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Title: The woollen dress

Author: Henry Bordeaux

Translator: Ruth Helen Davis

Release date: August 15, 2023 [eBook #71410]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Duffield & Company

Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOOLLEN DRESS ***


                                  THE

                             WOOLLEN DRESS




                                  BY

                            HENRY BORDEAUX

                  AUTHOR OF “THE PARTING OF THE WAYS”




                             TRANSLATED BY

                           RUTH HELEN DAVIS

                   NEW YORK DUFFIELD & COMPANY 1912




                Copyright, 1911, by PLON-NOURRIT & CO.



                Copyright, 1912, by DUFFIELD & COMPANY




                            TO PIERRE LOTI


In dedicating to you this story of “The Woollen Dress,” I discharge a
very old debt, a debt of my youth, when enthusiasm for your works--your
poems, I ought rather to call them--flushed and exalted me as the first
misty moments of the dawn suffuse the surface of the earth.

With what magic did you not gild our adolescent years! We were at the
spoiled age of twenty, at the threshold of life’s work, when one arms
one’s self against love, and indulges in yearnings for universal things
which only later, alike with him who has lived too much and him who has
not lived at all, accept their limitations and disenchantments;--we
were twenty, and we found in you that melancholy which at twenty it is
so sweet to breathe.

This book is the story of a quite simple young girl crushed by the
cruelties of our modern life. When I hear children singing that old
round, which I am sure you loved as well as I,

    “We were ten girls in a field
    All waiting to be married,”

I picture Claudine, Suzanne, Dumaine and their companions as a graceful
chorus in which the voices of old France still sound. I call them
by name and they come to me from all the provinces,--Sylvia from
Valois and Marie from Brittany, the little Fadette from Berry, humble
Genevieve from Dauphiné, and from Aunis that little Madeleine, whose
feet tread the same crooked path where later Dominique must pass, drawn
back by sorrow to his native land, “like an animal wounded and bleeding
who yet knows his way home.” Here, too, are Mireille and Nerte, glowing
with the sun of Provence, Gracieuse from Basque, and Colette from Metz.

In the field they were only ten. Can they not take by the hand a little
sister who has such need of their protection, this Raymonde, that I
have gathered from Savoy, who would like so much to join their game if
she could do so without intrusion?

                                                                  H. B.

CHALET DU MAUPAS, September 20, 1910.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

  I THE SLEEPING WOODS

  II AND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE
       LOVES

  III THE FACE OF THIS WORLD CHANGES




THE WOOLLEN DRESS


PART I


THE SLEEPING WOODS


AMAZED, enraptured, I gazed about me. This, surely, was the very forest
of the Sleeping Beauty in the Woods. Suddenly, at a turn of the road,
her castle loomed up among the trees, huge and mysterious.

I had been pushing my bicycle, despite its various gears, up a long
heavy slope. Once again in the saddle, I had penetrated into a wild
valley, a mere gorge at first, then broadening into field and forest,
with a pool in the lower distance. The brilliant bouquet that autumn
can make if it pleases, of water and trees and bushes massed upon a
mountain side, was before me--autumn, the flower time of the woods,
when the heaviest burdens have fallen and the spring of trunk and
branch and airy foliage show all the indescribable hues of light.
Golden lindens, pale elms, ruddy chestnuts, copper horse-chestnuts,
rusty oaks, purplish fruit trees, poplars like golden candle-sticks,
form under the level rays of sunlight, a fairy train: it is a gay
parade that would cause a thrill of joyful amazement, did not the
lightest whispering breeze threaten the loss of all the marvellous
attire. Dread and pleasure meet in October walks, dread that comes with
the pleasure that is fleeting.

It was Sunday, and I had met no one. A village through which I had
passed was as if dead. The women were no doubt at church, the men in
the wine-shop. From the whole valley, as from a vast deserted garden,
arose a perfume of old legend, which I inhaled with rapture. The
country here had the look of some deserted park, and I was keen to
discover some abandoned habitation in it. Any usual modern villa would
have dishonoured this ageless landscape. Nothing would answer my mood
but a confusion of ancient stones and wild vines, or at least real
ruins, authentic and crumbling.

To tell the truth, it was not ruins that I had perceived on the
hillside at the end of the avenue of more than century-old oaks. The
avenue led up to a terrace ornamented by urns and stretching all along
the front of the house. The urns were empty and no one had thought
to mow the grass. The chateau was a large building, with mullioned
windows, and a sort of cloister running its entire length, and but for
these ivy wreathed arcades would have appeared almost commonplace. The
dark tone of its walls gave it an aspect of venerable age, with all
the added solitude of silence and the melancholy of the season and the
surrounding forest. There it stood, in its own well-sheltered place,
presenting its front, as an old man his face, to the warmth of the sun,
letting the days flow by. A clump of yellow chrysanthemums and a few
climbing roses gave it the look of a faint smile.

I dismounted to enter into communion with this old place. The gate was
open; indeed the hinges, being sprung, would not allow it to be shut.
A lodge at the entrance was almost hidden among the trees, overwhelmed
as with a flood of greenery by their luxuriant growth. As I drew nearer
I observed that several oaks had been replaced by horse-chestnuts, the
rapid growth of which had speedily filled the gaps that time had made
in the avenue.

A peasant was raking up the nuts, though they seemed to me to be
uneatable.

“They are for my beasts,” he explained.

I at once proceeded to question him.

“What is the name of this chateau?”

“The chateau of the Sleeping Beauty, that is, of the Sleeping Woods.”

I could hardly have imagined a name more perfectly responding to the
enchantment which had taken possession of me since my entrance into the
valley.

“Was it not an ancient nunnery?”

“Perhaps--once upon a time, long ago. No one knows how long.”

“Before the Revolution?”

“Long before that. At the Revolution it belonged to the Count.”

“What Count?”

“Count d’Alligny. The same whose grandson sold it.”

“Sold it to whom?”

“To M. Cernay, the present owner.”

The name Cernay is known to every one nowadays as that borne by
the millionaire aviator who has devoted himself to perfecting the
aeroplane, and in the train of Bleriot, Latham, the Wrights, has
experimented in the conquest of the air. I knew Raymond Cernay
personally, having met him in society a few years ago, before he became
interested in aviation, and I was proud of the acquaintance. He gave
me the impression of a man richly endowed mentally, though perhaps too
versatile, one who would find it difficult to fix upon any interest,
likely to abandon every attempt if the outcome of it were within easy
reach. He had begun to succeed in many things, giving them up, each
one, at the first smile of success, as if a mere forecast of glory
was all he sought. A few rough-hewn sculptures, the narrative of a
journey in the Indies, daring century motor rides, brief scientific
investigations had sufficed at that time to win for him a sort of
reputation in society for originality. The reputation was fostered by
constant change, and appeared to satisfy him, for above all things he
valued the celebrity of the drawing room. During the last few years he
had disappeared from Paris, doubtless to devote himself all the more
fervently to the new passion of aviation.

I at once spread out my arms in imitation of a bird.

“Cernay--the one who flies?”

The man gazed at my pantomime with astonishment. He did not understand.
Fame is short-lived. But there might be other Cernays. Pointing to the
building I asked:

“Does he live here?”

“Not much, since his lady died.”

“His _lady_ is dead? How long ago?”

“The grain has been reaped three times.”

Then, memory awakening within him, he added:

“I who tell you, I carried her to the grave. She was not very heavy,
poor thing! But to know she was dead--that took the strength out of
your arms and legs. All the villagers came.”

By the dates it might be Madame Cernay of whom he spoke. But she had
passed away almost unnoticed. Her death, too early though it was, had
not awakened such regret in Paris. It had occurred at a distance, in
the country, unobtrusively. Raymond Cernay himself had not reappeared
after it until the notable week of Rheims, when he had won the prize
for altitude by an ascension in regular spirals, like the circles
described by some gigantic bird of prey, and amid the applause of a
delirious crowd, became in a moment the popular hero.

We are always ready to consider reserved persons, who ward off our
confidences or fail to accord to our remarks all the importance we
ourselves attach to them, as insignificant. This was the epithet with
which she who was dead had been characterised in my hearing. My memory
could at first revive her only as a colourless, washed out, vanishing
figure. Then I vaguely recalled her hair, of many tinted blond, and her
limpid eyes, so bright that one might suppose no shadow should ever
have dimmed them. She was so reserved or so indifferent that people
talked little with her. Once, chance having placed me beside her at a
charity concert, I had been struck by an ecstatic expression on her
usually pale countenance. Her face was suffused with colour, while on
the stage a singer was interpreting, with an orchestral accompaniment,
the air in Lulli’s Amadis:

    O faithful wood, redouble now your shades,
    You can not be too sombre--nothing fades
    Too pale before my own too luckless love.

It is an entreaty and supplication to the familiar forest that Lulli
develops with a classic regularity, which far from weakening the
energy of its musical expression, is in fact strengthened by it. Not a
single one of those crude imitations of nature sounds superficial and
meaningless, such as the well-known “Murmurs” in Siegfried, marred the
air, in which passion is restrained by purity, and by consciousness
of its own danger; but its ardour is none the less felt for not being
expressed in outcry and convulsive rhythm. Mme. Cernay at my side was
veritably living again the sentiments of the great poem. The episode
gave me an intuitive conviction that the imputation of insignificance
put upon her by society to justify its neglect of her, was false. I
recalled it now. Still she had either little conversational power,
or cared little to use it; she never sought the slightest display of
culture. She kept her impressions to herself. Certainly no one ever saw
her posing, nor ever practising the slightest deception, as other women
in society do, putting on knowledge of art like a new headdress.

I don’t know whether it was due to some dim conviction, or to curiosity
now, that I asked the good man who had thus far been my informant:

“Where is the graveyard?”

The avenue crossed the country road by which I had come, and no doubt
ended in a terrace, for at its extremity I could perceive nothing more
of the near landscape, but only the slope of the distant mountain on
the border of the valley. The road crossed the Cernay property, one of
those expropriations, no doubt, which make no account of the decorative
value of private estates. The peasant indicated the direction by a
gesture.

“Over there.”

At the entrance of this part of the avenue were two granite columns,
once evidently intended as supports for an iron chain, which, rusty and
disused, was lying on the ground between them. I remounted my machine
and urged it on over the rustling leaves. There were so many that I
sank among them, and needed to take care not to be tripped up. Beyond
the last two oaks I found, as I had expected, a terrace, from which, as
from a balcony, one overlooked the deep valley. A pool in the hollow
reflected the light of day, doubling the glory of the landscape, its
banks of serried reeds, so close as to conceal their separate pliancy,
forming a long golden barrier.

This was what I saw at first, as from a window one first sees the
opposite distance and later takes in the nearer features of the scene.
When I looked closer I perceived beside me on the right a chapel, and
on the left, against a hillock, the little graveyard for which I was
looking.

What a charming, sunny little graveyard it was! Girdled with a newly
whitewashed wall, overrun with wild plants, it had the look rather of
a deserted garden patch than of a cemetery. Here and there a cross
pierced the thick green, making itself the trellis for some shrub. The
lovely coral clusters hanging from one or two roan trees achieved an
aspect almost of gaiety for the little enclosure. Sloping gently and
with a fine exposure it seemed quite literally a tiny garden plot. It
invited to terrestrial rest, not the eternal repose of death. No idea
of the end of things was in this place.

I wanted to sun myself on the wall there like a lizard, and had
to resist the temptation. I entered, and before I realised it was
searching for the grave of some one I hardly knew. The monument of
the Allignys, crenelated like a fortress and crowned with a truncated
pillar, first caught my eye. Happily the passing of this ancient
family had given nature and the audacious weeds an opportunity to
make successful headway against man’s domination. No other monument
looked down upon these flower beds. Was the millionaire Cernay, noted
for his love of pomp, so neglectful of his wife’s memory? No--at last
a very simple tombstone, hardly higher than the weeds, showed me an
inscription, though I could read it only by raising the ivy beneath
which it lay half hidden:

                            RAYMONDE CERNAT
                             BORN MAIRIEUX
                        TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

How potent is the idea of youth! The mere reminder of her years upon
this tombstone gave at once to the neglected plot its touch of glory
and majesty. With an involuntary gesture I removed my hat. Not less
mechanically I turned to go. If the forest had flung down the last of
its beautiful flower-tinted leaves dead upon the ground in the meantime
I should not have been surprised. I had felt too keenly my experiences
of the morning: it was as if now, in a gust of wind, I felt the passing
by of death.

On my return, as my old man was still raking up his chestnuts, I
resumed my questions:

“Can one visit the chateau?”

“Ask the steward.”

“Where is he?”

In reply he simply pointed to the lodge.

The land steward received me in a glass-enclosed dining room which
resembled a conservatory. It opened upon the woods, though the trees
were not near enough to shut out the air. An invitation to rest there
could not but be most agreeable. I was at once politely invited to
drink and smoke, for my host was at the moment filling his pipe, with
an open bottle of white wine at his elbow. The sun shone upon his
half-filled glass in sparkles of dull gold.

“You see,” he explained, “I have already made my rounds on horseback
this morning.”

I too had been in the saddle all the morning, and so I accepted his
invitation to fellowship. He was a man of some sixty years, holding
himself a little too upright, as if to resist a tendency to stoop. He
had the ruddy skin of those who live much in the open air, a colour
emphasised by his white hair. One would have taken him, at a first
glance, for an old cavalry officer worn out in the service. But he
showed nothing of that apparent assurance acquired by the habit of
command. His blue eyes had a confiding expression such as one used to
see in those of young girls. I was prepared, from our first libation in
common, to find a certain familiarity, but not the air of distinction
and total absence of pose, the nobility of manner, unobtrusive and
innate, that shrouded his simplicity as a tower in ivy. He bore the
true hallmark of ancient lineage. In neither his person nor his speech
was there anything superficial.

At first he met my request with a refusal. To begin with there was
nothing to see in the chateau. But he had hardly made the statement
when, as if from an instinctive horror of falsehood, he corrected
himself with an exception: perhaps a few old tapestries and pieces
of furniture, and a small Italian painting, no bigger than that,
representing an Annunciation. At once, I knew not why, perhaps because
of his very reserve, a strong desire to see the interior of the
chateau took possession of me, and I repeated my request, pleading my
acquaintance with M. Cernay.

“That is another thing. I will take you,” he said.

In the avenue I expressed regret that I should not see the owner,
adding:

“But he seldom comes here.”

“Oh, no,” said my friend. “He will be here in a few days. He always
spends the month of November here. He comes before All Saints’ Day, on
account of my daughter.”

“Of your daughter?”

The steward looked at me in some surprise.

“Did you not know that he married my daughter, and that we have lost
her?”

There was no ostentation in the reminder, only a deep sadness. I told
him of my visit to the graveyard.

“Could you find her grave? It is hidden among the others.”

“Yes, only an ivy covered stone. But there is so much of youth in the
inscription that it goes to the heart.”

“My wife would have liked a different monument. But it is enough.”

The cloister surrounding the chateau, with the purity of its arches,
over which vines and clematis clambered at will, was a joy to see.

“It is all that remains of the ancient nunnery,” my guide explained.
“The nunnery was abandoned in the seventeenth century for another
religious house, larger and more severe, that of Saint Hugo, and the
family of the Count d’Alligny took possession. The present Count sold
the estate to M. Cernay. I had been steward in his day. He lost all his
money at the gaming table; he cared for nothing so much as play. He was
an excellent man.”

“What has become of him?”

“He is in command of the four soldiers of the Prince of Monaco, and
having not a sou to lose he looks on while other men ruin themselves.
The occupation diverts him. And yet I had administered his estate well.
But he cared nothing for the land. No one cares for the land any more.”

“Not you?”

“Oh, I! I have walked these woods so long that I know every tree of
them. I used to walk here so much with my daughter when she was a
little girl.”

The memory of his daughter visibly obsessed him. Was it that he wished
to remind me of her brilliant marriage? Hardly: because he seemed, as I
have said, so utterly free from snobbery.

We found ourselves in the dwelling rooms, and he pointed to a portrait.

“When she used to run the country with me she was not so pale and thin.”

I recognised her pallor, a bloodlessness which the artist’s palette had
not flattered. In the sumptuous ball dress in which she was tricked out
her bare arms and shoulders seemed to embarrass her. One felt that they
were cold, and almost looked to see the goose flesh. To this impression
of discomfort the eyes added an impression of timidity, almost of fear.
For a moment I thought that it was a sort of ecstasy which held her
thus rigid--had I indeed not seen her almost shivering, listening to
the air from Amadis? Examining the portrait more closely I attributed
the expression to fear--excessive modesty or secret wretchedness, a
mystery now unfathomable, one which the artist had either penetrated or
unconsciously revealed. She reminded one of those portraits of Spanish
Infantas whose youth seems stifled by etiquette and tight lacing.
Presently I discovered another resemblance.

By way of showing some degree of sympathy, I asked:

“You lost her so early: of what malady did she die?”

“No one knows.”

The tone of the reply was so full of pain that I involuntarily coupled
his enigma with that of the portrait.

Just then I discovered the small Italian picture which the steward had
mentioned, and hastened to ask for a better light upon it. It was an
Annunciation, somewhat dark in tone, but surprisingly delicate, and
easily to be attributed to the school of da Vinci. The subject was
treated in the manner of that Ufizzi Annunciation in Florence in which
people have found the special mark and stamp of the master’s style. The
angel has just delivered his message: he has spoken, and now he bends
the knee before the future mother of God. How touching she is in her
surprise, her modesty and embarrassment! She crosses her hands upon her
breast, as if to hold in check a heart that would leap from its resting
place. She cannot refuse so high an honour, yet she feels herself
unworthy; she is happy; and yielding under the burden of divine love
she offers to God her readiness to endure the suffering that is to come.

I stood long before this picture, deeply moved by it: it was so
perfect, so full of grace. Then a resemblance began to force itself
upon me. The countenance of Mme. Cernay incontestably recalled that
emotion, that modest embarrassment. She might have posed long ago for
that portrait of the Virgin. There was the same tender grace, the same
elongation of the throat, the same slimness and even the same light in
the startled eyes. I remarked the fact aloud.

“My son-in-law bought this canvas because of the resemblance of which
you speak,” said M. Mairieux.

“It is striking.”

“No doubt.”

And the steward turned his head towards his trees, as if under the
influence of a sadness which he would fain hide from me, and which it
was not for me to fathom.

By a refined delicacy, and as if anticipating probable comments, he
took pains as we descended the stairs to dwell upon the generosity of
his son-in-law, which I might have questioned on seeing that he himself
retained his subordinate functions.

“We do not live in the chateau, my wife and I, though M. Cernay has
begged us to do so. Why should we change our way of life? In this great
building I should not feel at ease as in our lodge: we should need
too large a household. And he won’t let me render the accounts of the
estate to him; he pretends that the revenues are so small and hard to
collect. He gave me my horse Zeno, which is of Farbeo pedigree, strong
and sturdy as I like a horse to be. Did you not see him as I came in
from my ride?”

“You had come in before my arrival.”

“Would you like to see him in his box?”

Condescendingly I accompanied him to the stable and admired the hind
quarters of an ill-tempered brown beast which seemed more than willing
to kick me. His owner calmed him with cajoling words, as a personage
accustomed to flattery.

“There is not a gentler animal,” he assured me. “When I am on Zeno’s
back, and in the Maiden’s Wood, I let myself live in my memories.”

In friendly wise he detailed his present pleasures. No doubt his
country instincts would have found satisfaction in the monotonous
administration of the estate, but for the tragedy caused in his
peaceful existence by the untimely death of his daughter. A question
came to my lips.

“Madame Cernay left no child?”

“Yes, indeed, a daughter, Dilette,” he answered. “Our little Dilette.
My son-in-law entrusts her to us in the summer. In winter she needs
more sunshine than we can give her here, on account of the trees. She
will soon go away with her father. It is not a cheerful thought. See!
There she is!”

A child of six or seven years, with long hair flying, was at the moment
crossing the greensward. Lightly she skipped along, her feet hardly
touching the ground, like a bird learning to fly. The moment she saw me
she ran away. My host smiled, approving and disapproving at once.

“She is shy,” he said, “as her mother was.”

I was about to take my leave, when he earnestly begged me to come into
the house.

“Madame Mairieux would be charmed to receive you,” he said.

I excused myself to the best of my ability, pleading the early hour,
my bicycle costume. He would not let me off, and I perceived from his
kindly pertinacity that a scolding would be his lot should he permit
his wife to be defrauded of a visit--a rare event in these parts, no
doubt. I was therefore admitted to the presence of Mme. Mairieux, who,
I assumed, had been watching me, not without some ill-humour, from
the window, since we found her at that early hour all tricked out in
silk and lace; unless, indeed it might be her Sunday garb she had
on. She was certainly endowed with charm and Conversational ability,
though the charm was a bit affected and the conversation that of the
fashion papers and the women’s magazines. I at once made a distinction
in favour of her husband, though he kept silence and appeared to be
dominated by her. She talked intimately of “Raymond,” and, not without
a certain satisfaction, of the chateau in which they might live
whenever it pleased them so to do.

“But M. Mairieux detests luxury and even comfort. And M. Mairieux must
be heard too, for he will hear no one.”

I turned toward M. Mairieux, who made no protest. Possibly he was
endowed with that gentleness possessed by obstinate folk, who quietly
escape from everything that does not accord with their pleasure. The
want of harmony between the pair was patent, but, contrary to first
appearances, the reins of government were in the husband’s hands.

Mme. Mairieux confirmed the report of M. Cernay’s approaching arrival.
“He always comes for All Saints’ Day,” she said.

And when for the second time I spoke of my visit to the graveyard she
asked me if I did not deem her daughter’s tombstone very mean. She
would have desired a larger monument, a colonade, a broken vase, a
weeping angel; at least something that might be seen from a distance
and would speak of grief.

“No, no,” interposed M. Mairieux, “a stone is enough.”

My leave-taking was quite a ceremony. I was about to occupy quarters
in the neighbourhood, at the hunting lodge of Sylve-Benite, where I
was to find my baggage. I promised to return and renew my acquaintance
with M. Cernay, who was to be duly informed of my proximity. Just as I
was bestriding my machine, little Dilette again crossed the court on
the run, her long hair floating upon the breeze like wings. With this
vision before me I turned my back upon the chateau of the Maiden of the
Wood.

Was this in Savoy? In Dauphine? I have forgotten to say. But what does
it matter? I recall to mind a ballad with the recurring refrain:

    Was it in Brittany? Was it in Ireland?
    Perhaps in the land of the King of Thule.

If I am not more definite every one will think it was in Savoy!

One evening about five o’clock as I came in from the chase, a hare in
my game bag, a fine fatigue in my legs and my stomach empty down to my
heels, I found an urchin awaiting me at Sylve. He was the bearer of a
pressing letter from Mme. Mairieux, begging me to dine with her on the
sudden and unannounced arrival of her son-in-law. Between Sylve Benite
and the Maiden of the Wood there are two good leagues. In case of need
one can cover three-quarters of the distance on the bicycle by a bad
road, which shakes one to pieces, and I should greatly have preferred
to be spared such a night march, and remain peacefully in my lair,
where the soup was already simmering over the fire. But an inexplicable
impulse of curiosity or vanity urged me to visit Raymond Cernay--the
victor of Bethany.

“Very well, I will go,” said I to the small messenger. “Go on ahead. I
will change my clothes and overtake you with my machine.”

He smiled with a knowing air, for he was riding an old nag which it
might not be easy to distance. In fact, I did not see him again. When
I descended the avenue the chateau with its cloister was half buried
in obscurity, lighted at but a single window. I rang at the lodge:
which on the other hand was resplendent with light. I had put on my
most elegant hunting suit, but I regretted the lack of formality when
I saw Mme. Mairieux in great pomp of toilette and her husband ill at
ease in a frock coat which he must have exhumed with difficulty from
the wardrobe in which it had been buried. I was beginning to dread M.
Cernay’s dinner coat, when I was informed with no little embarrassment
that he would not be of the party.

“He begs you to excuse him,” explained Mme. Mairieux. “An indisposition.
The long journey--”

The steward, more sincere, came out with the truth:

“He desires to be alone. He always shuts himself up thus the first few
days. I told my wife how it would be.”

“And your granddaughter,” I asked. “Will she hide again?”

“Dilette? She was here just now. She ran away when she saw you. She was
afraid of you. Faces frighten her, but danger, never.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“In her usual place I’ll wager, perched upon the cloister wall, waiting
for some adventure to come to pass--an apparition of angels, or the
arrival of a knight on horseback. Wait a little: perhaps I can persuade
her to come.”

M. Mairieux returned with the fugitive, whom he had succeeded in
taming. The grandfather and grandchild had no doubt come to understand
one another by their walks in the forest together. I looked more
closely at the child, of whom I had barely caught a glimpse on my first
visit. Her hair, golden at the ends of the curls, paler blond on her
head, fell unconfined far down her back. She was small and slight with
legs and arms of no size at all, and yet her slightest motion revealed
the easy play, the facile grace of the swift runner. Her dark eyes, at
once limpid and deep, like still water pools, encircled by shade, the
transparency of which serves no purpose, were wide open, and far too
shy for the eyes of a child. Had her mother transmitted to her some of
that mysterious fear that haunted her?

I paid systematic court to this little girl of six and a half years.
At coffee she handed me sugar, remembered to remove my empty cup, and
shortly after she was perched upon my knee. Proud indeed I was of the
conquest.

“It is surprising,” remarked Mme. Mairieux, somewhat disconcerted by
the importance which I attached to the incident.

But her husband was unreservedly delighted with my attentions to
Dilette. As for Dilette, she would not go to bed. Only a scolding could
detach her from the place to which I had enchained her with stories.

“You’ll tell me some more, won’t you, Sir?”

“Surely.”

“Stories with afraid in them?”

We parted the best friends in the world.

                             *     *     *

Two days later, passing that way, gun on shoulder, I perceived her slim
little figure in the part of the avenue that leads to the graveyard.
It stood out sharply against the sunlit arch. She was kicking her feet
through the dead leaves, which rose as it were in a wave before her.
All the golden autumn was pouring itself in light upon the child, and
all unknowingly she adapted herself to it, miraculously. When she saw
me she darted to one side and would have hidden behind the oaks. I
called to her, reassuringly:

“Dilette, don’t you know me?”

She stopped at the sound of my voice: in two or three leaps, like a
young greyhound, she was beside me.

“Have you run away, Dilette?”

“No, papa is over there with flowers.”

“With flowers?”

“Yes, that he is taking to mamma.”

“And you?”

“I got tired of it. So he told me to go back.”

“All alone?”

“This is our place, and I know it all.”

She gravely led me toward the chateau when it appeared that I was
minded to join Cernay.

“We mustn’t disturb papa. He doesn’t like any one to talk to him when
he is there.”

“Very well, let us go.”

We installed ourselves upon the low cloister wall, Dilette with her
legs swinging, I leaning against a pillar under the pendant sprays of
the wild vines whose reddening leaves clambered over the arches.

“Now,” she said, “a story, quick!”

Rapidly I reviewed in mind my repertory of myths and legends, choosing
from it a touching version by Tennyson of an ancient ballad. Do you
know it perhaps? If not I must tell it to you too. Try to imitate
Dilette and listen very quietly, for it is necessary to follow this
story if you would understand what is to come in my book.

                             *     *     *


                               THE STORY


The eyes of the little shepherdess were fastened upon the picture which
the poor painter who had lately come to the village was making at the
edge of the forest. Upon a square of canvas no bigger than _that_ he
had put everything one could see,--or almost everything. How could he
do it? It was wonderful!

He gave the last stroke of the brush, then turned and looked into
her face as if he would like to carry it away with him. She was the
prettiest and best girl in all the country-side.

“You are beautiful,” he said; “did you know it?”

She laughed gaily as if pleased.

“The fountain told me so,” she said.

“Did it tell you something else?”

“What else?”

“That you please me?”

And he added, softly: “Will you be my wife?”

She turned her face away, trembling with happiness, for she loved him
secretly.

“Yes,” she murmured.

They were married in the village church. But before leading her to
their home, a little thatched cottage on the edge of the wood, he
turned toward the fields:

“Let us take a walk, while the sun shines,” he said; “we can go home
when evening comes. Shall we go to the great castle, away over there? I
have heard wonderful things about it. You have never seen it, have you?”

She smiled disdainfully.

“I would not exchange our little home for it,” she said.

But he asked again: “Don’t you want to see the castle?”

“I want whatever you want,” she said.

They went beyond the end of the parish and through the gate of a park
into a long shady avenue of ancient oaks. Far away at the end of the
avenue they could see the castle. Evening was coming on; the branches
of the trees leaned kindly over them. The birds were singing, but they
heard only their own hearts.

As they drew near the castle, the dogs came running out.

“I am afraid,” she said.

“With me?”

But the dogs barked joyfully and licked the young man’s hands.

“Why, they know you!” she said.

“I have been here sometimes,” he answered.

They went up the steps of rose-coloured marble.

“We may go in,” he said. “Visitors are allowed.”

They went in, and he showed her all the glories of the palace. While
he was pointing out the beauty of the pictures and furniture, the
convenience and luxury of the rooms, she was all the time thinking of
the little white cottage among the trees. They would be going there
soon. He had showed it to her the evening before, saying: “Here is the
fireside where we shall warm ourselves when winter comes. It is small
and mean, but love is enough for us, is it not?” Yes, love was enough.
She would love him so tenderly that he would never think again of this
fine castle, to which he had no right to bring her.

He saw that she was not noticing what he showed her.

“What are you thinking of?” he asked.

“Of you,” she said, simply.

They had reached the great drawing room, where there were windows upon
all sides through which one could see the trees and fountains of the
park. The sun was setting, and the mirrors reflected its last rays.

“It is getting late,” she whispered. “Shall we go home?”

He bowed low before her, smiling.

“This castle is yours, Madame.”

The vast room echoed with the young wife’s merry laugh.

“Mine!”

He replied gravely:

“Yes, yours. I am the Lord of Burleigh. All that I have is yours, with
my heart.”

She turned pale and was obliged to lean against the wall, near the
window. The view from it, at that sunset hour, was full of peaceful
beauty. Far away, the little white cottage reflected the sunlight.

“Alas!” she murmured softly, as if her happiness was gone.

“I chose you before all others,” he went on, “because you are beautiful
and good. And I wanted to win your love apart from my rank and fortune.”

Until then he had always said “thou” to her, as the country people did,
but now he was saying “you.”

“Why did he so suddenly stop saying ‘thou,’” she whispered to herself.
But not wishing to disappoint him, she smiled upon him sweetly, though
with sadness.

She soon became mistress of herself, and acted as I was fitting in
her new estate. But every evening when she was alone, she would stand
weeping, at the window from which she could see the little white
cottage among the trees.

“Ah,” she would think, “if only he were still the poor, proud artist
who could put all the country-side upon a square of canvas, and bounded
our horizon with his love of me!”

Soon she began to pine away. Not doctors, nor journeys to new places,
nor amusements, nor all the attention and comforts that money could
buy were to make her strong again. One summer evening, like that on
which she had first come to the castle, she leaned her head against the
window casing and closed her lovely eyes for ever.

“We cannot tell of what disease she died,” said the doctors.

“But I know,” said the Lord of Burleigh, bowed down with grief.

Then he called to her attendants: “Put her in her wedding gown. The
simple woollen dress which she wore when she came Here, that she may
rest in peace.”

                             *     *     *

I realise that this was hardly a story for a little girl of six or
seven; a tale of disillusionment, rather; of use in discouraging
the ambitious,--if the ambitious trouble themselves about the
poets--teaching the beauty of a humble lot in an age when every one is
envious of his neighbour and eager to push himself into the foreground.
But a whole flood of questions and comments from Dilette explained
and embellished it. _What is an outskirt_? _A thatched cottage_? _An
horizon_? _A doctor who does not understand sickness_? _etc._--

I admit, too, that the ending is sad enough, and that when Dilette
demanded some changes, in particular a happier conclusion, I should
have been willing to revive my heroine, if the angry man who intervened
had given me time. I admit whatever you wish. But certainly all this
did not warrant the scolding I received from Raymond Cernay, who had
crept silently behind the cloister wall, and now sprang up so abruptly
that he both frightened and shocked us.

“Leave that child alone, if you please!”

I am telling the exact truth: he spoke to me thus rudely. In a second I
was on my feet, angry, and my face crimson. My first words challenged
him without regard for politeness.

Now I ask you whether any man has a right to behave in this way to a
person who is taking enough interest in his progeny to sit on top of
a wall and teach her English ballads. Dilette, herself, although she
did not dare say anything, suffered from the paternal injustice. Such
a lack of courtesy, she realised, was not likely to help our future
relations. Cernay turned to his daughter.

“Go find your grandfather and say good-night to this gentleman who has
been trying to entertain you.”

This pacified me somewhat, and still more the gracious good-night that
Dilette purposely emphasised. When the child had gone, Cernay appeared
to hesitate over his course; then he resolutely commenced a strange
catechism, to which, I confess, I submitted with a bad grace, for his
ridiculous injunction still rang in my ears.

“How do you know what happened?” he began.

“What do you mean?” I retorted.

“What happened in my home. Who told you?”

“I do not understand,” I answered.

“You understand very well--but the heroine of your story did not die as
you said. Her husband killed her. Her husband, do you understand? But
of course you know that--only you did not want to say so to my little
girl. You were very wise--I was there, I heard every word--and I should
not have allowed you to go on. One does not talk to a child about her
mother’s unhappiness.”

My anger left me. Cernay was evidently crazy. He had suddenly imagined
that he was Lord Burleigh. His experiments in aviation, which taxed
too heavily his daring and presence of mind, possibly also, his
disappointment and isolation, had unsettled his mind. In order not to
provoke him, I decided to humour him.

“Follow me,” he commanded imperiously.

The prospect was not very reassuring. Night was falling and I did
not care for a walk in the country with an individual who gave every
evidence of being demented.

He led me, however, directly to the garden-like grave of Madame Cernay,
whence the mingled fragrance of the flowers rose to us, though the
gathering dusk obscured their colours. There, my companion became lost
in his memories. Forgetting my presence and his own pride, he permitted
at intervals a kind of wail of agony to escape him. Yet I was not
greatly affected by this manifestation of despair, because, dreading
some more dangerous happening, I devoted my attention to a close watch
upon his movements. When he had grown calmer, he was to astonish me
still more. We were walking back up the avenue through the night, when
at last he decided to speak:

“I was at fault just now,” he said. “Forgive me. That story which you
were telling my daughter--I don’t know where you found it.”

“In Tennyson,” I hastened to reply, in order to clear myself of my
unknown offence.

“It caused me much pain.”

“You?” I asked.

“It is so much like my own,” he replied.

This, then, was the explanation of his distress. I had attributed it to
madness but it was really only the expression of a protracted agony,
of a secret that had been kept too long and was now perhaps ripe for
confidence. He continued to accuse himself in broken phrases.

