The next day she wanted no other flowers in her bedroom, which was normally filled and radiant with the glory of fresh roses.
When Madame Lawrence came by, she halted before the vases where the cattleyas were finally dying and, for eyes without love, were stripped of beauty.
“What, darling, you who love flowers so much?”
Madeleine was going to say, “It seems to me that I have only begun loving them today”; she stopped, annoyed at having to explain herself and sensing that there are realities that people cannot be made to grasp if they do not already have them inside themselves.
She contented herself with smiling amiably at the reproach. The feeling that no one, perhaps not even Lepré himself, was aware of her new life gave her a rare and disconsolate pleasure of pride. The servant brought the mail; finding no letter from Lepré, she was overwhelmed with disappointment. Upon measuring the gap between the absurdity of her disappointment, when there had not been the slightest chance of hope, and the very real and very cruel intensity of that disappointment, she understood that she had stopped living solely a life of events and facts. The veil of lies had started unrolling before her eyes for a duration that was impossible to predict. She would now see things only through that veil, and, more than all other things, those she would have wanted to know and experience the most concretely and in the most similar way as Lepré, those that had to do with him.
Still, she had one remaining hope—that he had lied to her, that his indifference was feigned: she knew by unanimous consensus that she was one of the most beautiful women in Paris, that her reputation for wit, intelligence, elegance, her high social standing added prestige to her beauty. Lepré, on the other hand, was considered intelligent, artistic, very gentle, a very good son, but he was barely sought after and had never been successful with women; the attention she gave him was bound to strike him as something improbable and unhoped for. She was astonished and hopeful. . . .
Although Madeline would, in an instant, have subordinated all the interests and affections of her life to Lepré, she nevertheless still believed—and her judgment was fortified by the universal judgment—that, without being disagreeable, he was inferior to the remarkable men who, in the four years since the death of the Marquis de Gouvres, had been dropping by several times a day to console the widow and were thus the most precious ornament of her life.
She very keenly sensed that her inexplicable inclination, which made him a unique person for her, did not make him the equal of those other men. The reasons for her love were inside her, and if they were a bit inside him too, they were not in his intellectual superiority or even in his physical superiority. It was precisely because she loved him that no face, no smile, no conduct was as agreeable to her as his, and it was not because his face, his smile, his conduct were more agreeable that she loved him. She was acquainted with more handsome, more charming men, and she knew it.
Thus, when Lepré entered Madeleine’s drawing room on Saturday at a quarter past eight, he faced, without suspecting anything, his most passionate friend, his most clear-sighted adversary. While her beauty was armed to vanquish him, her mind was no less armed to judge him; she was ready to pick, like a bitter flower, the pleasure of finding him mediocre and ridiculously disproportionate to her love for him. She was not acting out of prudence! She quite keenly sensed that she would continually be caught again in the magic net, and that once Lepré left, her prolific imagination would repair the meshes that her too incisive mind would have torn in his presence.
And in fact, when he walked in, she was suddenly calmed; by shaking his hand, she appeared to drain him of all power. He was no longer the sole and absolute despot of her dreams; he was just a pleasant visitor. They chatted; now all her assumptions vanished. In his fine goodness, in the bold precision of his mind, she found reasons that, while not absolutely justifying her love, explained it, at least slightly, and, by showing her that something corresponded to it in reality, made its roots plunge deeper in that reality, draw more life from it. She also noticed that he was more attractive than she had thought, with a noble and delicate Louis XIII face.
All her artistic memories of the portraits of that period were henceforth tied to the thought of her love, gave it a new existence by letting it enter the system of her artistic sensibilities. She ordered a photograph from Amsterdam, the picture of a young man who resembled Lepré.
