Part 18

The dream I was dreaming at the moment that she waked me in such pleasant fashion was not very far removed from the reality.--My chamber looked on the little lake I described just now. The window was surrounded by jasmin, which shook its stars over my floor in a silvery shower: large, exotic flowers swayed in the wind under my balcony as if to waft incense up to me; a vague, sweet perfume, composed of a thousand different perfumes, penetrated to my bed, from which I could see the water gleaming and flashing with millions of spangles; the birds chattered and warbled and whistled and chirped; it was a confusion of harmonious sounds like the hum and buzz of a fête.--Opposite, on a hill-side lying in the sunlight, was a smooth field of a golden green, with fat cattle feeding here and there, under the care of a small boy.--Higher up the hill and farther away were great patches of forest of a darker green, above which the bluish smoke of charcoal-kilns rose in spiral columns.

Every detail of the picture was calm and fresh and smiling, and wherever I turned my eyes, I saw only what was young and fair. My chamber was hung with chintz, with mats on the floor, and blue Japanese jars with rounded bodies and tapering necks, filled with strange flowers, artistically arranged on étagères and on the dark-blue marble chimney-piece; the fire-place also was filled with flowers. Panels above the doors, representing rural or pastoral scenes, bright-colored and daintily executed, sofas and divans in every nook and corner--and a lovely young woman, all in white, whose flesh gave a delicate pink tinge to the transparent dress where it came in contact with it: one can conceive nothing better calculated to give pleasure to the soul as well as to the eyes.

And so my gratified, careless glance wandered, with equal pleasure, from a magnificent jar thickly strewn with dragons and mandarins, to Rosette's slipper, and thence to the corner of her shoulder that glistened under the lawn; it rested on the fluttering stars of the jasmin and the white hairs of the willows on the bank, crossed the water and sauntered over the hill-side, then returned to the chamber to fix itself on the rose-colored ribbons of some shepherdess's long corset.

Through the openings in the foliage the sky showed millions of blue eyes; the water rippled gently and I gave myself up to the enjoyment of the moment, plunged in blissful tranquillity, saying nothing, with my hand still in Rosette's tiny hands.

It is of no use to talk: happiness is white and pink; it can hardly be represented otherwise. Delicate colors belong to it as of right. It has on its palette only sea-green, sky-blue and light yellow: its pictures are all light like those of the Chinese painters. Flowers, bright light, perfumes, a soft and velvety skin touching yours, a veiled melody coming from you know not where,--with those one can be perfectly happy; there is no way of being happy otherwise. I myself, who have a horror of the commonplace, who dream only of strange adventures, violent passions, frenzied bliss, unusual and difficult situations, I must be happy like an animal in that way, and, whatever I may do, I can find no other.

I beg you to believe that I made none of these reflections at the time; they have come to me since as I sat here writing to you; at that moment I thought of nothing but enjoying myself--the only occupation of a reasonable man.

I will not describe the life we lead here, it is easily imagined. There are walks under the great trees, violets and strawberries, kisses and little blue flowers, luncheons on the grass, readings and books forgotten under the trees; water parties with the end of a scarf or a white hand dipping in the stream, long ballads and long laughter repeated by the echoes of the bank;--the most Arcadian life imaginable!

Rosette overwhelms me with caresses and little attentions; more amorous than the dove in May, she twines about me and envelops me in her folds; she tries to let me breathe no other atmosphere than her breath and see no other horizon than her eyes; she maintains a very strict blockade and allows nothing to go in or out without permission; she has built a little guard-house beside my heart, from which she keeps watch on it night and day.--She says delightful things to me; she makes very complimentary speeches; she sits on my knee and acts in my presence exactly like a submissive slave before her lord and master; all of which suits me very well, for I like such little humble ways and I have a leaning toward Oriental despotism; she doesn't do the smallest thing without asking my opinion, and seems to have completely laid aside her own fancy and her will; she tries to divine my thought and anticipate it; she crushes me with her wit, her affection and her submission; she is perfect enough to throw out of the window.--How in the devil can I leave a woman so adorable without seeming to be a monster? It would be enough to discredit my heart forever.

Oh! how I would like to catch her tripping, to find some grievance against her! how impatiently I await an opportunity for a quarrel! but there is no danger that the hussy will give me one! When I speak sharply to her, in a harsh tone, to bring about a quarrel, she answers me so sweetly, in such a silvery voice, with her eyes swimming in tears, and such a sad, loving expression, that I seem to myself to be more than a tiger, or at least a crocodile, and, inwardly raging, I am forced to ask her pardon.

