And, as he compared his own worth to the minister’s garrulous self-importance, he reflected: ‘God! If I just had a hundred thousand francs so I could stand as candidate for my fine native-city of Rouen, and give all those worthy, wily Normandy yokels a dose of their own cunning, what a statesman I’d make, compared with these short-sighted rogues.’
M. Laroche-Mathieu talked until the coffee and then, seeing it was late, rang for his carriage; offering the journalist his hand, he said:
‘Is that quite clear, my good fellow?’
‘Certainly, my dear minister, rely on me.’
And Du Roy walked slowly off to the newspaper to begin his article, for he had nothing to do until four o’clock. At four he was to meet Mme de Marelle at the Rue de Constantinople; he saw her there regularly twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
But, when he entered the office, he was handed a sealed message; it was from Mme Walter and said: ‘I absolutely must talk to you today. It’s very, very important. Expect me at the Rue de Constantinople at two. I can do you a great service.
‘Eternally yours,
‘Virginie.’
He swore: ‘Christ Almighty! What a pest she is!’ And, seized by a fit of rage, he went straight out again, too annoyed to work.
For six weeks now he had been trying to break with her, without managing to weary her relentless devotion.
After her seduction she had suffered a terrible attack of remorse, and at three successive meetings had heaped reproaches and abuse on her lover. Bored by these scenes, and already sated by this middle-aged, over-dramatic woman, he had simply kept his distance, hoping by this means to end the affair. But then she had attached herself to him with desperation, throwing herself into this love-affair the way people throw themselves into a river, with a stone tied round their necks. He had let himself be caught again, out of weakness, and self-indulgence, and politeness; and she had imprisoned him in a web of frantic, exhausting passion, tormenting him with her affection.
She kept trying to see him every day, summoning him by telegram at all hours for brief meetings on a street corner, in a shop, in a public park. Then, in a few sentences that never varied, she would tell him that she adored him, that she idolized him, and would then leave, assuring him that she was ‘so very happy to have seen him’.
She had turned out to be quite different from what he had imagined, attempting to captivate him with a youthful winsomeness and childish love-play that were ridiculous at her age. This virtuous woman who had, until then, lived an entirely respectable life, a virgin at heart, impervious to emotion and oblivious of sensuality, had suddenly found her tranquil middle age, which had been like a pallid autumn following upon a chilly summer, transmuted into a kind of faded spring, full of little half-open blossoms and aborted buds, a strange flowering of adolescent love, passionate and artless, made up of unexpected transports, of little girlish cries, of embarrassing sweet-talk, of charms that had aged without ever being young. She would write him ten letters in a day, foolish, demented letters, in bizarre, ridiculously flowery language, embellished in the Indian style, full of the names of animals and birds.
As soon as they were alone she would kiss him with all the awkward allurements of an overgrown girl, pouting her lips almost grotesquely, and jumping about so that her heavy breasts made the fabric of her bodice jiggle.
Most of all he was sickened by hearing her say: ‘my mouse’, ‘my pet’, ‘my kitten’, ‘my jewel’, ‘my sweetie-pie’, ‘my treasure’, and by seeing how every time she gave herself to him, she went through a mini-comedy of childish modesty, with little fearful gestures that she imagined were pleasing, and little games suggestive of a depraved schoolgirl.
She would ask: ‘Whose lips are these?’ And, when he did not instantly reply, she would repeat insistently: ‘They’re mine,’ until he turned white with exasperation.
She ought to have realized, he felt, that the most extreme tact, and skill, and circumspection, and appropriateness were necessary in love, that having surrendered to him, she, a mature woman with a family, with a position in society, ought to give herself with a certain gravity, with a kind of controlled passion, sternly, with tears perhaps, but the tears of Dido, not of Juliet.*
She was always saying to him: ‘How I love you, my little pet! Tell me, my baby, do you love me as much?’ He could no longer hear her say ‘my little pet’ or ‘my baby’ without wanting to call her ‘my old girl’.