She ran into him a few days later. His mother was seriously ill; his trip was put off. She told him that she now had a picture on her table, a portrait that reminded her of him. He appeared moved but cold. She was deeply pained, but consoled herself with the thought that he at least understood her attention though he did not enjoy it. Loving a boor who did not realize it would have been even crueler. So, mentally reproaching him for his indifference, she wanted to see the men who were enamored of her, with whom she had been indifferent and coquettish; she wanted to see them again in order to show them the ingenious and tender compassion that she would have at least wanted to obtain from him. But when she encountered them, they all had the horrible defect of not being Lepré, and the sight of them merely irritated her. She wrote to him; four days wore by without a response; then she received a letter that any other woman would have found friendly but that drove Madeleine to despair. He wrote:
“My mother has improved; I am leaving in three weeks; until then, my life is quite full, but I will try to call on you once to pay my respects.”
Was it jealousy of everything that “filled his life,” preventing her from penetrating it, was it sorrow that he was going abroad and that he would come by only once, or even the greater sorrow that he did not feel the need to come and visit her ten times a day before his departure: she could no longer stay at home; she hastily donned a hat, went out, and, hurrying, on foot, along the streets that led to him, she nurtured the absurd hope that, by some miracle she was counting on, he would appear to her at the corner of a square, radiant with tenderness, and that a single glance of his would explain everything to her. All at once she spotted him walking, chatting gaily with friends. But now she was embarrassed; she believed he would guess that she was looking for him, and so she brusquely stepped into a shop. During the next few days she no longer looked for him; she avoided places where she might run into him—she maintained this final coquetry toward him, this final dignity for herself.
One morning, she was sitting alone in the Tuileries, on the waterside terrace. She let her sorrow float, spread out, relax more freely on the broader horizon, she let it pick flowers, spring forth with the hollyhocks, the fountains, and the columns, gallop behind the dragoons leaving the Quartier d’Orsay, she let her sorrow drift on the Seine and soar with the swallows across the pale sky. It was the fifth day since the friendly letter that had devastated her. All at once she saw Lepré’s fat, white poodle, which he allowed to go out alone every morning. She had joked about it, had said to him that one day somebody would kidnap it. The animal recognized her and came over. After five days of repressing her emotions, she was utterly overwhelmed with a wild need to see Lepré. Seizing the animal in her arms and shaking with sobs, she hugged it for a long time, with all her strength; then, unpinning the nosegay of violets from her bodice and attaching it to the dog’s collar, she let the animal go.
But, calmed by that crisis, also mollified, and feeling better, she noticed her resentment vanishing bit by bit, a little cheer and hope coming back to her with her physical well-being, and she perceived that she valued life and happiness again. Lepré would be leaving in seventeen days; she wrote him, inviting him to dinner the next day, apologizing for not responding earlier, and she spent a rather pleasant afternoon. That evening, she would be attending a dinner; the guests probably included many artists and athletes who knew Lepré. She wanted to know if he had a mistress, any kind of attachment that prevented him from getting close to Madeleine, that explained his extraordinary behavior. She would suffer greatly upon finding out, but at least she would know, and perhap
s she might hope that in time her beauty would carry the day. She went out, determined to inquire immediately, but then, stricken with fear, she lost her nerve. In the last moment, upon arriving, she was impelled less by the desire to know the truth than by the need to speak to others about him, that sad charm of vainly conjuring him up wherever she was without him. After dinner she said to two men who were near her, and whose conversation was quite free:
“Tell me, do you know Lepré well?”
“We’ve been running into him every day forever, but we’re not very close.”
“Is he a charming man?”
“He’s a charming man.”
“Well, perhaps you can tell me. . . . Don’t feel obligated to be too benevolent—you see, I have a very important reason for asking. A girl I love with all my heart likes him a bit. Is he a man whom a woman could marry with an easy mind?”
Her two interlocutors paused for a moment, embarrassed:
“No, that’s out of the question.”
Madeleine, very courageously, went on, all the more quickly to get it over with:
“Does he have any long-term attachment?”
“No, but still, it’s impossible.”
“Tell me why, seriously, I beg you.”
“No.”
“But still, it would be better to tell her after all. Otherwise she might imagine worse things or silly things.”
