II
The next day, Thérèse received the following letter from Laurent:
“MY DEAR GOOD FRIEND:
“How did I leave you last night? If I said some horrible thing to you, forget it, I had no consciousness of it. I had an attack of vertigo which did not leave me at your door; for I found myself at my own door, in a cab, with no idea how I got there.
“It often happens with me, my dear friend, that my mouth says one thing when my brain is saying another. Pity me and forgive me. I am ill, and you were right in saying that the life I lead is detestable.
“By what right do I put questions to you? Do me the justice to admit that this is the first time I have ever questioned you, in the three months that I have known you intimately. What does it matter to me whether you are engaged, married, or a widow? You do not choose that anybody shall know, and have I tried to find out? Have I asked you? Ah! Thérèse, my head is still in confusion this morning, and yet I feel that I am lying, and I do not intend to lie to you. Friday evening I had my first attack of curiosity with regard to you, and yesterday’s was the second; but it shall be the last, I swear, and to have done with the subject once and for all, I propose to make a clean breast of everything. I was at your door the other evening, that is to say, at your garden gate. I looked, and saw nothing; I listened and I heard! Even so, what does it matter to you? I do not know his name, I did not see his face; but I know that you are my sister, my consolation, my confidante, my mainstay. I know that I wept at your feet last night, and that you wiped my eyes with your handkerchief, and said: ‘What are we to do, what are we to do, my poor boy?’ I know that you, wise, hard-working, placid, respected creature that you are, since you are free and beloved, since you are happy, find time and charity to remember that I exist, to pity me, and to try to make my life better. Dear Thérèse, the man who would not bless you would be an ingrate, and, although I am a miserable wretch, I do not know ingratitude. When will you receive me, Thérèse? It seems to me that I insulted you? That only was lacking! Shall I come to you this evening? If you say no, on my word, I shall go to the devil!”
Laurent’s servant brought back Thérèse’s reply. It was very short: Come this evening. Laurent was neither a roué nor a puppy, although he often thought of being, or was tempted to be, one or the other. He was, as we have seen, a creature full of contrasts, whom we describe without trying to explain, for that would not be possible; certain characters elude logical analysis.
Thérèse’s reply made him tremble like a child. She had never written him in that tone. Was it meant as a command to him to come to receive his dismissal upon stated grounds? or was she summoning him to a love-meeting? Had those three words, cold or ardent as it happened, been dictated by indignation or by passion?
Monsieur Palmer arrived, and Laurent, agitated and preoccupied as he was, must needs begin his portrait. He had made up his mind to question him with consummate art, and to extort all Thérèse’s secrets from him. He could devise no way of broaching the subject, and as the American posed conscientiously, as motionless and dumb as a statue, hardly a word was spoken on either side during the sitting.
Laurent succeeded, therefore, in calming himself sufficiently to study the American’s regular, placid features. His beauty was without a blemish, a fact that imparted to his face at first sight the inanimate air peculiar to absolutely regular faces. But, on examining him more closely, you could detect a certain shrewdness in his smile and fire in his glance. At the same time that Laurent made these observations, he was trying to determine his model’s age.
“I beg your pardon,” he said abruptly, “but it would be well for me to know whether you are a young man somewhat overworked, or a middle-aged man wonderfully well preserved. It is of no use for me to look at you, I do not understand what I see.”
“I am forty years old,” replied Monsieur Palmer simply.
“God save us!” exclaimed Laurent; “then you must enjoy robust health?”
“Excellent!” said Palmer.
And he resumed his graceful pose and his tranquil smile.
“It’s the face of a happy lover,” said the artist to himself, “or else of a man who has never cared for anything but roast beef.”
He could not resist the temptation to ask:
“So you knew Mademoiselle Jacques when she was very young?”
“She was fifteen years old when I first saw her.”
Laurent had not the courage to ask him in what year that was. It seemed to him that the blood rushed to his face when he mentioned Thérèse. What did her age matter to him? It was her story that he would have liked to hear. Thérèse did not appear thirty; Palmer might have been no more than her friend. And then his voice was loud and penetrating. If it had been he to whom Thérèse had said: I love no one but you, he would have made some sort of a reply that Laurent would have heard.
