Paul Bourget

“ She knew by hearsay that men usually despise women when they have nothing more to obtain from them. But her Armand was not like the rest, since he had lavished upon her his most caressing kisses after their common ecstacy. "I was there," she reflected; "it was when I had left that he judged me. Judged?—and how? I deceived for his sake, but still I deceived." Then once more she saw him, full of such tender passion, that she fell asleep with a smile at his image, and at the thought:
"I shall see him to-morrow." ”

“ When Helen perceived this cruel truth, the enchantment of the hours of meeting suddenly ceased. Sometimes she longed for these meetings with the gloomiest ardour, that she might at least hear her lover's voice lavishing upon her those phrases of intoxication which, at the beginning of their intercourse, had been the adorable music that had exalted her. Then she dreaded these same interviews, and their caresses into which the senses perhaps entered more than the heart.
"Ah! my Armand," she had ventured to say to him, "you love my person more than you love myself." ”

“ I am already too much ashamed of having spoken to you in this way.—Armand," he said, advancing towards his friend, "give me your word of honour that Helen and you are not in love with each other."
"Madame Chazel and I!" exclaimed De Querne, "nay, I give you my word of honour that not a word has passed between us that was not one of simple, honourable friendship. In my turn I will ask you: 'For what do you take me?'" And with the secret loathing of all his pride he added inwardly; "What mean actions a woman can make a man commit!" ”

“ When I saw Helen, I found in her a likeness to this chimera such as I had never met with. Do not smile. Just understand me. I married her. At first I was quite sensible of the fact that she was not very happy. I said to myself: Time will bring everything right. Time has brought nothing right. The martyrdom that it has been to me to see her dull, wearied, and sad, and to be able to do nothing for her—ah! no one shall ever know. Especially since we have been living in Paris, I can see that she is sinking into still greater melancholy, that her poor face is growing thin and her eyes hollow. ”

“ Oh! what injustice, what hideous injustice! She sobbed her heart out at the thought of it. She came and went, a prey to continual fever, finding no more rest for her poor burning head than for her poor bleeding heart, and inwardly given over to a medley of emotions—despair for happiness that was lost for ever, keen regret for her absent lover, frenzy at having been misunderstood in the noblest and most genuine of her feelings. To repent of having belonged to this cruel Armand before the hour of her supreme deception, was what she could not do. ”

“ The cab went slowly along the streets, and every moment Helen said to herself: "Shall I see him again?" She was now facing the irresistible thought, the mere appearance of which had hurried her to the immediate quest of Armand when she had barely emerged from her horrible delirium. She must be able to cry to this man that he had ruined her. Yes, she must do this, and he must at last believe her and understand the infamy of his behaviour. She would say to her former lover:
"I am Monsieur de Varades's mistress, and you are the cause of it—you, your injustice, and your desertion." ”

“ Deceiving! always deceiving! This word recurred in Armand's conversations—indefatigably; she read it in his eyes, his gestures, his thoughts. Did she find herself obliged at the last moment to fail at one of their meetings in the Rue de Stockholm, she knew that he would not believe in her excuse. But a man of that kind—no, such a man cannot love.
"Ah, love me, love me!" she would murmur feverishly as she drew closer to him after passing through one of those crisis of anguish in which she had felt how little her lover's heart belonged to her. ”

“ Good, evil, remorse, conscience, freedom—all so many unreal apparitions, so many bodiless shadows! But there was indisputable reality in the ruin of a soul, and in the fact that a dreadful destiny had made him the instrument of its ruin. A ruined soul? There are then a life and a death of souls, something that fosters them and something that destroys them, after the manner of spiritual damnation and salvation. Then he thought of Helen's soul before the final disaster, all the episodes of their common past recurred simultaneously to him, and he interpreted and understood them. ”

