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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Red Lily, by Anatole France, entire
+#9 in our series The French Immortals Crowned by the French Academy
+#7 in our series by Anatole France
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+Title: The Red Lily, complete
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Release Date: April, 2003  [Etext #3922]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 08/26/01]
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Red Lily, entire, by Anatole France
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RED LILY
+
+By ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+
+
+The real name of the subject of this preface is Jacques-Anatole Thibault.
+He was born in Paris, April 16, 1844, the son of a bookseller of the Quai
+Malaquais, in the shadow of the Institute.  He was educated at the
+College Stanislas and published in 1868 an essay upon Alfred de Vigny.
+This was followed by two volumes of poetry: 'Les Poemes Dores' (1873),
+and 'Les Noces Corinthiennes' (1876).  With the last mentioned book his
+reputation became established.
+
+Anatole France belongs to the class of poets known as "Les Parnassiens."
+Yet a book like 'Les Noces Corinthiennes' ought to be classified among a
+group of earlier lyrics, inasmuch as it shows to a large degree the
+influence of Andre Chenier and Alfred de Vigny.  France was, and is,
+also a diligent contributor to many journals and reviews, among others,
+'Le Globe, Les Debats, Le Journal Officiel, L'Echo de Paris, La Revue de
+Famille, and Le Temps'.  On the last mentioned journal he succeeded Jules
+Claretie.  He is likewise Librarian to the Senate, and has been a member
+of the French Academy since 1896.
+
+The above mentioned two volumes of poetry were followed by many works in
+prose, which we shall notice.  France's critical writings are collected
+in four volumes, under the title, 'La Vie Litteraire' (1888-1892); his
+political articles in 'Opinions Sociales' (2 vols., 1902).  He combines
+in his style traces of Racine, Voltaire, Flaubert, and Renan, and,
+indeed, some of his novels, especially 'Thais' (1890), 'Jerome Coignard'
+(1893), and Lys Rouge (1894), which was crowned by the Academy, are
+romances of the first rank.
+
+Criticism appears to Anatole France the most recent and possibly the
+ultimate evolution of literary expression, "admirably suited to a highly
+civilized society, rich in souvenirs and old traditions .  .  .  .  It
+proceeds," in his opinion, "from philosophy and history, and demands for
+its development an absolute intellectual liberty .  .  .  .  .  It is the
+last in date of all literary forms, and it will end by absorbing them all
+.  .  .  .  To be perfectly frank the critic should say: 'Gentlemen, I
+propose to enlarge upon my own thoughts concerning Shakespeare, Racine,
+Pascal, Goethe, or any other writer.'"
+
+It is hardly necessary to say much concerning a critic with such
+pronounced ideas as Anatole France.  He gives us, indeed, the full flower
+of critical Renanism, but so individualized as to become perfection in
+grace, the extreme flowering of the Latin genius.  It is not too much to
+say that the critical writings of Anatole France recall the Causeries du
+Lundi, the golden age of Sainte-Beuve!
+
+As a writer of fiction, Anatole France made his debut in 1879 with
+'Jocaste', and 'Le Chat Maigre'.  Success in this field was yet decidedly
+doubtful when 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' appeared in 1881.  It at
+once established his reputation; 'Sylvestre Bonnard', as 'Le Lys Rouge'
+later, was crowned by the French Academy.  These novels are replete with
+fine irony, benevolent scepticism and piquant turns, and will survive the
+greater part of romances now read in France.  The list of Anatole
+France's works in fiction is a large one.  The titles of nearly all of
+them, arranged in chronological order, are as follows: 'Les Desirs de
+Jean Seyvien (1882); Abeille (1883); Le Livre de mon Ami (1885); Nos
+Enfants (1886); Balthazar (1889); Thais (1890); L'Etui de Naire (1892);
+Jerome Coignard, and La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedanque (1893); and
+Histoire Contemporaine (1897-1900), the latter consisting of four
+separate works: 'L'Orme du Mail, Le Mannequin d'Osier, L'Anneau
+d'Amethyste, and Monsieur Bergeret a Paris'.  All of his writings show
+his delicately critical analysis of passion, at first playfully tender in
+its irony, but later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to
+Brunetiere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter.  In 'Thais' he has
+undertaken to show the bond of sympathy that unites the pessimistic
+sceptic to the Christian ascetic, since both despise the world.  In 'Lys
+Rouge', his greatest novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that
+separates love from hate; in 'Opinions de M. l'Abbe Jerome Coignard' he
+has given us the most radical breviary of scepticism that has appeared
+since Montaigne.  'Le Livre de mon Ami' is mostly autobiographical;
+'Clio' (1900) contains historical sketches.
+
+To represent Anatole France as one of the undying names in literature
+would hardly be extravagant.  Not that I would endow Ariel with the
+stature and sinews of a Titan; this were to miss his distinctive
+qualities: delicacy, elegance, charm.  He belongs to a category of
+writers who are more read and probably will ever exercise greater
+influence than some of greater name.  The latter show us life as a whole;
+but life as a whole is too vast and too remote to excite in most of us
+more than a somewhat languid curiosity.  France confines himself to
+themes of the keenest personal interest, the life of the world we live
+in.  It is herein that he excels!  His knowledge is wide, his sympathies
+are many-sided, his power of exposition is unsurpassed.  No one has set
+before us the mind of our time, with its half-lights, its shadowy vistas,
+its indefiniteness, its haze on the horizon, so vividly as he.
+
+In Octave Mirbeau's notorious novel, a novel which it would be
+complimentary to describe as naturalistic, the heroine is warned by her
+director against the works of Anatole France, "Ne lisez jamais du
+Voltaire.  .  .  C'est un peche mortel .  .  .  ni de Renan .  .  .  ni
+de l'Anatole France.  Voila qui est dangereux."  The names are
+appropriately united; a real, if not precisely an apostolic, succession
+exists between the three writers.
+
+                              JULES LEMAITRE
+     de l'Academie Francais
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK 1.
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+"I NEED LOVE"
+
+She gave a glance at the armchairs placed before the chimney, at the tea-
+table, which shone in the shade, and at the tall, pale stems of flowers
+ascending above Chinese vases.  She thrust her hand among the flowery
+branches of the guelder roses to make their silvery balls quiver.  Then
+she looked at herself in a mirror with serious attention.  She held
+herself sidewise, her neck turned over her shoulder, to follow with her
+eyes the spring of her fine form in its sheath-like black satin gown,
+around which floated a light tunic studded with pearls wherein sombre
+lights scintillated.  She went nearer, curious to know her face of that
+day.  The mirror returned her look with tranquillity, as if this amiable
+woman whom she examined, and who was not unpleasing to her, lived without
+either acute joy or profound sadness.
+
+On the walls of the large drawing-room, empty and silent, the figures of
+the tapestries, vague as shadows, showed pallid among their antique games
+and dying graces.  Like them, the terra-cotta statuettes on slender
+columns, the groups of old Saxony, and the paintings of Sevres, spoke of
+past glories.  On a pedestal ornamented with precious bronzes, the marble
+bust of some princess royal disguised as Diana appeared about to fly out
+of her turbulent drapery, while on the ceiling a figure of Night,
+powdered like a marquise and surrounded by cupids, sowed flowers.
+Everything was asleep, and only the crackling of the logs and the light
+rattle of Therese's pearls could be heard.
+
+Turning from the mirror, she lifted the corner of a curtain and saw
+through the window, beyond the dark trees of the quay, the Seine
+spreading its yellow reflections.  Weariness of the sky and of the water
+was reflected in her fine gray eyes.  The boat passed, the 'Hirondelle',
+emerging from an arch of the Alma Bridge, and carrying humble travellers
+toward Grenelle and Billancourt.  She followed it with her eyes, then let
+the curtain fall, and, seating herself under the flowers, took a book
+from the table.  On the straw-colored linen cover shone the title in
+gold: 'Yseult la Blonde', by Vivian Bell.  It was a collection of French
+verses composed by an Englishwoman, and printed in London.  She read
+indifferently, waiting for visitors, and thinking less of the poetry than
+of the poetess, Miss Bell, who was perhaps her most agreeable friend, and
+whom she almost never saw; who, at every one of their meetings, which
+were so rare, kissed her, calling her "darling," and babbled; who, plain
+yet seductive, almost ridiculous, yet wholly exquisite, lived at Fiesole
+like a philosopher, while England celebrated her as her most beloved
+poet.  Like Vernon Lee and like Mary Robinson, she had fallen in love
+with the life and art of Tuscany; and, without even finishing her
+Tristan, the first part of which had inspired in Burne-Jones dreamy
+aquarelles, she wrote Provencal verses and French poems expressing
+Italian ideas.  She had sent her 'Yseult la Blonde' to "Darling," with a
+letter inviting her to spend a month with her at Fiesole.  She had
+written: "Come; you will see the most beautiful things in the world, and
+you will embellish them."
+
+And "darling" was saying to herself that she would not go, that she must
+remain in Paris.  But the idea of seeing Miss Bell in Italy was not
+indifferent to her.  And turning the leaves of the book, she stopped by
+chance at this line:
+
+                    Love and gentle heart are one.
+
+And she asked herself, with gentle irony, whether Miss Bell had ever been
+in love, and what manner of man could be the ideal of Miss Bell.  The
+poetess had at Fiesole an escort, Prince Albertinelli.  He was very
+handsome, but rather coarse and vulgar; too much so to please an aesthete
+who blended with the desire for love the mysticism of an Annunciation.
+
+"Good-evening, Therese.  I am positively worn out."
+
+The Princess Seniavine had entered, supple in her furs, which almost
+seemed to form a part of her dark beauty.  She seated herself brusquely,
+and, in a voice at once harsh yet caressing, said:
+
+"This morning I walked through the park with General Lariviere.  I met
+him in an alley and made him go with me to the bridge, where he wished to
+buy from the guardian a learned magpie which performs the manual of arms
+with a gun.  Oh!  I am so tired!"
+
+"But why did you drag the General to the bridge?"
+
+"Because he had gout in his toe."
+
+Therese shrugged her shoulders, smiling:
+
+"You squander your wickedness.  You spoil things."
+
+"And you wish me, dear, to save my kindness and my wickedness for a
+serious investment?"
+
+Therese made her drink some Tokay.
+
+Preceded by the sound of his powerful breathing, General Lariviere
+approached with heavy state and sat between the two women, looking
+stubborn and self-satisfied, laughing in every wrinkle of his face.
+
+"How is Monsieur Martin-Belleme?  Always busy?"
+
+Therese thought he was at the Chamber, and even that he was making a
+speech there.
+
+Princess Seniavine, who was eating caviare sandwiches, asked Madame
+Martin why she had not gone to Madame Meillan's the day before.  They had
+played a comedy there.
+
+"A Scandinavian play?  Was it a success?"
+
+"Yes--I don't know.  I was in the little green room, under the portrait
+of the Duc d'Orleans.  Monsieur Le Menil came to me and did me one of
+those good turns that one never forgets.  He saved me from Monsieur
+Garain."
+
+The General, who knew the Annual Register, and stored away all useful
+information, pricked up his ears.
+
+"Garain," he asked, "the minister who was in the Cabinet when the princes
+were exiled?"
+
+"Himself.  I was excessively agreeable to him.  He talked to me of the
+yearnings of his heart and he looked at me with alarming tenderness.
+And from time to time he gazed, with sighs, at the portrait of the Duc
+d'Orleans.  I said to him: 'Monsieur Garain, you are making a mistake.
+It is my sister-in-law who is an Orleanist.  I am not.'  At this moment
+Monsieur Le Menil came to escort me to the buffet.  He paid great
+compliments--to my horses!  He said, also, there was nothing so beautiful
+as the forest in winter.  He talked about wolves.  That refreshed me."
+
+The General, who did not like young men, said he had met Le Menil the day
+before in the forest, galloping, with vast space between himself and his
+saddle.
+
+He declared that old cavaliers alone retained the traditions of good
+horsemanship; that people in society now rode like jockeys.
+
+"It is the same with fencing," he added.  "Formerly--"
+
+Princess Seniavine interrupted him:
+
+"General, look and see how charming Madame Martin is.  She is always
+charming, but at this moment she is prettier than ever.  It is because
+she is bored.  Nothing becomes her better than to be bored.  Since we
+have been here, we have bored her terribly.  Look at her: her forehead
+clouded, her glance vague, her mouth dolorous.  Behold a victim!"
+
+She arose, kissed Therese tumultuously, and fled, leaving the General
+astonished.
+
+Madame Martin-Belleme prayed him not to listen to what the Princess had
+said.
+
+He collected himself and asked:
+
+"And how are your poets, Madame?"
+
+It was difficult for him to forgive Madame Martin her preference for
+people who lived by writing and were not of his circle.
+
+"Yes, your poets.  What has become of that Monsieur Choulette, who visits
+you wrapped in a red muffler?"
+
+"My poets?  They forget me, they abandon me.  One should not rely on
+anybody.  Men and women--nothing is sure.  Life is a continual betrayal.
+Only that poor Miss Bell does not forget me.  She has written to me from
+Florence and sent her book."
+
+"Miss Bell?  Isn't she that young person who looks, with her yellow
+waving hair, like a little lapdog?"
+
+He reflected, and expressed the opinion that she must be at least thirty.
+
+An old lady, wearing with modest dignity her crown of white hair, and a
+little vivacious man with shrewd eyes, came in suddenly--Madame Marmet
+and M. Paul Vence.  Then, carrying himself very stiffly, with a square
+monocle in his eye, appeared M. Daniel Salomon, the arbiter of elegance.
+The General hurried out.
+
+They talked of the novel of the week.  Madame Marmet had dined often with
+the author, a young and very amiable man.  Paul Vence thought the book
+tiresome.
+
+"Oh," sighed Madame Martin, "all books are tiresome.  But men are more
+tiresome than books, and they are more exacting."
+
+Madame Marmet said that her husband, who had much literary taste,  had
+retained, until the end of his days, a horror of naturalism. She was the
+widow of a member of the 'Academie des Inscriptions',  and plumed herself
+upon her illustrious widowhood.  She was sweet and modest in her black
+gown and her beautiful white hair.
+
+Madame Martin said to M. Daniel Salomon that she wished to consult him
+particularly on the picture of a group of beautiful children.
+
+"You will tell me if it pleases you.  You may also give me your opinion,
+Monsieur Vence, unless you disdain such trifles."
+
+M. Daniel Salomon looked at Paul Vence through his monocle with disdain.
+Paul Vence surveyed the drawing-room.
+
+"You have beautiful things, Madame.  That would be nothing.  But you have
+only beautiful things, and all serve to set off your own beauty."
+
+She did not conceal her pleasure at hearing him speak in that way.  She
+regarded Paul Vence as the only really intelligent man she knew.  She had
+appreciated him before his books had made him celebrated.  His ill-
+health, his dark humor, his assiduous labor, separated him from society.
+The little bilious man was not very pleasing; yet he attracted her.  She
+held in high esteem his profound irony, his great pride, his talent
+ripened in solitude, and she admired him, with reason, as an excellent
+writer, the author of powerful essays on art and on life.
+
+Little by little the room filled with a brilliant crowd.  Within the
+large circle of armchairs were Madame de Wesson, about whom people told
+frightful stories, and who kept, after twenty years of half-smothered
+scandal, the eyes of a child and cheeks of virginal smoothness; old
+Madame de Morlaine, who shouted her witty phrases in piercing cries;
+Madame Raymond, the wife of the Academician; Madame Garain, the wife of
+the exminister; three other ladies; and, standing easily against the
+mantelpiece, M. Berthier d'Eyzelles, editor of the 'Journal des Debats',
+a deputy who caressed his white beard while Madame de Morlaine shouted at
+him:
+
+"Your article on bimetallism is a pearl, a jewel!  Especially the end of
+it."
+
+Standing in the rear of the room, young clubmen, very grave, lisped among
+themselves:
+
+"What did he do to get the button from the Prince?"
+
+"He, nothing.  His wife, everything."
+
+They had their own cynical philosophy.  One of them had no faith in
+promises of men.
+
+"They are types that do not suit me.  They wear their hearts on their
+hands and on their mouths.  You present yourself for admission to a club.
+They say, 'I promise to give you a white ball.  It will be an alabaster
+ball--a snowball!  They vote.  It's a black ball.  Life seems a vile
+affair when I think of it."
+
+"Then don't think of it."
+
+Daniel Salomon, who had joined them, whispered in their ears spicy
+stories in a lowered voice.  And at every strange revelation concerning
+Madame Raymond, or Madame Berthier, or Princess Seniavine, he added,
+negligently:
+
+"Everybody knows it."
+
+Then, little by little, the crowd of visitors dispersed.  Only Madame
+Marmet and Paul Vence remained.
+
+The latter went toward Madame Martin, and asked:
+
+"When do you wish me to introduce Dechartre to you?"
+
+It was the second time he had asked this of her.  She did not like to see
+new faces.  She replied, unconcernedly:
+
+"Your sculptor?  When you wish.  I saw at the Champ de Mars medallions
+made by him which are very good.  But he does not work much.  He is an
+amateur, is he not?"
+
+"He is a delicate artist.  He does not need to work in order to live.
+He caresses his figures with loving slowness.  But do not be deceived
+about him, Madame.  He knows and he feels.  He would be a master if he
+did not live alone.  I have known him since his childhood.  People think
+that he is solitary and morose.  He is passionate and timid.  What he
+lacks, what he will lack always to reach the highest point of his art,
+is simplicity of mind.  He is restless, and he spoils his most beautiful
+impressions.  In my opinion he was created less for sculpture than for
+poetry or philosophy.  He knows a great deal, and you will be astonished
+at the wealth of his mind."
+
+Madame Marmet approved.
+
+She pleased society by appearing to find pleasure in it.  She listened a
+great deal and talked little.  Very affable, she gave value to her
+affability by not squandering it.  Either because she liked Madame
+Martin, or because she knew how to give discreet marks of preference in
+every house she went, she warmed herself contentedly, like a relative, in
+a corner of the Louis XVI chimney, which suited her beauty.  She lacked
+only her dog.
+
+"How is Toby?"  asked Madame Martin.  "Monsieur Vence, do you know Toby?
+He has long silky hair and a lovely little black nose."
+
+Madame Marmet was relishing the praise of Toby, when an old man, pink and
+blond, with curly hair, short-sighted, almost blind under his golden
+spectacles, rather short, striking against the furniture, bowing to empty
+armchairs, blundering into the mirrors, pushed his crooked nose before
+Madame Marmet, who looked at him indignantly.
+
+It was M. Schmoll, member of the Academie des Inscriptions.  He smiled
+and turned a madrigal for the Countess Martin with that hereditary harsh,
+coarse voice with which the Jews, his fathers, pressed their creditors,
+the peasants of Alsace, of Poland, and of the Crimea.  He dragged his
+phrases heavily.  This great philologist knew all languages except
+French.  And Madame Martin enjoyed his affable phrases, heavy and rusty
+like the iron-work of brica-brac shops, among which fell dried leaves of
+anthology.  M. Schmoll liked poets and women, and had wit.
+
+Madame Marmet feigned not to know him, and went out without returning his
+bow.
+
+When he had exhausted his pretty madrigals, M. Schmoll became sombre and
+pitiful.  He complained piteously.  He was not decorated enough, not
+provided with sinecures enough, nor well fed enough by the State--he,
+Madame Schmoll, and their five daughters.  His lamentations had some
+grandeur.  Something of the soul of Ezekiel and of Jeremiah was in them.
+
+Unfortunately, turning his golden-spectacled eyes toward the table, he
+discovered Vivian Bell's book.
+
+"Oh, 'Yseult La Blonde'," he exclaimed, bitterly.  "You are reading that
+book, Madame?  Well, learn that Mademoiselle Vivian Bell has stolen an
+inscription from me, and that she has altered it, moreover, by putting it
+into verse.  You will find it on page 109 of her book: 'A shade may weep
+over a shade.'  You hear, Madame?  'A shade may weep over a shade.' Well,
+those words are translated literally from a funeral inscription which I
+was the first to publish and to illustrate.  Last year, one day, when I
+was dining at your house, being placed by the side of Mademoiselle Bell,
+I quoted this phrase to her, and it pleased her a great deal.   At her
+request, the next day I translated into French the entire inscription and
+sent it to her.  And now I find it changed in this volume of verses under
+this title: 'On the Sacred Way'--the sacred way, that is I."
+
+And he repeated, in his bad humor:
+
+"I, Madame, am the sacred way."
+
+He was annoyed that the poet had not spoken to him about this
+inscription.  He would have liked to see his name at the top of the poem,
+in the verses, in the rhymes.  He wished to see his name everywhere, and
+always looked for it in the journals with which his pockets were stuffed.
+But he had no rancor.  He was not really angry with Miss Bell.  He
+admitted gracefully that she was a distinguished person, and a poet that
+did great honor to England.
+
+When he had gone, the Countess Martin asked ingenuously of Paul Vence if
+he knew why that good Madame Marmet had looked at M. Schmoll with such
+marked though silent anger.  He was surprised that she did not know.
+
+"I never know anything," she said.
+
+"But the quarrel between Schmoll and Marmet is famous.  It ceased only at
+the death of Marmet.
+
+"The day that poor Marmet was buried, snow was falling.  We were wet and
+frozen to the bones.  At the grave, in the wind, in the mud, Schmoll read
+under his umbrella a speech full of jovial cruelty and triumphant pity,
+which he took afterward to the newspapers in a mourning carriage.  An
+indiscreet friend let Madame Marmet hear of it, and she fainted.  Is it
+possible, Madame, that you have not heard of this learned and ferocious
+quarrel?
+
+"The Etruscan language was the cause of it.  Marmet made it his unique
+study.  He was surnamed Marmet the Etruscan.  Neither he nor any one else
+knew a word of that language, the last vestige of which is lost.  Schmoll
+said continually to Marmet: 'You do not know Etruscan, my dear colleague;
+that is the reason why you are an honorable savant and a fair-minded
+man.' Piqued by his ironic praise, Marmet thought of learning a little
+Etruscan.  He read to his colleague a memoir on the part played by
+flexions in the idiom of the ancient Tuscans."
+
+Madame Martin asked what a flexion was.
+
+"Oh, Madame, if I explain anything to you, it will mix up everything.
+Be content with knowing that in that memoir poor Marmet quoted Latin
+texts and quoted them wrong.  Schmoll is a Latinist of great learning,
+and, after Mommsen, the chief epigraphist of the world.
+
+"He reproached his young colleague--Marmet was not fifty years old--with
+reading Etruscan too well and Latin not well enough.  From that time
+Marmet had no rest.  At every meeting he was mocked unmercifully; and,
+finally, in spite of his softness, he got angry.  Schmoll is without
+rancor.  It is a virtue of his race.  He does not bear ill-will to those
+whom he persecutes.  One day, as he went up the stairway of the Institute
+with Renan and Oppert, he met Marmet, and extended his hand to him.
+Marmet refused to take it, and said 'I do not know you.'--'Do you take me
+for a Latin inscription?'  Schmoll replied.  Marmet died and was buried
+because of that satire.  Now you know the reason why his widow sees his
+enemy with horror."
+
+"And I have made them dine together, side by side."
+
+"Madame, it was not immoral, but it was cruel."
+
+"My dear sir, I shall shock you, perhaps; but if I had to choose, I
+should like better to do an immoral thing than a cruel one."
+
+A young man, tall, thin, dark, with a long moustache, entered, and bowed
+with brusque suppleness.
+
+"Monsieur Vence, I think that you know Monsieur Le Menil."
+
+They had met before at Madame Martin's, and saw each other often at the
+Fencing Club.  The day before they had met at Madame Meillan's.
+
+"Madame Meillan's--there's a house where one is bored," said Paul Vence.
+
+"Yet Academicians go there," said M. Robert Le Menil.  "I do not
+exaggerate their value, but they are the elite."
+
+Madame Martin smiled.
+
+"We know, Monsieur Le Menil, that at Madame Meillan's you are preoccupied
+by the women more than by the Academicians.  You escorted Princess
+Seniavine to the buffet and talked to her about wolves."
+
+"What wolves?"
+
+"Wolves, and forests blackened by winter.  We thought that with so pretty
+a woman your conversation was rather savage!"
+
+Paul Vence rose.
+
+"So you permit, Madame, that I should bring my friend Dechartre?  He has
+a great desire to know you, and I hope he will not displease you.  There
+is life in his mind.  He is full of ideas."
+
+"Oh, I do not ask for so much," Madame Martin said.  "People that are
+natural and show themselves as they are rarely bore me, and sometimes
+they amuse me."
+
+When Paul Vence had gone, Le Menil listened until the noise of footsteps
+had vanished; then, coming nearer:
+
+"To-morrow, at three o'clock?  Do you still love me?"
+
+He asked her to reply while they were alone.  She answered that it was
+late, that she expected no more visitors, and that no one except her
+husband would come.
+
+He entreated.  Then she said:
+
+"I shall be free to-morrow all day.  Wait for me at three o'clock."
+
+He thanked her with a look.  Then, placing himself on at the other side
+of the chimney, he asked who was that Dechartre whom she wished
+introduced to her.
+
+"I do not wish him to be introduced to me.  He is to be introduced to me.
+He is a sculptor."
+
+He deplored the fact that she needed to see new faces, adding:
+
+"A sculptor?  They are usually brutal."
+
+"Oh, but this one does so little sculpture!  But if it annoys you that I
+should meet him, I will not do so."
+
+"I should be sorry if society took any part of the time you might give to
+me."
+
+"My friend, you can not complain of that.  I did not even go to Madame
+Meillan's yesterday."
+
+"You are right to show yourself there as little as possible.  It is not a
+house for you."
+
+He explained.  All the women that went there had had some spicy adventure
+which was known and talked about.  Besides, Madame Meillan favored
+intrigue.  He gave examples.  Madame Martin, however, her hands extended
+on the arms of the chair in charming restfulness, her head inclined,
+looked at the dying embers in the grate.  Her thoughtful mood had flown.
+Nothing of it remained on her face, a little saddened, nor in her languid
+body, more desirable than ever in the quiescence of her mind.  She kept
+for a while a profound immobility, which added to her personal attraction
+the charm of things that art had created.
+
+He asked her of what she was thinking.  Escaping the magic of the blaze
+in the ashes, she said:
+
+"We will go to-morrow, if you wish, to far distant places, to the odd
+districts where the poor people live.  I like the old streets where
+misery dwells."
+
+He promised to satisfy her taste, although he let her know that he
+thought it absurd.  The walks that she led him sometimes bored him,  and
+he thought them dangerous.  People might see them.
+
+"And since we have been successful until now in not causing gossip--"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Do you think that people have not talked about us?  Whether they know or
+do not know, they talk.  Not everything is known, but everything is
+said."
+
+She relapsed into her dream.  He thought her discontented, cross, for
+some reason which she would not tell.  He bent upon her beautiful, grave
+eyes which reflected the light of the grate.  But she reassured him.
+
+"I do not know whether any one talks about me.  And what do I care?
+Nothing matters."
+
+He left her.  He was going to dine at the club, where a friend was
+waiting for him.  She followed him with her eyes, with peaceful sympathy.
+Then she began again to read in the ashes.
+
+She saw in them the days of her childhood; the castle wherein she had
+passed the sweet, sad summers; the dark and humid park; the pond where
+slept the green water; the marble nymphs under the chestnut-trees, and
+the bench on which she had wept and desired death.  To-day she still
+ignored the cause of her youthful despair, when the ardent awakening of
+her imagination threw her into a troubled maze of desires and of fears.
+When she was a child, life frightened her.  And now she knew that life is
+not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope; that it is a very ordinary
+thing.  She should have known this.  She thought:
+
+"I saw mamma; she was good, very simple, and not very happy.  I dreamed
+of a destiny different from hers.  Why?  I felt around me the insipid
+taste of life, and seemed to inhale the future like a salt and pungent
+aroma.  Why?  What did I want, and what did I expect?  Was I not warned
+enough of the sadness of everything?"
+
+She had been born rich, in the brilliancy of a fortune too new.  She was
+a daughter of that Montessuy, who, at first a clerk in a Parisian bank,
+founded and governed two great establishments, brought to sustain them
+the resources of a brilliant mind, invincible force of character, a rare
+alliance of cleverness and honesty, and treated with the Government as if
+he were a foreign power.  She had grown up in the historical castle of
+Joinville, bought, restored, and magnificently furnished by her father.
+Montessuy made life give all it could yield.  An instinctive and powerful
+atheist, he wanted all the goods of this world and all the desirable
+things that earth produces.  He accumulated pictures by old masters, and
+precious sculptures.  At fifty he had known all the most beautiful women
+of the stage, and many in society.  He enjoyed everything worldly with
+the brutality of his temperament and the shrewdness of his mind.
+
+Poor Madame Montessuy, economical and careful, languished at Joinville,
+delicate and poor, under the frowns of twelve gigantic caryatides which
+held a ceiling on which Lebrun had painted the Titans struck by Jupiter.
+There, in the iron cot, placed at the foot of the large bed, she died one
+night of sadness and exhaustion, never having loved anything on earth
+except her husband and her little drawing-room in the Rue Maubeuge.
+
+She never had had any intimacy with her daughter, whom she felt
+instinctively too different from herself, too free, too bold at heart;
+and she divined in Therese, although she was sweet and good, the strong
+Montessuy blood, the ardor which had made her suffer so much, and which
+she forgave in her husband, but not in her daughter.
+
+But Montessuy recognized his daughter and loved her.  Like most hearty,
+full-blooded men, he had hours of charming gayety.  Although he lived out
+of his house a great deal, he breakfasted with her almost every day,  and
+sometimes took her out walking.  He understood gowns and furbelows.  He
+instructed and formed Therese.  He amused her.  Near her, his instinct
+for conquest inspired him still.  He desired to win always, and he won
+his daughter.  He separated her from her mother.  Therese admired him,
+she adored him.
+
+In her dream she saw him as the unique joy of her childhood.  She was
+persuaded that no man in the world was as amiable as her father.
+
+At her entrance in life, she despaired at once of finding elsewhere so
+rich a nature, such a plenitude of active and thinking forces.  This
+discouragement had followed her in the choice of a husband, and perhaps
+later in a secret and freer choice.
+
+She had not really selected her husband.  She did not know: she had
+permitted herself to be married by her father, who, then a widower,
+embarrassed by the care of a girl, had wished to do things quickly and
+well.  He considered the exterior advantages, estimated the eighty years
+of imperial nobility which Count Martin brought.  The idea never came to
+him that she might wish to find love in marriage.
+
+He flattered himself that she would find in it the satisfaction of the
+luxurious desires which he attributed to her, the joy of making a display
+of grandeur, the vulgar pride, the material domination, which were for
+him all the value of life, as he had no ideas on the subject of the
+happiness of a true woman, although he was sure that his daughter would
+remain virtuous.
+
+While thinking of his absurd yet natural faith in her, which accorded so
+badly with his own experiences and ideas regarding women, she smiled with
+melancholy irony.  And she admired her father the more.
+
+After all, she was not so badly married.  Her husband was as good as any
+other man.  He had become quite bearable.  Of all that she read in the
+ashes, in the veiled softness of the lamps, of all her reminiscences,
+that of their married life was the most vague.  She found a few isolated
+traits of it, some absurd images, a fleeting and fastidious impression.
+The time had not seemed long and had left nothing behind.  Six years had
+passed, and she did not even remember how she had regained her liberty,
+so prompt and easy had been her conquest of that husband, cold, sickly,
+selfish, and polite; of that man dried up and yellowed by business and
+politics, laborious, ambitious, and commonplace.  He liked women only
+through vanity, and he never had loved his wife.  The separation had been
+frank and complete.  And since then, strangers to each other, they felt
+a tacit, mutual gratitude for their freedom.  She would have had some
+affection for him if she had not found him hypocritical and too subtle in
+the art of obtaining her signature when he needed money for enterprises
+that were more for ostentation than real benefit.  The man with whom she
+dined and talked every day had no significance for her.
+
+With her cheek in her hand, before the grate, as if she questioned a
+sibyl, she saw again the face of the Marquis de Re.  She saw it so
+precisely that it surprised her.  The Marquis de Re had been presented to
+her by her father, who admired him, and he appeared to her grand and
+dazzling for his thirty years of intimate triumphs and mundane glories.
+His adventures followed him like a procession.  He had captivated three
+generations of women, and had left in the heart of all those whom he had
+loved an imperishable memory.  His virile grace, his quiet elegance,  and
+his habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth far beyond the ordinary
+term of years.  He noticed particularly the young Countess Martin.   The
+homage of this expert flattered her.  She thought of him now with
+pleasure.  He had a marvellous art of conversation.  He amused her.   She
+let him see it, and at once he promised to himself, in his heroic
+frivolity, to finish worthily his happy life by the subjugation of this
+young woman whom he appreciated above every one else, and who evidently
+admired him.  He displayed, to capture her, the most learned stratagems.
+But she escaped him very easily.
+
+She yielded, two years later, to Robert Le Menil, who had desired her
+ardently, with all the warmth of his youth, with all the simplicity of
+his mind.  She said to herself: "I gave myself to him because he loved
+me."  It was the truth.  The truth was, also, that a dumb yet powerful
+instinct had impelled her, and that she had obeyed the hidden impulse of
+her being.  But even this was not her real self; what awakened her nature
+at last was the fact that she believed in the sincerity of his sentiment.
+She had yielded as soon as she had felt that she was loved.  She had
+given herself, quickly, simply.  He thought that she had yielded easily.
+He was mistaken.  She had felt the discouragement which the irreparable
+gives, and that sort of shame which comes of having suddenly something to
+conceal.  Everything that had been whispered before her about other women
+resounded in her burning ears.  But, proud and delicate, she took care to
+hide the value of the gift she was making.  He never suspected her moral
+uneasiness, which lasted only a few days, and was replaced by perfect
+tranquillity.  After three years she defended her conduct as innocent and
+natural.
+
+Having done harm to no one, she had no regrets.  She was content.  She
+was in love, she was loved.  Doubtless she had not felt the intoxication
+she had expected, but does one ever feel it?  She was the friend of the
+good and honest fellow, much liked by women who passed for disdainful and
+hard to please, and he had a true affection for her.  The pleasure she
+gave him and the joy of being beautiful for him attached her to this
+friend.  He made life for her not continually delightful, but easy to
+bear, and at times agreeable.
+
+That which she had not divined in her solitude, notwithstanding vague
+yearnings and apparently causeless sadness, he had revealed to her.  She
+knew herself when she knew him.  It was a happy astonishment.  Their
+sympathies were not in their minds.  Her inclination toward him was
+simple and frank, and at this moment she found pleasure in the idea of
+meeting him the next day in the little apartment where they had met for
+three years.  With a shake of the head and a shrug of her shoulders,
+coarser than one would have expected from this exquisite woman, sitting
+alone by the dying fire, she said to herself: "There!  I need love!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+"ONE CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE YOUNG!"
+
+It was no longer daylight when they came out of the little apartment in
+the Rue Spontini.  Robert Le Menil made a sign to a coachman, and entered
+the carriage with Therese.  Close together, they rolled among the vague
+shadows, cut by sudden lights, through the ghostly city, having in their
+minds only sweet and vanishing impressions while everything around them
+seemed confused and fleeting.
+
+The carriage approached the Pont-Neuf.  They stepped out.  A dry cold
+made vivid the sombre January weather.  Under her veil Therese joyfully
+inhaled the wind which swept on the hardened soil a dust white as salt.
+She was glad to wander freely among unknown things.  She liked to see the
+stony landscape which the clearness of the air made distinct; to walk
+quickly and firmly on the quay where the trees displayed the black
+tracery of their branches on the horizon reddened by the smoke of the
+city; to look at the Seine.  In the sky the first stars appeared.
+
+"One would think that the wind would put them out," she said.
+
+He observed, too, that they scintillated a great deal.  He did not think
+it was a sign of rain, as the peasants believe.  He had observed, on the
+contrary, that nine times in ten the scintillation of stars was an augury
+of fine weather.
+
+Near the little bridge they found old iron-shops lighted by smoky lamps.
+She ran into them.  She turned a corner and went into a shop in which
+queer stuffs were hanging.  Behind the dirty panes a lighted candle
+showed pots, porcelain vases, a clarinet, and a bride's wreath.
+
+He did not understand what pleasure she found in her search.
+
+"These shops are full of vermin.  What can you find interesting in them?"
+
+"Everything.  I think of the poor bride whose wreath is under that globe.
+The dinner occurred at Maillot.  There was a policeman in the procession.
+There is one in almost all the bridal processions one sees in the park on
+Saturdays.  Don't they move you, my friend, all these poor, ridiculous,
+miserable beings who contribute to the grandeur of the past?"
+
+Among cups decorated with flowers she discovered a little knife, the
+ivory handle of which represented a tall, thin woman with her hair
+arranged a la Maintenon.  She bought it for a few sous.  It pleased her,
+because she already had a fork like it.  Le Menil confessed that he had
+no taste for such things, but said that his aunt knew a great deal about
+them.  At Caen all the merchants knew her.  She had restored and
+furnished her house in proper style.  This house was noted as early as
+1690.  In one of its halls were white cases full of books.  His aunt had
+wished to put them in order.  She had found frivolous books in them,
+ornamented with engravings so unconventional that she had burned them.
+
+"Is she silly, your aunt?"  asked Therese.
+
+For a long time his anecdotes about his aunt had made her impatient.
+Her friend had in the country a mother, sisters, aunts, and numerous
+relatives whom she did not know and who irritated her.  He talked of them
+with admiration.  It annoyed her that he often visited them.  When he
+came back, she imagined that he carried with him the odor of things that
+had been packed up for years.  He was astonished, naively, and he
+suffered from her antipathy to them.
+
+He said nothing.  The sight of a public-house, the panes of which were
+flaming, recalled to him the poet Choulette, who passed for a drunkard.
+He asked her if she still saw that Choulette, who called on her wearing
+a mackintosh and a red muffler.
+
+It annoyed her that he spoke like General Lariviere.  She did not say
+that she had not seen Choulette since autumn, and that he neglected her
+with the capriciousness of a man not in society.
+
+"He has wit," she said, "fantasy, and an original temperament.  He
+pleases me."
+
+And as he reproached her for having an odd taste, she replied:
+
+"I haven't a taste, I have tastes.  You do not disapprove of them all,
+I suppose."
+
+He replied that he did not criticise her.  He was only afraid that she
+might do herself harm by receiving a Bohemian who was not welcome in
+respectable houses.
+
+She exclaimed:
+
+"Not welcome in respectable houses--Choulette?  Don't you know that he
+goes every year for a month to the Marquise de Rieu?  Yes, to the
+Marquise de Rieu, the Catholic, the royalist.  But since Choulette
+interests you, listen to his latest adventure.  Paul Vence related it to
+me.  I understand it better in this street, where there are shirts and
+flowerpots at the windows.