She is literally murdering me with love; she puts me to the question and every day she draws closer the planks between which I am caught. She probably wants to drive me to tell her that I detest her, that she bores me to death, and that, if she doesn't leave me in peace, I will slash her face with my hunting crop. Pardieu! she will succeed, and if she continues to be as amiable, it will be before long or may the devil carry me off!

Notwithstanding all this fine show, Rosette is surfeited with me as I am with her; but as she has done some notoriously foolish things for me, she doesn't want to take to herself the discredit of a rupture in the eyes of the excellent corporation of sensible women. Every great passion claims to be everlasting, and it is very convenient to assume the credit of that everlastingness without suffering its disadvantages.--Rosette reasons thus:--"Here is a young man who has hardly a vestige of fondness left for me, and, as he is simple-minded and easy-going, he doesn't dare show it openly and doesn't know which way to turn: it is plain that I bore him, but he will wear his life out in the toils rather than take it on himself to leave me. As he is a poet after a fashion, he has his head full of fine phrases about love and passion, and considers himself bound in conscience to be a Tristan or an Amadis. Now, as nothing in the world is more insupportable than the caresses of a person one is beginning not to love--and to cease to love a woman is to hate her intensely--I propose to lavish them on him in a way to sicken him, and the result will be either that he will send me to the devil or will begin to love me again as he did on the first day, which he will take very good care not to do."

No reasoning could be better.--Isn't it charming to play the part of the abandoned Ariadne?--People pity you and admire you, and there are no imprecations strong enough for the infamous wretch who has been so inhuman as to abandon such an adorable creature; you assume an air of grieved resignation, you put your hand under your chin and your elbow on your knee so as to show off the pretty blue veins in your wrist. You wear your hair more dishevelled, and your dresses for some little time are of soberer hue. You avoid mentioning the ingrate's name, but you make roundabout allusions to him, at the same time heaving beautifully modulated little sighs.

A woman so good, so beautiful, so passionate, who has made such great sacrifices, who has done nothing worthy of blame, a chosen vessel, a pearl of love, a spotless mirror, a drop of milk, a white rose, an ideal essence to perfume a life;--a woman whom you should have adored on your knees, and who will have to be cut in little pieces after her death, to make relics:--such a woman to be abandoned iniquitously, villainously, fraudulently! Why a pirate would do no worse! To give her her death-blow!--for she certainly will die of it.--One must have a paving-stone in his breast, instead of a heart, to act so.

O men! men!

I say this to myself, but perhaps it's not true.

However great actresses women naturally are, I find it hard to believe that they carry it as far as that; and, when all is said, are all Rosette's demonstrations simply the exact expression of her sentiments for me?--However it may be, the continuation of the tête-à-tête is impossible, and the fair chatelaine has at last issued invitations to her acquaintances in the neighborhood. We are busily engaged making preparations to receive the worthy provincials.--Adieu, my dear fellow.

I was mistaken.--My evil heart, incapable of love, seized upon that reason to deliver itself from the burden of a gratitude it did not wish to bear; I joyfully grasped that idea to excuse myself to my own conscience; I clung fast to it, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Rosette was not playing a part, and if ever woman was true, she is the woman.--Ah! well! I am almost angry with her for the sincerity of her passion, which is an additional bond and makes a rupture more difficult or less excusable; I would prefer her to be false and fickle.

What an extraordinary position! You long to go, but you stay; you long to say: "I hate you," but you say: "I love you;"--your past urges you forward and prevents you from turning back or stopping. You are faithful and you regret it. An indefinable sense of shame prevents your abandoning yourself altogether to other acquaintances and leads you to compromise with yourself. You give to one all you can steal from the other and at the same time keep up appearances; the opportunities for meeting which formerly came about so naturally are very hard to find to-day.--You begin to remember that you have business of importance.--Such a perplexing situation as that is very painful, but it is much less so than my present situation.--When it is a new friendship that steals you from the old, it is easier to extricate yourself. Hope smiles sweetly upon you from the threshold of the house that contains your new-born love.--A fairer and rosier illusion hovers on its white wings over the scarce-closed tomb of its sister who has died; another flower, blooming more radiantly and of sweeter perfume, upon whose petals trembles a celestial tear, has suddenly sprung forth from among the withered calyxes of the old bouquet;--lovely, azure-hued perspectives open before you; avenues of fresh and unpretentious beeches stretch away to the horizon; there are gardens with white statues here and there, or a bench against an ivy-covered wall, lawns dotted with marguerites, narrow balconies, on whose rails you lean and gaze at the moon, and shadows cut by fleeting rays of light;--salons from which the daylight is excluded by heavy curtains;--all the darkness and isolation that the passion craves which dares not avow itself. It is as if your youth had come again. You have, moreover, a complete change of haunts and habits and persons; you feel a sort of remorse, to be sure; but the desire that flutters and hums about your head, like a bee in spring, prevents your hearing its voice; the void in your heart is filled and your memories are effaced by present impressions,--But in my case it is different: I love no one and it is from weariness and disgust with myself rather than with her that I wish I were able to break with Rosette.