“ And suddenly his visions would fade away, and his theories and dreamings, to give place to the sole image of Helen in agony, or else of Helen depraved, and of these two images Armand could not have told which tortured his thought the most.
"Can I be in love with her?" he asked himself one morning as he was rising, "and is what I am taking for remorse simply love?"
He found it impossible to answer this question. When a man loves, he conceives happiness as coming from the woman he loves, and how could he imagine a single minute of happiness as coming from Helen now? ”

“ Helen, however, received the derisive utterance with the smile of a woman who has her answer ready.
"So you will always have the same distrust," she said, and although she was very happy, as her eyes sufficiently testified, a shadow of melancholy passed into those soft eyes when she added: "So you cannot believe in my feelings without this last proof?"
"Proof," said Armand, "you call that a proof! Why the unqualified gift of the person is not a proof of love, it is love itself. ”

“ His anguish was so great that he could not remember having ever experienced anything analogous to it. His heart was paining him in his left breast, so that it seemed as though breath would fail him. Night was falling fast, the winter night, whose oncoming is so melancholy. The death struggle of the light is so cruelly like the agony of thought!
Here he was at last at his own street, in his own courtyard, in front of his own door. He did not ask whether his wife had returned, but he went straight to her room, and knocked modestly. Helen's clear voice said, "Come in." ”

“ Little Henry recalled Alfred too much at certain moments.
Then it was, when she had fathomed the bankruptcy of her first youth, that her imagination pictured to her the dawn of a reparative feeling; and what could this mysterious feeling be if it were not that one with which she was unacquainted, and the sweetness, power and happiness of which were celebrated by all?
"But no," she said to herself, "it is a crime to love when one is not free." ”

“ Where is the married woman who has not fondled this chimera of a reconciliation between the infidelity of heart and the faith sworn to her husband? The renunciation of the delights of complete love seems at first to her a sufficient expiation. She engages in adultery believing that she will not pass beyond a certain limit, and she does in fact keep within it a longer or a shorter time according to the disposition of the man she loves. But the inflexible logic that governs life resumes its rights. Soul and body do not separate, and love admits of no other law than itself. ”

“ She understood that the word had not the same signification to him as to her, and the whole of the inward tragedy whereof she was the silent, grief-stricken heroine, burst forth one frightful day. Like a captive who, during his sleep, has been bound by his conquerors to a corpse, and awakes to discover himself chained to this horrible companion, she found herself, a living heart, a heart susceptible to love, and happiness, and life, fastened to a corpse-like heart, icy, moveless—slain! ”

“ It was not that in the little home she would find her lover less distracted with her beauty, less passionate than in the days which had followed upon the complete surrender. But his kisses, and the sort of frenzy with which he embraced her now, made her afraid. She dreaded to feel the contrast between the ecstasy caused to her lover by physical possession, and the evident weariness of soul which he displayed in their almost daily interviews. It seemed as though the young man were striving to electrify his heart with the desire for her person. ”

“ These words, which were uttered in the deep voice of a woman probing to the inmost chamber of her heart, appeared to astonish the young man even more than they moved him. He wrapped Helen in his strange gaze. If the poor woman had had strength enough to observe him she would not have encountered in those keen eyes the divine emotion which atones for the guilt of the mistress by the happiness of the lover. It was just the same gaze, at once contemptuous and inquisitive, with which he had lately contemplated the group formed by Alfred and Helen. ”

“ Why did the same memory pass at the same moment through Alfred's imagination? She, however, kept this memory before her mind, while he repelled it.
"Helen," he said to himself, "is an honourable woman. Armand is an honourable man. What right should I have to insult them with suspicion? He takes an interest in her; did I not desire that it should be so? She is attached to him—and why not? Can there not be honourable friendship between a man and a woman?" ”

“ Is not the regretting of one's happiness the thinking of it again? Why had she asked her lover not to come to the Rue de la Rochefoucauld that evening? When yonder, beside him, she had thought that to meet him again in her own home after an interval of so few hours, would be distressing to her. Now she said to herself, while working after dinner at her crochet in the little drawing-room, and seated in the arm-chair which Armand usually occupied—yes, she said to herself with melancholy that it would be very sweet if she had him there, close beside her. ”