+
+"This winter, one night when it was raining, Choulette went into a
+public-house in a street the name of which I have forgotten, but which
+must resemble this one, and met there an unfortunate girl whom the
+waiters would not have noticed, and whom he liked for her humility.  Her
+name was Maria.  The name was not hers.  She found it nailed on her door
+at the top of the stairway where she went to lodge.  Choulette was
+touched by this perfection of poverty and infamy.  He called her his
+sister, and kissed her hands.  Since then he has not quitted her a
+moment.  He takes her to the coffee-houses of the Latin Quarter where the
+rich students read their reviews.  He says sweet things to her.  He
+weeps, she weeps.  They drink; and when they are drunk, they fight.  He
+loves her.  He calls her his chaste one, his cross and his salvation.
+She was barefooted; he gave her yarn and knitting-needles that she might
+make stockings.  And he made shoes for this unfortunate girl himself,
+with enormous nails.  He teaches her verses that are easy to understand.
+He is afraid of altering her moral beauty by taking her out of the shame
+where she lives in perfect simplicity and admirable destitution."
+
+Le Menil shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"But that Choulette is crazy, and Paul Vence has no right to tell you
+such stories.  I am not austere, assuredly; but there are immoralities
+that disgust me."  They were walking at random.  She fell into a dream.
+
+"Yes, morality, I know--duty!  But duty--it takes the devil to discover
+it.  I can assure you that I do not know where duty is.  It's like a
+young lady's turtle at Joinville.  We spent all the evening looking for
+it under the furniture, and when we had found it, we went to bed."
+
+He thought there was some truth in what she said.  He would think about
+it when alone.
+
+"I regret sometimes that I did not remain in the army.  I know what you
+are going to say--one becomes a brute in that profession.  Doubtless, but
+one knows exactly what one has to do, and that is a great deal in life.
+I think that my uncle's life is very beautiful and very agreeable.  But
+now that everybody is in the army, there are neither officers nor
+soldiers.  It all looks like a railway station on Sunday.  My uncle knew
+personally all the officers and all the soldiers of his brigade.
+Nowadays, how can you expect an officer to know his men?"
+
+She had ceased to listen.  She was looking at a woman selling fried
+potatoes.  She realized that she was hungry and wished to eat fried
+potatoes.
+
+He remonstrated:
+
+"Nobody knows how they are cooked."
+
+But he had to buy two sous' worth of fried potatoes, and to see that the
+woman put salt on them.
+
+While Therese was eating them, he led her into deserted streets far from
+the gaslights.  Soon they found themselves in front of the cathedral.
+The moon silvered the roofs.
+
+"Notre Dame," she said.  "See, it is as heavy as an elephant yet as
+delicate as an insect.  The moon climbs over it and looks at it with a
+monkey's maliciousness.  She does not look like the country moon at
+Joinville.  At Joinville I have a path--a flat path--with the moon at the
+end of it.  She is not there every night; but she returns faithfully,
+full, red, familiar.  She is a country neighbor.  I go seriously to meet
+her.  But this moon of Paris I should not like to know.  She is not
+respectable company.  Oh, the things that she has seen during the time
+she has been roaming around the roofs!"
+
+He smiled a tender smile.
+
+"Oh, your little path where you walked alone and that you liked because
+the sky was at the end of it!  I see it as if I were there."
+
+It was at the Joinville castle that he had seen her for the first time,
+and had at once loved her.  It was there, one night, that he had told her
+of his love, to which she had listened, dumb, with a pained expression on
+her mouth and a vague look in her eyes.
+
+The reminiscence of this little path where she walked alone moved him,
+troubled him, made him live again the enchanted hours of his first
+desires and hopes.  He tried to find her hand in her muff and pressed her
+slim wrist under the fur.
+
+A little girl carrying violets saw that they were lovers, and offered
+flowers to them.  He bought a two-sous' bouquet and offered it to
+Therese.
+
+She was walking toward the cathedral.  She was thinking: "It is like an
+enormous beast--a beast of the Apocalypse."
+
+At the other end of the bridge a flower-woman, wrinkled, bearded, gray
+with years and dust, followed them with her basket full of mimosas and
+roses.  Therese, who held her violets and was trying to slip them into
+her waist, said, joyfully:
+
+"Thank you, I have some."
+
+"One can see that you are young," the old woman shouted with a wicked
+air, as she went away.
+
+Therese understood at once, and a smile came to her lips and eyes.  They
+were passing near the porch, before the stone figures that wear sceptres
+and crowns.
+
+"Let us go in," she said.
+
+He did not wish to go in.  He declared that the door was closed.  She
+pushed it, and slipped into the immense nave, where the inanimate trees
+of the columns ascended in darkness.  In the rear, candles were moving in
+front of spectre-like priests, under the last reverberations of the
+organs.  She trembled in the silence, and said:
+
+"The sadness of churches at night moves me; I feel in them the grandeur
+of nothingness."
+
+He replied:
+
+"We must believe in something.  If there were no God, if our souls were
+not immortal, it would be too sad."
+
+She remained for a while immovable under the curtains of shadow hanging
+from the arches.  Then she said:
+
+"My poor friend, we do not know what to do with this life, which is so
+short, and yet you desire another life which shall never finish."
+
+In the carriage that took them back he said gayly that he had passed
+a fine afternoon.  He kissed her, satisfied with her and with himself.
+But his good-humor was not communicated to her.  The last moments they
+passed together were spoiled for her always by the presentiment that he
+would not say at parting the thing that he should say.  Ordinarily, he
+quitted her brusquely, as if what had happened were not to last.  At
+every one of their partings she had a confused feeling that they were
+parting forever.  She suffered from this in advance and became irritable.
+
+Under the trees he took her hand and kissed her.
+
+"Is it not rare, Therese, to love as we love each other?"
+
+"Rare?  I don't know; but I think that you love me."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I, too, love you."
+
+"And you will love me always?"
+
+"What does one ever know?"
+
+And seeing the face of her lover darken:
+
+"Would you be more content with a woman who would swear to love only you
+for all time?"
+
+He remained anxious, with a wretched air.  She was kind and she reassured
+him:
+
+"You know very well, my friend, that I am not fickle."
+
+Almost at the end of the lane they said good-by.  He kept the carriage to
+return to the Rue Royale.  He was to dine at the club and go to the
+theatre, and had no time to lose.
+
+Therese returned home on foot.  Opposite the Trocadero she remembered
+what the old flower-woman had said: "One can see that you are young."
+The words came back to her with a significance not immoral but sad.  "One
+can see that you are young!"  Yes, she was young, she was loved, and she
+was bored to death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A DISCUSSION ON THE LITTLE CORPORAL
+
+In the centre of the table flowers were disposed in a basket of gilded
+bronze, decorated with eagles, stars, and bees, and handles formed like
+horns of plenty.  On its sides winged Victorys supported the branches of
+candelabra. This centrepiece of the Empire style had been given by
+Napoleon, in 1812, to Count Martin de l'Aisne, grandfather of the present
+Count Martin-Belleme.  Martin de l'Aisne, a deputy to the Legislative
+Corps in 1809, was appointed the following year member of the Committee
+on Finance, the assiduous and secret works of which suited his laborious
+temperament.  Although a Liberal, he pleased the Emperor by his
+application and his exact honesty. For two years he was under a rain of
+favors.  In 1813 he formed part of the moderate majority which approved
+the report in which Laine censured power and misfortune, by giving to the
+Empire tardy advice.  January 1, 1814, he went with his colleagues to
+the Tuileries. The Emperor received them in a terrifying manner.
+He charged on their ranks.  Violent and sombre, in the horror of his
+present strength and of his coming fall, he stunned them with his anger
+and his contempt.
+
+He came and went through their lines, and suddenly took Count Martin by
+the shoulders, shook him and dragged him, exclaiming: "A throne is four
+pieces of wood covered with velvet?  No!  A throne is a man, and that man
+is I.  You have tried to throw mud at me.  Is this the time to
+remonstrate with me when there are two hundred thousand Cossacks at the
+frontiers?  Your Laine is a wicked man.  One should wash one's dirty
+linen at home."  And while in his anger he twisted in his hand the
+embroidered collar of the deputy, he said: "The people know me.  They do
+not know you.  I am the elect of the nation.  You are the obscure
+delegates of a department."  He predicted to them the fate of the
+Girondins.  The noise of his spurs accompanied the sound of his voice.
+Count Martin remained trembling the rest of his life, and tremblingly
+recalled the Bourbons after the defeat of the Emperor.  The two
+restorations were in vain; the July government and the Second Empire
+covered his oppressed breast with crosses and cordons.  Raised to the
+highest functions, loaded with honors by three kings and one emperor, he
+felt forever on his shoulder the hand of the Corsican.  He died a senator
+of Napoleon III, and left a son agitated by the same fear.
+
+This son had married Mademoiselle Belleme, daughter of the first
+president of the court of Bourges, and with her the political glories of
+a family which gave three ministers to the moderate monarch.  The
+Bellemes, advocates in the time of Louis XV, elevated the Jacobin origins
+of the Martins.  The second Count Martin was a member of all the
+Assemblies until his death in 1881.  His son took without trouble his
+seat in the Chamber of Deputies.  Having married Mademoiselle Therese
+Montessuy, whose dowry supported his political fortune, he appeared
+discreetly among the four or five bourgeois, titled and wealthy, who
+rallied to democracy, and were received without much bad grace by the
+republicans, whom aristocracy flattered.
+
+In the dining-room, Count Martin-Belleme was doing the honors of his
+table with the good grace, the sad politeness, recently prescribed at the
+Elysee to represent isolated France at a great northern court.  From time
+to time he addressed vapid phrases to Madame Garain at his right; to the
+Princess Seniavine at his left, who, loaded with diamonds, felt bored.
+Opposite him, on the other side of the table, Countess Martin, having by
+her side General Lariviere and M. Schmoll, member of the Academie des
+Inscriptions, caressed with her fan her smooth white shoulders.  At the
+two semicircles, whereby the dinner-table was prolonged, were
+M. Montessuy, robust, with blue eyes and ruddy complexion; a young
+cousin, Madame Belleme de Saint-Nom, embarrassed by her long, thin arms;
+the painter Duviquet; M. Daniel Salomon; then Paul Vence and Garain the
+deputy; Belleme de Saint-Nom; an unknown senator; and Dechartre, who was
+dining at the house for the first time.  The conversation, at first
+trivial and insignificant, was prolonged into a confused murmur, above
+which rose Garain's voice:
+
+"Every false idea is dangerous.  People think that dreamers do no harm.
+They are mistaken: dreamers do a great heal of harm.  Even apparently
+inoffensive utopian ideas really exercise a noxious influence.  They tend
+to inspire disgust at reality."
+
+"It is, perhaps, because reality is not beautiful," said Paul Vence.
+
+M. Garain said that he had always been in favor of all possible
+improvements.  He had asked for the suppression of permanent armies in
+the time of the Empire, for the separation of church and state, and had
+remained always faithful to democracy.  His device, he said, was "Order
+and Progress."  He thought he had discovered that device.
+
+Montessuy said:
+
+"Well, Monsieur Garain, be sincere.  Confess that there are no reforms to
+be made, and that it is as much as one can do to change the color of
+postage-stamps.  Good or bad, things are as they should be.  Yes, things
+are as they should be; but they change incessantly.  Since 1870 the
+industrial and financial situation of the country has gone through four
+or five revolutions which political economists had not foreseen and which
+they do not yet understand.  In society, as in nature, transformations
+are accomplished from within."
+
+As to matters of government his ideas were terse and decided.  He was
+strongly attached to the present, heedless of the future, and the
+socialists troubled him little.  Without caring whether the sun and
+capital should be extinguished some day, he enjoyed them.  According to
+him, one should let himself be carried.  None but fools resisted the
+current or tried to go in front of it.
+
+But Count Martin, naturally sad, had, dark presentiments.  In veiled
+words he announced catastrophes.  His timorous phrases came through the
+flowers, and irritated M. Schmoll, who began to grumble and to prophesy.
+He explained that Christian nations were incapable, alone and by
+themselves, of throwing off barbarism, and that without the Jews and the
+Arabs Europe would be to-day, as in the time of the Crusades, sunk in
+ignorance, misery, and cruelty.
+
+"The Middle Ages," he said, "are closed only in the historical manuals
+that are given to pupils to spoil their minds.  In reality, barbarians
+are always barbarians.  Israel's mission is to instruct nations.  It was
+Israel which, in the Middle Ages, brought to Europe the wisdom of ages.
+Socialism frightens you.  It is a Christian evil, like priesthood.  And
+anarchy?  Do you not recognize in it the plague of the Albigeois and of
+the Vaudois?  The Jews, who instructed and polished Europe, are the only
+ones who can save it to-day from the evangelical evil by which it is
+devoured.  But they have not fulfilled their duty.  They have made
+Christians of themselves among the Christians.  And God punishes them.
+He permits them to be exiled and to be despoiled.  Anti-Semitism is
+making fearful progress everywhere.  From Russia my co-religionists are
+expelled like savage beasts.  In France, civil and military employments
+are closing against Jews.  They have no longer access to aristocratic
+circles.  My nephew, young Isaac Coblentz, has had to renounce a
+diplomatic career, after passing brilliantly his admission examination.
+The wives of several of my colleagues, when Madame Schmoll calls on them,
+display with intention, under her eyes, anti-Semitic newspapers.  And
+would you believe that the Minister of Public Instruction has refused to
+give me the cross of the Legion of Honor for which I have applied?
+There's ingratitude!  Anti-Semitism is death--it is death, do you hear?
+to European civilization."
+
+The little man had a natural manner which surpassed all the art in the
+world.  Grotesque and terrible, he threw the table into consternation by
+his sincerity.  Madame Martin, whom he amused, complimented him on this:
+
+"At least," she said, "you defend your co-religionists.  You are not,
+Monsieur Schmoll, like a beautiful Jewish lady of my acquaintance who,
+having read in a journal that she received the elite of Jewish society,
+went everywhere shouting that she had been insulted."
+
+"I am sure, Madame, that you do not know how beautiful and superior to
+all other moralities is Jewish morality.  Do you know the parable of the
+three rings?"
+
+This question was lost in the murmur of the dialogues wherein were
+mingled foreign politics, exhibitions of paintings, fashionable scandals,
+and Academy speeches.  They talked of the new novel and of the coming
+play.  This was a comedy.  Napoleon was an incidental character in it.
+
+The conversation settled upon Napoleon I, often placed on the stage and
+newly studied in books--an object of curiosity, a personage in the
+fashion, no longer a popular hero, a demi-god, wearing boots for his
+country, as in the days when Norvins and Beranger, Charlet and Raffet
+were composing his legend; but a curious personage, an amusing type in
+his living infinity, a figure whose style is pleasant to artists, whose
+movements attract thoughtless idlers.
+
+Garain, who had founded his political fortune on hatred of the Empire,
+judged sincerely that this return of national taste was only an absurd
+infatuation.  He saw no danger in it and felt no fear about it.  In him
+fear was sudden and ferocious.  For the moment he was very quiet; he
+talked neither of prohibiting performances nor of seizing books, of
+imprisoning authors, or of suppressing anything.  Calm and severe, he saw
+in Napoleon only Taine's 'condottiere' who kicked Volney in the stomach.
+Everybody wished to define the true Napoleon.  Count Martin, in the face
+of the imperial centrepiece and of the winged Victorys, talked suitably
+of Napoleon as an organizer and administrator, and placed him in a high
+position as president of the state council, where his words threw light
+upon obscure questions.  Garain affirmed that in his sessions, only too
+famous, Napoleon, under pretext of taking snuff, asked the councillors to
+pass to him their gold boxes ornamented with miniatures and decked with
+diamonds, which they never saw again.  The anecdote was told to him by
+the son of Mounier himself.
+
+Montessuy esteemed in Napoleon the genius of order.  "He liked," he said,
+"work well done.  That is a taste most persons have lost."
+
+The painter Duviquet, whose ideas were those of an artist, was
+embarrassed.  He did not find on the funeral mask brought from St.
+Helena the characteristics of that face, beautiful and powerful, which
+medals and busts have consecrated.  One must be convinced of this now
+that the bronze of that mask was hanging in all the old shops, among
+eagles and sphinxes made of gilded wood.  And, according to him, since
+the true face of Napoleon was not that of the ideal Napoleon, his real
+soul may not have been as idealists fancied it.  Perhaps it was the soul
+of a good bourgeois.  Somebody had said this, and he was inclined to
+think that it was true.  Anyway, Duviquet, who flattered himself with
+having made the best portraits of the century, knew that celebrated men
+seldom resemble the ideas one forms of them.
+
+M. Daniel Salomon observed that the fine mask about which Duviquet
+talked, the plaster cast taken from the inanimate face of the Emperor,
+and brought to Europe by Dr. Antommarchi, had been moulded in bronze and
+sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe,
+and had then inspired surprise and mistrust.  People suspected the
+Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and
+famished, of having tried to make fun of people.  Disciples of Dr. Gall,
+whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious.  They
+did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the forehead, examined in
+accordance with the master's theories, presented nothing remarkable in
+its formation.
+
+"Precisely," said Princess Seniavine.  "Napoleon was remarkable only for
+having kicked Volney in the stomach and stealing a snuffbox ornamented
+with diamonds.  Monsieur Garain has just taught us."
+
+"And yet," said Madame Martin, "nobody is sure that he kicked Volney."
+
+"Everything becomes known in the end," replied the Princess, gayly.
+"Napoleon did nothing at all.  He did not even kick Volney, and his head
+was that of an idiot."
+
+General Lariviere felt that he should say something.  He hurled this
+phrase:
+
+"Napoleon--his campaign of 1813 is much discussed."
+
+The General wished to please Garain, and he had no other idea.  However,
+he succeeded, after an effort, in formulating a judgment:
+
+"Napoleon committed faults; in his situation he should not have committed
+any."  And he stopped abruptly, very red.
+
+Madame Martin asked:
+
+"And you, Monsieur Vence, what do you think of Napoleon?"
+
+"Madame, I have not much love for sword-bearers, and conquerors seem to
+me to be dangerous fools.  But in spite of everything, that figure of the
+Emperor interests me as it interests the public.  I find character and
+life in it.  There is no poem or novel that is worth the Memoirs of Saint
+Helena, although it is written in ridiculous fashion.  What I think of
+Napoleon, if you wish to know, is that, made for glory, he had the
+brilliant simplicity of the hero of an epic poem.  A hero must be human.
+Napoleon was human."
+
+"Oh, oh!"  every one exclaimed.
+
+But Paul Vence continued:
+
+"He was violent and frivolous; therefore profoundly human.  I mean,
+similar to everybody.  He desired, with singular force, all that most men
+esteem and desire.  He had illusions, which he gave to the people.  This
+was his power and his weakness; it was his beauty.  He believed in glory.
+He had of life and of the world the same opinion as any one of his
+grenadiers.  He retained always the infantile gravity which finds
+pleasure in playing with swords and drums, and the sort of innocence
+which makes good military men.  He esteemed force sincerely.  He was a
+man among men, the flesh of human flesh.  He had not a thought that was
+not in action, and all his actions were grand yet common.  It is this
+vulgar grandeur which makes heroes.  And Napoleon is the perfect hero.
+His brain never surpassed his hand--that hand, small and beautiful, which
+grasped the world.  He never had, for a moment, the least care for what
+he could not reach."
+
+"Then," said Garain, "according to you, he was not an intellectual
+genius.  I am of your opinion."
+
+"Surely," continued Paul Vence, "he had enough genius to be brilliant in
+the civil and military arena of the world.  But he had not speculative
+genius.  That genius is another pair of sleeves, as Buffon says.  We have
+a collection of his writings and speeches.  His style has movement and
+imagination.  And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic
+curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an
+expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny.  At Saint
+Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little
+fourteen-year-old school-boy.  Thrown upon the world, his mind found
+itself fit for the world, and embraced it all.  Nothing of that mind was
+lost in the infinite.  Himself a poet, he knew only the poetry of action.
+He limited to the earth his powerful dream of life.  In his terrible and
+touching naivete he believed that a man could be great, and neither time
+nor misfortune made him lose that idea.  His youth, or rather his sublime
+adolescence, lasted as long as he lived, because life never brought him a
+real maturity.  Such is the abnormal state of men of action.  They live
+entirely in the present, and their genius concentrates on one point.
+The hours of their existence are not connected by a chain of grave and
+disinterested meditations.  They succeed themselves in a series of acts.
+They lack interior life.  This defect is particularly visible in
+Napoleon, who never lived within himself.  From this is derived the
+frivolity of temperament which made him support easily the enormous load
+of his evils and of his faults.  His mind was born anew every day.  He
+had, more than any other person, a capacity for diversion.  The first day
+that he saw the sun rise on his funereal rock at Saint Helena, he jumped
+from his bed, whistling a romantic air.  It was the peace of a mind
+superior to fortune; it was the frivolity of a mind prompt in
+resurrection.  He lived from the outside."
+
+Garain, who did not like Paul Vence's ingenious turn of wit and language,
+tried to hasten the conclusion:
+
+"In a word," he said, "there was something of the monster in the man."
+
+"There are no monsters," replied Paul Vence; "and men who pass for
+monsters inspire horror.  Napoleon was loved by an entire people.  He had
+the power to win the love of men.  The joy of his soldiers was to die for
+him."
+
+Countess Martin would have wished Dechartre to give his opinion.  But he
+excused himself with a sort of fright.
+
+"Do you know," said Schmoll again, "the parable of the three rings,
+sublime inspiration of a Portuguese Jew."
+
+Garain, while complimenting Paul Vence on his brilliant paradox,
+regretted that wit should be exercised at the expense of morality and
+justice.
+
+"One great principle," he said, "is that men should be judged by their
+acts."
+
+"And women?"  asked Princess Seniavine, brusquely; "do you judge them by
+their acts?  And how do you know what they do?"
+
+The sound of voices was mingled with the clear tintinabulation of
+silverware.  A warm air bathed the room.  The roses shed their leaves on
+the cloth.  More ardent thoughts mounted to the brain.
+
+General Lariviere fell into dreams.
+
+"When public clamor has split my ears," he said to his neighbor, "I shall
+go to live at Tours.  I shall cultivate flowers."
+
+He flattered himself on being a good gardener; his name had been given to
+a rose.  This pleased him highly.
+
+Schmoll asked again if they knew the parable of the three rings.
+
+The Princess rallied the Deputy.
+
+"Then you do not know, Monsieur Garain, that one does the same things for
+very different reasons?"
+
+Montessuy said she was right.
+
+"It is very true, as you say, Madame, that actions prove nothing.  This
+thought is striking in an episode in the life of Don Juan, which was
+known neither to Moliere nor to Mozart, but which is revealed in an
+English legend, a knowledge of which I owe to my friend James Russell
+Lowell of London.  One learns from it that the great seducer lost his
+time with three women.  One was a bourgeoise: she was in love with her
+husband; the other was a nun: she would not consent to violate her vows;
+the third, who had for a long time led a life of debauchery, had become
+ugly, and was a servant in a den.  After what she had done, after what
+she had seen, love signified nothing to her.  These three women behaved
+alike for very different reasons.  An action proves nothing.  It is the
+mass of actions, their weight, their sum total, which makes the value of
+the human being."
+
+"Some of our actions," said Madame Martin, "have our look, our face: they
+are our daughters.  Others do not resemble us at all."
+
+She rose and took the General's arm.
+
+On the way to the drawing-room the Princess said:
+
+"Therese is right.  Some actions do not express our real selves at all.
+They are like the things we do in nightmares."
+
+The nymphs of the tapestries smiled vainly in their faded beauty at the
+guests, who did not see them.
+
+Madame Martin served the coffee with her young cousin, Madame Belleme de
+Saint-Nom.  She complimented Paul Vence on what he had said at the table.
+
+"You talked of Napoleon with a freedom of mind that is rare in the
+conversations I hear.  I have noticed that children, when they are
+handsome, look, when they pout, like Napoleon at Waterloo.  You have made
+me feel the profound reasons for this similarity."
+
+Then, turning toward Dechartre:
+
+"Do you like Napoleon?"
+
+"Madame, I do not like the Revolution.  And Napoleon is the Revolution in
+boots."
+
+"Monsieur Dechartre, why did you not say this at dinner?  But I see you
+prefer to be witty only in tete-a-tetes."
+
+Count Martin-Belleme escorted the men to the smoking-room.  Paul Vence
+alone remained with the women.  Princess Seniavine asked him if he had
+finished his novel, and what was the subject of it.  It was a study in
+which he tried to reach the truth through a series of plausible
+conditions.
+
+"Thus," he said, "the novel acquires a moral force which history, in its
+heavy frivolity, never had."
+
+She inquired whether the book was written for women.  He said it was not.
+
+"You are wrong, Monsieur Vence, not to write for women.  A superior man
+can do nothing else for them."
+
+He wished to know what gave her that idea.
+
+"Because I see that all the intelligent women love fools."
+
+"Who bore them."
+
+"Certainly!  But superior men would weary them more.  They would have
+more resources to employ in boring them.  But tell me the subject of your
+novel."
+
+"Do you insist?"
+
+"Oh, I insist upon nothing."
+
+"Well, I will tell you.  It is a study of popular manners; the history of
+a young workman, sober and chaste, as handsome as a girl, with the mind
+of a virgin, a sensitive soul.  He is a carver, and works well.  At
+night, near his mother, whom he loves, he studies, he reads books.  In
+his mind, simple and receptive, ideas lodge themselves like bullets in a
+wall.  He has no desires.  He has neither the passions nor the vices that
+attach us to life.  He is solitary and pure.  Endowed with strong
+virtues, he becomes conceited.  He lives among miserable people.  He sees
+suffering.  He has devotion without humanity.  He has that sort of cold
+charity which is called altruism.  He is not human because he is not
+sensual."
+
+"Oh!  One must be sensual to be human?"
+
+"Certainly, Madame.  True pity, like tenderness, comes from the heart.
+He is not intelligent enough to doubt.  He believes what he has read.
+And he has read that to establish universal happiness society must be
+destroyed.  Thirst for martyrdom devours him.  One morning, having kissed
+his mother, he goes out; he watches for the socialist deputy of his
+district, sees him, throws himself on him, and buries a poniard in his
+breast.  Long live anarchy!  He is arrested, measured, photographed,
+questioned, judged, condemned to death, and guillotined.  That is my
+novel."
+
+"It is not very amusing," said the Princess; "but that is not your fault.
+Your anarchists are as timid and moderate as other Frenchmen.  The
+Russians have more audacity and more imagination."
+
+Countess Martin asked Paul Vence whether he knew a silent, timid-looking
+man among the guests.  Her husband had invited him.  She knew nothing of
+him, not even his name.  Paul Vence could only say that he was a senator.
+He had seen him one day by chance in the Luxembourg, in the gallery that
+served as a library.
+
+"I went there to look at the cupola, where Delacroix has painted, in a
+wood of bluish myrtles, heroes and sages of antiquity.  That gentleman
+was there, with the same wretched and pitiful air.  His coat was damp and
+he was warming himself.  He was talking with old colleagues and saying,
+while rubbing his hands: 'The proof that the Republic is the best of
+governments is that in 1871 it could kill in a week sixty thousand
+insurgents without becoming unpopular.  After such a repression any other
+regime would have been impossible.'"
+
+"He is a very wicked man," said Madame Martin.  "And to think that I was
+pitying him!"
+
+Madame Garain, her chin softly dropped on her chest, slept in the peace
+of her housewifely mind, and dreamed of her vegetable garden on the banks
+of the Loire, where singing-societies came to serenade her.
+
+Joseph Schmoll and General Lariviere came out of the smoking-room.  The
+General took a seat between Princess Seniavine and Madame Martin.
+
+"I met this morning, in the park, Baronne Warburg, mounted on a
+magnificent horse.  She said, 'General, how do you manage to have such
+fine horses?' I replied: Madame, to have fine horses, you must be either
+very wealthy or very clever.'"
+
+He was so well satisfied with his reply that he repeated it twice.
+
+Paul Vence came near Countess Martin:
+
+"I know that senator's name: it is Lyer.  He is the vice-president of a
+political society, and author of a book entitled, The Crime of December
+Second."
+
+The General continued:
+
+"The weather was horrible.  I went into a hut and found Le Menil there.
+I was in a bad humor.  He was making fun of me, I saw, because I sought
+shelter.  He imagines that because I am a general I must like wind and
+snow.  He said that he liked bad weather, and that he was to go
+foxhunting with friends next week."
+
+There was a pause; the General continued:
+
+"I wish him much joy, but I don't envy him.  Foxhunting is not
+agreeable."
+
+"But it is useful," said Montessuy.
+
+The General shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Foxes are dangerous for chicken-coops in the spring when the fowls have
+to feed their families."
+
+"Foxes are sly poachers, who do less harm to farmers than to hunters.
+I know something of this."
+
+Therese was not listening to the Princess, who was talking to her.  She
+was thinking:
+
+"He did not tell me that he was going away!"
+
+"Of what are you thinking, dear?"  inquired the Princess.
+
+"Of nothing interesting," Therese replied.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE END OF A DREAM
+
+In the little shadowy room, where sound was deadened by curtains,
+portieres, cushions, bearskins, and carpets from the Orient, the
+firelight shone on glittering swords hanging among the faded favors of
+the cotillons of three winters.  The rosewood chiffonier was surmounted
+by a silver cup, a prize from some sporting club.  On a porcelain plaque,
+in the centre of the table, stood a crystal vase which held branches of
+white lilacs; and lights palpitated in the warm shadows.  Therese and
+Robert, their eyes accustomed to obscurity, moved easily among these
+familiar objects.  He lighted a cigarette while she arranged her hair,
+standing before the mirror, in a corner so dim she could hardly see
+herself.  She took pins from the little Bohemian glass cup standing on
+the table, where she had kept it for three years.  He looked at her,
+passing her light fingers quickly through the gold ripples of her hair,
+while her face, hardened and bronzed by the shadow, took on a mysterious
+expression.  She did not speak.
+
+He said to her:
+
+"You are not cross now, my dear?"
+
+And, as he insisted upon having an answer, she said:
+
+"What do you wish me to say, my friend?  I can only repeat what I said at
+first.  I think it strange that I have to learn of your projects from
+General Lariviere."
+
+He knew very well that she had not forgiven him; that she had remained
+cold and reserved toward him.  But he affected to think that she only
+pouted.
+
+"My dear, I have explained it to you.  I have told you that when I met
+Lariviere I had just received a letter from Caumont, recalling my promise
+to hunt the fox in his woods, and I replied by return post.  I meant to
+tell you about it to-day.  I am sorry that General Lariviere told you
+first, but there was no significance in that."
+
+Her arms were lifted like the handles of a vase.  She turned toward him a
+glance from her tranquil eyes, which he did not understand.
+
+"Then you are going?"
+
+"Next week, Tuesday or Wednesday.  I shall be away only ten days at
+most."
+
+She put on her sealskin toque, ornamented with a branch of holly.
+
+"Is it something that you can not postpone?"
+
+"Oh, yes.  Fox-skins would not be worth anything in a month.  Moreover,
+Caumont has invited good friends of mine, who would regret my absence."
+
+Fixing her toque on her head with a long pin, she frowned.
+
+"Is fox-hunting interesting?"
+
+"Oh, yes, very.  The fox has stratagems that one must fathom.  The
+intelligence of that animal is really marvellous.  I have observed at
+night a fox hunting a rabbit.  He had organized a real hunt.  I assure
+you it is not easy to dislodge a fox.  Caumont has an excellent cellar.
+I do not care for it, but it is generally appreciated.  I will bring you
+half a dozen skins."
+
+"What do you wish me to do with them?"
+
+"Oh, you can make rugs of them."
+
+"And you will be hunting eight days?"
+
+"Not all the time.  I shall visit my aunt, who expects me.  Last year at
+this time there was a delightful reunion at her house.  She had with her
+her two daughters and her three nieces with their husbands.  All five
+women are pretty, gay, charming, and irreproachable.  I shall probably
+find them at the beginning of next month, assembled for my aunt's
+birthday, and I shall remain there two days."
+
+"My friend, stay as long as it may please you.  I should be inconsolable
+if you shortened on my account a sojourn which is so agreeable."
+
+"But you, Therese?"
+
+"I, my friend?  I can take care of myself."
+
+The fire was languishing.  The shadows were deepening between them.  She
+said, in a dreamy tone:
+
+"It is true, however, that it is never prudent to leave a woman alone."
+
+He went near her, trying to see her eyes in the darkness.  He took her
+hand.
+
+"You love me?"  he said.
+
+"Oh, I assure you that I do not love another but--"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Nothing.  I am thinking--I am thinking that we are separated all through
+the summer; that in winter you live with your parents and your friends
+half the time; and that, if we are to see so little of each other, it is
+better not to see each other at all."
+
+He lighted the candelabra.  His frank, hard face was illuminated.  He
+looked at her with a confidence that came less from the conceit common to
+all lovers than from his natural lack of dignity.  He believed in her
+through force of education and simplicity of intelligence.
+
+"Therese, I love you, and you love me, I know.  Why do you torment me?
+Sometimes you are painfully harsh."
+
+She shook her little head brusquely.
+
+"What will you have?  I am harsh and obstinate.  It is in the blood.  I
+take it from my father.  You know Joinville; you have seen the castle,
+the ceilings, the tapestries, the gardens, the park, the hunting-grounds,
+you have said that none better were in France; but you have not seen my
+father's workshop--a white wooden table and a mahogany bureau.
+Everything about me has its origin there.  On that table my father made
+figures for forty years; at first in a little room, then in the apartment
+where I was born.  We were not very wealthy then.  I am a parvenu's
+daughter, or a conqueror's daughter, it's all the same.  We are people of
+material interests.  My father wanted to earn money, to possess what he
+could buy--that is, everything.  I wish to earn and keep--what?  I do not
+know--the happiness that I have--or that I have not.  I have my own way
+of being exacting.  I long for dreams and illusions.  Oh, I know very
+well that all this is not worth the trouble that a woman takes in giving
+herself to a man; but it is a trouble that is worth something, because my
+trouble is myself, my life.  I like to enjoy what I like, or think what I
+like.  I do not wish to lose.  I am like papa: I demand what is due to
+me.  And then--"
+
+She lowered her voice:
+
+"And then, I have--impulses!  Now, my dear, I bore you.  What will you
+have?  You shouldn't have loved me."
+
+This language, to which she had accustomed him, often spoiled his
+pleasure.  But it did not alarm him.  He was sensitive to all that she
+did, but not at all to what she said; and he attached no importance to a
+woman's words.  Talking little himself, he could not imagine that often
+words are the same as actions.
+
+Although he loved her, or, rather, because he loved her with strength and
+confidence, he thought it his duty to resist her whims, which he judged
+absurd.  Whenever he played the master, he succeeded with her; and,
+naively, he always ended by playing it.
+
+"You know very well, Therese, that I wish to do nothing except to be
+agreeable to you.  Don't be capricious with me."
+
+"And why should I not be capricious?  If I gave myself to you, it was not
+because I was logical, nor because I thought I must.  It was because I
+was capricious."
+
+He looked at her, astonished and saddened.
+
+"The word is not pleasant to you, my friend?  Well let us say that it was
+love.  Truly it was, with all my heart, and because I felt that you loved
+me.  But love must be a pleasure, and if I do not find in it the
+satisfaction of what you call my capriciousness, but which is really my
+desire, my life, my love, I do not want it; I prefer to live alone.  You
+are astonishing!  My caprices!  Is there anything else in life?  Your
+foxhunt, isn't that capricious?"
+
+He replied, very sincerely:
+
+"If I had not promised, I swear to you, Therese, that I would sacrifice
+that small pleasure with great joy."
+
+She felt that he spoke the truth.  She knew how exact he was in filling
+the most trifling engagements, yet realized that if she insisted he would
+not go.  But it was too late: she did not wish to win.  She would seek
+hereafter only the violent pleasure of losing.  She pretended to take his
+reason seriously, and said:
+
+"Ah, you have promised!"
+
+And she affected to yield.
+
+Surprised at first, he congratulated himself at last on having made her
+listen to reason.  He was grateful to her for not having been stubborn.
+He put his arm around her waist and kissed her on the neck and eyelids as
+a reward.  He said:
+
+"We may meet three or four times before I go, and more, if you wish.
+I will wait for you as often as you wish to come.  Will you meet me here
+to-morrow?"
+
+She gave herself the satisfaction of saying that she could not come the
+next day nor any other day.
+
+Softly she mentioned the things that prevented her.
+
+The obstacles seemed light; calls, a gown to be tried on, a charity fair,
+exhibitions.  As she dilated upon the difficulties they seemed to
+increase.  The calls could not be postponed; there were three fairs; the
+exhibitions would soon close.  In fine, it was impossible for her to see
+him again before his departure.
+
+As he was well accustomed to making excuses of that sort, he failed to
+observe that it was not natural for Therese to offer them.  Embarrassed
+by this tissue of social obligations, he did not persist, but remained
+silent and unhappy.
+
+With her left arm she raised the portiere, placed her right hand on the
+key of the door; and, standing against the rich background of the
+sapphire and ruby-colored folds of the Oriental draperies, she turned her
+head toward the friend she was leaving, and said, a little mockingly, yet
+with a touch of tragic emotion:
+
+"Good-by, Robert.  Enjoy yourself.  My calls, my errands, your little
+visits are nothing.  Life is made up of just such trifles.  Good-by!"
+
+She went out.  He would have liked to accompany her, but he made it a
+point not to show himself with her in the street, unless she absolutely
+forced him to do so.
+
+In the street, Therese felt suddenly that she was alone in the world,
+without joy and without pain.  She returned to her house on foot, as was
+her habit.  It was night; the air was frozen, clear, and tranquil.  But
+the avenues through which she walked, in shadows studded with lights,
+enveloped her with that mild atmosphere of the queen of cities, so
+agreeable to its inhabitants, which makes itself felt even in the cold of
+winter.  She walked between the lines of huts and old houses, remains of
+the field-days of Auteuil, which tall houses interrupted here and there.
+These small shops, these monotonous windows, were nothing to her.  Yet
+she felt that she was under the mysterious spell of the friendship of
+inanimate things; and it seemed to her that the stones, the doors of
+houses, the lights behind the windowpanes, looked kindly upon her.  She
+was alone, and she wished to be alone. The steps she was taking between
+the two houses wherein her habits were almost equal, the steps she had
+taken so often, to-day seemed to her irrevocable.  Why?  What had that
+day brought?  Not exactly a quarrel.  And yet the words spoken that day
+had left a subtle, strange, persistent sting, which would never leave
+her.  What had happened?  Nothing.  And that nothing had effaced
+everything.  She had a sort of obscure certainty that she would never
+return to that room which had so recently enclosed the most secret and
+dearest phases of her life.  She had loved Robert with the seriousness of
+a necessary joy.  Made to be loved, and very reasonable, she had not lost
+in the abandonment of herself that instinct of reflection, that necessity
+for security, which was so strong in her.  She had not chosen: one seldom
+chooses.  She had not allowed herself to be taken at random and by
+surprise.  She had done what she had wished to do, as much as one ever
+does what one wishes to do in such cases.  She had nothing to regret.
