On finishing your letter I implored God to bring you into our midst for one day, so that you might be converted to the family, to its inexpressible, faithful, eternal joys, because they are real, simple, and natural. But alas! what can my reason do to combat an unreason in which you find happiness? I have tears in my eyes as I write these last words. I honestly believed that a few months of conjugal love would bring you to your senses, for you would be sated, but I see that you are insatiable, and that, having already killed a lover, you will soon have killed love. Farewell, dear lost one, I despair, since the letter in which I hoped to return you to society by depicting my happiness served only to glorify your egoism. Yes, there is only you in your love, and you love Gaston much more for yourself than for him.
54
FROM MADAME GASTON TO COUNTESS DE L’ESTORADE
May 20
Renée, sorrow has come to me; no, it has crashed down on your poor Louise quick as a lightning bolt, and you understand me: for me, sorrow is doubt. Certainty would be death. The day before yesterday, after my first toilette, I came looking for Gaston so we could take a stroll before breakfast. I couldn’t find him anywhere. I went to the stables, and there I saw his mare bathed in sweat, the groom whisking away dollops of froth with a knife before drying the animal off.
“Who on earth could have put Fedelta into such a state?” I asked.
“Monsieur,” the boy answered.
On the mare’s hocks I recognized the mud of Paris, which is nothing like the mud of the countryside. “So he’s been to Paris,” I told myself. That thought made a thousand more spring up in my heart and drained the blood from my face. He went to Paris without telling me, using the hour in which I leave him to himself, and then came back in such haste that Fedelta is half dead with exhaustion! . . . Suspicion laced its terrible corset around me until I could no longer draw breath. I sat down on a nearby bench, struggling to get hold of myself. Gaston found me in that state, which must have alarmed him, for he said “What is it?” so urgently and with such concern in his voice that I stood and took his arm. But there was no strength in my limbs, and I had to sit down again; he helped me up and led me into the parlor a few steps away, with all our domestics following in alarm. Gaston waved them away. Once we were alone, I staggered to our bedroom, refusing to speak, and locked the door behind me so I might weep in peace.
For some two hours Gaston stood by listening to my sobs, questioning his creature with angelic patience, and hearing no reply. “I will see you again when my eyes are no longer red and my voice has stopped shaking,” I finally told him, calling him vous, which made him race out of the house. I bathed my eyes with ice water, I washed my face, the door to our room opened, and I found him there, back again without my having heard his footsteps.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I recognized the mud of Paris on Fedelta’s weary hocks. I couldn’t understand why you should go there without telling me, but you are free.”
“As a punishment for your criminal doubts, you will not learn my reasons until tomorrow,” he answered.
“Look at me,” I said. I plunged my gaze into his: the infinite penetrated the infinite. No, I saw no sign of the cloud that infidelity draws over the soul, which cannot help but sully the purity of the pupils. I feigned reassurance, though I was as worried as ever. Men are every bit as skilled in lies and deceit as we! After that, we stayed at each other’s side. Oh! my dear, how unalterably attached to him I sometimes felt as I looked at him. How I trembled inside when he reappeared after leaving me alone for a moment! My life is in him, not in me. I cruelly dismissed your cruel letter. Did I ever feel such dependence on that divine Spaniard, for whom I was what this atrocious child is for me? How I hate that mare! How stupid of me to have horses. But I would also have had to cut off Gaston’s feet or lock him into the chalet. Idiotic thoughts such as those filled my mind—you see the state I was in! If love has not built a cage around him, no force will ever hold back a bored man.
“Do I bore you?” I asked him, point-blank.
“You’re tormenting yourself for no reason,” he answered, his eyes full of a gentle pity. “I’ve never been so in love with you.”
“If that’s true, my adored angel,” I answered, “then allow me to sell Fedelta.”
“Go ahead and sell her!” he said.
I was half crushed by that answer, for Gaston seemed to be saying: You alone are rich here, I am nothing, my will does not exist. Even if he thought no such thing, I believed he was thinking it, and once again I left him to go to bed, for night had come.