At last, the evening came, and the artist, who was not in the habit of being punctual, arrived before the time at which Thérèse usually received him. He found her in her garden, unoccupied, contrary to her custom, and walking back and forth in evident agitation. As soon as she spied him, she went to meet him, and said, taking his hand with an air of authority rather than affection:
“If you are a man of honor, you will tell me all that you heard through this shrubbery. Come, speak; I am listening.”
She sat down on a bench, and Laurent, irritated by this unusual reception, tried to worry her by making evasive replies; but she cowed him by her manifest displeasure, and by an expression of the face which was entirely strange to him. The dread of a definitive rupture with her led him to tell her the simple truth.
“So that was all you heard?” she said. “I said to a person whom you did not even see: ‘You are now my only love on earth?’”
“Did I dream it, Thérèse? I am ready to believe it, if you bid me.”
“No, you did not dream it. I may have said it, nay, I probably did say it. And what was the answer?”
“None that I heard,” replied Laurent, upon whom Thérèse’s admission had the effect of a cold shower-bath; “I didn’t even hear the sound of his voice. Is your mind at rest?”
“No, I have other questions to ask you. To whom do you suppose that I said that?”
“I suppose nothing. I know no one but Monsieur Palmer, with whom the nature of your relations is not known.”
“Ah!” cried Thérèse, with a strange air of satisfaction, “so you think it was Monsieur Palmer?”
“Why should it not be he? Do I insult you by supposing the possibility of an old liaison recently renewed? I know that your relations with all those whom I have seen here for the past three months are as disinterested on their part and as indifferent on yours as my own relations with you. Monsieur Palmer is very handsome, and he has the manners of a gallant man. I like him very much. I have neither the right nor the presumption to examine you touching your private sentiments. But—you will say that I have been watching you.”
“I shall, indeed,” rejoined Thérèse, who did not seem to think of denying anything whatsoever; “why do you watch me? It seems to me a wretched thing to do, although I don’t understand it at all. Tell me how you came to do it.”
“Thérèse!” replied the young man eagerly, determined to rid himself of all that he had on his mind, “tell me that you have a lover, and that Palmer is the man, and I will love you truly, I will talk to you with absolute frankness. I will ask your pardon for an outbreak of madness, and you shall never have any reason to reproach me. Come, do you wish me to be your friend? Despite all my boasting, I feel that I need your friendship and that I am capable of being your friend. Be frank with me, that is all that I ask of you!”
“My dear fellow,” Thérèse replied, “you talk to me as if I were a coquette who was trying to keep you by her side, and who had some confession to make. I cannot accept that situation; it is in no respect suited to me. Monsieur Palmer is not and never will be to me anything more than a highly valued friend, with whom I am not even on intimate terms, and whom I had lost sight of for a long time until recently. So much I may say to you, but nothing more. My secrets, if I have any, do not require a confidant, and I beg you to take no more interest in them than I desire you to do. It is not for you to question me, therefore, but to answer my questions. What were you doing here four days ago? Why were you watching me? What is the outbreak of madness which I am to know about and pass judgment upon?”
“The tone in which you speak to me is not encouraging. Why should I confess, when you no longer deign to treat me as a comrade and to have confidence in me?”
“Do not confess then,” said Thérèse, rising. “That will prove to me that you did not deserve the esteem I felt for you, and that you did not reciprocate it in the least, since you tried to find out my secrets.”
“So you turn me out,” said Laurent, “and it is all over between us?”
“It is all over, adieu!” replied Thérèse in a severe tone.
Laurent left the house in a rage which made it impossible for him to say a word; but he had not taken thirty steps in the street, when he returned, telling Catherine that he had forgotten to deliver a message which somebody had given him for her mistress. He found Thérèse sitting in a small salon; the garden door was still open; she seemed to have gone so far, and to have paused there, grieved and downcast, absorbed in her reflections. She received him frigidly.
“So you have come back?” she said; “what is it that you forgot?”
“I forgot to tell you the truth.”
“I no longer care to hear it.”
“But you asked me for it?”
“I thought that you might tell it spontaneously.”
“And I might have, I should have; I was wrong not to do it. Look you, Thérèse, do you think it possible for a man of my age to see you without falling in love with you?”
“In love?” said Thérèse, with a frown. “So you were making sport of me, were you, when you told me that you could not fall in love with any woman?”
“No, indeed; I said what I thought.”
“Then you were mistaken, and you are really in love! are you quite sure of it?”