+He had been to her what it was his duty to be.  She felt, in spite of
+everything, that all was at an end.  She thought, with dry sadness,
+that three years of her life had been given to an honest man who had
+loved her and whom she had loved.  "For I loved him.  I must have loved
+him in order to give myself to him."  But she could not feel again the
+sentiments of early days, the movements of her mind when she had yielded.
+She recalled small and insignificant circumstances: the flowers on the
+wall-paper and the pictures in the room.  She recalled the words,
+a little ridiculous and almost touching, that he had said to her.
+But it seemed to her that the adventure had occurred to another woman,
+to a stranger whom she did not like and whom she hardly understood.
+And what had happened only a moment ago seemed far distant now.
+The room, the lilacs in the crystal vase, the little cup of Bohemian
+glass where she found her pins--she saw all these things as if through a
+window that one passes in the street.  She was without bitterness,
+and even without sadness.  She had nothing to forgive, alas!
+This absence for a week was not a betrayal, it was not a fault against
+her; it was nothing, yet it was everything.  It was the end.  She knew
+it.  She wished to cease.  It was the consent of all the forces of her
+being.  She said to herself: "I have no reason to love him less.  Do I
+love him no more?  Did I ever love him?"  She did not know and she did
+not care to know. Three years, during which there had been months when
+they had seen each other every day--was all this nothing?  Life is not a
+great thing.  And what one puts in it, how little that is!
+
+In fine, she had nothing of which to complain.  But it was better to end
+it all.  All these reflections brought her back to that point.  It was
+not a resolution; resolutions may be changed.  It was graver: it was a
+state of the body and of the mind.
+
+When she arrived at the square, in the centre of which is a fountain, and
+on one side of which stands a church of rustic style, showing its bell in
+an open belfry, she recalled the little bouquet of violets that he had
+given to her one night on the bridge near Notre Dame.  They had loved
+each other that day--perhaps more than usual.  Her heart softened at that
+reminiscence.  But the little bouquet remained alone, a poor little
+flower skeleton, in her memory.
+
+While she was thinking, passers-by, deceived by the simplicity of her
+dress, followed her.  One of them made propositions to her: a dinner and
+the theatre.  It amused her.  She was not at all disturbed; this was not
+a crisis.  She thought: "How do other women manage such things?  And I,
+who promised myself not to spoil my life.  What is life worth?"
+
+Opposite the Greek lantern of the Musee des Religions she found the soil
+disturbed by workmen. There were paving-stones crossed by a bridge made
+of a narrow flexible plank.  She had stepped on it, when she saw at the
+other end, in front of her, a man who was waiting for her.  He recognized
+her and bowed.  It was Dechartre.  She saw that he was happy to meet her;
+she thanked him with a smile.  He asked her permission to walk a few
+steps with her, and they entered into the large and airy space.  In this
+place the tall houses, set somewhat back, efface themselves, and reveal a
+glimpse of the sky.
+
+He told her that he had recognized her from a distance by the rhythm of
+her figure and her movements, which were hers exclusively.
+
+"Graceful movements," he added, "are like music for the eyes."
+
+She replied that she liked to walk; it was her pleasure, and the cause of
+her good health.
+
+He, too, liked to walk in populous towns and beautiful fields.  The
+mystery of highways tempted him.  He liked to travel.  Although voyages
+had become common and easy, they retained for him their powerful charm.
+He had seen golden days and crystalline nights, Greece, Egypt, and the
+Bosporus; but it was to Italy that he returned always, as to the mother
+country of his mind.
+
+"I shall go there next week," he said.  "I long to see again Ravenna
+asleep among the black pines of its sterile shore.  Have you seen
+Ravenna, Madame? It is an enchanted tomb where sparkling phantoms appear.
+The magic of death lies there.  The mosaic works of Saint Vitale, with
+their barbarous angels and their aureolated empresses, make one feel the
+monstrous delights of the Orient.  Despoiled to-day of its silver lamels,
+the grave of Galla Placidia is frightful under its crypt, luminous yet
+gloomy.  When one looks through an opening in the sarcophagus, it seems
+as if one saw the daughter of Theodosius, seated on her golden chair,
+erect in her gown studded with stones and embroidered with scenes from
+the Old Testament; her beautiful, cruel face preserved hard and black
+with aromatic plants, and her ebony hands immovable on her knees.  For
+thirteen centuries she retained this funereal majesty, until one day a
+child passed a candle through the opening of the grave and burned the
+body."
+
+Madame Martin-Belleme asked what that dead woman, so obstinate in her
+conceit, had done during her life.
+
+"Twice a slave," said Dechartre, "she became twice an empress."
+
+"She must have been beautiful," said Madame Martin.  "You have made me
+see her too vividly in her tomb.  She frightens me.  Shall you go to
+Venice, Monsieur Dechartre?  Or are you tired of gondolas, of canals
+bordered by palaces, and of the pigeons of Saint Mark?  I confess that
+I still like Venice, after being there three times."
+
+He said she was right.  He, too, liked Venice.
+
+Whenever he went there, from a sculptor he became a painter, and made
+studies.  He would like to paint its atmosphere.
+
+"Elsewhere," he said, "even in Florence, the sky is too high.  At Venice
+it is everywhere; it caresses the earth and the water.  It envelops
+lovingly the leaden domes and the marble facades, and throws into the
+iridescent atmosphere its pearls and its crystals.  The beauty of Venice
+is in its sky and its women.  What pretty creatures the Venetian women
+are!  Their forms are so slender and supple under their black shawls.
+If nothing remained of these women except a bone, one would find in that
+bone the charm of their exquisite structure.  Sundays, at church, they
+form laughing groups, agitated, with hips a little pointed, elegant
+necks, flowery smiles, and inflaming glances.  And all bend, with the
+suppleness of young animals, at the passage of a priest whose head
+resembles that of Vitellius, and who carries the chalice, preceded by two
+choir-boys."
+
+He walked with unequal step, following the rhythm of his ideas, sometimes
+quick, sometimes slow.  She walked more regularly, and almost outstripped
+him.  He looked at her sidewise, and liked her firm and supple carriage.
+He observed the little shake which at moments her obstinate head gave to
+the holly on her toque.
+
+Without expecting it, he felt a charm in that meeting, almost intimate,
+with a young woman almost unknown.
+
+They had reached the place where the large avenue unfolds its four rows
+of trees.  They were following the stone parapet surmounted by a hedge of
+boxwood, which entirely hides the ugliness of the buildings on the quay.
+One felt the presence of the river by the milky atmosphere which in misty
+days seems to rest on the water.  The sky was clear.  The lights of the
+city were mingled with the stars.  At the south shone the three golden
+nails of the Orion belt.  Dechartre continued:
+
+"Last year, at Venice, every morning as I went out of my house, I saw at
+her door, raised by three steps above the canal, a charming girl, with
+small head, neck round and strong, and graceful hips.  She was there, in
+the sun and surrounded by vermin, as pure as an amphora, fragrant as a
+flower.  She smiled.  What a mouth!  The richest jewel in the most
+beautiful light. I realized in time that this smile was addressed to a
+butcher standing behind me with his basket on his head."
+
+At the corner of the short street which goes to the quay, between two
+lines of small gardens, Madame Martin walked more slowly.
+
+"It is true that at Venice," she said, "all women are pretty."
+
+"They are almost all pretty, Madame.  I speak of the common girls--the
+cigar-girls, the girls among the glass-workers.  The others are
+commonplace enough."
+
+"By others you mean society women; and you don't like these?"
+
+"Society women?  Oh, some of them are charming.  As for loving them,
+that's a different affair."
+
+"Do you think so?"
+
+She extended her hand to him, and suddenly turned the corner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A DINNER 'EN FAMILLE'
+
+She dined that night alone with her husband.  The narrow table had not
+the basket with golden eagles and winged Victorys.  The candelabra did
+not light Oudry's paintings.  While he talked of the events of the day,
+she fell into a sad reverie.  It seemed to her that she floated in a
+mist.  It was a peaceful and almost sweet suffering.  She saw vaguely
+through the clouds the little room of the Rue Spontini transported by
+angels to one of the summits of the Himalaya Mountains, and Robert Le
+Menil--in the quaking of a sort of world's end--had disappeared while
+putting on his gloves.  She felt her pulse to see whether she were
+feverish.  A rattle of silverware on the table awoke her.  She heard her
+husband saying:
+
+"My dear friend Gavaut delivered to-day, in the Chamber, an excellent
+speech on the question of the reserve funds.  It's extraordinary how his
+ideas have become healthy and just.  Oh, he has improved a great deal."
+
+She could not refrain from smiling.
+
+"But Gavaut, my friend, is a poor devil who never thought of anything
+except escaping from the crowd of those who are dying of hunger.  Gavaut
+never had any ideas except at his elbows.  Does anybody take him
+seriously in the political world?  You may be sure that he never gave an
+illusion to any woman, not even his wife.  And yet to produce that sort
+of illusion a man does not need much."  She added, brusquely:
+
+"You know Miss Bell has invited me to spend a month with her at Fiesole.
+I have accepted; I am going."
+
+Less astonished than discontented, he asked her with whom she was going.
+
+At once she answered:
+
+"With Madame Marmet."
+
+There was no objection to make.  Madame Marmet was a proper companion,
+and it was appropriate for her to visit Italy, where her husband had made
+some excavations.  He asked only:
+
+"Have you invited her?  When are you going?"
+
+"Next week."
+
+He had the wisdom not to make any objection, judging that opposition
+would only make her capriciousness firmer, and fearing to give impetus to
+that foolish idea.  He said:
+
+"Surely, to travel is an agreeable pastime.  I thought that we might in
+the spring visit the Caucasus and Turkestan.  There is an interesting
+country.  General Annenkoff will place at our disposal carriages, trains,
+and everything else on his railway.  He is a friend of mine; he is quite
+charmed with you.  He will provide us with an escort of Cossacks."
+
+He persisted in trying to flatter her vanity, unable to realize that her
+mind was not worldly.  She replied, negligently, that it might be a
+pleasant trip.  Then he praised the mountains, the ancient cities, the
+bazaars, the costumes, the armor.
+
+He added:
+
+"We shall take some friends with us--Princess Seniavine, General
+Lariviere, perhaps Vence or Le Menil."
+
+She replied, with a little dry laugh, that they had time to select their
+guests.
+
+He became attentive to her wants.
+
+"You are not eating.  You will injure your health."
+
+Without yet believing in this prompt departure, he felt some anxiety
+about it.  Each had regained freedom, but he did not like to be alone.
+He felt that he was himself only when his wife was there.  And then, he
+had decided to give two or three political dinners during the session.
+He saw his party growing.  This was the moment to assert himself, to make
+a dazzling show.  He said, mysteriously:
+
+"Something might happen requiring the aid of all our friends.  You have
+not followed the march of events, Therese?"
+
+"No, my dear."
+
+"I am sorry.  You have judgment, liberality of mind.  If you had followed
+the march of events you would have been struck by the current that is
+leading the country back to moderate opinions.  The country is tired of
+exaggerations.  It rejects the men compromised by radical politics and
+religious persecution.  Some day or other it will be necessary to make
+over a Casimir-Perier ministry with other men, and that day--"
+
+He stopped: really she listened too inattentively.
+
+She was thinking, sad and disenchanted.  It seemed to her that the pretty
+woman, who, among the warm shadows of a closed room, placed her bare feet
+in the fur of the brown bear rug, and to whom her lover gave kisses while
+she twisted her hair in front of a glass, was not herself, was not even a
+woman that she knew well, or that she desired to know, but a person whose
+affairs were of no interest to her.  A pin badly set in her hair, one of
+the pins from the Bohemian glass cup, fell on her neck.  She shivered.
+
+"Yet we really must give three or four dinners to our good political
+friends," said M. Martin-Belleme.  "We shall invite some of the ancient
+radicals to meet the people of our circle.  It will be well to find some
+pretty women.  We might invite Madame Berard de la Malle; there has been
+no gossip about her for two years.  What do you think of it?"
+
+"But, my dear, since I am to go next week--"
+
+This filled him with consternation.
+
+They went, both silent and moody, into the drawing-room, where Paul Vence
+was waiting.  He often came in the evening.
+
+She extended her hand to him.
+
+"I am very glad to see you.  I am going out of town.  Paris is cold and
+bleak.  This weather tires and saddens me.  I am going to Florence, for
+six weeks, to visit Miss Bell."
+
+M. Martin-Belleme then lifted his eyes to heaven.
+
+Vence asked whether she had been in Italy often.
+
+"Three times; but I saw nothing.  This time I wish to see, to throw
+myself into things.  From Florence I shall take walks into Tuscany, into
+Umbria.  And, finally, I shall go to Venice."
+
+"You will do well.  Venice suggests the peace of the Sabbath-day in the
+grand week of creative and divine Italy."
+
+"Your friend Dechartre talked very prettily to me of Venice, of the
+atmosphere of Venice, which sows pearls."
+
+"Yes, at Venice the sky is a colorist.  Florence inspires the mind.
+An old author has said: 'The sky of Florence is light and subtle, and
+feeds the beautiful ideas of men.'  I have lived delicious days in
+Tuscany.  I wish I could live them again."
+
+"Come and see me there."
+
+He sighed.
+
+The newspaper, books, and his daily work prevented him.
+
+M. Martin-Belleme said everyone should bow before such reasons, and that
+one was too happy to read the articles and the fine books written by M.
+Paul Vence to have any wish to take him from his work.
+
+"Oh, my books!  One never says in a book what one wishes to say.  It is
+impossible to express one's self.  I know how to talk with my pen as well
+as any other person; but, after all, to talk or to write, what futile
+occupations!  How wretchedly inadequate are the little signs which form
+syllables, words, and phrases.  What becomes of the idea, the beautiful
+idea, which these miserable hieroglyphics hide?  What does the reader
+make of my writing?  A series of false sense, of counter sense, and of
+nonsense.  To read, to hear, is to translate.  There are beautiful
+translations, perhaps.  There are no faithful translations.  Why should I
+care for the admiration which they give to my books, since it is what
+they themselves see in them that they admire?  Every reader substitutes
+his visions in the place of ours.  We furnish him with the means to
+quicken his imagination.  It is a horrible thing to be a cause of such
+exercises.  It is an infamous profession."
+
+"You are jesting," said M. Martin-Belleme.
+
+"I do not think so," said Therese.  "He recognizes that one mind is
+impenetrable to another mind, and he suffers from this.  He feels that he
+is alone when he is thinking, alone when he is writing.  Whatever one may
+do, one is always alone in the world.  That is what he wishes to say.
+He is right.  You may always explain: you never are understood."
+
+"There are signs--" said Paul Vence.
+
+"Don't you think, Monsieur Vence, that signs also are a form of
+hieroglyphics?  Give me news of Monsieur Choulette.  I do not see him any
+more."
+
+Vence replied that Choulette was very busy in forming the Third Order of
+Saint Francis.
+
+"The idea, Madame, came to him in a marvellous fashion one day when he
+had gone to call on his Maria in the street where she lives, behind the
+public hospital--a street always damp, the houses on which are tottering.
+You must know that he considers Maria the saint and martyr who is
+responsible for the sins of the people.
+
+"He pulled the bell-rope, made greasy by two centuries of visitors.
+Either because the martyr was at the wine-shop, where she is familiarly
+known, or because she was busy in her room, she did not open the door.
+Choulette rang for a long time, and so violently that the bellrope
+remained in his hand.  Skilful at understanding symbols and the hidden
+meaning of things, he understood at once that this rope had not been
+detached without the permission of spiritual powers.  He made of it a
+belt, and realized that he had been chosen to lead back into its
+primitive purity the Third Order of Saint Francis.  He renounced the
+beauty of women, the delights of poetry, the brightness of glory, and
+studied the life and the doctrine of Saint Francis.  However, he has sold
+to his editor a book entitled 'Les Blandices', which contains, he says,
+the description of all sorts of loves.  He flatters himself that in it he
+has shown himself a criminal with some elegance.  But far from harming
+his mystic undertakings, this book favors them in this sense, that,
+corrected by his later work, he will become honest and exemplary; and the
+gold that he has received in payment, which would not have been paid to
+him for a more chaste volume, will serve for a pilgrimage to Assisi."
+
+Madame Martin asked how much of this story was really true.  Vence
+replied that she must not try to learn.
+
+He confessed that he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the
+adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal
+and Judaic sense.
+
+He affirmed that at least Choulette was publishing Les Blandices, and
+desired to visit the cell and the grave of St. Francis.
+
+"Then," exclaimed Madame Martin, "I will take him to Italy with me.
+Find him, Monsieur Vence, and bring him to me.  I am going next week."
+
+M. Martin then excused himself, not being able to remain longer.  He had
+to finish a report which was to be laid before the Chamber the next day.
+
+Madame Martin said that nobody interested her so much as Choulette.
+Paul Vence said that he was a singular specimen of humanity.
+
+"He is not very different from the saints of whose extraordinary lives
+we read.  He is as sincere as they.  He has an exquisite delicacy of
+sentiment and a terrible violence of mind.  If he shocks one by many of
+his acts, the reason is that he is weaker, less supported, or perhaps
+less closely observed.  And then there are unworthy saints, just as there
+are bad angels: Choulette is a worldly saint, that is all.  But his poems
+are true poems, and much finer than those written by the bishops of the
+seventeenth century."
+
+She interrupted him:
+
+"While I think of it, I wish to congratulate you on your friend
+Dechartre.  He has a charming mind."
+
+She added:
+
+"Perhaps he is a little too timid."
+
+Vence reminded her that he had told her she would find Dechartre
+interesting.
+
+"I know him by heart; he has been my friend since our childhood."
+
+"You knew his parents?"
+
+"Yes.  He is the only son of Philippe Dechartre."
+
+"The architect?"
+
+"The architect who, under Napoleon III, restored so many castles and
+churches in Touraine and the Orleanais.  He had taste and knowledge.
+Solitary and quiet in his life, he had the imprudence to attack Viollet-
+le-Duc, then all-powerful.  He reproached him with trying to reestablish
+buildings in their primitive plan, as they had been, or as they might
+have been, at the beginning.  Philippe Dechartre, on the contrary, wished
+that everything which the lapse of centuries had added to a church, an
+abbey, or a castle should be respected.  To abolish anachronisms and
+restore a building to its primitive unity, seemed to him to be a
+scientific barbarity as culpable as that of ignorance.  He said: 'It is a
+crime to efface the successive imprints made in stone by the hands of our
+ancestors.  New stones cut in old style are false witnesses.'  He wished
+to limit the task of the archaeologic architect to that of supporting and
+consolidating walls.  He was right.  Everybody said that he was wrong.
+He achieved his ruin by dying young, while his rival triumphed.  He
+bequeathed an honest fortune to his widow and his son.  Jacques Dechartre
+was brought up by his mother, who adored him.  I do not think that
+maternal tenderness ever was more impetuous.  Jacques is a charming
+fellow; but he is a spoiled child."
+
+"Yet he appears so indifferent, so easy to understand, so distant from
+everything."
+
+"Do not rely on this.  He has a tormented and tormenting imagination."
+
+"Does he like women?"
+
+"Why do you ask?"
+
+"Oh, it isn't with any idea of match-making."
+
+"Yes, he likes them.  I told you that he was an egoist.  Only selfish men
+really love women.  After the death of his mother, he had a long liaison
+with a well-known actress, Jeanne Tancrede."
+
+Madame Martin remembered Jeanne Tancrede; not very pretty, but graceful
+with a certain slowness of action in playing romantic roles.
+
+"They lived almost together in a little house at Auteuil," Paul Vence
+continued.  "I often called on them.  I found him lost in his dreams,
+forgetting to model a figure drying under its cloths, alone with himself,
+pursuing his idea, absolutely incapable of listening to anybody; she,
+studying her roles, her complexion burned by rouge, her eyes tender,
+pretty because of her intelligence and her activity.  She complained to
+me that he was inattentive, cross, and unreasonable.  She loved him and
+deceived him only to obtain roles.  And when she deceived him, it was
+done on the spur of the moment.  Afterward she never thought of it.
+A typical woman!  But she was imprudent; she smiled upon Joseph Springer
+in the hope that he would make her a member of the Comedie Francaise.
+Dechartre left her.  Now she finds it more practical to live with her
+managers, and Jacques finds it more agreeable to travel."
+
+"Does he regret her?"
+
+"How can one know the things that agitate a mind anxious and mobile,
+selfish and passionate, desirous to surrender itself, prompt in
+disengaging itself, liking itself most of all among the beautiful things
+that it finds in the world?"
+
+Brusquely she changed the subject.
+
+"And your novel, Monsieur Vence?"
+
+"I have reached the last chapter, Madame.  My little workingman has been
+guillotined.  He died with that indifference of virgins without desire,
+who never have felt on their lips the warm taste of life.  The journals
+and the public approve the act of justice which has just been
+accomplished.  But in another garret, another workingman, sober, sad, and
+a chemist, swears to himself that he will commit an expiatory murder."
+
+He rose and said good-night.
+
+She called him back.
+
+"Monsieur Vence, you know that I was serious.  Bring Choulette to me."
+
+When she went up to her room, her husband was waiting for her, in his
+red-brown plush robe, with a sort of doge's cap framing his pale and
+hollow face.  He had an air of gravity.  Behind him, by the open door of
+his workroom, appeared under the lamp a mass of documents bound in blue,
+a collection of the annual budgets.  Before she could reach her room he
+motioned that he wished to speak to her.
+
+"My dear, I can not understand you.  You are very inconsequential.  It
+does you a great deal of harm.  You intend to leave your home without any
+reason, without even a pretext.  And you wish to run through Europe with
+whom?  With a Bohemian, a drunkard--that man Choulette."
+
+She replied that she should travel with Madame Marmet, in which there
+could be nothing objectionable.
+
+"But you announce your going to everybody, yet you do not even know
+whether Madame Marmet can accompany you."
+
+"Oh, Madame Marmet will soon pack her boxes.  Nothing keeps her in Paris
+except her dog.  She will leave it to you; you may take care of it."
+
+"Does your father know of your project?"
+
+It was his last resource to invoke the authority of Montessuy.  He knew
+that his wife feared to displease her father.  He insisted:
+
+"Your father is full of sense and tact.  I have been happy to find him
+agreeing with me several times in the advices which I have permitted
+myself to give you.  He thinks as I do, that Madame Meillan's house is
+not a fit place for you to visit.  The company that meets there is mixed,
+and the mistress of the house favors intrigue.  You are wrong, I must
+say, not to take account of what people think.  I am mistaken if your
+father does not think it singular that you should go away with so much
+frivolity, and the absence will be the more remarked, my dear, since
+circumstances have made me eminent in the course of this legislature.
+My merit has nothing to do with the case, surely.  But if you had
+consented to listen to me at dinner I should have demonstrated to you
+that the group of politicians to which I belong has almost reached power.
+In such a moment you should not renounce your duties as mistress of the
+house.  You must understand this yourself."
+
+She replied "You annoy me."  And, turning her back to him, she shut the
+door of her room between them.  That night in her bed she opened a book,
+as she always did before going to sleep.  It was a novel.  She was
+turning the leaves with indifference, when her eyes fell on these lines:
+
+"Love is like devotion: it comes late.  A woman is hardly in love or
+devout at twenty, unless she has a special disposition to be either, a
+sort of native sanctity.  Women who are predestined to love, themselves
+struggle a long time against that grace of love which is more terrible
+than the thunderbolt that fell on the road to Damascus.  A woman oftenest
+yields to the passion of love only when age or solitude does not frighten
+her.  Passion is an arid and burning desert.  Passion is profane
+asceticism, as harsh as religious asceticism.  Great woman lovers are as
+rare as great penitent women.  Those who know life well know that women
+do not easily bind themselves in the chains of real love.  They know that
+nothing is less common than sacrifice among them.  And consider how much
+a worldly woman must sacrifice when she is in love--liberty, quietness,
+the charming play of a free mind, coquetry, amusement, pleasure--she
+loses everything.
+
+"Coquetry is permissible.  One may conciliate that with all the
+exigencies of fashionable life.  Not so love.  Love is the least mundane
+of passions, the most anti-social, the most savage, the most barbarous.
+So the world judges it more severely than mere gallantry or looseness of
+manners.  In one sense the world is right.  A woman in love betrays her
+nature and fails in her function, which is to be admired by all men, like
+a work of art.  A woman is a work of art, the most marvellous that man's
+industry ever has produced.  A woman is a wonderful artifice, due to the
+concourse of all the arts mechanical and of all the arts liberal.  She is
+the work of everybody, she belongs to the world."
+
+Therese closed the book and thought that these ideas were only the dreams
+of novelists who did not know life.  She knew very well that there was in
+reality neither a Carmel of passion nor a chain of love, nor a beautiful
+and terrible vocation against which the predestined one resisted in vain;
+she knew very well that love was only a brief intoxication from which one
+recovered a little sadder.  And yet, perhaps, she did not know
+everything; perhaps there were loves in which one was deliciously lost.
+She put out her lamp.  The dreams of her first youth came back to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A DISTINGUISHED RELICT
+
+It was raining.  Madame Martin-Belleme saw confusedly through the glass
+of her coupe the multitude of passing umbrellas, like black turtles under
+the watery skies.  She was thinking.  Her thoughts were gray and
+indistinct, like the aspect of the streets and the squares.
+
+She no longer knew why the idea had come to her to spend a month with
+Miss Bell.  Truly, she never had known.  The idea had been like a spring,
+at first hidden by leaves, and now forming the current of a deep and
+rapid stream.  She remembered that Tuesday night at dinner she had said
+suddenly that she wished to go, but she could not remember the first
+flush of that desire.  It was not the wish to act toward Robert Le Menil
+as he was acting toward her.  Doubtless she thought it excellent to go
+travelling in Italy while he went fox-hunting.  This seemed to her a fair
+arrangement.  Robert, who was always pleased to see her when he came
+back, would not find her on his return.  She thought this would be right.
+She had not thought of it at first.  And since then she had thought
+little of it, and really she was not going for the pleasure of making him
+grieve.  She had against him a thought less piquant, and more harsh.
+She did not wish to see him soon.  He had become to her almost a
+stranger.  He seemed to her a man like others--better than most others--
+good-looking, estimable, and who did not displease her; but he did not
+preoccupy her.  Suddenly he had gone out of her life.  She could not
+remember how he had become mingled with it.  The idea of belonging to him
+shocked her.  The thought that they might meet again in the small
+apartment of the Rue Spontini was so painful to her that she discarded it
+at once.  She preferred to think that an unforeseen event would prevent
+their meeting again--the end of the world, for example.  M. Lagrange,
+member of the Academie des Sciences, had told her the day before of a
+comet which some day might meet the earth, envelop it with its flaming
+hair, imbue animals and plants with unknown poisons, and make all men die
+in a frenzy of laughter.  She expected that this, or something else,
+would happen next month.  It was not inexplicable that she wished to go.
+But that her desire to go should contain a vague joy, that she should
+feel the charm of what she was to find, was inexplicable to her.
+
+Her carriage left her at the corner of a street.
+
+There, under the roof of a tall house, behind five windows, in a small,
+neat apartment, Madame Marmet had lived since the death of her husband.
+
+Countess Martin found her in her modest drawing-room, opposite
+M. Lagrange, half asleep in a deep armchair.  This worldly old savant had
+remained ever faithful to her.  He it was who, the day after M. Marmet's
+funeral, had conveyed to the unfortunate widow the poisoned speech
+delivered by Schmoll.  She had fainted in his arms.  Madame Marmet
+thought that he lacked judgment, but he was her best friend.  They
+dined together often with rich friends.
+
+Madame Martin, slender and erect in her zibeline corsage opening on a
+flood of lace, awakened with the charming brightness of her gray eyes the
+good man, who was susceptible to the graces of women.  He had told her
+the day before how the world would come to an end.  He asked her whether
+she had not been frightened at night by pictures of the earth devoured by
+flames or frozen to a mass of ice.  While he talked to her with affected
+gallantry, she looked at the mahogany bookcase.  There were not many
+books in it, but on one of the shelves was a skeleton in armor.  It
+amazed one to see in this good lady's house that Etruscan warrior wearing
+a green bronze helmet and a cuirass.  He slept among boxes of bonbons,
+vases of gilded porcelain, and carved images of the Virgin, picked up at
+Lucerne and on the Righi.  Madame Marmet, in her widowhood, had sold the
+books which her husband had left.  Of all the ancient objects collected
+by the archaeologist, she had retained nothing except the Etruscan.  Many
+persons had tried to sell it for her.  Paul Vence had obtained from the
+administration a promise to buy it for the Louvre, but the good widow
+would not part with it.  It seemed to her that if she lost that warrior
+with his green bronze helmet she would lose the name that she wore
+worthily, and would cease to be the widow of Louis Marmet of the Academie
+des Inscriptions.
+
+"Do not be afraid, Madame; a comet will not soon strike the earth.  Such
+a phenomenon is very improbable."
+
+Madame Martin replied that she knew no serious reason why the earth and
+humanity should not be annihilated at once.
+
+Old Lagrange exclaimed with profound sincerity that he hoped the
+cataclysm would come as late as possible.
+
+She looked at him.  His bald head could boast only a few hairs dyed
+black.  His eyelids fell like rags over eyes still smiling; his cheeks
+hung in loose folds, and one divined that his body was equally withered.
+She thought, "And even he likes life!"
+
+Madame Marmet hoped, too, that the end of the world was not near at hand.
+
+"Monsieur Lagrange," said Madame Martin, "you live, do you not, in a
+pretty little house, the windows of which overlook the Botanical Gardens?
+It seems to me it must be a joy to live in that garden, which makes me
+think of the Noah's Ark of my infancy, and of the terrestrial paradises
+in the old Bibles."
+
+But he was not at all charmed with his house.  It was small, unimproved,
+infested with rats.
+
+She acknowledged that one seldom felt at home anywhere, and that rats
+were found everywhere, either real or symbolical, legions of pests that
+torment us.  Yet she liked the Botanical Gardens; she had always wished
+to go there, yet never had gone.  There was also the museum, which she
+was curious to visit.
+
+Smiling, happy, he offered to escort her there.  He considered it his
+house.  He would show her rare specimens, some of which were superb.
+
+She did not know what a bolide was.  She recalled that some one had said
+to her that at the museum were bones carved by primitive men, and plaques
+of ivory on which were engraved pictures of animals, which were long ago
+extinct.  She asked whether that were true.  Lagrange ceased to smile.
+He replied indifferently that such objects concerned one of his
+colleagues.
+
+"Ah!"  said Madame Martin, "then they are not in your showcase."
+
+She observed that learned men were not curious, and that it is indiscreet
+to question them on things that are not in their own showcases.  It is
+true that Lagrange had made a scientific fortune in studying meteors.
+This had led him to study comets.  But he was wise.  For twenty years he
+had been preoccupied by nothing except dining out.
+
+When he had left, Countess Martin told Madame Marmet what she expected of
+her.
+
+"I am going next week to Fiesole, to visit Miss Bell, and you are coming
+with me."
+
+The good Madame Marmet, with placid brow yet searching eyes, was silent
+for a moment; then she refused gently, but finally consented.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MADAME HAS HER WAY
+
+The Marseilles express was ready on the quay, where the postmen ran, and
+the carriages rolled amid smoke and noise, under the light that fell from
+the windows.  Through the open doors travellers in long cloaks came and
+went.  At the end of the station, blinding with soot and dust, a small
+rainbow could be discerned, not larger than one's hand.  Countess Martin
+and the good Madame Marniet were already in their carriage, under the
+rack loaded with bags, among newspapers thrown on the cushions.
+Choulette had not appeared, and Madame Martin expected him no longer.
+Yet he had promised to be at the station.  He had made his arrangements
+to go, and had received from his publisher the price of Les Blandices.
+Paul Vence had brought him one evening to Madame Martin's house.  He had
+been sweet, polished, full of witty gayety and naive joy.  She had
+promised herself much pleasure in travelling with a man of genius,
+original, picturesquely ugly, with an amusing simplicity; like a child
+prematurely old and abandoned, full of vices, yet with a certain degree
+of innocence.  The doors closed.  She expected him no longer.  She should
+not have counted on his impulsive and vagabondish mind.  At the moment
+when the engine began to breathe hoarsely, Madame Marmet, who was looking
+out of the window, said, quietly:
+
+"I think that Monsieur Choulette is coming."
+
+He was walking along the quay, limping, with his hat on the back of his
+head, his beard unkempt, and dragging an old carpet-bag.  He was almost
+repulsive; yet, in spite of his fifty years of age, he looked young, so
+clear and lustrous were his eyes, so much ingenuous audacity had been
+retained in his yellow, hollow face, so vividly did this old man express
+the eternal adolescence of the poet and artist.  When she saw him,
+Therese regretted having invited so strange a companion.  He walked
+along, throwing a hasty glance into every carriage--a glance which,
+little by little, became sullen and distrustful.  But when he recognized
+Madame Martin, he smiled so sweetly and said good-morning to her in so
+caressing a voice that nothing was left of the ferocious old vagabond
+walking on the quay, nothing except the old carpet-bag, the handles of
+which were half broken.
+
+He placed it in the rack with great care, among the elegant bags
+enveloped with gray cloth, beside which it looked conspicuously sordid.
+It was studded with yellow flowers on a blood-colored background.
+
+He was soon perfectly at ease, and complimented Madame Martin on the
+elegance of her travelling attire.
+
+"Excuse me, ladies," he added, "I was afraid I should be late.  I went to
+six o'clock mass at Saint Severin, my parish, in the Virgin Chapel, under
+those pretty, but absurd columns that point toward heaven though frail as
+reeds-like us, poor sinners that we are."
+
+"Ah," said Madame Martin, "you are pious to-day."
+
+And she asked him whether he wore the cordon of the order which he was
+founding.  He assumed a grave and penitent air.
+
+"I am afraid, Madame, that Monsieur Paul Vence has told you many absurd
+stories about me.  I have heard that he goes about circulating rumors
+that my ribbon is a bell-rope--and of what a bell!  I should be pained if
+anybody believed so wretched a story.  My ribbon, Madame, is a symbolical
+ribbon.  It is represented by a simple thread, which one wears under
+one's clothes after a pauper has touched it, as a sign that poverty is
+holy, and that it will save the world.  There is nothing good except in
+poverty; and since I have received the price of Les Blandices, I feel
+that I am unjust and harsh.  It is a good thing that I have placed in my
+bag several of these mystic ribbons."
+
+And, pointing to the horrible carpet-bag:
+
+"I have also placed in it a host which a bad priest gave to me, the works
+of Monsieur de Maistre, shirts, and several other things:"
+
+Madame Martin lifted her eyebrows, a little ill at ease.  But the good
+Madame Marmet retained her habitual placidity.
+
+As the train rolled through the homely scenes of the outskirts, that
+black fringe which makes an unlovely border to the city, Choulette took
+from his pocket an old book which he began to fumble.  The writer, hidden
+under the vagabond, revealed himself.  Choulette, without wishing to
+appear to be careful of his papers, was very orderly about them.  He
+assured himself that he had not lost the pieces of paper on which he
+noted at the coffeehouse his ideas for poems, nor the dozen of flattering
+letters which, soiled and spotted, he carried with him continually, to
+read them to his newly-made companions at night.  After assuring himself
+that nothing was missing, he took from the book a letter folded in an
+open envelope.  He waved it for a while, with an air of mysterious
+impudence, then handed it to the Countess Martin.  It was a letter of
+introduction from the Marquise de Rieu to a princess of the House of
+France, a near relative of the Comte de Chambord, who, old and a widow,
+lived in retirement near the gates of Florence.  Having enjoyed the
+effect which he expected to produce, he said that he should perhaps visit
+the Princess; that she was a good person, and pious.
+
+"A truly great lady," he added, "who does not show her magnificence in
+gowns and hats.  She wears her chemises for six weeks, and sometimes
+longer.  The gentlemen of her train have seen her wear very dirty white
+stockings, which fell around her heels.  The virtues of the great queens
+of Spain are revived in her.  Oh, those soiled stockings, what real glory
+there is in them!"
+
+He took the letter and put it back in his book.  Then, arming himself
+with a horn-handled knife, he began, with its point, to finish a figure
+sketched in the handle of his stick.  He complimented himself on it:
+
+"I am skilful in all the arts of beggars and vagabonds.  I know how to
+open locks with a nail, and how to carve wood with a bad knife."
+
+The head began to appear.  It was the head of a thin woman, weeping.
+
+Choulette wished to express in it human misery, not simple and touching,
+such as men of other times may have felt it in a world of mingled
+harshness and kindness; but hideous, and reflecting the state of ugliness
+created by the free-thinking bourgeois and the military patriots of the
+French Revolution.  According to him the present regime embodied only
+hypocrisy and brutality.
+
+"Their barracks are a hideous invention of modern times.  They date from
+the seventeenth century.  Before that time there were only guard-houses
+where the soldiers played cards and told tales.  Louis XIV was a
+precursor of Bonaparte.  But the evil has attained its plenitude since
+the monstrous institution of the obligatory enlistment.  The shame of
+emperors and of republics is to have made it an obligation for men to
+kill.  In the ages called barbarous, cities and princes entrusted their
+defence to mercenaries, who fought prudently.  In a great battle only
+five or six men were killed.  And when knights went to the wars, at least
+they were not forced to do it; they died for their pleasure.  They were
+good for nothing else.  Nobody in the time of Saint Louis would have
+thought of sending to battle a man of learning.  And the laborer was not
+torn from the soil to be killed.  Nowadays it is a duty for a poor
+peasant to be a soldier.  He is exiled from his house, the roof of which
+smokes in the silence of night; from the fat prairies where the oxen
+graze; from the fields and the paternal woods.  He is taught how to kill
+men; he is threatened, insulted, put in prison and told that it is an
+honor; and, if he does not care for that sort of honor, he is fusilladed.
+He obeys because he is terrorized, and is of all domestic animals the
+gentlest and most docile.  We are warlike in France, and we are citizens.
+Another reason to be proud, this being a citizen!  For the poor it
+consists in sustaining and preserving the wealthy in their power and
+their laziness.  The poor must work for this, in presence of the majestic
+quality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from
+sleeping under the bridges, from begging in the streets, and from
+stealing bread.  That is one of the good effects of the Revolution.
+As this Revolution was made by fools and idiots for the benefit of those
+who acquired national lands, and resulted in nothing but making the
+fortune of crafty peasants and financiering bourgeois, the Revolution
+only made stronger, under the pretence of making all men equal, the
+empire of wealth.  It has betrayed France into the hands of the men of
+wealth.  They are masters and lords.  The apparent government, composed
+of poor devils, is in the pay of the financiers.  For one hundred years,
+in this poisoned country, whoever has loved the poor has been considered
+a traitor to society.  A man is called dangerous when he says that there
+are wretched people.  There are laws against indignation and pity, and
+what I say here could not go into print."