Oh! Renée, when one is alone, a single devastating thought can drive one to suicide. Those delicious gardens, that starry night, the cool breeze bringing in the incense of all our flowers, our valley, our hills, everything seemed somber, dark, and empty. I felt as if at the bottom of an abyss, surrounded by snakes and poisonous plants; I saw no God in the sky. A night such as that ages a woman.
“Take Fedelta, run off to Paris,” I told him the next morning. “We won’t sell her; I love her, for she carries you!” But my tone did not deceive him; the secret rage I was trying to hide pierced through.
“Trust me!” he answered, extending one hand with so noble a gesture, and giving me so noble a look, that I felt utterly flattened.
“We women are so small,” I cried.
“No, you love me, that’s all,” he said, pressing me to him.
“Go to Paris without me,” I said, showing him that I was disarming myself of all my suspicions, and off he went. I thought perhaps he would stay.
I will not attempt to describe my misery. There was another woman inside me, one I never realized could exist. For one thing, my dear, to a woman in love, scenes such as these have a tragic solemnity beyond all expression: your entire life lies before you, and the eye sees no horizon; nothing is everything, a glance is a book, great chunks of ice float atop a single word, and you read a death sentence in one twitch of the lips. I was hoping for a little gratitude: was there not a certain nobility and generosity in what I had done? I climbed to the top of the chalet and watched him ride off. Ah! my dear Renée, I saw him disappear not a moment later. “What a hurry he’s in!” I couldn’t help thinking. Then, once I was alone, I fell back into the hell of conjectures, the tumult of suspicions. From time to time the certainty that I had been betrayed seemed a relief, compared to the horrors of doubt! Doubt is our duel with ourselves, and we inflict the most grievous wounds. I wandered aimlessly through our gardens, returned to the chalet, came running out again like a madwoman. Gaston had left at seven o’clock, and was not back until eleven; clearly, since it takes only half an hour to reach Paris by way of the Parc de Saint-Cloud and the Bois de Boulogne, he had spent three hours in the city. He entered triumphantly, bringing me a rubber riding crop with a gold handle. I’d made do with no riding crop for two weeks; worn and old, mine had broken.
“It was for this that you were torturing me?” I said, admiring the skill that went into that beautiful object, whose tip holds a vinaigrette. I then realized that this present concealed a new deceit; nonetheless, I promptly threw myself into his arms, not without gently rebuking him for inflicting such torments for the sake of a mere bagatelle. He thought himself very clever. I then saw in his manner, his gaze, that sort of private joy one feels on pulling off an act of deceit; it escapes like a glimmer from our soul, like a ray from our mind, and it is reflected in our faces, it emanates from us with every move we make. I went on admiring that pretty crop, and then, at a moment when we were looking straight at each other, I asked, “Who made this lovely thing?”
“An artist friend of mine.”
“Ah! here we are: Verdier,” I added, reading the merchant’s name printed on the crop. Gaston stood looking at me like a little child, blushing. I gave him a tender caress to repay him for his shame at betraying me. I played innocent, and he thought it was all over.
May 25
The next day, toward six
o’clock, I put on my riding clothes; by seven I was at Verdier’s, where I saw several crops of the very same design. A clerk recognized mine when I showed it to him. “We sold it yesterday, to a young man,” he told me. And once I gave him a description of my disloyal Gaston, all doubt was dispelled. I will spare you the palpitations that racked my breast on my way to Paris and all through this little scene, my fate hanging in the balance. I came home at seven thirty, and Gaston found me freshly scrubbed and lovely, with my morning face, strolling in the gardens with deceptive insouciance, certain that nothing would give away my absence, whose secret I had entrusted solely to my old Philippe.
