IV
Thérèse was deeply distressed by this letter. She was, as it were, struck by lightning. Her love bore so little resemblance to Laurent’s, that she fancied that she did not love him with love, especially when she reread the expressions used by him. There was no delirium in Thérèse’s heart, or, if there were, it had entered there, drop by drop, so slowly that she did not notice it, and believed that she was as thoroughly mistress of herself as on the first day. The word passion offended her.
“Passions! I?” she said to herself. “In Heaven’s name, does he think that I don’t know what passion is, and that I want any more of that poisoned draught? What have I done to him, I who have given him so much affection and thought, that he should propose to me, by way of thanks, despair, madness, and death?—After all,” she thought, “it is not his fault, poor creature! He doesn’t know what he wants, nor what he asks for. He seeks love like the philosopher’s stone, in which one strives all the more earnestly to believe because he cannot grasp it. He thinks that I have it, and that I amuse myself by refusing to give it to him! There is always a touch of frenzy in whatever he thinks. How can I appease him, and turn him aside from a fancy that is rapidly making him unhappy?
“It is my fault; he has some right to say so. While trying to wean him from debauchery, I familiarized him too much with a virtuous attachment; but he is a man, and he deems our affection incomplete. Why did he deceive me? why did he make me believe that he was tranquil when he was with me? What shall I do to repair the idiocy of my inexperience? I have not been enough of a woman in the matter of presumption. I did not know that a woman, however lukewarm and weary of life she may be, can still disturb a man’s brain. I ought to have believed that I was fascinating and dangerous, as he once told me, and to have guessed that he afterward contradicted himself on that point only to quiet my fears. So it is a misfortune, then,—for it certainly cannot be a sin,—not to have the instinct of coquetry?”
Thereupon, Thérèse, searching her memory, remembered that she had instinctively been reserved and distrustful to defend herself from the desires of other men who were not attractive to her; with Laurent she felt no such instinct, because she esteemed him in his friendship for her, because she could not believe that he would seek to deceive her, and also, it must be admitted, because she cared more for him than for any other. Alone in her studio, she paced the floor, oppressed by a painful sense of discomfort, sometimes glancing at the fatal letter which she had placed on a table as if she knew not what to do with it and could neither decide to read it again nor to destroy it, and sometimes looking at her unfinished work on the easel. She was working with enthusiasm and pleasure when they brought her that letter, that is to say, that doubt, that anxiety, that amazement, and that dread. It was like a mirage which caused all the spectres of her former miseries to reappear upon her unclouded, peaceful horizon. Every word written on that paper was like a hymn of death which she had heard in the past, a prophecy of fresh misfortunes to come.
She tried to recover her serenity by resuming her painting. That was her great remedy for all the petty ills of external life; but it was powerless that day; the terror which that passion aroused in her assailed her in the purest and most private sanctuary of her present life.
“Two pleasures disturbed or destroyed,” she said to herself, throwing away her brush and taking up the letter: “work and friendship.”
She passed the rest of the day without making up her mind to anything. But one point was perfectly clear in her mind, the determination to say no; but she proposed that it should be no in reality, and was not bent upon announcing her decision in hot haste, with the timorous abruptness of the woman who is afraid of succumbing unless she makes haste to barricade the door. How to say that no from which there should be no appeal, which should leave no hope behind, yet should not be like a red-hot iron on the sweet memory of friendship, was a hard and bitter problem for her to solve. That memory was her own love; when one has the body of a dearly loved one to bury, one cannot decide, without bitter sorrow, to place a white cloth over the face and bestow the body in the common grave. You would fain embalm it in a grave of its own, which you could look upon from time to time, praying for the soul of him whose dust it contains.
Darkness came upon her before she had hit upon any expedient for denying herself without inflicting too much pain. Catherine, seeing that she dined with little appetite, asked her anxiously if she were ill.
“No,” she replied, “I have something on my mind.”
“Ah! you work too hard,” said the good old woman, “you do not think about taking care of yourself.”
Thérèse raised her finger; it was a gesture with which Catherine was familiar, and which signified: “Don’t speak of that.”
The hour at which Thérèse received her few friends had, for some time past, been taken advantage of by Laurent only. Although the door stood open for whoever chose to come, he alone came, whether because the others were away from Paris—it was the season for going into the country or remaining there—or because they had detected in Thérèse a certain preoccupation, an involuntary and poorly concealed desire to talk exclusively with Monsieur de Fauvel.