+
+Choulette became excited and waved his knife, while under the wintry
+sunlight passed fields of brown earth, trees despoiled by winter, and
+curtains of poplars beside silvery rivers.
+
+He looked with tenderness at the figure carved on his stick.
+
+"Here you are," he said, "poor humanity, thin and weeping, stupid with
+shame and misery, as you were made by your masters--soldiers and men of
+wealth."
+
+The good Madame Marmet, whose nephew was a captain in the artillery, was
+shocked at the violence with which Choulette attacked the army.  Madame
+Martin saw in this only an amusing fantasy.  Choulette's ideas did not
+frighten her.  She was afraid of nothing.  But she thought they were a
+little absurd.  She did not think that the past had ever been better than
+the present.
+
+"I believe, Monsieur Choulette, that men were always as they are to-day,
+selfish, avaricious, and pitiless.  I believe that laws and manners were
+always harsh and cruel to the unfortunate."
+
+Between La Roche and Dijon they took breakfast in the dining-car, and
+left Choulette in it, alone with his pipe, his glass of benedictine, and
+his irritation.
+
+In the carriage, Madame Marmet talked with peaceful tenderness of the
+husband she had lost.  He had married her for love; he had written
+admirable verses to her, which she had kept, and never shown to any one.
+He was lively and very gay.  One would not have thought it who had seen
+him later, tired by work and weakened by illness.  He studied until the
+last moment.  Two hours before he died he was trying to read again.  He
+was affectionate and kind.  Even in suffering he retained all his
+sweetness.  Madame Martin said to her:
+
+"You have had long years of happiness; you have kept the reminiscence of
+them; that is a share of happiness in this world."
+
+But good Madame Marmet sighed; a cloud passed over her quiet brow.
+
+"Yes," she said, "Louis was the best of men and the best of husbands.
+Yet he made me very miserable.  He had only one fault, but I suffered
+from it cruelly.  He was jealous.  Good, kind, tender, and generous as
+he was, this horrible passion made him unjust, ironical, and violent.
+I can assure you that my behavior gave not the least cause for suspicion.
+I was not a coquette.  But I was young, fresh; I passed for beautiful.
+That was enough.  He would not let me go out alone, and would not let me
+receive calls in his absence.  Whenever we went to a reception, I
+trembled in advance with the fear of the scene which he would make later
+in the carriage."
+
+And the good Madame Marmet added, with a sigh:
+
+"It is true that I liked to dance.  But I had to renounce going to balls;
+it made him suffer too much."
+
+Countess Martin expressed astonishment.  She had always imagined Marmet
+as an old man, timid, and absorbed by his thoughts; a little ridiculous,
+between his wife, plump, white, and amiable, and the skeleton wearing a
+helmet of bronze and gold.  But the excellent widow confided to her that,
+at fifty-five years of age, when she was fifty-three, Louis was just as
+jealous as on the first day of their marriage.
+
+And Therese thought that Robert had never tormented her with jealousy.
+Was it on his part a proof of tact and good taste, a mark of confidence,
+or was it that he did not love her enough to make her suffer?  She did
+not know, and she did not have the heart to try to know.  She would have
+to look through recesses of her mind which she preferred not to open.
+
+She murmured carelessly:
+
+"We long to be loved, and when we are loved we are tormented or worried."
+
+The day was finished in reading and thinking.  Choulette did not
+reappear.  Night covered little by little with its gray clouds the
+mulberry-trees of the Dauphine.  Madame Marmet went to sleep peacefully,
+resting on herself as on a mass of pillows.  Therese looked at her and
+thought:
+
+"She is happy, since she likes to remember."
+
+The sadness of night penetrated her heart.  And when the moon rose on the
+fields of olive-trees, seeing the soft lines of plains and of hills pass,
+Therese, in this landscape wherein everything spoke of peace and
+oblivion, and nothing spoke of her, regretted the Seine, the Arc de
+Triomphe with its radiating avenues, and the alleys of the park where,
+at least, the trees and the stones knew her.
+
+Suddenly Choulette threw himself into the carriage.  Armed with his
+knotty stick, his face and head enveloped in red wool and a fur cap, he
+almost frightened her.  It was what he wished to do.  His violent
+attitudes and his savage dress were studied.  Always seeking to produce
+effects, it pleased him to seem frightful.
+
+He was a coward himself, and was glad to inspire the fears he often felt.
+A moment before, as he was smoking his pipe, he had felt, while seeing
+the moon swallowed up by the clouds, one of those childish frights that
+tormented his light mind.  He had come near the Countess to be reassured.
+
+"Arles," he said.  "Do you know Arles?  It is a place of pure beauty.
+I have seen, in the cloister, doves resting on the shoulders of statues,
+and I have seen the little gray lizards warming themselves in the sun on
+the tombs.  The tombs are now in two rows on the road that leads to the
+church.  They are formed like cisterns, and serve as beds for the poor at
+night.  One night, when I was walking among them, I met a good old woman
+who was placing dried herbs in the tomb of an old maid who had died on
+her wedding-day.  We said goodnight to her.  She replied: 'May God hear-
+you!  but fate wills that this tomb should open on the side of the
+northwest wind.  If only it were open on the other side, I should be
+lying as comfortably as Queen Jeanne.'"
+
+Therese made no answer.  She was dozing.  And Choulette shivered in the
+cold of the night, in the fear of death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE LADY OF THE BELLS
+
+In her English cart, which she drove herself, Miss Bell had brought over
+the hills, from the railway station at Florence, the Countess Martin-
+Belleme and Madame Marmet to her pink-tinted house at Fiesole, which,
+crowned with a long balustrade, overlooked the incomparable city.  The
+maid followed with the luggage.  Choulette, lodged, by Miss Bell's
+attention, in the house of a sacristan's widow, in the shadow of the
+cathedral of Fiesole, was not expected until dinner.  Plain and gentle,
+wearing short hair, a waistcoat, a man's shirt on a chest like a boy's,
+almost graceful, with small hips, the poetess was doing for her French
+friends the honors of the house, which reflected the ardent delicacy of
+her taste.  On the walls of the drawing-room were pale Virgins, with long
+hands, reigning peacefully among angels, patriarchs, and saints in
+beautiful gilded frames.  On a pedestal stood a Magdalena, clothed only
+with her hair, frightful with thinness and old age, some beggar of the
+road to Pistoia, burned by the suns and the snows, whom some unknown
+precursor of Donatello had moulded.  And everywhere were Miss Bell's
+chosen arms-bells and cymbals.  The largest lifted their bronze clappers
+at the angles of the room; others formed a chain at the foot of the
+walls.  Smaller ones ran along the cornices.  There were bells over the
+hearth, on the cabinets, and on the chairs.  The shelves were full of
+silver and golden bells.  There were big bronze bells marked with the
+Florentine lily; bells of the Renaissance, representing a lady wearing a
+white gown; bells of the dead, decorated with tears and bones; bells
+covered with symbolical animals and leaves, which had rung in the
+churches in the time of St. Louis; table-bells of the seventeenth
+century, having a statuette for a handle; the flat, clear cow-bells of
+the Ruth Valley; Hindu bells; Chinese bells formed like cylinders--they
+had come from all countries and all times, at the magic call of little
+Miss Bell.
+
+"You look at my speaking arms," she said to Madame Martin.  "I think that
+all these Misses Bell are pleased to be here, and I should not be
+astonished if some day they all began to sing together.  But you must not
+admire them all equally.  Reserve your purest and most fervent praise for
+this one."
+
+And striking with her finger a dark, bare bell which gave a faint sound:
+
+"This one," she said, "is a holy village-bell of the fifth century.
+She is a spiritual daughter of Saint Paulin de Nole, who was the first to
+make the sky sing over our heads.  The metal is rare.  Soon I will show
+to you a gentle Florentine, the queen of bells.  She is coming.  But I
+bore you, darling, with my babble.  And I bore, too, the good Madame
+Marmet.  It is wrong."
+
+She escorted them to their rooms.
+
+An hour later, Madame Martin, rested, fresh, in a gown of foulard and
+lace, went on the terrace where Miss Bell was waiting for her.  The humid
+air, warmed by the sun, exhaled the restless sweetness of spring.
+Therese, resting on the balustrade, bathed her eyes in the light.  At her
+feet, the cypress-trees raised their black distaffs, and the olive-trees
+looked like sheep on the hills.  In the valley, Florence extended its
+domes, its towers, and the multitudes of its red roofs, through which the
+Arno showed its undulating line.  Beyond were the soft blue hills.
+
+She tried to recognize the Boboli Gardens, where she had walked at her
+first visit; the Cascine, which she did not like; the Pitti Palace.  Then
+the charming infinity of the sky attracted her.  She looked at the forms
+in the clouds.
+
+After a long silence, Vivian Bell extended her hand toward the horizon.
+
+"Darling, I do not know how to say what I wish.  But look, darling, look
+again.  What you see there is unique in the world.  Nature is nowhere
+else so subtle, elegant, and fine.  The god who made the hills of
+Florence was an artist.  Oh, he was a jeweller, an engraver, a sculptor,
+a bronze-founder, and a painter; he was a Florentine.  He did nothing
+else in the world, darling.  The rest was made by a hand less delicate,
+whose work was less perfect.  How can you think that that violet hill of
+San Miniato, so firm and so pure in relief, was made by the author of
+Mont Blanc?  It is not possible.  This landscape has the beauty of an
+antique medal and of a precious painting.  It is a perfect and measured
+work of art.  And here is another thing that I do not know how to say,
+that I can not even understand, but which is a real thing.  In this
+country I feel--and you will feel as I do, darling--half alive and half
+dead; in a condition which is sad, noble, and very sweet.  Look, look
+again; you will realize the melancholy of those hills that surround
+Florence, and see a delicious sadness ascend from the land of the dead."
+
+The sun was low over the horizon.  The bright points of the mountain-
+peaks faded one by one, while the clouds inflamed the sky.  Madame Marmet
+sneezed.
+
+Miss Bell sent for some shawls, and warned the French women that the
+evenings were fresh and that the night-air was dangerous.
+
+Then suddenly she said:
+
+"Darling, you know Monsieur Jacques Dechartre?  Well, he wrote to me that
+he would be at Florence next week.  I am glad Monsieur Jacques Dechartre
+is to meet you in our city.  He will accompany us to the churches and to
+the museums, and he will be a good guide.  He understands beautiful
+things, because he loves them.  And he has an exquisite talent as a
+sculptor.  His figures in medallions are admired more in England than in
+France.  Oh, I am so glad Monsieur Jacques Dechartre and you are to meet
+at Florence, darling!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+CHOULETTE FINDS A NEW FRIEND
+
+She next day, as they were traversing the square where are planted, in
+imitation of antique amphitheatres, two marble pillars, Madame Marmet
+said to the Countess Martin:
+
+"I think I see Monsieur Choulette."
+
+Seated in a shoemaker's shop, his pipe in his hand, Choulette was making
+rhythmic gestures, and appeared to be reciting verses.  The Florentine
+cobbler listened with a kind smile.  He was a little, bald man, and
+represented one of the types familiar to Flemish painters.  On a table,
+among wooden lasts, nails, leather, and wax, a basilic plant displayed
+its round green head.  A sparrow, lacking a leg, which had been replaced
+by a match, hopped on the old man's shoulder and head.
+
+Madame Martin, amused by this spectacle, called Choulette from the
+threshold.  He was softly humming a tune, and she asked him why he had
+not gone with her to visit the Spanish chapel.
+
+He arose and replied:
+
+"Madame, you are preoccupied by vain images; but I live in life and in
+truth."
+
+He shook the cobbler's hand and followed the two ladies.
+
+"While going to church," he said, "I saw this old man, who, bending over
+his work, and pressing a last between his knees as in a vise, was sewing
+coarse shoes.  I felt that he was simple and kind.  I said to him, in
+Italian: 'My father, will you drink with me a glass of Chianti?'  He
+consented.  He went for a flagon and some glasses, and I kept the shop."
+
+And Choulette pointed to two glasses and a flagon placed on a stove.
+
+"When he came back we drank together; I said vague but kind things to
+him, and I charmed him by the sweetness of sounds.  I will go again to
+his shop; I will learn from him how to make shoes, and how to live
+without desire.  After which, I shall not be sad again.  For desire and
+idleness alone make us sad."
+
+The Countess Martin smiled.
+
+"Monsieur Choulette, I desire nothing, and, nevertheless, I am not
+joyful.  Must I make shoes, too?"
+
+Choulette replied, gravely:
+
+"It is not yet time for that."
+
+When they reached the gardens of the Oricellari, Madame Marmet sank
+on a bench.  She had examined at Santa Maria-Novella the frescoes of
+Ghirlandajo, the stalls of the choir, the Virgin of Cimabue, the
+paintings in the cloister.  She had done this carefully, in memory of her
+husband, who had greatly liked Italian art.  She was tired.  Choulette
+sat by her and said:
+
+"Madame, could you tell me whether it is true that the Pope's gowns are
+made by Worth?"
+
+Madame Marmet thought not.  Nevertheless, Choulette had heard people say
+this in cafes.  Madame Marmet was astonished that Choulette, a Catholic
+and a socialist, should speak so disrespectfully of a pope friendly to
+the republic.  But he did not like Leo XIII.
+
+"The wisdom of princes is shortsighted," he said; "the salvation of the
+Church must come from the Italian republic, as Leo XIII believes and
+wishes; but the Church will not be saved in the manner which this pious
+Machiavelli thinks.  The revolution will make the Pope lose his last sou,
+with the rest of his patrimony. And it will be salvation.  The Pope,
+destitute and poor, will then become powerful.  He will agitate the
+world. We shall see again Peter, Lin, Clet, Anaclet, and Clement; the
+humble, the ignorant; men like the early saints will change the face of
+the earth.  If to-morrow, in the chair of Peter, came to sit a real
+bishop, a real Christian, I would go to him, and say: 'Do not be an old
+man buried alive in a golden tomb; quit your noble guards and your
+cardinals; quit your court and its similacrums of power.  Take my arm and
+come with me to beg for your bread among the nations.  Covered with rags,
+poor, ill, dying, go on the highways, showing in yourself the image of
+Jesus.  Say, "I am begging my bread for the condemnation of the wealthy."
+Go into the cities, and shout from door to door, with a sublime
+stupidity, "Be humble, be gentle, be poor!"  Announce peace and charity
+to the cities, to the dens, and to the barracks.  You will be disdained;
+the mob will throw stones at you.  Policemen will drag you into prison.
+You shall be for the humble as for the powerful, for the poor as for the
+rich, a subject of laughter, an object of disgust and of pity.  Your
+priests will dethrone you, and elevate against you an anti-pope, or will
+say that you are crazy.  And it is necessary that they should tell the
+truth; it is necessary that you should be crazy; the lunatics have saved
+the world.  Men will give to you the crown of thorns and the reed
+sceptre, and they will spit in your face, and it is by that sign that you
+will appear as Christ and true king; and it is by such means that you
+will establish Christian socialism, which is the kingdom of God on
+earth.'"
+
+Having spoken in this way, Choulette lighted one of those long and
+tortuous Italian cigars, which are pierced with a straw.  He drew from it
+several puffs of infectious vapor, then he continued, tranquilly:
+
+"And it would be practical.  You may refuse to acknowledge any quality in
+me except my clear view of situations.  Ah, Madame Marmet, you will never
+know how true it is that the great works of this world were always
+achieved by madmen.  Do you think, Madame Martin, that if Saint Francis
+of Assisi had been reasonable, he would have poured upon the earth, for
+the refreshment of peoples, the living water of charity and all the
+perfumes of love?"
+
+"I do not know," replied Madame Martin; "but reasonable people have
+always seemed to me to be bores.  I can say this to you, Monsieur
+Choulette."
+
+They returned to Fiesole by the steam tramway which goes up the hill.
+The rain fell.  Madame Marmet went to sleep and Choulette complained.
+All his ills came to attack him at once: the humidity in the air gave him
+a pain in the knee, and he could not bend his leg; his carpet-bag, lost
+the day before in the trip from the station to Fiesole, had not been
+found, and it was an irreparable disaster; a Paris review had just
+published one of his poems, with typographical errors as glaring as
+Aphrodite's shell.
+
+He accused men and things of being hostile to him.  He became puerile,
+absurd, odious.  Madame Martin, whom Choulette and the rain saddened,
+thought the trip would never end.  When she reached the house she found
+Miss Bell in the drawing-room, copying with gold ink on a leaf of
+parchment, in a handwriting formed after the Aldine italics, verses which
+she had composed in the night.  At her friend's coming she raised her
+little face, plain but illuminated by splendid eyes.
+
+"Darling, permit me to introduce to you the Prince Albertinelli."
+
+The Prince possessed a certain youthful, godlike beauty, that his black
+beard intensified.  He bowed.
+
+"Madame, you would make one love France, if that sentiment were not
+already in our hearts."
+
+The Countess and Choulette asked Miss Bell to read to them the verses she
+was writing.  She excused herself from reciting her uncertain cadence to
+the French poet, whom she liked best after Francois Villon.  Then she
+recited in her pretty, hissing, birdlike voice.
+
+"That is very pretty," said Choulette, "and bears the mark of Italy
+softly veiled by the mists of Thule."
+
+"Yes," said the Countess Martin, "that is pretty.  But why, dear Vivian,
+did your two beautiful innocents wish to die?"
+
+"Oh, darling, because they felt as happy as possible, and desired nothing
+more.  It was discouraging, darling, discouraging.  How is it that you do
+not understand that?"
+
+"And do you think that if we live the reason is that we hope?"
+
+"Oh, yes.  We live in the hope of what to-morrow, tomorrow, king of the
+land of fairies, will bring in his black mantle studded with stars,
+flowers, and tears.  Oh, bright king, To-morrow!"
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A hero must be human.  Napoleon was human
+Anti-Semitism is making fearful progress everywhere
+Brilliancy of a fortune too new
+Curious to know her face of that day
+Do you think that people have not talked about us?
+Each had regained freedom, but he did not like to be alone
+Fringe which makes an unlovely border to the city
+Gave value to her affability by not squandering it
+He could not imagine that often words are the same as actions
+He does not bear ill-will to those whom he persecutes
+He is not intelligent enough to doubt
+He studied until the last moment
+Her husband had become quite bearable
+His habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth
+I feel in them (churches) the grandeur of nothingness
+I gave myself to him because he loved me
+I haven't a taste, I have tastes
+It was too late: she did not wish to win
+Knew that life is not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope
+Laughing in every wrinkle of his face
+Learn to live without desire
+Life as a whole is too vast and too remote
+Life is made up of just such trifles
+Life is not a great thing
+Love was only a brief intoxication
+Made life give all it could yield
+Miserable beings who contribute to the grandeur of the past
+None but fools resisted the current
+Not everything is known, but everything is said
+One would think that the wind would put them out: the stars
+Picturesquely ugly
+Recesses of her mind which she preferred not to open
+Relatives whom she did not know and who irritated her
+She is happy, since she likes to remember
+She pleased society by appearing to find pleasure in it
+Should like better to do an immoral thing than a cruel one
+So well satisfied with his reply that he repeated it twice
+That if we live the reason is that we hope
+That sort of cold charity which is called altruism
+The discouragement which the irreparable gives
+The most radical breviary of scepticism since Montaigne
+The violent pleasure of losing
+Umbrellas, like black turtles under the watery skies
+Was I not warned enough of the sadness of everything?
+Whether they know or do not know, they talk
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Red Lily, v1
+by Anatole France
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RED LILY
+
+By ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+DECHARTRE ARRIVES IN FLORENCE
+
+They had dressed for dinner.  In the drawing-room Miss Bell was sketching
+monsters in imitation of Leonard.  She created them, to know what they
+would say afterward, sure that they would speak and express rare ideas in
+odd rhythms, and that she would listen to them.  It was in this way that
+she often found her inspiration.
+
+Prince Albertinelli strummed on the piano the Sicilian 'O Lola'!  His
+soft fingers hardly touched the keys.
+
+Choulette, even harsher than was his habit, asked for thread and needles
+that he might mend his clothes.  He grumbled because he had lost a
+needle-case which he had carried for thirty years in his pocket, and
+which was dear to him for the sweetness of the reminiscences and the
+strength of the good advice that he had received from it.  He thought he
+had lost it in the hall devoted to historic subjects in the Pitti Palace;
+and he blamed for this loss the Medicis and all the Italian painters.
+
+Looking at Miss Bell with an evil eye, he said:
+
+"I compose verses while mending my clothes.  I like to work with my
+hands.  I sing songs to myself while sweeping my room; that is the reason
+why my songs have gone to the hearts of men, like the old songs of the
+farmers and artisans, which are even more beautiful than mine, but not
+more natural.  I have pride enough not to want any other servant than
+myself.  The sacristan's widow offered to repair my clothes.  I would not
+permit her to do it.  It is wrong to make others do servilely for us work
+which we can do ourselves with noble pride."
+
+The Prince was nonchalantly playing his nonchalant music.  Therese, who
+for eight days had been running to churches and museums in the company of
+Madame Marmet, was thinking of the annoyance which her companion caused
+her by discovering in the faces of the old painters resemblances to
+persons she knew.  In the morning, at the Ricardi Palace, on the frescoes
+of Gozzoli, she had recognized M. Gamin, M. Lagrange, M. Schmoll, the
+Princess Seniavine as a page, and M. Renan on horseback.  She was
+terrified at finding M. Renan everywhere.  She led all her ideas back to
+her little circle of academicians and fashionable people, by an easy
+turn, which irritated her friend.  She recalled in her soft voice the
+public meetings at the Institute, the lectures at the Sorbonne, the
+evening receptions where shone the worldly and the spiritualist
+philosophers.  As for the women, they were all charming and
+irreproachable.  She dined with all of them.  And Therese thought: "She
+is too prudent.  She bores me."  And she thought of leaving her at
+Fiesole and visiting the churches alone.  Employing a word that Le Menil
+had taught her, she said to herself:
+
+"I will 'plant' Madame Marmet."
+
+A lithe old man came into the parlor.  His waxed moustache and his white
+imperial made him look like an old soldier; but his glance betrayed,
+under his glasses, the fine softness of eyes worn by science and
+voluptuousness.  He was a Florentine, a friend of Miss Bell and of the
+Prince, Professor Arrighi, formerly adored by women, and now celebrated
+in Tuscany for his studies of agriculture. He pleased the Countess Martin
+at once.  She questioned him on his methods, and on the results he
+obtained from them. He said that he worked with prudent energy. "The
+earth," he said, "is like women.  The earth does not wish one to treat it
+with either timidity or brutality."  The Ave Maria rang in all the
+campaniles, seeming to make of the sky an immense instrument of religious
+music.  "Darling," said Miss Bell, "do you observe that the air of
+Florence is made sonorous and silvery at night by the sound of the
+bells?"
+
+"It is singular," said Choulette, "we have the air of people who are
+waiting for something."
+
+Vivian Bell replied that they were waiting for M. Dechartre.  He was a
+little late; she feared he had missed the train.
+
+Choulette approached Madame Marmet, and said, gravely "Madame Marmet, is
+it possible for you to look at a door--a simple, painted, wooden door
+like yours, I suppose, or like mine, or like this one, or like any other
+--without being terror-stricken at the thought of the visitor who might,
+at any moment, come in?  The door of one's room, Madame Marmet, opens on
+the infinite.  Have you ever thought of that?  Does one ever know the
+true name of the man or woman, who, under a human guise, with a known
+face, in ordinary clothes, comes into one's house?"
+
+He added that when he was closeted in his room he could not look at the
+door without feeling his hair stand on end. But Madame Marmet saw the
+doors of her rooms open without fear.  She knew the name of every one who
+came to see her--charming persons.
+
+Choulette looked at her sadly, and said, shaking his head: "Madame
+Marmet, those whom you call by their terrestrial names have other names
+which you do not know, and which are their real names."
+
+Madame Martin asked Choulette if he thought that misfortune needed to
+cross the threshold in order to enter one's life.
+
+"Misfortune is ingenious and subtle.  It comes by the window, it goes
+through walls.  It does not always show itself, but it is always there.
+The poor doors are innocent of the coming of that unwelcome visitor."
+
+Choulette warned Madame Martin severely that she should not call
+misfortune an unwelcome visitor.
+
+"Misfortune is our greatest master and our best friend.  Misfortune
+teaches us the meaning of life. Madame, when you suffer, you know what
+you must know; you believe what you must believe; you do what you must
+do; you are what you must be.  And you shall have joy, which pleasure
+expels.  True joy is timid, and does not find pleasure among a multitude."
+
+Prince Albertinelli said that Miss Bell and her French friends did not
+need to be unfortunate in order to be perfect, and that the doctrine of
+perfection reached by suffering was a barbarous cruelty, held in horror
+under the beautiful sky of Italy.  When the conversation languished, he
+prudently sought again at the piano the phrases of the graceful and banal
+Sicilian air, fearing to slip into an air of Trovatore, which was written
+in the same manner.
+
+Vivian Bell questioned the monsters she had created, and complained of
+their absurd replies.
+
+"At this moment," she said, "I should like to hear speak only figures on
+tapestries which should say tender things, ancient and precious as
+themselves."
+
+And the handsome Prince, carried away by the flood of melody, sang.  His
+voice displayed itself like a peacock's plumage, and died in spasms of
+"ohs" and "ahs."
+
+The good Madame Marmet, her eyes fixed on the door, said:
+
+"I think that Monsieur Dechartre is coming."
+
+He came in, animated, with joy on his usually grave face.
+
+Miss Bell welcomed him with birdlike cries.
+
+"Monsieur Dechartre, we were impatient to see you.  Monsieur Choulette
+was talking evil of doors--yes, of doors of houses; and he was saying
+also that misfortune is a very obliging old gentleman.  You have lost all
+these beautiful things.  You have made us wait very long, Monsieur
+Dechartre.  Why?"
+
+He apologized; he had taken only the time to go to his hotel and change
+his dress.  He had not even gone to bow to his old friend the bronze San
+Marco, so imposing in his niche on the San Michele wall.  He praised the
+poetess and saluted the Countess Martin with joy hardly concealed.
+
+"Before quitting Paris I went to your house, where I was told you had
+gone to wait for spring at Fiesole, with Miss Bell.  I then had the hope
+of finding you in this country, which I love now more than ever."
+
+She asked him whether he had gone to Venice, and whether he had seen
+again at Ravenna the empresses wearing aureolas, and the phantoms that
+had formerly dazzled him.
+
+No, he had not stopped anywhere.
+
+She said nothing.  Her eyes remained fixed on the corner of the wall, on
+the St. Paulin bell.
+
+He said to her:
+
+"You are looking at the Nolette."
+
+Vivian Bell laid aside her papers and her pencils.
+
+"You shall soon see a marvel, Monsieur Dechartre.  I have found the queen
+of small bells.  I found it at Rimini, in an old building in ruins, which
+is used as a warehouse.  I bought it and packed it myself.  I am waiting
+for it.  You shall see.  It bears a Christ on a cross, between the Virgin
+and Saint John, the date of 1400, and the arms of Malatesta--Monsieur
+Dechartre, you are not listening enough.  Listen to me attentively.  In
+1400 Lorenzo Ghiberti, fleeing from war and the plague, took refuge at
+Rimini, at Paola Malatesta's house.  It was he that modelled the figures
+of my bell.  And you shall see here, next week, Ghiberti's work."
+
+The servant announced that dinner was served.
+
+Miss Bell apologized for serving to them Italian dishes.  Her cook was a
+poet of Fiesole.
+
+At table, before the fiascani enveloped with corn straw, they talked of
+the fifteenth century, which they loved.  Prince Albertinelli praised the
+artists of that epoch for their universality, for the fervent love they
+gave to their art, and for the genius that devoured them.  He talked with
+emphasis, in a caressing voice.
+
+Dechartre admired them.  But he admired them in another way.
+
+"To praise in a becoming manner," he said, "those men, who worked so
+heartily, the praise should be modest and just.  They should be placed in
+their workshops, in the shops where they worked as artisans.  It is there
+that one may admire their simplicity and their genius.  They were
+ignorant and rude.  They had read little and seen little.  The hills that
+surround Florence were the boundary of their horizon.  They knew only
+their city, the Holy Scriptures, and some fragments of antique
+sculptures, studied and caressed lovingly."
+
+"You are right," said Professor Arrighi.  "They had no other care than to
+use the best processes.  Their minds bent only on preparing varnish and
+mixing colors.  The one who first thought of pasting a canvas on a panel,
+in order that the painting should not be broken when the wood was split,
+passed for a marvellous man.  Every master had his secret formulae."
+
+"Happy time," said Dechartre, "when nobody troubled himself about that
+originality for which we are so avidly seeking to-day.  The apprentice
+tried to work like the master.  He had no other ambition than to resemble
+him, and it was without trying to be that he was different from the
+others.  They worked not for glory, but to live."
+
+"They were right," said Choulette.  "Nothing is better than to work for a
+living."
+
+"The desire to attain fame," continued Dechartre, "did not trouble them.
+As they did not know the past, they did not conceive the future; and
+their dream did not go beyond their lives.  They exercised a powerful
+will in working well.  Being simple, they made few mistakes, and saw the
+truth which our intelligence conceals from us."
+
+Choulette began to relate to Madame Marmet the incidents of a call he had
+made during the day on the Princess of the House of France to whom the
+Marquise de Rieu had given him a letter of introduction.  He liked to
+impress upon people the fact that he, the Bohemian and vagabond, had been
+received by that royal Princess, at whose house neither Miss Bell nor the
+Countess Martin would have been admitted, and whom Prince Albertinelli
+prided himself on having met one day at some ceremony.
+
+"She devotes herself," said the Prince, "to the practices of piety."
+
+"She is admirable for her nobility, and her simplicity," said Choulette.
+"In her house, surrounded by her gentlemen and her ladies, she causes the
+most rigorous etiquette to be observed, so that her grandeur is almost a
+penance, and every morning she scrubs the pavement of the church.  It is
+a village church, where the chickens roam, while the 'cure' plays
+briscola with the sacristan."
+
+And Choulette, bending over the table, imitated, with his napkin, a
+servant scrubbing; then, raising his head, he said, gravely:
+
+"After waiting in consecutive anterooms, I was at last permitted to kiss
+her hand."
+
+And he stopped.
+
+Madame Martin asked, impatiently:
+
+"What did she say to you, that Princess so admirable for her nobility and
+her simplicity?"
+
+"She said to me: 'Have you visited Florence?  I am told that recently new
+and handsome shops have been opened which are lighted at night.'
+She said also 'We have a good chemist here.  The Austrian chemists are
+not better.  He placed on my leg, six months ago, a porous plaster which
+has not yet come off.'  Such are the words that Maria Therese deigned to
+address to me.  O simple grandeur!  O Christian virtue!  O daughter of
+Saint Louis!  O marvellous echo of your voice, holy Elizabeth of
+Hungary!"
+
+Madame Martin smiled.  She thought that Choulette was mocking.  But he
+denied the charge, indignantly, and Miss Bell said that Madame Martin was
+wrong.  It was a fault of the French, she said, to think that people were
+always jesting.
+
+Then they reverted to the subject of art, which in that country is
+inhaled with the air.
+
+"As for me," said the Countess Martin, "I am not learned enough to admire
+Giotto and his school.  What strikes me is the sensuality of that art of
+the fifteenth century which is said to be Christian.  I have seen piety
+and purity only in the images of Fra Angelico, although they are very
+pretty.  The rest, those figures of Virgins and angels, are voluptuous,
+caressing, and at times perversely ingenuous.  What is there religious in
+those young Magian kings, handsome as women; in that Saint Sebastian,
+brilliant with youth, who seems merely the dolorous Bacchus of
+Christianity?"
+
+Dechartre replied that he thought as she did, and that they must be
+right, she and he; since Savonarola was of the same opinion, and, finding
+no piety in any work of art, wished to burn them all.
+
+"There were at Florence, in the time of the superb Manfred, who was half
+a Mussulman, men who were said to be of the sect of Epicurus, and who
+sought for arguments against the existence of God.  Guido Cavalcanti
+disdained the ignorant folk who believed in the immortality of the soul.
+The following phrase by him was quoted: 'The death of man is exactly
+similar to that of brutes.'  Later, when antique beauty was excavated
+from ruins, the Christian style of art seemed sad.  The painters that
+worked in the churches and cloisters were neither devout nor chaste.
+Perugino was an atheist, and did not conceal it."
+
+"Yes," said Miss Bell; "but it was said that his head was hard, and that
+celestial truths, could not penetrate his thick cranium.  He was harsh
+and avaricious, and quite embedded in material interests.  He thought
+only of buying houses."
+
+Professor Arrighi defended Pietro Vanucci of Perugia.
+
+"He was," he said, "an honest man.  And the prior of the Gesuati of
+Florence was wrong to mistrust him.  That monk practised the art of
+manufacturing ultramarine blue by crushing stones of burned lapis-lazuli.
+Ultramarine was then worth its weight in gold; and the prior, who
+doubtless had a secret, esteemed it more precious than rubies or
+sapphires.  He asked Pietro Vanucci to decorate the two cloisters of his
+convent, and he expected marvels, less from the skilfulness of the master
+than from the beauty of that ultramarine in the skies.  During all the
+time that the painter worked in the cloisters at the history of Jesus
+Christ, the prior kept by his side and presented to him the precious
+powder in a bag which he never quitted.  Pietro took from it, under the
+saintly man's eyes, the quantity he needed, and dipped his brush, loaded
+with color, in a cupful of water, before rubbing the wall with it.  He
+used in that manner a great quantity of the powder.  And the good father,
+seeing his bag getting thinner, sighed: 'Jesus!  How that lime devours
+the ultramarine!'  When the frescoes were finished, and Perugino had
+received from the monk the agreed price, he placed in his hand a package
+of blue powder: 'This is for you, father.  Your ultramarine which I took
+with my brush fell to the bottom of my cup, whence I gathered it every
+day.  I return it to you.  Learn to trust honest people."
+
+"Oh," said Therese, "there is nothing extraordinary in the fact that
+Perugino was avaricious yet honest.  Interested people are not always the
+least scrupulous.  There are many misers who are honest."
+
+"Naturally, darling," said Miss Bell.  "Misers do not wish to owe
+anything, and prodigal people can bear to have debts.  They do not think
+of the money they have, and they think less of the money they owe.
+I did not say that Pietro Vanucci of Perugia was a man without property.
+I said that he had a hard business head and that he bought houses.  I am
+very glad to hear that he returned the ultramarine to the prior of the
+Gesuati."
+
+"Since your Pietro was rich," said Choulette, "it was his duty to return
+the ultramarine.  The rich are morally bound to be honest; the poor are
+not."
+
+At this moment, Choulette, to whom the waiter was presenting a silver
+bowl, extended his hands for the perfumed water.  It came from a vase
+which Miss Bell passed to her guests, in accordance with antique usage,
+after meals.
+
+"I wash my hands," he said, "of the evil that Madame Martin does or may
+do by her speech, or otherwise."
+
+And he rose, awkwardly, after Miss Bell, who took the arm of Professor
+Arrighi.
+
+In the drawing-room she said, while serving the coffee:
+
+"Monsieur Choulette, why do you condemn us to the savage sadness of
+equality?  Why, Daphnis's flute would not be melodious if it were made of
+seven equal reeds.  You wish to destroy the beautiful harmonies between
+masters and servants, aristocrats and artisans.  Oh, I fear you are a sad
+barbarian, Monsieur Choulette.  You are full of pity for those who are in
+need, and you have no pity for divine beauty, which you exile from this
+world.  You expel beauty, Monsieur Choulette; you repudiate her, nude and
+in tears.  Be certain of this: she will not remain on earth when the poor
+little men shall all be weak, delicate, and ignorant.  Believe me, to
+abolish the ingenious grouping which men of diverse conditions form in
+society, the humble with the magnificent, is to be the enemy of the poor
+and of the rich, is to be the enemy of the human race."
+
+"Enemies of the human race!"  replied Choulette, while stirring his
+coffee.  "That is the phrase the harsh Roman applied to the Christians
+who talked of divine love to him."
+
+Dechartre, seated near Madame Martin, questioned her on her tastes about
+art and beauty, sustained, led, animated her admirations, at times
+prompted her with caressing brusquerie, wished her to see all that he had
+seen, to love all that he loved.
+
+He wished that she should go in the gardens at the first flush of spring.
+He contemplated her in advance on the noble terraces; he saw already the
+light playing on her neck and in her hair; the shadow of laurel-trees
+falling on her eyes.  For him the land and the sky of Florence had
+nothing more to do than to serve as an adornment to this young woman.
+
+He praised the simplicity with which she dressed, the characteristics of
+her form and of her grace, the charming frankness of the lines which
+every one of her movements created.  He liked, he said, the animated and
+living, subtle, and free gowns which one sees so rarely, which one never
+forgets.
+
+Although she had been much lauded, she had never heard praise which had
+pleased her more.  She knew she dressed well, with bold and sure taste.
+But no man except her father had made to her on the subject the
+compliments of an expert.  She thought that men were capable of feeling
+only the effect of a gown, without understanding the ingenious details of
+it.  Some men who knew gowns disgusted her by their effeminate air.  She
+was resigned to the appreciation of women only, and these had in their
+appreciation narrowness of mind, malignity, and envy.  The artistic
+admiration of Dechartre astonished and pleased her.  She received
+agreeably the praise he gave her, without thinking that perhaps it was
+too intimate and almost indiscreet.
+
+"So you look at gowns, Monsieur Dechartre?"
+
+No, he seldom looked at them.  There were so few women well dressed,
+even now, when women dress as well as, and even better, than ever.
+He found no pleasure in seeing packages of dry-goods walk.  But if a
+woman having rhythm and line passed before him, he blessed her.
+
+He continued, in a tone a little more elevated:
+
+"I can not think of a woman who takes care to deck herself every day,
+without meditating on the great lesson which she gives to artists.
+She dresses for a few hours, and the care she has taken is not lost.
+We must, like her, ornament life without thinking of the future.
+To paint, carve, or write for posterity is only the silliness of
+conceit."
+
+"Monsieur Dechartre," asked Prince Albertinelli, "how do you think a
+mauve waist studded with silver flowers would become Miss Bell?"
+
+"I think," said Choulette, "so little of a terrestrial future, that I
+have written my finest poems on cigarette paper.  They vanished easily,
+leaving to my verses only a sort of metaphysical existence."
+
+He had an air of negligence for which he posed.  In fact, he had never
+lost a line of his writing.  Dechartre was more sincere.  He was not
+desirous of immortality.  Miss Bell reproached him for this.
+
+"Monsieur Dechartre, that life may be great and complete, one must put
+into it the past and the future.  Our works of poetry and of art must be
+accomplished in honor of the dead and with the thought of those who are
+to come after us.  Thus we shall participate in what has been, in what
+is, and in what shall be.  You do not wish to be immortal, Monsieur
+Dechartre?  Beware, for God may hear you."
+
+Dechartre replied:
+
+"It would be enough for me to live one moment more."
+
+And he said good-night, promising to return the next day to escort Madame
+Martin to the Brancacci chapel.