“It was I who killed her, do you understand? Some murderers are less
cruel. They only strike once. They do not kill gradually, by a slow
fire. She forgave me. And I--instead of expiating my crime, I am
preparing to commit another. Oh, I hoped, I dared, to take up my life
again. Since my return here, the past has gripped me, possessed me
absolutely again, and I feel a savage pleasure in coming back to it--”

Without any farewell, he turned away, in what direction I could not
tell. Night enveloped us. I lost sight of him almost immediately, and
returned to my quarters at Sylve-Benite, surprised and dumbfounded by
such an unexpected revelation, a revelation which the future was so
strangely to fulfil.

                             *     *     *

After a farewell day of fairly good shooting I prepared to leave
Sylve-Benite, despite the peace and quiet that I had enjoyed there,
and I was collecting my luggage when Raymond Cernay called upon me.
He charged up at a full gallop, on M. Mairieux’s horse, and the hardy
animal must have been pushed beyond reason for he was badly blown. It
was five or six days after our singular meeting. Cernay noticed my
preparations and demanded abruptly:

“You are leaving.”

“As you see,” said I.

“Where are you going?”

“I am going home.”

“Is it necessary?”

“We must always go home in the end.”

“But nobody is waiting for you?”

“No, nobody.”

“Very well, then, I will take you with me.”

“Where?”

“To the chateau. You can stay there several days, as long as you wish.
Your luggage is ready. Come.”

I was so far from expecting this invitation that I had myself thrown
away all pretexts for declining. Nevertheless I was determined to
refuse it, the more so on account of the peremptory way in which it
was given, much as a millionaire with money to spare might throw down
a little cash. “Come, now,” he seemed to say, “strap up your valise,
you are wanted.” Without troubling my conscience, therefore, I invented
some pressing obligations.

“But just now you did not mention any of those things,” he said.

“I had not thought, then,” I replied.

Raymond Cernay made an angry movement. Apparently he did not admit the
possibility of the least opposition from any one, or possibly he was in
a highly nervous condition.

“No, no, no,” he repeated, “you will come.”

“I am exceedingly sorry.”

“I wish it.”

I could not keep from smiling as I listened to him storming, ordering
and commanding. He was ashamed of making an exhibition of his temper,
and he changed his tone with a promptitude that amazed and touched me.

“Yes,” he said. “I am not yet chastened. Shall I ever be? It is not
easy when one has taken the wrong turn from childhood. I always knew
that I could satisfy every one of my whims, and so I could not endure
opposition. Even misfortune does not always succeed in humbling us. You
must excuse my brusqueness.”

Then he added, pleadingly:

“Won’t you come with me. They are waiting for you, M. and Mme.
Mairieux, and Dilette especially. Dilette wants you. She asks every
one for stories, stories like yours. I cannot tell them to her; I have
never learned them.”

“Ah, Dilette wants me.”

He dwelt upon his daughter’s wishes, until out of respect to my wild
little friend, whom I was proud to have conquered, I permitted myself
to be convinced, or rather to be carried off, for we left without
delay, he on Zeno and I on my bicycle. My luggage would be sent for.
That evening I was installed in the chateau.

                             *     *     *

I sincerely believe that my arrival there was a pleasure to every one.
The atmosphere pervading the chateau was troubled with mists which the
presence of a stranger might perhaps succeed in dissipating. I am not
speaking only of Dilette, who bounded to welcome me like a dog wild
with joy, but also of M. and Mme. Mairieux, who despite their long life
together had neither feelings nor opinions in common, and above all of
Raymond Cernay, who, to all appearances was not in a state of mental
equilibrium. He had urged his daughter as a pretext to secure me, when
in fact he sought assistance for himself.

For the first few days he monopolized me. The emptiness or the
bitterness of his life he lightened with fishing, shooting, riding, and
walking. He had long since retired from all intercourse with other men.
Hitherto his unhappiness, his mechanical studies, his experiments and
his flights had sufficed to interest him. Now, however, yielding to his
old taste for society, or perhaps simply to the thousand and one charms
and attractions of everyday life, which does not long permit us to
defy it, he felt the need of a companion and sought one. His daughter
he surrounded with an almost passionate affection, yet he did not know
how to talk with her as one talks with a child. He recognised this and
left her, not without sorrow, to M. Mairieux, who understood both the
child’s bursts of confidence and her reserve. I noticed, not without
surprise, the respect that Cernay showed his father-in-law, though he
exhibited too such embarrassment in the older man’s presence that of
his own accord he kept out of his way.

I soon believed that I had found the explanation of his character.
Out of conjugal loyalty he imposed upon himself each year one month
of solitude in this dwelling in the heart of the woods, and little by
little the solitude became intolerable to him. Boredom preyed upon him,
he turned about in his prison like a tiger in a cage. I supplied him
with a diversion. He was faithful to the grief in his heart, to his
abiding love. But, then, what can one expect? He did not know how to
feast upon his sorrow, how to satiate himself with it. Few people do.
Introspection had played but a small part in his life. His days had
been consumed by the need of physical activity. Within him a similar
fever had devoured that tender affection which was most dear to him,
and he was grief-stricken at his helplessness to fan its ashes into
flame.

Thus I analysed his restlessness. I deceived myself thoroughly, it
afterwards appeared; but how could I then have perceived its complex
causes?

                             *     *     *

In the course of our walks I noticed the minute and prolonged study
that he invariably bestowed upon the sky before we started. He was
skilled in interpreting the form and movements of the clouds; those
cumuli, lying on the horizon like snow hills, would dissolve in rain;
these parasites hanging upon the summits of the mountains heralded
a storm. I saw him sniff the air, examining it, one might say, as a
hunter studies the depths of the woods and inhales their odour, or a
fisherman scrutinises the mysteries of the water.

“It is the enemy,” he confided to me one day. “It is invisible and
formidable. Before attacking it, we must try to understand it.”

I knew that he was thinking of his flying machines, and while we walked
on to a neighbouring pond, I questioned him about the origin of his
sudden interest in aviation.

“It is no sudden interest,” he explained. “I have always loved the
conquest of space. The same motor drives the automobile and the
aeroplane. Is not the rudder for the air much like that which steers
a sailboat at sea? One grows out of the other. But what does the
sensation of speed amount to, compared with the satisfaction of
springing free from the soil and attaining true liberty at last? And
the field is infinite.”

I listened without interrupting him, knowing that he was interested
only in his own visions.

“_She_ did not dissuade me when I thought of it before.” (He did not
mention his wife more directly.) “To her, work was the glory of man. ‘I
am afraid,’ she said to me, ‘but I will pray. A woman can afford to be
afraid.’ _The other_, at Rheims, always cried to me to go higher.”

What other? I abandoned any attempt to understand this unexplained
allusion. On several previous occasions I had questioned his incoherent
remarks. This time it was better not to interrupt him.

“After I lost her, I endured days of agony. I should have been glad to
punish myself, to scourge myself.”

Again I found trembling on his lips the same confession of some
mysterious guilt which had come when he heard “The Lord of Burleigh.”
Here was the secret that tormented him. After a moment’s hesitation he
went on:

“Even in the greatest suffering, the desire for life keeps its power.
It seemed to me that danger would bring me nearer to her and at the
same time in danger there is an exaltation which carries you one does
not know where. Perhaps my vocation, as you call it, is due to that.
Some old investigations and scientific studies had prepared me for
it. I have perfected somewhat the work of others, but I have not yet
invented anything. My merit is unimportant. Do not exaggerate it. Only
good luck and a certain audacity have enabled me to attain interesting
results. Ah, if I could discover some automatic way to assure lateral
stability, that would be another story.”

Our path ended in the reeds along the bank of the pond. He cast loose
the boat that was moored there, and I took the oars, while he steered.
After we had pushed off, he continued:

“The monoplane which I use I have named for her, but nobody knows it.
Very soon I shall not have the right to do so.”

Why would he not have the right?

I inquired about his experiments in altitude.

“I must fly high,” he replied. “It is an irresistible fascination,
a necessity. Above my two wings, I possess the infinite. The air
surrounds me, bathes me, caresses me, as this water does our boat. I
forget the noise of the motor, the buzzing of the propeller. Energy
clamours within me. My wings shift about, like extended arms, to ensure
control. A horseman is no more one with his living mount than I am with
my machine. I experience a new calm, a peace like that of religion.
She is with me, she does not speak, she smiles. She is no longer a
victim of the fear that paralysed her on earth. It is just as if I
were carrying her to her heaven. I am quite sure that I shall never
again cause her any harm. As long as my flight lasts, I am scarcely a
separate being from her. Between my suspended life and her invisible
one, there is no longer anything but a thin veil.--But we fly too
seldom. The machines need incessant repairing.”

In the very act of describing his sensations to me, he had forgotten
me. It was to himself, rather than to me, that he continued:

“Some wood and linen, a little steel, and a few wires, and you have an
arrow with which to cleave the air. It is not complicated. And yet,
how much study, how much preparation and effort in order to fly a few
hours, a few hours without touching earth, while we do not take the
trouble to learn to know a soul which trusts itself to us, which would
carry us equally high in life, if we understood it.”

Expressed though it was in incoherent phrases, his exaltation won me,
and I begged him some day to take me with him. But he refused with
unexpected violence.

“Do not ask me that. I have never carried a single passenger. My
solitude is necessary to me, the comforting solitude of space. The
Rheims woman asked me to take her. She wished to drive away the
_other_. Ah, I used to think that some day I would break my wings
while in full flight. It would have been a good end, and so easy,
nothing but the cutting of a rope. Nobody would have suspected. But it
is impossible. It would mean betraying the machine, allowing a false
suspicion to rest upon it. It can play false: the man it carries--no.”

I laid down the oars. He had already abandoned the rudder, and we
drifted with the current. Seated in the back of the boat, he stared
down at our wake. Thoughts of death or madness accompanied us like
sombre birds. From that moment I began to alter my opinion of the
intensity of his memories, in which remorse for some crime showed
itself clearly.

We returned almost in silence. I had not dared to question him and he
was absorbed in himself.

                             *     *     *

The next day I waited in vain for him to take the walk which we had
planned. He did not leave his room until the luncheon bell rang, and at
table uttered nothing but a few insignificant remarks. Without Dilette,
with whom I talked and laughed, and M. and Mme. Mairieux, who took
their meals at the chateau while their son-in-law was there, we should
not have exchanged twenty sentences during the whole luncheon.

                             *     *     *

In the afternoon he again isolated himself, and on the succeeding days
I saw no more of him. Did he avoid me because he thought he had told me
too much, too much and not enough? At first I believed this to be the
case, and without making any explanations, I informed Mairieux that I
was about to leave. Of what use was it to remain?

“No,” he urged, “do not affront him that way.”

“He would not notice my absence,” I said.

“Listen,” replied M. Mairieux. “For one or two weeks last year he was
so depressed that he moved me to pity. Besides, your company will be
welcome to us. Wait, I beg of you.”

“But what does he do all day?” I asked.

We were talking in the carriage road. Raymond Cernay’s apartments
consisted of three adjoining rooms on the second story, a library, a
study, and a bedroom. The autumn days were so mild that the large bay
window of the study was open and we could see him seated at a table,
with his head between his hands. He was reading or studying. A ray of
light came to me--he disappeared in order to work the better on his
monoplanes.

“Calculations?” I asked M. Mairieux.

“I don’t think so.”

In spite of myself, the secret of this man’s life tormented, I was
about to say haunted, me. Why at our first meeting had he imagined
himself to be the Lord of Burleigh whose wife could not live outside
of her own environment? What was there connected with Mme. Cernay for
which he blamed himself? Why did he insist upon punishment for some
unknown crime or crimes which nobody but he suspected?

                             *     *     *

I fell into the habit of spending the end of each day at the pavilion
in order to escape from the morose atmosphere of the chateau. One
evening it happened that Mme. Mairieux began to speak freely of her
daughter and with deep emotion. Sympathising with her grief, I tried to
console her:

“At least she was happy,” I murmured.

“Was she not?” the good lady replied quickly. “Her husband gave
her such a beautiful life, Paris, society, luxury, entertainments,
everything that one cares for at her age. It is true that she was not
as fond of that sort of thing as most young women are. According to
my ideas, she was a little too quiet and serious. It was pleasure,
nevertheless, especially after this desert of The Sleeping Woods.”

“This _desert_ pleased her,” interrupted M. Mairieux, who did not like
this statement.

“Perhaps the change was too abrupt,” I suggested.

“Oh, no. She never complained of it, and surely she would have told me.
In whom would she confide, if not in her mother? I knew her so well,
the dear child.”

Her husband was obviously and unmistakably growing irritated. He tried
to change the subject, but she would have none of it.

“During her long illness Raymond was perfect to her,” she persisted.
“He came here with her, he gave up all his own affairs, he called in
the most celebrated physicians, and now, on top of it all, he accuses
himself of not having been a sufficiently devoted husband. To us, who
saw him at the time, it is simply madness.”

She had reached this point in her eulogy of her son-in-law, when M.
Mairieux left the room. I believed that I understood the meaning of his
departure: he was protesting silently against his wife’s praises.

                             *     *     *

Cernay’s seclusion led me to frequent the park with the steward and
Dilette. M. Mairieux, little by little, as he watched the child
skipping ahead and then running back to us like a young greyhound
travelling over the same road two or three times, fell into the habit
of conjuring up before me an earlier childhood, that of his daughter.
He never spoke to me of Mme. Cernay, but constantly of little Raymonde.
I learned every detail of her life up to the age of fourteen or
fifteen. Beyond that there was silence.

His memories kept time with Dilette’s actions. One morning, as she bent
over a colchicum, he asked:

“Why don’t you pick it?”

“It is better there in the grass, grandpa,” she said.

This reply seemed to me to affect him beyond measure.

“Raymonde,” he explained, “loved flowers in the same way, and never
plucked them. She thought them lovelier growing on their stems in the
fields. No one could ever get a bouquet from her. It is odd, don’t you
think?”

But the oddity brought tears to his eyes. At other times he spoke of
other characteristics.

“I had taken her into the forest at sunset,” he said once. “How old
was she? Probably Dilette’s age. The leaves were nearly all gone, it
was this time of year. In front of us the tree trunks partly blocked
our view of the sun’s red disc. She stretched her little arms towards
the disappearing orb and when it had completely vanished, I found her
dear face so sad that I began to apologise. ‘I can’t stop the sun, my
darling,’ I said. ‘It is a great pity, grandpa,’ she replied with a
sigh. Ah, it was a sigh that would break your heart! Would you believe
it? That evening I envied Joshua. As a matter of fact, I had as good
reason as he for working a miracle. The laughter of a little girl is
the dew which refreshes our years. A child who does not laugh seems to
be reproaching the one who gave it life.”

On this topic he was never silent; now, it was Raymonde’s inborn love
for all things, or again, of her running along the forest paths and her
abrupt halts, as if she saw some one coming, her charming combination
of trust and fear.

“She was so timid, so shy,” he said, “that we even determined to send
her to boarding school near by, in a convent in the city, in order that
contact with companions might accustom her to everyday life. You have
no idea of the ceremony that took place before she left. She wished to
say good-bye to all the rooms in the house as if they were persons of
flesh and blood, and to certain favoured trees and to Stop, the dog,
and my horse, and the whole farmyard. She was not absent long. At the
end of three days she ran away. She had to climb over a wall, topped
with iron spikes. A little of her dress stayed there. Moreover she
lost her hat and did not go back to look for it. In this condition she
passed through the city somewhat ashamed of her appearance; and ran off
at full speed from an old gentleman who began to question her. Once out
in the country she was reassured. The city faces did not trouble her
any more and those of the peasants gave her confidence, as though she
were on familiar ground. So she came back to us on foot, just before
nightfall. Have you noticed at the side of the gate a single birch,
planted there by chance? It was much smaller then. Raymonde’s first act
was to go to this friend and embrace it. From a distance I thought a
little pauper girl was coming up the avenue. Stop was already licking
her hands, and even her cheeks. And in this beggar I recognised my own
daughter.”

While he was narrating this memorable Odyssey, M. Mairieux straightened
up, he seemed to grow younger, and he smiled. He threw out his leg and
walked like a dancing master explaining a step. Then suddenly he fell
back into his former attitude, as though ashamed of his spirit. He was
recovering from the past a little of its lost happiness.

“And how lovely she was at fifteen! Like a ray of golden light, you
understand. Curls of changing shades, a fresh complexion of that
unsullied white that actually shines, and eyes which it did one good
to look at, because you would never imagine that there could be any
so pure. There was a little terror in my love for her. She seemed too
delicate, too sensitive, and yet I would not have wished her less so.
I felt that she would never be happy. I feared for her beforehand. Oh,
how right I was!”

The last reflection, which escaped involuntarily from his lips,
appeared to upset him completely. It coincided too well with the
painful allusions of Raymond Cernay not to strike me forcibly. M.
Mairieux did not agree with his wife about the conjugal felicity of
their daughter. There was a secret here, which a few days later I was
destined to learn under tragic circumstances.

                             *     *     *

Bad weather followed the last of the Autumn sunshine. We were prisoners
of the rain. A dense fog hid the forest from our sight, and the
atmosphere of the chateau became unbearable.

Raymond Cernay, buried in his study like an alchemist in his
laboratory, occasionally passed like a ghost through a corridor or sat
at the table without recognising us, his gaze lost in space. Dilette,
not daring to raise her eyes to him, implored my protection. M. and
Mme. Mairieux, being in accord on nothing, maintained protracted
silences. I determined to take refuge in flight, but the tragedy
anticipated me.

On the day of which I speak, we were together in the drawing-room after
luncheon, sitting almost in silence, like a family whose scattered
members have re-assembled in anticipation of a funeral and await the
coming of death. The child once more insisted on a story from me, and I
protested that I did not know any more. Cernay, who had not yet opened
his mouth, descended from his tower of ivory:

“And the Lord of Burleigh?”

“I have already told that.”

But Dilette clapped her hands, and insisted so long and so hard that
I began over again the story of the Lord of Burleigh. I attempted to
introduce a variation, generously permitting the heroine to recover,
but Cernay shocked his daughter by objecting. When I had finished, he
asked in a sarcastic voice:

“And what happened then to your Lord of Burleigh?”

What was the purpose of this embarrassing question?

“I don’t know,” I answered at random. “I suppose he went on living.”

“Yes,” he announced, in a tone of utter despair that I can still hear.
“Yes, one lives.”

He rose from his arm-chair at the corner of the hearth, where a fire
was sputtering--one of those fires of half-dried wood which char, cry,
and smoke. He paced the room two or three times, his pace growing
quicker and quicker. His irregular gait and the fixed expression on his
face impressed and worried us. Moreover we heard distinctly phrases not
intended for us but referring to my story.

“He lived--He forgot the evil he had done--Perhaps he married again.”

Then, with sudden decision, he rushed to the door and disappeared.
We looked at each other wearily. Some moments later we saw him rush
bare-headed through the rain and wind, down the avenue of oaks, and
disappear in the direction of the forest.

We found nothing more to say until Dilette went out to play. Then Mme.
Mairieux assumed an air of importance and favoured us with this news:

“Listen to me, I know something. He is really going to marry again. He
is already engaged.”

“How do you know,” demanded her husband.

“I read it in the society announcements two days ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did not want to give you pain. I was waiting for him to announce it.”

“Do you know the name of his fiancée?”

“Mlle. Simone de R--. A good family. It is quite right. He is still so
young, he is so rich, so prominent, so much sought after. During that
week at Rheims the papers did not talk of anybody but him.”

“It is not right,” replied M. Mairieux drily.

And we relapsed into silence in spite of the desire that possessed Mme.
Mairieux to excuse and to justify her son-in-law, to whom, whether from
indulgence or admiration, she conceded every privilege.

I had instantly connected this information with the obscure allusions
to “The Woman at Rheims” and “the other” which had escaped from Raymond
Cernay when he had been previously disturbed that day at the pond.
Nowadays even young girls are famous and the name of Mlle. Simone de
R-- was not unknown to me. I had met her two or three times, a tall
woman, the effect of height being increased by her way of carrying
herself, supple, muscular, possessed of the grace that strength gives,
devoted to sport, and a champion at tennis or perhaps polo--I no longer
remember exactly--which brought her the honour of having her picture
in the illustrated weeklies. She went steadily on her way without
coquetry but with the thirst for conquest which is the mark of the new
generation. I could easily imagine their introduction at Rheims, she
conquered by the boldness of the aviator, he attracted, despite the
past, to this beautiful and frank being, who breathed life and promised
victory.

Two or three hours passed before Raymond Cernay returned, exhausted and
drenched, but not calm. The insane look on his face terrified us, as he
passed by without noticing our presence.

When the bell rang for dinner he did not come down. Going up to his
apartment in search of him, I had great difficulty in securing his
attention. When I did obtain a reply, it was a flat refusal. Without
him the meal was lugubrious, and Mme. Mairieux was quick to withdraw
with little Dilette. When we were alone, M. Mairieux confided his fears
to me.

“I believe I understand him,” he said. “Since his return the past
has gripped him again. There are some memories one cannot betray. If
you only knew! ... Well, he has not made up his mind about this new
marriage. He is tormented, crushed. And it is right that he should be.”

Then, either through a deliberate effort at compassion or from an
inherent goodness that was stronger than all his bitterness, he added:

“His agitation to-night alarms me. You have seen his eyes. He must be
watched.”

We summoned his valet, Jean, and he admitted that the condition of his
master seemed so serious to him that he had not slept for three nights.
“M. Cernay,” he said, “was in the habit of immersing himself in his
reading or writing until a late hour, and it was not until the early
morning that he sought his bed. However, the library adjoined the study
and it would be possible to observe him from there without his knowing
anything about it.”

Preferring to retire late, I claimed the first watch and seated myself
silently in the library, close to the communicating door, with a book
in front of me to serve as a pretext in case I should be surprised.
Outside the closed windows the silence of the country soon grew so
marked that I could hear not only my own breathing, but the least
movement on the other side of the thin partition which separated us,
even the light touch of a sleeve against the arm of a chair. Without
doubt he was reading at his table. From time to time I fancied I could
catch the rustle of a page as he turned it over. Suddenly he pushed
back his chair and began to pace the room with his irregular step. None
of his actions escaped me--my ears took the place of my eyes. I was
certain that he would open the door, and how was I then to explain my
presence there? He stopped. I calculated that he must be in front of
the window. Then he appeared to turn the bolt and throw open the glass
wings. Only empty space was now in front of him. Anxiety paralysed me.
I did not dare interfere; what if my interference should determine him!
The few seconds of suspense were filled with agony. At last he left the
threshold of the window, but without shutting it, and seated himself
again at the table. I could not endure the situation any longer. I
preferred to talk to him, to attempt to distract him, anything rather
than abandon my reason to his unseen madness. With a great effort, for
my legs seemed too weak for their task, I rose and went to the door. I
knocked; he did not reply. A second time there was no response. Then I
walked in.

At first I saw nothing but his back. A portfolio of documents lay open
on the table, but he was not reading. Some white paper, covered with
geometrical figures, was littered about, but he was not writing. He
sat with his head erect, apparently absorbed in his thoughts. Then I
perceived in a mirror the reflection of his face. Occasionally, in
order to indicate that a sick man is doomed, we use the expression:
“he has death in his face.” But a young man in perfect health--how can
he bear this stamp? Nevertheless I perceived it clearly. There it was,
unmistakable, obvious, threatening, and time stopped for me.

I remained motionless behind him as though hypnotised. To shake off the
evil influence, I lowered my glance, and an object on the table, which
I had not at first noticed, attracted my attention. I was not mistaken.
He had a revolver within reach of his hand--and it seemed to me that
his arm was reaching toward it.

It was no time to hesitate longer. I stepped abruptly and silently
forward, and seized the weapon. Raymond Cernay shook his head like one
who has received a blow, and remarked with astonishing indifference, as
if he had just returned to life:

“What are you afraid of? That revolver is not loaded.”

Nevertheless I kept it in my hand, for I doubted him.

“If you don’t believe me,” he said again, “you can throw it out the
open window. I know what I wish to do, and nothing will hinder me from
doing it.”

Convinced then, I put the revolver back where I had taken it, and
apologised, a little ashamed of my interference and ready to retire.
But he stopped me.

“No, stay, I beg of you,” he said. “I have not yet decided. That can
happen any minute.”

So I had not deceived myself about his determination after all. He
continued in a manner that was both savage and enigmatic.

“What I do not want, what I will not have at any price, is to have
my inexperience or my machine blamed some day. I have already killed
that which I loved; I will not kill my work at the very moment I am
perfecting it.”

I should have regarded these words as merely incoherent if, by one
of those lucid intuitions which in exceptional circumstances guide
us like some mysterious instinct, I had not instantly connected them
with the less confused utterances of a few days before: “I used to
think that some day I would break my wings while in full flight. It
would have been a good end, and so easy. Nobody would suspect. But it
is impossible. It would mean betraying the machine, allowing a false
suspicion to rest upon it. It can play false; the man it carries--no.”

He was forearmed against death when its appeal would be most immediate,
most alluring, most caressing; the revolver was there to put an end to
the temptation if it should become irresistible. This reverence for a
sacred work, which I had not expected from Raymond Cernay, formerly so
fickle and so easily wearied, threw more light upon that which followed:

“A soldier goes on to the end.”

But the reason for it all still eluded me. Trembling under the
domination of the raging fire that he struggled to restrain within him,
he permitted himself fragmentary explanations, which the information
imparted by Mme. Mairieux prepared me to comprehend:

“I am tormented by an intolerable situation--and there is no way out. I
crush my victims under me as I go. I am about, you understand, to cause
another misfortune.”

Believing that I had divined his meaning, I challenged him brusquely to
greater frankness:

“Yes, you are divided between the old love and the new.”

He bent on me that madman’s look that no one faces willingly.

“No love will ever equal mine for Raymonde. No love will ever efface
her memory from my life.”

I ceased to understand him. After a silence which I did not disturb, he
continued:

“The week at Rheims was filled with shouts of applause, it was a
veritable triumphal progress. You were not there, you cannot imagine
it. The boldest hopes accompanied our flights. I had my share of glory.
The intoxication of success which I had formerly been so eager to taste
even in small measure, exaggerated and magnified now, went to my head
and for the moment made me forget. I was introduced to this young girl,
who shone with enthusiasm as the windows of an unknown city blaze in
the sun. When I came to myself I was her fiancé. Do you know that the
day of our marriage has been announced? It is set for next month. Since
my return here, I have recognised my mistake. The days have passed;
they are passing now, and I am still silent and they are waiting for
me. But understand me, it is impossible, it would be monstrous.”

He addressed me with increasing violence, and I endeavoured to reassure
him. Life holds us captive, I urged, in spite of ourselves. Youth has
an aptitude for happiness which may be nothing more than the faculty of
beginning over again. He stopped me.

“No, no, you don’t understand.”

Two manuscript portfolios were lying on the table, one open and the
other closed. With a movement that seemed almost inspired, he suddenly
picked them up and handed them to me.

“Here, read this,” he said. “You will understand then. You will learn
that there are silent dramas more tragic than the bloodiest crimes. Now
leave me. Good-bye till to-morrow. Oh, don’t fear for me. Your presence
this evening has dissipated bad ideas.”

It was his secret that I was about to learn.




PART II


AND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES


I KILLED the one I loved ... Raymond Cernay had said to me on that
mournful night.

It is almost the phrase of the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” which I have
used at the head of this transcription:--the explanation will come
later: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”

The first note-book was dated November of the year following the
death of Mme. Cernay. The second, also dated November, the month he
consecrated to thoughts of the past, was written one year later, and
one year therefore before my visit to the Sleeping Woods.

In the course of that same Autumn night in which I believed I had seen
death, I read the two without a pause.




                           _FIRST NOTE BOOK_


                                                          November 19--


Six months, day by day, have already passed since the moment when I
lost her. And already when I wish to recall them, many recollections
evade and escape me, or seem inconsistent.

I shall try to fix here all that I can grasp of joy and sorrow, from
our first meeting to her last breath. Thus, perhaps, I may be able to
keep her nearer me. Each effort to find suitable words will help me to
commune with her, as the faithful commune with God in prayer....

                             *     *     *

The first time that I caught a glimpse, between the two rows of oak
trees, of the chateau of the Sleeping Woods, I thought of a scene at
the opera.

Twelve years ago, on my return from Italy, I had passed the place in an
automobile. The road maps were none too good, and I had lost my way.
The road plunges down into the valley with many sharp turns. It was in
the early days of the new mode of locomotion and I was in the habit
of committing many imprudent acts. Nevertheless I was obliged to slow
down, and then, fascinated by the beauty of this forgotten nook, made
golden by the Autumn, as it is to-day with the light falling on the
last of the leaves, I stopped my car.

To stop was, and is still, for me to experience unusual sensations.

Ordinarily my impressions of landscapes are swiftly gathered. My eye is
trained to seize them at a glance, just as the snapping of the shutter
of a camera is sufficient to secure an instantaneous photograph. I had
never been able to stop for more than a minute or two. But now, I had a
sudden impulse to stop entirely.

On the gate, which was open and sprung,--I have not wished ever to
repair it--hung a sign announcing that the property was for sale.
Immediately I determined to purchase it.

At that time I was twenty-five years old; all I knew of life was the
intoxication of youth and strength. I was indeed one of those merciless
rulers of the upper classes who do not tolerate restraint from law or
men while they have, or think they have, the means of escaping it. I
had at my disposal a fortune whose extent I did not measure; my whim
was my guide, and I recognised no obstacle. Who would have been able
to convince me that there were limits to my wishes? The friends whom I
favoured or neglected at will were flatterers and parasites whom one
picked up in abundance in the resorts of pleasure. If the women that I
selected did not treat me with cruelty, the very nature of their choice
would have prevented me from deriving any pride from it, if it had not
been for the ridiculous admiration that I openly professed for myself.
Crude and headstrong, what a foolish creature a young man is before he
has been flayed by the plane of suffering, of compelling ambition or by
love!

The chateau pleased me. Therefore I coveted the property at once. I
could scarcely conceive of beauty without possession, and immediate
possession.

As I approached the lodge a young girl was leaving it. She wore no hat
and her beautiful hair covered her shoulders. A lock or two had blown
out of place and gleamed like pure gold in the sunlight. But I thought
her neither pretty nor ugly. I had noticed at once that she was only a
slight, unformed girl, fourteen or fifteen years old at the most, an
age which did not interest me.

“Here, little girl,” I called to her, as if I were speaking to a
servant.

She turned around, revealing a startled countenance.

“What’s your name,” I continued.

She stiffened, as she answered:

“Mlle. Raymonde Mairieux, Monsieur.”

She had taught me a lesson; what right had I to address her so
familiarly? But I did not understand at first, and having caught only
her first name I answered:

“Raymonde? And I am Raymond.”

I burst out into a stupid laugh at a coincidence that was sufficiently
trivial. My laughter completed her fear, my laughter and my goatskin
motor coat as well, which gave me the appearance of some shaggy animal.

She hurried back to hide herself in the lodge, as a hunted hare seeks
its form. I followed her, opened the door without ringing, entered
a hall and then a room which I found to be the kitchen. There I
breathed the appetising odour of a dish of potatoes au-gratin, which
gave promise of being delicious. It was not far from noon and I was
very hungry. In fashionable restaurants one cannot get true potatoes
au-gratin. This particular dish made my nostrils dilate with desire.
I leaned over it. I inhaled the odour with avidity. Nothing in the
world would have induced me to leave without tasting it. Already a
threatening cook, emerging from the pantry, was shrieking aloud at the
sight of a wild animal in her kitchen. She shook a soup ladle in her
hand, crying out at the thief.

I tried in vain to reassure her.

“No, no! My Heavens, I will pay you what you want,” I said.

The superintendent, M. Mairieux, attracted by the commotion, now ran
into the room. He did not waste any time, but would have thrown me
out bodily without listening to me. At last I succeeded in explaining
my presence, and my desire both to buy the chateau and to devour the
potatoes.

“The chateau, yes,” he replied, “the gratin, no.”

Nothing excited me like contradiction.

“I shall not take the one without the other,” I declared. “The chateau
and the gratin at the market price.”

“My dinner is not for sale,” said M. Mairieux.

“Then invite me.”

“I don’t know who you are,” he returned.

This conversation was being carried on in a kitchen which I had entered
by force. Despite my self-satisfaction, I had to admit that my manner
of introducing myself was hardly a correct one. I opened my coat,
therefore, which, incidentally, was suffocating me, and presented my
card. At the same time I offered to write a cheque at once for the
price of the property. At this the superintendent multiplied the number
of his objections.

“It is impossible,” he said, “you have not seen the place.”

“One glance has been sufficient for me. It pleases me.”

“But we must discuss the price. It is my duty to protect the interests
of Count d’Alligny. The amount which he named is not definite.”

“Then you can arrange that with him,” I said; “and now for the dinner
table. That gratin should be delicious.”

My companion evidently took me for a lunatic, but an unexpected ally
presented herself in the person of the cook, who, flattered by my
compliment, suggested that she set another place. I clapped my hands.

“That’s right, that’s right. Quick, another place! As for my chauffeur
he can have his luncheon when we have finished.”

“Your chauffeur?”

“Yes, I left him outside in the automobile. He takes care of the car
and I run it. A fine machine, eh?”

                             *     *     *

While the table was being set and Mme. Mairieux was being informed of
the incident I told M. Mairieux how I had happened to reach the gate
with my car. He condescended at last to take me seriously on account of
the automobile’s forty horse power. That was the way I lunched for the
first time with my future parents-in-law.

Mme. Mairieux immediately took me under her protection, but Raymonde
did not address a word to me. For my part, it is true, I paid no
attention to the child.

When I was well-fed and nourished and it was time for me to go, I
repeated my offer of the cheque for the property. M. Mairieux, however,
would not accept it. Instead, he gave me the address of the attorney
whom Count d’Alligny had put in charge of the sale.

“Is his office far from here?” I enquired.

“The town is about nine or ten miles distant.”

“I shall go there and sign the papers at once.”

“Think it over a little longer,” he said.

“I never reflect,” I replied, “and besides have I not eaten your
gratin?”

“It will prove expensive,” replied my host with a laugh.

While my chauffeur was cranking his machine, I observed on M.
Mairieux’s face a pre-occupied, anxious expression as if he had
something to say which embarrassed him. He did not make up his mind to
put it into words until just as we were leaving.

“No doubt,” he stammered timidly, “you will replace the superintendent.”

“What superintendent? You? Never in the world. On the contrary, I shall
buy the property only on condition that you remain. Your cook will give
her recipes to my chef.”

The cook, who had come out from the lodge in order to watch me get
under way, blushed to the roots of her hair with satisfaction, before
hiding behind the Mairieux family which had gathered to say good-bye.
We exchanged resounding farewells. The little girl alone did not open
her mouth.