Laurent usually arrived at eight, and Thérèse said to herself as she glanced at the clock:
“I did not answer his letter; he won’t come to-day.”
There was a horrible void in her heart as she added:
“He must never come again.”
How was she to pass that endless evening, which she was accustomed to pass in conversation with her young friend, while she worked at some little sketch or some fancy-work, and he smoked his cigar, half-reclining lazily on the cushions of the couch? It occurred to her to escape the impending ennui by calling upon a friend in Faubourg Saint-Germain, with whom she sometimes went to the play; but her friend always retired early, and it would be too late when she arrived. It was such a long way, and the cabs moved so slowly! Then, too, she would have to dress, and Thérèse, who lived in slippers, like all artists who work with enthusiasm and cannot bear to be incommoded by their clothes, was very indolent in the matter of arraying herself in visiting costume. Suppose she should put on a veil and a shawl, send for a cab, and drive slowly through the deserted avenues of the Bois de Boulogne? Thérèse had sometimes taken such a drive with Laurent, when the evening heat was so stifling that they sought a breath of fresh air under the trees. Such excursions with anybody else would have compromised her seriously; but Laurent guarded religiously the secret of her confidence, and they both took delight in the unconventionality of those mysterious tête-à-têtes, which concealed no mystery. She remembered them as if they were already far away, and said to herself, sighing at the thought that they would never return:
“Those were happy times! They can never come again for him who suffers, or for me who am no longer in ignorance of it.”
At nine o’clock, she at last attempted to answer Laurent’s letter, but a peal of the bell made her heart beat fast. It was he! She rose to tell Catherine to say that she had gone out. Catherine returned: it was only a letter from him. Thérèse had an involuntary thrill of regret that it was not himself.
There were only these few words in the letter:
“Adieu, Thérèse! you do not love me, and I love you like a child!”
These two lines made Thérèse tremble from head to foot. The only passion that she had never striven to extinguish in her heart was maternal love. That wound, although apparently healed, was still bleeding like unsatisfied love.
“Like a child!” she repeated, crumpling the letter in her quivering hands. “He loves me like a child! Mon Dieu! what does he mean by that? does he know how he hurts me? Adieu! My boy had learned to say adieu! but he did not say it when they carried him away. I should have heard him! and I shall never hear him again!”
Thérèse was overexcited, and, as her emotion seized upon the most painful of pretexts for manifesting itself, she burst into tears.
“Did you call me?” said Catherine, entering the room. “Mon Dieu! what is the matter? You are weeping as you used to in the old days!”
“Nothing, nothing, leave me,” replied Thérèse. “If any one comes to see me, say that I have gone to the theatre. I want to be alone. I am ill.”
Catherine left the room, but went into the garden. She had seen Laurent creeping stealthily along the hedge.
“Do not sulk like this,” she said. “I don’t know why my mistress is crying; but it must be your fault, you make her unhappy. She doesn’t want to see you. Go, ask her pardon!”
Catherine, despite all her respect for Thérèse and devotion to her, was satisfied that Laurent was her lover.
“She is weeping?” he cried. “Oh! mon Dieu! why is she weeping?”
And he rushed across the little garden and threw himself at Thérèse’s feet, who was sobbing in the small salon, with her face in her hands.
Laurent would have been overjoyed to see her thus if he had been the rake that he sometimes sought to appear; but in reality he was wonderfully tender-hearted, and Thérèse possessed the secret power of arousing his real nature. The tears with which her face was bathed caused him genuine and profound grief. On his knees he implored her to forget his madness, and to restore him to reason by her gentleness and good sense.
