Paul Bourget

“ Nothing has had any further existence for me—nothing but yourself; no," she added with a fixed look, "neither good nor evil, nor duty, nor remembrance. But can you understand that—you who think, as all men do, that it is a crime to love when one is not free?"
"I have ceased to know," replied Hubert, bending towards her to raise her, "except that you are to me the noblest and dearest of women."
"No, let me remain at your feet, like your little slave," she rejoined, with an expression of ecstacy; "but is it truly true? Ah! swear to me that you will never speak ill to yourself of this hour." ”

“ She did not know that Theresa's first care was just to lull all the young man's scruples of conscience by leading him insensibly from timid tenderness to burning passion. Caught in the mesh of this sweet snare, Hubert had literally never judged his life for the past five months, and nature had become his lover's accomplice. We easily repent of our pleasures, but it is difficult to have remorse for happiness, and the youth was happy with such an absolute felicity as cannot even see the sufferings that it causes. ”

“ All men accustomed to feel through their imaginations are well acquainted with that unique description of melancholy which is inflicted by too complete a likeness between a mother and her daughter, when the mother is fifty years old and the daughter twenty-five, and the one happens thus to exhibit the looked-for spectre of the old age of the other. How fruitful in bitterness for a lover is such a vision of the inevitable withering reserved for the beauty that he loves! ”

“ But why had she had such a violent fit of sobbing in his very arms? She was often melancholy in her voluptuousness. The intoxications of love usually ended with her in sad emotion. But how far removed was this frenzy of despair from her habitual, dreamy languor! Hubert had been almost frightened at it, and then she had answered him:
"It was so long since I had tasted your kisses! They are so sweet to me that they pain me. But it is a dear pain," she had added, drawing him to her heart and cradling him in her arms. ”

“ He had passed through the first crisis of his grief, a crisis after which a man ceases to die from despair, because he has really reached the deepest depth of sorrow. Then he had recovered that momentary calm which follows upon prodigious deperditions of nervous energy, and had been able to think. It was then that he had been seized with anxiety respecting Madame de Sauve—an anxiety which was devoid of tenderness, for at this moment, after the assault of grief which he had just sustained, his soul was dried up, his inward lethargy was absolute, all capacity for feeling was gone. ”

“ But it is none the less true that I love you more than ever."
"Well!" replied Hubert, "this love will be the only vengeance that I wish to exact from you. Know then that you have caused this man whom you love to endure a martyrdom such as may scarcely be survived; you have rent his heart, you have been his tormentor, the tormentor of every hour and every minute. There is nothing more within me but a wound, and it is you, you who have opened it. I have ceased to believe anything, hope for anything, love anything, and you are the cause. ”

“ With her, too, days had succeeded to days, but while the young man, a prey to a metamorphosis of soul provoked by the most unlooked-for and tragic of deceptions, suffered these rapid burning days to slip away as he passed from one extremity of the universe of feeling to the other, she, the guilty one, the vanquished one, was absorbed in a single thought. Herein like all women who love, she would have given her blood-drops, one after another, to cure the sorrow that she had caused to her lover. ”

“ The apartment was scented with the exhalations from the flowers, the cups and vases of which she used herself to trim, and she alternately dreaded and desired the entry of Hubert. Would he forgive her? Would he repel her? And finally she had to leave this refuge of her last hope, and she departed, her veil drawn down, her soul flooded by the same sadness that she used formerly to feel when Hubert's kisses were still fresh on her lips, at once comforted and terrified by this thought:
"When shall I see him again? Will it be to-morrow?" ”

“ She had gone so far in her idolatry of Hubert as to worship Madame Liauran, although she well knew that she was hated by her. She worshipped her for having brought up this son in such an atmosphere of pure and shrinking sensibility. She worshipped her for having kept him for her during the years of adolescence and youth, so delicate, so graceful, so tender, so much her own, so absolutely her own in the past, the present, and the future. For there was loftiness, almost folly, in her pride. ”

“ Ah! when she thought now of those two days at Folkestone she could scarcely believe that they had been real, and that she had had the courage to survive them. She remembered that she had gone with Hubert to the terminus in spite of every consideration of prudence; she had seen him disappear in the direction of London, leaning out of the carriage window to watch her the longer; she had re-entered the rooms which they had both occupied, before herself taking train for Dover, and there she had spent two hours in the grievous loneliness of a soul overwhelmed with simultaneous despair and felicity. ”

