This sort of behaviour soon earned me a name for shallowness, sarcastic wit and malice. My bitter words were taken as proofs of a spiteful disposition, my jokes as attacks on all the most respectable things. The people I had unwisely poked fun at found it convenient to identify themselves with the principles they accused me of throwing into doubt. Because I had unwittingly made them laugh at each other’s expense they all combined against me. It was just as though by pointing out their funny little ways I had betrayed their confidence, or as if by exhibiting themselves to me as they really were they had extracted from me a promise of silence. I was not aware of having subscribed to any such agreement, which would have been too binding. They had enjoyed indulging in unbridled self-revelation and I had enjoyed watching them at it and describing what I saw; what they now called a betrayal seemed to me quite a harmless and legitimate compensation for what I had had to put up with.
I am not seeking to make excuses: self-justification is the facile and frivolous resort of the inexperienced, and I have given it up long ago. I simply mean to say (and this is for the benefit of others, not myself, for I am now safe from the attacks of society) that mankind, as it has been moulded by self-interest, affectation, vanity, and fear, takes a great deal of getting used to. A young man’s astonishment when he beholds the artificial and highly-wrought thing called society is a sign of a natural heart rather than of a spiteful mind. Not, of course, that society is in any danger; it presses down so heavily upon us and its imperceptible influence is so strong that it soon moulds us into the universal pattern. And then we are no longer surprised, unless it be at our own former surprise, and we feel quite at home in our new character, just as we eventually breathe quite freely in a stuffy, crowded theatre, whereas when we first came in we found the greatest difficulty in breathing at all.
The few who escape this general fate lock their secret disagreement in their hearts: they can see that most ridiculous mannerisms contain incipient vices, and they give up joking about them because contempt has taken the place of amusement, and contempt is silent.
And so vague misgivings about my character began to spread through this limited society. Nobody could point to any reprehensible act of mine, nobody could even deny me credit for acts apparently springing from generosity or devotion to duty, but it was said that I was an immoral and unreliable person. These two epithets are happy inventions calculated to suggest things we are ignorant of, and leave people to guess what we do not know.
Chapter Two
LISTLESS, unobservant, bored as I was, I never noticed the impression I was making, and I divided my time between studies which were frequently interrupted, plans I failed to carry out, and amusements which scarcely interested me at all. And then an apparently quite trivial event led to a radical change in my outlook.
For some time a young man with whom I was fairly intimate had been paying attention to one of the less vapid women in our circle, and he had chosen me as a disinterested party in whom to confide his aspirations. After a long campaign he succeeded in winning her love, and as he had not hidden his sorrows and rebuffs from me he felt obliged to tell me about his triumphs. His demonstrations of joy knew no bounds. The sight of such happiness made me regret not having tried such an experience myself, for until then I had had no affair with a woman which could possibly have flattered my self-esteem, and a new future seemed to unfold before my eyes and a fresh need stir into life in my heart. Of course there was a great deal of vanity in it, but it was not merely vanity, and perhaps there was less of it than I believed myself. Man’s emotions are so confused and tangled, they are made up of countless impressions unrecognized by the observer, and language, always too crude and generalized, can point them out but never really define them.
In my father’s home I had adopted a somewhat immoral attitude towards women. My father was a strict observer of outward appearances, but he quite often indulged in loose talk about love-affairs. He looked upon them, if not as legitimate amusements, at any rate as excusable ones, and in his view marriage alone was a serious matter. His principle was that a young man must carefully avoid committing what is called a ‘folly’, that is to say embarking on a permanent relationship with anybody not fully his equal in wealth, birth and the obvious social advantages. But apart from that, so long as marriage was not contemplated, there was no harm in taking any woman and then dropping her. I had seen him smile, almost with approval, at this parody of the well-known saying: It does them so little harm and gives us so much pleasure!
It is not sufficiently realized what a deep impression sayings of this kind make upon the very young and the extent to which, at an age when all their opinions are still unformed and fluid, children are amazed to see strict rules that have been laid down for them contradicted by jokes enjoyed by all. Such rules cease to be for them anything more than empty phrases which their parents see fit to repeat in order to satisfy their own consciences, whereas the jokes seem to contain the true secret of life.