She would say to him: ‘I was mad to give in to you. But I don’t regret it. It’s so wonderful to be in love!’
Georges found all this, coming from her mouth, irritating. She would murmur: ‘It’s so wonderful to be in love’ just like an ingénue in a play.
Furthermore she exasperated him with the clumsiness of her love-making. Her sensuality having been suddenly kindled by the kisses of this handsome young man who had so fiercely aroused her passion, she brought to her embraces an awkward fervour and a heavy-handed concentration which struck Du Roy as comic, and reminded him of old men trying to learn to read.
And when she should have been crushing him in her arms, gazing ardently at him with that profound and terrible gaze of certain ageing women who are superb in their final love-affair, when she should have been biting him with her mute and quivering mouth as, exhausted yet insatiable, she pressed down upon him with her heavy, warm flesh, instead she would fidget about like a little girl and, thinking it would please, lisp: ‘I love you so, sweetie-pie, I love you so. Give your little wifey a nice cuddle!’
Then he would feel a mad urge to swear, pick up his hat, and leave, slamming the door.
In the early days, they had often met at the Rue de Constantinople, but Du Roy, who feared an encounter with Mme de Marelle, now found a thousand excuses to avoid those meetings.
So then he had had to come to her house almost every day, sometimes to lunch, sometimes to dinner. She would squeeze his hand under the table, offer him her mouth behind the door. But what he most enjoyed was amusing himself with Suzanne, whose funny stories cheered him up. Her doll-like body contained a mind that was nimble and shrewd, unpredictable and sly, which sought constantly to entertain, like a puppet in a street-show. With mordant appositeness, she made fun of everything and everybody. Georges stimulated her lively wit, goading her into derision, and they got on wonderfully.
She was forever calling to him: ‘Listen, Bel-Ami. Come here, Bel-Ami.’ He would immediately leave the mother and hurry over to the daughter who would whisper some spiteful comment in his ear, and they would laugh heartily together.
Nevertheless, weary of the love of the mother, he came to feel an insurmountable aversion towards her; he could no longer see her, or hear her, or think of her without getting angry. So then he stopped going to her house, answering her letters, or responding to her pleas.
Finally she grasped that he did not love her any more, and this caused her terrible suffering. But she pursued him frantically, spying on him, following him, waiting for him in a cab with drawn blinds at the entrance to the newspaper, at the entrance to his home, in streets where she hoped he would pass by.
He wanted to hurt her, to swear at her, to hit her, to tell her outright: ‘I’ve had enough, damn it, you’re pestering me.’ But he continued to treat her with circumspection, because of La Vie française; and he tried, by coldness concealed beneath good manners and even by occasional harsh words, to make her understand that this absolutely had to end.
She was especially determined in thinking up stratagems to lure him to the Rue de Constantinople, and he was always fearful that some day the two women would bump into each other at the door.
His affection for Mme de Marelle, by contrast, had increased over the course of the summer. He called her his ‘little monkey’, and there was no question but that she pleased him. Their two natures had similar quirks; both he and she indisputably belonged to that daredevil breed of high-society vagabonds who, without knowing it, closely resemble the gypsies who travel the h
ighways.
They had enjoyed a delightful summer of love, a summer of students on a spree, escaping to lunch or dine at Argenteuil, at Bougival, at Maisons,* at Poissy, spending hours in a boat, picking flowers along the river banks. She adored fried fish from the Seine, rabbit fricassees, and fish stews, eaten in tavern gardens, while listening to the cries of the boatmen. He loved setting off with her on a bright day, sitting on the upper deck of a suburban train and chatting nonsensically as they crossed the ugly Paris countryside, spotted with hideous middle-class chalets.
And when he was obliged to return for dinner with Mme Walter, he felt full of hatred for the old, persistent mistress, remembering the young one he had just left, who had gathered the flower of his desire and the harvest of his ardour in the grasses of the river bank.