“Gaston,” I said to him as we walked around our pond, “I am perfectly capable of seeing the difference between a unique work of art, made with love for one single person, and something that came out of a mold.” He turned pale and looked at me as I held out the damning evidence. “My friend,” I told him, “this isn’t a riding crop, it’s a screen, behind which you are concealing a secret.” On that, my dear, I allowed myself the pleasure of seeing him lose his way in the bowers of lies and the labyrinths of deceit, never finding an exit, deploying a prodigious ingenuity in search of a wall to scale but forced to remain on the battleground facing an adversary who in the end consented to let herself be deceived. That indulgence came too late, as it always does in such scenes. Besides, I had made the mistake that my mother had always tried to warn me against. By exposing itself, my jealousy had declared a state of war between Gaston and me, with all the attendant ruses and stratagems. My dear, jealousy is essentially a stupid and brutish thing. I then vowed to suffer in silence, to spy on his every move, to arrive at a certainty, and then either be done with Gaston or consent to my unhappiness: no other conduct is suitable for a woman of good breeding. What is he hiding from me? For he is indeed hiding a secret. That secret must involve a woman. Is it some youthful adventure he finds embarrassing? Or what? That what, my dear, is engraved in four letters of fire on everything around me. I read that terrible word as I look at the mirror of my pond, I see it in my flower beds, in the clouds of the sky, the ceilings, at table, in the flowers of my rugs. When I am sound asleep, a voice cries out to me: “What?” Starting from that morning, a cruel self-interest came into our life, and I knew the bitterest of all the many thoughts that can corrode the human heart: that of belonging to a man we think unfaithful. Oh! my dear, there is in such a life something of hell and of heaven at the same time. I had never set foot in those flames, I who had heretofore been so sacredly adored.
“Ah! so one day you fancied a look around the dark, burning palace of torment?” I said to myself. “Well, the demons have heard your fateful wish: walk onward, wretch!”
May 30
From that day on, rather than write in the careless, idle manner of the rich artist toying with his pet project, Gaston has been pushing himself like a writer who must live by his pen. He spends four hours a day working to finish two plays.
“He needs money!” whispered a voice inside me. He spends virtually nothing; we know everything of each other’s affairs, there is not one corner of his study that my eyes and fingers cannot probe. His annual expenses never amount to two thousand francs, and I know he has thirty thousand not so much set aside as shoved into a drawer. You can guess what I was thinking. In the middle of the night, as he slept, I went to see if the money was still there. How icy was the shiver that ran through me when I found the drawer empty! In the course of that same week, I discovered that he picks up letters in Sèvres; he must then tear them into tiny pieces, for despite all my Figaroesque machinations I have found not a trace of them. Alas! my angel, after all my promises, all my fine vows concerning the riding crop, I was spurred into action by a sudden reflex of the soul that must be called madness, and I followed him on one of his quick dashes to the post office. Gaston was terrified to find himself caught in the act, still on his horse, paying the postage for a letter he had in his hand. He stared at me for some time, then kicked Fedelta into a gallop so wild that I felt utterly broken when I arrived at the wooden door, and this at a moment when I believed I was beyond bodily fatigue, so terrible was the pain in my soul!
There Gaston said nothing; he rang the bell and waited without a word. I was more dead than alive. Perhaps I was right, perhaps I was wrong; in either case, this espionage was unworthy of Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu. I was tumbling into the social gutter, lower than the shopgirl, the slattern, side by side with courtesans, actresses, creatures with no breeding. How horrible! Finally the door opened, he handed his horse over to the groom, and I dismounted as well, but in his arms, for he stretched them out to me; I held the hem of my riding skirt over my left arm, I gave him my right arm, and we walked on . . . still in silence. The hundred paces we walked in this way count in my mind for a hundred years of purgatory. With each step my soul was assailed by thousands of thoughts, almost visible, swarming around me like tongues of fire, each with its own special stinger, its own venom!
Once we were away from the groom and the horses, I stopped Gaston, looked at him, and, with a gesture you can surely imagine, pointed to the awful letter still clutched in his right hand: “May I read that?” He gave it to me, I opened it, and I found a letter from Nathan, the playwright, telling him that one of our works, accepted for performance, memorized, and put into rehearsals, would be staged the following Saturday. A ticket was enclosed. Although with that I went directly from martyrdom to paradise, the demon was still seeking to trouble my joy with shrieks of “Where are the thirty thousand francs?” And I couldn’t bring myself to ask him, held back by dignity, by honor, by all I once was. I could feel the question on my lips; if that thought became words, I knew I would have to throw myself into my pond. At the price of a great struggle, I choked back the urge to speak. My dear, was my suffering not more than a woman can bear?
