She wanted to close her bedroom door on Honoré, but he then said, “Neck!” and she promptly held out her neck with an exaggerated docility and eagerness that made him burst out laughing:
“Even if you didn’t want to,” he said, “there would still be small special friendships between your neck and my lips, between your ears and my moustache, between your hands and my hands. I’m certain those friendships wouldn’t stop if we fell out of love. After all, even though I’m not speaking to my cousin Paule, I can’t prevent my footman from going and chatting with her chambermaid every evening. My lips move toward your neck of their own accord and without my consent.”
They were now a step apart. Suddenly their gazes met and locked as they tried to rivet the notion of their love in each other’s eyes. She stood like that for a second, then collapsed on a chair, panting as if she had been running. And, pursing their lips as if for a kiss, they said, almost simultaneously and with a grave exaltation:
“My love!”
Shaking her head, she repeated, in a sad and peevish tone:
“Yes, my love.”
She knew he could not resist that small movement of her head; he swept her up in his arms, kissed her, and said slowly, “Naughty girl!” and so tenderly that her eyes moistened.
The clock struck seven-thirty. He left.
Returning home, Honoré kept repeating to himself: “My mother, my brother, my country”—he halted. “Yes, my country. . . . My little seashell, my little tree”; and he could not help laughing when saying those words, which he and she had so quickly gotten accustomed to using—those little words that can seem empty and that he and she filled with infinite meaning. Entrusting themselves, without thinking, to the inventive and fruitful genius of their love, they had gradually been endowed, by this genius, with their own private language, just as a nation is supplied with arms, games, and laws.
While dressing for dinner, he automatically kept his mind focused on the moment when he would see her again, the way an acrobat already touches the still faraway trapeze toward which he is flying, or the way a musical phrase seems to reach the chord that will resolve it and that draws the phrase across the full distance between them, draws it by the very force of the desire that heralds the force and summons it. That was how Honoré had been dashing through life for a year now, hurrying from morning to the afternoon hour when he would see her. And his days were actually composed not of twelve or thirteen different hours, but of four or five half-hours, of his anticipation and his memories of them.
Honoré had been in Princess Alériouvre’s home for several minutes when Madame Seaune arrived. She greeted the mistress of the house and the various guests and she seemed not so much to bid Honoré good evening as to take his hand the way she might have done in the middle of a conversation. Had their affair been common knowledge, one might have assumed that they had arrived simultaneously and that she had waited at the door for several minutes to avoid entering with him. But they could have spent two whole days apart (which had never once happened during that year) and yet not have experienced the joyous surprise of finding each other again—the surprise that is at the basis of every friendly greeting; for, unable to spend five minutes without thinking about one another, they could never meet by chance because they never separated.
During dinner, whenever they conversed with one another, they showed more vivacity and gentleness than two friends, but a natural and majestic respect unknown among lovers. They thus seemed like those gods who, according to fable, lived in disguise among human beings, or like two angels whose fraternal closeness exalts their joy but does not diminish the respect inspired by the common nobility of both their origin and their mysterious blood. In experiencing the power of the roses and irises that languidly reigned over the table, the air gradually became imbued with the fragrance of the tenderness exhaled naturally by Honoré and Françoise. At certain moments, the air seemed to embalm the room with a violence that was more delicious than its usual sweetness, a violence that nature had refused to let the flowers moderate, any more than it permits heliotropes to moderate their perfume in the sun or blossoming lilacs their perfume in the rain.
Thus their affection, for not being secret, was all the more mysterious. Anyone could draw close to it as to those inscrutable and defenseless bracelets on the wrists of a woman in love—bracelets on which unknown yet visible characters spell out the name that makes her live or die, bracelets that incessantly offer the meaning of those characters to curious and disappointed eyes that cannot grasp it.
“How much longer will I love her?” Honoré mused to himself as he rose from the table. He remembered the brevity of all the passions that, at their births, he had believed immortal, and the certainty that this passion would eventually come to an end cast a gloom on his tender feelings.
Then he remembered what he had heard that very morning, at mass, when the priest had been reading from the Gospel: “Jesus stretched forth his hand and told them: This is my brother, and also my mother, and all my brethren.” Trembling, Honoré had, for an instant, lifted up his entire soul to God, very high, like a palm tree, and he had prayed: “Lord! Lord! Grant me Your grace and let me love her forever! Lord! This is the only favor I ask of you. Lord, You can do it, make me love her forever!”
Now, in one of those utterly physical moments, when the soul takes a backseat to the digesting stomach, the skin enjoying a recent ablution and some fine linen, the mouth smoking, the eyes reveling in bare shoulders and bright lights, he repeated his prayer more indolently, doubting a miracle that would upset the psychological law of his fickleness, which was as impossible to flout as the physical laws of weight or death.
She saw his preoccupied gaze, stood up, and approached him without his noticing; and since they were quite far from the others, she said in that drawling, whimpering tone, that infantile tone which always made him laugh—she said as if he had just spoken:
“What?”
He laughed and said:
“Don’t say another word or I’ll kiss you—do you hear?—I’ll kiss you right in front of everybody!”