+
+An hour later, in the aesthetic room hung with tapestry, whereon citron-
+trees loaded with golden fruit formed a fairy forest, Therese, her head
+on the pillow, and her handsome bare arms folded under her head, was
+thinking, seeing float confusedly before her the images of her new life:
+Vivian Bell and her bells, her pre-Raphaelite figures, light as shadows,
+ladies, isolated knights, indifferent among pious scenes, a little sad,
+and looking to see who was coming; she thought also of the Prince
+Albertinelli, Professor Arrighi, Choulette, with his odd play of ideas,
+and Dechartre, with youthful eyes in a careworn face.
+
+She thought he had a charming imagination, a mind richer than all those
+that had been revealed to her, and an attraction which she no longer
+tried to resist.  She had always recognized his gift to please.  She
+discovered now that he had the will to please.  This idea was delightful
+to her; she closed her eyes to retain it.  Then, suddenly, she shuddered.
+She had felt a deep blow struck within her in the depth of her being.
+She had a sudden vision of Robert, his gun under his arm, in the woods.
+He walked with firm and regular step in the shadowy thicket.  She could
+not see his face, and that troubled her.  She bore him no ill-will.
+She was not discontented with him, but with herself.  Robert went
+straight on, without turning his head, far, and still farther, until he
+was only a black point in the desolate wood.  She thought that perhaps
+she had been capricious and harsh in leaving him without a word of
+farewell, without even a letter.  He was her lover and her only friend.
+She never had had another.  "I do not wish him to be unfortunate because
+of me," she thought.
+
+Little by little she was reassured.  He loved her, doubtless; but he was
+not susceptible, not ingenious, happily, in tormenting himself.  She said
+to herself:
+
+"He is hunting and enjoying the sport.  He is with his aunt, whom he
+admires."  She calmed her fears and returned to the charming gayety of
+Florence.  She had seen casually, at the Offices, a picture that
+Dechartre liked.  It was a decapitated head of the Medusa, a work wherein
+Leonardo, the sculptor said, had expressed the minute profundity and
+tragic refinement of his genius.  She wished to see it again, regretting
+that she had not seen it better at first.  She extinguished her lamp and
+went to sleep.
+
+She dreamed that she met in a deserted church Robert Le Menil enveloped
+in furs which she had never seen him wear.  He was waiting for her, but a
+crowd of priests had separated them.  She did not know what had become of
+him.  She had not seen his face, and that frightened her.  She awoke and
+heard at the open window a sad, monotonous cry, and saw a humming-bird
+darting about in the light of early dawn.  Then, without cause, she began
+to weep in a passion of self-pity, and with the abandon of a child.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+"THE DAWN OF FAITH AND LOVE"
+
+She took pleasure in dressing early, with delicate and subtle taste.
+Her dressing-room, an aesthetic fantasy of Vivian Bell, with its coarsely
+varnished pottery, its tall copper pitchers, and its faience pavement,
+like a chess-board, resembled a fairy's kitchen.  It was rustic and
+marvellous, and the Countess Martin could have in it the agreeable
+surprise of mistaking herself for a fairy.  While her maid was dressing
+her hair, she heard Dechartre and Choulette talking under her windows.
+She rearranged all the work Pauline had done, and uncovered the line of
+her nape, which was fine and pure.  She looked at herself in the glass,
+and went into the garden.
+
+Dechartre was there, reciting verses of Dante, and looking at Florence:
+"At the hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh.  .  ."
+
+Near him, Choulette, seated on the balustrade of the terrace, his legs
+hanging, and his nose in his beard, was still at work on the figure of
+Misery on his stick.
+
+Dechartre resumed the rhymes of the canticle: "At the hour when our mind,
+a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of
+thoughts, is almost divine in its visions, .  .  .  ."
+
+She approached beside the boxwood hedge, holding a parasol and dressed in
+a straw-colored gown.  The faint sunlight of winter enveloped her in pale
+gold.
+
+Dechartre greeted her joyfully.
+
+She said:
+
+"You are reciting verses that I do not know.  I know only Metastasio.
+My teacher liked only Metastasio.  What is the hour when the mind has
+divine visions?"
+
+"Madame, that hour is the dawn of the day.  It may be also the dawn of
+faith and of love."
+
+Choulette doubted that the poet meant dreams of the morning, which leave
+at awakening vivid and painful impressions, and which are not altogether
+strangers to the flesh.  But Dechartre had quoted these verses in the
+pleasure of the glorious dawn which he had seen that morning on the
+golden hills.  He had been, for a long time, troubled about the images
+that one sees in sleep, and he believed that these images were not
+related to the object that preoccupies one the most, but, on the
+contrary, to ideas abandoned during the day.
+
+Therese recalled her morning dream, the hunter lost in the thicket.
+
+"Yes," said Dechartre, "the things we see at night are unfortunate
+remains of what we have neglected the day before.  Dreams avenge things
+one has disdained.  They are reproaches of abandoned friends.  Hence
+their sadness."
+
+She was lost in dreams for a moment, then she said:
+
+"That is perhaps true."
+
+Then, quickly, she asked Choulette if he had finished the portrait of
+Misery on his stick.  Misery had now become a figure of Piety, and
+Choulette recognized the Virgin in it.  He had even composed a quatrain
+which he was to write on it in spiral form--a didactic and moral
+quatrain.  He would cease to write, except in the style of the
+commandments of God rendered into French verses.  The four lines
+expressed simplicity and goodness.  He consented to recite them.
+
+Therese rested on the balustrade of the terrace and sought in the
+distance, in the depth of the sea of light, the peaks of Vallambrosa,
+almost as blue as the sky.  Jacques Dechartre looked at her.  It seemed
+to him that he saw her for the first time, such was the delicacy that he
+discovered in her face, which tenderness and intelligence had invested
+with thoughtfulness without altering its young, fresh grace.  The
+daylight which she liked, was indulgent to her.  And truly she was
+pretty, bathed in that light of Florence, which caresses beautiful forms
+and feeds noble thoughts.  A fine, pink color rose to her well-rounded
+cheeks; her eyes, bluish-gray, laughed; and when she talked, the
+brilliancy of her teeth set off her lips of ardent sweetness.  His look
+embraced her supple bust, her full hips, and the bold attitude of her
+waist.  She held her parasol with her left hand, the other hand played
+with violets.  Dechartre had a mania for beautiful hands.  Hands
+presented to his eyes a physiognomy as striking as the face--a character,
+a soul.  These hands enchanted him.  They were exquisite.  He adored
+their slender fingers, their pink nails, their palms soft and tender,
+traversed by lines as elegant as arabesques, and rising at the base of
+the fingers in harmonious mounts.  He examined them with charmed
+attention until she closed them on the handle of her umbrella.  Then,
+standing behind her, he looked at her again.  Her bust and arms, graceful
+and pure in line, her beautiful form, which was like that of a living
+amphora, pleased him.
+
+"Monsieur Dechartre, that black spot over there is the Boboli Gardens, is
+it not?  I saw the gardens three years ago.  There were not many flowers
+in them.  Nevertheless, I liked their tall, sombre trees."
+
+It astonished him that she talked, that she thought.  The clear sound of
+her voice amazed him, as if he never had heard it.
+
+He replied at random.  He was awkward.  She feigned not to notice it, but
+felt a deep inward joy.  His low voice, which was veiled and softened,
+seemed to caress her.  She said ordinary things:
+
+"That view is beautiful, The weather is fine."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HEARTS AWAKENED
+
+In the morning, her head on the embroidered pillow, Therese was thinking
+of the walks of the day before; of the Virgins, framed with angels;
+of the innumerable children, painted or carved, all beautiful, all happy,
+who sing ingenuously the Alleluia of grace and of beauty.  In the
+illustrious chapel of the Brancacci, before those frescoes, pale and
+resplendent as a divine dawn, he had talked to her of Masaccio, in
+language so vivid that it had seemed to her as if she had seen him,
+the adolescent master of the masters, his mouth half open, his eyes dark
+and blue, dying, enchanted.  And she had liked these marvels of a morning
+more charming than a day. Dechartre was for her the soul of those
+magnificent forms, the mind of those noble things.  It was by him, it was
+through him, that she understood art and life. She took no interest in
+things that did not interest him. How had this affection come to her?
+She had no precise remembrance of it.  In the first place, when Paul
+Vence wished to introduce him to her, she had no desire to know him, no
+presentiment that he would please her.  She recalled elegant bronze
+statuettes, fine waxworks signed with his name, that she had remarked at
+the Champ de Mars salon or at Durand-Ruel's.  But she did not imagine
+that he could be agreeable to her, or more seductive than many artists
+and lovers of art at whom she laughed with her friends.  When she saw
+him, he pleased her; she had a desire to attract him, to see him often.
+The night he dined at her house she realized that she had for him a noble
+and elevating affection.  But soon after he irritated her a little;
+it made her impatient to see him closeted within himself and too little
+preoccupied by her.  She would have liked to disturb him.  She was in
+that state of impatience when she met him one evening, in front of the
+grille of the Musee des Religions, and he talked to her of Ravenna and
+of the Empress seated on a gold chair in her tomb.  She had found him
+serious and charming, his voice warm, his eyes soft in the shadow of the
+night, but too much a stranger, too far from her, too unknown.  She had
+felt a sort of uneasiness, and she did not know, when she walked along
+the boxwood bordering the terrace, whether she desired to see him every
+day or never to see him again.
+
+Since then, at Florence, her only pleasure was to feel that he was near
+her, to hear him.  He made life for her charming, diverse, animated, new.
+He revealed to her delicate joys and a delightful sadness; he awakened
+in her a voluptuousness which had been always dormant.  Now she was
+determined never to give him up.  But how?  She foresaw difficulties;
+her lucid mind and her temperament presented them all to her.  For a
+moment she tried to deceive herself; she reflected that perhaps he,
+a dreamer, exalted, lost in his studies of art, might remain assiduous
+without being exacting.  But she did not wish to reassure herself with
+that idea.  If Dechartre were not a lover, he lost all his charm.  She
+did not dare to think of the future.  She lived in the present, happy,
+anxious, and closing her eyes.
+
+She was dreaming thus, in the shade traversed by arrows of light, when
+Pauline brought to her some letters with the morning tea.  On an envelope
+marked with the monogram of the Rue Royale Club she recognized the
+handwriting of Le Menil.  She had expected that letter.  She was only
+astonished that what was sure to come had come, as in her childhood, when
+the infallible clock struck the hour of her piano lesson.
+
+In his letter Robert made reasonable reproaches.  Why did she go without
+saying anything, without leaving a word of farewell?  Since his return to
+Paris he had expected every morning a letter which had not come.  He was
+happier the year before, when he had received in the morning, two or
+three times a week, letters so gentle and so well written that he
+regretted not being able to print them.  Anxious, he had gone to her
+house.
+
+"I was astounded to hear of your departure.  Your husband received me.
+He said that, yielding to his advice, you had gone to finish the winter
+at Florence with Miss Bell.  He said that for some time you had looked
+pale and thin.  He thought a change of air would do you good.  You had
+not wished to go, but, as you suffered more and more, he succeeded in
+persuading you.
+
+"I had not noticed that you were thin.  It seemed to me, on the contrary,
+that your health was good.  And then Florence is not a good winter
+resort.  I cannot understand your departure.  I am much tormented by it.
+Reassure me at once, I pray you.
+
+"Do you think it is agreeable for me to get news of you from your husband
+and to receive his confidences?  He is sorry you are not here; it annoys
+him that the obligations of public life compel him to remain in Paris.
+I heard at the club that he had chances to become a minister.
+This astonishes me, because ministers are not usually chosen among
+fashionable people."
+
+Then he related hunting tales to her.  He had brought for her three fox-
+skins, one of which was very beautiful; the skin of a brave animal which
+he had pulled by the tail, and which had bitten his hand.
+
+In Paris he was worried.  His cousin had been presented at the club.
+He feared he might be blackballed.  His candidacy had been posted.
+Under these conditions he did not dare advise him to withdraw; it would
+be taking too great a responsibility.  If he were blackballed it would be
+very disagreeable.  He finished by praying her to write and to return
+soon.
+
+Having read this letter, she tore it up gently, threw it in the fire,
+and calmly watched it burn.
+
+Doubtless, he was right.  He had said what he had to say; he had
+complained, as it was his duty to complain.  What could she answer?
+Should she continue her quarrel?  The subject of it had become so
+indifferent to her that it needed reflection to recall it.  Oh, no; she
+had no desire to be tormented.  She felt, on the contrary, very gentle
+toward him!  Seeing that he loved her with confidence, in stubborn
+tranquillity, she became sad and frightened.  He had not changed.  He was
+the same man he had been before.  She was not the same woman.  They were
+separated now by imperceptible yet strong influences, like essences in
+the air that make one live or die.  When her maid came to dress her, she
+had not begun to write an answer.
+
+Anxious, she thought: "He trusts me.  He suspects nothing."  This made
+her more impatient than anything.  It irritated her to think that there
+were simple people who doubt neither themselves nor others.
+
+She went into the parlor, where she found Vivian Bell writing.  The
+latter said:
+
+"Do you wish to know, darling, what I was doing while waiting for you?
+Nothing and everything.  Verses.  Oh, darling, poetry must be our souls
+naturally expressed."
+
+Therese kissed Miss Bell, rested her head on her friend's shoulder, and
+said:
+
+"May I look?"
+
+"Look if you wish, dear.  They are verses made on the model of the
+popular songs of your country."
+
+"Is it a symbol, Vivian?  Explain it to me."
+
+"Oh, darling, why explain, why?  A poetic image must have several
+meanings.  The one that you find is the real one.  But there is a very
+clear meaning in them, my love; that is, that one should not lightly
+disengage one's self from what one has taken into the heart."
+
+The horses were harnessed.  They went, as had been agreed, to visit the
+Albertinelli gallery.  The Prince was waiting for them, and Dechartre was
+to meet them in the palace.  On the way, while the carriage rolled along
+the wide highway, Vivian Bell talked with her usual transcendentalism.
+As they were descending among houses pink and white, gardens and terraces
+ornamented with statues and fountains, she showed to her friend the
+villa, hidden under bluish pines, where the ladies and the cavaliers of
+the Decameron took refuge from the plague that ravaged Florence, and
+diverted one another with tales frivolous, facetious, or tragic.  Then
+she confessed the thought which had come to her the day before.
+
+"You had gone, darling, to Carmine with Monsieur Dechartre, and you had
+left at Fiesole Madame Marmet, who is an agreeable person, a moderate and
+polished woman.  She knows many anecdotes about persons of distinction
+who live in Paris.  And when she tells them, she does as my cook
+Pompaloni does when he serves eggs: he does not put salt in them, but he
+puts the salt-cellar next to them.  Madame Marmet's tongue is very sweet,
+but the salt is near it, in her eyes.  Her conversation is like
+Pompaloni's dish, my love--each one seasons to his taste.  Oh, I like
+Madame Marmet a great deal.  Yesterday, after you had gone, I found her
+alone and sad in a corner of the drawing-room.  She was thinking
+mournfully of her husband.  I said to her: 'Do you wish me to think of
+your husband, too?  I will think of him with you.  I have been told that
+he was a learned man, a member of the Royal Society of Paris.  Madame
+Marmet, talk to me of him.'  She replied that he had devoted himself to
+the Etruscans, and that he had given to them his entire life.  Oh,
+darling, I cherished at once the memory of that Monsieur Marmet, who
+lived for the Etruscans.  And then a good idea came to me.  I said to
+Madame Marmet, 'We have at Fiesole, in the Pretorio Palace, a modest
+little Etruscan museum.  Come and visit it with me.  Will you?'  She
+replied it was what she most desired to see in Italy.  We went to the
+Pretorio Palace; we saw a lioness and a great many little bronze figures,
+grotesque, very fat or very thin.  The Etruscans were a seriously gay
+people.  They made bronze caricatures.  But the monkeys--some afflicted
+with big stomachs, others astonished to show their bones--Madame Marmet
+looked at them with reluctant admiration.  She contemplated them like--
+there is a beautiful French word that escapes me--like the monuments and
+the trophies of Monsieur Marmet."
+
+Madame Martin smiled.  But she was restless.  She thought the sky dull,
+the streets ugly, the passers-by common.
+
+"Oh, darling, the Prince will be very glad to receive you in his palace."
+
+"I do not think so."
+
+"Why, darling, why?"
+
+"Because I do not please him much."
+
+Vivian Bell declared that the Prince, on the contrary, was a great
+admirer of the Countess Martin.
+
+The horses stopped before the Albertinelli palace.  On the sombre facade
+were sealed those bronze rings which formerly, on festival nights, held
+rosin torches.  These bronze rings mark, in Florence, the palaces of the
+most illustrious families.  The palace had an air of lofty pride.
+The Prince hastened to meet them, and led them through the empty salons
+into the gallery.  He, apologized for showing canvases which perhaps had
+not an attractive aspect.  The gallery had been formed by Cardinal Giulio
+Albertinelli at a time when the taste for Guido and Caraccio, now fallen,
+had predominated.  His ancestor had taken pleasure in gathering the works
+of the school of Bologna.  But he would show to Madame Martin several
+paintings which had not displeased Miss Bell, among others a Mantegna.
+
+The Countess Martin recognized at once a banal and doubtful collection;
+she felt bored among the multitude of little Parrocels, showing in the
+darkness a bit of armor and a white horse.
+
+A valet presented a card.
+
+The Prince read aloud the name of Jacques Dechartre.  At that moment he
+was turning his back on the two visitors.  His face wore the expression
+of cruel displeasure one finds on the marble busts of Roman emperors.
+Dechartre was on the staircase.
+
+The Prince went toward him with a languid smile.  He was no longer Nero,
+but Antinous.
+
+"I invited Monsieur Dechartre to come to the Albertinelli palace," said
+Miss Bell.  "I knew it would please you.  He wished to see your gallery."
+
+And it is true that Dechartre had wished to be there with Madame Martin.
+Now all four walked among the Guidos and the Albanos.
+
+Miss Bell babbled to the Prince--her usual prattle about those old men
+and those Virgins whose blue mantles were agitated by an immovable
+tempest.  Dechartre, pale, enervated, approached Therese, and said to
+her, in a low tone:
+
+"This gallery is a warehouse where picture dealers of the entire world
+hang the things they can not sell.  And the Prince sells here things that
+Jews could not sell."
+
+He led her to a Holy Family exhibited on an easel draped with green
+velvet, and bearing on the border the name of Michael-Angelo.
+
+"I have seen that Holy Family in the shops of picture-dealers of London,
+of Basle, and of Paris.  As they could not get the twenty-five louis that
+it is worth, they have commissioned the last of the Albertinellis to sell
+it for fifty thousand francs."
+
+The Prince, divining what they were saying, approached them gracefully.
+
+"There is a copy of this picture almost everywhere.  I do not affirm that
+this is the original.  But it has always been in the family, and old
+inventories attribute it to Michael-Angelo.  That is all I can say about
+it."
+
+And the Prince turned toward Miss Bell, who was trying to find pictures
+by the pre-Raphaelites.
+
+Dechartre felt uneasy.  Since the day before he had thought of Therese.
+He had all night dreamed and yearned over her image.  He saw her again,
+delightful, but in another manner, and even more desirable than he had
+imagined in his insomnia; less visionary, of a more vivid piquancy, and
+also of a mind more mysteriously impenetrable.  She was sad; she seemed
+cold and indifferent.  He said to himself that he was nothing to her;
+that he was becoming importunate and ridiculous.  This irritated him.  He
+murmured bitterly in her ear: "I have reflected.  I did not wish to come.
+Why did I come?" She understood at once what he meant, that he feared her
+now, and that he was impatient, timid, and awkward.  It pleased her that
+he was thus, and she was grateful to him for the trouble and the desires
+he inspired in her.  Her heart throbbed faster.  But, affecting to
+understand that he regretted having disturbed himself to come and look at
+bad paintings, she replied that in truth this gallery was not
+interesting.  Already, under the terror of displeasing her, he felt
+reassured, and believed that, really indifferent, she had not perceived
+the accent nor the significance of what he had said.  He said "No,
+nothing interesting."  The Prince, who had invited the two visitors to
+breakfast, asked their friend to remain with them.  Dechartre excused
+himself.  He was about to depart when, in the large empty salon, he found
+himself alone with Madame Martin.  He had had the idea of running away
+from her.  He had no other wish now than to see her again.  He recalled
+to her that she was the next morning to visit the Bargello. "You have
+permitted me to accompany you."  She asked him if he had not found her
+moody and tiresome.  Oh, no; he had not thought her tiresome, but he
+feared she was sad.
+
+"Alas," he added, "your sadness, your joys, I have not the right to know
+them." She turned toward him a glance almost harsh. "You do not think
+that I shall take you for a confidante, do you?" And she walked away
+brusquely.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+"YOU MUST TAKE ME WITH MY OWN SOUL!"
+
+After dinner, in the salon of the bells, under the lamps from which the
+great shades permitted only an obscure light to filter, good Madame
+Marmet was warming herself by the hearth, with a white cat on her knees.
+The evening was cool.  Madame Martin, her eyes reminiscent of the golden
+light, the violet peaks, and the ancient trees of Florence, smiled with
+happy fatigue.  She had gone with Miss Bell, Dechartre, and Madame Marmet
+to the Chartrist convent of Ema.  And now, in the intoxication of her
+visions, she forgot the care of the day before, the importunate letters,
+the distant reproaches, and thought of nothing in the world but cloisters
+chiselled and painted, villages with red roofs, and roads where she saw
+the first blush of spring.  Dechartre had modelled for Miss Bell a waxen
+figure of Beatrice.  Vivian was painting angels.  Softly bent over her,
+Prince Albertinelli caressed his beard and threw around him glances that
+appeared to seek admiration.
+
+Replying to a reflection of Vivian Bell on marriage and love:
+
+"A woman must choose," he said.  "With a man whom women love her heart is
+not quiet.  With a man whom the women do not love she is not happy."
+
+"Darling," asked Miss Bell, "what would you wish for a friend dear to
+you?"
+
+"I should wish, Vivian, that my friend were happy.  I should wish also
+that she were quiet.  She should be quiet in hatred of treason,
+humiliating suspicions, and mistrust."
+
+"But, darling, since the Prince has said that a woman can not have at the
+same time happiness and security, tell me what your friend should
+choose."
+
+"One never chooses, Vivian; one never chooses.  Do not make me say what I
+think of marriage."
+
+At this moment Choulette appeared, wearing the magnificent air of those
+beggars of whom small towns are proud.  He had played briscola with
+peasants in a coffeehouse of Fiesole.
+
+"Here is Monsieur Choulette," said Miss Bell.  "He will teach what we are
+to think of marriage.  I am inclined to listen to him as to an oracle.
+He does not see the things that we see, and he sees things that we do not
+see.  Monsieur Choulette, what do you think of marriage?"
+
+He took a seat and lifted in the air a Socratic finger:
+
+"Are you speaking, Mademoiselle, of the solemn union between man and
+woman?  In this sense, marriage is a sacrament.  But sometimes, alas!
+it is almost a sacrilege.  As for civil marriage, it is a formality.
+The importance given to it in our society is an idiotic thing which would
+have made the women of other times laugh.  We owe this prejudice, like
+many others, to the bourgeois, to the mad performances of a lot of
+financiers which have been called the Revolution, and which seem
+admirable to those that have profited by it.  Civil marriage is,
+in reality, only registry, like many others which the State exacts in
+order to be sure of the condition of persons: in every well organized
+state everybody must be indexed.  Morally, this registry in a big ledger
+has not even the virtue of inducing a wife to take a lover.  Who ever
+thinks of betraying an oath taken before a mayor?  In order to find joy
+in adultery, one must be pious."
+
+"But, Monsieur," said Therese, "we were married at the church."
+
+Then, with an accent of sincerity:
+
+"I can not understand how a man ever makes up his mind to marry; nor how
+a woman, after she has reached an age when she knows what she is doing,
+can commit that folly."
+
+The Prince looked at her with distrust.  He was clever, but he was
+incapable of conceiving that one might talk without an object,
+disinterestedly, and to express general ideas.  He imagined that Countess
+Martin-Belleme was suggesting to him projects that she wished him to
+consider.  And as he was thinking of defending himself and also avenging
+himself, he made velvet eyes at her and talked with tender gallantry:
+
+"You display, Madame, the pride of the beautiful and intelligent French
+women whom subjection irritates.  French women love liberty, and none of
+them is as worthy of liberty as you.  I have lived in France a little.
+I have known and admired the elegant society of Paris, the salons, the
+festivals, the conversations, the plays.  But in our mountains, under our
+olive-trees, we become rustic again.  We assume golden-age manners, and
+marriage is for us an idyl full of freshness."
+
+Vivian Bell examined the statuette which Dechartre had left on the table.
+
+"Oh!  it was thus that Beatrice looked, I am sure.  And do you know,
+Monsieur Dechartre, there are wicked men who say that Beatrice never
+existed?"
+
+Choulette declared he wished to be counted among those wicked men.
+He did not believe that Beatrice had any more reality than other ladies
+through whom ancient poets who sang of love represented some scholastic
+idea, ridiculously subtle.
+
+Impatient at praise which was not destined for himself, jealous of Dante
+as of the universe, a refined man of letters, Choulette continued:
+
+"I suspect that the little sister of the angels never lived, except in
+the imagination of the poet.  It seems a pure allegory, or, rather, an
+exercise in arithmetic or a theme of astrology.  Dante, who was a good
+doctor of Bologna and had many moons in his head, under his pointed cap--
+Dante believed in the virtue of numbers.  That inflamed mathematician
+dreamed of figures, and his Beatrice is the flower of arithmetic, that
+is all."
+
+And he lighted his pipe.
+
+Vivian Bell exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, do not talk in that way, Monsieur Choulette.  You grieve me much,
+and if our friend Monsieur Gebhart heard you, he would not be pleased
+with you.  To punish you, Prince Albertinelli will read to you the
+canticle in which Beatrice explains the spots on the moon.  Take the
+Divine Comedy, Eusebio.  It is the white book which you see on the table.
+Open it and read it."
+
+During the Prince's reading, Dechartre, seated on the couch near Countess
+Martin, talked of Dante with enthusiasm as the best sculptor among the
+poets.  He recalled to Therese the painting they had seen together two
+days before, on the door of the Servi, a fresco almost obliterated, where
+one hardly divined the presence of the poet wearing a laurel wreath,
+Florence, and the seven circles.  This was enough to exalt the artist.
+But she had distinguished nothing, she had not been moved.  And then she
+confessed that Dante did not attract her.  Dechartre, accustomed to her
+sharing all his ideas of art and poetry, felt astonishment and some
+discontent.  He said, aloud:
+
+"There are many grand and strong things which you do not feel."
+
+Miss Bell, lifting her head, asked what were these things that "darling"
+did not feel; and when she learned that it was the genius of Dante, she
+exclaimed, in mock anger:
+
+"Oh, do you not honor the father, the master worthy of all praise, the
+god?  I do not love you any more, darling.  I detest you."
+
+And, as a reproach to Choulette and to the Countess Martin, she recalled
+the piety of that citizen of Florence who took from the altar the candles
+that had been lighted in honor of Christ, and placed them before the bust
+of Dante.
+
+The Prince resumed his interrupted reading.  Dechartre persisted in
+trying to make Therese admire what she did not know.  Certainly he would
+have easily sacrificed Dante and all the poets of the universe for her.
+But near him, tranquil, and an object of desire, she irritated him,
+almost without his realizing it, by the charm of her laughing beauty.
+He persisted in imposing on her his ideas, his artistic passions, even
+his fantasy, and his capriciousness.  He insisted in a low tone, in
+phrases concise and quarrelsome.  She said:
+
+"Oh, how violent you are!"
+
+Then he bent to her ear, and in an ardent voice, which he tried to
+soften:
+
+"You must take me with my own soul!"
+
+Therese felt a shiver of fear mingled with joy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE AVOWAL
+
+She next day she said to herself that she would reply to Robert.  It was
+raining.  She listened languidly to the drops falling on the terrace.
+Vivian Bell, careful and refined, had placed on the table artistic
+stationery, sheets imitating the vellum of missals, others of pale violet
+powdered with silver dust; celluloid pens, white and light, which one had
+to manage like brushes; an iris ink which, on a page, spread a mist of
+azure and gold.  Therese did not like such delicacy.  It seemed to her
+not appropriate for letters which she wished to make simple and modest.
+When she saw that the name of "friend," given to Robert on the first
+line, placed on the silvery paper, tinted itself like mother-of-pearl,
+a half smile came to her lips.  The first phrases were hard to write.
+She hurried the rest, said a great deal of Vivian Bell and of Prince
+Albertinelli, a little of Choulette, and that she had seen Dechartre at
+Florence.  She praised some pictures of the museums, but without
+discrimination, and only to fill the pages.  She knew that Robert had no
+appreciation of painting; that he admired nothing except a little
+cuirassier by Detaille, bought at Goupil's.
+
+She saw again in her mind this cuirassier, which he had shown to her one
+day, with pride, in his bedroom, near the mirror, under family portraits.
+All this, at a distance, seemed to her petty and tiresome.  She finished
+her letter with words of friendship, the sweetness of which was not
+feigned.  Truly, she had never felt more peaceful and gentle toward her
+lover.  In four pages she had said little and explained less.  She
+announced only that she should stay a month in Florence, the air of which
+did her good.  Then she wrote to her father, to her husband, and to
+Princess Seniavine.  She went down the stairway with the letters in her
+hand.  In the hall she threw three of them on the silver tray destined to
+receive papers for the post-office.  Mistrusting Madame Marmet, she
+slipped into her pocket the letter to Le Menil, counting on chance to
+throw it into a post-box.
+
+Almost at the same time Dechartre came to accompany the three friends in
+a walk through the city.  As he was waiting he saw the letters on the
+tray.
+
+Without believing that characters could be divined through penmanship,
+he was susceptible to the form of letters as to elegance of drawing.
+The writing of Therese charmed him, and he liked its openness, the bold
+and simple turn of its lines.  He looked at the addresses without reading
+them, with an artist's admiration.
+
+They visited, that morning, Santa Maria Novella, where the Countess
+Martin had already gone with Madame Marmet.  But Miss Bell had reproached
+them for not observing the beautiful Ginevra of Benci on a fresco of the
+choir.  "You must visit that figure of the morning in a morning light,"
+said Vivian.  While the poetess and Therese were talking together,
+Dechartre listened patiently to Madame Marmet's conversation, filled with
+anecdotes, wherein academicians dined with elegant women, and shared the
+anxiety of that lady, much preoccupied for several days by the necessity
+to buy a tulle veil.  She could find none to her taste in the shops of
+Florence.
+
+As they came out of the church they passed the cobbler's shop.  The good
+man was mending rustic shoes.  Madame Martin asked the old man whether he
+was well, whether he had enough work for a living, whether he was happy.
+To all these questions he replied with the charming affirmative of Italy,
+the musical si, which sounded melodious even in his toothless mouth.  She
+made him tell his sparrow's story.  The poor bird had once dipped its leg
+in burning wax.
+
+"I have made for my little companion a wooden leg out of a match, and he
+hops upon my shoulder as formerly," said the cobbler.
+
+"It is this good old man," said Miss Bell, "who teaches wisdom to
+Monsieur Choulette.  There was at Athens a cobbler named Simon, who wrote
+books on philosophy, and who was the friend of Socrates.  I have always
+thought that Monsieur Choulette resembled Socrates."
+
+Therese asked the cobbler to tell his name and his history.  His name was
+Serafino Stoppini, and he was a native of Stia.  He was old.  He had had
+much trouble in his life.
+
+He lifted his spectacles to his forehead, uncovering blue eyes, very
+soft, and almost extinguished under their red lids.
+
+"I have had a wife and children; I have none now.  I have known things
+which I know no more."
+
+Miss Bell and Madame Marmet went to look for a veil.
+
+"He has nothing in the world," thought Therese, "but his tools, a handful
+of nails, the tub wherein he dips his leather, and a pot of basilick, yet
+he is happy."
+
+She said to him:
+
+"This plant is fragrant, and it will soon be in bloom."
+
+He replied:
+
+"If the poor little plant comes into bloom it will die."
+
+Therese, when she left him, placed a coin on the table.
+
+Dechartre was near her.  Gravely, almost severely, he said to her:
+
+"You know .  .  .  "
+
+She looked at him and waited.
+
+He finished his phrase:
+
+" .  .  .  that I love you?"
+
+She continued to fix on him, silently, the gaze of her clear eyes, the
+lids of which were trembling.  Then she made a motion with her head that
+meant Yes.  And, without his trying to stop her, she rejoined Miss Bell
+and Madame Marmet, who were waiting for her at the corner.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE MYSTERIOUS LETTER
+
+Therese, after quitting Dechartre, took breakfast with her friend and
+Madame Marmet at the house of an old Florentine lady whom Victor Emmanuel
+had loved when he was Duke of Savoy.  For thirty years she had not once
+gone out of her palace on the Arno, where, she painted, and wearing a
+wig, she played the guitar in her spacious white salon.  She received the
+best society of Florence, and Miss Bell often called on her.  At table
+this recluse, eighty-seven years of age, questioned the Countess Martin
+on the fashionable world of Paris, whose movement was familiar to her
+through the journals.  Solitary, she retained respect and a sort of
+devotion for the world of pleasure.
+
+As they came out of the palazzo, in order to avoid the wind which was
+blowing on the river, Miss Bell led her friends into the old streets with
+black stone houses and a view of the distant horizon, where, in the pure
+air, stands a hill with three slender trees.  They walked; and Vivian
+showed to her friend, on facades where red rags were hanging, some marble
+masterpiece--a Virgin, a lily, a St. Catherine.  They walked through
+these alleys of the antique city to the church of Or San Michele, where
+it had been agreed that Dechartre should meet them.  Therese was thinking
+of him now with deepest interest.  Madame Marmet was thinking of buying a
+veil; she hoped to find one on the Corso.  This affair recalled to her
+M. Lagrange, who, at his regular lecture one day, took from his pocket a
+veil with gold dots and wiped his forehead with it, thinking it was his
+handkerchief.  The audience was astonished, and whispered to one another.
+It was a veil that had been confided to him the day before by his niece,
+Mademoiselle Jeanne Michot, whom he had accompanied to the theatre,
+and Madame Marmet explained how, finding it in the pocket of his
+overcoat, he had taken it to return it to his niece.
+
+At Lagrange's name, Therese recalled the flaming comet announced by the
+savant, and said to herself, with mocking sadness, that it was time for
+that comet to put an end to the world and take her out of her trouble.
+But above the walls of the old church she saw the sky, which, cleared of
+clouds by the wind from the sea, shone pale blue and cold.  Miss Bell
+showed to her one of the bronze statues which, in their chiselled niches,
+ornament the facade of the church.
+
+"See, darling, how young and proud is Saint George.  Saint George was
+formerly the cavalier about whom young girls dreamed."
+
+But "darling" said that he looked precise, tiresome, and stubborn.  At
+this moment she recalled suddenly the letter that was still in her
+pocket.
+
+"Ah! here comes Monsieur Dechartre," said the good Madame Marmet.
+
+He had looked for them in the church, before the tabernacle.  He should
+have recalled the irresistible attraction which Donatello's St. George
+held for Miss Bell.  He too admired that famous figure.  But he retained
+a particular friendship for St. Mark, rustic and frank, whom they could
+see in his niche at the left.
+
+When Therese approached the statue which he was pointing out to her, she
+saw a post-box against the wall of the narrow street opposite the saint.
+Dechartre, placed at the most convenient point of view, talked of his St.
+Mark with abundant friendship.
+
+"It is to him I make my first visit when I come to Florence.  I failed to
+do this only once.  He will forgive me; he is an excellent man.  He is
+not appreciated by the crowd, and does not attract attention.  I take
+pleasure in his society, however.  He is vivid.  I understand that
+Donatello, after giving a soul to him, exclaimed: 'Mark, why do you not
+speak?'"
+
+Madame Marmet, tired of admiring St. Mark, and feeling on her face the
+burning wind, dragged Miss Bell toward Calzaioli Street in search of a
+veil.
+
+Therese and Dechartre remained.
+
+"I like him," continued the sculptor; "I like Saint Mark because I feel
+in him, much more than in the Saint George, the hand and mind of
+Donatello, who was a good workman.  I like him even more to-day, because
+he recalls to me, in his venerable and touching candor, the old cobbler
+to whom you were speaking so kindly this morning."
+
+"Ah," she said, "I have forgotten his name.  When we talk with Monsieur
+Choulette we call him Quentin Matsys, because he resembles the old men of
+that painter."
+
+As they were turning the corner of the church to see the facade, she
+found herself before the post-box, which was so dusty and rusty that it
+seemed as if the postman never came near it.  She put her letter in it
+under the ingenuous gaze of St. Mark.
+
+Dechartre saw her, and felt as if a heavy blow had been struck at his
+heart.  He tried to speak, to smile; but the gloved hand which had
+dropped the letter remained before his eyes.  He recalled having seen in
+the morning Therese's letters on the hall tray.  Why had she not put that
+one with the others?  The reason was not hard to guess.  He remained
+immovable, dreamy, and gazed without seeing.  He tried to be reassured;
+perhaps it was an insignificant letter which she was trying to hide from
+the tiresome curiosity of Madame Marmet.
+
+"Monsieur Dechartre, it is time to rejoin our friends at the
+dressmaker's."
+
+Perhaps it was a letter to Madame Schmoll, who was not a friend of Madame
+Marmet, but immediately he realized that this idea was foolish.
+
+All was clear.  She had a lover.  She was writing to him.  Perhaps she
+was saying to him: "I saw Dechartre to-day; the poor fellow is deeply in
+love with me."  But whether she wrote that or something else, she had a
+lover.  He had not thought of that.  To know that she belonged to another
+made him suffer profoundly.  And that hand, that little hand dropping the
+letter, remained in his eyes and made them burn.
+
+She did not know why he had become suddenly dumb and sombre.  When she
+saw him throw an anxious glance back at the post-box, she guessed the
+reason.  She thought it odd that he should be jealous without having the
+right to be jealous; but this did not displease her.
+
+When they reached the Corso, they saw Miss Bell and Madame Marmet coming
+out of the dressmaker's shop.
+
+Dechartre said to Therese, in an imperious and supplicating voice:
+
+"I must speak to you.  I must see you alone tomorrow; meet me at six
+o'clock at the Lungarno Acciaoli."
+
+She made no reply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+"TO-MORROW?"
+
+When, in her Carmelite mantle, she came to the Lungarno Acciaoli, at
+about half-past six, Dechartre greeted her with a humble look that moved
+her.  The setting sun made the Arno purple.  They remained silent for a
+moment.  While they were walking past the monotonous line of palaces to
+the old bridge, she was the first to speak.
+
+"You see, I have come.  I thought I ought to come.  I do not think I am
+altogether innocent of what has happened.  I know: I have done what was
+my fate in order that you should be to me what you are now.  My attitude
+has put thoughts into your head which you would not have had otherwise."