                             *     *     *

My fine enthusiasm had no immediate result. I waited two years before
I returned to the Sleeping Woods. Without losing a minute, I had
signed the deed of transfer in due form, but once I was away other
adventures less strange and more absorbing led me elsewhere. I endorsed
the accounts without verifying them. How many accounts during my
lifetime have I passed without verifying! In this case at least, with
my scrupulous superintendent, I could do so without fear. And then
one fine day, remembering my property, I took there a company of my
acquaintances, with little enough to recommend them.

I had notified Mr. Mairieux by telegram. We descended upon the place
like a cyclone, with champagne, patties and cakes, a rattle of dishes
and an uproar of cries and laughter. It was a great scandal in the
country. The Mairieux family, shut up in the lodge, did not even show
their noses at the windows. And when I visited them, I encountered icy
frigidity. I enquired familiarly for news of their daughter, whom I had
not seen.

“And Raymonde?”

“Mlle. Mairieux is very well,” replied her father solemnly.

I left there the more depressed, because I felt that I had done wrong
disturbing the peace of these good people.

But then, are you compelled to place restraint upon yourself in order
to retain the good opinion of your superintendent?

Happily Mariette, the cook, comforted me with a word of welcome. But I
dared not order another gratin from her. And the pretentious chef whom
I had brought with me completely spoiled the one which he tried himself
to prepare for me.

                             *     *     *

I wonder at landlords who live on their estates. How do they spend
their time? As for me, I was always knocking about, always somewhere
else.

A year later I came back again, but this time alone. I had learned
my lesson. My physician, somewhat alarmed by certain symptoms of
overwork--physical overwork--had prescribed a rest cure.

“You need a place where you will bore yourself,” he had said, “where
you can stay a good month without any distraction. If I knew some
thoroughly uncivilised spot I should send you there.”

“Ah,” I said, “don’t look. I have the thing you want, my chateau in the
Sleeping Woods.”

He agreed, after some explanation, that it was perfect, and so
behold me established in my own house by order of the doctor. Being
distrustful of me the Mairieux family extended no invitations. They
remembered my previous visit and maintained their reserve. But after
all a superintendent is a superintendent, and I was certainly not going
to cringe before him. My physician had condemned me to boredom; I was
having it in abundance. There was no one to see, no one to talk to,
and the length of the days made one believe that the sun had forgotten
itself.

                             *     *     *

But--Spring was in the woods!

I thought I knew her, and I soon found that I had not known her at all.
Each morning in the forest paths I discovered some new manifestation of
her presence. New buds appeared on the trees, and little garlands of
green leaves seemed to creep from branch to branch like insects, and
little by little made a robe of themselves. On the sward and in the
moss she opened the bells of the lily of the valley, and in the hedges
the wild roses. In the orchards she powdered the apple and cherry trees
with white and pink snow, stolen from the mountains already re-covered
with a new supply and glistening in the sunlight before God! How
charming were all these daily details! And before, had I delighted in
this spectacle, or rather, to be more accurate, had I ever followed so
closely the joyous and wonderful march of Springtime?

But at last I met Spring herself.

I met her on her fête day, which in some of our provinces is still
celebrated on the first of May. Those of us who spend the greater part
of our lives in the city, where one day is like another, are ignorant
of the things that it is important to know, beginning with the earth’s
renewal.

There are customary ways of celebrating the coming of Spring, and these
ways, differing in various parts of the world, reveal the delicate or
coarse tastes of the people. I recall one night, many years ago, being
awakened by a frightful tumult. It was at Saint Moritz, whither I had
gone for the skating and coasting. Hunting horns, fifes, clarions,
trumpets, tambourines, cowbells, gongs, cymbals, rattles and castanets,
as well as cans tied to the tails of maddened dogs;--there was all
this in this imperial charivari. I jumped out of bed, convinced that
the hotel was afire, and ran to the window. In fact, there was a red
glow shaking and moving about beneath me. In the glare of torches
triumphing over the night, I saw from fifty to a hundred young boys
capering around like demons, blowing horns with the full strength of
their lungs or drumming with their arms. The light was sufficient for
me to distinguish their triumphant faces. They passed by and little
by little the tempest which they had unchained died away. I looked
at my watch, it was five o’clock in the morning. What could be the
meaning of all this music? I was furious at such a premature reveille,
but, not understanding the reason for it, I put off the search for
an explanation. At a more suitable hour I attempted to obtain some
information. Nobody at the hotel, however, seemed surprised by the
performance.

“Did you hear that row?” I enquired.

“Most certainly,” I was told.

“What does it mean?”

“It is the birthday of Spring.”

The birthday of Spring! March had just begun, and it had snowed the
greater part of the day before. All the neighbouring mountains were
white, and there was not the faintest trace of verdure to be seen; even
the pitch pines were hidden by the frost.

This birthday of Spring seemed to me a little precocious. In the
Engadine it takes place on the eve of Shrovetide, and the formidable
uproar is intended to drive away the winter, to give it its rude
dismissal. Possibly that is necessary in a country where the winter is
prone to fall asleep and never depart. If one did not scream in his
ears “Go away” he might remain throughout the year. Therefore in that
country they pray to Spring in the midst of cold and darkness.

At the Sleeping Woods such a hubbub is not necessary. Things happen
differently. But that day is so important to me that, reluctant to
recall it, I have interposed some other recollections. Still, nothing
happened to me on that day.

Nothing happened to me on that day, and yet that day is the brightest
of my life!

Little girls and boys, all of them barefooted--for those who had shoes
carried them in their hands in order not to wear them out on the hard
roads--appeared at the end of the avenue of oaks. I stood astonished at
the window.

“What does that lot of brats want?” I thought. They marched along
singing, and very quickly, too, for their little legs. When they
reached the arches of the cloister, just below me, they entertained me
with a song. It was an old folk song, which I had once heard sung at a
concert, but had not imagined to be genuine; by that I mean to say I
did not know that it was really sung in the country. Out in the open
air, bursting from these youthful lips, it soared in swift flight far
higher than in any theatre.

“Who taught you that?” I asked, when they had finished.

“Nobody.”

“Did you all know it when you were born?”

“Surely.”

I have kept the words of the refrain. Whoever thinks them commonplace,
does not grasp their real significance:


    Awaken, sleeping beauty!
    Awaken, if you sleep.


To me this beautiful sleeping one is Nature, who stretches herself
after the winter’s sleep and smiles in the woods and in the gardens.

After this the children ranged themselves on the lawn, the girls on one
side and the boys on the other, and danced--upon my word--a pavane.
Perhaps it was not really a pavane, but I will not call it otherwise.
It deserved that beautiful name, for it included some complicated
steps, embellished with graceful bows.

I threw them some coppers and even some silver pieces. They scarcely
thanked me, which impaired their success with me, and ran away toward
the lodge. Why several moments later did they burst out into such
clamorous joy, a joy that piqued me? I came down from my room and
approached them. Seated at M. Mairieux’s table they were eating,
drinking and laughing with their mouths full. Then they went off with
red cheeks and full stomachs to other houses and other villages.

“Everywhere,” my superintendent explained, “they gather presents of
bread and butter, cheese, eggs and other provisions in accordance with
each one’s resources, but no one gives them money, and in the evening
they return to their own homes well laden. Even the poor offer them
something. You understand, no one refuses anything to those who herald
fine days. We must pay attention to these swarms of little children
when we see them passing by as the days grow longer. They warn us
to watch for the Spring, and to rejoice when we perceive it in the
distance.”

Thus forewarned, I did not fail to meet it.

After I had followed the children, I plunged into the woods. As I
reached the cross-roads that are called the Green Fountain, because of
a tiny little natural basin whose clear water rests on a bed of soft
starry moss, I saw Spring coming from afar.

She was riding a horse that was a golden chestnut, and I caught sight
of her under the light, broken arch of an alley of ash trees, coming
slowly and inattentively toward me. I held my breath, for fear that I
might alarm her, for I was ignorant of the forest customs of the gods.
Motionless, I awaited her approach. When she was quite near, I removed
my hat, and saluted her politely, as courteously as I could.

“Good-day, Mlle. Raymonde.”

That was Spring’s name.

Quite proud of my own valour, I was to learn that the gods are
sometimes afraid of simple mortals. My “Spring” turned about and fled
away at a gallop, her youthful body swaying in rhythm with each stride
of her horse. Soon she disappeared, leaving me, after one movement of
offended pride, in a state of depression that was almost anger.

I rushed away to the lodge.

“How many horses have you?” I asked M. Mairieux.

“Only one, my old Sultan,” he answered.

“The one which your daughter is riding now?”

“Yes, I trust him, he is very gentle.”

“Well, I want two more, one for you and one for me. Set yourself to
find them. We shall arrange some riding parties.”

He was accustomed to my sudden wishes, and to this one he lent himself
with a good will. Together we rode through the neighbouring woods, both
those of the estate, which covered close to a hundred acres, and which
I, as the proprietor, explored with delight, and those of Sylve-Benite,
which were more extensive and more broken.

The dead leaves amassed by the winter in the roads are soft under
horses’ feet, and we rode along noiselessly. As if by magic the
returning verdure covered all the branches of the trees. The forest,
which seems boundless when it is bare, now enclosed us, embraced us,
and hemmed us in with a jealous love. Here and there an opening, whence
one or two paths branched off, restored to us our sense of space:
at the end of the vaulted ways holes of light marked the horizon.
Nevertheless the foliage was quite high, and the oblique rays of the
setting sun shone through among the straight, slender trunks of the
trees.

After these excursions, I often invited myself to the home of the
Mairieux. My superintendent never accepted my invitations to dine
at the chateau, although in his little house he gave me the warmest
welcome in the world, and yet, I must say, with perfect simplicity and
without display. Mme. Mairieux would have preferred more ostentation,
but happily he restrained her. The poor woman, I recall now, never
ceased to evince toward me a kind of sanctimonious admiration. Later I
realised that this unmerited worship was directed toward my fortune,
through an inborn and conventional respect for social distinctions.
At that time, however, I thought it was due to myself, and I did not
dislike it. It fed my vanity.

She questioned me incessantly about Paris, about the theatres, the
fashions and what she called “the grand life,” and never noticed that
her husband indulged her with a courtesy that was a trifle mocking. “We
live in a desert here,” was her favourite expression, the prelude to,
and the excuse for, her questions.

Although in delicate health, she was still very pretty, pretty with
that grace and delicacy which one sees in the eighteenth century
pastels, and which implies in most cases a shallow mind, always ready
to blossom forth in society, and less fitted for intimacy. The powder
which she used to excess strengthened this resemblance. I have since
learned of her humble origin. In order to marry her, M. Mairieux, then
an officer in the chasseurs, left the army, for she could not bring
him the prescribed dowry. They settled at first at Compiègne, where an
honourable place was offered the former captain, the supervision and
maintenance of a part of the forest.

“We rode to hounds then, Monsieur,” said Mme. Mairieux, in recalling
that brilliant phase of her existence.

Whether it was due to the too keen pleasure that she took in hunting,
or to a taste for more complete isolation, or to more pressing
necessities, M. Mairieux accepted an offer to bury himself at the
Sleeping Woods, close to his native country, and to manage for Count
d’Alligny, whom he had known at Saint-Cyr, this estate, which was in a
bad enough way.

I perceive that I am not setting down my true opinion of Mme. Mairieux.
She showed on every occasion that power of adaption to circumstances
which is characteristic of happy natures. When the time arrived to
leave Compiègne, where she enjoyed herself, I know that she did not
protest, and physical ills she always faced with courage. Without doubt
she loved, and still loves, glittering, stirring, noisy things; many
women have the same taste. She is perfectly good and loyal. If she has
never suspected the martyrdom which exhausted and then slowly killed
her daughter, I cannot forget that even this lack of comprehension
has perhaps helped to save me from despair by making me doubt the
extent of my culpability. For her I have remained a sort of god, to
whom everything is permitted, who has the right to be an unscrupulous
egotist, for no other reason than because he is. Although she sometimes
bores me with her trivial worldliness, which was strong enough to
survive Raymonde’s death, and which will last as long as she herself
does, now that I know her thoroughly, her affection touches me. My
marriage only flattered her maternal pride. She has retained this
somewhat childish feeling, and I cannot bear her a grudge for it.

As for M. Mairieux, although our mutual sorrow has not brought us
closer together--for he has divined its cause--what can I write here
that will be worthy of my respect for him? His sensitive pride, which
at that time prevented his accepting my invitations to the chateau
and later caused him to reject, with a certain excess of resolution,
offers from a son-in-law whose highest wish was to be taken for a
son; the uprightness and nobility of his character, even the courtesy
which enabled him to maintain unaffectedly the proper distance
between us, should have enlightened me as to his ancient lineage and
the superiority of his nature; matters to which, at that time, my
thoughtlessness attached no importance. The firmness underlying his
kindliness, the adoration which he bestowed upon his daughter and
afterwards extended to Dilette; his generosity, which permitted him
to appear to attribute my ill-omened work to the fates rather than to
myself, by virtue perhaps, of the unfortunate lesson he had received
in his own life of the differences of taste and feelings;--all that I
venerate in him brings me closer to the memory of my dear Raymonde.

                             *     *     *

Little by little, during our rides together, I saw Raymonde’s shyness
and reticence melt, like the mist which rises from the earth when the
dew evaporates in the light of a beautiful morning.

The first time I heard her laugh I stopped in surprise. It sounded so
crystalline, so pure, so aerial, that no note of music in my memory
could suggest an equivalent. She was greatly amused by my ignorance.
I did not know how to distinguish an ash tree from a beech, an aspen
from an elm, or a hornbeam from a sycamore. At first I was not a very
apt pupil. The usefulness of this forest-lore did not impress me. I
permitted myself to be instructed as a pastime, but she brought much
patience to the work, for she believed in it. What do we learn at
college, that we should be ignorant of such elementary things? If I had
asked of her, as I asked the children about their songs, who had taught
them to her, she would doubtless have answered as they did:

“No one.”

The forest, of which she was the little queen, revealed to me all its
rites and mysteries; not only those which one sees from horseback in
the alleys, but those also which belong to the depths of its life and
which one must seek on foot, gently, under its arched trees, as one
studies the aisles of a church and the ornaments of the chapels.

“A tree, like a human being, grows refined in society,” M. Mairieux
explained to me. “When it stands alone we see its trunk short, stumpy
and gnarled, its roots cramped in the soil, its foliage growing close
to the ground and its summit bare, as if it had rolled itself up to
resist the wind; but in the company of others it reveals a smooth,
round shaft, bare of branches until far up, while at the top they
form a thick and symmetrical group. But this elegance, this dash,
this grace, I was about to say this politeness, does not preclude the
competition which is the law of nature. A grove of beautiful trees
rises toward the sun, each wishes to receive from on high the light of
day, and the conquered ones, broken and suffocated, degenerate and soon
perish. The law of selection is at work here as everywhere, for the
benefit of the strong who overthrow the weak and attain to a free and
higher expansion.”

Raymonde admired the victors, but disapproved of their pride.

“I believe,” she said, “that if I were changed into a tree, I should be
a species of shadow.”

“A species of shadow?” I repeated in astonishment.

“Yes, there are trees of shadow and trees of light. Did you not know
that?”

And then while her father listened to her tenderly as she instructed me
in her turn, she obligingly taught me how to distinguish them. Trees
of light are the oak, which, despite the fable, resists the storm, the
exquisite but robust birch, the pitch pine, which still grows at an
altitude of eighteen hundred metres, and the even hardier larch, which
attains the land of external snow; the shadow trees are the fir and the
beech, with their delicate organisms, sensitive to frost, the attacks
of the sun and the lack of water. They too bravely attempt to storm the
mountain, but they are in too close touch with the elements. Whatever
affects the earth, affects them. They forecast the atmospheric changes.
They experience the suffering of the sun as well as its joy, for which
they hasten to smile with due gravity. In them the heart of the world
beats more delicately. The others are harder and their fate simpler.

I at once placed myself among the trees of light. One morning, Raymonde
picked up a seed which was supplied with a wing.

“The trees fly,” she told me. “See how the wind can carry them along!”

At the border of the forest she threw the tiny seed in the air with
this incantation:

“Go find favourable soil, and grow to shelter a happy home some day.”

Before she tossed it to the wind, I studied the little wing
attentively. Those of the birds had never inspired me with any desire
to rival them, but this little vegetable membrane disturbed me. Later I
recalled this omen of the forest....

                             *     *     *

Thus our walks were full of sweetness.

I was in love with her eighteen years. No woman, no young girl whom I
had ever met, had offered me such clearness of regard, such freshness.
The others, like the children of St. Moritz, had created a great uproar
in order to arouse the springtime in my heart. It was too soon, or
maybe the barbarians lacked the grace of our little children at the
Sleeping Woods, for whom a song without such a multitude of brass pans
and drums, was sufficient to announce the coming of joy.

                             *     *     *

I should have delighted in what was to me an unpublished story, in the
feeling of new birth into such supreme love as it is the privilege of
few lives to know; but instead I plotted an infernal scheme of which,
as I confess it to-day, after so long a time, I am still ashamed.
My absolute power recognised no scruples. The persons with whom I
associated habitually scoffed freely at conventionalities and all
moral restraint, and treated virtue, honour, and respect for women as
hypocrisy. I was willing to betray without remorse the confidence of
the Mairieux. As for the complicity of the young girl in my scheme, I
did not imagine that the whim of a multi-millionaire could encounter
obduracy. Must she not, like her mother, be dying of ennui “in this
desert”? I would awaken my sleeping beauty of the woods, and carry her
off to Paris. What could be more natural? What more fine?

My plan was laid. There only remained the simple task of securing
Raymonde’s consent. I might obtain it by means of jewels as in Faust,
or through the fascination of Paris as in Manon. The everlasting
presence of her father prevented my paving the way, but I took
advantage one day of a sufficiently useless forestry investigation with
which I had purposely charged M. Mairieux, to propose to our Amazon
that I should accompany her alone on her ride. I intended to seize the
opportunity to open negotiations. Our conversation was of the shortest,
and I shall record it faithfully:

“Mlle. Raymonde,” I began, “would you not like to go to Paris?”

“Of course,” she answered, “I should love it.”

“With me? Would you consent if I asked you very nicely?”

“Oh yes, with you. Because in the forest I can guide you, but in Paris
you would be guide.”

She laughed as she lowered her head to avoid a branch. I can see her
now!

“We’ll go as soon as possible,” I said.

“To-night, if you wish to.”

“To-night, then, I want to very much.”

And again her laugh, the laugh of a little girl, rang clear in the
alley. She touched her horse lightly with her riding whip and old
Sultan went off at a gallop. As I urged on my horse to rejoin her, I
was stupefied by the speed of my conquest.

“Look at those little humbugs who are so reserved and discreet,” I
thought. “At the first word of love they catch fire.” For the meaning
of our departure, emphasized by the equivocal tone I had employed, was,
I thought, very explicit. No one could possibly have been deceived by
it.

Then, as suddenly as she had started off, my companion and accomplice
halted.

“We must go home at once,” she said.

“What for?” I asked.

“Why, to let father and mother know we are going away.”

I opened my eyes in astonishment, which she interpreted at once.

“Let us go on,” she said, “I see clearly that it was only a joke. You
were amusing yourself with my credulity. And besides;--”

“And besides?” I repeated in my bewilderment. “I am like my father--I
prefer the Sleeping Woods.”

The enormity of my aberration caused me at that moment one of the
keenest disappointments of my life. How could I even have thought
of the possibility of realising such a preposterous scheme! So keen
was my discomfort that I must have looked like a fool. But later, I
detected with delight a feeling of shame that was quite new to me. When
one has misused his all, such a discovery is full of enchantment. One
perceives, beyond the dull fields he has travelled all too often, a
shining country which draws him on, toward which he gazes as Moses must
have gazed upon the Promised Land. I tried to regain my composure.

“Why?” I said at random.

“I do not know. Paris frightens me.”

Then she added gaily: “No doubt I shall never go there. So much the
worse for me.”

We turned toward home. Except for a few insignificant words she said
nothing more to me, as if a belated intuition had warned her not to
prolong the conversation. During the following days, and up to the time
of my departure, she carefully avoided a tête-à-tête. Or perhaps she
did not even think of one. I too did not desire to meet her. It seemed
to me that I had insulted her, and the cowardice of my intentions, if
not of my acts, wounded my pride. This feeling was stronger even than
her attraction for me. Her presence threw me into a state of extreme
confusion which I bore with impatience. I was relieved to get away. At
the Sleeping Woods I felt lowered and shrunken in my own esteem. And
nothing is more unnerving.

I returned to my former life, but with this difference, that, disgusted
with the gross cynicism cultivated by my free set, I went more into
formal society. This was the worse for me, however, for I lost thereby
that mental independence which some day might have been guided into
more natural channels.

I frequented several salons, and was led to reflect bitterly not only
upon the frailty of women, though I took advantage of it, but also upon
their ability to forget, a frailty and an ability possessed in equal
parts by those women whose broadly scattered amorous favours encourage
young people in the delusion that such as they represent all womankind.

But this harmful and commonplace pessimism was of little account
compared with another and much more dangerous habit of mind which I
began to form. To it I attribute my unhappiness. The spectacle of
society had infected me with the craze for scheming and success. I
considered nothing comparable to the momentary triumphs achieved by a
costume, a clever word or conversation. In things like these I saw the
quintessence of glory. Should not a man seize his share of it? In my
world it blazed in kohl-widened eyes, in rouged cheeks, in cunningly
suggestive words and bared flesh. Like the trees of the forest, this
mass of men and women flung themselves up to the light that glittered
on them, and trampled down the weakest. Did not the desire to please,
to prove themselves superior to each other, induce them to surpass
themselves and put forth their greatest powers of seduction? And had I
not recognized that I belonged to _the trees of light_? What did I care
for closet scholars, for those creative minds whom their own thought
satisfies, for lovers imprisoned by their love, for all humanity at
labor? The obvious triumphs of society furnished me with sufficient
excitement. Thus I began a course of frittering away a life which
excessive prosperity and a lack of discipline had already marred, but
which, thanks to a new emotion, I was on the point of being able to
redeem, when of my own accord I threw away the opportunity.

In this way two years rolled by. They were two years of intoxication
and poison. Pierre Ducal, one of those false friends whom public
opinion rather than our own taste thrusts upon us, handed me the
poison. His reputation he had built with a smile upon devastation
and ruin, as well as upon frivolity, in which he quite understood
his power, and he took pains equally with his liaisons and with his
waistcoats. His assurance in the most delicate situations, that social
dexterity which is often the possession of those who live only for
the moment, I regarded as the refinement of intellect. He played with
passions which he did not really feel. I too indulged in this dangerous
game which wears away and withers the heart, and my emotions became
mere vanities. By a miracle, it is true, I was going to recover my
health, but in the moral as in the physical world one cannot inhale
with impunity deadly germs. Their evil effects endure.

                             *     *     *

Mlle. Mairieux had taken advantage of these two years to blossom forth
like a flower on a long stem. Her slender figure did not indicate
weakness so much as a life in the open air. If she blushed or turned
pale too rapidly it was due to a sensitiveness too exquisite, like
that of the shadow trees, not to the fluctuations of an irregular
circulation.

Her features were regular without being bold, and were softened by a
crown of blond hair of blended shades, so thick that combs could with
difficulty restrain it. And her eyes, which had been so large before,
seemed to me to have grown even larger. It seemed as if the whole sky
had sought to enter into them. Had I seen her again in the woods, she
would have appeared to me like a huntress, more quickly frightened than
the hunted game.

I have often searched my memory, in order to defend myself against
the fault with which I feel charged, for any physical symptoms which
at that time might have foretold the shortness of her life. I cannot
recall any. Though the doctors were not able to discover the origin of
that strange malady which, after having long sapped her strength, at
last carried her away, I, I know whence it came, and I know too that it
was not her body that was first attacked.

During our separation I had almost avoided going back to her even in
my thought. What with superficial occupation, sport, travel and some
sensual indulgence, ordinarily one is fairly successful in suppressing
such a fancy. The instant I saw her again, however, my love revived.
Had I imprisoned her in the chateau of the Sleeping Woods, and was she
only awaiting my return?

                             *     *     *

The summer which I spent on my estate was warm and stormy. The forest
offered us its freshness, its sheltered nooks, its peace. But why was
it that we did not resume our rides? My superintendent evaded any reply
to my suggestions. He had devoted more time than I to observing the
external attractions of his daughter. To her I spoke only with the most
scrupulous deference, for the most part in the presence of her parents,
only occasionally when we met alone, these meetings having now become
rare. Her clear eyes remained inscrutable to me. Why was it that she
did not realise I loved her? And if she did realise it, why did she
give no evidence of her joy and gratitude?

Yes, her gratitude. For there was no use in my recognising in her every
moral superiority over the women that I had previously met; I was still
confident that I was doing her a favour in loving her. Her father might
belong to a family much older than my own; but he was nevertheless my
employé. She would mount in the social scale. I would raise her to
my level. Through me she would attain the summit of fortune. Out of
a little sylvan nymph I was going to create one of those divinities
who reign over Paris, one of those queens whose despotic tyranny
and recognised fascination I had recently experienced. Was not that
enough to intoxicate her? I thought how I could inform her of her good
fortune tactfully, in order not to overwhelm her with the revelation.
Thus do we judge from on high when we perch ourselves upon riches and
prejudice. We like to believe that we attach no importance to them,
that we are showing genuine simplicity, that we treat as equals those
whom we overwhelm with our insolence; and all the time the treasures
of the soul escape our vision. We need the virgin ore, and we make use
only of the minted gold!

I should have prolonged this period of waiting; for me a period of
spiritual refreshment. Raymonde was nearing her twentieth birthday,
the white summit of her first youth. In her “desert” she had sprung
up like a lily of the fields. She was ignorant of the very existence
of those sensations, those flirtations, those trivial love affairs,
which, weak emotions though they are, mere forerunners to true love,
are yet sufficient to tarnish the heart of a young girl, to put upon
it a useless stigma before life has really begun. But those women who
preserve themselves unsullied even in their inmost thoughts, who cross
their pure hands upon their breasts as though to guard the tabernacle
of their future and only love--what husband can ever merit the absolute
surrender that they will some day make to him? Can he ever comprehend,
can he ever realise the significance of such a gift of infinite
confidence, of undying promise? He accepts his conquest as if it were a
foreign country, while all the sweetness of a fatherland is offered to
him. Yes, I should have prolonged that period of waiting.

Before marriage every man ought to compel himself to retire from the
world, to leave an interval between his past and that future for which
he is not prepared. A little time must be permitted to flow over our
dead passions. A new life demands a new-born spirit. My self-conceit
convinced me that I was beloved by Raymonde, although nothing had
betrayed her. Might I not have profited by this security to attempt
to merit her love by cultivating my own? Was there any need to demand
so soon a useless confession, when the spectacle of a heart which was
ignorant of itself could cleanse my heart that knew too much?

On the contrary I was all impatience and desire. I imagined in advance
Raymonde’s joy on learning that among all others I had chosen her for
my wife. I wished to be the only one to see her transfigured face.
Without any fear of reversing the convention I intended to speak to her
first, in order the better to enjoy her surprise. Later I would speak
to her parents, who would be only too happy to consent to so brilliant
a match! Such was the arrangement I determined upon.

Chance favoured me after I had spent several days in a vain attempt to
arrange so important an interview. I had asked Mme. Mairieux, of whom
I knew I could easily dispose, at the opportune moment, to come to the
chateau, to help me with some household arrangements with which I was
not satisfied. I hoped that Raymonde would accompany her. However, she
came without her mother. Less perspicacious than her husband, Mme.
Mairieux kept no supervision over her daughter’s actions. Besides, did
not Raymonde’s own dignity protect her sufficiently? I looked upon her
with an intoxication of delight, but how can I depict what I felt?
I looked at her as a sovereign at his subject, as an Ahasuerus upon
an Esther. My imagination dwelt lovingly upon the dream that she was
about to realise through me. She was coming to me who awaited her. In a
few moments she would learn of her good fortune. It seemed to me that
I could already hear her heart beat. It would beat like that of the
pigeon which I had once wounded while hunting. I had picked it up in my
hands and felt its warm life as I caressed it, the warm life that was
ebbing away.

After we had settled the details in question I suggested that we look
over the chateau.

“It is strange,” I said, “that you have never visited it. Would you
like to?”

“Very much,” she replied.

We began our inspection of the salon and the galleries. I opened
the doors for the young girl and showed her the pictures and the
furniture, while she listened attentively to my small remarks. She
wore, I remember, a dress of white serge, touching in its simplicity,
and rather clumsily cut, which, however, did not succeed in concealing
the slender lines of her figure. The plain dress seemed to match the
frankness of her face and the peace of her eyes.

Outside it was one of those September days whose close one dreads, for
fear that on the morrow one may not find its equal.

After our little expedition was over and she was about to leave, I
stopped her:

“Would you enjoy living here, Mlle. Raymonde?”

She turned her calm eyes to me.

“Our lodge satisfies me,” she said.

So then I should have to dazzle her with one stroke, in spite of my
desire to drink in her emotion slowly and in little swallows. She would
not guess. Not to lose anything of the agitation she was about to feel
I looked her full in the face, as I went on:

“You will leave your lodge some day.”

She was astonished and even showed some anxiety.

“Our lodge? When?”

“When you marry.”--

Then, in order to strike her the more suddenly, I added with scarcely a
pause: “When you become my wife.”

I watched for the rapture which these magic words were surely to
produce. Instead she only burst into a laugh, though it seemed to me
that the laugh did not have its accustomed clearness.

“It is absurd,” she said, “to make fun that way.”

I insisted that I was in earnest, and repeated my declaration, which
was more like an announcement than a proposal of marriage, so certain
was I in advance of her consent. Could the idea of a refusal have
entered my mind? I could sooner have believed that Raymonde was mad.

When at last she understood, I saw the colour leave her face. She swung
for a second like a boat on the sea when the wind rises, and then she
fled at full speed through the open door of the ante-chamber.

I scarcely heard her light tread as she descended the stairs, but I saw
her cross the court without slackening her speed. In the same way two
years before she had run away at the Green Fountain. Was it even then
on account of my love?

To me, her flight was an insult, an unjust and cruel insult, and I
hastened to lay the blame for it upon the Mairieux. Did not this girl
deserve to be scolded for her rudeness? And what was the meaning of
this access of shyness? at the very moment when I was thinking of
checking generously an outburst of gratitude!

Nevertheless I loved her, and to lose her would have been intolerable.
But, like the majority of lovers, I could not distinguish between love
and the selfish gratification of my immediate desires.

The elder Mairieux, whom I found in their drawing room, raised dismayed
faces to me. Indeed, it is stretching a point to say that I was not
even welcomed by my superintendent. Raymonde had told them nothing, and
they were laying all the blame upon me.

“Where is your daughter,” I demanded of them almost violently.

“In her room--what have you said that has wounded her so? I insist upon
knowing.”

It was a new M. Mairieux that I, dumbfounded by this note of
antagonism, saw before me. His broad experience of life, his
indifference to the fashionable world, his courtesy in his business
relations, the good-fellowship of his conversations with me,
everything, in short, which had made our relations so agreeable,
prevented me from crediting him with such firmness of character. Now,
however, when his daughter was concerned, he spoke with an authority I
had not anticipated.

In a single word I explained the situation.

“I asked her to marry me and she ran away.”

M. Mairieux, accustomed as he was to the quickness of my resolves,
understood at once. So much his smile told me, a smile that was quite
grave, somewhat serious even, in the face of such wonderful news. He
repeated my statement to his wife, who could not believe her ears, and
insisted upon demanding further explanations from me without giving me
an opportunity to utter a word.

“Is it really true, monsieur? Do you wish to marry our daughter?” she
exclaimed, and then lifting her hands to heaven, she cried: “And she
ran away from you!”

This particular gesture, and in fact, her general attitude, flattered
my vanity a little. But I knew that Mme. Mairieux was peculiarly alive
to the social advantages of this union, even more to them than to the
material benefits that would result from it.

“Be seated, monsieur,” said the good woman; “I am going to scold
Raymonde and bring her down to you.”

“Wait,” ordered her husband.

It was a command which conveyed a warning to her. Then he began to
question me about the hasty scene at the chateau. His conclusion was
that I should have talked to him before I spoke to his daughter. I was
no longer addressing my superintendent, but the father of Raymonde,
from whom I wished to take, without obtaining his consent, that which
was most precious to him. A totally new view of life was opened to
me, upon which I had never bestowed a thought. His reasoning overcame
me, and though I was conquered by it for the moment, I was furious
at my inability to withstand him. To submit without a protest to the
categorical rebuke of this man whom I regarded as an inferior--was that
not in itself a proof of my love?

However, M. Mairieux went on with a calm determination, which overawed
me despite myself, and which now, as I look back upon it, revealed
truth and simplicity, a greatness of spirit which I did not then
appreciate:

“Marriage,” he began, “is a lifelong bond. It involves the whole of
one’s life. For us, who are good Catholics, it implies a definite
choice; it is indissoluble. Do you also consider it so? Is it in this
way that you regard marriage? The point is essential.”

Most assuredly, I did. When one is about to marry one believes that
it will last forever, and very often, also, when one is in love. What
useless questions! And there were more to come, together with some
definitions.

“The husband is the head of the family,” declared M. Mairieux, “but
he owes his wife the protection of his love. You understand: you must
protect her against others, against unhappiness, against herself,
against you yourself, and the temptations that you will encounter
more frequently in your world. Have you taken into account all these
obligations, so foreign to your past life?”

Hurt by these doubts, and convinced of my omniscience as to the care
of a wife, I assured him that I was prepared to fulfill all my duties.
Thereupon M. Mairieux softened.

“Let me speak to you now of my little Raymonde,” he said; “she
will come to her fiancé with a pure heart, and the treasure, yes,
the treasure, of the rarest feeling. You will give her wealth and
surroundings very different from her own. But she--how much more will
she bring you! You are too young to understand all the perfection that
is in her. You must watch over her, watch over yourself, if your union
is to be blessed.”

With these words, the last of which rose to the height of solemnity,
he completely overthrew the conception that I had formed of our mutual
relations. My pride might perhaps have revolted against them, seeing in
them chiefly an evidence of paternal partiality sufficiently remarkable
in the mouth of my superintendent, if I had not appreciated their
essential truth. As it was, I confined my reply to promises whose full
extent I did not then perceive.

“Are you sure, at least, that you love her?” went on M. Mairieux.

Was I sure of it! My presence there proved it.

“But she?” he persisted.

“I believe she loves me.”

“Has she told you so?”

“No, she has not told me.”

“How do you know it?”

As this examination grew more pointed, I searched vainly in my memory
for a single token, a single sign, no matter how slight, which might
have revealed Raymonde’s heart. There was nothing--not a word, not a
look, not a gesture, neither the intimacy of some ride, nor some sudden
shyness--there was absolutely nothing to put me on the track. I had
settled the question without ever having asked it. And so, after a
hesitation which covered me with confusion, I confessed aloud that I
knew nothing about it.