“Oh! don’t be angry; great Heaven! I am not sure enough for that. Thoughts of love have passed through my head, through my senses, if you choose. Have you so little experience that you considered it impossible?”
“I am old enough to have had experience,” she replied; “but I have lived alone for a long while. I have had no experience of certain situations. Does that surprise you? It is true, none the less. I am very simple-minded, although I have been deceived, like everybody else! You have told me a hundred times that you respected me too much to look upon me as a woman, for the reason that your love for women was altogether gross. So I believed that I was in no danger from the outrage of your desires; and of all that I esteemed in you, your sincerity upon that point was what I esteemed most highly. I allowed myself to become interested in your destiny with the greater freedom, because, you remember, we said to each other, laughing, but with serious meaning: ‘Between two persons, of whom one is an idealist and the other a materialist, there is the Baltic Sea.’”
“I said it in all sincerity, and I walked confidently along the shore on my side, without an idea of crossing; but it happened that the ice would not bear. Is it my fault that I am twenty-four, and that you are beautiful?”
“Am I still beautiful? I hoped not.”
“I cannot say; I did not think so at first, and then, one fine day, you seemed beautiful to me. So far as you are concerned, it is involuntary, I know that perfectly well; but it was involuntary on my part, too, my feeling this fascination, so involuntary that I fought against it and tried to divert my mind from it. I rendered unto Satan what belongs to Satan, that is to say, my poor soul, and I brought here unto Cæsar only what belongs to Cæsar,—my respect and my silence. But for eight or ten days this accursed emotion has reappeared in my dreams. It vanishes as soon as I am with you. On my word of honor, Thérèse, when I see you, when you speak to me, I am calm, I no longer remember that I cried out for you in a moment of frenzy, which I cannot understand myself. When I speak of you, I say that you are not young, or that I don’t like the color of your hair. I declare that you are my comrade, that is to say, my brother, and I feel when I say it that I am perfectly loyal. And then a few puffs of spring surprise the winter in my idiotic heart, and I fancy that it is you who blow them. And it is you, in truth, Thérèse, with your adoration of what you call real love! That sets me thinking, whatever kind of love one may have!”
“I think that you are mistaken, I never speak of love.”
“No, I know it. You follow a rigid rule in that respect. You have read somewhere that even to speak of love was to give it or take it; but your silence is most eloquent, your reticence gives one the fever, and your excessive prudence has a diabolical fascination.”
“In that case, let us meet no more,” said Thérèse.
“Why not? what is it to you that I have had a few sleepless nights, since it depends solely upon you to make me as tranquil as I used to be.”
“What must I do to bring that about?”
“What I told you: tell me that you belong to some one. I shall look upon that as final, and as I am very proud, I shall be cured as by a fairy’s wand.”
“And suppose I tell you that I belong to no one, because I no longer care to love any one, will not that suffice?”
“No; I shall be conceited enough to think that you may change your mind.”
Thérèse could not help laughing at the adroitness with which Laurent manœuvred.
“Very well,” said she, “be cured, and give me back a friendship of which I was proud, instead of a life for which I should have to blush. I love some one.”
“That is not enough, Thérèse: you must tell me that you belong to him.”
“Otherwise you would think that some one was yourself, eh? Well, so be it, I have a lover. Are you satisfied?”
“Perfectly. As you see, I kiss your hand to thank you for your frankness. Come, be a good girl, tell me that it is Palmer.”
“I cannot do that: it would be false.”
“Then—I don’t know what to think!”
“It is no one whom you know; it is a person who is absent from Paris.”
“But who comes sometimes?”
“Apparently, since you overheard an outpouring of sentiment.”
“Thanks, thanks, Thérèse. Now I am fairly on my feet again; I know who you are and who I am, and, if I must tell you the whole truth, I believe that I love you better so, for you are a woman now, and not a sphinx. Ah! why didn’t you speak sooner?”
“Has this passion made such terrible ravages?” said Thérèse, mockingly.
“Why, yes, perhaps! Ten years hence I will tell you about it, Thérèse, and we will laugh together over it.”
“Agreed; good-night.”
Laurent went to bed in a very tranquil frame of mind and altogether undeceived. He had really suffered on Thérèse’s account. He had passionately desired her, but had never dared to let her suspect it. Certainly it was not a meritorious passion. There was as much vanity as curiosity in it. That woman of whom all her friends said: “Whom does she love? I wish it were I, but it is no one,” had appeared to him in the guise of a beautiful ideal to be grasped. His imagination had taken fire, his pride had bled with the dread, the almost certainty, of failure.