“I wish only what you wish,” he said, “and since you weep for our dead and gone friendship, I swear that I will bring it to life again rather than cause you fresh sorrow. But let us be frank with each other, my sweet, kind Thérèse, my dearest sister, for I no longer feel the strength to deceive you! do you summon the courage to accept my love as a deplorable discovery that you have made, and as a disease of which you propose to cure me by patience and pity. I will do my utmost in that direction, I swear to you! I will not ask you for so much as a kiss, and I think that will not cost me so much as you might fear, for I do not yet know whether my senses are involved in all this. No, really I do not think it. How could it be so, after the life I have led and am at liberty to lead still? What I feel is a thirst of the heart; why should it frighten you? Give me a little of your heart, and take all of mine. Consent to be loved by me, and do not tell me again that it is an insult to you, for what drives me to despair is to see that you despise me too much to permit me, even in a dream, to aspire to you. That lowers me so in my own eyes that it makes me long to kill the miserable devil who so offends your moral sense. Raise me, rather, from the slough into which I have fallen, and bid me expiate my evil life and become worthy of you. Yes, leave me a ray of hope! however faint it may be, it will make another man of me. You will see, you will see, Thérèse! The mere idea of striving to seem a better man to you gives me strength already; I can feel it! do not take it from me. What will become of me if you spurn me? I shall descend again all the steps I have climbed up since I have known you. All the fruit of our sacred friendship will be lost, so far as I am concerned. You will have tried to cure a sick man, and will have killed him instead! And then, too, will you yourself, who are so noble and so good, be content with your work? will you not reproach yourself for not having conducted it to a better end? Be to me a Sister of Charity, who does not confine herself to dressing the hurts of a wounded man, but who strives to reconcile his soul with Heaven. Come, Thérèse, do not withdraw your faithful hands from mine, do not turn away your face, so lovely in sorrow. I will not leave your feet until you have at least forgiven me for loving you, if you have not authorized me to love you!”
Thérèse could but accept this effusion as serious, for Laurent was perfectly honest. To hold him off with distrust would have been equivalent to an avowal of the too warm affection which she had for him; a woman who shows fear is already vanquished. So she assumed a brave face, and perhaps it was not mere affectation, for she believed that her strength was still equal to the task. Indeed, she was not ill-advised by her very weakness.
To break with him at that moment would have been to arouse terrible emotions which it was much better to appease, reserving the right to relax the bond gently, with skill and prudence. That might be a matter of some days. Laurent was so impressionable, and rushed so abruptly from one extreme to the other!
So they both calmed down, assisting each other to forget the storm, and even exerting themselves to laugh at it, in order to afford each other mutual encouragement touching the future; but, do what they would, their position was essentially changed, and their intimacy had taken a giant’s stride. The fear of losing each other had brought them nearer together, and, while vowing that there had been no change in their friendship, there was in all their words and thoughts a sort of languor of the heart, a sort of rapturous fatigue, which was in effect the enfranchisement of love!
Catherine, when she brought the tea, put them completely at their ease by her artless, maternal solicitude.
“You would do much better,” she said to Thérèse, “to eat the wing of a chicken instead of making a hole in your stomach with this tea!—Do you know,” she said to Laurent, pointing at her mistress, “that she never touched her dinner?”
“Then let her sup at once!” cried Laurent. “Don’t say no, Thérèse; you must do it! What in Heaven’s name would become of me if you should be taken sick?”
And as Thérèse refused to eat, for she really was not hungry, he declared, at a sign from Catherine urging him to insist, that he was hungry himself; and that was quite true, for he had forgotten to dine. Thereupon Thérèse was delighted to give him some supper; and they ate together for the first time, which was no trivial occurrence in Thérèse’s lonely and modest life. To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion, as the word indicates.
Laurent, whose ideas naturally took a poetic turn, even in the midst of merriment, laughingly compared himself to the Prodigal Son, for whom Catherine made haste to kill the fatted calf. This fatted calf, which presented itself in the guise of a meagre chicken, naturally added to the gaiety of the two friends. It was so little for the young man’s appetite to feed upon, that Thérèse was distressed. The quarter was sadly lacking in resources, and Laurent insisted that Catherine should not put herself out for him. In the depths of a closet they unearthed a huge jar of guava jelly. It was a present from Palmer, which Thérèse had forgotten to open, but which Laurent opened and attacked with great zest, talking meanwhile with the utmost warmth of the excellent Dick, of whom he had been foolish enough to be jealous, and whom he should love thenceforth with all his heart.
“You see, Thérèse,” he said, “how unjust disappointment makes us! Believe me, children should be spoiled. Only those who are treated gently, turn out well. So give me plenty of guavas, now and always! Harshness is not simply a bitter gall, it is a deadly poison!”