For the first time since the commencement of this conversation, M.
Mairieux regarded me with sympathy. His clear eyes are almost as limpid
as his daughter’s were, and I was surprised at their tenderness.
Nevertheless, at the moment, I hated him for the avowals that his
cross-examination forced upon me. Was he not casting me down from the
pedestal I had mounted? My wealth, by which I thought he would of
course be conquered, had been stripped of all its importance in my
offer of marriage, and now, uncertain that I had inspired love, I was
like those poor lovers whom suspense drives to despair and excess of
hope keeps in suspense. But I did not remain there long. Internally I
was boiling over, and if I restrained myself on the surface, it was
because I thought I should surmount these obstacles without delay.

Mme. Mairieux, to whose remarks her husband had several times responded
by requesting her to keep silent, and who had not ceased bestowing upon
him evidence of her surprise and disapproval, arose at last to play her
part.

“I am going to question her,” she declared.

“No, no, my dear,” protested M. Mairieux.

He attempted to detain her and she grew angry.

“A daughter hides nothing from her mother,” she cried.

I can only guess at what passed between the two women. Raymonde never
spoke to me of her mother except with the deepest and the most filial
respect. Nevertheless one can divine the conversation from the reply
which her mother brought back.

“The child is peculiar,” she said. “I consider her stubborn; she does
not want to listen to reason.”

“What is the matter.”

“She considers you too different from us, too--I don’t know what, too
rich.”

“And because of that?”

“She will not accept? Yes, because of that. It is crazy. I am
heart-broken. I ask--I ask your pardon for it.”

She asked my pardon for this refusal as if it were a lapse in good
manners. In the conversation which she had just had with Raymonde
without doubt she had emphasised that which appealed to and blinded
her, that upon which I had based my own superiority: the unexpected
opportunity of this union, the change of circumstances, the pleasures
of success and of life in the great world, far from “this desert.”
Over the vanishing of a dream in such harmony with her aspirations she
mourned as sorrowfully as Pierette over her broken pitcher.

M. Mairieux, on the contrary, seemed comforted: he was to keep his
daughter.

On my part, suffering from this blow struck at both my passion and my
pride, I cried out:

“But since I love her!”

I could not conceive that any one should oppose my will. Was it
possible to tolerate any obstacle which did not proceed from me myself?

“Possibly you do,” observed M. Mairieux, “but she is the question.”

I felt an intense anger at this child, who at her age and in her
position, dared not to love me. I could not believe such audacity. The
whole current of my life was stopped, congealed like the surface of a
frozen stream. Yet I had not said, “Will she ever love me.” Neither had
I said, “Will she not love me some day.” No, I had simply said, “Since
I love her!”

“She will accept,” good Mme. Mairieux assured me. “How can you imagine
that she will not?”

To her the refusal was almost sacrilege.

Seeing my stupefaction and my emotion, her husband took my hand.

“We are much touched by your offer, M. Cernay,” he said. “We expected
it so little. We are simple folk, without ambition. Some nice fellow,
an industrious, cheerful, intelligent, upright, sensitive-souled lad
who would have assured us Raymonde’s happiness--we did not ask anything
more. In order to find him we were planning to go to the city the next
winter or two. But you--no, truly, we did not think of it.”

Throughout this harangue, which was scarcely to her taste, Mme.
Mairieux kept shaking her head. Despite her denials, however, her
husband continued:

“Your offer is an honour. Many advantageous marriages were open to
you and you chose this. Now allow us to recover our breath and think
it over. I will question my daughter, and learn whether her answer is
final or not.”

“No, no,” protested his wife. “It is not.”

“I will let you know, I promise you,” he said.

“When?” I demanded instantly.

“Some day soon.”

To wait still longer! It was not to be dreamed of, and I turned
impetuously upon my superintendent.

“No, no, not some day soon--immediately. I wish to see her, to speak to
her. I will learn from her why it is that she avoids me. I insist upon
it.”

But in the face of M. Mairieux as he confronted me, there was the same
resolution which had so much surprised me when I first observed it,
and which I felt was invincible. Influenced by it despite myself, I
modified my language.

“Allow me to see her, I beg of you, if only for a few moments. I will
talk to her before you, before her mother. Don’t you understand my
suffering?”

Mme. Mairieux, who had been incessantly encouraging me with all kinds
of significant looks, now turned to her husband.

“My dear,” said she, “see how he suffers. It is inconceivable. Do you
wish me to go back to Raymonde?”

But, reaching his own decision, he rebuffed her.

“I will go myself,” he said, and walked to the door.

“I will go with you,” said his wife.

He instructed her to keep me company instead, and disappeared. His
absence seemed long to me, though I do not believe that it was really
so. Mme. Mairieux deluged me throughout this period of expectation
with the most consoling flattery, and the consoling flattery of Mme.
Mairieux had the gift of exasperating me. I began to walk up and down
the room, now fast, now slow.

“Everything will come out all right,” the good woman kept repeating.
“If she does not love you now, she will not fail to do so in time. It
is not an opportunity that presents itself twice, and Raymonde is so
reasonable.”

But these assurances merely increased my anxiety.

At last M. Mairieux reappeared. He did not bring back with him,
however, the repentant culprit, as I had hoped he would. Walking up to
me, he laid his hand upon my shoulder.

“We must give her time to come to herself,” he said. “You have
frightened her a little. You should have spoken to me first. She is
timid. She does not know.”

I heeded nothing but the delay that was being forced upon me.

“Time?” I demanded. “How much time?”

“Several days.”

“Oh, several days! That will be death. A day, one day, won’t that be
enough? Mayn’t I come back to-morrow?”

“Well, try it,” agreed M. Mairieux.

I returned to my own home exalted by mingled sensations of anger and
love. In the avenue several dead oak trees had been replaced by early
chestnuts, and from one of these a leaf blew away. It was certainly
one of the first to fall. A breath of wind kept it in the air, and it
floated, like a tired bird, around one of the stone vases on the open
lawn. Would it rest there, or would it reach the earth? With childish
superstition, I looked upon it as an omen. If it fell to the ground, it
would mean happiness for me.

The wind understood me and the urn swallowed it.

When the heart is truly alive the least trifles are important.

                             *     *     *

In later years M. Mairieux consented to tell me how he had learned his
daughter’s secret. It was later, much later, after we had lost her,
and I was questioning him greedily about the past. I had envied him
the possession of this secret, but it was just that he should have
received it, and not me. After twenty years of boundless and absolutely
unselfish affection, what an advantage he had over me!

When he entered Raymonde’s rooms, she was standing by the threshold
of the window, motionless, inert, almost indifferent. He told her of
my impatience, my unhappiness. Nevertheless, he said, she should take
counsel only of her own heart. The material advantages of a marriage
should only be a secondary consideration.

She kept repeating obstinately:

“No, no, I do not want to marry him.”

“But why?”

“M. Cernay is not the husband for me.”

He was tempted to stop there. A presentiment, which he took to be
paternal selfishness warned him, as he confessed to me, warned him not
to insist. Conscientious scruples, however, and the desire to exhaust
every argument in favour of the alliance, urged him to add:

“Possibly, but he loves you.”

This time he received no reply; indeed it was not a question. There was
only one thing more to say:

“And you--do you love him?”

“How can I know?” she murmured, and then, realising the truth, she
wept. These first tears I did not see. How many others did her love
cost her, less observed, even more secret, which I saw no better?

To young girls who have not squandered their imagination in precocious
little flirtations, love is like a garden in springtime before the
dawn. The flowers are there, all the flowers. We do not realise it,
although we inhale their perfume, because it is so incredible. Thus,
enclosed within the heart, the magic enchantment sleeps, invisible. Day
breaks, and with it all the world seems to be born. But the love which
shines forth was always there.

                             *     *     *

The next day I had my turn.

Mme. Mairieux watched for my arrival. It was she who opened the door
for me, and from her I learned of my happiness. It lost nothing in the
telling, for she was anxious to spare me several moments of anxiety.

Raymonde met me in the drawing-room, holding her father’s hand.

She wore the same simple dress of white serge that she had had on the
day before. Her smooth cheeks had grown pale; she did not smile, she
was serious, indeed almost severe. When her eyes rested upon me they
seemed to me to have grown not only even larger, but almost terrified,
and at the same time that I read in them the avowal of her love, I saw
a kind of holy fear, a sort of religious ecstasy. With ardour I poured
out all my love to her, but of what value were my protestations in
comparison with that pathetic countenance haloed by devotion? Why did I
not throw myself upon my knees to plead before her, to pray to her as
to a saint?

I have before me as I write a little picture of the Annunciation. Mary,
who is scarcely fifteen years old, has just learned from the angel her
divine mission. With clasped hands she strives to quiet her heart. In
spite of her unworthiness, she accepts the honour at which she thrills,
but at the same time she foresees all the sorrow that will come to her.
She trembles with joy or fear, or rather with joy and fear together.

In the course of a journey to Italy I came upon the picture in a little
town. To secure it I needed more than money; I had to use persistence,
strategy, eloquence. But I wanted it at any price. For this acceptance
without fear--oh, in my comparison I do not intend any irreverence,
which as far as I am concerned would only be detestable and
ridiculous--this acceptance without fear recalled to me my betrothal,
which in truth was for Raymonde an oblation that she made to me of all
the suffering to come. With mystic intuition she foresaw it, but I, I
guessed nothing.

She had listened to me without speaking. At last, as though there were
any need of words when I saw that the whole current of her being was
arrested, I demanded:

“Will you not tell me, too, that you love me?”

She shivered all over and I dared insist.

“Not to-day,” she murmured at length in a colourless voice. “I cannot.”

“And to-morrow?”

“To-morrow perhaps.”

Fool that I was, I could obtain nothing more from her, though she was
sinking under the weight of her love. Ordinarily we employ the same
phrases in common conversation that we use for the deepest emotions.
Through reluctance, through delay, through the difficulty of giving
them utterance, the desire to keep them in her heart, which cherished
them in order the better to absorb their virtue, Raymonde restored to
the divine words their true meaning, their power and their freshness.
And I complained!

I wished to embrace her, but despite myself my respect for her checked
me, and instead I bent over the hand that hung by her side. She had to
restrain herself from drawing it away, as if my kiss had burned it.

“Leave her now,” said her father. “You do not see that she is
thoroughly tired out.”

Ah, how I pity those who become engaged, who marry, in the city! Does
not everything urge them to set bounds to a love which they must keep,
as it were, on a leash, in the streets, must protect incessantly in the
midst of acquaintances, difficulties and embarrassments? My own and
Raymonde’s love blossomed forth in freedom.

We had resumed our horseback rides, and sometimes M. Mairieux
accompanied us, sometimes he entrusted his daughter to me, when he
would follow us with his eyes for several moments before he returned to
his office or his work outdoors.

The trees still retained their foliage, but the colours changed from
day to day, a marvel to behold. The leaves of the lindens became a pale
yellow, those of the oaks, at first a red copper, later that colour
of rust which they keep all winter, for they do not fall: shrivelled,
hardened, and curled up they cling to the branches until the new growth
comes in the spring and flings them down.

“They are like those feelings,” I said to Raymonde, “which remain in
the heart even after they are dead, and which only a new passion has
the power to drive away.”

Whenever I gave vent to such sentimental rubbish as this, the art of
which one acquires in society, she used to look me full in the face,
her astonished eyes seeming to discover in me some unknown abysses.
Why did I aim to dazzle her with such empty talk? I was thinking of
those faded memories which still occasionally obtruded themselves upon
my mind, and which, although they had not yet entirely gone, were
destined, under the influence of my love, to disappear only to be
reborn another day.

“None of my affections is dead,” she replied. “None will die before I
do.”

We were passing the Green Fountain, and we paused to give our horses
a drink from the basin. We saw the reflection of their heads mingle
in the calm water, and leaning forward, she unconsciously and I
intentionally, we saw our own heads come together and touch. Drawing
back I looked at Raymonde: she was blushing as if she had felt my lips,
although they had never yet touched her.

Two years before, more than two years since, it was, on the birthday of
spring, I had waylaid her there. I recalled the incident to her, and
asked her the reason of her fear.

“I did not expect you,” she said.

“Was I so dreadful?” I inquired.

“We must believe so, since I was afraid,” she answered, with her clear
laugh.

I should have been glad to have her assure me that even at that time
she had begun to love me, although nothing could have equalled the
charm that her ignorance of her own heart then possessed.

“Whom did you love before me?” I asked.

“Before you? My mother, and my father and all this besides,” she
answered, and stretched out her arms in a comprehensive gesture that
her little riding whip accentuated.

“All this?” I repeated, not grasping her meaning.

“Yes, the trees, the little pond that is down there, the orchards, the
meadows, and the whole sky that you see.”

I laughed as I listened to this catalogue.

“I am not jealous of them,” I said.

She looked about her at the forest, the luminous autumn forest which
had contributed to the awakening of her spirit, and murmured:

“You may well be, nevertheless.”

She never questioned me about my past. Through a generosity, the
nobility of which I understand now, she did not wish to crush me
with it, although she suspected that it had been turbid and stormy.
Believing me to be as honest as she was, she considered that I was
sufficiently punished by not being able to sweep it utterly away when
we exchanged our unequal love.

As we turned for home the wind arose. Should we find our leaves again
in the morning? On the avenue, those on the chestnut trees were
stained brown and red. Before the chateau, the plane trees, with their
leaves open like giant hands, were green and dull gold. They offered
a splendid prize to the north wind which was beginning to blow. Each
one, as it was gathered in, wavered gently in the air. Along the wall,
the well-sheltered Virginia creeper spread out its vivid red, and the
hardy hedges of privet and hawthorne preserved a touch of green in this
symphony of brilliant colours.

I was a little ahead and I turned.

Why did Raymonde, in her white woollen dress, and mounted on her
glistening horse, why did she, so young, seem to be so in harmony with
the autumn, and like it to be so clothed with the delicate charm of
things that perish? And why, feeling thus, did I not swear to watch
over each instant of her happiness and her life?

In the forest she showed me a young ash tree which, after several
years, had succeeded in piercing the baleful vault of foliage and crept
upward between its two powerful neighbours, now exposing its summit to
the sun’s rays.

“Raymonde, are you still a shadow-tree?” I asked.

She recalled our former conversations, and, surprised at the attention
I had paid to them, smiled.

“The ash,” she said, “is a tree of light.”

I believed that this was an answer and gloried in it. In reality she
had not replied to me at all; possibly she was thinking of those trees
that are so sensitive that the least hardship pierces them.

                             *     *     *

“I am glad,” she said to me one day, “that I had never given a single
thought to any one before I met you. If it were not for this, my love
would not be complete.”

                             *     *     *

Another day, under the arch of the cloister, she said:

“My spirit seems so light that I can hardly hold it back. I feel as
though it were beating its wings, as though it wished to fly away. I
hold it back as much as I can, for if it should fly away, I should die.
And I do not wish to die now, oh, no!”

                             *     *     *

In the valleys in October the evening falls swiftly. On our return
from our ride, when night had surprised us, a falling star crossed the
sky in front of us. Actually it seemed purposely not to hasten in its
passage, as if it were asking us to tell it our desires.

“What wish have you made?” I asked Raymonde.

She turned on me her calm look.

“None. Why should I?”

“You would have had ample time,” I said. “One always wants something.”

“Not I,” she answered. “I wish nothing.”

                             *     *     *

All the recollections that I pluck from the past contribute to picture
her in a perfection of a love that I cannot imagine more complete. It
was her very life, the very breath of her being.

This love I believed myself worthy of inspiring, so many illusions
did I still cherish. Her fervour, the solitude, the woods and the
autumn days, strove together to exalt me. I truly believe that during
this period I tried unconsciously to raise myself to her level. Her
glance calmed, soothed and purified me. They say the moonlight calms
the waves. In the same way, her influence stilled my transports and
my desires. I should have striven to find my true self, to prune the
forest of my spirit, to clear it of all its vanity and sham, of all
that rank vegetation which I had permitted to grow up there--which,
though temporarily stifled, would soon flourish again. I did not
comprehend her love. I thought that I should teach her life, while she
already knew by intuition that it was quite simple, and direct, level
and smooth.

One night the wind carried away the leaves. The next day we found them
under our horses’ feet, and we left a track of red gold rustling behind
us. However, in the forest we could the better appreciate the upward
shooting of the bare trees, and the depth and charm of the paths.
Winter was here, and the cold. Soon we should have to face bad weather.
That ride would be one of our last. Mindful of all our others, we rode
in silence more and more slowly, as if to prolong the hours....

                             *     *     *

Mme. Mairieux always prepared tea and small cakes for us on our return.

She was very busy. Her daughter entrusted to her the choice of the
trousseau, and she it was also who fixed the date for the marriage,
made the arrangements for the official ceremony, marshalled the bridal
procession as a captain his company, and finally even attempted to
secure a bishop to pronounce the nuptial benediction.

Her husband, somewhat reserved since our engagement, teased her gently,
and by a calculated stubbornness obtained from her some concessions and
omissions. These tilts consumed the evenings.

“We must have a large wedding,” she said.

“No, indeed, no,” he replied.

Nevertheless she made out a list on the back of a mourning
announcement, a sheet which she had economically torn from a letter of
condolence. I recall that detail now, that omen: a black bordered sheet
of paper for the list of our wedding guests.

M. Mairieux read the list, which assumed disturbing proportions. Hoping
for allies, he turned to the corner of the room where Raymonde and I
were sitting, paying indifferent attention to these preparations.

“What is your opinion, dear?” he inquired.

“Oh, I,” she said, “you know very well that all the others are
indifferent to me. All that I want are here now.”

“One does not get married in secret,” protested her mother. “You, M.
Cernay, who know so much of the world, must agree with me, do you not?”

Thus drawn into the discussion, I supported my fiancée with an energy
which astonished myself. Unquestionably, like her, I preferred to be
alone with my happiness. Perhaps too--I am ashamed to admit it, but
have I not undertaken to confess?--even at this happy time my vanity
may not have been so completely dead that it did not suggest the
advantage of not seeking to advertise too loudly a marriage without
distinction, a union which would astonish the world, which they would
make fun of in Paris. I was marrying my superintendent’s daughter;
there was nothing in that on which to pride myself. Such were some of
the imaginary difficulties that I had not succeeded in dispelling.
When our judgment has been warped in early life by excess of worldly
advantages and success, how many years and how much suffering are
necessary to bring the truth, the real meaning of life, back to us! And
in the interval, irreparable harm can be done.

                             *     *     *

One night about this time we began to discuss the plans of our life
after the wedding. My wife and I intended to spend the winter in Rome,
the following summer at the Sleeping Woods, and to postpone until the
next winter our residence in Paris. I adopted this plan partly to
secure more leisure for Raymonde’s education, which I flattered myself
I was to undertake. Curiously enough, she smiled at the thought of
Rome, while Paris frightened her.

“But why?” I asked her.

“In Italy we know nobody, all our time will be our own, all our hours,
all our thoughts. It will be like the forest.”

“Like the forest?” I repeated.

“Yes, instead of the trees, the names of which I who know nothing of
anything, was so proud to teach you, we shall see beautiful things, of
which I am totally ignorant and which you will explain to me.”

“And in Paris?”

“In Paris, I shall be afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That you will not be pleased with me; I am only a little girl.”

“How strange you are, Raymonde!” I answered.

Nevertheless I did not ask her in what I could possibly fail to be
pleased with her. It is not enough to say that I divined her doubts,
for I actually shared them. But that which with her was merely
modesty and shyness, was in my case, unwarranted distrust, a wretched
preoccupation with the world’s opinion, which, even when away from it,
I could not entirely disregard. What would be thought of my wife by the
world, would my friends approve my choice?

After a prolonged silence, in which there was no harmony of spirit, I
determined to show my generosity, and turned to my parents-in-law.

“It is understood,” I said, “that whether or not we are here, you will
live in the chateau. I do not wish you to remain in this little lodge.”

Mme. Mairieux broke into loud protestations of gratitude. Evidently I
was making real one of her dreams. She had always wished to live in
state, with dignity and ceremony, a troupe of servants, a continual
round of visits, much publicity. A certain childishness lent to
her ambition a touch of prettiness. The simplicity of her husband
disconcerted her, for she did not recognise in it the superiority of
breeding. The daughter of a bookseller in the town where he had been
in garrison, thoroughly saturated with romantic novels, she had been
captivated by his uniform and his horsemanship, and, after his marriage
had cost him his career, had always cherished a grudge against him for
the lack of money which compelled him to abandon his life of show. I
reconstructed without difficulty this domestic drama, so common and
inglorious.

Raymonde looked at her father, who had not yet spoken. I noticed the
anxiety in her glance, but I could not understand it. M. Mairieux gave
me the explanation. He thanked me most amicably for what he called my
delicacy, and declined. “This lodge,” he concluded, “was sufficient for
us when we had our daughter. Without her it will be much too big and
too empty. And see how conveniently it is arranged, and outside, the
walls are clothed with vines and clematis. Let us live and die here.”

Mme. Mairieux made a face, and I too was a little hurt by his refusal.
I insisted, but ungraciously.

“If not for your own sake, accept, for mine,” I said. “I cannot permit
my parents-in-law to remain in an inferior position. What will they say
in the neighbourhood?”

This was the poorest of all arguments. At once the blood rushed to
Raymonde’s face and she blushed all over. This excessive sensitiveness,
which, however, she showed only in connection with the most subtle
sentiments, gave her an incomparable charm. The time was still to come
when I should reproach her for it.

“That is perfectly true,” said Mme. Mairieux, her hopes reviving. “What
will people say?”

“What does it matter?” Her husband scorned the objection. “Are they not
saying already that we have long lain in wait for M. Cernay in order to
give him our daughter?”

He regretted having repeated this gossip when he saw Raymonde’s eyes
fill with tears.

“They say that!” she cried.

He endeavoured to soothe her at once.

“Little one, little one! There are always evil-minded people. One must
realise that.”

“When you are happy,” she murmured, “how is one to know that?”

                             *     *     *

On the day we signed the marriage contract, she followed the example of
her father. In the contract I had settled upon her a sum which would
insure her future. She refused to accept it, and all my entreaties were
useless.

“But I may die, Raymonde,” I said.

“Then I shall no longer need anything.”

“One has to live even in sorrow,” I explained.

“It takes very little.”

“Fortune has favoured me,” I said. “Let me look after you.”

“I want only your heart,” she answered, “because you already have mine.”

“You know that you have mine too, Raymonde, but there are laws--”

“The law cannot provide for everything.”

Why had I not determined upon the expedient of holding the property
in common? Why did I adopt that of dividing it, and then pose as a
benefactor? Why, after her refusal to accept, did I not alter the
contract? And, not having done so, why did I not draw a will in her
favour on the day after the wedding? We forget too often to make our
deeds consistent with our attitude in life. Our carelessness, or our
egotism, or some mental reservation which escapes superficial analysis,
leads us astray.

Raymonde came to me with empty hands. Her youth and innocence amazed
me, and I bargained for her.

Now, now, I understand her better. There was no need of a contract
between us, or, if one was necessary, it was only in order that a brief
and indissoluble formula might unite our fortunes.

                             *     *     *

Our triple alliance cut down the greater part of Mme. Mairieux’s
guests. I confined my own list to my two witnesses, Col. Briare, my
nearest relative, and Pierre Ducal, one of my most intimate friends.

The Colonel appeared to be satisfied with my alliance when he learned
that my future father-in-law was an old army officer. Outside of his
troopers, nothing interested him. Every one, including Mme. Mairieux,
who was enraptured at the prospect of beholding a uniform, called him
“my Colonel.” When he learned that Raymonde was an excellent horseman,
he congratulated me brusquely.

Pierre Ducal made me more uneasy. He brought into our woods the
atmosphere of Paris, the dreaded judgment of Paris. His sarcasm is
almost famous there. It is he who utters the last word about things, he
who with no authority but his own acts as arbiter of fashion. Why did I
choose him rather than another? I hoped by offering him this compliment
to secure him as an ally. Would it not be better to have him with me
than against me? Clearly I foresaw hostilities and in asking him to
help me I would disarm him. Then too, although I had of late seen
little of him, he still possessed for me the fascination with which he
had once dazzled me. At one time, when the world monopolized me, I had
copied him, so strongly did his assurance and ease of manner appeal to
me as the summit of attractiveness.

From the moment of his arrival at the chateau he was on the alert.
The news of my marriage had burst like a bombshell upon the society
we frequented. I had been the target for several of those forward,
modern girls who look up a possible husband’s eligibility in advance.
What rival in some forgotten corner of the world had snatched me from
out of their experienced hands? No one knew anything, no one suspected
anything, for my brief letter of invitation explained nothing.
Nevertheless, I have learned since, before leaving, he trumpeted
forth great news of the event. He had been generally commissioned to
investigate my case.

After the usual greetings he began the examination at once.

“Is she a neighbour in the country here?”

“Oh, a very close neighbour,” I replied. “She lives in the lodge which
you see.”

“At the entrance of the Avenue? Isn’t that part of your estate?”

“Certainly, since her father is my superintendent.”

In order to be done with it as quickly as possible, I hurled the
sentence at him in a single breath, as if it were the confession of a
sin. I decidedly was not enjoying the serenity which should have come
from the happiness and honour of marrying Raymonde. The presence of a
single man was sufficient to cause me one of those little shudders of
cowardice and baseness. Nothing suggested a greater menace to my own
and Raymonde’s happiness than the troubled way in which I confessed
this little fact to Ducal. It proved that I was not cured of my
pettiest vanities.

Over them my love, born in solitude and nourished and beautified by the
clear, fresh influence of my fiancée, temporarily triumphed. It did not
destroy them. So many briers prevent the tree of our life from growing,
and drain its sap.

When Pierre Ducal’s trunks arrived I laughed at their number.

“Well, you see,” he said nonchalantly, “I did not know.”

Did not know what? In this vague phrase I perceived a painful
significance. After a moment he explained:

“You see I did not know exactly the character of the ceremony.”

“It will be very simple.”

“Naturally.”

Naturally! I could have boxed his ears.

At the same time a host of thoughts, which had not occurred to me
during the happy months of my seclusion, beset and assailed me. I
breathed again the intoxication of certain successes, I recollected the
splendid alliances which had been offered me, I evoked the memory of
some mistress whose rouge and whose treachery I had passed over because
she carried to perfection the arts of dress and of fencing with words.
What a position I might have held in Paris, had I wished! Forgotten
impressions, as glittering and as false as the jewelry of a bazaar,
impressions which tarnished my youth but had been happily lost during
my rides with a pure child in the Sleeping Woods, conquests which had
temporarily faded from my memory, these Ducal brought back to me as if
they were precious stones that he had recovered.

However, he had not yet seen _Her_. My radiant Raymonde would restore
order in my heart.

We were to take luncheon at the lodge before going to the mayor’s
office. The religious ceremony was to be celebrated on the following
day. Raymonde appeared in her plain street dress, almost entirely
devoid of trimming or ornament, and for the first time I noticed those
faults in attire which cost youth so little.

“She is charming,” Ducal said to me in an undertone. “She has a little
gown--”

He hesitated a moment, then continued:

“A delightful little gown. My compliments.”

In words such as these the sneer is as plain as day, and I tasted
its poison. It spoiled my pleasure. Why should I have attached any
significance to what he said? I was like a mediocre artist or savant,
who, not completely absorbed in his work, keeps his ears open for
external sounds, for the voice of the critics, of rivals and of public
opinion. The most beautiful love that could have illumined my youth did
not shield me from such petty slights. Oh, dissipations of time and
energy! Why must we perceive the greatest wonder of this life, that we
can live but once, only when it has been put irreparably beyond our
reach, when, like some perfect form arrested in the marble, or cloaked
by night we cannot see it moving past?

                             *     *     *

My farmers, woodcutters and the neighbouring peasants, who adored M.
Mairieux, but for whom I was a distant and puzzling landlord, had,
during the night, covered with branches of fir trees the road which led
from the lodge to the little church. They had despoiled the borders of
the forest, in order that on this day of festivity we might walk on
green boughs. It was late autumn in the forest, bare of leaves, but on
the road it was spring. And in our hearts? Ah! Mine would have burst
with joy, with that sheer joy which no impurity can spot, if Pierre
Ducal had not been there.

But he was there, piercing the least detail with his gimlet eyes. I
should have been indifferent to him, and I hated him. He absorbed part
of my attention, he prevented me from abandoning myself without reserve
to the current of my love.

Raymonde, her Book of Hours in her hand, slender and delicate, the
contour of her face and the varying shades of gold in her hair softened
despite the sunlight by her veil, looked in her white dress like one of
those old missal pictures so radiant that it stands out from a golden
background. Knowing the delicacy of her feelings I expected to see her
agitated, but inwardly and outwardly she was peace. And seeing her thus
I recalled the words she had said to me:

“My Soul is so high that I can hardly hold it down.”

I almost looked for wings, and it seemed to me that I could hear them
beat. The first time I made a flight in my aeroplane, I distinctly saw
a vision of Raymonde on the road strewn with foliage for the procession.

Pierre Ducal approached to greet her. As he bowed, I noticed an uneven
pleat in her gown. He straightened up and looked at me. I thought that
I read his meaning: “That gown is certainly not a Maulet creation.”

I realise that I am laying too much stress on impressions that were
almost imperceptible, which slipped and fled away almost as soon as
they were born. They indicated nevertheless the existence of that
invisible crack in our happiness which made it the most vulnerable, the
easiest to break.

The sky was of that delicate tint which it assumes in mountainous
countries at the end of the season, changing from pale blue to a pearl
grey, as though by its transparency it was announcing the coming of
snow.

Raymonde, in order that we might be together in thought each moment of
this unique day, had asked me to read the marriage service.

“You will see,” she said, “how beautiful the Liturgy is.”

I read it then. Since her death I have many times reread the words of
St. Paul: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the
church. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet
hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as Christ
also the church: because we are members of his body. They two shall
become one flesh--”

I understood, I realised for one moment at least, that miracle of
immortal love, which dares to brave time and because of its injuries
from the union of body and soul, arrives at unity, order and peace.
Yes, I understood that in loving Raymonde and in Raymonde’s love, I
loved my better self, the heart of my heart, that which lives on in us
after our youth is fled, that which, in each one of us, is part of the
living Spirit of God.

I had closed my Book of Hours. The thoughts which came to me were as
refreshing as the living waters. I felt a kind of ecstasy. We were on
our knees, and my bride signed to me to rise with her. I embraced her
with my look, as though she were an object of infinite value, of which
the internal charm exceeds by a thousand times the visible beauty. She
smiled at me with perfect confidence, and at this moment we exchanged
the mystic promise which includes in anticipation the sacramental “Yes.”

A slight movement brought Pierre Ducal within my range of vision. I
knew well the subtle smile which hollowed his cheeks. He was amusing
himself, collecting anecdotes, already preparing an interesting story
in which I was to figure as a first communicant. I felt it intuitively.
Seized suddenly by fear of becoming ridiculous, I studied my actions.
The ecstasy did not return. I placed the wedding ring on my bride’s
finger with the indifference of some trivial mechanical duty.

After luncheon Ducal asked me to lend him my automobile, for he wished
to return to Paris that night. His many trunks, for which he had had no
use, were placed on the machine, and after he had disappeared around
the curve in the road, the wheels of the car crushing the fir boughs
that had not yet been picked up, I breathed more easily, in fact I was
conscious of a distinct sense of relief. Raymonde noticed the change at
once.

“Why were you not like this a little while ago?” she asked. “During the
service you changed completely. Did you regret anything?”

“Oh, Raymonde, what could I have regretted?”

“Listen, I think I have guessed it,” she said. “You were looking at my
white gown. Perhaps it did not become me very well.”

“But, it did, I assure you.”

“No, no, I know it,” she said. “But I should have grieved my little
dressmaker in the village too much if I had given the order to any one
else. What does a bad pleat amount to? But in the midst of happiness,
to be neglectful of others, you agree with me that that would have been
wicked?”

I agreed with her, and moreover I did not discover the bad pleat again.
It was as if it had disappeared with Pierre Ducal.

Mme. Mairieux, to whom Col. Briare was telling stories of hunting
in the forest of Fontainebleau, had followed the course of our
conversation and now began to excuse her daughter.

“I scolded her,” she said. “She is lacking in elegance. You will know
how to give it to her.”

“Is it necessary?” asked Raymonde, laughing.

“Of course it is, in the world to which your husband is going to take
you. You will be gowned by the great dressmakers. Isn’t she fortunate,
Colonel?”

She spoke to every one of the luck of Mme. Cernay. These two words,
“Madame Cernay,” assumed in her mouth majestic importance. Our marriage
flattered her as though it were a personal triumph. The lack of guests,
however, appeared to her unreasonable, harmful, and distressing.
One had to talk continually to the same people. For lack of anything
better, want of better guests, she gave orders that every peasant who
passed the gate that day should receive entertainment.

When the evening came, and I was leading my wife away, Mme. Mairieux,
at the moment of parting, looked at her daughter in admiration before
kissing her, like a commander embracing a newly decorated soldier. The
chateau represented in her eyes the Promised Land.

Her husband expressed his emotion differently:

“She is my only child,” he said to me. “Take care of her.”

Fearing lest he might break down, he dared not say more. In the midst
of our little group, swayed by such different sentiments, Raymonde
preserved her face of peace.

We had only to walk the length of the avenue, and we were at home.
After the fir branches which carpeted the space in front of the lodge,
we found the ground hard, and it crackled under our feet, for it was
freezing. The night was not dark. In the depths of the sky, between
the chestnut trees whose branches stood out black and bare, and the
oaks with their dry, shrivelled leaves, shone thousands of stars, that
almost touched each other, and seemed to be in motion like a swarm of
bees. Certainly this sense of throbbing has remained in my memory. Have
I since seen similar nights? Did I dream of that one? I do not know now.

The cold was stinging.

“Suppose we run?” I suggested.

“Come,” she answered.

She picked up the train of her wedding dress and darted off. Practice
in the woods had made her agile, and I still see clearly before me this
flight in the shadow, the bare trees, the lawn and the empty urns. Oh!
it was a wonderful night, a holy night, when in the majestic silence I
heard her two little shoes striking the ground.

I stopped, and then at last I pursued her. She was the first to gain
the arches of the cloister. Without doubt the apparent life in the sky
had struck her too, for when I rejoined her, she pointed it out to me
with these words:

“There are no falling stars to-night. Do you still want something more?”

“No, Raymonde,” I said. “Nothing more.”

I might have added: “_Not even you_.” No, not even her! Beyond desire,
I was experiencing that kind of love, which one enjoys in moments of
ecstatic adoration, when the blood flows gently not to thwart the
rush of the spirit, when life means sweetness, goodness, joy, light,
serenity--

                             *     *     *

“Let us go in,” I said, “you will catch cold.”

“Listen,” she replied.

The branches nearest to the cloister cracked with the frost. And from
the forest, of which we could distinguish only a vague outline, a
confused murmur came to us.

“The night sings,” said I.

“The night is praying,” she replied, and again she raised her head to
the stars.

