XIII
One evening, he abused her so long and so incoherently that she ceased to listen to him, and dozed in her chair. After a few moments, a slight rustling made her open her eyes. Laurent convulsively threw on the floor something that gleamed: it was a dagger. Thérèse smiled, and closed her eyes again. She understood feebly, and as if through the haze of a dream, that he had thought of killing her. At that moment, Thérèse was utterly indifferent to everything. To rest from living and thinking, let that rest be sleep or death—she left the choice to destiny.
Death was what she despised. Laurent thought that it was he, and, as he despised himself, he left her at last.
Three days later, Thérèse, having decided to borrow a sum which would enable her to take a long journey, to leave Paris in earnest,—for such a succession of agitations and hurricanes was spoiling her work and her life,—went to the Quai aux Fleurs and bought a white rose-bush, which she sent to Laurent without giving her name to the messenger. It was her farewell. On returning home, she found there a white rose-bush, sent without a name: that was Laurent’s farewell. They both intended to go away—they both remained. The incident of the white rose-bushes moved Laurent to tears. He hurried to Thérèse and found her finishing her packing. Her place was taken in the mail-coach for six o’clock that evening. Laurent’s place also was taken in the same coach. Both had thought of visiting Italy again alone. “Well, let us go together!” he cried.
“No, I am not going,” said she.
“Thérèse, it’s of no use for us to plan! this horrible bond that connects us will never be broken. It is madness to think of it. My love has withstood everything that can crush a sentiment, everything that can break a heart. You must love me as I am, or else we must die together. Are you willing to love me?”
“It would be of no use for me to be willing to do it; I cannot,” said Thérèse. “I feel that my heart is exhausted; I think that it is dead.”
“Very well; are you willing to die?”
“It is a matter of indifference to me how soon I die, as you know; but I do not wish you to live or die with me.”
“Ah! yes, you believe in the eternity of the ego! You don’t want to meet me again in the other life! Poor martyr! I can understand that.”
“We shall not meet again, Laurent, I am sure. Each soul goes toward its centre of attraction. Repose summons me, while you will always and everywhere be attracted by the tempest.”
“That is to say that you have not earned hell!”
“Nor have you earned it. You will be in another heaven, that is all!”
“What is there left for me in this world, if you leave me?”
“Glory, when you no longer seek love.”
Laurent became pensive. Several times he repeated mechanically: “Glory!”—then he knelt in front of the hearth, poking the fire as he was accustomed to do when he wished to be alone with himself. Thérèse went out to countermand the orders for her journey. She was well aware that Laurent would have followed her.
When she returned, she found him very calm and cheerful.
“This world is only a dull comedy,” he said; “but why seek to rise above it, since we do not know what there may be higher up, or even if there is anything at all? Glory, at which you laugh in your sleeve, I know very well——”
“I do not laugh at other people’s glory.”
“What other people?”
“Those who believe in it and love it.”
“God knows whether I believe in it, Thérèse, or whether I snap my fingers at it as a mere farce! But one can love a thing of which he knows the trifling value. You love a balky horse that breaks your neck, the tobacco that poisons you, a wretched play that makes you laugh, and glory, which is only a masquerade! Glory! what is glory to a living artist? Newspaper articles that tear you to pieces and make people talk about you, and laudatory articles that no one reads, for the public is amused only by bitter criticisms, and when its idol is praised to the skies it ceases to care for him at all. And then the groups that gather about a painted canvas, and the monumental orders which fill you with delight and ambition, and leave you half-dead with fatigue, with your ideal unrealized. And then—the Institute—a collection of men who detest you, and who themselves——”
Here Laurent indulged in the most intensely bitter sarcasms, and concluded his dithyramb by saying:
“No matter! such is the glory of this world! We spit upon it, but we cannot do without it, since there is nothing better!”
Their conversation was prolonged until evening, satirical, philosophical, and becoming gradually altogether impersonal. To look at them and listen to them, one would have said that they were two friends, naturally peaceable, who had never quarrelled. This strange situation had occurred several times in the midst of their fiercest storms: when their hearts were silent, their minds still understood each other and agreed.
Laurent was hungry, and asked Thérèse to give him some dinner.
“What about the coach?” she said. “It is almost time for it to start.”
“But you are not going?”
“I shall go if you stay.”
“Very well; then I will go, Thérèse. Adieu!”
He left the house abruptly, and returned an hour later.
“I missed the mail,” he said; “I will go to-morrow. Haven’t you dined yet?”
In her preoccupation Thérèse had forgotten her dinner, which was on the table.