In my state of vague emotional torment I decided that I wanted to be loved, and looked about me. But I saw nobody who inspired love in me or looked likely to feel any. I studied my own heart and tastes and could not discover any definite preferences. While I was in the throes of this internal debate I made the acquaintance of Count P—, a man of forty whose family was connected with mine. He invited me to go and see him. Ill-fated visit! Living in his house was his mistress, a Polish woman noted for her beauty, though she was past her first youth. In spite of her anomalous position this woman had more than once proved the superiority of her character. She came of an illustrious family which had been ruined during the troubles in Poland; her father had been banished and her mother had sought refuge in France, taking her daughter with her, and there, after her death, she had left her alone in the world. Count P— had fallen in love with her. I have never known how this liaison came about, but when I first saw Ellenore it was long established and so to speak hallowed by time. Was it that her plight was inevitable or was it the inexperience of youth that had thrown her into a way of life repugnant alike to her upbringing, habits and the pride that was one of the most remarkable traits of her character? What I do know and what everybody knew is that when Count P—’s fortune had been reduced to next to nothing and his personal freedom jeopardized, Ellenore had given him such proofs of her loyalty, had repulsed the most brilliant offers with such scorn, had shared his poverty and dangers with so much zeal and even joy, that the most fastidiously censorious could not help doing justice to the purity of her motives and unselfishness of her behaviour. It was thanks to her energy, courage and good sense, and the sacrifices of all kinds that she had borne uncomplainingly that her lover had been able to recover part of his property. They had come to D— to attend to a lawsuit which might restore the whole of the Count’s former wealth, and expected to stay there about two years.
Ellenore was no more than ordinarily intelligent, but her ideas were sound, and her speech, though always simple, was sometimes striking because of the high-minded nobility of the sentiments she expressed. She had many prejudices, but they were all directly opposed to her own interests. Because of the very irregularity of her own life according to generally accepted tenets, she set great store by correctness of behaviour. She was deeply religious because religion sternly condemned her way of life. In conversation she strongly discouraged what to other women might have seemed harmless jokes, because she was always afraid that owing to her position people might think themselves free to make uncalled-for remarks to her. She would have preferred to receive in her house none but men of the highest rank and most irreproachable lives because those women with whom she shuddered to be compared usually surround themselves with mixed company and merely choose amusing friends, having resigned themselves to the loss of public respect. In a word, Ellenore was continually fighting against her destiny. Every one of her words and deeds was, so to speak, a protest against the class to which she found herself relegated, and as she felt that the fac
ts of the case were stronger than she was and that whatever she tried to do could not alter the position in any way, she was very unhappy. The two children she had had by the Count were being brought up very strictly, and at times you might have said that in the passionate rather than loving care she lavished on them she was expressing a secret revolt, and that they were almost unwanted. When anybody made some well-intentioned remark to her about how the children were growing, how clever they promised to be, or what sort of career they ought to take up, she visibly paled at the thought that some day she would have to tell them about their birth. But if there were the slightest danger, or if she were away for a single hour, she came back to them with an anxiety in which you could see a kind of remorse and a desire to give them happiness by caresses in which she found no pleasure herself. This contrast between her real sentiments and the place she occupied in society had made her emotionally unstable. Often she would be pensive and silent, but at times she would pour forth torrents of words. As she was haunted by one particular obsession, she was never quite self-possessed even during the most general conversation. But for that very reason there was something impetuous and unexpected in her manner that made her more attractive than she would have been by nature. In her, strangeness of situation made up for lack of new ideas. People watched her with the mingled curiosity and interest inspired by a magnificent tempest.
Coming into my consciousness just when my heart was longing for affection and my vanity needed success, Ellenore seemed a conquest worthy of me. For her part she found enjoyment in the company of a man different from any she had so far met. Her circle consisted of a few friends or relations of her lover and their wives, who had been forced by the Count’s prestige to acknowledge his mistress. The husbands were no more provided with feelings than with ideas, and the wives only differed from their husbands because there was something more restless and active about their dullness, since they lacked that placidity of mind which derives from having regular occupation and business to attend to. My lighter, more amusing, and varied conversation, my peculiar blend of melancholy and gaiety, apathy and interest, enthusiasm and mockery, came as a surprise to Ellenore and appealed to her. She spoke several languages, imperfectly I admit, but always fluently and sometimes with elegance. Her ideas seemed to emerge all the more pleasing, fresh, and novel because they had to fight their way through such obstacles, for foreign tongues, by removing stock expressions which make our ideas seem either commonplace or affected, give them new life. We read English poets together and went for walks. I often called on her in the morning and again in the evening, and I discussed all sorts of things with her.