“How many there are! How many there are!”

She named some of the constellations. Cygnus, the most beautiful,
appeared to be on the wing like a diamond-shaped flock of birds. I took
Raymonde’s hand in mine so that she would look at me.

“Now,” I said, “there is no one in the world but you and me. I shall
love you all my life.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “that is not sufficient.”

“What must you have?”

“Our life--that is not enough. It will end. I wish a love which will
never end. Never. Never.”

“Is that possible?”

“Of course, since there is Eternity.”

At that moment her faith was contagious, enlarging and consecrating our
love.

                             *     *     *

At the chateau we found a large fire burning in the little salon, which
I had refurnished for her. She looked at the furniture, the pictures
and the hangings, and then at me with a smile that was a little sad.
Did she have a presentiment of the future? Now that I am able to
interpret truly the past, I recall having seen, one morning when I was
out shooting, a young hind stop at the entrance to a wood, where I
was hiding. She inhaled the fresh breeze and then hesitated in fear.
Finally she came on in my direction.

“You are in your own home, Raymonde,” I said.

“Oh! it is very beautiful, but I am not accustomed to it.”

“You will become so soon.”

“Of course, I must.”

To her the new luxury was a burden. Otherwise it meant nothing. The
only effect of this change of conditions for her was one of restraint.

She left me to change her gown. When she reappeared, she came over and
clung to me.

“My love,” she said.

And as I held her to my heart, so young, so pure and so confiding, I
felt two tears fill my eyes. Raising her head a little she saw them.

“What troubles you?” she asked anxiously. “Are you weeping?”

I am proud now to remember those tears, the quivering of my love and
the obscure confession of my own unworthiness. Through them Raymonde
recognised the upheaval that I felt before the perfection of her love.
Later they unquestionably helped her to endure my cruelty and to
forgive it.

I was silent.

“Dear,” she repeated, “why do you weep?”

“No doubt because I love you too much,” I managed to say at last, in an
attempt to play with my emotion.

“That is so simple,” she answered.

Our happiness was indeed so simple that I could not believe that it
was happiness. Until then I had sought it in the artificialities and
complexities of pleasure. My engagement and marriage had restored it
to me in its integrity and fulness, and I was astonished that it was
serene.

She took down her hair, and it spread over her shoulders and breast,
even more golden at the ends than on top. The various shades of gold
blended to frame the whiteness of her face and neck. She had chosen the
white woollen dress which she had worn on the day I had asked for her
hand. I felt that this act brought her closer to me, and that I shared
in the radiance which emanated from her.

We did not touch the supper which had been prepared. The chateau was
asleep, and when we were silent there was nothing but the solemn
silence of the country night. There was no one but us in the world;
only us and love that was stronger than we.

“It is late,” she murmured, and it was like a prayer. “Don’t you want
me to retire? I am tired.”

She leaned toward me and my mouth touched her forehead. Then I let her
go. The peace that was in her dominated my love.

I sat long before the open fire--how long, I cannot say--and my heart
opened to all the sweetness of life.

When I rejoined her she was sleeping. I did not waken her.




                          _Second Note Book_

                                                          November 19--


As we were nearing Rome, I pointed out to Raymonde the Sabine
mountains, already covered with snow. But she only saw a rainbow,
trembling in the golden haze which the setting sun, reappearing after
the rain, drew from the damp soil. She derived from it a happy omen.

Then she compared the dome of St. Peter’s, which one sees first of
all, to a rick in the field. Later, was she not to compare the Eternal
City, upon which the centuries have left their imprint, to her forest,
with its centenarian trees covered with moss, ivy, and mistletoe? One
thinks that one will always remain bewildered, and soon things become
so familiar, although imposing, that one speaks and listens to them.
Her forest had prepared her. The shafts of the trees formed innumerable
arches as at St. Paul’s outside the Walls; on the old trunks new stems
grew, and the fallen leaves composed the soil which nourished the
roots. Thus the continuity of historic Rome, which allowed Christian
churches to flourish on the sites of pagan temples, did not astonish
her.

Her divine ignorance preserved her miraculously from that insincere
admiration which the sanctity of established reputations imposes upon
most of us. She delighted in art as she breathed the morning air in
the woods, of which one knows neither where it comes from nor why it
leaves upon the lips so agreeable a flavour. With sure taste she walked
through the midst of statues and pictures as through a garden pointing
out to me her favourites. Invariably these were works of calmness and
serenity, in which the old masters represented life either with all its
natural joy or with religious acceptation,--the draped Muses of the
Vatican, that veiled woman on one of the sides of the throne of the
goddess in the “Thermos” Museum who keeps alive the sacred fire on the
hearth,--what others shall I name, a young Madonna by Fra Angelico;
Raphael’s Parnassus; or Michelangelo’s sublime creation of the first
man. By instinct she turned to them as to old friends. I never caught
her in a mistake. Like the doves of the Villa Adrien who stoop on the
basin and then lift their throats swelled with water, she was drinking
in the masterpieces, in her appreciation of which I might well have
tried to imitate her.

However, I did not accept this unexpected superiority, this
straightforward impulse of a young and unspoiled sensitiveness. I
paraded my learning, I imposed on her my instruction. Her assurance
disconcerted me, at the same time that her willing attention did not
prevent her from confusing the different schools and classifications I
tried to teach her. I corrected and scolded her, and she apologized and
made more mistakes--except in the selection of her favourites.

Through a spirit of contradiction in which vanity played the chief
part, I turned her attention to works palpitating with unrest,
misery, passion or sensuality. The contortions of a Laocoön, the
“Dying Gladiator” crushed to the ground, Apollo darting forward with
a theatrical gesture, Venus bowed under the weight of her own beauty
and not like a Diana free in her movements,--these satisfied me
but offended her. She did not respond to my enthusiasms, surmising
perhaps that they were forced, and inwardly I reproached her for not
understanding, for not knowing.

“She knows nothing,” I thought, “of the passion that disfigures, the
jealousy that twists, the doubt that convulses these countenances and
permits them no peace. For the moment she and I are far apart.”

And I prided myself on the discovery.

All this she was to learn one day through me without permitting any
alteration in her features to reveal it, merely becoming whiter and
more distant as my cruelty increased and she grew nearer to death,
death which writes for us our definitive expression, her own too pure
and too noble to lower itself to complaints.

These differences, which I considered insignificant and which were in
fact hardly perceptible, were they not already part of a more profound
discord?

                             *     *     *

Nevertheless the first months of our marriage flowed on like a limpid
stream that seems motionless. Our days slipped by without our being
aware of them. I was amazed at the intimate peace I breathed; it did
not seem consistent with the passion I wished to feel again. In time I
came to ask myself whether I was really sufficiently in love. I looked
for disturbances, outbreaks, storms, a great thirst for life, and
around me, within me, I found only simplicity and clearness. Thus I
grew distrustful of the new order that was making over my heart.

I had been accustomed to think of love as a combat, and victory
appeared to me to be filled with idleness. I began to scorn the harmony
which was for her the summit of love, which united her by a thousand
secret bonds to artistic perfection.

I was afraid of monotony, even though I had not known it, I attained
it very soon through the bitterness I mingled with Raymonde’s pure
offerings.

                             *     *     *

Among the books and the guides that I had selected in order to give
her what I called, pretentiously enough, “intellectual culture,” were
included some extracts from Chateaubriand, compositions that conjured
up ruins, prose nothings that accompanied admirable descriptions
throbbing with the soul of Rome, After a visit to the church of Saint
Louis-des-Français, in which Chateaubriand had erected the tomb of
Pauline de Beaumont--she is reclining on a couch, one arm hanging
down and the other folded, in a mournful attitude that is much too
beautiful--I read aloud the passage from the “Memoirs,” in which her
lover tells of alms that he had condescended to bestow upon one in
agony.

“I observed that until her last breath, Mme. de Beaumont did not doubt
the truth of my attachment to her; she did not cease to show her
surprise at it, and she seemed to die both disconsolate and overjoyed.
She had believed that she was a burden to me, and she had wished to go
away in order to rid me of her.”

With what sadness these sentences were later to come back to us!

I turned to Raymonde to note the effect upon her of such magnanimity.

“How is it possible,” she said, “to write things like that if one is
really in love. And if one is not in love, what an abominable farce!”

All her simplicity and frankness was opposed to the sentimental
buffoonery which is so widespread in our society, and from which she
herself was shortly to suffer in her inability to accommodate herself
to it.

                             *     *     *

When my thoughts are turned toward Rome by these moving memories, whose
sweetness--which happily I did not succeed in utterly spoiling--I can
better appreciate at a distance, I recall particularly two or three
pilgrimages that drew me closer to her. In my thoughts I return alone
to places where we had been together.

We were standing at the edge of the first of the basins that occupy
to-day the site of the palace of the Vestals. It was in the beginning
of Spring, and some newly blown red roses were reflected in the water.
Behind her stood the three remaining columns of the temple of Castor
and Pollux, their marble shining with the caress of the sun. Around
her there was nothing but ancient debris, mutilated statues, and these
flowers. As at the end of autumn in the Sleeping Woods, she stood quite
congruously in this past of more than two thousand years ago.

Again, we were at the Coliseum, the arena already plunged into shadow,
while the upper part of the huge wall, completely covered with
gillyflowers, was still lighted by the rays of the setting sun. A guide
had shown us the door through which they carried the dead bodies of the
Christians that had been sacrificed to the wild beasts. Long shudders
shook her whole body, and suddenly two tears, which she tried too long
to keep back, fell from her eyes.

“Why do you weep?” I asked.

“It was here,” she murmured.

What was the use of asking the cause of her emotion? The fire of
sacrifice was burning her. I had before me a young martyr in the
making. And then again I recall the cloister of St. John Lateran,
a quiet corner, where one inhales with the perfume of roses the
unchanging charm of Rome. We were there alone one sunny afternoon. The
recollection of the roses growing among the palms in the little central
garden about the wall fixes the time for me as again the beginning
of Spring, doubtless a short time before our departure. She was at a
little distance from me, standing between two of those slender columns
which support the cloister and seem as transparent as alabaster in the
sunlight. She was dressed in white; she smiled. I have never since seen
so perfect an image of peace.

                             *     *     *

Her catholic heart rejoiced in the city of three hundred and fifty
churches, eighty of which are dedicated to the Virgin. And here her
knowledge surpassed mine. She gave me brief accounts of the lives of
Saint Cecilia, Saint Agnes and Saint Catherine of Siena, of whom I
knew nothing. The places which their deaths have sanctified derived
all their meaning from these narratives. At the church of Santa Maria
Maggiore she told me of the miracle of the snow which fell in the month
of August, to point out to the Pope the site of the basilica. I grieved
her with my ironies and doubts, whereas the miracle of her charm should
have watered the barrenness of my mind like that cool snowfall itself.
Then, having amused myself with the religious instruction of which she
gave me the benefit, little by little I began to be annoyed by it. It
seemed to me that I was reduced to second place. My vanity could not
endure it. In consequence, for several days I systematically selected
for the object of our walks those ancient ruins wherein I had the
advantage of her.

However, I did go with her sometimes to service at Santa Maria del
Popolo, and the Trinità dei Monte, which, being near the Piazza di
Spagna, where we were living, were her particular churches. For
Trinity, whose rose-coloured bell towers at the alluring hour of the
Benediction, are beautified by the evening light, we had only to mount
the staircase, from the flower market at the bottom. It is on the Road
to the Pincio, where we went later.

But instead of admiring this elevation of spirit I derived bitterness
from it. Did I not wish to confiscate all her powers of feeling to the
profit of my love alone?

“A moment ago,” I protested once, “you were praying, and I was not in
your thoughts.”

She was much surprised at my remark.

“You are always in my thoughts when I pray,” she replied. “How could it
be otherwise?”

I was struggling against a happiness the perfection of which I was
incapable of understanding. My wife charmed and at the same time
bewildered me. I had thought to find her a docile pupil and yet
sometimes my teachings seemed vain, useless and absurd, sometimes in
advance of her age and preparation. I had at times, in the bottom of
my heart, the instinctive feeling that she surpassed me, and perhaps
without self-love I might have bowed to her nobility. But what man
ever renounces his self-love? Instead of renouncing mine I hastened to
pronounce her childish.

                             *     *     *

I recall one more incident at Rome in which I find our differences
revealed.

The night before our departure, we had climbed to the garden of the
Pincio. After sunset, which one watches from the terrace as if it
were a play, we walked on in the direction of the Villa Borghese. On
our right, a lawn sloped down to a small wood of pine trees, on the
outskirts of which a group of seminary students, in their red robes,
were walking up and down, reciting their breviary. A bareheaded young
girl of the people ran past us. I noticed her erect carriage, her
black hair, the beads of perspiration on her neck. Presently she lay
down on the grass, drawing up her dress round her for a rug. A young
man who had followed her approached her from behind. He had plucked
several clusters from a border of flowering acacias, and began to throw
them at her laughingly. She did not move. Then he came nearer, and,
stooping, kissed her on the neck in the spot where I had seen the bead
of perspiration. Even pleasure did not change her motionless attitude.

“Look,” I said to Raymonde, “is that not as beautiful as an antique
marble?”

But she stood still, her ear strained, her arm a little raised.

“Listen,” she murmured.

Answering each other the bells of countless churches announced the
_Angelus_. Their chimes came faintly up the slope to us, but she was
familiar with several and recognised them. For the last time, religious
Rome was speaking to her.

I was jealous of her diverted attention; that hour of peace, which the
voices of the evening, the twilight, and the realisation of our love
combined to make sacred, I spoiled by a wish to oppose my companion, to
humiliate her, to bruise her.

I was tormented by restlessness and sensuality instead of yielding
myself to the beneficent tranquillity which sprang naturally from her
love.

                             *     *     *

When we returned from Italy, the springtime which we had left in full
blossom in the Roman campagna, where the grain was already tall and
ripening, had hardly begun to make our woods verdant again.

M. and Mme. Mairieux awaited us.

“My little one,” stammered her father on seeing us.

He, ordinarily so calm and self-controlled, was greatly moved now,
showing openly the emotion that gripped him. He had grown older,
and stooped; and for the first time I thought his demonstrations of
fatherly affection overdone. After loving and almost minute scrutiny of
his daughter, he turned to me and took my hand:

“Thank you,” he said.

He gave me the credit for Raymonde’s good health, and assured me of
his confidence in me at the very moment when I was thinking how to get
away, astonished at this excess of gratitude.

Mme. Mairieux was never weary of admiring us. Sometimes she made a
special point of calling me by my first name; and again she abandoned
these happy advances as if she feared their boldness. She gloried in
the length of our journey, the importance of our hotels, and even in
the beauty of Rome. It was all part of the new and longed-for luxury
which I gave my wife, the mere announcement of which pleased her like a
coloured poster.

One day, when Raymonde was a little later than usual, I had an
opportunity to watch from my window the manœuvres of her father, who
rode up for the express purpose of waiting for her at the threshold. It
was very natural, yet instead of sympathising with his expectation I
felt only impatience at it.

My wife came in after the luncheon bell had sounded.

“Where have you been?” I asked quite unfairly.

“Down there.”

“I suppose so. Are you not always thrusting yourself in there?”

Unquestionably she was about to say: “I am their only child, and they
love to see me,” but instead she looked at me with her clear glance and
kept silent.

That was my first direct blow at the ideal which, she had formed of me.
My opinions on our journey, my restlessness, my strange curiosity, had
made her uneasy, but she had kept her faith intact. Now, in the way
she looked at me, I read her distress at seeing me reveal this petty
jealousy. Tears rose in her eyes, but she restrained them. Irritated
with myself and angry with her as well, instead of restoring my lost
tenderness, I permitted the sense of my injustice to drop into her
heart, to grow there as the circles from a falling stone in a quiet
lake widen until they reach the shore.

Next day, timid and bashful, she asked me if I objected to her going to
the lodge.

“Of course not,” I answered crossly. “Have I ever hindered your
liberty?”

Again an opportunity offered itself to make amends, and again I did not
avail myself of it.

She went to the lodge, but shortened her visit. After her return, the
promptness of which I refrained from mentioning, M. Mairieux appeared
more than once at the doorstep, wandering about like a soul in pain
in the avenue leading up to the chateau. I saw him take up several
pieces of work only to abandon them again, passing confusedly from one
thing to another. Something was missing in his day: the smile of his
daughter, of which I had deprived him. He continually approached the
door and then withdrew again. I should have called to him, “She is
here, come in,” and instead I contented myself with watching him. My
apprenticeship of cruelty was beginning already. Raymonde saw him too,
but she did not move. She was waiting for my decision, resolved not to
thwart me, and hoping everything from my tenderness. Hating the wrong
I did, I none the less accentuated it, and thus, without benefit to
myself, I impaired a source of joy.

The following day Mme. Mairieux invaded our apartment. She came to make
certain on the spot of the happiness of her daughter. Raymonde would
have liked to spare me these interminable and noisy visits, which my
coldness could not shorten. She knew how impatient I was after them. I
was growing tired of the Sleeping Woods; she knew it and mourned for
it, and, thinking only of me, blamed herself for it.

                             *     *     *

Almost immediately after our return to the chateau Raymonde’s condition
necessitated our giving up our horseback rides.

“Let us walk,” she said, “we can see better when we go slowly, and one
hears the life in the trees better, too, and the stirring of the little
blades of grass. Shan’t we?”

In the early morning, especially when the air is keen and freshened by
the dew, these slow strolls under the trees should have been exquisite.
The leaves were not yet thick enough to keep the sun from filtering
through the branches and throwing its gold on the footpaths, but they
had already that effect of young verdure that is so delightful. The
paths were carpeted with grass, and, since our footfalls made no sound
upon it, we were often surprised by almost touching a woodpecker or a
chaffinch, who, believing himself master in his own house, flew off
in safe and leisurely flight. Oftentimes a hare crossed the avenue in
front of us with little bounds.

Yes, these strolls would have been exquisite but for the skill I
employed to spoil them! As I had tormented Raymonde about her parents,
so now I tormented her about the hope that filled her with a joy that
was all but sacred. She saw in it the continuation of our cherished
love, the palpable thrill of our union, the living bond of our united
bodies and souls. I saw only the inconvenience, and I showed my
irritation and nervousness over it. I appreciate to-day that this
new affection which preceded its object, far from diminishing it,
broadened, strengthened and extended her love as a wife. I did not
recognise it then, and I spurred myself on to detect in her beforehand
some cause of estrangement.

When I was silent too long, she would say to me with an adorable flush
of colour:

“Let us talk about _him_.”

And then, correcting herself, in order not to be unfair, she would add:

“Or, of _her_.”

She pictured it as an image of our happiness that we should see grow,
whose youth, one day, should prolong ours in its decline. She smiled as
she thought of him and saw him. These first maternal smiles, bestowed
on one who does not yet exist, seem to give a woman the sweetness,
freshness and purity of a young girl again. Barren love is ignorant of
many forms of beauty. The madonnas have a deeper beauty, but not less
innocent, not less melodious than the young maid who carries in herself
the Springtime. But these first smiles, whose charm I understand
so well now, I questioned then, as I remember, in jealousy, not in
admiration. So new were they to me that I did not know how to gather
them. Thus we permit the simple emotions that are the ornament of life
to escape from it because we seek our happiness in ourselves instead of
finding it on the faces of others. While I made our love complicated by
trying to confine it to my personal satisfactions, Raymonde gave to it
quite naturally her primitive capacity for acceptation, her radiance,
her creative splendour.

“_He_ will look like you,” she assured me.

“How can we tell?”

“Why should he not look like you? My child is my thought, and my
thought is you.”

She wished us to give him a name, and wanted, herself, that of her
father, but she dared not suggest it. I often changed the conversation,
yet what more beautiful topic can there be than the certainty that the
future is holding for us the continuation of our race?

My wife remarked my coldness and lack of enthusiasm. She talked less
to me in consequence of that which constantly preoccupied her. And
then, with an effort which I now understand, she spoke again to me of
it. Already forgetful of herself, she was willing to make herself less
agreeable to me if in that way she could induce me to bestow a little
of my love on the one who was to come, who was beginning to live within
her.

However, her lassitude and the change in her figure increased. It all
seemed to threaten blows at my pleasure, attacks on her beauty,--I
saw this in it instead of the patience and gentle pity and sense of
protection which ennoble a woman’s love. I did not altogether conceal
my boredom. One evening, as we were returning from the woods a little
later than usual, where I had been for a part of the way inattentive,
she stopped, very weary, before passing through the gate.

“I am afraid,” she said.

I looked about us; there was no noise, no movement to cause her fear. I
thought that perhaps the shadows and the silence had affected her.

“There is nothing, Raymonde.”

“No,” she agreed, “there is nothing.”

I let the matter drop, satisfied. I did not understand that she needed
to be reassured. Her fear was not of external things; those she
understood and trusted. Already, her fear was of me.

                             *     *     *

During my previous visits in the Sleeping Woods, I had had scarcely a
word to say to the farmers and workmen whom I met on my estate. They
were my superintendent’s affair, not mine; such people were total
strangers to me. During our engagement, I had been much surprised at
the looks of understanding exchanged between them and Raymonde when I
accompanied her. Later, love traced around us its circle of isolation
and no one addressed us, but through its social aspect, marriage made
us more accessible. On our return from Italy, the tenants and day
labourers whom we encountered, never failed to salute my wife. They
called her “Our Lady.” She was “Our Lady of the Woods,” and at first
it amused me. But they told her of the deaths and the births, obscure
stories of the village or the household, bad crops, or the sickness of
the live stock, and I saw myself put aside. They consulted her and let
me alone.

“But here is your Master,” she objected, pointing to me, and
entrenching herself behind my authority.

“Yes, but you are our lady.”

Instead of rejoicing in this, at last I became offended.

“Speak to them,” she advised me. “Are you not their master?”

“I do not know them,” I answered.

“Exactly, but you will know them.”

“They bore me,” I replied.

“Give them a little friendship, and they will cease to weary you.”

“I don’t find it easy,” I said.

“There is poor Fannette, the washerwoman: her hands are covered with
cracks and chilblains. Then there is Pierre, the deaf man, who works in
our garden.”

“If he is deaf, it would be useless to talk to him.”

“Oh, but one can speak to him with a hearty laugh, or a handshake,
or a finger showing him a flower bed. That is the language which
he understands. He has never forgotten to bring me a bouquet on my
birthday.”

She was teaching me a little humanity, after all the art that I had
thought to teach her! I did not care for it at all, and profited very
little from her lessons. It is the same with most of those who screen
themselves behind agents in the administration of their estates: they
ignore the sweat and labour which all production exacts, and the money
which labour makes for them, so far from putting them in contact with
other men, only succeeds in keeping them apart.

The sovereignty which Raymonde exercised on my estate made me uneasy.
Of a certainty, I refused to confess it to myself, but was not the
sympathy she showed and inspired in all these worthy people in itself a
criticism of my disdain and indifference? With the intuition which she
possessed for my slightest, my most secret annoyances, she perceived my
state of mind. Thereafter she cut short her conversations with these
people, contenting herself for the most part with a courteous greeting
from a distance, which yet managed to cheer them, even if they hoped
for more.

And so again, without benefit to myself, I turned aside a source of joy.

Our daughter Odette, whom we afterwards called Dilette, was born in
October.

In the face of Raymonde’s sufferings I was less courageous than she.
And if I dare confess the whole truth to myself, a horror of anything
which attacked the ordering of my life mingled with the compassion
which I felt for her.

After the birth of the child, when my own nerves were shattered, I was
surprised at the long shudder which shook the mother. She suffered
no more, but trembled before the life which she had brought into the
world. It was the mysterious prelude to maternal love.

                             *     *     *

The autumn advanced. Tired of “the desert” of the Sleeping Woods, and
of the incessant attention which a new-born baby demands, deprived
by my own act of the strong ties which bound us to a region where we
directed the labour and endeavoured to create prosperity, I was eager
to return to Paris after so long an absence. Our apartment in the
Avenue du Bois was in readiness for us. We had nothing to do but depart.

“Whenever you wish,” consented Raymonde.

We arranged our departure for the first of December. The baby could
travel then without danger. The milk of her nurse agreed with her
wonderfully. For a child of two months, she showed good strength.

Raymonde suggested a last walk, and a pale, cold sun enticed us. It
scarcely melted the white frost in the fields and on the weed-grown
paths. The grass crackled under our steps as we entered the woods.
We went deep into them. Along the edge, the leaves more exposed to
the wind had already fallen. Deeper within there were still a few,
especially on the oaks and maples. Copper-coloured or golden, they
clung stiffly to the branches, and with the least breath of wind
sounded like toy bells. At the Green Fountain, where our horses had
drunk that day, they nearly stopped the basin.

Beside me, enveloped in a white cloak and hood, my wife gazed
absorbedly, her eyes dim with tears. I was astonished, and even
somewhat annoyed by such emotion. Was I not sufficient for her
happiness? Why should a mere change of environment, one at which,
indeed, she ought to have rejoiced, since I was offering her Paris and
its gaieties, have so affected her?

“What troubles you, my dear?” I asked her.

“I have been so happy here,” she replied.

“But we shall be happy in Paris.”

“Here my trees help me. Everything helps me. I feel myself at ease and
protected. Yonder I shall be alone.”

“You will be with me. Is not that enough?” I asked.

“Alone to keep your love, which I am so afraid of losing.”

“But that is absurd.”

Why did she doubt herself? In the clear light of the winter sun, which
filled the woods, she was resplendent with youth; or rather not youth,
but almost childish beauty. Maternity had restored to her that air of
extreme purity that one sees in young novices. I looked at her, all in
white, so sweet and so gentle, and then round us again at the familiar
forest which contented her.

“My love,” I said, with condescending protection, “I will watch over
you.”

Oh, the smile with which she rewarded this promise that I was to keep
so badly!

                             *     *     *

A day or two after our arrival in Paris I surprised her leaning against
the window of her room overlooking the Avenue du Bois. She was so
absorbed that she did not hear me come in. I approached her. It was of
course the novelty of the sight that held her prisoner.

A beautiful winter morning had drawn all the idle world of Paris to a
promenade before luncheon. Men and women on horseback, riding at a walk
or a quiet canter, crowded the beaten earth of the bridle path. The
roadway was devoted to a few surviving carriages, whose ancient steeds
seemed hardly able to move their thin legs, and above all to many
motors, which, under less restraint than in the crowded city, passed
by at full speed, as though revenging themselves with absolute license
in the country. On the broad pavement by the side of the grass plots
pedestrians were taking their constitutionals among the nurses and
children scattered about in pursuit of hoops and balloons. The bluish
haze of the clear day softened the outlines of the Arch of Triumph and
the light, entering it from all sides, seemingly, increased the height
of its arch and columns. At the other end of the Avenue, the Bois slept.

“I am sure you love Paris already,” I said.

Much to her astonishment, I had ceased in Paris calling her “thou,”
on account of the custom in society, of which I had already begun
to think, and she had obediently imitated me, without asking any
explanation. Now, not knowing that I was near, she gave a slight start
when she heard my voice.

“Oh, no,” she answered. “There are too many houses and too many people.”

“What were you looking at?”

“I was looking yonder for the forest of the Maiden and the lodge at the
gate.”

“That is the Porte Dauphine and the Chinese Pavilion.”

“I did not know it. I imagined that we were at home.”

I had thought this procession that our apartment commanded would have
attracted and captivated the love of elegance latent in every woman,
that Paris would not have failed to awaken it in her; and behold, the
nook where she was born, the country of her love, was sufficient for
her. She did not see beyond it; or rather she saw it everywhere.

“You will come to love it,” I continued, with a gesture toward the
city. “At your age Paris is irresistible, above all when you will be
one of its queens.”

“Oh, one of its queens? You are laughing at me.”

At that moment, attentive and interested, her blond hair caressed
by a ray of sunlight, she was at the same time so sensible and so
fascinating that I felt I could hope everything for her.

“I am not joking,” I said. “You do not know my power.”

“Do you dare say that?”

“Well, I will make you a queen.”

“Again?”

“That is to say, a woman of fashion.”

Before this prospect she opened her large eyes like a child who is
taken to the zoological gardens for the first time and introduced to
unknown and strange animals, ostriches, giraffes, or delicate and
impossible-looking pink flamingoes. She repeated my phrase, uttering
the words as if they hurt her.

“A woman of fashion.”

It meant nothing to her. There had never been any question of it at
the Sleeping Woods, and in Rome we lived as strangers, apart from the
regular social hierarchy and absolutely at liberty to do as we wished.
Now, however, this was the goal that I proposed for her. Already Paris
had begun to claim me once again. I breathed its atmosphere, laden with
envy and vanity and artificial charms, the more eagerly because for a
time it had ceased to intoxicate me and I brought to it new appetite.
I had not retained that which my love had given me--regeneration and
peace of heart. On the contrary, I wished to force upon her my own
habits of life. Face to face with this child, I became aware of the
absurdity of my desire. I became aware of it, but I did not abandon it
on that account. I wished the world to appreciate and to envy me the
treasure that I possessed. In order to be in the fashion, my happiness
required publicity.

She turned her head:

“It is impossible,” she said. “I should not know how.”

“Yes, yes,” I insisted, not without a little impatience. “You will
learn. You can learn everything.”

“Dost thou wish it?” and then, correcting herself, “Do you wish it?”
she asked.

“Certainly.”

“Then I will obey you to the best of my ability.”

That evening, when the nurse did not succeed in quieting Dilette,
who was for some reason out of sorts, Raymonde insisted on putting
the baby to sleep herself, a privilege which she had always enjoyed
at the chateau. As a lullaby she sang in a low voice, to the tune of
“Malbrough,” a romance of Chérubin. When she came to the stanza:

    There, by a fountain green,
    O, my heart, my heart, it grieves!
    There had my lover been,
    And my tears were full, I ween.
    And my grief believes.

whether it was because of the contagious sadness of the verses, the
memory of our own Green Fountain, or a presentiment of the dangers that
threw their shadows across our love, I do not know, but she stopped.
I was in the next room and the curtains between us were drawn back.
I heard what sounded like a stifled sigh. Awakened by the silence,
Dilette began to cry again, and my wife slowly continued her song.

                             *     *     *

The occasion I had chosen for presenting her to society was a reception
given one evening by Madame de Saunois, at whose house in the old days
I was a frequent guest. Mme. de Saunois is a lady who has attained the
summit of that social elegance which springs from exquisite dressing,
novel entertainment, clever conversation and the careful cultivation of
every natural and artificial charm. Though her age may be subject to
some debate, her name and fortune admit of no discussion. Her visiting
list is restricted and select, and her invitations are proportionately
sought for. Outwardly manners and taste are the same at her house as
anywhere else but she would regard herself as old-fashioned if she
were thought for one moment to set any limit to liberty of conduct or
opinion. She accepts every irregularity of mind or heart if only it is
perpetrated by one of the socially elect. According to my ideas at that
time her drawing-room was just the one in which I could count upon a
gratifying reception for Raymonde.

Promptly upon our arrival in Paris I besought my wife to put herself in
the hands of one of the big dressmakers. As she seemed almost averse to
this idea I myself looked over her wardrobe with her before we started
out to order anything new.

“What’s this?” I asked, picking up a cheap looking woollen skirt. I did
not recognise the little wedding dress that had produced such a sweet
and simple effect in the Sleeping Woods. Alas, effects change with
place and mood: in Paris the little dress was not the same at all.

Guessing my thoughts she said with a blush, “I shall never wear it
again, you may be sure.”

“Why not give it away to some poor girl to whom it would be of some
use?” I said, with the best intentions in the world.

Raymonde’s flush, which I did not yet understand, faded suddenly. I saw
her cheek whiten.

“I was a poor girl once,” she said.

“Oh, but you must forget that.”

“No, let me have my memories. If ever I am tempted to become proud some
day, they will keep me humble.”

I understood, then, the wound I had given, but instead of asking her
pardon, I said nothing.

To me nothing seemed too sumptuous and elaborate for her, while her one
desire was to pass unnoticed. She “set no store” by success: she wished
only to please me. But must she not please the whole world, to please
me? As to the clothes, she had her way more than I, and I had to be
content with a lace robe that suited marvellously her air of candour.
All the time the fittings and appraising looks of the tailors, the
insulting physical evaluations as of professional buyers, positively
affronted her. Again and again she turned toward me eyes that besought
mercy like the tender eyes of a hunted doe! But I held to my conquest
with an unpitying tenacity.

When she had tried on the skirt and waist, that brought out and moulded
her body under the vapory lightness of the material, leaving no outline
unseen, and displaying the bare expanse of her throat, she was ashamed
at the sight of herself in the mirror.

“Is it possible,” she protested, “that you can wish me to appear like
this?”

“Why not?” said I. “You are beautiful.”

“But every one will see me,” she objected.

It began to seem laughable to me, her idea of reserving her beauty for
me alone.

The evening upon which we made our first appearance in the drawing-room
of Madame de Saunois I felt a curious diminution in my proprietary
satisfaction. My too long absence had allowed people to recover from
their concern with me, and become indifferent. Paris avenges herself
upon those who scorn her. Pierre Ducal was there, informing every one
of my marriage. I thought I heard whispered as we passed: “The daughter
of his superintendent.” When one is conscious of ill-will one is prompt
to imagine hostile remarks, and it seemed to me that every one there
was spying jealously upon my wife. The sharp contrast of her youth and
bloom with the maturer charms of the other women made instant enemies
of them, enemies fully accoutred in the art of feminine war. There were
young girls there crowned with name and fortune any one of whom I might
have married. Not that I had any regret, but I committed the indelicacy
of remembering the advantages I had let slip. There was indeed one
woman there, not a stranger to me, whose presence should have been very
painful to me, since I especially watched for her opinion of my wife
and hoped it would be favourable. Such is the host of petty infamies a
man can harbour in his heart when he surrenders himself to vanity.

At my wedding in the Sleeping Woods it was the presence of Pierre Ducal
that had been the cause of my noticing the cut of my bride’s wedding
gown. To-night Raymonde was in faultless toilette, though timidity and
reserve and half fright, made her seem full of awkwardness. Her modest
embarrassment under the steady gaze of so many people became ridiculous
constraint, and instead of encouraging her I too became ill at ease and
caught some of her discomfort.

My friend Pierre Ducal came forward to speak to us. He was cordial in
his greeting, but my wife did not remember him.

“I looked at him so little,” she explained to me later, by way of
apology. “And how should I have seen him? It was our wedding day!”

Nothing is more offensive to a man who prides himself on the number of
hearts he has broken, than the knowledge that he has left absolutely
no impression on a young woman’s mind. Ducal turned coldly away to pay
his homages elsewhere and make his scathing comments; and as I had
no doubt of his pique nor of the vengeance he was taking, Raymonde’s
maladroitness gave me fresh cause for irritation. The very man upon
whom I had counted as an ally she had succeeded in offending.