First she laughed, then, resuming her dissatisfied pouting in order to amuse him, she said:
“Yes, yes, that’s very good, you weren’t thinking of me at all!”
And he, seeing her laugh, replied: “How well you can lie!” And he gently added: “Naughty, naughty!”
She left him and went to chat with the others. Honoré mused: “When I feel my heart retreating from her, I will try to delay it so gently that she won’t even feel it. I will always be just as tender, just as respectful. When a new love replaces my love for her in my heart, I will conceal it from her as carefully as I now conceal the occasional pleasures that my body, and it alone, savors without her.” (He glanced at Princess Alériouvre.) And as for Françoise, he would gradually allow her to attach her life elsewhere, with other bonds. He would not be jealous; he himself would designate the men who appeared capable of offering her a more decent or more glorious homage. The more he pictured Françoise as a different woman, whom he would not love, but all of whose spiritual charms he would relish wisely, the more noble and effortless the sharing seemed. Words of sweet and tolerant friendship, of lovely generosity in giving the worthiest people our most precious possessions—those words flowed softly to his relaxed lips.
At that instant, Françoise, noticing it was ten o’clock, said good night and left. Honoré escorted her to her carriage, kissed her imprudently in the dark, and went back inside.
Three hours later, Honoré was walking home, accompanied by Monsieur de Buivres, whose return from Tonkin had been celebrated that evening. Honoré was questioning him about Princess Alériouvre, who, widowed approximately at the same time, was far more beautiful than Françoise. While not being in love with the princess, Honoré would have delighted in possessing her if he could have been certain that Françoise would not find out and be made unhappy.
“Nobody knows anything about her,” said Mo
nsieur de Buivres, “or at least nobody knew anything when I left Paris, for I haven’t seen anyone since my return.”
“So all in all there were no easy possibilities tonight,” Honoré concluded.
“No, not many,” Monsieur de Buivres replied, and since Honoré had reached his door, the conversation was about to end there, when Monsieur de Buivres added:
“Except for Madame Seaune, to whom you must have been introduced, since you attended the dinner. If you wanted to, it would be very easy. But as for me, I wouldn’t be interested!”
“Why, I’ve never heard anyone say what you’ve just said,” Honoré rejoined.
“You’re young,” replied de Buivres. “Come to think of it, there was someone there tonight who had quite a fling with her—there’s no denying it, I think. It’s that little François de Gouvres. He says she’s quite hot-blooded! But it seems her body isn’t all that great, and he didn’t want to continue. I bet she’s living it up somewhere at this very moment. Have you noticed that she always leaves a social function early?”
“Well, but now that she’s a widow, she lives in the same house as her brother, and she wouldn’t risk having the concierge reveal that Madame comes home in the middle of the night.”
“Come on, old chum! There’s a lot you can do between ten P.M. and one A.M.! Oh well, who knows?! Anyhow it’s almost one o’clock, I’d better let you turn in.”
De Buivres rang the bell himself; a second later, the door opened; de Buivres shook hands with Honoré, who said goodbye mechanically, entered, and simultaneously felt a wild need to go back out; but the door had closed heavily behind him, and there was no light aside from the candle waiting for him and burning impatiently at the foot of the staircase. He did not dare awaken the concierge in order to reopen the door for him, and so he went up to his apartment.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
—BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
Life had greatly changed for Honoré since the night when Monsieur de Buivres had made certain comments (among so many others) similar to those that Honoré himself had so often heard or stated with indifference, and which now rang in his ears during the day, when he was alone, and all through the night. He had instantly questioned Françoise, who loved him too deeply and suffered too deeply from his distress to so much as dream of taking offense; she swore that she had never deceived him and that she would never deceive him.
When he was near her, when he held her little hands, to which he softly recited:
You lovely little hands that will close my eyes,
when he heard her say, “My brother, my country, my beloved,” her voice lingering endlessly in his heart with the sweetness of childhood bells, he believed her. And if he did not feel as happy as before, at least it did not seem impossible that his convalescent heart should someday find happiness. But when he was far away from Françoise, and also at times when, being near her, he saw her eyes glowing with fires that he instantly imagined as having been kindled at other times (who knows?—perhaps yesterday as they would be tomorrow), kindled by someone else; when, after yielding to a purely physical desire for another woman and recalling how often he had yielded and had managed to lie to Françoise without ceasing to love her, he no longer found it absurd to assume that she was lying to him, that, in order to lie to him it was not even necessary to no longer love him—to assume that before knowing him she had thrown herself upon others with the ardor that was burning him now—and it struck him as more terrible that the ardor he inspired in her did not appear sweet, because he saw her with the imagination, which magnifies all things.
Then he tried to tell her that he had deceived her; he tried not out of vengeance or a need to make her suffer like him, but so that she would tell him the truth in return, a need above all to stop feeling the lie dwelling inside him, to expiate the misdeeds of his sensuality, since, for creating an object for his jealousy, it struck him at times that it was his own lies and his own sensuality that he was projecting onto Françoise.