+
+He looked as if he did not understand.  She continued:
+
+"I was selfish, I was imprudent.  You were agreeable to me; I liked your
+wit; I could not get along without you.  I have done what I could to
+attract you, to retain you.  I was a coquette--not coldly, nor
+perfidiously, but a coquette."
+
+He shook his head, denying that he ever had seen a sign of this.
+
+"Yes, I was a coquette.  Yet it was not my habit.  But I was a coquette
+with you.  I do not say that you have tried to take advantage of it, as
+you had the right to do, nor that you are vain about it.  I have not
+remarked vanity in you.  It may be possible that you had not noticed.
+Superior men sometimes lack cleverness.  But I know very well that I was
+not as I should have been, and I beg your pardon.  That is the reason why
+I came.  Let us be good friends, since there is yet time."
+
+He repeated, with sombre softness, that he loved her.  The first hours of
+that love had been easy and delightful.  He had only desired to see her,
+and to see her again.  But soon she had troubled him.  The evil had come
+suddenly and violently one day on the terrace of Fiesole.  And now he had
+not the courage to suffer and say nothing.  He had not come with a fixed
+design.  If he spoke of his passion he spoke by force and in spite of
+himself; in the strong necessity of talking of her to herself, since she
+was for him the only being in the world.  His life was no longer in
+himself, it was in her.  She should know it, then, that he was in love
+with her, not with vague tenderness, but with cruel ardor.  Alas!  his
+imagination was exact and precise.  He saw her continually, and she
+tortured him.
+
+And then it seemed to him that they might have joys which should make
+life worth living.  Their existence might be a work of art, beautiful and
+hidden.  They would think, comprehend, and feel together.  It would be a
+marvellous world of emotions and ideas.
+
+"We could make of life a delightful garden."
+
+She feigned to think that the dream was innocent.
+
+"You know very well that I am susceptible to the charm of your mind.
+It has become a necessity to see you and hear you.  I have allowed this
+to be only too plain to you.  Count upon my friendship and do not torment
+yourself."  She extended her hand to him.  He did not take it, but
+replied, brusquely:
+
+"I do not desire your friendship.  I will not have it.  I must have you
+entirely or never see you again.  You know that very well.  Why do you
+extend your hand to me with derisive phrases?  Whether you wished it or
+not, you have made me desperately in love with you.  You have become my
+evil, my suffering, my torture, and you ask me to be an agreeable friend.
+Now you are coquettish and cruel.  If you can not love me, let me go;
+I will go, I do not know where, to forget and hate you.  For I have
+against you a latent feeling of hatred and anger.  Oh, I love you, I love
+you!"
+
+She believed what he was saying, feared that he might go, and feared the
+sadness of living without him.  She replied:
+
+"I found you in my path.  I do not wish to lose you.  No, I do not wish
+to lose you."
+
+Timid yet violent, he stammered; the words were stifled in his throat.
+Twilight descended from the far-off mountains, and the last reflections
+of the sun became pallid in the east.  She said:
+
+"If you knew my life, if you had seen how empty it was before I knew you,
+you would know what you are to me, and would not think of abandoning me."
+
+But, with the tranquil tone of her voice and with the rustle of her
+skirts on the pavement, she irritated him.
+
+He told her how he suffered.  He knew now the divine malady of love.
+
+"The grace of your thoughts, your magnificent courage, your superb pride,
+I inhale them like a perfume.  It seems to me when you speak that your
+mind is floating on your lips.  Your mind is for me only the odor of your
+beauty.  I have retained the instincts of a primitive man; you have
+reawakened them.  I feel that I love you with savage simplicity."
+
+She looked at him softly and said nothing.  They saw the lights of
+evening, and heard lugubrious songs coming toward them.  And then, like
+spectres chased by the wind, appeared the black penitents.  The crucifix
+was before them.  They were Brothers of Mercy, holding torches, singing
+psalms on the way to the cemetery.  In accordance with the Italian
+custom, the cortege marched quickly.  The crosses, the coffin, the
+banners, seemed to leap on the deserted quay.  Jacques and Therese stood
+against the wall in order that the funeral train might pass.
+
+The black avalanche had disappeared.  There were women weeping behind the
+coffin carried by the black phantoms, who wore heavy shoes.
+
+Therese sighed:
+
+"What will be the use of having tormented ourselves in this world?"
+
+He looked as if he had not heard, and said:
+
+"Before I knew you I was not unhappy.  I liked life.  I was retained in
+it by dreams.  I liked forms, and the mind in forms, the appearances that
+caress and flatter.  I had the joy of seeing and of dreaming.  I enjoyed
+everything and depended upon nothing.  My desires, abundant and light,
+I gratified without fatigue.  I was interested in everything and wished
+for nothing.  One suffers only through the will.  Without knowing it,
+I was happy.  Oh, it was not much, it was only enough to live.  Now I
+have no joy in life.  My pleasures, the interest that I took in the
+images of life and of art, the vivid amusement of creating with my hands
+the figures of my dreams--you have made me lose everything and have not
+left me even regret.  I do not want my liberty and tranquillity again.
+It seems to me that before I knew you I did not live; and now that I feel
+that I am living, I can not live either far from you or near you.  I am
+more wretched than the beggars we saw on the road to Ema.  They had air
+to breathe, and I can breathe only you, whom I have not.  Yet I am glad
+to have known you.  That alone counts in my existence.  A moment ago I
+thought I hated you.  I was wrong; I adore you, and I bless you for the
+harm you have done me.  I love all that comes to me from you."
+
+They were nearing the black trees at the entrance to San Niccola bridge.
+On the other side of the river the vague fields displayed their sadness,
+intensified by night.  Seeing that he was calm and full of a soft
+languor, she thought that his love, all imagination, had fled in words,
+and that his desires had become only a reverie.  She had not expected so
+prompt a resignation.  It almost disappointed her to escape the danger
+she had feared.
+
+She extended her hand to him, more boldly this time than before.
+
+"Then, let us be friends.  It is late.  Let us return.  Take me to my
+carriage.  I shall be what I have been to you, an excellent friend.  You
+have not displeased me."
+
+But he led her to the fields, in the growing solitude of the shore.
+
+"No, I will not let you go without having told you what I wish to say.
+But I know no longer how to speak; I can not find the words.  I love you.
+I wish to know that you are mine.  I swear to you that I will not live
+another night in the horror of doubting it."
+
+He pressed her in his arms; and seeking the light of her eyes through the
+obscurity of her veil, said "You must love me.  I desire you to love me,
+and it is your fault, for you have desired it too.  Say that you are
+mine.  Say it."
+
+Having gently disengaged herself, she replied, faintly and slowly "I can
+not!  I can not!  You see I am acting frankly with you.  I said to you a
+moment ago that you had not displeased me.  But I can not do as you
+wish."
+
+And recalling to her thought the absent one who was waiting for her, she
+repeated: "I can not!" Bending over her he anxiously questioned her eyes,
+the double stars that trembled and veiled themselves. "Why?  You love me,
+I feel it, I see it.  You love me.  Why will you do me this wrong?"
+
+He drew her to him, wishing to lay his soul, with his lips, on her veiled
+lips.  She escaped him swiftly, saying: "I can not.  Do not ask more.
+I can not be yours."
+
+His lips trembled, his face was convulsed.  He exclaimed "You have a
+lover, and you love him.  Why do you mock me?"
+
+"I swear to you I have no desire to mock you, and that if I loved any one
+in the world it would be you." But he was not listening to her.
+
+"Leave me, leave me!" And he ran toward the dark fields.  The Arno formed
+lagoons, upon which the moon, half veiled, shone fitfully.  He walked
+through the water and the mud, with a step rapid, blind, like that of one
+intoxicated. She took fright and shouted.  She called him.  But he did
+not turn his head and made no answer.  He fled with alarming
+recklessness.  She ran after him.  Her feet were hurt by the stones, and
+her skirt was heavy with water, but soon she overtook him.
+
+"What were you about to do?"
+
+He looked at her, and saw her fright in her eyes. "Do not be afraid," he
+said.  "I did not see where I was going.  I assure you I did not intend
+to kill myself.  I am desperate, but I am calm.  I was only trying to
+escape from you.  I beg your pardon.  But I could not see you any longer.
+Leave me, I pray you.  Farewell!"
+
+She replied, agitated and trembling: "Come!  We shall do what we can."
+
+He remained sombre and made no reply.  She repeated "Come!"
+
+She took his arm.  The living warmth of her hand animated him.  He said:
+
+"Do you wish it?"
+
+"I can not leave you."
+
+"You promise?"
+
+"I must."
+
+And, in her anxiety and anguish, she almost smiled, in thinking that he
+had succeeded so quickly by his folly.
+
+"To-morrow?"  said he, inquiringly.
+
+She replied quickly, with a defensive instinct:
+
+"Oh, no; not to-morrow!"
+
+"You do not love me; you regret that you have promised."
+
+"No, I do not regret, but--
+
+He implored, he supplicated her.  She looked at him for a moment, turned
+her head, hesitated, and said, in a low tone:
+
+"Saturday."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+MISS BELL ASKS A QUESTION
+
+After dinner, Miss Bell was sketching in the drawing-room.  She was
+tracing, on canvas, profiles of bearded Etruscans for a cushion which
+Madame Marmet was to embroider.  Prince Albertinelli was selecting the
+wool with an almost feminine knowledge of shades.  It was late when
+Choulette, having, as was his habit, played briscola with the cook at
+the caterer's, appeared, as joyful as if he possessed the mind of a god.
+He took a seat on a sofa, beside Madame Martin, and looked at her
+tenderly.  Voluptuousness shone in his green eyes.  He enveloped her,
+while talking to her, with poetic and picturesque phrases.  It was like
+the sketch of a lovesong that he was improvising for her.  In oddly
+involved sentences, he told her of the charm that she exhaled.
+
+"He, too!"  said she to herself.
+
+She amused herself by teasing him.  She asked whether he had not found in
+Florence, in the low quarters, one of the kind of women whom he liked to
+visit.  His preferences were known.  He could deny it as much as he
+wished: no one was ignorant of the door where he had found the cordon of
+his Third Order.  His friends had met him on the boulevard.  His taste
+for unfortunate women was evident in his most beautiful poems.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur Choulette, so far as I am able to judge, you like very bad
+women."
+
+He replied with solemnity:
+
+"Madame, you may collect the grain of calumiy sown by Monsieur Paul Vence
+and throw handfuls of it at me.  I will not try to avoid it.  It is not
+necessary you should know that I am chaste and that my mind is pure.
+But do not judge lightly those whom you call unfortunate, and who should
+be sacred to you, since they are unfortunate.  The disdained and lost
+girl is the docile clay under the finger of the Divine Potter: she is the
+victim and the altar of the holocaust.  The unfortunates are nearer God
+than the honest women: they have lost conceit.  They do not glorify
+themselves with the untried virtue the matron prides herself on.
+They possess humility, which is the cornerstone of virtues agreeable to
+heaven.  A short repentance will be sufficient for them to be the first
+in heaven; for their sins, without malice and without joy, contain their
+own forgiveness.  Their faults, which are pains, participate in the
+merits attached to pain; slaves to brutal passion, they are deprived of
+all voluptuousness, and in this they are like the men who practise
+continence for the kingdom of God.  They are like us, culprits; but shame
+falls on their crime like a balm, suffering purifies it like fire.  That
+is the reason why God will listen to the first voice which they shall
+send to him.  A throne is prepared for them at the right hand of the
+Father.  In the kingdom of God, the queen and the empress will be happy
+to sit at the feet of the unfortunate; for you must not think that the
+celestial house is built on a human plan.  Far from it, Madame."
+
+Nevertheless, he conceded that more than one road led to salvation.  One
+could follow the road of love.
+
+"Man's love is earthly," he said, "but it rises by painful degrees, and
+finally leads to God."
+
+The Prince had risen.  Kissing Miss Bell's hand, he said:
+
+"Saturday."
+
+"Yes, the day after to-morrow, Saturday," replied Vivian.
+
+Therese started.  Saturday!  They were talking of Saturday quietly, as of
+an ordinary day.  Until then she had not wished to think that Saturday
+would come so soon or so naturally.
+
+The guests had been gone for half an hour.  Therese, tired, was thinking
+in her bed, when she heard a knock at the door of her room.  The panel
+opened, and Vivian's little head appeared.
+
+"I am not intruding, darling?  You are not sleepy?"
+
+No, Therese had no desire to sleep.  She rose on her elbow.  Vivian sat
+on the bed, so light that she made no impression on it.
+
+"Darling, I am sure you have a great deal of reason.  Oh, I am sure of
+it.  You are reasonable in the same way that Monsieur Sadler is a
+violinist.  He plays a little out of tune when he wishes.  And you,
+too, when you are not quite logical, it is for your own pleasure.
+Oh, darling, you have a great deal of reason and of judgment, and I come
+to ask your advice."
+
+Astonished, and a little anxious, Therese denied that she was logical.
+She denied this very sincerely.  But Vivian would not listen to her.
+
+"I have read Francois Rabelais a great deal, my love.  It is in Rabelais
+and in Villon that I studied French.  They are good old masters of
+language.  But, darling, do you know the 'Pantagruel?'  ' Pantagruel' is
+like a beautiful and noble city, full of palaces, in the resplendent
+dawn, before the street-sweepers of Paris have come.  The sweepers have
+not taken out the dirt, and the maids have not washed the marble steps.
+And I have seen that French women do not read the 'Pantagruel.'  You do
+not know it?  Well, it is not necessary.  In the 'Pantagruel,' Panurge
+asks whether he must marry, and he covers himself with ridicule, my love.
+Well, I am quite as laughable as he, since I am asking the same question
+of you."
+
+Therese replied with an uneasiness she did not try to conceal:
+
+"As for that, my dear, do not ask me.  I have already told you my
+opinion."
+
+"But, darling, you have said that only men are wrong to marry.  I can not
+take that advice for myself."
+
+Madame Martin looked at the little boyish face and head of Miss Bell,
+which oddly expressed tenderness and modesty.
+
+Then she embraced her, saying:
+
+"Dear, there is not a man in the world exquisite and delicate enough for
+you."
+
+She added, with an expression of affectionate gravity:
+
+"You are not a child.  If some one loves you, and you love him, do what
+you think you ought to do, without mingling interests and combinations
+that have nothing to do with sentiment.  This is the advice of a friend."
+
+Miss Bell hesitated a moment.  Then she blushed and arose.  She had been
+a little shocked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+"I KISS YOUR FEET BECAUSE THEY HAVE COME!"
+
+Saturday, at four o'clock, Therese went, as she had promised, to the gate
+of the English cemetery.  There she found Dechartre.  He was serious and
+agitated; he spoke little.  She was glad he did not display his joy.
+He led her by the deserted walls of the gardens to a narrow street which
+she did not know.  She read on a signboard: Via Alfieri.  After they had
+taken fifty steps, he stopped before a sombre alley:
+
+"It is in there," he said.
+
+She looked at him with infinite sadness.
+
+"You wish me to go in?"
+
+She saw he was resolute, and followed him without saying a word, into the
+humid shadow of the alley.  He traversed a courtyard where the grass grew
+among the stones.  In the back was a pavilion with three windows, with
+columns and a front ornamented with goats and nymphs. On the moss-covered
+steps he turned in the lock a key that creaked and resisted.  He murmured
+
+"It is rusty."
+
+She replied, without thought "All the keys are rusty in this country."
+
+They went up a stairway so silent that it seemed to have forgotten the
+sound of footsteps.  He pushed open a door and made Therese enter the
+room.  She went straight to a window opening on the cemetery.  Above the
+wall rose the tops of pine-trees, which are not funereal in this land
+where mourning is mingled with joy without troubling it, where the
+sweetness of living extends to the city of the dead.  He took her hand
+and led her to an armchair.  He remained standing, and looked at the room
+which he had prepared so that she would not find herself lost in it.
+Panels of old print cloth, with figures of Comedy, gave to the walls the
+sadness of past gayeties.  He had placed in a corner a dim pastel which
+they had seen together at an antiquary's, and which, for its shadowy
+grace, she called the shade of Rosalba.  There was a grandmother's
+armchair; white chairs; and on the table painted cups and Venetian
+glasses.  In all the corners were screens of colored paper, whereon were
+masks, grotesque figures, the light soul of Florence, of Bologna, and of
+Venice in the time of the Grand Dukes and of the last Doges.  A mirror
+and a carpet completed the furnishings.
+
+He closed the window and lighted the fire.  She sat in the armchair, and
+as she remained in it erect, he knelt before her, took her hands, kissed
+them, and looked at her with a wondering expression, timorous and proud.
+Then he pressed his lips to the tip of her boot.
+
+"What are you doing?"
+
+"I kiss your feet because they have come."
+
+He rose, drew her to him softly, and placed a long kiss on her lips.
+She remained inert, her head thrown back, her eyes closed.  Her toque
+fell, her hair dropped on her shoulders.
+
+Two hours later, when the setting sun made immeasurably longer the
+shadows on the stones, Therese, who had wished to walk alone in the city,
+found herself in front of the two obelisks of Santa Maria Novella without
+knowing how she had reached there.  She saw at the corner of the square
+the old cobbler drawing his string with his eternal gesture.  He smiled,
+bearing his sparrow on his shoulder.
+
+She went into the shop, and sat on a chair.  She said in French:
+
+"Quentin Matsys, my friend, what have I done, and what will become of
+me?"
+
+He looked at her quietly, with laughing kindness, not understanding nor
+caring.  Nothing astonished him.  She shook her head.
+
+"What I did, my good Quentin, I did because he was suffering, and because
+I loved him.  I regret nothing."
+
+He replied, as was his habit, with the sonorous syllable of Italy:
+
+"Si! si!"
+
+"Is it not so, Quentin?  I have not done wrong?  But, my God!  what will
+happen now?"
+
+She prepared to go.  He made her understand that he wished her to wait.
+He culled carefully a bit of basilick and offered it to her.
+
+"For its fragrance, signora!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+CHOULETTE TAKES A JOURNEY
+
+It was the next day.
+
+Having carefully placed on the drawing-room table his knotty stick, his
+pipe, and his antique carpet-bag, Choulette bowed to Madame Martin, who
+was reading at the window.  He was going to Assisi.  He wore a sheepskin
+coat, and resembled the old shepherds in pictures of the Nativity.
+
+"Farewell, Madame.  I am quitting Fiesole, you, Dechartre, the too
+handsome Prince Albertinelli, and that gentle ogress, Miss Bell.  I am
+going to visit the Assisi mountain, which the poet says must be named no
+longer Assisi, but the Orient, because it is there that the sun of love
+rose.  I am going to kneel before the happy crypt where Saint Francis is
+resting in a stone manger, with a stone for a pillow.  For he would not
+even take out of this world a shroud--out of this world where he left the
+revelation of all joy and of all kindness."
+
+"Farewell, Monsieur Choulette.  Bring me a medal of Saint Clara.  I like
+Saint Clara a great deal."
+
+"You are right, Madame; she was a woman of strength and prudence.  When
+Saint Francis, ill and almost blind, came to spend a few days at Saint
+Damien, near his friend, she built with her own hands a hut for him in
+the garden.  Pain, languor, and burning eyelids deprived him of sleep.
+Enormous rats came to attack him at night.  Then he composed a joyous
+canticle in praise of our splendid brother the Sun, and our sister the
+Water, chaste, useful, and pure.  My most beautiful verses have less
+charm and splendor.  And it is just that it should be thus, for Saint
+Francis's soul was more beautiful than his mind.  I am better than all my
+contemporaries whom I have known, yet I am worth nothing.  When Saint
+Francis had composed his Song of the Sun he rejoiced.  He thought:
+'We shall go, my brothers and I, into the cities, and stand in the public
+squares, with a lute, on the market-day.  Good people will come near us,
+and we shall say to them: "We are the jugglers of God, and we shall sing
+a lay to you.  If you are pleased, you will reward us."  They will
+promise, and when we shall have sung, we shall recall their promise to
+them.  We shall say to them: "You owe a reward to us.  And the one that
+we ask of you is that you love one another."  Doubtless, to keep their
+word and not injure God's poor jugglers, they will avoid doing ill to
+others.'"
+
+Madame Martin thought St. Francis was the most amiable of the saints.
+
+"His work," replied Choulette, "was destroyed while he lived.  Yet he
+died happy, because in him was joy with humility.  He was, in fact, God's
+sweet singer.  And it is right that another poor poet should take his
+task and teach the world true religion and true joy.  I shall be that
+poet, Madame, if I can despoil myself of reason and of conceit.  For all
+moral beauty is achieved in this world through the inconceivable wisdom
+that comes from God and resembles folly."
+
+"I shall not discourage you, Monsieur Choulette.  But I am anxious about
+the fate which you reserve for the poor women in your new society.  You
+will imprison them all in convents."
+
+"I confess," replied Choulette, "that they embarrass me a great deal in
+my project of reform.  The violence with which one loves them is harsh
+and injurious.  The pleasure they give is not peaceful, and does not lead
+to joy.  I have committed for them, in my life, two or three abominable
+crimes of which no one knows.  I doubt whether I shall ever invite you to
+supper, Madame, in the new Saint Mary of the Angels."  He took his pipe,
+his carpet-bag, and his stick:
+
+"The crimes of love shall be forgiven.  Or, rather, one can not do
+evil when one loves purely.  But sensual love is formed of hatred,
+selfishness, and anger as much as of passion.  Because I found you
+beautiful one night, on this sofa, I was assailed by a cloud of violent
+thoughts.  I had come from the Albergo, where I had heard Miss Bell's
+cook improvise magnificently twelve hundred verses on Spring.  I was
+inundated by a celestial joy which the sight of you made me lose.
+It must be that a profound truth is enclosed in the curse of Eve.
+For, near you, I felt reckless and wicked.  I had soft words on my lips.
+They were lies.  I felt that I was your adversary and your enemy; I hated
+you.  When I saw you smile, I felt a desire to kill you."
+
+"Truly?"
+
+"Oh, Madame, it is a very natural sentiment, which you must have inspired
+more than once.  But common people feel it without being conscious of it,
+while my vivid imagination represents me to myself incessantly.
+I contemplate my mind, at times splendid, often hideous.  If you had been
+able to read my mind that night you would have screamed with fright."
+
+Therese smiled:
+
+"Farewell, Monsieur Choulette.  Do not forget my medal of Saint Clara."
+
+He placed his bag on the floor, raised his arm, and pointed his finger:
+
+"You have nothing to fear from me.  But the one whom you will love and
+who will love you will harm you.  Farewell, Madame."
+
+He took his luggage and went out.  She saw his long, rustic form
+disappear behind the bushes of the garden.
+
+In the afternoon she went to San Marco, where Dechartre was waiting for
+her.  She desired yet she feared to see him again so soon.  She felt an
+anguish which an unknown sentiment, profoundly soft, appeased.  She did
+not feel the stupor of the first time that she had yielded for love; she
+did not feel the brusque vision of the irreparable.  She was under
+influences slower, more vague, and more powerful.  This time a charming
+reverie bathed the reminiscence of the caresses which she had received.
+She was full of trouble and anxiety, but she felt no regret.  She had
+acted less through her will than through a force which she divined to be
+higher.  She absolved herself because of her disinterestedness.  She
+counted on nothing, having calculated nothing.
+
+Doubtless, she had been wrong to yield, since she was not free; but she
+had exacted nothing.  Perhaps she was for him only a violent caprice.
+She did not know him.  She had not one of those vivid imaginations that
+surpass immensely, in good as in evil, common mediocrity.  If he went
+away from her and disappeared she would not reproach him for it;
+at least, she thought not.  She would keep the reminiscence and the
+imprint of the rarest and most precious thing one may find in the world.
+Perhaps he was incapable of real attachment.  He thought he loved her.
+He had loved her for an hour.  She dared not wish for more, in the
+embarrassment of the false situation which irritated her frankness and
+her pride, and which troubled the lucidity of her intelligence.  While
+the carriage was carrying her to San Marco, she persuaded herself that he
+would say nothing to her of the day before, and that the room from which
+one could see the pines rise to the sky would leave to them only the
+dream of a dream.
+
+He extended his hand to her.  Before he had spoken she saw in his look
+that he loved her as much now as before, and she perceived at the same
+time that she wished him to be thus.
+
+"You--" he said, "I have been here since noon.  I was waiting, knowing
+that you would not come so soon, but able to live only at the place where
+I was to see you.  It is you!  Talk; let me see and hear you."
+
+"Then you still love me?"
+
+"It is now that I love you.  I thought I loved you when you were only a
+phantom.  Now, you are the being in whose hands I have put my soul.  It
+is true that you are mine!  What have I done to obtain the greatest, the
+only, good of this world?  And those men with whom the earth is covered
+think they are living!  I alone live!  Tell me, what have I done to
+obtain you?"
+
+"Oh, what had to be done, I did.  I say this to you frankly.  If we have
+reached that point, the fault is mine.  You see, women do not always
+confess it, but it is always their fault.  So, whatever may happen, I
+never will reproach you for anything."
+
+An agile troupe of yelling beggars, guides, and coachmen surrounded them
+with an importunity wherein was mingled the gracefulness which Italians
+never lose.  Their subtlety made them divine that these were lovers, and
+they knew that lovers are prodigal.  Dechartre threw coin to them, and
+they all returned to their happy laziness.
+
+A municipal guard received the visitors.  Madame Martin regretted that
+there was no monk.  The white gown of the Dominicans was so beautiful
+under the arcades of the cloister!
+
+They visited the cells where, on the bare plaster, Fra Angelico, aided by
+his brother Benedetto, painted innocent pictures for his companions.
+
+"Do you recall the winter night when, meeting you before the Guimet
+Museum, I accompanied you to the narrow street bordered by small gardens
+which leads to the Billy Quay?  Before separating we stopped a moment on
+the parapet along which runs a thin boxwood hedge.  You looked at that
+boxwood, dried by winter.  And when you went away I looked at it for a
+long time."
+
+They were in the cell wherein Savonarola lived.  The guide showed to them
+the portrait and the relics of the martyr.
+
+"What could there have been in me that you liked that day?  It was dark."
+
+"I saw you walk.  It is in movements that forms speak.  Each one of your
+steps told me the secrets of your charming beauty.  Oh! my imagination
+was never discreet in anything that concerned you.  I did not dare to
+speak to you.  When I saw you, it frightened me.  It frightened me
+because you could do everything for me.  When you were present, I adored
+you tremblingly.  When you were far from me, I felt all the impieties of
+desire."
+
+"I did not suspect this.  But do you recall the first time we saw each
+other, when Paul Vence introduced you?  You were seated near a screen.
+You were looking at the miniatures.  You said to me: 'This lady, painted
+by Siccardi, resembles Andre Chenier's mother.'  I replied to you: 'She
+is my husband's great-grandmother.  How did Andre Chenier's mother look?'
+And you said: 'There is a portrait of her: a faded Levantine.'"
+
+He excused himself and thought that he had not spoken so impertinently.
+
+"You did.  My memory is better than yours."
+
+They were walking in the white silence of the convent.  They saw the cell
+which Angelico had ornamented with the loveliest painting.  And there,
+before the Virgin who, in the pale sky, receives from God the Father the
+immortal crown, he took Therese in his arms and placed a kiss on her
+lips, almost in view of two Englishwomen who were walking through the
+corridors, consulting their Baedeker.  She said to him:
+
+"We must not forget Saint Anthony's cell."
+
+"Therese, I am suffering in my happiness from everything that is yours
+and that escapes me.  I am suffering because you do not live for me
+alone.  I wish to have you wholly, and to have had you in the past."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders a little.
+
+"Oh, the past!"
+
+"The past is the only human reality.  Everything that is, is past."
+
+She raised toward him her eyes, which resembled bits of blue sky full of
+mingled sun and rain.
+
+"Well, I may say this to you: I never have felt that I lived except with
+you."
+
+When she returned to Fiesole, she found a brief and threatening letter
+from Le Menil.  He could not understand, her prolonged absence, her
+silence.  If she did not announce at once her return, he would go to
+Florence for her.
+
+She read without astonishment, but was annoyed to see that everything
+disagreeable that could happen was happening, and that nothing would be
+spared to her of what she had feared.  She could still calm him and
+reassure him: she had only to say to him that she loved him; that she
+would soon return to Paris; that he should renounce the foolish idea of
+rejoining her here; that Florence was a village where they would be
+watched at once.  But she would have to write: "I love you."  She must
+quiet him with caressing phrases.
+
+She had not the courage to do it.  She would let him guess the truth.
+She accused herself in veiled terms.  She wrote obscurely of souls
+carried away by the flood of life, and of the atom one is on the moving
+ocean of events.  She asked him, with affectionate sadness, to keep of
+her a fond reminiscence in a corner of his soul.
+
+She took the letter to the post-office box on the Fiesole square.
+Children were playing in the twilight.  She looked from the top of the
+hill to the beautiful cup which carried beautiful Florence like a jewel.
+And the peace of night made her shiver.  She dropped the letter into the
+box.  Then only she had the clear vision of what she had done and of what
+the result would be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+WHAT IS FRANKNESS?
+
+In the square, where the spring sun scattered its yellow roses, the bells
+at noon dispersed the rustic crowd of grain-merchants assembled to sell
+their wares.  At the foot of the Lanzi, before the statues, the venders
+of ices had placed, on tables covered with red cotton, small castles
+bearing the inscription: 'Bibite ghiacciate'.  And joy descended from
+heaven to earth.  Therese and Jacques, returning from an early promenade
+in the Boboli Gardens, were passing before the illustrious loggia.
+Therese looked at the Sabine by John of Bologna with that interested
+curiosity of a woman examining another woman.  But Dechartre looked at
+Therese only.  He said to her:
+
+"It is marvellous how the vivid light of day flatters your beauty, loves
+you, and caresses the mother-of-pearl on your cheeks."
+
+"Yes," she said.  "Candle-light hardens my features.  I have observed
+this.  I am not an evening woman, unfortunately.  It is at night that
+women have a chance to show themselves and to please.  At night, Princess
+Seniavine has a fine blond complexion; in the sun she is as yellow as a
+lemon.  It must be owned that she does not care.  She is not a coquette."
+
+"And you are?"
+
+"Oh, yes.  Formerly I was a coquette for myself, now I am a coquette for
+you."
+
+She looked at the Sabine woman, who with her waving arms, long and
+robust, tried to avoid the Roman's embraces.
+
+"To be beautiful, must a woman have that thin form and that length of
+limb?  I am not shaped in that way."
+
+He took pains to reassure her.  But she was not disturbed about it.  She
+was looking now at the little castle of the ice-vender.  A sudden desire
+had come to her to eat an ice standing there, as the working-girls of the
+city stood.
+
+"Wait a moment," said Dechartre.
+
+He ran toward the street that follows the left side of the Lanzi, and
+disappeared.
+
+After a moment he came back, and gave her a little gold spoon, the handle
+of which was finished in a lily of Florence, with its chalice enamelled
+in red.
+
+"You must eat your ice with this.  The man does not give a spoon with his
+ices.  You would have had to put out your tongue.  It would have been
+pretty, but you are not accustomed to it."
+
+She recognized the spoon, a jewel which she had remarked the day before
+in the showcase of an antiquarian.
+
+They were happy; they disseminated their joy, which was full and simple,
+in light words which had no sense.  And they laughed when the Florentine
+repeated to them passages of the old Italian writers.  She enjoyed the
+play of his face, which was antique in style and jovial in expression.
+But she did not always understand what he said.  She asked Jacques:
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"Do you really wish to know?"
+
+Yes, she wished to know.
+
+"Well, he said he should be happy if the fleas in his bed were shaped
+like you!"
+
+When she had eaten the ice, he asked her to return to San Michele.  It
+was so near!  They would cross the square and at once discover the
+masterpiece in stone.  They went.  They looked at the St. George and at
+the bronze St. Mark.  Dechartre saw again on the wall the post-box, and
+he recalled with painful exactitude the little gloved hand that had
+dropped the letter.  He thought it hideous, that copper mouth which had
+swallowed Therese's secret.  He could not turn his eyes away from it.
+All his gayety had fled.  She admired the rude statue of the Evangelist.
+
+"It is true that he looks honest and frank, and it seems that, if he
+spoke, nothing but words of truth would come out of his mouth."
+
+He replied bitterly:
+
+"It is not a woman's mouth."
+
+She understood his thought, and said, in her soft tone:
+
+"My friend, why do you say this to me?  I am frank."
+
+"What do you call frank?  You know that a woman is obliged to lie."
+
+She hesitated.  Then she said:
+
+"A woman is frank when she does not lie uselessly."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+"I NEVER HAVE LOVED ANY ONE BUT YOU!"
+
+Therese was dressed in sombre gray.  The bushes on the border of the
+terrace were covered with silver stars and on the hillsides the laurel-
+trees threw their odoriferous flame.  The cup of Florence was in bloom.
+
+Vivian Bell walked, arrayed in white, in the fragrant garden.
+
+"You see, darling, Florence is truly the city of flowers, and it is not
+inappropriate that she should have a red lily for her emblem.  It is a
+festival to-day, darling."
+
+"A festival, to-day?"
+
+"Darling, do you not know this is the first day of May?  You did not wake
+this morning in a charming fairy spectacle?  Do you not celebrate the
+Festival of Flowers?  Do you not feel joyful, you who love flowers?  For
+you love them, my love, I know it: you are very good to them.  You said
+to me that they feel joy and pain; that they suffer as we do."
+
+"Ah! I said that they suffer as we do?"
+
+"Yes, you said it.  It is their festival to-day.  We must celebrate it
+with the rites consecrated by old painters."
+
+Therese heard without understanding.  She was crumpling under her glove
+a letter which she had just received, bearing the Italian postage-stamp,
+and containing only these two lines:
+
+"I am staying at the Great Britain Hotel, Lungarno Acciaoli.  I shall
+expect you to-morrow morning.  No. 18."
+
+"Darling, do you not know it is the custom of Florence to celebrate
+spring on the first day of May every year?  Then you did not understand
+the meaning of Botticelli's picture consecrated to the Festival of
+Flowers.  Formerly, darling, on the first day of May the entire city gave
+itself up to joy.  Young girls, crowned with sweetbrier and other
+flowers, made a long cortege through the Corso, under arches, and sang
+choruses on the new grass.  We shall do as they did.  We shall dance in
+the garden."
+
+"Ah, we shall dance in the garden?"
+
+"Yes, darling; and I will teach you Tuscan steps of the fifteenth century
+which have been found in a manuscript by Mr. Morrison, the oldest
+librarian in London.  Come back soon, my love; we shall put on flower
+hats and dance."
+
+"Yes, dear, we shall dance," said Therese.
+
+And opening the gate, she ran through the little pathway that hid its
+stones under rose-bushes.  She threw herself into the first carriage she
+found.  The coachman wore forget-me-nots on his hat and on the handle of
+his whip:
+
+"Great Britain Hotel, Lungarno Acciaoli."
+
+She knew where that was, Lungarno Acciaoli.  She had gone there at
+sunset, and she had seen the rays of the sun on the agitated surface of
+the river.  Then night had come, the murmur of the waters in the silence,
+the words and the looks that had troubled her, the first kiss of her
+lover, the beginning of incomparable love.  Oh, yes, she recalled
+Lungarno Acciaoli and the river-side beyond the old bridge--Great Britain
+Hotel--she knew: a big stone facade on the quay.  It was fortunate, since
+he would come, that he had gone there.  He might as easily have gone to
+the Hotel de la Ville, where Dechartre was.  It was fortunate they were
+not side by side in the same corridor.  Lungarno Acciaoli!  The dead body
+which they had seen pass was at peace somewhere in the little flowery
+cemetery.
+
+"Number 18."
+
+It was a bare hotel room, with a stove in the Italian fashion, a set of
+brushes displayed on the table, and a time-table.  Not a book, not a
+journal.  He was there; she saw suffering on his bony face, a look of
+fever.  This produced on her a sad impression.  He waited a moment for a
+word, a gesture; but she dared do nothing.  He offered a chair.  She
+refused it and remained standing.
+
+"Therese, something has happened of which I do not know.  Speak."
+
+After a moment of silence, she replied, with painful slowness:
+
+"My friend, when I was in Paris, why did you go away from me?"
+
+By the sadness of her accent he believed, he wished to believe, in the
+expression of an affectionate reproach.  His face colored.  He replied,
+ardently:
+
+"Ah, if I could have foreseen!  That hunting party--I cared little for
+it, as you may think!  But you--your letter, that of the twenty-seventh"
+--he had a gift for dates--"has thrown me into a horrible anxiety.
+Something has happened.  Tell me everything."
+
+"My friend, I believed you had ceased to love me."
+
+"But now that you know the contrary?"
+
+"Now--"
+
+She paused, her arms fell before her and her hands were joined.
+
+Then, with affected tranquillity, she continued:
+
+"Well, my friend, we took each other without knowing.  One never knows.
+You are young; younger than I, since we are of the same age.  You have,
+doubtless, projects for the future."
+
+He looked at her proudly.  She continued:
+
+"Your family, your mother, your aunts, your uncle the General, have
+projects for you.  That is natural.  I might have become an obstacle.
+It is better that I should disappear from your life.  We shall keep a
+fond remembrance of each other."
+
+She extended her gloved hand.  He folded his arms:
+
+"Then, you do not want me?  You have made me happy, as no other man ever
+was, and you think now to brush me aside?  Truly, you seem to think you
+have finished with me.  What have you come to say to me?  That it was a
+liaison, which is easily broken?  That people take each other, quit each
+other--well, no!  You are not a person whom one can easily quit."
+
+"Yes," said Therese, "you had perhaps given me more of your heart than
+one does ordinarily in such 180 cases.  I was more than an amusement for
+you.  But, if I am not the woman you thought I was, if I have deceived
+you, if I am frivolous--you know people have said so--well, if I have not
+been to you what I should have been--"
+
+She hesitated, and continued in a brave tone, contrasting with what she
+said:
+
+"If, while I was yours, I have been led astray; if I have been curious;
+if I say to you that I was not made for serious sentiment--"
+
+He interrupted her:
+
+"You are not telling the truth."
+
+"No, I am not telling the truth.  And I do not know how to lie.  I wished
+to spoil our past.  I was wrong.  It was--you know what it was.  But--"
+
+"But?"
+
+"I have always told you I was not sure of myself.  There are women, it is
+said, who are sure of themselves.  I warned you that I was not like
+them."
+
+He shook his head violently, like an irritated animal.
+
+"What do you mean?  I do not understand.  I understand nothing.  Speak
+clearly.  There is something between us.  I do not know what.  I demand
+to know what it is.  What is it?"
+
+"There is the fact that I am not a woman sure of herself, and that you
+should not rely on me.  No, you should not rely on me.  I had promised
+nothing--and then, if I had promised, what are words?"