Mme. de Saunois being asked--asked, it must be confessed, without
much eagerness--consented to give us a romance by Duparc, which no
doubt she would follow with one or two others, perhaps three, if she
found herself in voice or were sufficiently encouraged. Singing was
her passion, a perfect mania, indeed. She had a thread of a voice,
which she eked out with a pantomime meant to suggest unbounded
temperament. Her pretensions to artistic ability were inordinate. She
allowed herself to be called a great society singer in the newspaper
paragraphs. People laughed heartily about it all behind her back, but
in her presence restrained their amusement as best they could, so that
she was doomed never to know the real impression she created.

After her first selection, the last note of it still hanging on
her lips, her guests rushed to her from all sides, at the risk of
stifling her, and let loose upon her an avalanche of compliments
and appreciation. They compared her, without shame, to this or that
celebrity, preferably foreigners, who are more apt to pass current
without the stamp of critical approval. Being unable to praise the
volume of her voice, they made up by praising its timbre, and above
all, her spirit, as being something less definite and discernible and
so a safer basis of compliment.

Raymonde alone kept her place, motionless, a slender isle of truth in
the midst of this sea of falsehood. Mme. de Saunois, after her last
grand aria, with unrestrained enthusiasm in her wake, passed in front
of us.

“Well, Madame, have I your approval?” she inquired. Apparently she
had not yet her fill of praise: she must have something from Raymonde
too, all the more delicious because it was kept back by some resisting
scruple.

I listened anxiously for Raymonde’s reply.

“The music is new to me,” murmured my wife. “I think I shall like it
when I know it better.”

“Yes, isn’t it, and so suggestive! It has to be well interpreted,” said
Mme. de Saunois.

Clearly enough it was not a question of the romance but of its
interpreter.

“I am not accustomed to it,” answered Raymonde. “But perhaps that will
come later,” she added, poor little one, calling to her aid her most
gracious smile.

Instead of being pleased with the charming sight of so much sincerity
in the midst of these conventional praises, I anxiously followed Mme.
de Saunois in her further majestic progress.

“She knows nothing of music,” I heard some one reassure her.

Later in the evening, a young professional pianist, of considerable
though as yet unrecognised talent, began to play Mozart’s sonata in F,
that one whose yielding rhythm expresses so much fresh and wholesome
joy, touched here and there by the melancholy of youth. Every one in
the drawing-room chattered, because this time there was no need to
compliment, but Raymonde, attentive, forgotten and forgetful, listened
gravely to the divine poem of youth.

The people near her were talking aloud. Suddenly she seemed to awaken
from her dream and I saw her quickly change her seat. What remarks I
wondered had provoked her confusion and flight? Instead of being drawn
toward her protection, I blamed her for holding such scruples about
insignificant things. In short everything turned against her at this
gathering, where I had expected to exhibit her proudly and obtain the
approbation of the world. Soon people began to avoid her. Hostesses
do not squander their energies at receptions or put themselves to any
trouble for the entertainment of their guests nowadays as they used to
do: they merely give them a chance to amuse themselves or be bored as
they may see fit.

In the hubbub which the end of the selection had called forth,
she found herself alone, while all the others surrounded a
woman--young?--whom I had not specially noticed, but whose evident fame
now attracted my attention and took possession of me. I asked Mme. de
Saunois about her as she was passing.

“You do not know her? Why, she is famous. Mme. de H--, the author of
‘The Open Garden.’ A new muse.”

There are so many of these nowadays that only the specialists can
enumerate them: I confessed my ignorance, which amused my hostess.

“You will know her very soon,” she added. “For she is going to recite
some verses for us. She has a prodigious memory--for her own works. She
has never been known to forget a single one of them--fortunately for
us.”

I confessed in the same tone of badinage my satisfaction at the
prospect in store for me, remarking that the muse was already
interesting to look at.

This drew from Madame de Saunois the comment, “In what respect?”

“In her colouring--that dark skin and red hair.”

“It is dyed.”

“Her pale face and those blood-red lips.”

“Paint.”

“Listen to her. She speaks our language with a singing accent. It
sounds foreign and has a charm.”

“Her mother is an Italian and her father a Pole. In her writing she
expresses the soul of France. Her husband, that very excellent H--,
brought her back from somewhere. But she is well connected. I have made
inquiries. But what of that? With her here any drawing-room will be
like a public garden, and the invasion will begin.”

“What invasion?”

“The foreign invasion. Go and make love to her. She is as contagious as
the whooping cough with you men.”

“Indeed!”

“Oh, don’t boast. You will go the way of all the others. She makes the
necessary concessions.”

A call for silence interrupted us. Mme. de H--, with a queenly gesture,
enlarged the circle about her; then, with an apparent inward search for
inspiration, began her recitation.

I am not expert enough in poetry to decide on the merit of her poem;
besides, too many conflicting impressions affected my judgment. In her
verses deified nature took human shape, the better to offer herself
to our comprehension. Once more the Bacchantes, after having killed
Orpheus, substituted for his sacred rhythms their wild fanatic dances
and disorderly rounds. In the tone of her warm, flexible, and sonorous
voice and the harmonious gestures with which she accompanied her poem,
in the whole dashing movement of her lithe body, which appeared to be
burning with earnestness, there was a certain sensual appeal which
disturbed one’s nerves. It was the return to primitive instincts,
to the cult of force and desire. Yet no one, except Raymonde, who
preserved her calm in the midst of the general emotion, thought of
being surprised at hearing such ideas exploited in the most refined
salon in Paris by a woman whose face was rouged and whose youth was
already a thing of the past.

Mme. de Saunois had evidently known what was coming. As for me, I was
eager to be presented to Mme. de H--, the beautiful Nacha she was
familiarly called by those about me, like an established celebrity. She
barely deigned to acknowledge my compliments by a movement of her head.
The rouge and powder, at close range, did not seem to detract from her
beauty.

“What did I say?” whispered Mme. de Saunois, with the air of improving
her prediction. For the success of another was hardly pleasing to her.

Raymonde did not consent to manifest any sort of approval, although
Mme. de H-- regarded her fixedly. What was the matter with them that
they all wanted the approbation which she could not give? Is a single
reproach, probably justified, more important than an outburst of
acclamations?

In the carriage in which we drove away, my wife and I exchanged only
the vaguest remarks. But when we were at home and she was removing her
cloak, I noticed that she was on the verge of tears.

“Did you not enjoy yourself?” I asked, hypocritically.

“Oh, I didn’t go for that purpose,” she answered, naively.

“Why, then?”

“So that you might be pleased with me. And you are not.”

“Oh, yes, I am.”

I could not deceive her by my weak protestations.

“No, you’re not. You can’t be. And I shall never know how to please
you.”

I condescendingly consoled her. I promised to direct and form her.
And when I questioned her (what made me do it?) about the impression
which Mme. de H-- had produced on her, I received, after a moment’s
hesitation, this abrupt reply:

“She is indecent. Don’t you think so?”

Frankness pleases us so little when it is at variance with our
concealed views and inclinations that I was offended by her remark.
As the result of this first contact with a sphere which love had
temporarily abolished, was I beginning to lose or even reject the sweet
simplicity which had been poured into my heart by the little maiden of
the Sleeping Woods?

If the most insignificant details and conversations of that evening
come back to me, it is because in reality nothing happened that was not
important. Memory does not encumber itself with frivolities: that which
is of no value it lets escape as water flows through one’s fingers.
What stays, one may often undervalue, but the day comes at length when
it is perceived to be of real worth.

Raymonde’s unsuccessful effort, and even more her fear, which wounded
me sensibly; the many moments when I turned from her and her truthful
face for some tangle of youth and beauty, some fabric of bleached hair
and painted lips and assumed merriment, some embodiment of all the
usual artful powers of feminine enslavement;--in a single evening, in a
single place, I saw these things grouped before me, calling up visions
of my errors and the distant but certain causes of the misfortune or
the crime toward which I was advancing--

                             *     *     *

--Toward which I was advancing, but not without hesitations and glances
back. One cannot quickly or entirely throw off a past in which one has
securely attained, in spite of oneself, to some marvellous state of
sweetness, rectitude and cheer. The most diverse sentiments, far from
excluding each other, often exist quietly side by side, preserving that
fatal ignorance that shall finally rend us in twain.

If, during that time, I resumed my interest in work, which I had too
long neglected, I owe it to Raymonde and her influence. The new life
upon which I had entered demanded that I should not be content even
with happy idleness. In order that the harmony created by our love
continue, all our faculties must be employed, our entire personality
must develop in right directions. A single love, if it aspires to be
lasting, if it wishes to be definitive, considers the balance in our
natures, prevents us from scattering our forces and restores them
rather to our command.

By a gift of happy flattery Raymonde impelled me to make use of gifts
which she recognised in me. I collected my notes of a journey I had
once made through Northern India. I published them, and expressed a
desire to dedicate them to her; but she could not bear the idea of
having her name in print.

“It would be an invasion of our privacy,” she objected quite
obstinately.

I also modelled a few statuettes: a Group of Girls Announcing Spring,
and a Young Girl at the Fountain, inspired by my engagement and that
lost fountain in the forest which the autumn leaves had covered.

It often happens that our most disinterested and normal resolutions
turn, against us. My work, which was also hers, was destined to be
harmful to her. People gave my modelling unmerited praise. Criticism
willingly caresses geniuses whom it believes to be short-lived: they
can not be a burden; their course will soon be run, and consequently
they may be praised without fear. A reputation at the Salons was
bestowed upon me at once, and I was too sensible of the advantages
which renown brings not to accept it with alacrity.

Deceived by myself, I was astonished that Raymonde did not exhibit
more satisfaction. Our first disagreement came from the offer of an
illustrated magazine which, following a small exhibition where only
amateurs of art could have seen it, asked permission to reproduce the
Young Girl at the Fountain. Radiant with delight, I informed my wife,
and was surprised at her repugnance to the idea.

“One would think you were displeased,” I said.

“Refuse permission: I beg you to,” was her reply.

“But why?”

“Did I not pose for the statue?” she demanded.

“Of course.”

“Don’t you see then it’s impossible?”

“But I don’t understand, Raymonde,” I said.

“Keep me all for yourself. Don’t share me with the world. I submitted
to your exhibiting my statue. Was not that enough?”

However that was not the sole reason for her protest, that sense of
modesty. With unfailing intuition she fathomed too the limitations
of my ability. Her love warned her not to allow me to seek that more
extensive reputation which requires, besides enthusiasm, a daily
perseverance and obstinacy. Later I realised better the thorough
preparation and almost superhuman energy required by art, if the artist
aspires to conquer time. And having realised them I gave up my art.

But now this publicity attracted and fascinated me, and I considered
my wife’s susceptibility singularly retrograde, absurd even. Should
one not obey the conventions? Nowadays fashion has its laws and its
rites. A politician, a writer, an artist belongs to the public, which
is no longer content with dancers and actresses. And not only do the
notabilities of to-day belong to the public in their official capacity;
in their private life also, together with their wives and children,
cats and dogs, country homes too if they have any, are they public
property. They are seen spread out in magazines, in all forms, alone
and with their families. Their poses are accompanied with captions for
which a new style has been created, a style uniformly conventional.
Their privacy is taken by assault. They consent to it willingly when
they do not hunt for it from vanity or self-advertisement. They even
appear regularly on commercial posters destined to advertise one or
another of our modern industrial products.

I was now to have an opportunity for free advertisement, and should I
give it up for the fancy of a too scrupulous woman? Was it reasonable?
Who would do it in my place? I reserved my reply, and a day or two
later reopened the subject.

“The magazines insist on having that photograph. Are you still so
opposed to my giving it?” I began.

As a matter of fact I did not need her consent, and yet I asked her
for it. Was it for the purpose of giving her proof of my affection and
condescension? Or was it, rather, to oblige her to give in? She gave
in, and fifty thousand copies of “The Young Girl at the Fountain” were
printed. I distributed some of them myself. Mme. de Saunois had one,
and so did Mme. de H-- whose opinion, of course in lyric form, created
much talk.

I had made that statue for Raymonde and for her alone. How many times,
while she gently encouraged me, during its execution, had I told her
so? And yet I did not know how to resist the first temptation to make
it public.

I remembered reading of the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti that
when he lost his wife he placed beside her in the coffin the manuscript
of the poems that she had inspired, but later did not hesitate to
violate her grave to get them back and publish them. How many artists
pluck out their tenderest memories to offer them to the crowd! They
invoke glory, but vanity more often is the spirit that leads them.

Vanity, vanity! It is the motive of so many lives! I too chose it
rather than the greatest love. There is the whole story.

A little later I had a chance to compare my attitude with Raymonde’s.
A series of old French dances was arranged by Mme. de Saunois. Against
her wishes, but upon my insisting, she had figured in a gavotte. A
society journal asked permission to photograph her.

“If she agrees,” I thought, “that will be my revenge.”

At bottom I was certain that she would refuse, which she did, much
to the chagrin of the other dancers, who could not forgive her
for depriving the public of their simperings. The gavotte, in the
journal, was replaced by a minuet, which admitted of but two persons,
and no more; and people avoided thereafter giving her a part in any
presentation for fear she might stand in the way of that publicity that
was so useful, they assured themselves, to their charity.

As for myself I saw in it another failure.

                             *     *     *

At that time, I was interested in the first experiments in aviation,
still of questionable success, just as I had formerly been enamoured
of automobiling. She would not have selected this field for me, but
at the same time she refused to turn me aside from it. She saw that
it appealed strongly to my activities, which in-door work could not
satisfy and which needed some out-door strife more closely allied to
sport.

“If I fly,” I said to her, “you will not be afraid?”

“Oh, yes, I shall.”

“Ought I to give it up then?”

“Oh, no, indeed. Your work is your glory. I shall be afraid, but I
shall pray. A woman can fear--”

However, I soon abandoned my studies because they seemed too
problematical, and would not have been productive of immediate visible
prestige. I was not to take them up again until much later.

                             *     *     *

One makes mistakes: I was mistaken in my belief of Raymonde’s
lowly origin. I prided myself that I had raised her to my rank, by
magnificent generosity, without seeking to divine how such tact and
moral culture as hers had come about without the slow formation of
time. The chance discovery of some legal document one day informed
me of the great age and secular distinction of her family, which
reverses had forced to take up service in almost the same place where
it had once enjoyed its fortune. This discovery seemed a blow at my
superiority. Pride kept me from mentioning it.

                             *     *     *

One evening we came home and found that her maid was not there for us.
I made the occasion an excuse for reprimands.

“You do not know how to give your orders,” I said.

“I did not want her to wait up for me.”

“That is a mistake,” I said.

“I can wait on myself.”

She did not think it right that she should oblige a servant to wait up
for her pleasure. She preferred to arrange her beautiful hair for the
night herself.

                             *     *     *

I had noticed the time she spent each day in going over her accounts.
It seemed that she always had too much money at her disposal. I was
not accustomed to such saving. I attributed to a narrow education that
admirable sense of economy which is one of the superiorities of the
French woman, expert in thrift and housekeeping, knowing how to be
unostentatiously charitable as well, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan
crowd encamped among us with its dissipations and luxuries.

“Leave that,” I assured her, “you do not know how to spend money.”

“I need nothing now.”

“But that is the point, you should want all sorts of things.”

“Why should I?”

“Why not, since we can afford them.”

She made me share her charities with her, which were numerous, but she
resisted all entreaties to personal luxuries, with a gentleness and
disinterestedness which offended me. I unceasingly suggested changes
of toilette, and was irritated by the resistance which I encountered,
unexpected in any woman, much less in the wife of the millionaire
Cernay.

“Do you find no pleasure in being more fashionable than the others,
better dressed and more noticed?”

“None, I assure you.”

“I want every one to mark your appearance as soon as you enter a salon.
I want all the men to admire you and all the women to envy you. That is
an artistic pleasure. But you are insensible to everything. You like
nothing.”

“Oh, but I do like so many things.”

“What, for instance?”

“I need not tell you.”

I did not yet understand the tenderness of her feeling toward me.
However, it was hardly like the sentiments I held toward her, and I
ceased presently to compare them.

It was her greatest pleasure to remain at home, to play with Dilette,
who laughed and appreciated her little mother always; or to read some
“Introduction to a Devoted Life,” or “The Letters of Saint Francis of
Sales to Mme. de Chanta” (in which he urges her to light her own fire
in the morning rather than make her chambermaid rise before her); or
perhaps some other pious work, or some fairy tales and legends, as if
she were preparing herself for maternal instruction generally. She
delighted too in such simple tales of good folk as gave them the air
of having really lived. “Mireille” enchanted her, and “Genevieve, or
the Story of a Servant,” and “Dominique” and “Ramuntcho,” and “Nerte,”
in which she had underlined these four lines of a benediction which
the Pope, traversing a path through the ripe grain, addresses to some
workmen in the field:

    Search peace in field and home--
    It is the better part;
    And drops from labour’s brow
    Like pearls shall deck the heart.

Such an attitude toward life as hers has gone out of style. Nowadays,
all women, young and old alike, leave their homes as soon as they are
rigged out, fleeing from their firesides as from a pest. They hurry
their automobiles in all directions; to teas, to bridge-parties,
to soirées that are like exhibitions, to fashionable weddings that
seem like parades of the most enterprising dressmakers, to lectures
where art and history are popularised; even to the hospitals, where
they learn how to care for other people’s children while their own,
supposing they have deigned to bear any, are abandoned in the nursery.

I urged her to follow their example!

“You are not seen about at all. You never go out,” I said. “Do you not
care to go out?”

“With you? With Dilette?”

“No, alone.”

She suggested walks in the Bois, which she knew better than the rest of
Paris. At first, when Spring came, we had ourselves taken there almost
every day. When I gave up going she went with Dilette. She preferred
those paths which lead from the lakes to St. James Pond and are never
crowded. It was not the Sleeping Woods, but at least there were trees.

“Why do we know so many people?” she sighed one day, as she was putting
on her hat, vainly hoping that I would forego my plan of sending her
out.

“It is not your fault if we keep them,” I replied impatiently.

At that she departed as quickly as possible, in order to please me. And
yet, whenever I returned before she did I was impatient at not finding
her there.

It was not only at Mme. de Saunois’ first reception that Raymonde
failed of sufficiently enthusiastic formulæ for amateur singers and
elocutionists. Even on occasions when she was genuinely stirred, the
exaggerated congratulations of those about her arrested her enthusiasm.
Her lips would half open to express a compliment, but if she deemed it
insufficient she would blush and remain silent after all. I believe it
was a physical impossibility for her to conceal her thoughts. People
complained of her disdain, her coldness, but never of her candour. And
I was distressed by this silence that other people took for hostility.

“You do not talk. One must talk,” I told her.

“I do not dare,” she answered.

“Say anything, no matter what.”

“It is just that kind of thing I dare not say.”

Indeed she could neither speak nor understand those little nothings
which pretty lips can utter with so much assurance.

I made some pretence of teaching hey how to converse: I led her to
those places where one selects subjects of conversation like cakes at
the baker’s--such as art exhibitions and first nights. She felt out of
her element in the company of those painted, enamelled women, versed
in all the arts and graces of Parisian life, who, though they may
please separately, in an assemblage strike one with a sort of solemn
horror, with their perfume of withered flowers. I brought her into
the midst of this and tolerated the insult of this impure air. Stiff,
and a little stilted, slender and distant, she retired within herself
like a sensitive plant. Those others, large and many-decked ships,
fast-sailing torpedo-boats, old hulks from the waters of the theatre
or of gallantry, all artifice and rouge, backed by their husbands or
protectors, had the air of setting victoriously out to sea to capture
public opinion. Vaguely they would announce success or failure. And I
was disposed to accept their judgment as to Raymonde, never questioning
if it were not as false as their faces.

The day after a new play, Paris would learn from such as these
whether or not the presentation deserved success: they made or
unmade reputations. When we attended the theatre, Raymonde would
sit motionless in the corner of the box. Occasionally she fell
back--recoiling as if from some insupportable contact--though she
herself was all the time unconscious of her instinctive movements.

“What is the matter?” I asked once.

“Nothing.”

“You do not look as if you were enjoying yourself.”

“To be truthful with you, I am not.”

“This play displeases you?”

“Oh, how could it please me?”

“But there is nothing but enthusiasm in the lobby between the acts.
Every one is delighted with it,” I argued.

“I do not share every one’s opinion. You must excuse me.”

How often our dialogue ran like that! The drama or the comedy changed,
but our words were usually the same. I can still see her mechanical
gesture. Before us, on the stage, a woman would torment and harass
her husband with her sensual love; another, virtuous all her life to
that time, surrender at last to an unknown blackguard; a third stole
money to buy beautiful gowns in which to excite her husband’s waning
desire for her; all, shedding an odour of the alcove upon the audience,
represented to us as heroines of love; and upon that basis applauded
frantically by the public, its nerves shaken.

“They love; that is all,” was the general comment all about us.

Raymonde shook her head, as if that were not all. One evening, aroused
by the general acclamation, unable to resist that magnetic current
which comes from an electrified crowd, I insisted on sustaining the
popular theories regarding a play in which the heroine, a young girl,
gave herself up in a burst of passion to her sister’s husband.

“Love, true love, disregards morals, tramples upon suffering, takes no
account of anything outside of itself. That has its beauty, don’t you
think so?”

“That is not loving,” she murmured.

I continued my panegyric.

“Love, true love, in its splendid violence, does not stop at a fault,
or even a crime.”

“That isn’t loving,” she repeated.

“What then does love mean, according to your idea?” I demanded,
surprised at her resistance.

“According to my idea? Oh, I don’t know. Don’t ask me that.”

“Yes, you must acquire the habit of being able to express what you
feel, Raymonde. That is the whole art of conversation.”

She hesitated: I saw her lips open and tremble a little. She shook her
head, and then suddenly made up her mind:

“Do you remember going into a little chapel one evening?”

“Yes, with you.”

“A dark chapel, lighted only by the altar lamp? It seems to me that
one’s heart is like that.”

“One’s heart?”

“Yes, the heart is in darkness, unknown. But the lamp which shines
in the sanctuary is our love. It is there, watching and praying. To
love is to understand oneself more clearly, to take one’s impulses
and thoughts out of the shadow. We do not take faults and crimes out
of the shadow. And since love is light, it is also the desire to make
ourselves better.” And then very low, as if to herself, she added:

“As for myself, the more I love, the less I can do evil.”

But when would she have done so? When had she not loved?

She rarely expressed herself at so great length. The flame which
watches and prays shone from her eyes all over her face; carried away
by her subject her every feature reflected the light of which she had
spoken. Had I been away from the theatre, the world, and its false
conception of life, I might have adored her for her simple lesson of
love, her ineffable avowal of tenderness. The air of the Sleeping Woods
suddenly refreshed me. I drank from those springs of youth and felt
their purifying virtue.

The curtain rose again. And once more the great wave of sophisms and
errors, of erratic folly and passional disorder, surged up, rolled over
the public and submerged it. I believe that in the whole theatre there
was only this young woman against whom it struck and broke in vain. I
did not realise the beauty of the spectacle.

“She is sweet,” I thought, in a moment of gentleness, “but still a
little childish. She does not understand these devastating passions
which sweep away everything. One should be able to comprehend what
one has not experienced even; she goes through life with blinders on
her eyes; she does not wish to see anything outside of her own narrow
little life, straight ahead of her.”

In good faith, I dared to think: “_her little life_--”

                             *     *     *

That very evening, or on another like it, as we were driving home from
the theatre in our automobile, she asked me suddenly:

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That there are women and young girls like those whom we saw on the
stage?”

“Of course there are, many like them, and many worse. What a child you
are.”

“Ah!” she murmured.

She said no more, but the electric light which shone upon her showed me
her look of pain. She felt a deep sadness at learning of the existence
of so many guilty women.

                             *     *     *

The popular books of the day, which I purposely placed about her,
thinking to tempt her into reading, usually inspired her with the same
repulsion. She did not retain the names of the authors,--they were
destined to be forgotten. Their literary beauty could not, for her, be
separated from the beauty of the matter. Those charming modern books in
which youth is presented to us as an animal at liberty, through which
pleasure runs fearless of the attacks of time and death, in which the
mind even has become sensual,--she only opened and began: she never
finished them.

“Why do you not go on with them?” I asked.

“My heart isn’t in them.”

“But the author cannot always paint one’s own heart.”

“But it is so difficult to read a book in which you find nothing of
yourself.”

I picked up one of the rejected books on her centre table.

“Listen to these beautiful sentences,” I began.

“Oh!” she replied, “a mannequin, too, wears beautiful clothes. I prefer
something living underneath. Do you remember my wedding gown? It did
not become me any too well. But I loved you so much--”

                             *     *     *

At that time, a foreign woman was being tried in Paris. She had driven
her lover to kill her husband, and had then denounced him in order to
rid herself of him and begin life anew with another. A veritable halo
of fatality encircled her, for to know her was to love her, and to
love her was to lose all honour and regard for humanity. Above all she
had very beautiful hands, their beauty shining all the more clear when
they were examined for any traces of guilty blood. She appeared before
her judges with the grace and prattle of an artless child, charming
everybody. Before testifying each day she would remove her gloves. It
was the fashion to go to court and submit to the enchantment of her
voice, her face whose very blemishes were thought of as the ravages of
love or amorous decorations--to give our nerves their daily wrenching.
The evening following the announcement of the verdict, we dined with
Mme. de Saunois. The accused was the sole topic of conversation. Mme.
de H-- summed her up and conferred the following degree upon her:

“She is such an exceptional creature, so seductive. She rises above our
common measure with such ease. Even her wickedness is attractive.”

Every one was approving this opinion, when it occurred to one guest to
ask Raymonde, who was seated next him:

“What is your idea, Madame?”

“I hope she is only a monster.”

All the women at the table looked toward me. They visibly pitied me for
having cast my lot with a person capable of so narrow and prejudiced an
opinion.

And I could not help an irritation at this blame that society put upon
me through her.

From seeing her continually rebel against our forms of art and all our
prevailing ideas, I became accustomed to thinking her callous. That was
indeed the general impression of her. Her reading was too different
from that recommended by success to attach any importance to it. At
the theatre, nothing, or almost nothing, succeeded in pleasing her.
The splendour of an unusual interpretation caused me to take her one
evening to see “Polyeucte.” I was not thinking so much of the play
itself, as of the actors. Is not that usual? Do not the names of the
players, inscribed in letters of fire on the front of our theatres,
eclipse those of the authors and even of the play?

In our box, as I called her attention to the acting of the old and
eminent actor who played Polyeucte, I was surprised to have no reply.
I looked at her more attentively: the tears coursed down her cheeks,
though she did not know that she was crying. I had surprised her once
before like this in the Coliseum in Rome, when the guide pointed out
the gate of the dead. Pauline threw away Severus’s love and her own.
Pauline received with open heart the divine spark of the faith. All the
pathos of the ardent masterpiece condensed and spiritualised itself on
my wife’s face, pale with the force of her emotion.

As the curtain fell, I offered explanations of her exaltation.

“Monroy was sublime,” I said. Had we not come only to see that great
actor?

“Which rôle did he play?” she asked. “I didn’t know.”

Completely given up to the tragedy she had quite simply relegated the
actor to his proper place.

                             *     *     *

One Good Friday she took me to Notre Dame to hear the sermon on the
Passion.

Spring had come in April. The moon when we arrived was mounting toward
the open sky just above the towers of the old cathedral, bathed in the
blue of the pure night. Inside, the crowd was so great that we could
not reach a church-warden’s pew, and with great difficulty I got a
chair for her at the back, in the midst of the throng.

The voice of the preacher, which had sounded thin to me as we entered,
reached us, distinct, insistent and powerful. It carried with it the
generosity of a heart that gives itself until it is exhausted. It
filled the immense edifice to the very shadows at the back, shadows
which covered also the transepts and the upper vaulting, making the
lighted portions of the church seem menaced by it on all sides.

We heard the story of the Mount of Olives. The Disciples went to sleep
while Jesus was enduring His agony. Likewise, about us and within us,
the moral life of others and ourselves suffers while we sleep. Later,
too late, when I awakened from my cruel sleep, I was destined to recall
with bitterness that warning which I had not heeded. We saw about us
all the visible and varied forms of cowardice, the cowardice of the
official, of the judge, of the crowd, of friends. All the truth of
human character shines out in the Gospel. In this series of denials,
one can see his own denying, just as one instinctively feels his
pockets when he hears the cry of “Thief.” I alone, perhaps, of those
present, gave the ceremony the interest of the mere amateur.

Next to us, an old news man, who had stopped his shouting only at the
door, crowding in through several rows of chairs, stood still, suddenly
captive, with his pile of papers under his arm. It was the death of
Righteousness. He uttered a long sob of indignation and pity, like a
half-uttered howl, held out his free arm before him in an involuntary
gesture, and then went away again upon his route. Outside once more he
tried to cry his papers, but emotion still gripped his throat. For an
instant he had offered himself to God. I have never known that instant;
I have never made that offering. It was now I who was callous.

When we left, the moon, detached from the towers, was sailing through
the open sky. The clear night, so blue and pure, enveloped the sombre
cathedral. Ranged along one side of the square the waiting automobiles
quivered incongruously at the foot of the old black building.

At last, we found our carriage. “Was it not beautiful?” Raymonde asked
immediately.

I agreed without interest, from courtesy, instead of giving way to my
emotions as I had been invited to do. For a second short space of time,
I surprised her in the act of trembling. Still, I continued to believe
in her apathy, her reputation for it was so well established. When
one holds to the judgment of the world one can not appreciate his own
fireside.

                             *     *     *

These discords, these difficulties that come between two people when
one aspires only to success and the attractions of fashionable life,
while the other keeps intact her native and religious sensibility, do
not necessarily prevent that kind of understanding which is possible
in our flexible modern life to people of fortune. So many husbands and
wives, for instance, if they should stop to think, would be surprised
by the amount of their incompatibilities. They are content with
approximate congeniality, in willing ignorance. But one cannot lay bare
the roots of a tree and have it grow and live. The denial of its proper
nourishment does not kill it at once: for a short time it may continue
to blossom and to flower. At last, however, it falls before some severe
storm, like a disabled ship which breasts the gale as long as possible
and in the end surrenders to the elements. So I laid bare the roots of
our love; little by little, I deprived it of its necessary protection,
and finally crushed it utterly by one severe blow.

These apparently trifling details, which I have enumerated, before
coming exactly to the real outbreak, by degrees alienated Raymonde from
me. It was indeed a gradual uprooting. So completely given up to this
imperious desire to shine that I was intolerant of any encroachments
upon it by the intimacies of our life together, entirely subordinated
to that state of mind in which one seeks applause, I turned more and
more from Raymonde and her influence, which I thought narrow and
old-fashioned.

She went with me uncomplainingly, wherever I suggested. I imposed on
her immodest spectacles and degrading associates, such as our society
supports, when she did not desire them: still she was not what I wanted
to make her, a woman of the world.

It was not in her. A stirring conflict was waged within her, between
her love for me and her upright nature, incapable of bending itself
to the manners of our day. I helped to create the problem, but did
not attempt to aid her in its solution. Her struggle even began to
undermine her health, though she showed no outward trace of the
exhaustion she felt, excepting perhaps a loss of weight. But thinness
was very fashionable at this time! Ah! those people whose daily acts
are regulated by a definite code of morals, to whom faith and love are
as necessary as food and respiration--they have a presentiment of death
when once that faith is shaken; they have no powers of resistance when
their ideals are finally shattered.

The first effect in Raymonde was a loss of cheerfulness. I did not
notice it then, yet I recall it clearly now. There is in our past
always something which we would forget, but which does not permit
itself to be forgotten. There was a time when her laughter was
spontaneous, with her little girl, in carelessness and innocence
of heart. When she held her child upon her knee, and lavished her
enticement on her, she resembled those madonnas which have altogether
the air of elder sisters. Little by little this clear, charming
laughter became less frequent, diminished, was shattered! Even Dilette
perceived it. And I did not fail to notice that the poor little
one missed, as she might her broken or lost toys, these tokens of
joyousness.

Raymonde enjoyed only the simple pleasures of life, of which I had none
to offer her. Into the simplest of them I had injected, like a secret
passion, this perverse desire for sensation, filling with astonishment,
torment and pained shame, a heart simple and ingenuous, ignorant of the
intricacy of our life.

The expression which I had seen in her face on that first day in May,
when I met her in the wood and when my unexpected presence made her
retrace her road, or when I had made my avowal of love at the chateau,
or on the evening of one of our last walks before the birth of our
child, this look of fear,--here, I saw it again, like a ghost, upon her
face. But I attached no importance to it.

                             *     *     *

She told me once later, that during all this time she was trying to
conform to my tastes, she never paid one of those visits to which I
attached such importance, without reciting a little prayer to God, on
the staircase or in the ante-chamber, for courage. And it was the same
thing when we received. It was absolute torture for her to endure the
custom of kissing the hand which had recently come again into vogue.
Her arms hung at her sides and one had always to search for her hand
there. She never submitted without a shudder, which, though she did her
best to suppress it, she never entirely succeeded in concealing--above
all, at home, when she wore no gloves.

                             *     *     *

We had reached that point, she in her isolation and growing
unhappiness, I in that state of nervous irritation where my baffled
worldly ambitions and the substitution of my personal life for our
common life had thrown me, when my hopes were revived by a sudden and
unexpected change.

                             *     *     *

Pierre Ducal, who in the old days had taught me the art of moving
with ease in the most dissimilar salons, Pierre Ducal, whose support
the negligence of my wife had diverted and I had counted too much on,
sought again evidently to get into touch with us. He had then attained
the summit of the only glory he had ever really desired. Slender of
figure, graceful, his clean-shaven face sallow of tint but passing at
night for interesting pallor, erect in carriage, affected in his wit,
of dashing demeanour, he aspired now all the more to fascinate because
he was pursued by the terror of old age. A time--not far distant--would
come when he would have to take his place in the faded and worn-out
category of old beaux, old fellows who had been handsome once, who
continued to dress and carry themselves as if they still were so,
touching knight-errants, a little comical, following that lost cause,
their youth. Being discerning, he foresaw the end that awaited him. But
this foresight diminished in proportion as the danger increased, or
rather, the threat was already put into execution while he continued to
believe it hanging over him. In the face of this shipwreck he turned to
account with agonising haste all the possible pleasures of life. Never
more than at this time had I seen him so engaging and so brilliant.
Never had he enjoyed such prestige, never had his clever sayings, his
judgments, his ironies been so much in demand, nor exercised so much
effect.

I attribute the happy change in Ducal’s attitude to his regret that he
had allowed our old friendship to lapse. He became our most intimate
associate. He accompanied us to the races, and the theatres; we
commenced to meet him in the society which we frequented, which was
less riotous, more dignified than that which he effected. In spite
of myself, I had submitted, in the choice of our associates, to the
guidance of Raymonde. However, I was apprehensive as to the effect
which my wife’s old-fashioned views could not fail to produce on our
worldly companion. The first time this apprehension put me in torture.
I was soon reassured. Pierre Ducal marvelled at her great originality,
which Paris had not shaken. Far from being amused, as I feared, he
invited comments which disconcerted him, but which he did not ridicule.
He even tried to understand them. This new interest which he took in
Raymonde’s reserved conversation was of great benefit to her. The world
was not slow to amend the reputation it had given her for shyness and
provincialism. I heard favourable echoes around me; the opinion of
Pierre Ducal weighed so heavily.