But this young man was not exclusively given over to pride. He had at times a dazzling and dominating vision of the right, the good, and the true.
He was an angel, gone astray and diseased, if not absolutely fallen like so many others. The craving for love devoured his heart, and a hundred times a day he asked himself in dismay if he had not abused life too much already, and if he still had strength to be happy.
He awoke calm and depressed. He already regretted his chimera, his beautiful sphinx, who read his thoughts with good-natured attention, who admired him, scolded him, pitied him, and encouraged him by turns, without ever revealing a corner of her own destiny, but affording a foretaste of treasures of affection, devotion, perhaps of sensual pleasure! At all events, it was in this way that it pleased Laurent to interpret Thérèse’s silence touching herself, and a certain smile, as mysterious as Joconda’s, which played about her lips and in the corner of her eye, when he blasphemed in her presence. At such times, she seemed to say to herself: “I could, if I chose, describe the paradise in contrast with that villainous hell; but the poor fool would not understand me.”
When the mystery of her heart was once unveiled, Thérèse lost her prestige in Laurent’s eyes at first. She was no longer anything more than a woman like other women. He was even tempted to degrade her in her own esteem, and, although she had never allowed him to question her, to accuse her of hypocrisy and prudery. But, from the moment that he knew that she belonged to some one, he ceased to regret that he had respected her, and he no longer desired anything of her, not even her friendship, which, he thought, he would have no difficulty in supplying elsewhere.
This state of affairs lasted two or three days, during which Laurent prepared several explanations, in the event that Thérèse should ask him, to account for the time that had passed without his calling upon her. On the fourth day, Laurent found himself in the clutches of a savage attack of spleen. Harlots and courtesans made him ill; he found in none of his friends the patient and delicate kindliness with which Thérèse would detect his ennui, try to divert his mind, help him to seek its cause and remedy, in a word, give her whole mind to him. She alone knew what ought to be said to him, and seemed to understand that the fate of an artist like him was not a matter of trifling importance, as to which a more exalted mind had the right to declare that, if he were unfortunate, it was so much the worse for him.
He ran to her house in such hot haste, that he forgot what he intended to say by way of apology; but Thérèse showed neither displeasure nor surprise because of his neglect, and spared him the necessity of lying by asking him no questions. He was stung by her indifference, and discovered that he was more jealous of her than before.
“She has probably seen her lover,” he thought; “she has forgotten me.”
However, he did not manifest his irritation, and kept such close watch upon himself thereafter, that Thérèse was deceived.
Several weeks passed in alternations of frenzy, coldness, and affection. Nothing else on earth was so necessary to him and so beneficent as that woman’s friendship, nothing so bitter and so galling as to be unable to seek her love. The confession he had demanded, far from curing him as he had flattered himself that it would, had intensified his suffering. It was jealousy, which he could no longer conceal from himself, since it had a definite and admitted cause. How, in Heaven’s name, could he ever have fancied that as soon as he knew that cause, he would scorn the idea of striving to destroy it?
And yet he made no effort to supplant the invisible and happy rival. His pride, which was excessive when he was with Thérèse, would not allow him to do it. When he was alone, he hated him, decried him to himself, attributing all sorts of absurdities to that phantom, insulting him and challenging him ten times a day.
Then he would become disgusted with suffering, seek comfort in debauchery, forget himself for a moment, but instantly relapse into profound depression, and go to pass an hour or two with Thérèse, overjoyed to see her, to breathe the air that she breathed, and to contradict her in order to have the pleasure of listening to her voice, scolding and caressing by turns.
Finally he detested her for not divining his torments; he despised her for remaining faithful to that lover of hers, who could not be a man of more than ordinary talent, since she did not feel the need of talking about him; he would leave her, swearing that he would not go near her again for a long while, and he would have returned an hour later if he had had any hope that she would receive him.
Thérèse, who had caught a glimpse of his love for a moment, no longer suspected it, so well did he play his part. She was sincerely attached to the unhappy youth. Being an enthusiastic artist beneath her calm and thoughtful exterior, she had set up a sort of altar, she said, to what he might have been, and she still felt for him an indulgent pity, blended with genuine respect for genius diseased and gone astray. If she had been very certain of not arousing any evil desire, she would have fondled him like a son, and there were times when she checked herself as she was on the point of using the familiar form of address to him.