When the tea arrived, Laurent discovered that he had devoured the chicken like a selfish glutton, and that Thérèse had eaten nothing at all. He rebuked himself for his heedlessness and confessed it; then he dismissed Catherine, and insisted upon making the tea himself and waiting on Thérèse. It was the first time in his life that he had ever waited on any one, and he found therein an exquisite enjoyment which he recognized with ingenuous surprise.
“Now,” he said to Thérèse, as he knelt to offer her her cup, “I can understand how one can be a servant and enjoy his profession.”
From certain people, even the most trivial attentions have an extraordinary value. There was in Laurent’s manners, and even in his attitudes, a certain stiffness which he never laid aside, even with society women. He offered them attentions with the ceremonious coldness of the most rigid etiquette. With Thérèse, who did the honors of her little home like the excellent woman and good-humored artist that she was, he had always been cared for and coddled without having to reciprocate. He would have shown a lack of taste and of tact in assuming to act as the man of the house. Suddenly, as a result of those tears and mutual outpourings of the heart, he found himself, without in the least understanding how it happened, invested with rights which did not belong to him, but which he seized upon as if by inspiration, without opposition on the part of the surprised and deeply moved Thérèse. It seemed to him that he was under his own roof, and that he had won the privilege of looking after the mistress of the house, like a loving brother or an old friend. And Thérèse, without a thought of the danger of this taking possession, watched him with wide-open, wondering eyes, asking herself if she had not been radically mistaken hitherto in regarding that affectionate and devoted child as a reserved and gloomy man.
However, Thérèse reflected during the night; but, in the morning, Laurent, who, although he had no premeditated plan, did not propose to give her time to breathe,—for he had ceased to breathe himself,—sent her magnificent flowers, rare sweetmeats, and a note so loving, so gentle and respectful, that she could not fail to be touched by it. He said that he was the happiest of men, that he desired nothing more except her forgiveness, and that, as soon as he had obtained that, he should be the king of the world. He would accept any deprivation, any harsh decree, provided only that he was not forbidden to see and talk with his friend. That alone would be beyond his strength; all the rest was as nothing. He was well aware that Thérèse could have no love for him; which fact did not deter him from saying, ten lines lower down: “Is not our sanctified love indissoluble?”
And stating thus the pros and the con’s, the false and the true, a hundred times a day, with a candor by which he was unquestionably deceived himself, encompassing Thérèse with delicate attentions, striving with all his heart to give her confidence in the chastity of their relations, and at every instant talking to her in a lofty strain of his adoration for her, seeking to divert her when she was disturbed in mind, to cheer her when she was sad, to melt her toward himself when she was stern, he led her insensibly to the point where she had no other will and no other existence than his.
Nothing is so perilous as those intimacies in which the parties have exchanged a promise not to attack each other, when neither of the two inspires a secret physical repulsion in the other. Artists, because of their independent life and the nature of their occupations, which oblige them often to depart from social conventions, are more exposed to these perils than they who live by rule and whose imaginations are less active. We should forgive them, therefore, for more sudden impressions and more feverish impulses. Public opinion realizes this duty, for it is generally more indulgent to those who go astray, perforce, in the tempest than those whose lives are passed in a flat calm. And then the world demands from artists the fire of inspiration, and that fire, which overflows for the enjoyment and enthusiasm of the public, must inevitably consume themselves in time. Then we pity them; and the honest bourgeois, returning to his family at night, after learning of their misfortunes and downfall, says to his excellent and gentle helpmeet:
“You remember that poor girl who sang so well? she is dead of a broken heart. And that famous poet who wrote such fine verses has killed himself. It’s a great pity, wife. All those people end badly. We, the simple creatures, are the happy ones.”
And the honest bourgeois is right.
Thérèse had lived a long while, however, if not as an honest bourgeois,—for one must have a family for that, and God had denied her a family,—at all events as a hard-working young woman, working from early morning, and not regaling herself with pleasure or sloth at the end of her day’s work. She constantly aspired to the joys of a regular, domestic life; she loved order, and, far from displaying the childish contempt which certain artists lavished upon what they called, in those days, the grocer class, she bitterly regretted that she had not married in that safe and modest social circle where she would have found affection and security instead of talent and renown. But we do not choose our own destinies, for fools and ambitious mortals are not the only imprudent wights whom destiny overwhelms.