“ He loved her, in fact, as though she were dead; but who does not know that is the most indestructible and frantic tenderness? When irrevocable separation has not primarily resulted in the killing of love, it exalts it on the contrary in a strange fashion. Impossible to embrace, so present and so far away, the dim shape of the wished-for phantom hovers before our gaze with the beauty that life will never wither more, and our whole soul goes out sadly and passionately to meet it. ”

“ The fault committed is an idea, a shadow, a chimera. The love felt is a fact, a reality. Thus Theresa had entirely emerged from the period of moral depression, the extreme limit of which had been marked by her confession. Certainly, she did not regret the latter, as so many other women would have done in like circumstances; but it was her longing, her hope, her wish that it should not have marked the end of her happiness, for, after all, she loved and was loved.
Nevertheless, her longing did not blind her to such a degree as to make her forget what she knew of her lover's character. ”

“ To preserve the ideal within us until death at last releases us from the dangerous slavery to others and to ourselves, we must early habituate ourselves to regard the universe of moral beauty as the opium-smoker regards the dreams of his intoxication. Their charm consists in the fact that they are dreams, and consequently correspond to nothing that is real.
Hubert, quite on the contrary, was so accustomed to move his intellect in one piece that he was unable to doubt or to believe by halves. If Theresa had lied to him why should not everyone do the same? ”

“ Yes, child, at twenty-six a woman is almost at the end of her youth, and you have so many years before you! But never, never will you be loved as I love you, and never will you forget me, never, never." And at other times: "You will marry," she would say; "she lives, she breathes, and yet she is not known to me, she who is to take you from me, and who will sleep every night upon your heart as I did at Folkestone. Ah! must it indeed be that I have met you so late, and that I cannot bind you to my kisses." ”

“ Answer me frankly—You have a mistress?"
"No," replied Hubert, with a fresh rush of purple across his cheeks. "I have no mistress."
"If it is neither the Queen of Spades nor the Queen of Hearts," said the General, who did not doubt his godson's veracity for a moment—he knew him to be incapable of a falsehood—"will you do me the honour of telling me what has become of the five hundred francs a month, a colonel's pay, which your mother gives you for pocket-money?"
"Ah! godfather," returned the young man, visibly relieved; "you do not know the requirements of a life in society. ”

“ And this will last for a long time, a long time, and every morning and every evening you will have to say to yourself: 'He whom I love is in his throes, and I am killing him.'"
And so he went on relieving his soul of the sorrow of so many days with all the cruel words with which his anger supplied him for the woman who was listening to him with downcast eyelids, disconcerted face, and frightful paleness, in the shadow wherein resounded the voice that was terrible in her ears. ”

“ As though seized with intoxication he went up to her, took her in his arms, and gave her a kiss. She gave way, and both fell upon the shadowed divan together, clasping each other in one of those wild and silent embraces wherein dissolves all animosity, just or unjust, but all dignity as well. These are moments when neither man nor woman utters the words, "I love you," as though feeling that such frenzies have, in fact, nothing in common with love. ”

“ Nevertheless, Theresa, who had married when very young, had had only two intrigues up to the time of her chance meeting with Hubert, and these two amours had caused her such disgust that she had sworn that she would never again fall into the folly of taking a lover. The good resolutions of a woman who has fallen, and who has suffered for her fault, are like the firm intentions of a gambler who has lost two thousand pounds, or a drunkard who has told his secrets during his intoxication. ”

“ This sleep of remorse left her free to absorb herself in the remembrance of Hubert.
She now lived in a condition of deadly anxiety concerning him, and was dominated by a steady longing to see him again, not that she hoped to obtain her forgiveness from him, but she knew that he was unhappy, and she felt within her such a love for the youth whom she had wounded, that she would willingly have found means to dress and close the sore. How? She could not have told that; but it was not possible that such great, deeply-repentant tenderness could be inefficacious. ”