“My dear Thérèse,” he said, “grant me one last favor; come to dine somewhere with me, and let us go to some play this evening. I want to be your friend once more, just your friend. That will cure me and be the salvation of both of us. Try me. I will not be jealous, nor exacting, nor even amorous any more. Let me tell you—I have another mistress, a pretty little woman in society, as slender as a linnet, and as white and dainty as a sprig of lily of the valley. She is a married woman. I am a friend of her lover, whom I am playing false. I have two rivals, two deadly perils to defy every time that I obtain a tête-à-tête. That is very exciting, and therein lies the whole secret of my love. Thus my passions and my imagination are satisfied there; my heart alone and a free exchange of ideas are what I offer you.”
“I refuse them,” said Thérèse.
“What! you are vain enough to be jealous of a man whom you no longer love?”
“Surely not! I no longer have my life to give, and I cannot understand such a friendship as you ask of me, without exclusive devotion. Come to see me as my other friends do, I am perfectly willing; but do not ask me for any further private intimacy, even apparent.”
“I understand, Thérèse; you have another lover!”
Thérèse shrugged her shoulders and made no reply. He was dying to have her boast to him of some caprice, as he had just boasted to her. His shattered strength was reviving and longed for a fight. He awaited anxiously her response to his challenge, ready to overwhelm her with reproaches and disdain, and perhaps to inform her that he had invented that mistress of his to induce her to betray herself. He could not understand Thérèse’s inertness. He preferred to think that she hated him and deceived him, rather than that he was simply annoying or indifferent to her.
She tired him out by her silence.
“Good-night,” he said at last. “I am going to dine, and then to the Opera, if I am not too drunk.”
Thérèse, left alone, explored for the thousandth time the fathomless depths of this mysterious destiny. What did it lack of being one of the most beautiful of human destinies? Reason.
“But what is reason?” Thérèse asked herself, “and how can genius exist without it? Is it because it is such a mighty force that it can kill reason and still survive it? Or is reason simply an isolated faculty, whose union with the other faculties is not always necessary?”
She fell into a sort of metaphysical reverie. It had always seemed to her that reason was an assemblage of ideas, and not a single detail; that all the faculties of a perfectly constituted being borrowed something from it and supplied something to it in turn; that it was at once the means and the end; that no masterpiece could evade its law, and that no man could have any real value after he had resolutely trampled reason under foot.
She reviewed in her mind her memories of the great artists of all time, and also of contemporary artists. Everywhere she saw the rigid rules of the true associated with the dream of the beautiful, and yet everywhere there were exceptions, terrifying anomalies, radiant yet blighted faces like Laurent’s. Aspiration to the sublime was a disease of Thérèse’s epoch and environment. It was a touch of fever which took possession of youth and caused it to despise the normal conditions of happiness as well as the ordinary duties of life. By the force of events, Thérèse was hurled, without desiring or anticipating it, into that awful circle of the human hell. She had become the companion, the intellectual half, of one of those sublime madmen, one of those unreasoning geniuses; she was a witness of the endless agony of Prometheus, of the recurrent frenzies of Orestes; she felt the recoil of those indescribable sufferings, with no comprehension of their cause, and with no power to find a remedy for them.
And yet God still dwelt in those rebellious, tormented souls, for Laurent became enthusiastic and kindly once more at certain hours, and the pure well-spring of sacred inspiration was not dried up; his talent was not exhausted, perhaps he still had a glorious future before him. Should such a man be abandoned to the assaults of delirium or to the stupor of fatigue?
Thérèse, we say, had skirted that abyss too often not to have been made giddy by it more than once. Her own talent as well as her own character had well-nigh become involved, without her knowledge, in that desperate path. She had known that exaltation of suffering which shows one the miseries of life on a large scale, and which hovers on the boundaries between the real and the imaginary; but, by virtue of a natural reaction, her mind aspired henceforth to the true, which is neither one nor the other, neither prosaic fact nor the uncurbed ideal. She felt that there the beautiful was to be found, and that, in order to resume the logical life of the soul, she must seek to live a simple and dignified material life. She reproached herself sternly for having been false to herself so long; and a moment later she reproached herself as sternly for thinking too much of her own lot, in face of the extreme peril by which Laurent was still threatened.
With all its voices, with the voice of friendship as well as that of public opinion, society called to her to rise and resume possession of herself. That was her duty, according to the world, a term which in such case is equivalent to general order, the interest of society: “Follow the straight road; let those perish who wander from it.”—And religion added: “The virtuous and the good for everlasting salvation, the blind and the rebellious for hell!”—Does it matter little to the wise man, pray, that the fool perishes?