“Very well! This is it, and I don’t think we’re hurting Lepré in any way by revealing it. First of all, you are not to repeat it; besides, the whole of Paris knows about it anyway; and as for marrying, he’s far too honest and sensitive to even consider it. Lepré is a charming fellow, but he has one vice. He loves the vile women that are found in the gutter, he’s crazy about them; he occasionally spends whole nights in the industrial suburbs or on the outer boulevards, running the risk of getting killed eventually; and not only is he crazy about them, but he loves only them. The most ravishing socialite, the most ideal girl leave him absolutely indifferent. He can’t even pay them any attention. His pleasures, his preoccupations, his life are somewhere else. People who didn’t know him well used to say that with his exquisite nature a great love would rescue him. But for that he would have to be capable of experiencing it, and he’s incapable of doing so. His father was already like that, and if it doesn’t happen to Lepré’s sons, then only because he won’t have any.”
At eight the next evening, Madeline was informed that Monsieur Lepré was in the drawing room. She went in; the windows were open, the lamps were not yet lit, and he was waiting on the balcony. Not far from there, several houses surrounded by gardens rested in the gentle evening light, distant, Oriental, and pious, as if this had been Jerusalem. The rare, caressing light gave each object a brand-new and almost poignant value. A luminous wheelbarrow in the middle of the dark street was as touching as, there, a bit further, the somber and already nocturnal trunk of a chestnut tree under its foliage, which was still basking in the final rays. At the end of the avenue the sunset was gloriously bowing like an arch of triumph decked out with celestial flags of gold and green. In the neighboring window, heads were absorbed in reading with familiar solemnity. Walking over to Lepré, Madeleine felt the appeased sweetness of all these things mellow her heart, half open it, make it languish, and she held back her tears.
He, however, more handsome tonight and more charming, displayed sensitive kindness such as he had never exhibited to her before. Then they had an earnest conversation, and now she first discovered how sublime his intelligence was. If he was not popular socially, it was precisely because the truths he was seeking lay beyond the visual horizon of intelligent people and because the truths of high minds are ridiculous errors down here. His goodness, incidentally, sometimes lent them an enchanting poetry the way the sun gracefully colors the high summits. And he was so genial with her, he acted so grateful for her goodness that, feeling she had never loved him this much and abandoning all hope of his requiting her love, she suddenly and joyously envisaged the prospect of a purely friendly intimacy that would enable her to see him every day; she inventively and joyfully revealed the plan to him. He, however, said that he was very busy and could hardly spare more than one day every two weeks. She had told him enough to make him understand she loved him—had he wanted to understand. And had he, timid as he was, felt a particle of love for her, he would have come up with even negligible words of friendship. Her sickly gaze was focused so intently on him that she would have promptly made out those words and greedily feasted on them. She wanted to stop Lepré, who kept talking about his demanding agenda, his crowded life, but suddenly her gaze plunged so deep into her adversary’s heart that it could have plunged into the infinite horizon of the sky that stretched out before her, and she felt the futility of words. She held her tongue, then she said:
“Yes, I understand, you’re very busy.”
And at the end of the evening, when they were parting, he said:
“May I call on you to say goodbye?”
And she gently replied: “No, my friend, I’m somewhat busy; I think we should leave things as they are.”
She waited for a word; he did not utter it, and she said:
“Goodbye.”
Then she waited for a letter, in vain. So she wrote him that it was preferable for her to be frank, that she may have led him to believe she liked him, that this was not the case, that she would rather not see him as often as she had requested with imprudent friendliness.
He replied that he had never really believed in anything more than her friendship, for which she was famous, and which he had never meant to abuse to the point of coming so often and bothering her.
Then she wrote him that she loved him, that she would never love anyone but him. He replied that she must be joking.
She stopped writing to him, but not, at first, thinking about him. Then that also stopped. Two years later, weighed down by her widowhood, she married the Duke de Mortagne, who was handsome and witty and who, until Madeleine’s death—for over forty years, that is—filled her life with a glory and affection that she never failed to appreciate.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Joachim Neugroschel works in French, German, Russian, Yiddish, and Italian. The winner of three PEN Translation Awards and the French-American Translation Prize, he has translated over 180 books, including works by such authors as Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Martin Buber, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan, Jean Arp, Herman Hesse, Leopold von Sucher-Masoch, and Albert Schweitzer. He lives in New York.
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