“ Ah! it was not only Hubert's tone, his short, hard tone, that was torturing her; it was above all, and once again, the evidence of the feeling that bound him to Madame de Sauve.
"Of us two," she thought, "he would choose her." The immediate result of her grief was to revive her hatred for the woman who was its cause, and in her impulse of aversion she found strength to continue the conversation.
"You have lost the feelings of our home, my child," she said, in a calmer voice; "you do not understand what tenderness binds us to yourself, and what duties it imposes upon us." ”

“ Was not the continuance of their intrigue secured by securing its mysteriousness? There was little question of that now. In her ungloved hand she held a little gold key hanging to the chain of a bracelet—a pretty trinket of tenderness which her lover had had contrived for her. This key, which never left her wrist, served to open the door of the ground floor lent by Emmanuel Deroy, the worshipped refuge of the few days during which she had really lived her life—a dream-oasis to which the unhappy woman was now going as to a cemetery. ”

“ Yes, it was indeed Hubert who was just coming in.
Since their rupture, he, too, had often wished to come back to the little ground floor rooms, where the clock had struck for him so many sweet hours,—the clock over which Theresa used gracefully to throw the black lace of her second veil "in order to veil the time better," she said. Then he had not ventured. Fond memories made him timid. People are afraid, in renewing such, both of feeling too much and of feeling too little. This afternoon, however, was it the influence of the gloomy winter sky and his own bewitching melancholy? ”

“ An infinite longing to draw still more closely to her mounted to his brain and intoxicated him, and yet he dreaded the coming of the evening with the mortal anguish of those to whom the feminine universe is a mystery. In spite of the proofs of passion that Theresa showed him, he felt himself in her presence a prey to an insurmountable impotence of will, which would have grown to pain had he not at the same time had an immense confidence in the soul of this woman. ”

“ Then, holding out her hand to George:
"Thank you, cousin," she said. "You have saved me. If this horrible intrigue had lasted, I should have died."
"Alas, my poor daughter," said Madame Castel, stroking her hair, "do not feed upon vain hopes. If Hubert has ever loved you he loves you still. Nothing is changed. There is only one evil action the more committed by this woman, and she must be accustomed to it."
"Then you think that he will not know of all this?" said Marie Alice, raising herself. ”

“ Theresa de Sauve had been endowed by nature with those dispositions which are most fatal to a woman in modern society, unless she marries under rare conditions, or unless maternity saves her from herself by breaking the energies of her physical, and engrossing the fervour of her moral, vitality. She had a romantic heart, while her temperament made her a creature of passion, that is to say, she fostered both dreams of feeling and unconquerable appetites for sensation. ”

“ Poor Hubert was certainly not one to harbour such base instincts; and yet his curiosity to become acquainted with his Trouville rival was already a very unhealthy one. Its nature was the same as that of Theresa's fault. It is the obscure, indestructible recollection of the flesh which operates without the knowledge of the being who is under its influence. The memory of all the caresses given and received since the night at Folkestone counted for something in this desire to feast his eyes on the real existence of the hated man. ”

“ For she did not tell him of every sadness.
She was married, and although she had at all times had a room of her own, she was sometimes obliged to receive her husband in it. Alas! it was all the more necessary because she had a lover. It was a sinister expiation of her passion, and one which she justified on her part by telling herself that she owed as much to Hubert. If she ever became a mother could she fly with him and take from him his whole life? and the pitiless necessity of baleful lies and degrading partitions would thus come to torture her at the height of her happiness. ”

“ She smiles upon you, and weeps for you, and already she has noticed a passer-by, to whom, if he amuse her for an hour, she will sacrifice all your tenderness, with flame in her eyes and grace on her lips! Ah! why? why? Yet what truth can there be in the world if even love is not true? And what love? Hubert was now thoroughly investigating his past; he conscientiously examined his attachment to Theresa, and he did himself the justice to acknowledge that for months past he had not had a thought that was not for her. ”

“ It was then that Hubert had seen her sobbing despairingly, and an immense sadness had come upon her, a death-like torpor, crossed by a cruel anxiety lest some indiscreet speech should reach her lover and awake his suspicions. Her own reputation she heeded but little; she was well aware that after acting as she did with La Croix-Firmin, she could count on little but contempt and hatred from him. She also knew what the honour of those men who make it their profession to have women is worth. ”