoiced to see him little by little recover his erstwhile healthy looks and his gaiety, now constantly met him in the company of Madame Seaune and attributed his new lease of life to this relationship that they imagined to be a recent development.
It was barely two months after Honoré’s complete recovery that there occurred the accident in the avenue in the Bois de Boulogne, in which he had both his legs broken under a runaway horse.
The accident happened on the first Tuesday in May; peritonitis set in on the Sunday. Honoré received the sacraments on Monday and passed away on the same Monday at six o’clock in the evening. But from the Tuesday, the day of the accident, to the Sunday evening, he was the only one to think that he was dying.
On the Tuesday, at around six o’clock, after his wounds had first been dressed, he asked to be left alone, but requested that he be shown the calling cards of the people who had already come to enquire how he was.
That very morning, more than eight hours previously, he had been walking down the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne. He had breathed his joy in and out, in the air with its fresh breeze and its sunlight, he had recognized that joy deep in the eyes of the women who admiringly followed his rapid handsome figure, momentarily lost sight of it as his capricious gaiety took another turn, then effortlessly regained it as the galloping and steaming horses overtook it, and tasted it in his youthful and avid mouth watering in the sweet air – the same profound joy that made life so beautiful that morning, the life of the sun, the shade, the sky, the stones, the easterly wind and the trees, trees as majestic as men standing erect, and as restful as women asleep in their glittering immobility.
One moment he had looked to see what time it was, retraced his steps, and then… then it had happened. In a second, the horse that he had not even seen had broken both his legs. It did not seem to him in the slightest that this second needed to have turned out necessarily the way it did. At that same second he could easily have been a little farther on, or a little less far, or the horse could have been diverted from its course, or, if it had been raining, he would have gone home, or, if he had not looked to see what time it was, he would not have retraced his steps and would have carried on as far as the waterfall. And yet the thing that might just as well not have happened (so much so that he could pretend for a moment that it was merely a dream) was something real, and was now part of his life, without him being able to change a thing about it by mere force of will. He had two broken legs and a bruised stomach. Oh, the accident in itself was not so very extraordinary; he remembered that, not a week ago, during dinner at the home of Dr S***, they had been talking about C***, who had been wounded in the same way by a runaway horse. When they asked how the patient was doing, the Doctor had replied, “He’s in a bad way.” Honoré had persisted, asked questions about the wound, and the Doctor had replied, in a self-important, pedantic and melancholy tone of voice, “But it’s not just the wound; you have to look at the whole picture; his sons are a worry to him; he doesn’t have the same high position he used to have; the attacks of the newspapers have dealt him quite a blow. I only wish I was wrong, but he’s in a damn awful state.” Having said those words, as the Doctor felt that he, on the contrary, was in an excellent state, healthier, cleverer and more admired than ever, as Honoré knew that Françoise loved him more and more deeply, that the world had accepted their relationship and bowed down no less to their happiness than to the greatness of character of Françoise; and as finally the wife of Dr S***, shaken at the thought of the wretched end and the loneliness of C***, forbade, as a measure of hygiene, both herself and her children from thinking of sad events or even going to funerals, everyone repeated one last time, “Poor old C***, he’s in a bad way”, while swallowing a last glass of champagne and sensing, from the pleasure they derived from drinking it, that “they were in an excellent way”.
But this was not at all the same thing. Honoré now felt submerged by the thought of his unhappy fate, as he had often been by that of the fate of others, but now he could no longer find any firm footing within himself. He felt the ground of good health slipping away from under his feet – that ground on which grow our highest resolutions and our mos
t graceful joys, just as oaks and violets have their roots in the black damp earth; and at each step he took within himself, he stumbled. When the Doctor had been talking about C*** at that dinner he was now remembering, he had said, “Already before his accident, ever since the newspapers had started attacking him, I’d met C*** and thought how sallow he looked, with hollow eyes and a really lousy appearance!” And the Doctor had drawn his hand, so celebrated for its skill and beauty, across his full, pink face, through his long, fine, well-kept beard, and everyone had taken pleasure in imagining their own healthy appearance in the same way that a property owner dwells with satisfaction on the sight of his tenant, still young, tranquil and rich. Now when Honoré looked at himself in the mirror he was alarmed at his “sallow face” and his “lousy appearance”. And immediately the thought that the Doctor would say for him the same words as for C***, with the same indifference, terrified him. The very same people who would come to him full of pity would turn away quickly enough, as if from an object that was dangerous for them; they would end up obeying the protests of their own good health, their desire for happiness and life. Then his thoughts returned to Françoise and, his shoulders bent and his head drooping in spite of itself, as if God’s commandment had been hovering there over him, he realized with a boundless and submissive sadness that he would have to renounce her. He felt the sensation of the humility of his body, bowing down in childlike weakness, with all the resignation of a patient, under that immense sorrow, and he felt pity for himself just as, across the intervening distance of his whole life, he had often seen himself as still a small child who aroused his own sympathy, and he felt like weeping.
He heard a knock at the door. The calling cards he had requested were brought in. He knew full well that people would come for news of him, since he was quite aware that his accident was serious, but even so he had not expected there to be so many cards, and he was alarmed to see that so many people had come, people who did not know him well and who would have made the effort only if he was to be married or buried. There was a whole heap of cards and the concierge was carrying it carefully so it would not fall off the big tray: the cards were practically overflowing. But all of a sudden, once he had these cards all next to him, the heap appeared such a little thing, really quite ridiculously little, much littler than the chair or the fireplace. And he was even more alarmed that it was so little, and he felt so alone that to distract himself he started feverishly to read the names: one card, two cards, three cards, ah! He shuddered, and looked closer: “Count François de Gouvres”. And yet he might well have expected M. de Gouvres to come and enquire after him, but he had not thought of him for a long while, and suddenly the words of Buivres came back to him – “this evening there was someone there who’s had a bit of a fling with her: François de Gouvres; he says she’s pretty hot-blooded; but it appears she hasn’t got much of a figure, and he decided he didn’t want to continue” – and, experiencing all the old suffering rising momentarily from the depths of his consciousness to the surface, he said to himself, “Now I’m only too glad if I am dying. Imagine not dying, being stuck in this situation, maybe for years, and her not with me for part of the day and all of the night – seeing her at another man’s! And now it wouldn’t be my sickly imagination causing me to see her like that, it would be a certain fact. How could she still love me? An amputee!” Suddenly he stopped. “And if I die, after me?”
Pleasures and Days Page 19