Thérèse was shocked at that conclusion.
“On the day that I deem myself the most perfect, the most useful and the best creature on earth,” she said to herself, “I will consent to a sentence of death against all others; but if that day does not come, shall I not be more mad than all the other madmen? Back, madness of vanity, the mother of selfishness! Let us continue to suffer for others than ourselves!”
It was almost midnight when she rose from the chair upon which she had sunk, crushed and spiritless, four hours before. Someone rang. A messenger brought a box and a note. The box contained a domino and a black satin mask. The note contained these words in Laurent’s handwriting: Senza veder, senza parlar.
Without seeing or speaking to each other!—What was the key to that enigma? Did it mean that she should go to the masked ball to amuse him by a commonplace intrigue? Did he mean to try to fall in love with her without knowing her? Was it the fancy of a poet, or the insult of a libertine?
Thérèse sent away the box, and fell back in her chair; but a feeling of uneasiness made it impossible for her to reflect. Ought she not to try every expedient to rescue that victim from his infernal aberrations?
“I will go,” she said, “I will follow him step by step. I will see, I will listen to his life away from me, I will learn how much truth there is in the villainous stories he tells me, whether he loves evil innocently or with affectation, whether he really has depraved tastes or is only seeking to distract his thoughts. Knowing all that I have hitherto tried not to know of him and his vile associates, all that I have striven with disgust to keep from his memory and my imagination, perhaps I shall discover some weak spot, some pretext for curing him of this vertigo.”
She remembered the domino Laurent had sent her, although she had barely glanced at it. It was of satin. She sent for one of Naples silk, donned a mask, carefully covered her hair, supplied herself plentifully with bows of ribbon, in order to change her appearance more completely in case Laurent should suspect her identity, and, sending for a carriage, she set out, alone and resolutely, for the Opera ball.
She had never attended one of those functions. The mask was stifling, intolerable to her. She had never tried to disguise her voice, yet she did not wish that her identity should be divined by any one. She glided silently through the corridors, seeking the deserted corners when she was tired of walking, but going on if any one was coming toward her, always pretending to have a definite goal, and succeeding better than she had hoped in remaining alone and unmolested in that hustling crowd.
It was the time when there was no dancing at the Opera ball, and when the only disguise admitted was the black domino. There was therefore a multitude, sombre and solemn in appearance, but probably intent for the most part upon intrigues as immoral as the bacchanalian revels of other functions of the sort, but of a most imposing aspect when seen as a whole from above. And at intervals a blaring orchestra would suddenly begin to play a frantic quadrille, as if the management, at odds with the police, wished to induce the public to disregard the prohibition; but no one seemed to think of such a thing. The black swarm continued to move slowly and whisper amid the uproar, which ended with a pistol-shot, a strange, fantastic finale, which seemed powerless to dispel the vision of that dismal festival.
For some moments Thérèse was so impressed by the spectacle that she forgot where she was, and fancied herself in the world of depressing dreams. She looked for Laurent, and did not find him.
She ventured into the foyer, where the best-known men in Paris were gathered, without masks or other disguises, and, having made the circuit of the room, she was about to retire, when she heard her name mentioned in a corner. She turned and saw the man she had loved so well, seated between two masked damsels, whose voices and accent had that indefinable combination of limpness and sharpness which betrays exhaustion of the senses and bitterness of spirit.
“Well,” said one of them, “so you have abandoned your famous Thérèse at last? It seems that she deceived you in Italy, and that you would not believe it.”
“He began to suspect it,” rejoined the other, “on the day that he succeeded in driving out his fortunate rival.”
Thérèse was mortally wounded to see the painful romance of her life laid open to such interpretations, and even more to see Laurent smile, tell those creatures that they did not know what they were saying, and change the subject, with no trace of indignation and apparently without noticing or being disturbed by what he heard. Thérèse would never have believed that he was not even her friend. Now she was sure of it! She remained, and continued to listen; her mask was glued to her face by a cold perspiration.
And yet Laurent said nothing to those girls that all the world might not have overheard. He chattered away, amused by their prattle, and answered them like a well-bred man. They were empty-headed creatures, and more than once he yawned, making a slight effort to conceal it. Nevertheless, he remained there, caring little whether he was seen of all men in such company, letting them pay court to him, yawning with fatigue and not with real ennui, absent-minded but affable, and talking to those chance companions as if they were women of the best society, almost dear and genuine friends, associated with pleasant memories of joys which one can avow.