My former ideas, which had become a little indistinct in my mind, are coming to the front again, more foolish than ever.--I am, as formerly, tortured by the longing to have a mistress, and, as formerly, even in Rosette's arms I doubt whether I have ever had one.--I see once more the lovely lady at her window, in her park of the time of Louis XIII., and the huntress on her white horse gallops along the forest path.--My ideal beauty smiles upon me from her hammock of clouds, I fancy that I recognize her voice in the song of the birds, in the rustling of the foliage; it seems to me that some one is calling me from every direction, and that the daughters of the air brush my face with the fringe of their invisible scarfs. As in the days of my agitation, I imagine that, if I should set out instantly and go somewhere very far away at great speed, I should reach some place where things that concern me are taking place and where my destiny is being decided.--I feel that somebody is impatiently awaiting my coming in some corner of the earth, I don't know where. Some suffering soul who cannot come to me is calling eagerly to me and dreaming of me; that is the reason of my uneasiness and of my inability to remain in one place; I am being violently drawn away from my centre. Mine is not one of those natures to which others flock, one of those fixed stars about which other radiant bodies gravitate; I must needs wander through the expanse of heaven like an erratic meteor, until I have fallen in with the planet whose satellite I am to be, the Saturn about whom I am to pass my ring. Oh! when will that union take place? Until then I cannot hope for rest or peace of mind, but I shall be like the bewildered, vacillating needle of a compass, seeking its pole.

I allowed my wing to be caught in the deceitful snare, hoping to leave only a feather there and to retain the power to fly away when it seemed good to me: nothing could be more difficult; I find myself covered by an invisible net, harder to break than the one forged by Vulcan, and the mesh is so fine and close that there are no openings through which I can escape. The net is large and roomy, however, and I can move about in it with an appearance of freedom; it is hardly perceptible except when you try to break it; but then it resists and becomes as firm as a wall of brass.

How much time I have lost, O my ideal! without the slightest effort to realize thee! How basely I have yielded to the temptation of a night's pleasure! and how little I deserve to meet thee!

Sometimes I think of forming another liaison; but I have no one in view; more frequently I make up my mind that, if I succeed in bringing about a rupture, I will never again involve myself in such bonds, and yet there is nothing to justify that resolution, for the present connection has been, to all appearance, a very happy one and I have no reason in the world for complaining of Rosette.--She has always been kind to me, and has behaved as well as any one could; she has been exemplarily faithful to me and has not given an opening for suspicion; the most alert and most anxious jealousy could have had no word of blame for her and must have slept in security.--A jealous man could have been jealous only of the past; in that direction, it is true, there was ample ground for jealousy. But luckily, jealousy of that sort is a very rare article, and one has quite enough to do to look after the present without going back to fumble under the ashes of extinct passion for phials of poison and cups of gall.--What woman could a man love, if he thought of all that?--You may have a sort of vague idea that a woman has had several lovers before you; but you say to yourself--a man's pride has so many tortuous folds and counterfolds!--that you are the first she has really loved, and that it was through a combination of fatal circumstances that she became connected with men unworthy of her, or else through a vague craving of a heart that sought to satisfy itself and changed because it had not met its affinity.

Perhaps one can really love none but a virgin--a virgin in body and in mind--a fragile bud that has never been caressed as yet by any zephyr and whose carefully hidden breast has neither received the drop of rain nor the pearl of dew; a chaste flower that displays its white robe for you alone, a beautiful lily with a silver urn at which no desire has slaked its thirst and which has been gilded only by your sun, swayed by no breath but yours, watered by no hand but yours.--The glare of the noonday sun is less agreeable than the divine pallor of the dawn, and all the ardor of an experienced heart that knows what life is, yields the palm to the celestial ignorance of a youthful heart just awaking to love.--Ah! what a bitter, degrading thought it is that you are wiping away another's kisses, that there may not be a single spot upon that brow, those lips, that bosom, those shoulders, that whole body which is yours now, that has not been reddened and branded by other lips; that those divine murmurs which come to the relief of the tongue that can find no more words of love, have been heard before; that those excited senses did not learn their ecstasy and their delirium from you, and that away, away down in one of those recesses of the heart which are never visited, there lives an inexorable memory which compares the joys of an earlier day to the joys of to-day!