“We see your friend very often,” my wife observed one day.

I expressed my contentment at this, but after she had made the remark
she seemed to me, when Ducal was present, more reserved and distant
than ever:--so much so, that I showed my displeasure and surprise.

“You are scarcely civil to him.”

“Oh, do you think so? Why should I be more agreeable?”

“He is my friend.”

She was about to object, then reddened and kept silent.

I had absolute confidence in her. Despite the obscure process which had
little by little undermined my tenderness, I could not have touched
her with a suspicion without despising myself. Above all she impressed
me as being unable to appeal to or even to hold the interest of a man
of the world like Pierre Ducal. I did not see--I could not see--in
his attentions, anything but a chance opportunity for instruction
to supplement mine when I had discontinued. At any rate, my friend,
without doubt a little abashed, treated her with a respect and a
deference which was in noticeable contrast to his usual insolent manner
toward women. I was grateful to him for it, and at the same time amused.

It was the time of year when the days are growing longer, and we
enjoyed even our dinner by the light of the setting sun, the twilight
being so beautiful that we deferred turning on the light as long as
possible. On the evening of which I am writing, as I returned from my
club, I was surprised not to see my wife in the salon. I called to
her: she did not answer. Turning on the electric light I surprised her
exhausted, stretched on a sofa, her head hidden in her hands, her body
convulsed with sobs.

“My God,” said I to her, “what is the matter?”

She tried to put me off.

“Nothing, nothing,” she insisted. “Do not look at me.”

“I beg of you, I ought to know.”

Brusquely, without raising her head, she replied:

“I have dismissed M. Ducal.”

“Dismissed Ducal,” I repeated in amazement, as if she had perpetrated a
most daring outrage.

I knew that her love for me, as well as her own inherent purity, was
sufficient assurance that my honour could not have been compromised:
therefore I felt that she must have exaggerated the importance of
Pierre Ducal’s conduct. To me the circumstances indicated only an
unforeseen destruction of carefully laid plans for increasing our
prestige in society; if for a moment I had had cause to doubt Raymonde,
then perhaps the worldly outcome might have meant less to me, but I
realised only the fact that she had peremptorily sent Pierre Ducal
away and that he would unquestionably seek revenge. He would make us
the victims of his sarcasms and pointed remarks, which could destroy
my reputation as an arrow wounds the flesh. He would use to advantage
the observations he had made during our close intimacy. I was incensed
by the thought of Raymonde’s having so needlessly exposed us to this
danger through laying too much stress on a trivial incident. Had she
not learned in our society that all women allow men to be attentive
to them? Of what use were receptions, beautiful gowns, enticing
conversation and the arts of coquetry, if not to call forth the very
thing she had resented! Could she not have let Pierre Ducal know in a
quiet, forceful manner that his advances annoyed her, without going
to the extreme limit of causing a break in our friendship? Surely
a woman’s greatest asset is the use of all her weapons of charm
and fascination to the best possible advantage. What to Raymonde
constituted an irreparable injury was to me only a source of great
annoyance. And I took the thing very lightly.

“Little one, little one, when will you learn to be reasonable?”

She did not answer when I spoke to her. While I had been rapidly
reviewing the situation, she had lain on the sofa, her face buried in
her hands, completely crushed by the weight of her despair. I repeated
my question and she looked up. Now at last I know the meaning of her
every gesture and glance. I realised that she hid her face because
she felt degraded for having even unknowingly appealed to the sensual
nature of Pierre Ducal. The very fact of those words, which she had
not invited, seemed to her to sully her purity. Even my presence was
painful to her on that account. I can still see her large eyes fixed on
me, those eyes so limpid, in which I could plainly read her terror.

“What did you say?” she murmured. “I did not understand you--I did not
understand.”

For one brief moment I felt intuitively that I had not been fair to
her. I went over to the couch, stooped, and would have taken her in my
arms.

“Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Do not touch me yet.”

That one cry of fright was an expression of the repulsion she felt for
herself. Her delicacy had been deeply wounded by the realisation that
any other man had dared to think of her as only her husband had the
right to do. But to my worldliness her terror had another significance,
and it infuriated me.

“He did not touch you, did he?” I cried.

“Oh,” she cried, wringing her hands.

The mere suspicion crushed her. I lacked fine feeling enough to give
her comfort then and restore her self-respect, and so I assumed a
fatherly air and lectured her for her foolish exaggeration of trifles.

“But my dear,” I said, “it is not so dreadful. What crime has that
tactless Ducal committed?”

I thought the word “tactless” strong enough to designate his insult.
She did not answer.

“He--he dared--to tell me--”

“What?” I asked impatiently. “Oh, yes, I can imagine--but what did he
say to you?”

“I do not know. He was talking generalities. I did not see where he
wished to arrive. He said that one is so rarely happy, and that one can
not be so if one is not loved.”

The miserable wretch had artfully tried to explain her own state of
mind to her before offering his sympathy. I have no doubt the knowledge
that he perceived her secret suffering was as painful to her as the
unmerited insult. Later, at least, I could understand that. My only
aim then was to minimise the effect of an incident which I thought so
little compromising.

“Oh, come,” I said, in an easy manner, “it’s not worth being annoyed
about. Pierre Ducal only acted like a man of the world, and very badly,
since he put you in such a state. Would it not have sufficed to let him
know that you realised his stupidity? He is a man of intelligence, and
he would not have begun again. He is good company; one is never bored
with him. Paris is not the Sleeping Woods. You seem to forget that.
Life here is highly organised and civilised. You try to live in the
city as you do in the solitude of the country. One can’t do that. You
must learn to adapt yourself. Besides, a young woman has a thousand
ways of protecting herself without struggling or screaming. All women
know the art of listening graciously. One has not the air of listening.
One jokes, one smiles, or one laughs frankly. One checks the indiscreet
man with a word, a blow of the fan on the fingers. Men hardly ever
insist. They do not carry on a hopeless siege, above all to-day, when
one is so practical and so hurried. Deuce take it! One does not throw
men out of the door, who, after all, do not wish you any harm. Whom
would one receive, if one adopted such a system? I assure you, it is
time you began to mature.”

I was very proud of this improvised argument. It might have availed
with women who do not fear to play with fire, or enjoy a flirtation
if they know they are temptation-proof. It might not have jarred the
finer sensibilities of that type of woman who enjoys a joke about such
things with her intimates, as one is amused by a toy pistol that only
looks real but is not really dangerous. To Raymonde it was absolutely
unintelligible. Every word was a fresh wound, every thought disloyal
and wicked.

While I was speaking she looked and looked at me. Her great eyes, wide
opened, burned with such an ardour that I felt them on me. I wished she
would close them or look away, for her gaze embarrassed me. Little by
little the colour faded from her cheeks, and when I finished speaking
she was deathly pale. As she kept silence, I went on a little annoyed:

“You seem to have nothing to say. I assure you Ducal will explain our
strained relations to suit his own need. Why do you not answer?”

“I am so fatigued,” she murmured; “let me go to my room, please.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“Thank you, I prefer to be alone.”

She glided through the room like a shadow. At the door, she turned
toward me and said brokenly:

“If I was wrong in dismissing your friend, forgive me.”

“No, no,” I said, “it is not that.”

She disappeared, and I walked up and down, reviewing the whole
unpleasant episode and its inevitable consequences. I was annoyed
with myself for the unpleasant sensation I felt. It was something
akin to that I felt when I asked the innocent young girl of the woods
to come to Paris with me alone and she had willingly consented, not
comprehending the significance of my invitation. Had I not nevertheless
committed the cowardice of injuring the little creature who had
entrusted herself to me and claimed protection? And as on that previous
occasion, I recalled the bird which I had picked up in my hand, whose
life, whose warm life, I felt slip away. Had I not held it too close
instead of caressing it?

I should have insisted on going with her,--I should not have left her
alone. But I stayed there, unnerved and dissatisfied with myself.

At dinner she occupied her place without a word of explanation. Any
further expression of opinion would have been as the spade of earth
that falls on a coffin. Neither she nor I reopened the subject. She
retired early, and her absence was a distinct relief to me. The cigar
which I was smoking was excellent. Out of doors, the mild evening air
announced the spring-time.

That night, I have since learned, was one of intense agony for her. How
could she still love me? Had I not yet succeeded in destroying love in
her? Love is not so dependent on its object as on the nature of the
being in whose heart it dwells, and from which it receives its life and
force. That of Raymonde was born immortal.

A few days later, I met Pierre Ducal. I saw at a glance that he was
master of the situation and had decided on his course of conduct. He
came toward me, his hand extended. I had an impulse to refuse it--why
did I not yield to it? I accepted that offered hand. The treason
commenced was by that act consummated.

Did he think I knew nothing of his conduct? He had arranged for leaving
his cards and going away for a while, in order not to make our breach
evident, and the bitter sarcasms which I had anticipated were never
uttered. He continued to say only pleasant things about us, and it
became a matter of general discussion that he had changed completely
and was now inclined to enjoy solitude.

How had it become possible for a worldly cynic of his stamp so suddenly
to withdraw from society and gain opinions so radically different from
those he had always held? I can now explain that mystery. My wife had
given him a new vista of life when she made him realise for the first
time what respect is due a woman. He had never before met a woman of
such ideals. I feel a supreme shame in thinking that he was in advance
of me, perhaps, in making the honourable reparation to Raymonde, the
amend which I was destined to make only later.

                             *     *     *

Spring had just begun when she asked me to allow her to return to the
Sleeping Woods. I opposed it on account of the lack of comfort and the
cold. But Paris did not agree with her, and she was gradually losing
weight alarmingly. At last I consented, as I recognised vaguely my
wrongs against her, to make the sacrifice, for such indeed it was for
me, to bury myself in “the desert” of Madame Mairieux.

For the past few years we had spent very little time there, because
I enjoyed travelling constantly to new places, while Raymonde found
pleasure in the associations of spots she knew and loved. At my request
we always left the baby in charge of her grandparents.

“I’ll go with you,” I said heroically after much hesitation, as she
suggested that she should go alone and that I should remain in Paris.
However, I insisted that I should go too, and during the journey I
dwelt on my heroism all the way.

It was pouring, when we arrived.

“One of the joys of the country,” I muttered bitterly.

But it was Raymonde’s own beloved land. She smilingly greeted all her
favourite trees; I believe she even loved the rain that was sent to
nourish them.

M. Mairieux scanned his daughter critically, and I could see that he
was worried by her altered appearance. He glanced from her to me, and I
read in his face that he held me responsible for the change. Without a
word he convicted me. Without a word of explanation he understood the
drama that was in progress. Raymonde herself would have died rather
than complain to him.

Mme. Mairieux, on the other hand, was enthusiastic about my wife’s
appearance.

“Of course she has grown a little thinner, but it is fashionable
nowadays to be slender,” was her characteristic remark.

For the first few days after our arrival, the rain kept up incessantly.
Unable to leave the house, I went from room to room, turning over my
regrets and boredom. In spite of my persistent contrariness Raymonde
seemed born again. Only to see the trees against the grey horizon,
leaning against the window, gave her pleasure.

Once more she could enjoy her beautiful allées. They were covered with
weeds and almost blended with the mossy carpet of the woods, through
which they continued their humble paths of light in every direction.
Dilette was as yet unable to distinguish one tree from another, but her
mother had taught her to shake her hand to people who offered her a
greeting, and one day when we were out walking in the woods, imagining
that the stirring branches were nodding to her, she waved her little
hand in answer to the politeness of the trees.

We again began our long promenades. Soon we left the child with her
governess, that we might bury ourselves deeper in the woods. About us
were all the old peaceful surroundings. The Green Fountain, cleared of
the dead leaves which obstructed it in the winter time, reflected in
its surface all the tranquil beauty of its remote corner of the wood.
If we had but leaned over its cool, transparent water, our faces would
have touched as on that other day when our horses stopped to drink. But
nothing seemed the same to her or to me.

I confused this calm with ennui. I did not know how to find happiness
in the repetition of these ordinary experiences. I needed constant
change of environment and new stimulation. To me life was tiresome if
every day did not bring with it an interesting social function or some
novel impression. The restless spirit of Paris is contagious. To be
constantly active was an absolute necessity for me, and I found the
dull family life to which I was condemned vapid and uninteresting.

To Raymonde, on the other hand, even despite the disillusioning
conditions, this return to the country with me was, as it were, a
halt on her road to Calvary. It brought soothing peace and comfort
to her to know that she was not obliged to see people in whom she
took no interest, to go to places merely to be seen. She was no doubt
continuing to hope for a renewal of the beautiful memories of our
engagement and of the blessed peace of the early days of our marriage,
even though she knew that they could never be revived. Inspired by
the choir of nature which she loved, the living beauty of her native
soil in which our first tender thoughts and the awakening of our love
had taken root, she awaited her fate, like the daughter of Jephthah,
surrounded in her mountain retreat by the maidens of Israel, those
faithful followers who for two months tried to stay the hand of death,
“after which her father did with her according to his vow which he had
vowed.” Raymonde, too, was waiting in that saddened state of mind that
is hardly painful and has its secret charm.

                             *     *     *

I soon began to take long automobile rides. Our walks in the forest
had become silent and dull. Perhaps I was unknowingly kinder in not
accompanying her to the places where our love had blossomed.

                             *     *     *

At the Sleeping Woods she wore “little dresses,” as Pierre Ducal
would have called them. She generally selected white, which was most
becoming to her. Her taste in clothes, although simple and inexpensive,
was exquisite, though my ultra-fashionable ideas would have dictated
more elaborate gowns. After all, the test of good taste is in being
fittingly attired, and she understood it better than I.

                             *     *     *

One day, as I was returning from a long ride, I met her on the road. It
was early morning, when one’s age cannot be successfully hidden. That
is why age scarcely exists in large cities, since the season and hours
of our life are not clearly defined there.

“Where are you going?” I asked, struck anew by her youthful beauty.

My sudden interest surprised her, but she did not know that it was
prompted by appreciation of her appearance rather than real interest in
her destination.

“I am going to take this package to Fannette,” she replied, blushing
with pleasure.

“The peasant with the chapped hands?” I asked, astonished at my own
recollection.

“Yes. She is very ill; I have some medicine for her.”

“Would you care to have me go with you?”

“Indeed I should,” she answered eagerly.

How very gently she spoke to me!

On our way home, she suggested that we take a longer but less sunny
road. I reluctantly agreed, having already regretted my condescension
in going so far with her.

“We’ll take your path,” I said, “we will go more rapidly.”

A long silence followed my remark, silence difficult to break after it
had lasted some time.

We walked on, not exchanging a word, and came to a little house in
the woods, the home of a peasant and his family. At the door stood a
young woman on whose face shone the happiness of motherhood. In her
arms she carried a blond rosy cherub, about her were two, three, four,
five little tots, rising like steps, each one just a head taller than
his next younger brother or sister. The whole family was watching and
pointing, and we heard their loud exclamation and outburst of happy
laughter, as a man with his scythe over his shoulder came down the path
toward me. When he neared the little group, he waved and called out
his greeting, with a voice that sounded like a deep-toned bell. He had
been harvesting, and the honest sweat of hard toil trickled down his
cheeks, but he forgot his tiring labour in the joy of home-coming, in
his return as father of a family to his mid-day meal.

Raymonde stopped a moment.

“Look,” she said to me.

The radiant faces and the evident contentment were indeed a perfect
picture of rustic life and the happiness of simplicity.

“Yes,” I replied, “the scene recalls a Dutch masterpiece. But see how
many children there are.”

“They are so pretty, especially the youngest with his blond curls.”

“Oh, but there are too many of them,” I repeated. She did not reply.
I walked on, not caring to witness the demonstration with which the
father would be greeted. That sort of affection did not appeal to me. I
understood only the so-called higher type of love. As Raymonde did not
follow, I turned around and saw her intently watching that scene from
a life which she appreciated and craved but had been denied. All the
tenderness and yearning of her womanhood were aroused; she could not
keep back the tears.

Instead of silently entering into her feeling, without useless words, I
said impatiently:

“What is the matter with you, Raymonde? Come, that is absurd.”

In reality I knew the deep causes of her emotion. With miraculous
intuition, had she not foreseen this, when she told her father that
although she loved me I was not the husband for her? Although she was
very ingenuous and ignorant of the degree of my unworthiness, yet she
presaged our incompatibility, if not my injustice.

She calmed herself with an heroic effort.

“It is foolish of me,” she agreed. “They are so happy that I was deeply
touched.”

“And we?” I demanded mechanically.

My question forced her to choose between a weak expression of self-pity
or a bolder attempt to conceal her feelings by lying to me.

“Yes, indeed, we too are happy,” she said in a voice bravely simulating
the truth.

At the gate we met M. Mairieux. Raymonde hastened to tell him where
we had been. Somewhat astonished to see us together, he gazed at us
attentively. The least favourable sign of happiness on his daughter’s
face reflected itself on his own. He understood her expression so
thoroughly that he was not to be deceived by appearances.

From her open window Mme. Mairieux caught sight of us.

“Ah! there are the lovers,” she cried.

                             *     *     *

I suggested to Raymonde that we make a little journey. The closer
intimacy of travel helps sometimes to heal the distress of hearts that
have been worn by concealed and daily irritations. Did I hope myself
that she would refuse? My project was to return to Paris for a week or
two, and then move on to some fashionable watering place. Although the
season was already advanced (it was the beginning of July) some affairs
were still taking place in the Bois de Boulogne and at Saint-Cloud.
One noticed foreigners in attendance especially, and I liked their
imaginative novelty and prestige.

Whether she accepted the idea of living away from me in order the
better to protect her threatened love from me, or whether her already
weakened condition would no longer permit her to travel, I do not know;
at any rate she refused to accompany me.

“You are right to go,” she added. “The Sleeping Woods are lonely for
your tastes. And as for me, I am so tired--you must let me rest a
little. I will rejoin you shortly, as soon as I am able.”

She no longer believed herself capable of detaching me so completely
from all my accustomed ways of living. Her confidence in herself was
dead, but her confidence in me, fashioned by her love, was more slow
in yielding. My departure would be almost a relief. I believe that I
should have tormented her more by remaining with her than by going. Our
cruelty grows quickly when its victim never complains of the blows.

Through the glass windows of Armenonville, in pleasant company, I
saw again the decorative beauty of long allées filled with leisurely
strolling people. This sort of thing was better suited to my state of
mind. When we ourselves are arid, uninhabited nature vexes us; as a
servant of our social pleasures, it becomes endurable.

From Paris I went in pursuit of it in fashionable resorts. Mme. de
Saunois had gone off to the Engadine, and I installed myself at
Waldhaus, near the lake of Sylvaplana, at the opening of the Fex
valley. Raymonde, either in better health or more anxious, offered to
join me. I evaded summoning her on the pretext of an immediate return,
which I put off time after time. I was determined to ramble about, I
was running after adventures for which I required my liberty. How was
she, in her ignorance, to suspect them?

Excursions were gotten up, romantic pilgrimages to Nietzsche’s house or
in memory of the painter Segantini, who died on the mountain above the
Maloja. I had come a long way in search of artificial emotions such as
one meets with in the theatre and drawing-rooms. Except that in having
them one breathed a healthier air, there was no change.

I had scorned the Sleeping Woods and Sylve-Benite, the black fish-pond
bordered with reeds, the sunken roads, the ravines, the hills, all the
peace that was offered within the reach of one’s hand; I had to have
movement.

When at last I decided to return, thinking of the loyal waiting of my
Penelope, but more and more averse to and disgusted with regular and
thoughtful life--though it is the kind by which alone one can improve
and watchfully perfect oneself--the only danger being lest one fall
asleep--I was not slow to be bored.

                             *     *     *

We returned to Paris very early. Raymonde, although the prolongation
of our stay in the country had benefited her health, as far as her
overworked heart was concerned, did not object to my haste. But she
gave every evidence of being unable to go about as much as during the
previous winter.

“A little later in the season,” she said, “I shall go everywhere with
you again.”

I proposed an arrangement which was very satisfactory to me.

“Let each of us be free,” I said, “each go to the places he likes.”

“I shall not go out at all for the present, if you are satisfied.”

“_Let each of us be free_:” what a convenient formula to regain one’s
independence by! I was so blinded that I saw no traces yet of her
growing weakness.

In society I renewed my acquaintance with Mme. de H--, whom I had met
at the Waldhaus, dressed in black, mourning for the shade of Nietzsche.
Her husband had died a few months before of a mysterious and rapid
illness. A court surrounded her, praising “The Open Garden” and newer
poems on the horror of death. Her charm in my eyes withered in one
evening like a full blown rose, and I can hardly to-day analyse it or
explain my servitude. I must, however, try to do so if I am to make
myself understood.

The first time I met her was at Mme. de Saunois’ reception, when
she had appeared in the salon after we had listened to a song by
Henry Duparc called “An Invitation to a Journey.” The music added to
Baudelaire’s words a neurasthenic morbidness. That nonchalance, that
nervous fatigue, was as if embodied in her. One felt that she was
ready for audacious departures. She was in a word the Invitation. Like
vessels anchored in a port, she gave promise of new sensations in other
countries whose fruits were more savoury or more sour. Their battered
sides, hung with the barnacles and weeds of previous journeys, give
evidence of adventure. And as the almost imperceptible movement of
the ship in quiet waters suggests its tossing in the open sea, so too
when Mme. de H-- crossed a salon she set in motion a wave of sensual
appeal. Her affectation, her make-up, her poems, all were marks of
a dark and stormy past. One conjectured healed wounds and suspected
venturesome risks. She had lived through many a perilous moment and
had not remained unscathed. Beauty which is no longer unblemished,
and dead youth which adorns itself as if it sought in advance to defy
time by substituting artificial for natural attractions, are like the
witchcraft of ancient sorcery, whose philtres were like perfumes,
stronger than the fading flowers of which they were made--stronger
because they were beginning to become tainted....

I had been guilty of infidelities before, but this last summed up for
me all the contaminated seduction of primitive passion, passion to
which our civilisation had added one thing more--a taste for flesh that
is “high.”--

                             *     *     *

I had forgotten that Raymonde spent part of almost every day in the
Bois with Dilette, among the pine trees around the little pond of St.
James, near the Bagatelle. It is an open playground where the mothers
and nurses bring their little charges, whom they can watch from a
distance during their games of hide and seek.

The Autumn sun was so inviting that Mme. de H-- suggested a walk in the
Bois before returning to the automobile waiting at the side of one of
the roads for us. We were sauntering along when suddenly we came upon
my wife and Dilette.

The fact of my being seen publicly with a lady of her calibre in a
frequented place need not of necessity have aroused suspicion. Was
it that the mere presence of one perfectly right and loyal creature
threw out falsehood and irregularity? We were often seen together--why
should we now appear so at fault? Until now Raymonde had no inkling
of anything between us Now the trembling of her lips a moment alarmed
me. In the Sleeping Woods how could she have learned that one must
control one’s self in public? I feared everything from her provincial
education, lest it cause her to indulge ill-founded jealousy. Yet was
not our sudden instinctive halt at sight of her unmistakable admission?

I was soon reassured. Everything happened in the best possible manner.
I asked her, I dared to invite her, to join us in the automobile,
impudently; but was it not necessary to set her doubts at rest?

“No,” she said, “I shall stay with Dilette.”

“Are you not afraid it is too cold?”

“The sun is strong, we have our furs.”

“Well, then, we shall leave you. Shall I send the machine back for you?”

“Yes, if you will, in about an hour.”

During this brief colloquy, my little girl was running toward me. Her
little three-year-old legs could not trot very quickly. She was already
a reflective person.

“Oh!” she said, seeing me, and seemed to be astonished, “there is papa.”

She looked indeed like an exquisite little miniature in her little
white hat and coat. Why had I never before noticed the charm of her
wonderful colouring, her clear blue eyes and blond curls? Mme. de H--,
responsive to every phase of beauty, stooped to talk to the child and
was about to embrace her, but when Raymonde saw those painted lips so
near the pure forehead of her little girl she quickly pulled Dilette
toward her, and the kiss fell on the child’s curls.

Mme. de H-- drew herself to her full height and looked fixedly at her,
as at one whom she recognised to be inimical. My wife turned her head.
One would have thought it an involuntary gesture. What importance is
there in kissing a child? We said good-bye, and I went on my way with
Mme. de H--.

When we had gone some distance, Mme. de H-- broke the silence.

“She knows.”

I scoffed at so absurd a supposition. Mme. de H-- made no attempt to
substantiate her conviction, but insisted authoritatively (with that
marvellous voice of hers, which is one of her best weapons) that she
was positive of it.

“She knows, but will never speak of it,” she added.

And I knew that my contradiction was only verbal. Deep in my own
consciousness, I felt the truth, and in my imagination I pictured
Raymonde sitting motionless as she watched me disappear with Mme. de
H--, Dilette holding her hand, but not understanding her mother’s
silence. She was thinking of another couple who walked under the trees
at the Sleeping Woods and exchanged vows of everlasting faithfulness.

We found my machine. Before she stepped in, Mme. de H-- turned to me,
and asked briskly:

“Are you thinking of her?”

Instead of answering, I put another question:

“And you?”

“I think only of myself.”

Then she added:

“And of thee.”

But very soon after, her intimacy with me was to come to an end.

                             *     *     *

Several days after this, Raymonde timidly informed me that she had
decided to accept every invitation in the future. I had been going
about alone ever since I returned from the country. I objected that
her health would not permit her to keep late hours, and besides that
she had no taste for social functions. She insisted with an unexpected
resolution, and I began to tease her about it:

“Why this sudden interest in society? People have grown quite
accustomed to seeing me go about alone.”

“I am very anxious,” she said sweetly, “that they should expect to see
me wherever they see you.”

I was at a loss to understand why she had suddenly determined to give
up the solitude which she so much enjoyed, but I now know that she
considered herself partly responsible for my intimacy with Mme. de H--;
she felt that if she had tried to share my pleasures she might have
been able to hold my interest. Her resolution was no doubt the result
of some analysis and introspection, and she announced it to me after
coming home from church, where she had gone to pray to God for courage
to carry it out, even though it were to cost her all her rapidly
declining strength.

And so she began to show again to the world her reserve and reticence.

                             *     *     *

I tactfully tried to avoid accepting invitations to houses where I was
sure to meet Mme. de H--, who, realising my attitude, reproached me for
what she did not hesitate to call my cowardice.

Humiliated by her scorn, and having no defence to offer, I agreed to go
to a reception at the salon of Mme. de Saunois, who seemed destined to
play an important part in our life drama, for it was through her that I
had met Mme. de H--, three or four years before.

If Raymonde had been absolutely indifferent to me, I should not have
felt so uneasy about the meeting. Her quiet sweetness sometimes soothed
me when we were at home alone. Why did she not remain there, instead
of going out into society with me, why did she not preserve that peace
there for me when I was to feel the need of it? Our varied feelings and
thoughts often make us appear inconsistent, yet one state of mind does
not necessarily preclude its opposite. They may coexist, and indeed
if they do not, we seldom reach our highest development. Yet when
circumstances compel a choice and a sacrifice of the one or the other,
we rebel against the hardship of a deprivation which our selfishness
and egotism alone could never have prompted.

I was in a state of anxiety, during the whole day preceding that
inevitable meeting, and was ready to start much earlier than was
necessary. Impatient, I went into Raymonde’s room to see if she were
waiting for me. She looked very beautiful that night, in a white tulle
gown embroidered in gold flowers, and I complimented her on it. The
decolletage, bordered with swan’s down, gave her added length and
grace: her neck was so small a child could have clasped his two hands
round it--so fragile she seemed.

“Are you ready?” I asked. “It’s time to go.”

My impatience, indeed my very presence, seemed to disconcert her.

“I’ll be with you in just a moment,” she said.

“Very well,” I replied, “do hurry: you’ll find me in the library.”

In her hand she held a lip stick. On the dressing table before her was
a box of powder and rouge.

She had never used artificial means of beautifying herself. She was
hesitating. No doubt I had disturbed her.

When she joined me a few minutes later, I mechanically looked at her
face for traces of the make-up. She was so pale, so particularly pale,
that I understood the shame she had felt, but neither her lips nor her
cheeks showed the slightest sign of artificial colour. She had tried to
imitate the other women, to make herself unreal with colour and false
emotion, but at the last moment she had found it impossible. She could
bear no artificiality.

As soon as we entered the salon, I looked about quickly, only to find
that Mme. de H-- had not arrived.

Why did I torture myself about this meeting, when I knew that my wife
went out too seldom to hear any reports that were being circulated? She
had indeed shown me an anonymous letter which had been sent to her,
and I felt confident that she was above opening my correspondence.
How then could she have gotten information? And as for the incident
in the Bois--she had never alluded to it again, and surely it was too
insignificant to lead to anything. At the worst she might have thought
it indicated a mild flirtation or a passing fancy. One does not court
public attention with a mistress. In this way I tried to reassure
myself. As a defence against hypocrisy and infidelity, Raymonde had
as a weapon only that imponderable frankness and sincerity which she
radiated always. When I looked elsewhere I believed she was calm, but
not so if I glanced at her face.

“I am very glad to welcome you again,” was Mme. de Saunois’ greeting to
Raymonde. “How very well you are looking!”

These stereotyped phrases, expected of her as the hostess, were
spoken at random; as a matter of fact, Raymonde had never looked so
delicate and pale. In fear and trembling she looked about the room.
Pierre Ducal was there. After an absence of several months, he had
come back; his old interests had reasserted themselves. At first he
had been missed, but his return did not cause much of a stir. How many
attempts one makes, how many backward steps one takes, before one
can give up society! It seems we are the slaves of habits from which
we cannot break ourselves. We often prefer them to the ideals of our
better nature, ideals that might lead us to undreamed heights. It took
a long time and very deep suffering for me to realise the nothingness
of social life. We could not avoid Ducal. Mme. de Saunois had been
speaking to him, and when she came to greet some new arrivals we were
brought face to face. He bowed respectfully to my wife, without saying
a word, while she, conquering her feelings, extended her hand to him.

That action on her part was an expression of her tenderness for me and
of her complete self-immolation, and yet, at the same time, it affected
me disagreeably, because it caused me to admire her magnanimity when
I knew that I myself was still disloyal. I greeted my old friend
cordially, but he only bowed to me. I was for a moment jealous of the
forgiveness he had received. Would he not thus recover his wounded
pride if, as every indication led me to believe, he had loved and still
loved her?

But this feeling gave way to one of interest as I saw Mme. de H--
enter the room with a train of admirers. She stopped short a few
steps from us and continued her conversation in a loud tone of voice.
Nothing could have been more vulgar than that apparently accidental but
carefully planned halt.

She was possibly the only person in the room who was talking, for
all other conversations ceased, as people observed the direction she
was taking. No doubt an interesting scene was expected, of which no
one wanted to lose the slightest detail. My private life was not a
secret, in a world where every one knows every one’s else remissness
and finds self-justification in it, or, if necessary, material for
revenge. But why did Mme. de H-- seek a demonstration which might so
easily have been avoided? Accustomed to publicity, and having won great
popularity, she had every possible advantage over Raymonde, whose
timidity, interpreted as disdain, had not made her a favourite. But in
that salon, as when hunting in a forest, one lay in wait for death and
inhaled an odour of blood.

I was standing behind my wife, and a change of position would have
meant coming very close to Mme. de H--, whose manœuvres completely
non-plussed me. It was very evident that she intended to make no
advance to Raymonde, who, paralysed with fear, had become so pale that
she kept up only with difficulty. She was exposed to public gaze like
the little Christian martyrs of old, exhibited in full view before they
were thrown to the wild beasts at the Coliseum. And I read contempt for
me in the eyes of Pierre Ducal, who stood looking at me.

As soon as Raymonde gained her self-control she stepped forward and
heroically extended her hand to Mme. de H--. As she did so, the picture
of it all impressed itself on my mind: her beautiful profile looked
like an alabaster bas-relief of a saint, with a halo about her head.
But this fleeting image quickly faded from my mind in the contemplation
of the simplicity of the situation which I had feared would be so
complex.

“She knows nothing,” I assured myself, “how could she know? One always
unnecessarily exaggerates the importance of things which do not happen
and never will. It is a vicious habit to worry.”

On the other hand one often minimises the import of incidents, as was
the case with me in this instance, because I could not understand
the magnanimity of which my wife was capable. We are prone to forget
bullets which have missed their mark, and, their danger once averted,
promptly disregard their deadly power.

A concert was to be given during this evening of which I am writing.
Mme. de H--, who was playing a game which I did not understand, invited
me to a chair which she had reserved for me. No one seemed to take
any notice of this fact, for other dramas, some suspected and others
definitely known, had absorbed the general attention.

I remained with her even during the intermission, while my wife sat
alone several feet away.

“Now that she has forgiven Ducal, he will surely go and talk to her,”
I thought; and I even hoped that he would, in order that she might not
appear so completely ignored.

But Ducal did not approach her. Withheld by his respect for her, he did
not presume that her pardon gave him the right to address her. And he
left without a word to her. What a lesson it was for me to realise that
her divine forgiveness had converted the heart of so hard a cynic as
Pierre Ducal.

When we returned home, I, with my consummate egotism, desired most
condescendingly to express my approval of her conduct. Had she not
behaved well? And I, I was very much relieved and indeed happy, and yet
I could not bring myself to tell her what I had planned, for I read an
expression in her eyes which seemed to say:

“Are you not satisfied with me this time? Have I not done my duty,
every duty, more than my duty? I offered my hand in forgiveness to
your friend who insulted me, and to the woman who took you from me and
then scoffed me. But my suffering has not wrung a cry from me. I am
silent, for I am your wife. My love for you and my baby Dilette binds
us indissolubly, with you--how have you kept your vow?”

For one brief moment, I was tempted to draw her to me and to confess my
infidelity. She would have pardoned me, I am sure that she would have
forgiven me. Her virtue seemed to purge the atmosphere of my lies and
insincerities. But I quickly rejected that unreasonable exaltation.
Such heroism on my part would have been absurd. I thought she could
have no suspicion of my intimacy with Mme. de H-- because she had
seen us once on the Bois. She had not been a heroine. I overestimated
her conduct, for she had no doubt reached the simple conclusion that
she had exaggerated the importance of Pierre Ducal’s declaration; and
as for Mme. de H-- well, she merely thought that the woman piqued my
curiosity. Why needlessly complicate matters? The dreaded meeting had
passed off uneventfully. Why consider the subject further?