This lasted fully a quarter of an hour. Thérèse still held her place. Laurent’s back was turned to her. The bench on which he was sitting stood in the recess of a closed glass door. When the groups wandering along the outer corridors stopped against that door, the black coats and dominos made an opaque background and the glass became a sort of black mirror, in which Thérèse’s face was reflected unknown to her. Laurent glanced at her several times without thinking of her; but eventually the immobility of that masked face made him uneasy, and he said to his companions, pointing her out to them in the black mirror:
“Don’t you call that mask ghastly?”
“Do we frighten you, pray?”
“No, not you; I know what sort of a nose you have under that bit of satin; but to have a face that you can’t divine, that you don’t know, glaring at you like that! I am going away, I have had enough of it.”
“That is to say,” they retorted, “that you have had enough of us.”
“No,” he said, “I have had enough of the ball. It’s stifling here. Don’t you want to come to see the snow fall? I am going to the Bois de Boulogne.”
“Why, that’s enough to kill you!”
“Ah! yes. Is there such a thing as death? Are you coming?”
“Faith, no!”
“Who wants to go to the Bois de Boulogne in a domino with me?” he asked, raising his voice.
A group of black figures swooped down upon him like a flock of bats.
“How much is it worth?” said one.
“Will you paint my portrait?” said another.
“Are we to go on foot or on horseback?” queried a third.
“A hundred francs a head,” he replied, “just to walk about in the snow by moonlight. I will follow you at a distance. I want to see the effect. How many of you are there?” he added, after a moment. “Ten! that’s hardly enough. But no matter, off we go!”
Three remained behind, saying:
“He hasn’t a sou. We shall get inflammation of the lungs, and that will be all.”
“You stay behind?” he said. “Seven left! Bravo! a cabalistic number, the seven deadly sins! Vive Dieu! I was afraid I should be bored, but there’s an idea that saves me.”
“Bah!” said Thérèse, “a mere artist’s whim! He remembers that he is a painter. Nothing is lost.”
She followed the strange party as far as the peristyle, to make sure that the fantastic idea was carried out; but the cold made the most determined draw back, and Laurent allowed himself to be persuaded to abandon the plan. He was asked to substitute a supper for the party.
“Faith,” he said, “you are nothing but timid, selfish creatures, just exactly like virtuous women. I am going back into respectable society. So much the worse for you.”
But they led him back to the foyer, and there ensued between him and other young men who were friends of his, and a party of shameless hussies, such a lively conversation, coupled with such fine projects, that Thérèse, overcome by disgust, withdrew, saying to herself that it was too late. Laurent loved vice; she could do nothing more for him.
Did Laurent really love vice? No: the slave does not love the yoke and the lash; but, when he is a slave through his own fault, when he has allowed his liberty to be stolen from him for lack of a day of courage or prudence, he becomes accustomed to slavery and all its sorrows: he justifies that profound saying of the ancients, that, when Jupiter reduces a man to that condition, he takes away half of his soul.
When bodily slavery was the awful fruit of victory, Heaven so ordained it in pity for the vanquished; but, when it is the mind that is subjected to the lamentable embrace of debauchery, the punishment is inflicted in its entirety. Laurent thoroughly deserved that punishment. He might have redeemed himself. Thérèse, too, had risked half of her soul: he had not profited by it.
As she entered the carriage to return home, a frantic man rushed after her. It was Laurent. He had recognized her, as she left the foyer, by an involuntary gesture of horror of which she was unconscious.
“Thérèse, let us go back to the ball,” he said. “I want to say to all those men: ‘You are brutes!’ to all those women: ‘You are vile creatures!’ I want to shout your name, your sacred name, to that idiotic crowd, to grovel at your feet and bite the dust, calling down upon myself all the scorn, all the insults, all the shame! I want to make my confession aloud in the midst of that vast masquerade, as the early Christians did in the heathen temples, which were suddenly purified by the tears of repentance, and washed clean by the blood of the martyrs.”
This outbreak lasted until Thérèse had taken him to his door. She could not at all understand why and how that man, who was so little intoxicated, so self-controlled, so agreeably loquacious among the damsels of the masked ball, could become passionate to the point of frenzy as soon as she appeared.
“It is I who drive you mad,” she said. “A moment ago, those women were talking about me as about any vile creature, and it did not even rouse you. I have become, so far as you are concerned, a sort of avenging spectre. That was not what I wanted. Let us part, therefore, since I can no longer do anything but harm.”