It was on an evening, while strolling on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, that he tried to tell her he had deceived her. He was appalled to see her turn pale, collapse feebly on a bench, and, worse still, when he reached toward her, she pushed his hand away, not angrily but gently, in sincere and desperate dejection. For two days he believed he had lost her, or rather that he had found her again. But this sad, glaring, and involuntary proof of her love for him did not suffice for Honoré. Even had he achieved the impossible certainty that she had never belonged to anyone but him, the unfamiliar agony his heart had experienced the evening Monsieur de Buivres had walked him to his door—not a kindred agony or the memory of that agony, but that agony itself—would not have faded, even if someone had demonstrated to him that his agony was groundless. Similarly, upon awakening, we still tremble at the memory of the killer whom we have already recognized as the illusion of a dream; and similarly, an amputee feels pain all his life in the leg he no longer has.
He would walk all day, wear himself out on horseback, on a bicycle, in fencing—all in vain; he would meet Françoise and escort her home—all in vain: in the evening he would gather peace, confidence, a honey sweetness from her hands, her forehead, her eyes, and then, calmed, and rich with the fragrant provision, he would go back to his apartment—all in vain: no sooner had he arrived than he started to worry; he quickly turned in so as to fall asleep before anything could spoil his happiness. Lying gingerly in the full balm of this fresh and recent tenderness, which was barely one hour old, his happiness was supposed to last all night, until the next morning, intact and glorious like an Egyptian prince; but then de Buivres’s words, or one of the innumerable images Honoré had formed since hearing those words, crept into his mind, and so much for his sleep. This image had not yet appeared, but he felt it was there, about to surface; and, steeling himself against it, he would relight the candle, read, and struggle interminably to stuff the meanings of the sentences into his brain, leaving no empty spaces, so that the ghastly image would not find an instant, would not find even the tiniest nook to slip into.
But all at once, the image had stolen in, and now he could not make it leave; the gates of his attention, which he had been holding shut with all his strength, to the point of exhaustion, had been opened by surprise; the gates had then closed again, and he would be spending the entire night with that horrible companion. So it was sure, it was done with: this night like all the others, he would not catch a wink of sleep. Fine, so he went to the bromide bottle, took three spoonfuls, and, certain he would now sleep, terrified at the mere notion of doing anything but sleeping, come what may, he began thinking about Françoise again, with dread, with despair, with hate. Profiting from the secrecy of their affair, he wanted to make bets on her virtue with other men, sic them upon her; he wanted to see if she would yield; he wanted to try to discover something, know everything, hide in a bedroom (he remembered doing that for fun when he was younger) and watch everything. He would not bat an eyelash since he would have asked facetiously (otherwise, what a scandal! What anger!); but above all on her account, to see if, when he asked her the next day, “You’ve never cheated on me?” she would reply, “Never,” with that same loving air. She might perhaps confess everything and actually would have succumbed only because of his tricks. And so that would have been the salutary operation to cure his love of the illness that was killing him, the way a parasitical disease kills a tree (to be certain he only had to peer into the mirror, which was dimly lit by his nocturnal candle). But no, for the image would keep recurring, so much more powerful than the images of his imagination and with what forceful and incalculable blows to his poor head—he did not even dare picture it.
Then, all at once, he would think about her, about her sweetness, her tenderness, her purity, and he wanted to weep about the outrage that he had, for a moment, considered inflicting on her. The very idea of suggesting that to his boon companions!
/>
Soon he would feel the overall shudder, the feebleness one experiences several minutes before sleep induced by bromide. Suddenly perceiving nothing, no dream, no sensation, between his last thought and this one, he would say to himself: “What? I haven’t slept yet?” But then seeing it was broad daylight, he realized that for over six hours he had been possessed by bromidic sleep without savoring it.
He would wait for the stabbing pains in his head to weaken a bit; then he would rise and, so that Françoise would not find him too ugly, he would try in vain to liven up his worn-out eyes, restore some color to his haggard face by dousing it with cold water and taking a walk. Leaving home, he went to church, and there, sagging and exhausted, with all the final, desperate strength of his failing body, which wanted to be revitalized, rejuvenated, his sick and aging heart, which wanted to be healed, his mind, which, endlessly harassed and gasping, wanted peace, he prayed to God—God, whom, scarcely two months ago, he had asked to grant Honoré the grace of letting him love Françoise forever. He now prayed to God with the same force, always with the force of that love, which had once, certain of its death, asked to live, and which now, too frightened to live, begged for death; and Honoré implored God to grant him the grace of not loving Françoise anymore, not loving her too much longer, not loving her forever, to enable him to finally picture her in someone else’s arms without suffering, for now he could not picture her except in someone else’s arms. And perhaps he would stop picturing her like that if he could picture it without suffering.
Then he remembered how deeply he had feared not loving her forever, how deeply he had engraved her in his memory so that nothing would efface her, engraved her cheeks, always offered to his lips, engraved her forehead, her little hands, her solemn eyes, her adored features. And abruptly, seeing them aroused from their sweet tranquillity by desire for someone else, he wanted to stop thinking about her, only to see her all the more obstinately, see her offered cheeks, her forehead, her little hands (oh, those little hands, those too!), her solemn eyes, her detested features.