“ Had she ever manifested so much as a trace of coquetry towards any one? Had she made him jealous for but a single hour, with jealousy such as women of the world, more abandoned in this than abandoned women themselves, do not hesitate to inflict upon a lover, in order to gratify the pettiest impulse of vanity, to please a man who has some claim or other to celebrity or who has merely been noticed by another woman. No, Helen had been perfect towards him. ”

“ But he knew that once out of her presence he would experience nothing but a moral aching, an infinite weariness, a sense of the uselessness of things, and, to sum up, a renewal of that torpor of soul which the fever of the senses galvanised without dissipating. As for Helen, she drank in every word coming at such moments from Armand's lips, like a liquid that would enable her to traverse with intoxication the space separating her from the next meeting. ”

“ And how could the man help believing her when she went on to say to him: "Before knowing you I was pure."
This indisputable proof of the genuineness of her love, this proof which she had so greatly desired, she now held fast, and she would not let it go. Would not her present sincerity be a guarantee of her past sincerity? If she acknowledged the guilt of to-day, what motive of modesty, hypocrisy or interest could prompt her to deny that of yesterday? This strange reasoning appeared to her to carry with it a sort of obviousness from which Armand could not escape. ”

“ She treated as chimeras those almost indefinable tokens which enable a tormented soul to penetrate another to its remotest depths. She loved Armand, and she wished to love him. Was not her entire life staked now on this card? It was only four months since she had become his mistress. What! four such short months! It is a horrible thing that in so short a time one can pass, without any visible shame, from the sublimest hope—that of making amends for all the injustice in a man's destiny—to the bitterest conviction of impotence. ”

“ By a contradiction in his nature, too usual with him to cause him astonishment, these early moments had been melancholy ones. He was one of those men who are moved by memories after having remained nearly indifferent to the reality, who become enamoured of the women whom they cast off, just as they regret the places of which they tired when living in them—a restless race, who know nothing of the present but its weariness, and for whom the past assumes a unique and affecting charm from the mere fact that it is the past.
Armand had never loved poor Helen ”

“ The nervous emotion of the night before had lost its keenness in her, leaving behind it an acuter susceptibility of heart with which to enjoy desired things with more of inward thrilling. Chance willed it that Alfred should breakfast away from home, and thanks to his absence the cruel impressions of the previous evening were not renewed. Thus, when she arrived at the door of the little stage-box in the theatre, she was in that delicious state of soul in which there is, as it were, an inward voice that sings. At such moments everything soothes, just as at others everything wounds. ”

“ Madame Chazel had granted him an appointment for the following day. Twenty-four hours more and he would have a new mistress, as desirable and as pretty as those whose memory was the most flattering to the pride of his recollection. Why then did he, instead of being happy, feel so deeply melancholy. Was it remorse for the treason to his friend?
His friend? Was Alfred really his friend? Yes, that was understood between themselves, as well as in the eyes of others. But a friend is a man who knows you and whom you know, to whom you show your heart and who shows you his. ”

“ Only, ever since their settlement at Paris had brought with it a separation of rooms, he had felt himself seized, whenever he longed for her caresses, by an emotion which he could with difficulty subdue. He must ask his Helen to allow him to remain with her, or else enter her room when she was in bed. This need of acting, united to the torment of physical desire, is so painful to certain men, that timid youths experience an almost unbearable throbbing of the heart on merely crossing the threshold of those houses in which pleasure is sold ready-made. ”

“ He felt close to him the beauty of this yielding body, he held in his arms those charming shoulders of which he had knowledge from having seen them in the ball-room, he drank in that indefinable aroma which lingers about every woman, and he pressed his lips upon those eyelids, which he could feel quivering beneath his kiss.
"You will at least be happy?" she asked him in a sort of anguish between two caresses.
"What a question! Why, you have never looked at yourself," he said, and he began to extol to her all the exquisiteness of her face. ”