+
+"You do not love me.  Oh, you love me no more!  I can see it.  But it is
+so much the worse for you!  I love you.  You should not have given
+yourself to me.  Do not think that you can take yourself back.  I love
+you and I shall keep you.  So you thought you could get out of it very
+quietly?  Listen a moment.  You have done everything to make me love you,
+to attach me to you, to make it impossible for me to live without you.
+
+"Six weeks ago you asked for nothing better.  You were everything for me,
+I was everything for you.  And now you desire suddenly that I should know
+you no longer; that you should be to me a stranger, a lady whom one meets
+in society.  Ah, you have a fine audacity!  Have I dreamed?  All the past
+is a dream?  I invented it all?  Oh, there can be no doubt of it.  You
+loved me.  I feel it still.  Well, I have not changed.  I am what I was;
+you have nothing to complain of.  I have not betrayed you for other
+women.  It isn't credit that I claim.  I could not have done it.  When
+one has known you, one finds the prettiest women insipid.  I never have
+had the idea of deceiving you.  I have always acted well toward you.  Why
+should you not love me?  Answer!  Speak!  Say you love me still.  Say it,
+since it is true.  Come, Therese, you will feel at once that you love as
+you loved me formerly in the little nest where we were so happy.  Come!"
+
+He approached her ardently.  She, her eyes full of fright, pushed him
+away with a kind of horror.
+
+He understood, stopped, and said:
+
+"You have a lover."
+
+She bent her head, then lifted it, grave and dumb.
+
+Then he made a gesture as if to strike her, and at once recoiled in
+shame.  He lowered his eyes and was silent.  His fingers to his lips,
+and biting his nails, he saw that his hand had been pricked by a pin on
+her waist, and bled.  He threw himself in an armchair, drew his
+handkerchief to wipe off the blood, and remained indifferent and without
+thought.
+
+She, with her back to the door, her face calm and pale, her look vague,
+arranged her hat with instinctive care.  At the noise, formerly
+delicious, that the rustle of her skirts made, he started, looked at her,
+and asked furiously:
+
+"Who is he?  I will know."
+
+She did not move.  She replied with soft firmness:
+
+"I have told you all I can.  Do not ask more; it would be useless."
+
+He looked at her with a cruel expression which she had never seen before.
+
+"Oh, do not tell me his name.  It will not be difficult for me to find
+it."
+
+She said not a word, saddened for him, anxious for another, full of
+anguish and fear, and yet without regret, without bitterness, because her
+real soul was elsewhere.
+
+He had a vague sensation of what passed in her mind.  In his anger to see
+her so sweet and so serene, to find her beautiful, and beautiful for
+another, he felt a desire to kill her, and he shouted at her:
+
+"Go!"
+
+Then, weakened by this effort of hatred, which was not natural to him, he
+buried his head in his hands and sobbed.
+
+His pain touched her, gave her the hope of quieting him.  She thought she
+might perhaps console him for her loss.  Amicably and comfortably she
+seated herself beside him.
+
+"My friend, blame me.  I am to blame, but more to be pitied.  Disdain me,
+if you wish, if one can disdain an unfortunate creature who is the
+plaything of life.  In fine, judge me as you wish.  But keep for me a
+little friendship in your anger, a little bitter-sweet reminiscence,
+something like those days of autumn when there is sunlight and strong
+wind.  That is what I deserve.  Do not be harsh to the agreeable but
+frivolous visitor who passed through your life.  Bid good-by to me as to
+a traveller who goes one knows not where, and who is sad.  There is so
+much sadness in separation!  You were irritated against me a moment ago.
+Oh, I do not reproach you for it.  I only suffer for it.  Reserve a
+little sympathy for me.  Who knows?  The future is always unknown.  It is
+very gray and obscure before me.  Let me say to myself that I have been
+kind, simple, frank with you, and that you have not forgotten it.  In
+time you will understand, you will forgive; to-day have a little pity."
+
+He was not listening to her words.  He was appeased simply by the caress
+of her voice, of which the tone was limpid and clear.  He exclaimed:
+
+"You do not love him.  I am the one whom you love.  Then--"
+
+She hesitated:
+
+"Ah, to say whom one loves or loves not is not an easy thing for a woman,
+or at least for me.  I do not know how other women do.  But life is not
+good to me.  I am tossed to and fro by force of circumstances."
+
+He looked at her calmly.  An idea came to him.  He had taken a
+resolution; he forgave, he forgot, provided she returned to him at once.
+
+"Therese, you do not love him.  It was an error, a moment of
+forgetfulness, a horrible and stupid thing that you did through weakness,
+through surprise, perhaps in spite.  Swear to me that you never will see
+him again."
+
+He took her arm:
+
+"Swear to me!"
+
+She said not a word, her teeth were set, her face was sombre.  He
+wrenched her wrist.  She exclaimed:
+
+"You hurt me!"
+
+However, he followed his idea; he led her to the table, on which, near
+the brushes, were an ink-stand, and several leaves of letter-paper
+ornamented with a large blue vignette, representing the facade of the
+hotel, with innumerable windows.
+
+"Write what I am about to dictate to you.  I will call somebody to take
+the letter."
+
+And as she resisted, he made her fall on her knees.  Proud and
+determined, she said:
+
+"I can not, I will not."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because--do you wish to know?--because I love him."
+
+Brusquely he released her.  If he had had his revolver at hand, perhaps
+he would have killed her.  But almost at once his anger was dampened by
+sadness; and now, desperate, he was the one who wished to die.
+
+"Is what you say true?  Is it possible?"
+
+"How do I know?  Can I say?  Do I understand?  Have I an idea,
+a sentiment, about anything?"
+
+With an effort she added:
+
+"Am I at this moment aware of anything except my sadness and your
+despair?"
+
+"You love him, you love him!  What is he, who is he, that you should love
+him?"
+
+His surprise made him stupid; he was in an abyss of astonishment.  But
+what she had said separated them.  He dared not complain.  He only
+repeated:
+
+"You love him, you love him!  But what has he done to you, what has he
+said, to make you love him?  I know you.  I have not told you every time
+your ideas shocked me.  I would wager he is not even a man in society.
+And you believe he loves you?  You believe it?  Well, you are deceiving
+yourself.  He does not love you.  You flatter him, simply.  He will quit
+you at the first opportunity.  When he shall have compromised you, he
+will abandon you.  Next year people will say of you: 'She is not at all
+exclusive.'  I am sorry for your father; he is one of my friends, and
+will know of your behavior.  You can not expect to deceive him."
+
+She listened, humiliated but consoled, thinking how she would have
+suffered had she found him generous.
+
+In his simplicity he sincerely disdained her.  This disdain relieved him.
+
+"How did the thing happen?  You can tell me."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders with so much pity that he dared not continue.
+He became contemptuous again.
+
+"Do you imagine that I shall aid you in saving appearances, that I shall
+return to your house, that I shall continue to call on your husband?"
+
+"I think you will continue to do what a gentleman should.  I ask nothing
+of you.  I should have liked to preserve of you the reminiscence of an
+excellent friend.  I thought you might be indulgent and kind to, me, but
+it is not possible.  I see that lovers never separate kindly.  Later, you
+will judge me better.  Farewell!"
+
+He looked at her.  Now his face expressed more pain than anger.  She
+never had seen his eyes so dry and so black.  It seemed as if he had
+grown old in an hour.
+
+"I prefer to tell you in advance.  It will be impossible for me to see
+you again.  You are not a woman whom one may meet after one has been
+loved by her.  You are not like others.  You have a poison of your own,
+which you have given to me, and which I feel in me, in my veins.  Why
+have I known you?"
+
+She looked at him kindly.
+
+"Farewell!  Say to yourself that I am not worthy of being regretted so
+much."
+
+Then, when he saw that she placed her hand on the latch of the door,
+when he felt at that gesture that he was to lose her, that he should
+never have her again, he shouted.  He forgot everything.  There remained
+in him only the dazed feeling of a great misfortune accomplished,
+of an irreparable calamity.  And from the depth of his stupor a desire
+ascended.  He desired to possess again the woman who was leaving him and
+who would never return.  He drew her to him.  He desired her, with all
+the strength of his animal nature.  She resisted with all the force of
+her will, which was free and on the alert.  She disengaged herself,
+crumpled, torn, without even having been afraid.
+
+He understood that everything was useless; he realized she was no longer
+for him, because she belonged to another.  As his suffering returned, he
+pushed her out of the door.
+
+She remained a moment in the corridor, proudly waiting for a word.
+
+But he shouted again, "Go!"  and shut the door violently.
+
+On the Via Alfieri, she saw again the pavilion in the rear of the
+courtyard where pale grasses grew.  She found it silent and tranquil,
+faithful, with its goats and nymphs, to the lovers of the time of the
+Grand Duchess Eliza.  She felt at once freed from the painful, brutal
+world, and transported to ages wherein she had not known the sadness of
+life.  At the foot of the stairs, the steps of which were covered with
+roses, Dechartre was waiting.  She threw herself in his arms.  He carried
+her inert, like a precious trophy before which he had become pallid and
+trembling.  She enjoyed, her eyelids half closed, the superb humiliation
+of being a beautiful prey.  Her fatigue, her sadness, her disgust with
+the day, the reminiscence of violence, her regained liberty, the need of
+forgetting, remains of fright, everything vivified, awakened her
+tenderness.  She threw her arms around the neck of her lover.
+
+They were as gay as children.  They laughed, said tender nothings,
+played, ate lemons, oranges, and other fruits piled up near-them on
+painted plates.  Her lips, half-open, showed her brilliant teeth.  She
+asked, with coquettish anxiety, if he were not disillusioned after the
+beautiful dream he had made of her.
+
+In the caressing light of the day, for the enjoyment of which he had
+arranged, he contemplated her with youthful joy.  He lavished praise and
+kisses upon her.  They forgot themselves in caresses, in friendly
+quarrels, in happy glances.
+
+He asked her how a little red mark on her temple had come there.  She
+replied that she had forgotten; that it was nothing.  She hardly lied;
+she had really forgotten.
+
+They recalled to each other their short but beautiful history, all their
+life, which began upon the day when they had met.
+
+"You know, on the terrace, the day after your arrival, you said vague
+things to me.  I guessed that you loved me."
+
+"I was afraid to seem stupid to you."
+
+"You were, a little.  It was my triumph.  It made me impatient to see you
+so little troubled near me.  I loved you before you loved me.  Oh, I do
+not blush for it!"
+
+He gave her a glass of Asti.  But there was a bottle of Trasimene.  She
+wished to taste it, in memory of the lake which she had seen silent and
+beautiful at night in its opal cup.  That was when she had first visited
+Italy, six years before.
+
+He chided her for having discovered the beauty of things without his aid.
+
+She said:
+
+"Without you, I did not know how to see anything.  Why did you not come
+to me before?"
+
+He closed her lips with a kiss.  Then she said:
+
+"Yes, I love you!  Yes, I never have loved any one but you!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+A MEETING AT THE STATION
+
+Le Menil had written: "I leave tomorrow evening at seven o'clock.  Meet
+me at the station."
+
+She had gone to meet him.  She saw him in long coat and cape, precise and
+calm, in front of the hotel stages.  He said only:
+
+"Ah, you have come."
+
+"But, my friend, you called me."
+
+He did not confess that he had written in the absurd hope that she would
+love him again and that the rest would be forgotten, or that she would
+say to him: "It was only a trial of your love."
+
+If she had said so he would have believed her, however.
+
+Astonished because she did not speak, he said, dryly:
+
+"What have you to say to me?  It is not for me to speak, but for you.
+I have no explanations to give you.  I have not to justify a betrayal."
+
+"My friend, do not be cruel, do not be ungrateful.  This is what I had to
+say to you.  And I must repeat that I leave you with the sadness of a
+real friend."
+
+"Is that all?  Go and say this to the other man.  It will interest him
+more than it interests me."
+
+"You called me, and I came; do not make me regret it."
+
+"I am sorry to have disturbed you.  You could doubtless find a better
+employment for your time.  I will not detain you.  Rejoin him, since you
+are longing to do so."
+
+At the thought that his unhappy words expressed a moment of eternal human
+pain, and that tragedy had illustrated many similar griefs, she felt all
+the sadness and irony of the situation, which a curl of her lips
+betrayed.  He thought she was laughing.
+
+"Do not laugh; listen to me.  The other day, at the hotel, I wanted to
+kill you.  I came so near doing it that now I know what I escaped.
+I will not do it.  You may rest secure.  What would be the use?  As I
+wish to keep up appearances, I shall call on you in Paris.  It will
+grieve me to learn that you can not receive me.  I shall see your
+husband, I shall see your father also.  It will be to say good-by to
+them, as I intend to go on a long voyage.  Farewell, Madame!"
+
+At the moment when he turned his back to her, Therese saw Miss Bell and
+Prince Albertinelli coming out of the freight-station toward her.  The
+Prince was very handsome.  Vivian was walking by his side with the
+lightness of chaste joy.
+
+"Oh, darling, what a pleasant surprise to find you here!  The Prince, and
+I have seen, at the customhouse, the new bell, which has just come."
+
+"Ah, the bell has come?"
+
+"It is here, darling, the Ghiberti bell.  I saw it in its wooden cage.
+It did not ring, because it was a prisoner.  But it will have a campanile
+in my Fiesole house.
+
+"When it feels the air of Florence, it will be happy to let its silvery
+voice be heard.  Visited by the doves, it will ring for all our joys and
+all our sufferings.  It will ring for you, for me, for the Prince, for
+good Madame Marmet, for Monsieur Choulette, for all our friends."
+
+"Dear, bells never ring for real joys and for real sufferings.  Bells are
+honest functionaries, who know only official sentiments."
+
+"Oh, darling, you are much mistaken.  Bells know the secrets of souls;
+they know everything.  But I am very glad to find you here.  I know, my
+love, why you came to the station.  Your maid betrayed you.  She told me
+you were waiting for a pink gown which was delayed in coming and that you
+were very impatient.  But do not let that trouble you.  You are always
+beautiful, my love."
+
+She made Madame Martin enter her wagon.
+
+"Come, quick, darling; Monsieur Jacques Dechartre dines at the house to-
+night, and I should not like to make him wait."
+
+And while they were driving through the silence of the night, through the
+pathways full of the fresh perfume of wildflowers, she said:
+
+"Do you see over there, darling, the black distaffs of the Fates, the
+cypresses of the cemetery?  It is there I wish to sleep."
+
+But Therese thought anxiously: "They saw him.  Did they recognize him?  I
+think not.  The place was dark, and had only little blinding lights.  Did
+she know him?  I do not recall whether she saw him at my house last
+year."
+
+What made her anxious was a sly smile on the Prince's face.
+
+"Darling, do you wish a place near me in that rustic cemetery?  Shall we
+rest side by side under a little earth and a great deal of sky?  But I do
+wrong to extend to you an invitation which you can not accept.  It will
+not be permitted to you to sleep your eternal sleep at the foot of the
+hill of Fiesole, my love.  You must rest in Paris, in a handsome tomb, by
+the side of Count Martin-Belleme."
+
+"Why?  Do you think, dear, that the wife must be united to her husband
+even after death?"
+
+"Certainly she must, darling.  Marriage is for time and for eternity.
+Do you not know the history of a young pair who loved each other in the
+province of Auvergne?  They died almost at the same time, and were placed
+in two tombs separated by a road.  But every night a sweetbrier bush
+threw from one tomb to the other its flowery branches.  The two coffins
+had to be buried together."
+
+When they had passed the Badia, they saw a procession coming up the side
+of the hill.  The wind blew on the candles borne in gilded wooden
+candlesticks.  The girls of the societies, dressed in white and blue,
+carried painted banners.  Then came a little St. John, blond, curly-
+haired, nude, under a lamb's fleece which showed his arms and shoulders;
+and a St. Mary Magdalene, seven years old, crowned only with her waving
+golden hair.  The people of Fiesole followed.  Countess Martin recognized
+Choulette among them.  With a candle in one hand, a book in the other,
+and blue spectacles on the end of his nose, he was singing.  His unkempt
+beard moved up and down with the rhythm of the song.  In the harshness of
+light and shade that worked in his face, he had an air that suggested a
+solitary monk capable of accomplishing a century of penance.
+
+"How amusing he is!"  said Therese.  "He is making a spectacle of himself
+for himself.  He is a great artist."
+
+"Darling, why will you insist that Monsieur Choulette is not a pious man?
+Why?  There is much joy and much beauty in faith.  Poets know this.  If
+Monsieur Choulette had not faith, he could not write the admirable verses
+that he does."
+
+"And you, dear, have you faith?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I believe in God and in the word of Christ."
+
+Now the banners and the white veils had disappeared down the road.  But
+one could see on the bald cranium of Choulette the flame of the candle
+reflected in rays of gold.
+
+Dechartre, however, was waiting alone in the garden.  Therese found him
+resting on the balcony of the terrace where he had felt the first
+sufferings of love.  While Miss Bell and the Prince were trying to fix
+upon a suitable place for the campanile, Dechartre led his beloved under
+the trees.
+
+"You promised me that you would be in the garden when I came.  I have
+been waiting for you an hour, which seemed eternal.  You were not to go
+out.  Your absence has surprised and grieved me."
+
+She replied vaguely that she had been compelled to go to the station, and
+that Miss Bell had brought her back in the wagon.
+
+He begged her pardon for his anxiety, but everything alarmed him.  His
+happiness made him afraid.
+
+They were already at table when Choulette appeared, with the face of an
+antique satyr.  A terrible joy shone in his phosphorous eyes.  Since his
+return from Assisi, he lived only among paupers, drank chianti all day
+with girls and artisans to whom he taught the beauty of joy and
+innocence, the advent of Jesus Christ, and the imminent abolition of
+taxes and military service.  At the beginning of the procession he had
+gathered vagabonds in the ruins of the Roman theatre, and had delivered
+to them in a macaronic language, half French and half Tuscan, a sermon,
+which he took pleasure in repeating:
+
+"Kings, senators, and judges have said: 'The life of nations is in us.'
+Well, they lie; and they are the coffin saying: 'I am the cradle.'
+
+"The life of nations is in the crops of the fields yellowing under the
+eye of the Lord.  It is in the vines, and in the smiles and tears with
+which the sky bathes the fruits on the trees.
+
+"The life of nations is not in the laws, which were made by the rich and
+powerful for the preservation of riches and power.
+
+"The chiefs of kingdoms and of republics have said in their books that
+the right of peoples is the right of war, and they have glorified
+violence.  And they render honors unto conquerors, and they raise in the
+public squares statues to the victorious man and horse.  But one has not
+the right to kill; that is the reason why the just man will not draw from
+the urn a number that will send him to the war.  The right is not to
+pamper the folly and crimes of a prince raised over a kingdom or over a
+republic; and that is the reason why the just man will not pay taxes and
+will not give money to the publicans.  He will enjoy in peace the fruit
+of his work, and he will make bread with the wheat that he has sown, and
+he will eat the fruits of the trees that he has cut."
+
+"Ah, Monsieur Choulette," said Prince Albertinelli, gravely, "you are
+right to take interest in the state of our unfortunate fields, which
+taxes exhaust.  What fruit can be drawn from a soil taxed to thirty-three
+per cent. of its net income?  The master and the servants are the prey of
+the publicans."
+
+Dechartre and Madame Martin were struck by the unexpected sincerity of
+his accent.
+
+He added:
+
+"I like the King.  I am sure of my loyalty, but the misfortunes of the
+peasants move me."
+
+The truth was, he pursued with obstinacy a single aim: to reestablish the
+domain of Casentino that his father, Prince Carlo, an officer of Victor
+Emmanuel, had left devoured by usurers.  His affected gentleness
+concealed his stubbornness.  He had only useful vices.  It was to become
+a great Tuscan landowner that he had dealt in pictures, sold the famous
+ceilings of his palace, made love to rich old women, and, finally, sought
+the hand of Miss Bell, whom he knew to be skilful at earning money and
+practised in the art of housekeeping.  He really liked peasants.  The
+ardent praises of Choulette, which he understood vaguely, awakened this
+affection in him.  He forgot himself enough to express his mind:
+
+"In a country where master and servants form one family, the fate of the
+one depends on that of the others.  Taxes despoil us.  How good are our
+farmers!  They are the best men in the world to till the soil."
+
+Madame Martin confessed that she should not have believed it.  The
+country of Lombardy alone seemed to her to be well cultivated.  Tuscany
+appeared a beautiful, wild orchard.
+
+The Prince replied, smilingly, that perhaps she would not speak in that
+way if she had done him the honor of visiting his farms of Casentino,
+although these had suffered from long and ruinous lawsuits.  She would
+have seen there what an Italian landscape really is.
+
+"I take a great deal of care of my domain.  I was coming from it to-night
+when I had the double pleasure of finding at the station Miss Bell, who
+had gone there to find her Ghiberti bell, and you, Madame, who were
+talking with a friend from Paris."
+
+He had the idea that it would be disagreeable to her to hear him speak of
+that meeting.  He looked around the table, and saw the expression of
+anxious surprise which Dechartre could not restrain.  He insisted:
+
+"Forgive, Madame, in a rustic, a certain pretension to knowing something
+about the world.  In the man who was talking to you I recognized a
+Parisian, because he had an English air; and while he affected stiffness,
+he showed perfect ease and particular vivacity."
+
+"Oh," said Therese, negligently, "I have not seen him for a long time.
+I was much surprised to meet him at Florence at the moment of his
+departure."
+
+She looked at Dechartre, who affected not to listen.
+
+"I know that gentleman," said Miss Bell.  "It is Monsieur Le Menil.  I
+dined with him twice at Madame Martin's, and he talked to me very well.
+He said he liked football; that he introduced the game in France, and
+that now football is quite the fashion.  He also related to me his
+hunting adventures.  He likes animals.  I have observed that hunters like
+animals.  I assure you, darling, that Monsieur Le Menil talks admirably
+about hares.  He knows their habits.  He said to me it was a pleasure to
+look at them dancing in the moonlight on the plains.  He assured me that
+they were very intelligent, and that he had seen an old hare, pursued by
+dogs, force another hare to get out of the trail so as to deceive the
+hunters.  Darling, did Monsieur Le Menil ever talk to you about hares?"
+
+Therese replied she did not know, and that she thought hunters were
+tiresome.
+
+Miss Bell exclaimed.  She did not think M. Le Menil was ever tiresome
+when talking of the hares that danced in the moonlight on the plains and
+among the vines.  She would like to raise a hare, like Phanion.
+
+"Darling, you do not know Phanion.  Oh, I am sure that Monsieur Dechartre
+knows her.  She was beautiful, and dear to poets.  She lived in the
+Island of Cos, beside a dell which, covered with lemon-trees, descended
+to the blue sea.  And they say that she looked at the blue waves.
+I related Phanion's history to Monsieur Le Menil, and he was very glad to
+hear it.  She had received from some hunter a little hare with long ears.
+She held it on her knees and fed it on spring flowers.  It loved Phanion
+and forgot its mother.  It died before having eaten too many flowers.
+Phanion lamented over its loss.  She buried it in the lemon-grove, in a
+grave which she could see from her bed.  And the shade of the little hare
+was consoled by the songs of the poets."
+
+The good Madame Marmet said that M. Le Menil pleased by his elegant and
+discreet manners, which young men no longer practise.  She would have
+liked to see him.  She wanted him to do something for her.
+
+"Or, rather, for my nephew," she said.  "He is a captain in the
+artillery, and his chiefs like him.  His colonel was for a long time
+under orders of Monsieur Le Menil's uncle, General La Briche.
+If Monsieur Le Menil would ask his uncle to write to Colonel Faure in
+favor of my nephew I should be grateful to him.  My nephew is not a
+stranger to Monsieur Le Menil.  They met last year at the masked ball
+which Captain de Lassay gave at the hotel at Caen."
+
+Madame Marmet cast down her eyes and added:
+
+"The invited guests, naturally, were not society women.  But it is said
+some of them were very pretty.  They came from Paris.  My nephew, who
+gave these details to me, was dressed as a coachman.  Monsieur Le Menil
+was dressed as a Hussar of Death, and he had much success."
+
+Miss Bell said that she was sorry not to have known that M. Le Menil was
+in Florence.  Certainly, she should have invited him to come to Fiesole.
+
+Dechartre remained sombre and distant during the rest of the dinner: and
+when, at the moment of leaving, Therese extended her hand to him, she
+felt that he avoided pressing it in his.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A woman is frank when she does not lie uselessly
+Disappointed her to escape the danger she had feared
+Does not wish one to treat it with either timidity or brutality
+He knew now the divine malady of love
+I do not desire your friendship
+I have known things which I know no more
+I wished to spoil our past
+Impatient at praise which was not destined for himself
+Incapable of conceiving that one might talk without an object
+Jealous without having the right to be jealous
+Lovers never separate kindly
+Magnificent air of those beggars of whom small towns are proud
+Nobody troubled himself about that originality
+One who first thought of pasting a canvas on a panel
+Simple people who doubt neither themselves nor others
+Superior men sometimes lack cleverness
+The door of one's room opens on the infinite
+The one whom you will love and who will love you will harm you
+The past is the only human reality--Everything that is, is past
+There are many grand and strong things which you do not feel
+They are the coffin saying: 'I am the cradle'
+To be beautiful, must a woman have that thin form
+Trying to make Therese admire what she did not know
+Unfortunate creature who is the plaything of life
+What will be the use of having tormented ourselves in this world
+Women do not always confess it, but it is always their fault
+You must take me with my own soul!
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Red Lily, v2
+by Anatole France
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RED LILY
+
+By ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+"ONE IS NEVER KIND WHEN ONE IS IN LOVE"
+
+The next day, in the hidden pavilion of the Via Alfieri, she found him
+preoccupied.  She tried to distract him with ardent gayety, with the
+sweetness of pressing intimacy, with superb humility.  But he remained
+sombre.  He had all night meditated, labored over, and recognized his
+sadness.  He had found reasons for suffering.  His thought had brought
+together the hand that dropped a letter in the post-box before the bronze
+San Marco and the dreadful unknown who had been seen at the station.  Now
+Jacques Dechartre gave a face and a name to the cause of his suffering.
+In the grandmother's armchair where Therese had been seated on the day of
+her welcome, and which she had this time offered to him, he was assailed
+by painful images; while she, bent over one of his arms, enveloped him
+with her warm embrace and her loving heart.  She divined too well what he
+was suffering to ask it of him simply.
+
+In order to bring him back to pleasanter ideas, she recalled the secrets
+of the room where they were and reminiscences of their walks through the
+city.  She was gracefully familiar.
+
+"The little spoon you gave me, the little red lily spoon, I use for my
+tea in the morning.  And I know by the pleasure I feel at seeing it when
+I wake how much I love you."
+
+Then, as he replied only in sentences sad and evasive, she said:
+
+"I am near you, but you do not care for me.  You are preoccupied by some
+idea that I do not fathom.  Yet I am alive, and an idea is nothing."
+
+"An idea is nothing?  Do you think so?  One may be wretched or happy for
+an idea; one may live and one may die for an idea.  Well, I am thinking."
+
+"Of what are you thinking?"
+
+"Why do you ask?  You know very well I am thinking of what I heard last
+night, which you had concealed from me.  I am thinking of your meeting at
+the station, which was not due to chance, but which a letter had caused,
+a letter dropped--remember!--in the postbox of San Michele.  Oh, I do not
+reproach you for it.  I have not the right.  But why did you give
+yourself to me if you were not free?"
+
+She thought she must tell an untruth.
+
+"You mean some one whom I met at the station yesterday?  I assure you it
+was the most ordinary meeting in the world."
+
+He was painfully impressed with the fact that she did not dare to name
+the one she spoke of.  He, too, avoided pronouncing that name.
+
+"Therese, he had not come for you?  You did not know he was in Florence?
+He is nothing more to you than a man whom you meet socially?  He is not
+the one who, when absent, made you say to me, 'I can not?'  He is nothing
+to you?"
+
+She replied resolutely:
+
+"He comes to my house at times.  He was introduced to me by General
+Lariviere.  I have nothing more to say to you about him.  I assure you he
+is of no interest to me, and I can not conceive what may be in your mind
+about him."
+
+She felt a sort of satisfaction at repudiating the man who had insisted
+against her; with so much harshness and violence, upon his rights of
+ownership.  But she was in haste to get out of her tortuous path.  She
+rose and looked at her lover, with beautiful, tender, and grave eyes.
+
+"Listen to me: the day when I gave my heart to you, my life was yours
+wholly.  If a doubt or a suspicion comes to you, question me.  The
+present is yours, and you know well there is only you, you alone, in it.
+As for my past, if you knew what nothingness it was you would be glad.
+I do not think another woman made as I was, to love, would have brought
+to you a mind newer to love than is mine.  That I swear to you.  The
+years that were spent without you--I did not live!  Let us not talk of
+them.  There is nothing in them of which I should be ashamed.  To regret
+them is another thing.  I regret to have known you so late.  Why did you
+not come sooner?  You could have known me five years ago as easily as to-
+day.  But, believe me, we should not tire ourselves with speaking of time
+that has gone.  Remember Lohengrin.  If you love me, I am for you like
+the swan's knight.  I have asked nothing of you.  I have wanted to know
+nothing.  I have not chided you about Mademoiselle Jeanne Tancrede.
+I saw you loved me, that you were suffering, and it was enough--because
+I loved you."
+
+"A woman can not be jealous in the same manner as a man, nor feel what
+makes us suffer."
+
+"I do not know that.  Why can not she?"
+
+"Why?  Because there is not in the blood, in the flesh of a woman that
+absurd and generous fury for ownership, that primitive instinct of which
+man has made a right.  Man is the god who wants his mate to himself.
+Since time immemorial woman is accustomed to sharing men's love.  It is
+the past, the obscure past, that determines our passions.  We are already
+so old when we are born!  Jealousy, for a woman, is only a wound to her
+own self-love.  For a man it is a torture as profound as moral suffering,
+as continuous as physical suffering.  You ask the reason why?  Because,
+in spite of my submission and of my respect, in spite of the alarm you
+cause me, you are matter and I am the idea; you are the thing and I am
+the mind; you are the clay and I am the artisan.  Do not complain of
+this.  Near the perfect amphora, surrounded with garlands, what is the
+rude and humble potter?  The amphora is tranquil and beautiful; he is
+wretched; he is tormented; he wills; he suffers; for to will is to
+suffer.  Yes, I am jealous.  I know what there is in my jealousy.  When I
+examine it, I find in it hereditary prejudices, savage conceit, sickly
+susceptibility, a mingling of rudest violence and cruel feebleness,
+imbecile and wicked revolt against the laws of life and of society.  But
+it does not matter that I know it for what it is: it exists and it
+torments me.  I am the chemist who, studying the properties of an acid
+which he has drunk, knows how it was combined and what salts form it.
+Nevertheless the acid burns him, and will burn him to the bone."
+
+"My love, you are absurd."
+
+"Yes, I am absurd.  I feel it better than you feel it yourself.  To
+desire a woman in all the brilliancy of her beauty and her wit, mistress
+of herself, who knows and who dares; more beautiful in that and more
+desirable, and whose choice is free, voluntary, deliberate; to desire
+her, to love her for what she is, and to suffer because she is not
+puerile candor nor pale innocence, which would be shocking in her if it
+were possible to find them there; to ask her at the same time that she be
+herself and not be herself; to adore her as life has made her, and regret
+bitterly that life, which has made her so beautiful, has touched her--
+Oh, this is absurd!  I love you!  I love you with all that you bring to
+me of sensations, of habits, with all that comes of your experiences,
+with all that comes from him-perhaps, from them-how do I know?  These
+things are my delight and they are my torture.  There must be a profound
+sense in the public idiocy which says that love like ours is guilty.  Joy
+is guilty when it is immense.  That is the reason why I suffer, my
+beloved."
+
+She knelt before him, took his hands, and drew him to her.
+
+"I do not wish you to suffer; I will not have it.  It would be folly.
+I love you, and never have loved any one but you.  You may believe me; I
+do not lie."
+
+He kissed her forehead.
+
+"If you deceived me, my dear, I should not reproach you for that; on the
+contrary, I should be grateful to you.  Nothing is so legitimate, so
+human, as to deceive pain.  What would become of us if women had not for
+us the pity of untruth?  Lie, my beloved, lie for the sake of charity.
+Give me the dream that colors black sorrow.  Lie; have no scruples.  You
+will only add another illusion to the illusion of love and beauty."
+
+He sighed:
+
+"Oh, common-sense, common wisdom!"
+
+She asked him what he meant, and what common wisdom was.  He said it was
+a sensible proverb, but brutal, which it was better not to repeat.
+
+"Repeat it all the same."
+
+"You wish me to say it to you: 'Kissed lips do not lose their
+freshness.'"
+
+And he added:
+
+"It is true that love preserves beauty, and that the beauty of women is
+fed on caresses as bees are fed on flowers."
+
+She placed on his lips a pledge in a kiss.
+
+"I swear to you I never loved any one but you.  Oh, no, it is not
+caresses that have preserved the few charms which I am happy to have in
+order to offer them to you.  I love you!  I love you!"
+
+But he still remembered the letter dropped in the post-box, and the
+unknown person met at the station.
+
+"If you loved me truly, you would love only me."
+
+She rose, indignant:
+
+"Then you believe I love another?  What you are saying is monstrous.  Is
+that what you think of me?  And you say you love me!  I pity you, because
+you are insane."
+
+"True, I am insane."
+
+She, kneeling, with the supple palms of her hands enveloped his temples
+and his cheeks.  He said again that he was mad to be anxious about a
+chance and commonplace meeting.  She forced him to believe her, or,
+rather, to forget.  He no longer saw or knew anything.  His vanished
+bitterness and anger left him nothing but the harsh desire to forget
+everything, to make her forget everything.
+
+She asked him why he was sad.
+
+"You were happy a moment ago.  Why are you not happy now?"
+
+And as he shook his head and said nothing:
+
+"Speak!  I like your complaints better than your silence."
+
+Then he said:
+
+"You wish to know?  Do not be angry.  I suffer now more than ever,
+because I know now what you are capable of giving."
+
+She withdrew brusquely from his arms and, with eyes full of pain and
+reproach, said:
+
+"You can believe that I ever was to another what I am to you!  You wound
+me in my most susceptible sentiment, in my love for you.  I do not
+forgive you for this.  I love you!  I never have loved any one except
+you.  I never have suffered except through you.  Be content.  You do me a
+great deal of harm.  How can you be so unkind?"
+
+"Therese, one is never kind when one is in love."
+
+She remained for a long time immovable and dreamy.  Her face flushed, and
+a tear rose to her eyes.
+
+"Therese, you are weeping!"
+
+"Forgive me, my heart, it is the first time that I have loved and that I
+have been really loved.  I am afraid."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+CHOULETTE'S AMBITION
+
+While the rolling of arriving boxes filled the Bell villa; while Pauline,
+loaded with parcels, lightly came down the steps; while good Madame
+Marmet, with tranquil vigilance, supervised everything; and while Miss
+Bell finished dressing in her room, Therese, dressed in gray, resting on
+the terrace, looked once again at the Flower City.
+
+She had decided to return home.  Her husband recalled her in every one of
+his letters.  If, as he asked her to do, she returned to Paris in the
+first days of May, they might give two or three dinners, followed by
+receptions.  His political group was supported by public opinion.  The
+tide was pushing him along, and Garain thought the Countess Martin's
+drawing-room might exercise an excellent influence on the future of the
+country.  These reasons moved her not; but she felt a desire to be
+agreeable to her husband.  She had received the day before a letter from
+her father, Monsieur Montessuy, who, without sharing the political views
+of his son-in-law and without giving any advice to his daughter,
+insinuated that society was beginning to gossip of the Countess Martin's
+mysterious sojourn at Florence among poets and artists.  The Bell villa
+took, from a distance, an air of sentimental fantasy.  She felt herself
+that she was too closely observed at Resole.  Madame Marmet annoyed her.
+Prince Albertinelli disquieted her.  The meetings in the pavilion of the
+Via Alfieri had become difficult and dangerous.  Professor Arrighi, whom
+the Prince often met, had seen her one night as she was walking through
+the deserted streets leaning on Dechartre.  Professor Arrighi, author of
+a treatise on agriculture, was the most amiable of wise men.  He had
+turned his beautiful, heroic face, and said, only the next day, to the
+young woman "Formerly, I could discern from a long distance the coming of
+a beautiful woman.  Now that I have gone beyond the age to be viewed
+favorably by women, heaven has pity on me.  Heaven prevents my seeing
+them.  My eyes are very bad.  The most charming face I can no longer
+recognize."  She had understood, and heeded the warning.  She wished now
+to conceal her joy in the vastness of Paris.
+
+Vivian, to whom she had announced her departure, had asked her to remain
+a few days longer.  But Therese suspected that her friend was still
+shocked by the advice she had received one night in the lemon-decorated
+room; that, at least, she did not enjoy herself entirely in the
+familiarity of a confidante who disapproved of her choice, and whom the
+Prince had represented to her as a coquette, and perhaps worse.  The date
+of her departure had been fixed for May 5th.
+
+The day shone brilliant, pure, and charming on the Arno valley.  Therese,
+dreamy, saw from the terrace the immense morning rose placed in the blue
+cup of Florence.  She leaned forward to discover, at the foot of the
+flowery hills, the imperceptible point where she had known infinite joys.
+There the cemetery garden made a small, sombre spot near which she
+divined the Via Alfieri.  She saw herself again in the room wherein,
+doubtless, she never would enter again.  The hours there passed had for
+her the sadness of a dream.  She felt her eyes becoming veiled, her knees
+weaken, and her soul shudder.  It seemed to her that life was no longer
+in her, and that she had left it in that corner where she saw the black
+pines raise their immovable summits.  She reproached herself for feeling
+anxiety without reason, when, on the contrary, she should be reassured
+and joyful.  She knew she would meet Jacques Dechartre in Paris.  They
+would have liked to arrive there at the same time, or, rather, to go
+there together.  They had thought it indispensable that he should remain
+three or four days longer in Florence, but their meeting would not be
+retarded beyond that.  They had appointed a rendezvous, and she rejoiced
+in the thought of it.  She wore her love mingled with her being and
+running in her blood.  Still, a part of herself remained in the pavilion
+decorated with goats and nymphs a part of herself which never would
+return to her.  In the full ardor of life, she was dying for things
+infinitely delicate and precious.  She recalled that Dechartre had said
+to her: "Love likes charms.  I gathered from the terrace the leaves of a
+tree that you had admired."  Why had she not thought of taking a stone of
+the pavilion wherein she had forgotten the world?
+
+A shout from Pauline drew her from her thoughts.  Choulette, jumping from
+a bush, had suddenly kissed the maid, who was carrying overcoats and bags
+into the carriage.  Now he was running through the alleys, joyful, his
+ears standing out like horns.  He bowed to the Countess Martin.
+
+"I have, then, to say farewell to you, Madame."
+
+He intended to remain in Italy.  A lady was calling him, he said: it was
+Rome.  He wanted to see the cardinals.  One of them, whom people praised
+as an old man full of sense, would perhaps share the ideas of the
+socialist and revolutionary church.  Choulette had his aim: to plant on
+the ruins of an unjust and cruel civilization the Cross of Calvary, not
+dead and bare, but vivid, and with its flowery arms embracing the world.