I thought I was a cool impartial observer exploring her mind and character, but every word she uttered seemed to me clothed in ineffable grace. My desire to please her gave me a new interest in life and enlivened my existence in a quite unaccustomed way. I attributed this almost magical effect to her charm, and I would have enjoyed it even more fully had I not given certain hostages to my own vanity. This vanity stood as a third party between Ellenore and me. I considered myself in honour bound to make as quickly as possible for the goal I had set myself, and because of this I was not wholeheartedly giving myself up to my impressions. I was impatient to declare myself, for it seemed to me that I had only to speak in order to succeed. I did not think I was in love with Ellenore, but already I could not endure the thought of not pleasing her. She was continually in my thoughts: I made countless plans and invented countless ways of winning her, with that callow fatuity which is so confident of success because it has never attempted anything.
And yet I was checked by an invincible shyness. All my fine speeches died on my lips or ended up quite differently from what I had intended. Within me a battle was raging and I was furious with myself.
Accordingly I looked round for some rationalization which would enable me to emerge from this struggle with my self-esteem intact. I persuaded myself that nothing should be rushed, that Ellenore was all too unprepared for the declaration I contemplated making, and that it would be wiser to wait a little longer. Nearly always, so as to live at peace with ourselves, we disguise our own impotence and weakness as calculation and policy; it is our way of placating that half of our being which is in a sense a spectator of the other.
This state of affairs dragged on. Each day I settled on the morrow as the final date for an unequivocal declaration, and each morrow went by like the day before. As soon as I left Ellenore my diffidence vanished and at once I took up my clever plans and subtle schemes again, but scarcely was I back by her side before I found myself nervous and trembling once more. Anyone who could have read my heart while I was away from her would have taken me for a cold and heartless seducer, but if he could have seen me with her he would have recognized in me the inexperienced, tongue-tied and passionate lover. Either conclusion would have been equally wrong, for there is never any real consistency in mankind, and hardly anybody is wholly sincere or wholly deceitful.
Convinced by these repeated experiences that I should never find the courage to speak to Ellenore, I made up my mind to write. The Count was away. My long drawn out battle against my own character, the irritation I felt at not having been able to overcome it, and my doubts about my chances of success all combined to tinge my letter with an emotional colour scarcely distinguishable from love. And indeed, warmed up as I was by my own rhetoric, by the time I had finished writing I really felt some of the passion I had been at such pains to express.
Ellenore read into my letter what it was natural to read, the passing infatuation of a youngster ten years her junior whose heart was opening to hitherto unknown emotions and who was more deserving of compassion than of anger. Her answer was kind, full of affectionate advice, and offered her true friendship, but she made it clear that she could not see me again before the Count’s return.
I was stunned. Inflamed by this setback, my imagination took possession of my whole life. Suddenly I found myself racked by the torments of love which but an hour before I had been simulating with such self-congratulation. I rushed to Ellenore’s house only to be told that she was out. I wrote again imploring her to see me for the last time, describing my despair in heartrending terms, and the sinister projects her cruel verdict had put into my mind. For the greater part of that day I vainly waited for an answer, and I could only calm my unspeakable suffering by repeatedly promising myself that next day I would brave every difficulty, seek her out, and speak to her. That evening I received a few words from her, and they were kind. I thought I could detect a hint of sadness and regret, but she stood by her resolve and said it was unshakeable. Next day I again presented myself at her house. She had left for a place in the country and the servants did not know the address. They could not even send on letters.
For a long time I stood there motionless at her door, unable to think of any further possibility of finding her. I was amazed by the intensity of my own suffering, recollecting the times when I had told myself that I was only out for a conquest, that this was just a campaign which I could call off without any trouble. I had no conception then of the violent pain which was implacably tearing my heart asunder. Several days went by in this way. I could neither study nor find distraction in amusement, but ceaselessly walked to and fro past her door. I wandered about the town as though in the hope of meeting her round each corner. One morning, while I was aimlessly walking about in this way, trying to drive away my distress by fatigue, I saw Count P—’s carriage bringing him back from his travels. He recognized me and got out. After a few commonplaces I mentioned Ellenore’s sudden departure, trying to hide my anxiety. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘one of her friends who lives a few miles away has had some trouble or other, and Ellenore thought her comforting presence would be a help. She went off without consulting me. She is the slave of her emotions, and her heart is always so restless that she finds something akin to peace in devotion to others. But I need her here too badly, and I shall write to her. She will certainly be back in a few d
ays’ time.’
This reassured me and my distress grew perceptibly less.
For the first time since Ellenore’s departure I could breathe freely. She did not come back as soon as the Count had hoped, but I had taken up my normal routine again and the anguish I had suffered was beginning to fade away when a month later M. de P— sent a message saying that Ellenore was due back that evening. As he attached great importance to maintaining her in a social position in keeping with her character but from which her situation seemed to preclude her, he had invited to supper several women relations and friends who had consented to see her.
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