“You’re bored, my poor Gaston,” I said, handing back the letter. “If you like, we can move back to Paris.”
“Paris?” he replied. “Why should we do that? I simply wanted to know if I had talent and taste the punch of success!”
Someday, when he is at work at his desk, I may well feign astonishment as I open the drawer and see no sign of his thirty thousand francs, but would I not be asking for the answer “I loaned them to some friend or other,” which a man as quick-minded as Gaston would not fail to give me?
My dear, the moral of this is that the glittering success of the play all of Paris is now flocking to is owed to us, though the glory goes to Nathan. I am one of the two clusters of stars in the words AND MESSIEURS *** AND ***. I saw the first performance, hidden deep inside a ground-floor stage box.
July 1
Gaston is still working, still going to Paris; he is writing new plays as a pretext for his outings and a source of income. Three of our plays have been accepted and two more requested. Oh! my dear, I am lost, I am wandering about in the dark. I would set fire to my house for a little light. What does such behavior signify? Is he ashamed to have received a fortune from me? His soul is too great to trouble itself with such trifles. Besides, when a man begins to feel scruples of that sort, they are always inspired by some interest of the heart. A man can accept everything from his wife, but he wants nothing from the woman he is thinking of leaving or whom he no longer loves. If Gaston wants so much money, he must need it to spend on a woman. Were it for himself, would he not simply dig into my purse and think no more of it? We have a hundred thousand francs in savings! My beautiful doe, I have circumnavigated the globe of hypotheses, and in the end I am certain I have a rival. He is leaving me, but for whom? I want to see her. . . .
July 10
Now I see clearly: I am lost. Yes, Renée, at thirty years of age, in all the glory of a woman’s beauty, rich with all the resources of my mind, adorned with all the charms of my toilette, always fresh, always elegant, I am betrayed, and for whom? For an Englishwoman with big feet, big bones, a big chest—for some British cow! I can doubt it no longer. Here is
what has happened to me over these past several days.
Tired of wondering, thinking that if Gaston had simply come to the aid of a friend he’d have no reason not to tell me, seeing him indicted by his silence, and finding him forever at work, forever called to his desk by a continual hunger for money, jealous of that work, alarmed by his perpetual trips to Paris, I took steps, and those steps were so far beneath me that I will tell you nothing of them. Three days ago, I learned that in Paris Gaston makes straight for a house on the rue de la Ville-l’Évêque, where his trysts are protected by a discretion unparalleled in all the city. The close-mouthed porter told me little, but enough to bring me to despair. I then made the sacrifice of my life: I simply had to know all. I went to Paris, I rented an apartment across the street, and with my own eyes I saw him riding his horse into the courtyard. Oh! I didn’t have to wait long.
This Englishwoman, who to my eye must be thirty-six years old, goes by the name of Madame Gaston. That discovery was the death blow. Soon I saw her going to the Tuileries with two children . . . oh! my dear, two children who are the living miniatures of Gaston. There is no overlooking that scandalous resemblance. . . . And such pretty children! They are luxuriously dressed, as only an Englishwoman knows how. She has given him children! Now all is explained. That Englishwoman is a sort of Greek statue descended from some monument; she has the whiteness and coldness of marble, she walks solemnly, like a happy mother. She is beautiful, it must be said, but she is as graceless as a warship. There is nothing elegant or refined about her: certainly she is not a lady, she is the daughter of some farmer from some wretched village in some distant county, or the eleventh daughter of some poor government minister. I came back from Paris half dead. All the way home, a thousand thoughts prodded at me like demons. Could she be married? Did he know her before he married me? Was she the mistress of some rich man who left her, and did she then suddenly fall back into Gaston’s hands? I piled one conjecture on top of another, as if there were any need to guess, given those children. The next day I went to Paris again, and I gave the porter enough money to make him answer the question “Is Madame Gaston legally married?” with the words “Yes, mademoiselle.”