Was there a touch of love in that maternal sentiment? There surely was, unknown to Thérèse; but a truly chaste woman, who has lived longer by work than by passion, can keep from herself for a long while the secret of a love which she has resolved to fight against. Thérèse believed that she was certain of having no thought of her own satisfaction in that attachment of which she bore all the burden; as soon as it was evident that Laurent found tranquillity and contentment with her, she found tranquillity and contentment to give him. She was well aware that he was incapable of loving as she understood the word; so that she had been hurt and alarmed at the momentary caprice which he had confessed. That paroxysm past, she congratulated herself upon having found in a harmless fib a means of preventing its recurrence; and, as on all occasions, whenever he felt at all excited, Laurent hastened to proclaim the impassable barrier of ice of the Baltic Sea, she was no longer afraid, and accustomed herself to live amid flames without being burned.
All these sufferings and perils of the two friends were concealed and, as it were, incubated beneath a habitual satirical gaiety, which is the natural mood, the indelible seal, as it were, of French artists. It is a sort of second nature, for which the people of more northern countries blame us severely, and for which the serious English, above all, look down upon us. Yet it is that which constitutes the charm of refined liaisons, and often preserves us from many a mad or foolish step. To seek the absurd side of things is to discover the weak and illogical side. To laugh at the perils by which the heart is encompassed, is to practise defying them, like our soldiers, who go into fire laughing and singing. To make fun of a friend is often to save him from some weakness in which our pity would have led him to gratify himself. And, finally, to make fun of one’s self is to rescue one’s self from the foolish intoxication of overweening self-esteem. I have noticed that people who never jest are generally endowed with puerile and intolerable vanity.
Laurent’s gaiety, like his talent, was dazzling with color and wit, and was the more natural because it was original. Thérèse had less wit than he, in the sense that she was naturally given to musing, and was an indolent talker; but what she needed was a playful spirit in others; then her own would gradually wake, and her quiet merriment was not without charm.
The result of this habitual good humor was that love, a subject upon which Thérèse never jested and did not like to have others jest in her presence, found no opportunity to slip in a word, to utter a note.
One fine morning, Monsieur Palmer’s portrait was finished, and Thérèse handed to Laurent, in her friend’s name, a snug little sum which the young man promised to put aside, to be used in case of illness or of some unforeseen and unavoidable expense.
Laurent had become intimate with Palmer while painting his portrait. He had found him what he was: upright, just, generous, intelligent, and well-informed. Palmer was a wealthy American of the middle class, whose patrimonial fortune was derived from trade. He had been in business himself and had travelled extensively in his younger days. At thirty, he had had the excellent sense to consider himself rich enough, and to determine to live for his own enjoyment. So he no longer travelled except for pleasure, and after he had seen, as he said, many curious things and extraordinary countries, he took delight in the sight of beautiful things and in studying countries which were really interesting by reason of their civilization.
Although he was not a very enlightened student of art, his judgment was reasonably reliable, and on all subjects his ideas were as healthy as his instincts. His French showed the effect of his timidity, to such a degree that it was almost unintelligible and absurdly incorrect at the beginning of a conversation; but when he felt at ease, one could see that he knew the language, and that all he lacked was longer practice or greater confidence to speak it very well.
Laurent had studied him with much curiosity and perturbation at the outset. When it was proved by affirmative evidence that he was not Mademoiselle Jacques’s lover, he estimated his character more fairly, and conceived a sort of friendship for him which resembled, albeit at a long distance, his sentiment for Thérèse. Palmer was a tolerant philosopher, strict enough in his dealings with himself and very charitable to others. In his ideas, if not in his character, he resembled Thérèse, and he was almost always in accord with her on all points. Now and then Laurent still felt jealous of what he called, in musical parlance, their imperturbable unison; and, as it was simply an intellectual jealousy, he ventured to complain of it to Thérèse.
“Your definition amounts to nothing,” she said. “Palmer is too placid and too perfect for me. I have a little more fire, and I sing a little louder than he does. Compared with him, I am the high note in the major third.”
“In that case, I am only a false note,” said Laurent.
“No,” said Thérèse, “with you I am modified and go down the scale to form the minor third.”
“Then with me you descend half a tone?”
“And I am half an interval nearer to you than to Palmer.”