He had thought that he was, at last, more or less free of the Director’s wife, to whom he had bluntly, almost brutally, expressed his determination of making a break, when the telegram summoning him at two o’clock to the Rue de Constantinople reached him at the newspaper office.
He reread it while walking along: ‘I absolutely must talk to you today. It’s very, very important. Expect me at the Rue de Constantinople at two. I can do you a great service. Eternally yours, Virginie.’
He was thinking: ‘Whatever can the old witch want with me now? I bet she’s got nothing to say to me. She’s going to tell me again that she adores me. Still, I’d better see her. She mentions something very important, a great service, perhaps it’s true. And Clotilde’s coming at four. I’ll have to get rid of her first, at three at the latest. Christ! As long as they don’t meet each other! What a pest women are!’
And he reflected that in fact his wife was the only woman who never plagued him. She led her own life, and she seemed to love him very much, at those times set aside for love, for she would not allow anything to interfere with the unvarying order of her day’s normal occupations.
He was walking slowly towards his rendezvous, working himself up into a fury against his boss’s wife: ‘Ah! I’ll give her a fine welcome if she has nothing to tell me! A trooper’ll sound polite compared with me! First, I’ll tell her I’ll never again set foot inside her door.’
And he went in to wait for Mme Walter.
She arrived almost immediately, and exclaimed, the moment she saw him: ‘Oh, you got my message! What luck!’
He said, with a nasty look: ‘I certainly did; it came to the paper just as I was leaving for the Chamber. Whatever is it now?’
Raising her little veil to kiss him, she approached him with the timid, cowed look of a dog that is often beaten.
‘How cruel you are to me… What hard things you say to me… What is it that I’ve done? You can’t imagine how I suffer because of you!’
He growled: ‘You’re surely not going to start that again?’
She was standing close beside him, waiting for a smile, or a gesture, to fling herself into his arms.
She murmured: ‘You should not have taken me just to treat me like this, you should have left me the way I was, good, and happy. Do you remember what you said to me in the church, and how you forced me to come into this house? And now look at the way you speak to me! The way you receive me! My God! My God! How you hurt me!’
Stamping his foot, he said violently: ‘Enough, damn it! That’s enough. The minute I see you it’s the same old refrain. Really, anyone would think I had you when you were twelve and as innocent as an angel. No, my dear, let’s look at the facts, this wasn’t a case of seducing a minor. You gave yourself to me as a consenting adult. Thank you very much, I’m infinitely grateful, but I’m under no obligation to remain tied to your apron strings until death. You have a husband and I have a wife. We’re neither of us free. We indulged ourselves in a passing fancy, and that’s that, it’s over.’
She said: ‘Oh, what a brute you are, how coarse, how vile! No, I wasn’t a young girl any longer, but I’d never ever loved, never been unfaithful…’
He cut her short: ‘You’ve told me that over and over again, I know. But you’d had two children… so I didn’t deflower you…’
She recoiled: ‘Oh, Georges, that’s contemptible!’
And, with her hands on her breast, she began to gasp as sobs choked her throat.
When he saw the tears start to flow, he took his hat from the end of the mantelpiece: ‘Oh! You’re going to cry! Then I’m off. Was this performance what you got me here for?’
She took a step so as to block his way and, quickly pulling a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped her eyes with a brusque gesture. In a voice that she made an effort to control, but which was still broken by an anguished quaver, she said:
‘No, I came to give you some news… some political news… to give you the chance to make fifty thousand francs… or even more… if you want to.’
Suddenly appeased, he asked: ‘How exactly? What do you mean?’
‘Last night I happened to overhear something my husband and Laroche said. They didn’t worry, anyway, about talking in front of me. But Walter was advising the minister not to let you into the secret because you’d reveal everything.’
Du Roy had put his hat down again on a chair. He waited, all ears.