                             *     *     *

I was not slow in understanding the object of Mme. de H--, who now
began to affect being seen in public with me. Did she not make bold to
recite a poem in which allusions were pointed and ill concealed? Our
modern poets express their confidences in precise terms, not general
themes. She would have liked to cause some scandal, to force Raymonde
to seek a separation. All such women as she extol free love, and
with an eye to the practical side as well know how to secure social
advantage from it all; though once they have it they exhibit marvellous
executive ability in preventing their passion from running away with
them.

Growing paler and paler, more and more silent, Raymonde still
accompanied me everywhere. Her preoccupied air re-established between
us those distances which indelicacy thought to have wiped out. I was
being apprenticed in that cruelty which Mme. de H-- practised with so
much ease, the cruelty which love exacts the moment it ceases to grow
in the clear light of day. I might have feared the softening effect
of Raymonde’s tears, but she never let me see them. I saw her pine
away, but I did not believe my eyes. I saw her suffer, and told myself
that she did not know. Why should she, I asked, think evil of these
flirtations and preferences that are now so notorious in society, which
every one sanctions? Thus one grows accustomed to his misdemeanours, if
nothing happens to expose them.

Once, however, as we were going out, I saw her face contract as if
through the effort of overcoming some internal pain.

“You are tired,” I said. “Don’t go.”

“Oh, no, not at all. I am quite able to go.”

“Please lie down awhile now. It will be better for you.”

“I shall take a rest soon.”

“To-night?”

“No, not to-night:--not yet.”

“You like going out, then?”

“I like going with you.”

I could not prevail upon her to stay behind. I offered to let her
return to the Sleeping Woods. She might regain her health and strength
there. At the name she smiled, a thing she did seldom enough now, but
still she refused.

“I do not care to leave you,” she said.

“That is stubbornness.”

She turned away. “Oh, no, it is not, I assure you.”

There was only one thing for me to say: “Let us stay at home to-night,
then.” I did not say it, although I was tempted to. The germ of evil
had been sown in me, and my crime was working out naturally, almost of
itself. When one has sown the seeds and covered them well, does not
grain grow in the fields? The bad grain in our hearts is still more
prompt to spring up.

Nevertheless, I was irritated with myself. My discontent gave me a sort
of fever, a need of activity and distraction, added to my taste for
society and the wicked fascinations of Mme. de H--. What loyalty and
wholesome tenderness remained in me thus took sides, while it disturbed
me, with my basest instincts, to push me the faster toward the abyss.
Only some miraculous intervention could have saved me. Raymonde, who
knew it, after having tried suffering in vain, gave her life that the
miracle might come to pass.

                             *     *     *

On our return that evening, she sank down on a divan in the vestibule
and had to admit that she was defeated.

“I cannot stir. I’m sorry.”

She had to be carried to her room and put to bed, and wrapped in warm
clothes to stimulate her circulation. Her feet and hands were fairly
frozen; the slackened course of her blood was quickened only with great
difficulty.

After the perplexing and alarming diagnosis of the nearest physician,
whom I had sent for in the night, I called in Dr. Aynaud, whose
authority is universally admitted. He could not come until six o’clock
that evening, but as soon as he was announced I felt reassured. An
illness without cause or first stages, without definite symptoms,
which had not prevented the patient from attending a function the
night before, could not be extremely dangerous. I explained things to
the doctor in a few words. He made the gesture of a man who trusts
only his own examination, and I led him to Raymonde’s room. After the
auscultation, he proceeded to investigation and minute questioning. My
wife lent herself to it complaisantly, and added nothing herself when
the doctor’s questions ceased.

“You do not ask my opinion?” he queried.

“What is the good?” she replied, preoccupied.

Still more surprised, he hesitated, then said:

“I see. You think it isn’t serious, eh?”

“If you like.”

“Come, come! A change of air, and everything will be all right.”

She repeated pensively:

“A change of air.”

I led the doctor into my study.

“You understood?” he said at once.

“That it isn’t serious?”

Whether he acted in accordance with his temperament, little inclined to
dissimulate no matter how serious a case might be, whether the evidence
seemed to him glaring, or whether in his clear-sightedness he realised
that I was responsible, he hurled his opinion in my face, without
warning of any kind.

“She is lost.”

When one is accustomed only to conversations velvety with politeness
even if they are savage at bottom, such brutal statements are
disconcerting; one does not allow them or believe in them, one
considers them declamatory. In society no one is flat-footed, with love
or truth or death. One turns carefully aside from such lack of taste or
tactless language as the doctor’s.

Quite calmly I let him know my incredulity.

“Come, come, then, what is her trouble?” I asked.

“Her trouble? She hasn’t any.”

“What is the matter then?”

“If she had any, I should know how to treat her. I find nothing,
and I can do nothing. She has reached the end of her forces, she is
exhausted. Her heart and arteries do not perform their functions
properly. They may stop at any moment. In any case, they will not act
much longer. It is the same with her as with very old people sometimes;
the oil is dry, the wick is burned out.”

“At her age? You are joking, doctor.”

“At her age, yes, it is surprising. I have met similar cases among the
working people in the hospitals, from too early or badly cared-for
maternity, or from too long uninterrupted manual labour and lack of
hygiene.”

“But none of those things can be the case with Mme. Cernay.”

Before making his point definite, the doctor seemed to stop and
meditate.

“Moral suffering, continued unrest and complete lack of mental
repose, can produce a similar result,” he ended by telling me.
“The slow wasting away which one sometimes finds with unhappiness
requires a highly wrought sensibility. But that realm is closed to my
investigation.”

And, stopping short, he wrote a prescription; he advised the quiet of
the country, talked of the unexpected reserves of her youth, mitigated
at a rather late hour the severity of his verdict, promised to return,
and took his leave.

As soon as he had gone, my spirit began to rebel against him. His
inability to define Raymonde’s illness drove him to exaggerate it. He
was falling back on those old-fashioned methods that attribute all our
ills to internal rather than external causes. I sent a telegram after
him, asking him to call in consultation a certain specialist whose name
had been made famous by the enthusiasm of a social clientèle.

It was important to reassure Raymonde absolutely, I thought. Before
rejoining her, I considered some means to this end. We had been asked
to Mme. de Saunois’ that very evening: I would go, so that she might
not think I was hiding anything. Yet the hope of meeting Mme. de H--
there, was not that something hidden?

As I reached this decision, I heard echoing like a refrain, the hard
words of Dr. Aynaud: “She is lost.” I recoiled from them. In order
to overcome my scruples, I reviewed all the reassuring symptoms--the
doctor’s final words, which had been less positive and less despondent,
Raymonde’s youth, her health, and our long walks in the old days, the
absence of any definite malady, especially the benefit that might be
gained from improvement in her mental condition.

Gaining some courage at last, I went to her room, and, composing
myself, proceeded to endow the doctor with optimistic opinions that
he had not held. It was a question of diet, rest and departure for
the Sleeping Woods, as soon as the season would permit, I said. As I
spoke, she looked at me as she had looked the day that I found fault
with her for repulsing Pierre Ducal. Her eyes troubled me in the same
way. The light tone I had adopted rang false, she knew. Ill as she was
I was provoked at her for pointing out my own hypocrisy by the sheer
limpidity of her eyes.

“Don’t be afraid,” I went on. “The nurse is here. I’ll bring her in
before I leave. You will have a quiet night.”

“You are going out?”

“Certainly. Why shouldn’t I? You are not so ill as all that.”

“Truly?”

“Of course. You can see that from my going out. I’ll see you in the
morning, dear.”

But on the doorstep, that “truly” lost its questioning meaning. She
_knew_, as she had always known, as she knew at the Sleeping Woods, that
my love was not bringing her happiness, as she knew, without proof,
without any need of proof, that I was betraying her. Her “truly” meant:
“The end will soon come, and you cannot even stay with me. Am I already
of so little importance?” It found no fault; it simply stated a fact.
And how should I get on in the future without tormenting her? I hurried
down the steps to drive away this mingled vision of cruelty and remorse.

“No, no,” I said, to encourage myself, “it is impossible. I am
exaggerating. Sickness does not develop so quickly. This Dr. Aynaud has
upset me by his stupid brutality.”

Was it a fact then? Those pale and meagre cheeks, those dominating
eyes, which dark rings made larger as a halo magnifies a light, that
sad and suffering look in them that not even habit could accustom me
to--was I to be deprived of them? A sense of danger suddenly gave me
sympathy for her. Was I to lose her?

I reached Mme. de Saunois’ at last in a state of extreme nervous
tension, such as a tired and horrified army must feel within a
conquered city. I craved, to benumb me, the excitement of music and
brilliant lights, the flash of jewels, the beauty of women and their
glistening lips, the suggestiveness in those attitudes by which the
present fashions submit our women’s bodies to our curious gaze.
I longed for all this intoxication of the eyes, this brilliancy
that should dispel that darker picture from my mind. Let all those
things greet me and I should be relieved of a great weight! Already
I discounted this relief as I was taking off my overcoat in the
vestibule, and entered, ready for my intoxication.

Yes, everything I sought was there. It was hot: it was the atmosphere
of unalloyed pleasure: there were flowers and numerous lamps and that
special offering of flesh that women’s dress sets out like baskets
of rich fruit. People were talking, laughing, moving about, enjoying
each moment. Is not a salon a guarded place without an opening on the
outside world, with no doors leading to the past or present, where one
forgets, where one goes in order to forget? It is the price one pays
for tastes of happiness.

Mme. de H--, who was watching for me, glided toward me and took me in
her wake, making off with me like a vessel that puts out to sea with
sealed orders.

Yes, everything was there to offer me distraction, and yet, that night,
I gained nothing of the sort. I was cold, and could not warm myself. In
the midst of so many colours my eyes saw nothing but the shadows on all
the faces under those lights. On that of Mme. de H--, nearer at hand,
in spite of the rouge, the powder, the smile, the forced joy, I saw
distinctly, the definite pallor of death: not that death which suddenly
suspends our motion and hurries us into the unknown, but that death of
emptiness that is covered with gilded superficiality, with emptiness of
false compliments and lying declarations and hypocritical enthusiasms,
emptiness of petty hates, of affections limited by desires and desire
that finds only limit in caresses, emptiness of wit, of artifice and
passion, emptiness even of our restlessness and pride; that death and
emptiness, in a word, of everything that is not the print of solitude
and immortality.

And just as death was there everywhere about me in that salon,
many-sided and invisible, life had fled for refuge yonder in that room
where Raymonde waited for me to return. She was not resting; she was
only waiting for me, I told myself. When I should enter, she would
lift her arms from the bed, and in her open palms would be security
and peace and love. Around her head would shine that halo which I had
already seen there. But I should have to hurry; she would not wait for
me long--

A sudden illumination shone within me. I felt a happiness without
knowing whence it came, a state for which the recollection of my
engagement and perhaps too some rare intuition that vanity had not
stifled in me, unconsciously had prepared me for, so that I stirred
beneath it, like the earth at dawn.

Some outward sign of it all must have shown in me, for Mme. de H--
asked:

“What is the matter with you?”

Her voice had suddenly become unfamiliar.

“With me? Nothing.”

“You are most peculiar this evening.”

“I am over-tired; that’s all. I must go.”

“Do you feel ill?”

“Very well, on the contrary,” I replied, without thinking of my words.

In the face of my incoherence she was clever enough to recognise
the futility of insisting, and contented herself with seeking an
appointment at some other time.

“To-morrow, then, at our house?”

“No, not to-morrow.”

“When, then?”

“I do not know--”

I left her in her surprise and anger, and crossed the salon like a
somnambulist. Amidst so many lights, I saw only one bright ray in front
of me, and followed it as the kings of old their guiding star.

My return did not change the tenour of my thoughts. In the vestibule I
stopped. What was I going to do? Perhaps she had fallen asleep in the
despair of my desertion and the anxiety of her illness. It would be
better to wait until morning. To-morrow I would tell her.--

What should I tell her? Suspicions do not take the place of proofs.
Why disturb her ignorance? No! No! I would be content to announce our
departure for the Sleeping Woods as soon as she was able to make the
journey.

I had started toward my room when I caught the glimmer of the night
light which filtered under her door. I approached it. It seemed to me
that my base ambitions, my petty desires, my selfishness, my cruelty,
even the impurity of my past fell from me like a discarded garment.
Almost light-hearted, I turned to cross that inevitable threshold.

I entered. From the depths of the bed a murmur reached me:

“Is it you?”

The little lamp shed only a tiny light. Scarcely did I distinguish her
eyes which gazed at me fixedly. I did not say a word in reply. A sacred
emotion overcame me. I turned to the nurse and told her to get some
sleep in the next room, which had been prepared for her. She objected
that Madame was depressed, although she had no fever.

“I shall remain with her myself,” I replied.

She showed me the medicines which had been prepared, and left the room.
When the door closed, I went to Raymonde’s bedside, knelt, and resting
my forehead on her hand which I had taken, softly uttered the necessary
word, the first I had to say:

“Forgive me.”

Her hand withdrew from mine, and placed itself on my head, and I
understood without Raymonde’s saying so, that I was forgiven. But could
it be done so quickly? The work which was being accomplished within
me did not permit me to renounce so easily the chance to describe the
scene of my conversion. I wished her to know its whole extent, and I
began:

“Listen--”

With an authority unexpected from one so weak, she broke off my
confidences.

“I do not wish to hear,” she said.

Completely overcome by her grace, I wished at least to cry out my love
for her. I went on stammering, when I saw her raise herself and put her
face close to mine.

“Oh, my dear,” she said; “you are weeping, as on the night of our
marriage at the Sleeping Woods,--do you remember?”

She told me that I wept, and, as on that occasion, she added:

“But it is so simple.”

I did not understand at once what she meant by it. Then I feared to
understand it, and interpreted it in my own way.

“Yes, is it not? It is so simple for us to love each other.”

She looked at me for a long time, surprised, and repeated:

“For us to love?”

And then no doubt she inwardly reproached herself for evading the
truth, at a time when truth was appearing plain to us, for she replied,
in a calm voice:

“Why do you not tell me that I must die?”

I rose quickly. “Oh, Raymonde, I beg of you, do not say that.”

I could doubt it no more than she. As I had left her in the evening I
had known it. And it was that which had enlightened me about myself,
which had flooded me with light.

With the same tone of authority, she calmed me:

“That too is so simple,” she repeated.

With a supreme effort I tried to rebuild some hope. I spoke to her of
her youth, of my love, and of Dilette--

“Oh, Dilette,” she said, and for the first time she grew tender. I
spoke of our return to the Sleeping Woods, of the wonderful air she
would breathe there, and of the spring, which would soon come.

“Dearest, do you remember the first of May?” I asked.

My words drew a faint smile from her, delicate as flowers that grow in
sandy soil. Encouraged by her smile, I insisted:

“We can still be happy.”

But she declared gravely:

“I _am_ happy.”

“Henceforth we shall always be happy.”

“Yes, always.”

And as if to intensify the meaning of the word “always,” she murmured
these strange words:

“Do not be afraid, my dear. I have accepted it, so as not to be a
burden to you--”

“What do you mean?” I inquired anxiously.

She did not seem to have heard my interruption, and went on:

“Now I am so happy that I dare not refuse God--”

What was this mysterious compact that she had entered into, at first
with unconscious delicacy and now renewed by deeds of mercy? The
mystery was so painful to me that I leaned closer to her and entreated
her:

“Raymonde, I beg of you, tell me what it is you have accepted.”

She threw back her head a little, looked at me with unspeakable
gentleness, and let fall like an avowal of love:

“Death--Do you not see it--?”

                             *     *     *

The word struck terror to my heart--stunned me. I was afraid to take
it in. Suddenly the exact words which I had read to her in Rome, after
our visit to the tomb of Pauline de Beaumont, came back to me. “She
wanted to die, in order not to be a burden to me any longer.” The
joy of living had made place in her for the glory of sacrifice. She
had offered herself to save me from my faults, to free me from all
restraints. My return, which she had ceased to expect, overjoyed her,
but her belated happiness seemed so fragile to her that she feared to
lose it if it were prolonged. Or she believed it alone well worth her
absolute submission to the divine will.

Dying, she was regaining my love. But if she recovered, what might not
happen to it? Perhaps her confidence had preceded her to the grave.

I could only call her by her name. And she listened to that name when
I repeated it, as though I took heart of grace to say it for the first
time. She was silent, to feel her joy the more keenly. She did not
speak, and yet her lips stirred. I believe she was praying.

                             *     *     *

With a thousand precautions, the doctors permitted me to take her to
the Sleeping Woods. That painful journey drew from her not a single
complaint. My tenderness compensated for all her suffering.

As we neared our estate, she asked me to open the windows of the
automobile in which she was lying, and to lift her up. The faintest
green bloom already covered the forest at the birth of Spring. At
the time of our return from Rome we had found it thus. Then all the
happiness, which I later spurned, was still before me.

“We are home,” she said.

She breathed deeply; a little colour came into her cheeks.

“You are looking better already,” I said: “that is a good sign.”

“Yes,” she murmured, as she fell back, “they must not know at once.”

She was thinking of her parents.

Her father gave up all hope as soon as he saw her. I could not
misunderstand his ravaged face. For a long time he had known that some
secret grief had undermined her health, but he did not believe the time
had come so soon. The tenacious optimism of Mme. Mairieux relieved the
situation of its tragedy.

“We are going to diet her,” she said; “in a few months I assure you she
will be transformed.”

And even when she learned that a specialist was to come expressly from
Paris, almost once every week, to take care of our invalid, she could
not believe Raymonde beyond recovery. She considered me attentive and
generous. The thought of this great doctor that we were putting to so
much trouble was agreeable to her, and quieted her anxiety. In the old
days her perseverance would have been a precious encouragement to me,
but now I saw too clearly the error of it to summon hope.

Raymonde, who had been brought into the chateau on a stretcher, would
not leave it alive. Reflected in my frightened love, which was no
longer deluded, and which nothing could again alter, she watched
herself die and pass away as in a mirror.

                             *     *     *

During the pleasant hours of the day, her chair was placed near an open
window. I never left her. I attached myself to each moment as if to
prevent its flight.

The birds were singing, the leaves beginning to come out. One seemed to
hear the germination in the earth like a low hum in the clear air. I
was tortured by the sight of this silently renewing life while the work
of death was going on before me.

Nothing of what passed within my heart escaped my wife.

“You are mistaken, dear,” she said. “This is not the end.” She was
thinking: “This is the beginning. It is not the earth that is calling
me.”

At that moment, a bell began to toll the Angelus. Other churches took
up the burden from a distance.

“Listen,” she murmured, inspired by those churchly voices, as she had
been in the garden of the Pincio,--“listen--”

I wanted to close the window, on account of the evening air. She
allowed me to do so, but she was thinking “Of what avail?” Or perhaps
she was repeating to herself:

“It is so simple.”

                             *     *     *

One morning I found M. Mairieux at the door, having come over for news
of the patient.

“Won’t you come in?” I asked.

He looked at me with his sad eyes, so charged with fatherly affection.
He did not know, then, that I was no longer the same man.

I led him to his daughter, but he scarcely dared to follow me,
remembering my former jealousy.

“Father,” Raymonde said to him, “I want you to come and see how happy
we are.”

His too long restraint before me broke down, and I saw him sobbing. I
believe that at that moment he forgave me the wrong which I had done
his daughter.

                             *     *     *

On the first of May, in accordance with their charming custom, the
children of the neighbouring villages came to sing and dance in the
court. They had scarcely begun when I wanted to send them away. In
the city one has straw thrown on the street in front of houses where
sick people are, to deaden the noise, and I feared their noise here.
Raymonde stopped me:

“Let them stay, please.”

“They will tire you,” I remonstrated.

“No, no. Do you remember--?”

As she was speaking, I recalled that other first of May, ours, when she
had run away from me in the forest.

The refrain of the old song had not changed. It was still:

    Awaken, sleeping beauty,
    Awaken, if you sleep!

For the first time I saw my wife’s calmness--that surprising calm to
which I was only now growing accustomed--shattered, as if it were a
crystal that had been too roughly handled.

“Soon,” she whispered.

She did not finish her thought, but I completed it myself;--one day,
soon, she would awaken no more. And I sent the troop of children away,
no longer able to endure their gaiety.

                             *     *     *

That same day she asked for Dilette, whom she no longer kept so much
near her, not to affect or sadden her precocious sensibility unduly.
The child was loth to leave her again: she looked at her insistently
and too closely.

“Take her away,” Raymonde begged me.

I had almost to take the child away by force. When she had gone,
Raymonde drew me down as if to whisper to me.

“Promise me,” she said, “that you will always love her, that you will
never let any one take her place in your affections.”

She stopped, not daring to go on. But I read her meaning in her eyes.

“Raymonde,” I answered in despair, “why do you speak to me like that?
You do not know, you never will know, that my love is now equal to
yours.”

She bowed her head as if she had been caught in wrong-doing.

“I cannot believe it, dear.” And then in a whisper: “That would be so
wonderful.”

She had thought to charge me with our daughter’s future, thinking of
the time when I should be her sole protector, when I might perhaps be
led to betray my tender memories. And in my powerlessness to convince
her, I knelt before her, insisting with all my power.

“You must believe me, Raymonde.”

She laid her hand on my head.

“Yes,” she said, “I believe you.”

And she smiled ... It was the last time.

                             *     *     *

How can I write what follows?

Her weakness increased; she no longer even left her room. Of her own
accord she asked for the final sacrament. As she received it, I saw her
face, so pale and white, grow bright, like a window behind which some
light is shining. It was a transfiguration, in which I had the feeling
that God was in her, stronger than she, so frail, whom He was going to
take away.

The days were growing longer, crowding night between slow twilights
and hastening dawns. The morning of the twentieth of May, a little
before five o’clock, she called to me. Her room, where I was watching,
faced the east, and through the loosely closed shutters a ray of light
entered.

“Isn’t it daylight yet?” she asked me.

She was oppressed. I took her hand, which was damp, in mine. There was
no abatement of the fever; yet I was not immediately alarmed.

“Yes, dear, don’t you see the sun?”

“No,” she said.

Her “no” startled me. I looked at her: her eyes were wide open,
searching: she could no longer see. I pushed back the shutters, and
through the open window a flood of light fell upon the bed, toward
which I ran again at once.

“And now?”

“Now?” she repeated, making an effort, as if to fix her attention.

Then she seemed to grow stronger, and replied:

“Now, my dear, yes, I see.”

She raised her two arms before her, and made as if to point to some
spot beyond me, repeating still more distinctly:

“Yes, I see.”

She fell back then. For a second I thought it was to rest, or perhaps,
to sleep. Filled with an inexpressible anguish, I leaned closer over
her. And I realised that she was, in fact, sleeping, that it was her
eternal sleep.

“It is so simple,” she had said.

I closed her eyelids, with their long lashes, on that invisible world
which she had seen, and her face took on immediately that ineffable
serenity with which death stamps the purest things in life, the most
divine. Overcome by such calm and peace, I knelt involuntarily and
prayed. Her gentleness had entered into me; her force communicated
itself to me.

It was only a little later that I faced despair, and all that ferment
of revolt which rises in us after such misfortune. But there, alone, in
her room, for a few moments I was what she would have wished me to be.

When Mme. Mairieux and the maid came and told me it was time to dress
her, they hesitated between two of her last gowns, the white and gold,
or the blue and gold, that she had worn when we went out together.

“No, no,” I said to them, “not those.”

And I went myself to look for the woollen dress which she had worn the
day of our betrothal--which I had one day ridiculed. Luxury had killed
her. It should not constrain her in her tomb. She had come to me in all
simplicity, and I had not understood her. I myself had crushed her.

They were astonished at my choice.

“No, please,” I said. “She would have wanted this one. We must do as
she would have liked.”

                             *     *     *

Oh, my love, whom I so cruelly tortured, even in Death you bear within
you that peace which, living, you held out to me with expiating hands.




PART III


THE FACE OF THE WORLD CHANGES


I HAD spent almost the entire night reading the two notebooks which
Raymond Cernay had entrusted to me. It was nearly dawn when I lay down
for a few hours. As soon as I had risen, I went to find my friend.

He was seated at his table, in the same place where I had surprised him
the previous night. But what a change had come over him! Instead of the
over-excitement and the melancholy tension which had been almost killing
him, instead of fatigue intensified by lack of sleep and mental strain,
he now exhibited such tranquillity and self-control that I stopped,
stupefied, in my offer of sympathy. I had left him in despair, and now
I found him smiling.

“Here,” I said to him, handing him his notebooks. “I understand you
now.”

Already, however, I was beginning not to understand him. By a new move,
the trend of which escaped me, he had re-established between us the
distance which his confidence had seemed to wipe out. I came to him,
disturbed by what I had read, and he received me with indifference!
I might have connected his attitude with the last sentence of his
journal, but not yet had I reached that state of composure which
enables us to rise above sorrow.

“It was so simple,” he declared, using Raymonde’s words. “There was
nothing to do but tell the truth.”

He pointed to the scattered sheets of a letter which he had not yet
sealed. He had been compelled to write to Mlle. Simone de R--, he told
me. Their engagement made at Rheims had been broken. He added:

“She too will understand, since it is the truth which I had no right
to conceal from her, and which will broaden her. Should she suffer a
little on my account, it is better so.”

His indifference, which for the moment shocked me, was after all like
that of a surgeon recognising the necessity of an operation.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

He looked at me, somewhat astonished by my question, and I discovered
at last on his face that transfiguration, by the like of which he
himself had been dazzled at his wife’s deathbed. A divine phenomenon
had taken place within him, a miracle of peace, a final choice: I can
think of nothing but a theological term to express my whole thought: a
state of grace. A monk who has taken eternal vows in the exaltation of
firm assurance must wear on his countenance a similar reflection of his
decision.

“Live,” he replied.

“Living” meant for him “accepting.”

A long silence followed, which he broke with these words, spoken more
for himself than for me:

“There is no horror in the death of those we love if it serves to make
us better. Do you not see that she was given to me for my improvement?
Oh, God! That I should have taken so long to see it! Since yesterday I
have drawn nearer to her; I am happy. She knew that nothing is finite,
especially a love like hers.”

The following day I left the Sleeping Woods. Raymond Cernay, henceforth
guided by unfailing memories, no longer needed my presence.

                             *     *     *

I read of his death one morning in the newspapers.

He had been found at nightfall the day before, in a field near the
seashore where he experimented with his aeroplane on his lonely
flights,--mangled, his shattered machine on top of him. No one, it was
at first supposed, had seen the accident, and consequently no details
could be learned.

I went to him at once. Admitted to the shed where his body had been
placed before the laying-out, I raised the sheet which covered him.
He was not disfigured. One could just make out above his right eye
a slight bruise. A fracture of the skull and a broken spine, only
natural, considering the weight of the motor, had caused his death. But
the face, spared by a curious chance, showed no sign of fear, and his
serenity was more impressive than any wounds.

On account of the mystery which surrounded his end, and recalling
that sorrowful evening when he had struggled against an impulse to
kill himself, I wondered if his fall had been voluntary. What he had
confided to me at the little lake, came back to me:

“One can not betray his machine, or allow false suspicion to fall upon
it. It may make a mistake, but the man that it carries--no--”

Looking for the last time on that countenance, where shone that same
peace he had achieved on that night of agony, I was ashamed of my
suspicions. Death had overtaken him in midair. It was not he that had
sought Death.

The tardy testimony of a little shepherd lad cast a feeble light ta
the catastrophe. The boy, seated every day on a rock, where he tended
his sheep, had been curiously watching Cernay fly. He had seen him
ascend in wide circles like a hawk, until he must have been quite high,
because the boy could not hear the buzzing of the screw, so high that
the machine touched a cloud and was swallowed up.

“I waited,” said the lad, “and then I saw him further up. At that
moment he was right against the sun. Then perhaps he began to come
down, but suddenly he fell like a stone. I got up, I screamed, I closed
my ears, but still I heard the shock against the earth. Then I ran away
with my sheep.”

Cernay’s ability as a pilot was universally known. People passed over
the aviator’s fault. The broken aeroplane would not give up the secret
of its downfall. It was known that he had flown the day before in
stormy weather, and it was supposed, considering the condition of the
canvas and wood, which were still rain-soaked, that there had been
some warping by the heat of the sun that made them offer insufficient
resistance to the wind. The accident was thought to be similar to the
one which had killed Wachter at Rheims. For a while, people spoke very
feelingly about it. Later others took his place in the gloomy series.

Cernay terminated his career like a solitary, apart from the multitude,
after the manner of some mountain climber who accomplishes his
dangerous ascent alone and is found some day dead at the bottom of an
abyss.

                             *     *     *

Two months later I was presented to Mlle. Simone de R--. I had already
met her, but had never had an opportunity of speaking to her. We were
among the few French people at a Swiss resort near the snow line, an
unattractive place for men and women of the world. One of us, by way
of a little diversion, had invited us all to dinner that evening. I
confess that I studied carefully the face of that tall and graceful
young woman, who bore victory on her forehead. What did she know of
that Raymonde, whose place she had almost filled? What recollections,
more or less bitter, did she retain of her cruel fiancé of a few weeks?

We were only twelve at table, and the conversation soon became general.
It is quite unusual nowadays for a dinner to take place without some
mention of aviation. The younger generation is enthusiastic about
it, and there were two or three young men there who were greatly
interested in Mlle. de R--, whose sporting reputation they knew. The
fall of a band of mountain climbers, two or three days before at the
Dente Blanche, which we could see from the window, its peak still
lit up by the sun, while twilight had descended upon us, served to
recall the catastrophe in which Raymond Cernay had perished. Nothing
was more natural; the allusion had to happen; and Mlle. de R-- showed
no surprise, though she did not take part in the conversation. Then
some one--though how could one be so untimely and incomplete?--related
a version which he had heard retailed in Paris. Cernay had not been
killed accidentally; he had married an insignificant wife, and after
losing her, committed suicide following some unfortunate love affair.

This recital brought forth protestations and an outburst of curiosity.
One of the guests, who probably knew about the broken engagement,
attempted a diversion. But from all sides opinions were expressed.

“Nonsense! Cernay had become a veritable barbarian. No one knew of any
liaison.”

“Who said it was a liaison?”

“Who could have resisted him, then?”

“Well, a young girl, who after having accepted him, changed her mind,
the good child, and refused to marry him.”

Throughout this discussion I had not taken my eyes off Mlle. Simone de
R--, who had not taken part in it, but, erect and motionless, seemed
in her studied indifference to be lying in wait for an enemy like a
sentinel at the top of a tower. Would she, by any chance, dare to
intervene, when they were not perhaps aiming at her? She did intervene
brusquely with this denial:

“It isn’t true.”

Every one turned to look at her. Without any embarrassment at all,
throwing off constraint like a cloak, and taking a straight course,
like one whom no obstacle could stop, she continued, even before her
father, guessing her purpose, had an opportunity to interrupt her:

“It was I who was engaged to M. Cernay, and it was he who broke our
engagement. Mme. Cernay, of whom you speak with such ignorance and
injustice, could not have been replaced in his heart. He told me so,
and I understood him. That is all. He did not commit suicide.”

She made this avowal in a firm and rapid manner. Every one rose from
the table. Immediately afterwards she left the room with her father.

Cernay had deemed her worthy of knowing the truth then. He had felt
that the knowledge would ennoble her. Did she know, as I did, from the
notebooks, of the life and death of Raymonde? I was inclined to believe
so. However that may be, to render homage to her successful rival, she
had just done one of the most difficult things a woman can possibly
do--make public avowal of having been jilted by her lover.

And I saw on her courageous face that night, a as shows on high
mountains after sunset, the divine rejection of Raymonde’s soul.

                             *     *     *

I have just paid another visit to the Sleeping Woods.

First I rang at the lodge, which was closed. As no one answered, I took
the road toward the chateau, whose open windows I could see through the
oaks. Mme. Mairieux received me with her customary affability.

“Yes” she explained, “we have at last come to live here. It is surely
more suitable and consistent with our position. Besides, shouldn’t
Dilette get used to her fortune?”

I hastened to express approval. No doubt she mourned the loss of her
son-in-law, but it was a sort of compensation, too, to be living in the
chateau.

“And where are M. Mairieux and Dilette?” I enquired.

“I don’t know exactly,” she replied. “They have gone out together, as
they do every afternoon. Perhaps you will find them at the edge of the
wood, or perhaps they have gone as far as the Green Fountain.”

“I’ll go and look for them.”

“And come back for dinner.”

I thanked her, and set out on my search. But on the way I changed my
mind about following them into the wood, and took the path that led to
the cemetery. I found my gay little field of the dead with its air of a
neglected garden. M. Mairieux and Dilette had preceded me, and at sight
of them I felt again the emotion of so much youth and love lost to them
both. The grandfather, assisted by his granddaughter, whom the work
amused, was carefully replacing the twisted ivy over a new inscription.

And I read on the stone, beside that other name:

                            RAYMOND CERNAT
                    DEAD AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-FIVE

We returned to the chateau together. I had taken Dilette’s hand, and
was admiring the calmness of M. Mairieux, whom I had scarcely seen at
Cernay’s funeral. He had without doubt grown old, but he resisted age,
resolved to accept without complaint the burden of his daily life, and
to keep on for the sake of the orphan daughter.

“I have a package for you,” he said to me, as we entered the house.

An envelope, left by his son-in-law, bore my name with a note. It
contained the two notebooks. I hesitated a long time before publishing
them, but the conquest of the air has claimed so many victims now,
that no one will recognise Raymond Cernay. I have suppressed or
modified what might have designated him too clearly. He did give me
that melancholy record for myself alone. If he could not make clear
his intentions, they nevertheless appear in this legacy. If I have
overstepped them, I do not believe that I have hurt his memory. The
admission of a mistake is so noble and so rare a thing, in the life of
a human being, that, perhaps Raymonde’s radiancy may light up other
hearts now unmindful, proud or frivolous.

With the notebooks there were also some loose sheets covered with
figures and drawings, which I submitted to a constructor of aeroplanes.
They appertained to a device for automatic lateral stability that
should revolutionise the science of aviation. Unfortunately the notes
are worthless, being embryonic and incomplete.

On one of the sheets I came across a peculiar expression: “The face of
the world changes.” I believed this to be one of Cernay’s reflections,
after a daring flight, when from his position in the air the earth
seemed to become smaller and smaller and finally disappear completely.
But in a volume of Bossuet’s “Meditations on the Gospel,” which M.
Mairieux showed me as the most precious souvenir of his daughter, I
reread that same phrase, underscored by Mme. Cernay. So one must take
it in its mystic meaning of splendid isolation. I inferred from it a
posthumous and closer union in eternal love.

                             *     *     *

That evening, a little before dinner, I was seated in our favourite
place on the cloister wall, with Dilette, who did not forget to ask me
for a story.

“Tell me about Lord Burleigh,--please!”

But I no longer dared repeat that story. Too many recollections clung
to it, like the ivy on the tombstone in the cemetery. I was searching
my memory for another, when I heard the little girl repeating to me
almost word for word the end, which she had learned by heart:

“Then he said, Put on her simple woollen dress. That is the one she
liked. And then she will lie in peace.--”


                               THE END.




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