Although my natural nonchalance leads me to prefer the high roads to unbroken paths, and the public watering-trough to the mountain spring, I absolutely must try to love some virginal creature as spotless as the snow, as timid as the sensitive plant, who can only blush and look down; it may be that, from that limpid stream, which no diver has as yet investigated, I shall fish up a pearl of the fairest water, worthy to be a pendant to Cleopatra's; but, in order to do that, I should have to cast off the bond that binds me to Rosette,--for I am not likely to realize that longing with her,--and to tell the truth, I do not feel strong enough to do it.

And then, too, if I must make the confession, there is at the bottom of my heart a secret, shameful motive, which dares not show itself in broad daylight, but which I must tell you of, since I have promised to conceal nothing from you, and a confession, to be deserving of credit, must be complete;--the motive I speak of has much to do with all this uncertainty.--If I break with Rosette, some time must necessarily pass before her place is filled, however easy of access the class of women may be among whom I shall seek her successor; and I have fallen into a habit of enjoying myself with her which it will be hard for me to break off. To be sure I have the resource of courtesans; I liked them well enough in the old days and I did not hesitate to resort to them under such circumstances;--but to-day they disgust me beyond measure and make me ill.--So I must not think of them, and I am so softened by indulgence, the poison has penetrated so deep into my bones that I cannot bear the idea of being one or two months without a woman.--That is pure egoism of the basest kind; but it is my opinion that the most virtuous men, if they would be perfectly frank, would have to make nearly a similar confession.

That is the true secret of my captivity and, if it weren't for that, Rosette and I would long ago have fallen out for good and all. Indeed it is such a deathly bore to pay court to a woman, that I haven't the heart to attempt it. To begin again the charming idiocies I have already said so many times, to play the adorable once more, to write notes and reply to them; to escort the charmer, in the evening, to some place two leagues away; to catch cold in your feet and your head standing in front of the window watching a beloved shadow; to sit upon a sofa calculating how many thicknesses of tissue separate you from your goddess; to carry bouquets and go the round of the ball-rooms to reach the point where I now am, is a vast deal of trouble!--It's about as well to remain in one's rut.--What is the use of leaving it, only to fall into another exactly like it, after much unnecessary agitation and untold trouble? If I were in love, the thing would go of itself and it would all seem perfectly delightful to me; but I am not, although I have the most earnest desire to be; for, after all, there is nothing but love in the world; and if pleasure, which is only its shadow, has so many allurements for us, what must the reality be? In what an ocean of ineffable bliss, in what seas of pure, unalloyed delight must they swim whose hearts Love has pierced with one of his gold-tipped arrows, and who burn with the delicious warmth of a mutual flame!

Beside Rosette I feel that insipid tranquillity, that sort of slothful well-being which results from the satisfaction of the senses, but nothing more; and that is not enough. Often that voluptuous indolence turns to torpor, and that tranquillity to ennui; thereupon I fall into aimless meditation and dull, spiritless reveries that weary and harass me;--it is a state of things that I must put an end to at any price.

Oh! if I could only be like some of my friends, who kiss an old glove with ecstasy; who are made perfectly happy by a clasp of the hand; who would not exchange for a sultana's jewel-case a few wretched flowers half-withered by the heat of the ball-room; who cover with tears and sew into their shirt, where it will rest against the heart, a note written in an inelegant style and so stupid that you would think it was copied from the Parfait Secrétaire; who adore women with large feet and apologize for them on the ground that they have noble souls! If I could follow tremblingly the vanishing folds of a dress, or wait for a door to open in order to see a cherished white apparition pass in a blaze of light; if a word spoken beneath the breath would make me change color; if I had the virtue to go without my dinner so as to arrive sooner at a rendezvous; if I were capable of killing a rival or fighting a duel with a husband; if by a special dispensation of Providence, I were endowed with the power of considering ugly women clever, and those who are ugly and stupid as well, pleasant and agreeable; if I could make up my mind to dance the minuet and to listen to sonatas played by young ladies on the harpsichord or harp; if my capacity should rise to the height of learning ombre and reversis; in short, if I were a man and not a poet--I certainly should be much happier than I am; I should be less bored myself and should bore others less.