‘Well, what is it?’
‘They’re going to take Morocco!’
‘Come on. I had lunch today with Laroche, who practically dictated the cabinet’s plans to me.’
‘No, darling, they’ve tricked you because they’re afraid their scheme will get out.’
‘Sit down,’ said Georges.
And he himself sat down in an armchair. So then she pulled a little stool over and crouched on it, between Duroy’s legs. She went on, in a wheedling tone: ‘Because I’m always thinking of you, I pay attention, now, to all the whispering that goes on in my presence.’
And she quietly began describing to him how for quite a while now she had guessed that something was being planned from which he was being excluded, that although he was being used, they were afraid of including him.
She said: ‘You know, being in love makes you crafty.’
At last, the night before, she had understood what was going on. It was an important affair, an extremely important affair that had been planned in secret. She was smiling now, pleased with her own cleverness; growing excited, she talked like the financier’s wife she was, someone used to the engineering of stock exchange crashes, of changes in the value of shares, of sudden rises and falls that ruin, in a couple of hours of speculation, thousands of ordinary people, of small investors, who put their savings in the funds guaranteed by men with honoured and respected names, politicians or bankers.
She kept saying: ‘Oh, what they’ve done is really something, really something. Actually it was Walter who managed it all, and he knows what he’s doing. Really, it’s quite remarkable.’
All this build-up was making him impatient.
‘Come on, tell me.’
‘Well, it’s like this. The expeditionary force being sent to Tangiers was agreed upon between them from the very day Laroche took over at the Foreign Office; and, little by little, they’ve bought back the whole of the Moroccan loan, which had fallen to sixty-four or sixty-five francs.* They’ve bought it up very cleverly, using dubious, shady agents who didn’t arouse any suspicion. They even hoodwinked the Rothschilds,* who were astonished that the Moroccan shares should be so much in demand. They were told the names of the agents, every one of them corrupt, every one of them penniless. That reassured all the great banks. And now the expedition is going to take place, and as soon as we’re over there, the French government will underwrite the loan. Our friends will have made fifty or sixty million. So now that you know what’s going on, you’ll also understand how afraid they are of everyone, how afraid of the smallest indiscretion.’
She had leant her head against the young man’s waistcoat, and with her arms resting on his legs she snuggled up and pressed against him, well aware that she had caught his interest now, ready to do a
nything, no matter what, for a caress or a smile.
‘You’re quite sure?’
She answered confidently: ‘Oh, absolutely!’
He declared: ‘Yes, it really is quite something. As for that bastard Laroche, I’ll get him one day. Oh, what a wretch! He’d better watch out! He’d better watch out! I’ll have his ministerial skin off him!’
Then, after a little reflection, he murmured: ‘Still, this ought to be used to advantage.’
‘You can still buy the debt,’ she said. ‘It’s only at seventy-two.’
‘Yes, but I’ve no spare cash.’
She looked up at him with eyes full of entreaty. ‘I’ve thought of that, my pet, and if you were really nice, really really nice, if you loved me just a little, you’d let me lend you some.’
His reply was sharp, almost cold: ‘As for that, no, certainly not.’
She whispered, in a beseeching voice: ‘Listen, there is something you can do without borrowing money. I myself was going to buy ten thousand worth of this loan, to get myself a little nest egg. Well! I’ll buy twenty thousand. You can be in for half. You understand, of course, that I’m not going to give Walter the cash. So there’s nothing to pay at present. If it succeeds, you’ll make seventy thousand francs. If it doesn’t, you’ll owe me ten thousand that you can pay me when it suits you.’
He said again: ‘No, I don’t like schemes of that kind.’
Then, to persuade him, she reasoned with him, proving that in reality he was pledging ten thousand on his word of honour, that he was running a risk, and that in consequence she wasn’t advancing him anything, since the outgoings were the responsibility of the Walter Bank.