+He was founding with that design an order and a newspaper.  Madame Martin
+knew the order.  The newspaper was to be sold for one cent, and to be
+written in rhythmic phrases.  It was a newspaper to be sung.  Verse,
+simple, violent, or joyful, was the only language that suited the people.
+Prose pleased only people whose intelligence was very subtle.  He had
+seen anarchists in the taverns of the Rue Saint Jacques.  They spent
+their evenings reciting and listening to romances.
+
+And he added:
+
+"A newspaper which shall be at the same time a song-book will touch the
+soul of the people.  People say I have genius.  I do not know whether
+they are right.  But it must be admitted that I have a practical mind."
+
+Miss Bell came down the steps, putting on her gloves:
+
+"Oh, darling, the city and the mountains and the sky wish you to lament
+your departure.  They make themselves beautiful to-day in order to make
+you regret quitting them and desire to see them again."
+
+But Choulette, whom the dryness of the Tuscan climate tired, regretted
+green Umbria and its humid sky.  He recalled Assisi.  He said:
+
+"There are woods and rocks, a fair sky and white clouds.  I have walked
+there in the footsteps of good Saint Francis, and I transcribed his
+canticle to the sun in old French rhymes, simple and poor."
+
+Madame Martin said she would like to hear it.  Miss Bell was already
+listening, and her face wore the fervent expression of an angel
+sculptured by Mino.
+
+Choulette told them it was a rustic and artless work.  The verses were
+not trying to be beautiful.  They were simple, although uneven, for the
+sake of lightness.  Then, in a slow and monotonous voice, he recited the
+canticle.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur Choulette," said Miss Bell, "this canticle goes up to
+heaven, like the hermit in the Campo Santo of Pisa, whom some one saw
+going up the mountain that the goats liked.  I will tell you.  The old
+hermit went up, leaning on the staff of faith, and his step was unequal
+because the crutch, being on one side, gave one of his feet an advantage
+over the other.  That is the reason why your verses are unequal.  I have
+understood it."
+
+The poet accepted this praise, persuaded that he had unwittingly deserved
+it.
+
+"You have faith, Monsieur Choulette," said Therese.  "Of what use is it
+to you if not to write beautiful verses?"
+
+"Faith serves me to commit sin, Madame."
+
+"Oh, we commit sins without that."
+
+Madame Marmet appeared, equipped for the journey, in the tranquil joy of
+returning to her pretty apartment, her little dog Toby, her old friend
+Lagrange, and to see again, after the Etruscans of Fiesole, the skeleton
+warrior who, among the bonbon boxes, looked out of the window.
+
+Miss Bell escorted her friends to the station in her carriage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+"WE ARE ROBBING LIFE"
+
+Dechartre came to the carriage to salute the two travellers.  Separated
+from him, Therese felt what he was to her: he had given to her a new
+taste of life, delicious and so vivid, so real, that she felt it on her
+lips.  She lived under a charm in the dream of seeing him again, and was
+surprised when Madame Marmet, along the journey, said: "I think we are
+passing the frontier," or "Rose-bushes are in bloom by the seaside."
+She was joyful when, after a night at the hotel in Marseilles, she saw
+the gray olive-trees in the stony fields, then the mulberry-trees and the
+distant profile of Mount Pilate, and the Rhone, and Lyons, and then the
+familiar landscapes, the trees raising their summits into bouquets
+clothed in tender green, and the lines of poplars beside the rivers.
+She enjoyed the plenitude of the hours she lived and the astonishment of
+profound joys.  And it was with the smile of a sleeper suddenly awakened
+that, at the station in Paris, in the light of the station, she greeted
+her husband, who was glad to see her.  When she kissed Madame Marmet,
+she told her that she thanked her with all her heart. And truly she was
+grateful to all things, like M. Choulette's St. Francis.
+
+In the coupe, which followed the quays in the luminous dust of the
+setting sun, she listened without impatience to her husband confiding to
+her his successes as an orator, the intentions of his parliamentary
+groups, his projects, his hopes, and the necessity to give two or three
+political dinners.  She closed her eyes in order to think better.  She
+said to herself: "I shall have a letter to-morrow, and shall see him
+again within eight days."  When the coupe passed on the bridge, she
+looked at the water, which seemed to roll flames; at the smoky arches;
+at the rows of trees; at the heads of the chestnut-trees in bloom on the
+Cours-la-Reine; all these familiar aspects seemed to be clothed for her
+in novel magnificence.  It seemed to her that her love had given a new
+color to the universe.  And she asked herself whether the trees and the
+stones recognized her.  She was thinking; "How is it that my silence, my
+eyes, and heaven and earth do not tell my dear secret?"
+
+M. Martin-Belleme, thinking she was a little tired, advised her to rest.
+And at night, closeted in her room, in the silence wherein she heard the
+palpitations of her heart, she wrote to the absent one a letter full of
+these words, which are similar to flowers in their perpetual novelty:
+"I love you.  I am waiting for you.  I am happy.  I feel you are near me.
+There is nobody except you and me in the world.  I see from my window a
+blue star which trembles, and I look at it, thinking that you see it in
+Florence.  I have put on my table the little red lily spoon.  Come!
+Come!"  And she found thus, fresh in her mind, the eternal sensations and
+images.
+
+For a week she lived an inward life, feeling within her the soft warmth
+which remained of the days passed in the Via Alfieri, breathing the
+kisses which she had received, and loving herself for being loved.  She
+took delicate care and displayed attentive taste in new gowns.  It was to
+herself, too, that she was pleasing.  Madly anxious when there was
+nothing for her at the postoffice, trembling and joyful when she received
+through the small window a letter wherein she recognized the large
+handwriting of her beloved, she devoured her reminiscences, her desires,
+and her hopes.  Thus the hours passed quickly.
+
+The morning of the day when he was to arrive seemed to her to be odiously
+long.  She was at the station before the train arrived.  A delay had been
+signalled.  It weighed heavily upon her.  Optimist in her projects, and
+placing by force, like her father, faith on the side of her will, that
+delay which she had not foreseen seemed to her to be treason.  The gray
+light, which the three-quarters of an hour filtered through the window-
+panes of the station, fell on her like the rays of an immense hour-glass
+which measured for her the minutes of happiness lost.  She was lamenting
+her fate, when, in the red light of the sun, she saw the locomotive of
+the express stop, monstrous and docile, on the quay, and, in the crowd of
+travellers coming out of the carriages, Jacques approached her.  He was
+looking at her with that sort of sombre and violent joy which she had
+often observed in him.  He said:
+
+"At last, here you are.  I feared to die before seeing you again.  You do
+not know, I did not know myself, what torture it is to live a week away
+from you.  I have returned to the little pavilion of the Via Alfieri.  In
+the room you know, in front of the old pastel, I have wept for love and
+rage."
+
+She looked at him tenderly.
+
+"And I, do you not think that I called you, that I wanted you, that when
+alone I extended my arms toward you?  I had hidden your letters in the
+chiffonier where my jewels are.  I read them at night: it was delicious,
+but it was imprudent.  Your letters were yourself--too much and not
+enough."
+
+They traversed the court where fiacres rolled away loaded with boxes.
+She asked whether they were to take a carriage.
+
+He made no answer.  He seemed not to hear.  She said:
+
+"I went to see your house; I did not dare go in.  I looked through the
+grille and saw windows hidden in rose-bushes in the rear of a yard,
+behind a tree, and I said: 'It is there !'  I never have been so moved."
+
+He was not listening to her nor looking at her.  He walked quickly with
+her along the paved street, and through a narrow stairway reached a
+deserted street near the station.  There, between wood and coal yards,
+was a hotel with a restaurant on the first floor and tables on the
+sidewalk.  Under the painted sign were white curtains at the windows.
+Dechartre stopped before the small door and pushed Therese into the
+obscure alley.  She asked:
+
+"Where are you leading me?  What is the time?  I must be home at half-
+past seven.  We are mad."
+
+When they left the house, she said:
+
+"Jacques, my darling, we are too happy; we are robbing life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+IN DECHARTRE'S STUDIO
+
+A fiacre brought her, the next day, to a populous street, half sad, half
+gay, with walls of gardens in the intervals of new houses, and stopped at
+the point where the sidewalk passes under the arcade of a mansion of the
+Regency, covered now with dust and oblivion, and fantastically placed
+across the street.  Here and there green branches lent gayety to that
+city corner.  Therese, while ringing at the door, saw in the limited
+perspective of the houses a pulley at a window and a gilt key, the sign
+of a locksmith.  Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to
+her.  Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle.  A servant
+with a military look opened the door.  She found herself in a yard
+covered with sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the
+janitor's box with bird-cages at the windows.  On that side rose, under a
+green trellis, the mansard of the neighboring house.  A sculptor's studio
+backed on it its glass-covered roof, which showed plaster figures asleep
+in the dust.  At the right, the wall that closed the yard bore debris of
+monuments, broken bases of columnettes.  In the rear, the house, not very
+large, showed the six windows of its facade, half hidden by vines and
+rosebushes.
+
+Philippe Dechartre, infatuated with the architecture of the fifteenth
+century in France, had reproduced there very cleverly the characteristics
+of a private house of the time of Louis XII.  That house, begun in the
+middle of the Second Empire, had not been finished.  The builder of so
+many castles died without being able to finish his own house.  It was
+better thus.  Conceived in a manner which had then its distinction and
+its value, but which seems to-day banal and outlandish, having lost
+little by little its large frame of gardens, cramped now between the
+walls of the tall buildings, Philippe Dechartre's little house, by the
+roughness of its stones, by the naive heaviness of its windows, by the
+simplicity of the roof, which the architect's widow had caused to be
+covered with little expense, by all the lucky accidents of the unfinished
+and unpremeditated, corrected the lack of grace of its new and affected
+antiquity and archeologic romanticism, and harmonized with the humbleness
+of a district made ugly by progress of population.
+
+In fine, notwithstanding its appearance of ruin and its green drapery,
+that little house had its charm.  Suddenly and instinctively, Therese
+discovered in it other harmonies.  In the elegant negligence which
+extended from the walls covered with vines to the darkened panes of the
+studio, and even in the bent tree, the bark of which studded with its
+shells the wild grass of the courtyard, she divined the mind of the
+master, nonchalant, not skilful in preserving, living in the long
+solitude of passionate men.  She had in her joy a sort of grief at
+observing this careless state in which her lover left things around him.
+She found in it a sort of grace and nobility, but also a spirit of
+indifference contrary to her own nature, opposite to the interested and
+careful mind of the Montessuys.  At once she thought that, without
+spoiling the pensive softness of that rough corner, she would bring to it
+her well-ordered activity; she would have sand thrown in the alley, and
+in the angle wherein a little sunlight came she would put the gayety of
+flowers.  She looked sympathetically at a statue which had come there
+from some park, a Flora, lying on the earth, eaten by black moss, her two
+arms lying by her sides.  She thought of raising her soon, of making of
+her a centrepiece for a fountain. Dechartre, who for an hour had been
+watching for her coming, joyful, anxious, trembling in his agitated
+happiness, descended the steps.  In the fresh shade of the vestibule,
+wherein she divined confusedly the severe splendor of bronze and marble
+statues, she stopped, troubled by the beatings of her heart, which
+throbbed with all its might in her chest. He pressed her in his arms and
+kissed her.  She heard him, through the tumult of her temples, recalling
+to her the short delights of the day before.  She saw again the lion of
+the Atlas on the carpet, and returned to Jacques his kisses with
+delicious slowness. He led her, by a wooden stairway, into the vast hall
+which had served formerly as a workshop, where he designed and modelled
+his figures, and, above all, read; he liked reading as if it were opium.
+
+Pale-tinted Gothic tapestries, which let one perceive in a marvellous
+forest a lady at the feet of whom a unicorn lay on the grass, extended
+above cabinets to the painted beams of the ceiling. He led her to a large
+and low divan, loaded with cushions covered with sumptuous fragments of
+Spanish and Byzantine cloaks; but she sat in an armchair. "You are here!
+You are here!  The world may come to an end."
+
+She replied "Formerly I thought of the end of the world, but I was not
+afraid of it.  Monsieur Lagrange had promised it to me, and I was waiting
+for it.  When I did not know you, I felt so lonely." She looked at the
+tables loaded with vases and statuettes, the tapestries, the confused and
+splendid mass of weapons, the animals, the marbles, the paintings, the
+ancient books. "You have beautiful things."
+
+"Most of them come from my father, who lived in the golden age of
+collectors.  These histories of the unicorn, the complete series of which
+is at Cluny, were found by my father in 1851 in an inn."
+
+But, curious and disappointed, she said: "I see nothing that you have
+done; not a statue, not one of those wax figures which are prized so
+highly in England, not a figurine nor a plaque nor a medal."
+
+"If you think I could find any pleasure in living among my works!  I know
+my figures too well--they weary me.  Whatever is without secret lacks
+charm."  She looked at him with affected spite.
+
+"You had not told me that one had lost all charm when one had no more
+secrets."
+
+He put his arm around her waist.
+
+"Ah!  The things that live are only too mysterious; and you remain for
+me, my beloved, an enigma, the unknown sense of which contains the light
+of life.  Do not fear to give yourself to me.  I shall desire you always,
+but I never shall know you.  Does one ever possess what one loves?  Are
+kisses, caresses, anything else than the effort of a delightful despair?
+When I embrace you, I am still searching for you, and I never have you;
+since I want you always, since in you I expect the impossible and the
+infinite.  What you are, the devil knows if I shall ever know!  Because I
+have modelled a few bad figures I am not a sculptor; I am rather a sort
+of poet and philosopher who seeks for subjects of anxiety and torment in
+nature.  The sentiment of form is not sufficient for me.  My colleagues
+laugh at me because I have not their simplicity.  They are right.  And
+that brute Choulette is right too, when he says we ought to live without
+thinking and without desiring.  Our friend the cobbler of Santa Maria
+Novella, who knows nothing of what might make him unjust and unfortunate,
+is a master of the art of living.  I ought to love you naively, without
+that sort of metaphysics which is passional and makes me absurd and
+wicked.  There is nothing good except to ignore and to forget.  Come,
+come, I have thought of you too cruelly in the tortures of your absence;
+come, my beloved!  I must forget you with you.  It is with you only that
+I can forget you and lose myself."
+
+He took her in his arms and, lifting her veil, kissed her on the lips.
+
+A little frightened in that vast, unknown hall, embarrassed by the look
+of strange things, she drew the black tulle to her chin.
+
+"Here!  You can not think of it."
+
+He said they were alone.
+
+"Alone?  And the man with terrible moustaches who opened the door?"
+
+He smiled:
+
+"That is Fusellier, my father's former servant.  He and his wife take
+charge of the house.  Do not be afraid.  They remain in their box.  You
+shall see Madame Fusellier; she is inclined to familiarity.  I warn you."
+
+"My friend, why has Monsieur Fusellier, a janitor, moustaches like a
+Tartar?"
+
+"My dear, nature gave them to him.  I am not sorry that he has the air of
+a sergeant-major and gives me the illusion of being a country neighbor."
+
+Seated on the corner of the divan, he drew her to his knees and gave to
+her kisses which she returned.
+
+She rose quickly.
+
+"Show me the other rooms.  I am curious.  I wish to see everything."
+
+He escorted her to the second story.  Aquarelles by Philippe Dechartre
+covered the walls of the corridor.  He opened the door and made her enter
+a room furnished with white mahogany:
+
+It was his mother's room.  He kept it intact in its past.  Uninhabited
+for nine years, the, room had not the air of being resigned to its
+solitude.  The mirror waited for the old lady's glance, and on the onyx
+clock a pensive Sappho was lonely because she did not hear the noise of
+the pendulum.
+
+There were two portraits on the walls.  One by Ricard represented
+Philippe Dechartre, very pale, with rumpled hair, and eyes lost in a
+romantic dream.  The other showed a middle-aged woman, almost beautiful
+in her ardent slightness.  It was Madame Philippe Dechartre.
+
+"My poor mother's room is like me," said Jacques; "it remembers."
+
+"You resemble your mother," said Therese; "you have her eyes.  Paul Vence
+told me she adored you."
+
+"Yes," he replied, smilingly.  "My mother was excellent, intelligent,
+exquisite, marvellously absurd.  Her madness was maternal love.  She did
+not give me a moment of rest.  She tormented herself and tormented me."
+
+Therese looked at a bronze figure by Carpeaux, placed on the chiffonier.
+
+"You recognize," said Dechartre, "the Prince Imperial by his ears, which
+are like the wings of a zephyr, and which enliven his cold visage.  This
+bronze is a gift of Napoleon III.  My parents went to Compiegne.  My
+father, while the court was at Fontainebleau, made the plan of the
+castle, and designed the gallery.  In the morning the Emperor would come,
+in his frock-coat, and smoking his meerschaum pipe, to sit near him like
+a penguin on a rock.  At that time I went to day-school.  I listened to
+his stories at table, and I have not forgotten them.  The Emperor stayed
+there, peaceful and quiet, interrupting his long silence with few words
+smothered under his big moustache; then he roused himself a little and
+explained his ideas of machinery.  He was an inventor.  He would draw a
+pencil from his pocket and make drawings on my father's designs.  He
+spoiled in that way two or three studies a week.  He liked my father a
+great deal, and promised works and honors to him which never came.  The
+Emperor was kind, but he had no influence, as mamma said.  At that time I
+was a little boy.  Since then a vague sympathy has remained in me for
+that man, who was lacking in genius, but whose mind was affectionate and
+beautiful, and who carried through great adventures a simple courage and
+a gentle fatalism.  Then he is sympathetic to me because he has been
+combated and insulted by people who were eager to take his place, and who
+had not, as he had, in the depths of their souls, a love for the people.
+We have seen them in power since then.  Heavens, how ugly they are!
+Senator Loyer, for instance, who at your house, in the smoking-room,
+filled his pockets with cigars, and invited me to do likewise.  That
+Loyer is a bad man, harsh to the unfortunate, to the weak, and to the
+humble.  And Garain, don't you think his mind is disgusting?  Do you
+remember the first time I dined at your house and we talked of Napoleon?
+Your hair, twisted above your neck, and shot through by a diamond arrow,
+was adorable.  Paul Vence said subtle things.  Garain did not understand.
+You asked for my opinion."
+
+"It was to make you shine.  I was already conceited for you."
+
+"Oh, I never could say a single phrase before people who are so serious.
+Yet I had a great desire to say that Napoleon III pleased me more than
+Napoleon I; that I thought him more touching; but perhaps that idea would
+have produced a bad effect.  But I am not so destitute of talent as to
+care about politics."
+
+He looked around the room, and at the furniture with familiar tenderness.
+He opened a drawer:
+
+"Here are mamma's eye-glasses.  How she searched for these eye-glasses!
+Now I will show you my room.  If it is not in order you must excuse
+Madame Fusellier, who is trained to respect my disorder."
+
+The curtains at the windows were down.  He did not lift them.  After an
+hour she drew back the red satin draperies; rays of light dazzled her
+eyes and fell on her floating hair.  She looked for a mirror and found
+only a looking-glass of Venice, dull in its wide ebony border.  Rising on
+the tips of her toes to see herself in it, she said:
+
+"Is that sombre and far-away spectre I?  The women who have looked at
+themselves in this glass can not have complimented you on it."
+
+As she was taking pins from the table she noticed a little bronze figure
+which she had not yet seen.  It was an old Italian work of Flemish taste:
+a nude woman, with short legs and heavy stomach, who apparently ran with
+an arm extended.  She thought the figure had a droll air.  She asked what
+she was doing.
+
+"She is doing what Madame Mundanity does on the portal of the cathedral
+at Basle."
+
+But Therese, who had been at Basle, did not know Madame Mundanity.  She
+looked at the figure again, did not understand, and asked:
+
+"Is it something very bad?  How can a thing shown on the portal of a
+church be so difficult to tell here?"
+
+Suddenly an anxiety came to her:
+
+"What will Monsieur and Madame Fusellier think of me?"
+
+Then, discovering on the wall a medallion wherein Dechartre had modelled
+the profile of a girl, amusing and vicious:
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"That is Clara, a newspaper girl.  She brought the Figaro to me every
+morning.  She had dimples in her cheeks, nests for kisses.  One day I
+said to her: 'I will make your portrait.'  She came, one summer morning,
+with earrings and rings which she had bought at the Neuilly fair.  I
+never saw her again.  I do not know what has become of her.  She was too
+instinctive to become a fashionable demi-mondaine.  Shall I take it out?"
+
+"No; it looks very well in that corner.  I am not jealous of Clara."
+
+It was time to return home, and she could not decide to go.  She put her
+arms around her lover's neck.
+
+"Oh, I love you!  And then, you have been to-day good-natured and gay.
+Gayety becomes you so well.  I should like to make you gay always.  I
+need joy almost as much as love; and who will give me joy if you do not?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+THE PRIMROSE PATH
+
+After her return to Paris, for six weeks Therese lived in the ardent half
+sleep of happiness, and prolonged delightfully her thoughtless dream.
+She went to see Jacques every day in the little house shaded by a tree;
+and when they had at last parted at night, she took away with her adored
+reminiscences.  They had the same tastes; they yielded to the same
+fantasies.  The same capricious thoughts carried them away.  They found
+pleasure in running to the suburbs that border the city, the streets
+where the wine-shops are shaded by acacia, the stony roads where the
+grass grows at the foot of walls, the little woods and the fields over
+which extended the blue sky striped by the smoke of manufactories.  She
+was happy to feel him near her in this region where she did not know
+herself, and where she gave to herself the illusion of being lost with
+him.
+
+One day they had taken the boat that she had seen pass so often under her
+windows.  She was not afraid of being recognized.  Her danger was not
+great, and, since she was in love, she had lost prudence.  They saw
+shores which little by little grew gay, escaping the dusty aridity of the
+suburbs; they went by islands with bouquets of trees shading taverns,
+and innumerable boats tied under willows.  They debarked at Bas-Meudon.
+As she said she was warm and thirsty, he made her enter a wine-shop.
+It was a building with wooden galleries, which solitude made to appear
+larger, and which slept in rustic peace, waiting for Sunday to fill it
+with the laughter of girls, the cries of boatmen, the odor of fried fish,
+and the smoke of stews.
+
+They went up the creaking stairway, shaped like a ladder, and in a first-
+story room a maid servant brought wine and biscuits to them.  On the
+mantelpiece, at one of the corners of the room, was an oval mirror in a
+flower-covered frame.  Through the open window one saw the Seine, its
+green shores, and the hills in the distance bathed with warm air.  The
+trembling peace of a summer evening filled the sky, the earth, and the
+water.
+
+Therese looked at the running river.  The boat passed on the water, and
+when the wake which it left reached the shore it seemed as if the house
+rocked like a vessel.
+
+"I like the water," said Therese.  "How happy I am!"
+
+Their lips met.
+
+Lost in the enchanted despair of love, time was not marked for them
+except by the cool plash of the water, which at intervals broke under the
+half-open window.  To the caressing praise of her lover she replied:
+
+"It is true I was made for love.  I love myself because you love me."
+
+Certainly, he loved her; and it was not possible for him to explain to
+himself why he loved her with ardent piety, with a sort of sacred fury.
+It was not because of her beauty, although it was rare and infinitely
+precious.  She had exquisite lines, but lines follow movement, and escape
+incessantly; they are lost and found again; they cause aesthetic joys and
+despair.  A beautiful line is the lightning which deliciously wounds the
+eyes.  One admires and one is surprised.  What makes one love is a soft
+and terrible force, more powerful than beauty.  One finds one woman among
+a thousand whom one wants always.  Therese was that woman whom one can
+not leave or betray.
+
+She exclaimed, joyfully:
+
+"I never shall be forsaken?"
+
+She asked why he did not make her bust, since he thought her beautiful.
+
+"Why?  Because I am an ordinary sculptor, and I know it; which is not the
+faculty of an ordinary mind.  But if you wish to think that I am a great
+artist, I will give you other reasons.  To create a figure that will
+live, one must take the model like common material from which one will
+extract the beauty, press it, crush it, and obtain its essence.  There is
+nothing in you that is not precious to me.  If I made your bust I should
+be servilely attached to these things which are everything to me because
+they are something of you.  I should stubbornly attach myself to the
+details, and should not succeed in composing a finished figure."
+
+She looked at him astonished.
+
+He continued:
+
+"From memory I might.  I tried a pencil sketch."  As she wished to see
+it, he showed it to her.  It was on an album leaf, a very simple sketch.
+She did not recognize herself in it, and thought he had represented her
+with a kind of soul that she did not have.
+
+"Ah, is that the way in which you see me?  Is that the way in which you
+love me?"
+
+He closed the album.
+
+"No; this is only a note.  But I think the note is just.  It is probable
+you do not see yourself exactly as I see you.  Every human creature is a
+different being for every one that looks at it."
+
+He added, with a sort of gayety:
+
+"In that sense one may say one woman never belonged to two men.  That is
+one of Paul Vence's ideas."
+
+"I think it is true," said Therese.
+
+It was seven o'clock.  She said she must go.  Every day she returned home
+later.  Her husband had noticed it.  He had said: "We are the last to
+arrive at all the dinners; there is a fatality about it!"  But, detained
+every day in the Chamber of Deputies, where the budget was being
+discussed, and absorbed by the work of a subcommittee of which he was the
+chairman, state reasons excused Therese's lack of punctuality.  She
+recalled smilingly a night when she had arrived at Madame Garain's at
+half-past eight.  She had feared to cause a scandal.  But it was a day of
+great affairs.  Her husband came from the Chamber at nine o'clock only,
+with Garain.  They dined in morning dress.  They had saved the Ministry.
+
+Then she fell into a dream.
+
+"When the Chamber shall be adjourned, my friend, I shall not have a
+pretext to remain in Paris.  My father does not understand my devotion to
+my husband which makes me stay in Paris.  In a week I shall have to go to
+Dinard.  What will become of me without you?"
+
+She clasped her hands and looked at him with a sadness infinitely tender.
+But he, more sombre, said:
+
+"It is I, Therese, it is I who must ask anxiously, What will become of me
+without you?  When you leave me alone I am assailed by painful thoughts;
+black ideas come and sit in a circle around me."
+
+She asked him what those ideas were.
+
+He replied:
+
+"My beloved, I have already told you: I have to forget you with you.
+When you are gone, your memory will torment me.  I have to pay for the
+happiness you give me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+NEWS OF LE MENIL
+
+The blue sea, studded with pink shoals, threw its silvery fringe softly
+on the fine sand of the beach, along the amphitheatre terminated by two
+golden horns.  The beauty of the day threw a ray of sunlight on the tomb
+of Chateaubriand.  In a room where a balcony looked out upon the beach,
+the ocean, the islands, and the promontories, Therese was reading the
+letters which she had found in the morning at the St. Malo post-office,
+and which she had not opened in the boat, loaded with passengers.  At
+once, after breakfast, she had closeted herself in her room, and there,
+her letters unfolded on her knees, she relished hastily her furtive joy.
+She was to drive at two o'clock on the mall with her father, her husband,
+the Princess Seniavine; Madame Berthier-d'Eyzelles, the wife of the
+Deputy, and Madame Raymond, the wife of the Academician.  She had two
+letters that day. The first one she read exhaled a tender aroma of love.
+Jacques had never displayed more simplicity, more happiness, and more
+charm.
+
+Since he had been in love with her, he said, he had walked so lightly and
+was supported by such joy that his feet did not touch the earth.  He had
+only one fear, which was that he might be dreaming, and might awake
+unknown to her.  Doubtless he was only dreaming.  And what a dream!  He
+was like one intoxicated and singing.  He had not his reason, happily.
+Absent, he saw her continually.  "Yes, I see you near me; I see your
+lashes shading eyes the gray of which is more delicious than all the blue
+of the sky and the flowers; your lips, which have the taste of a
+marvellous fruit; your cheeks, where laughter puts two adorable dimples;
+I see you beautiful and desired, but fleeing and gliding away; and when I
+open my arms, you have gone; and I see you afar on the long, long beach,
+not taller than a fairy, in your pink gown, under your parasol.  Oh, so
+small!--small as you were one day when I saw you from the height of the
+Campanile in the square at Florence.  And I say to myself, as I said that
+day: 'A bit of grass would suffice to hide her from me, yet she is for me
+the infinite of joy and of pain.'"
+
+He complained of the torments of absence.  And he mingled with his
+complaints the smiles of fortunate love.  He threatened jokingly to
+surprise her at Dinard.  "Do not be afraid.  They will not recognize me.
+I shall be disguised as a vender of plaster images.  It will not be a
+lie.  Dressed in gray tunic and trousers, my beard and face covered with
+white dust, I shall ring the bell of the Montessuy villa.  You may
+recognize me, Therese, by the statuettes on the plank placed on my head.
+They will all be cupids.  There will be faithful Love, jealous Love,
+tender Love, vivid Love; there will be many vivid Loves.  And I shall
+shout in the rude and sonorous language of the artisans of Pisa or of
+Florence: 'Tutti gli Amori per la Signora Teersinal!"
+
+The last page of this letter was tender and grave.  There were pious
+effusions in it which reminded Therese of the prayer-books she read when
+a child.  "I love you, and I love everything in you: the earth that
+carries you, on which you weigh so lightly, and which you embellish; the
+light that allows me to see you; the air you breathe.  I like the bent
+tree of my yard because you have seen it.  I have walked tonight on the
+avenue where I met you one winter night.  I have culled a branch of the
+boxwood at which you looked.  In this city, where you are not, I see only
+you."
+
+He said at the end of his letter that he was to dine out.  In the absence
+of Madame Fusellier, who had gone to the country, he should go to a wine-
+shop of the Rue Royale where he was known.  And there, in the indistinct
+crowd, he should be alone with her.
+
+Therese, made languid by the softness of invisible caresses, closed her
+eyes and threw back her head on the armchair.  When she heard the noise
+of the carriage coming near the house, she opened the second letter.  As
+soon as she saw the altered handwriting of it, the lines precipitate and
+uneven, the distracted look of the address, she was troubled.
+
+Its obscure beginning indicated sudden anguish and black suspicion:
+"Therese, Therese, why did you give yourself to me if you were not giving
+yourself to me wholly?  How does it serve me that you have deceived me,
+now that I know what I did not wish to know?"
+
+She stopped; a veil came over her eyes.  She thought:
+
+"We were so happy a moment ago.  What has happened?  And I was so pleased
+at his joy, when it had already gone; it would be better not to write,
+since letters show only vanished sentiments and effaced ideas."
+
+She read further.  And seeing that he was full of jealousy, she felt
+discouraged.
+
+"If I have not proved to him that I love him with all my strength, that I
+love him with all there is in me, how am I ever to persuade him of it?"
+
+And she was impatient to discover the cause of his folly.  Jacques told
+it.  While taking breakfast in the Rue Royale he had met a former
+companion who had just returned from the seaside.  They had talked
+together; chance made that man speak of the Countess Martin, whom he
+knew.  And at once, interrupting the narration, Jacques exclaimed:
+"Therese, Therese, why did you lie to me, since I was sure to learn some
+day that of which I alone was ignorant?  But the error is mine more than
+yours.  The letter which you put into the San Michele post-box, your
+meeting at the Florence station, would have enlightened me if I had not
+obstinately retained my illusions and disdained evidence.
+
+"I did not know; I wished to remain ignorant.  I did not ask you
+anything, from fear that you might not be able to continue to lie;
+I was prudent; and it has happened that an idiot suddenly, brutally, at a
+restaurant table, has opened my eyes and forced me to know.  Oh, now that
+I know, now that I can not doubt, it seems to me that to doubt would be
+delicious!  He gave the name--the name which I heard at Fiesole from Miss
+Bell, and he added: 'Everybody knows about that.'
+
+"So you loved him.  You love him still!  He is near you, doubtless.
+He goes every year to the Dinard races.  I have been told so.  I see him.
+I see everything.  If you knew the images that worry me, you would say,
+'He is mad,' and you would take pity on me.  Oh, how I should like to
+forget you and everything!  But I can not.  You know very well I can not
+forget you except with you.  I see you incessantly with him.  It is
+torture.  I thought I was unfortunate that night on the banks of the
+Arno.  But I did not know then what it is to suffer.  To-day I know."
+
+As she finished reading that letter, Therese thought: "A word thrown
+haphazard has placed him in that condition, a word has made him
+despairing and mad."  She tried to think who might be the wretched fellow
+who could have talked in that way.  She suspected two or three young men
+whom Le Menil had introduced to her once, warning her not to trust them.
+And with one of the white and cold fits of anger she had inherited from
+her father she said to herself: "I must know who he is."  In the
+meanwhile what was she to do?  Her lover in despair, mad, ill, she could
+not run to him, embrace him, and throw herself on him with such an
+abandonment that he would feel how entirely she was his, and be forced to
+believe in her.  Should she write?  How much better it would be to go to
+him, to fall upon his heart and say to him: "Dare to believe I am not
+yours only!"  But she could only write.  She had hardly begun her letter
+when she heard voices and laughter in the garden.  Therese went down,
+tranquil and smiling; her large straw hat threw on her face a transparent
+shadow wherein her gray eyes shone.
+
+"How beautiful she is!"  exclaimed Princess Seniavine.  "What a pity it
+is we never see her!  In the morning she is promenading in the alleys of
+Saint Malo, in the afternoon she is closeted in her room.  She runs away
+from us."
+
+The coach turned around the large circle of the beach at the foot of the
+villas and gardens on the hillside.  And they saw at the left the
+ramparts and the steeple of St. Malo rise from the blue sea.  Then the
+coach went into a road bordered by hedges, along which walked Dinard
+women, erect under their wide headdresses.
+
+"Unfortunately," said Madame Raymond, seated on the box by Montessuy's
+side, "old costumes are dying out.  The fault is with the railways."
+
+"It is true," said Montessuy, "that if it were not for the railways the
+peasants would still wear their picturesque costumes of other times.  But
+we should not see them."
+
+"What does it matter?"  replied Madame Raymond.  "We could imagine them."
+
+"But," asked the Princess Seniavine, "do you ever see interesting things?
+I never do."
+
+Madame Raymond, who had taken from her husband's books a vague tint of
+philosophy, declared that things were nothing, and that the idea was
+everything.
+
+Without looking at Madame Berthier-d'Eyzelles, seated at her right, the
+Countess Martin murmured:
+
+"Oh, yes, people see only their ideas; they follow only their ideas.
+They go along, blind and deaf.  One can not stop them."
+
+"But, my dear," said Count Martin, placed in front of her, by the
+Princess's side, "without leading ideas one would go haphazard.  Have you
+read, Montessuy, the speech delivered by Loyer at the unveiling of the
+Cadet-Gassicourt statue?  The beginning is remarkable.  Loyer is not
+lacking in political sense."
+
+The carriage, having traversed the fields bordered with willows, went up
+a hill and advanced on a vast, wooded plateau.  For a long time it
+skirted the walls of the park.
+
+"Is it the Guerric?"  asked the Princess Seniavine.
+
+Suddenly, between two stone pillars surmounted by lions, appeared the
+closed gate.  At the end of a long alley stood the gray stones of a
+castle.
+
+"Yes," said Montessuy, "it is the Guerric."
+
+And, addressing Therese:
+
+"You knew the Marquis de Re?  At sixty-five he had retained his strength
+and his youth.  He set the fashion and was loved.  Young men copied his
+frockcoat, his monocle, his gestures, his exquisite insolence, his
+amusing fads.  Suddenly he abandoned society, closed his house, sold his
+stable, ceased to show himself.  Do you remember, Therese, his sudden
+disappearance?  You had been married a short time.  He called on you
+often.  One fine day people learned that he had quitted Paris.  This is
+the place where he had come in winter.  People tried to find a reason for
+his sudden retreat; some thought he had run away under the influence of
+sorrow or humiliation, or from fear that the world might see him grow
+old.  He was afraid of old age more than of anything else.  For seven
+years he has lived in retirement from society; he has not gone out of the
+castle once.  He receives at the Guerric two or three old men who were
+his companions in youth.  This gate is opened for them only.  Since his
+retirement no one has seen him; no one ever will see him.  He shows the
+same care to conceal himself that he had formerly to show himself.  He
+has not suffered from his decline.  He exists in a sort of living death."
+
+And Therese, recalling the amiable old man who had wished to finish
+gloriously with her his life of gallantry, turned her head and looked at
+the Guerric lifting its four towers above the gray summits of oaks.
+
+On their return she said she had a headache and that she would not take
+dinner.  She locked herself in her room and drew from her jewel casket
+the lamentable letter.  She read over the last page.
+
+"The thought that you belong to another burns me.  And then, I did not
+wish that man to be the one."
+
+It was a fixed idea.  He had written three times on the same leaf these
+words: "I did not wish that man to be the one."
+
+She, too, had only one idea: not to lose him.  Not to lose him, she would
+have said anything, she would have done anything.  She went to her table
+and wrote, under the spur of a tender, and plaintive violence, a letter
+wherein she repeated like a groan: "I love you, I love you!  I never have
+loved any one but you.  You are alone, alone--do you hear?--in my mind,
+in me.  Do not think of what that wretched man said.  Listen to me!
+I never loved any one, I swear, any one, before you."
+
+As she was writing, the soft sigh of the sea accompanied her own sigh.
+She wished to say, she believed she was saying, real things; and all that
+she was saying was true of the truth of her love.  She heard the heavy
+step of her father on the stairway.  She hid her letter and opened the
+door.  Montessuy asked her whether she felt better.
+
+"I came," he said, "to say good-night to you, and to ask you something.
+It is probable that I shall meet Le Menil at the races.  He goes there
+every year.  If I meet him, darling, would you have any objection to my
+inviting him to come here for a few days?  Your husband thinks he would
+be agreeable company for you.  We might give him the blue room."
+
+"As you wish.  But I should prefer that you keep the blue room for Paul
+Vence, who wishes to come.  It is possible, too, that Choulette may come
+without warning.  It is his habit.  We shall see him some morning ringing
+like a beggar at the gate.  You know my husband is mistaken when he
+thinks Le Menil pleases me.  And then I must go to Paris next week for
+two or three days."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+JEALOUSY
+
+Twenty-four hours after writing her letter, Therese went from Dinard to
+the little house in the Ternes.  It had not been difficult for her to
+find a pretext to go to Paris.  She had made the trip with her husband,
+who wanted to see his electors whom the Socialists were working over.
+She surprised Jacques in the morning, at the studio, while he was
+sketching a tall figure of Florence weeping on the shore of the Arno.
+
+The model, seated on a very high stool, kept her pose.  She was a long,
+dark girl.  The harsh light which fell from the skylight gave precision
+to the pure lines of her hip and thighs, accentuated her harsh visage,
+her dark neck, her marble chest, the lines of her knees and feet, the
+toes of which were set one over the other.  Therese looked at her
+curiously, divining her exquisite form under the miseries of her flesh,
+poorly fed and badly cared for.
+
+Dechartre came toward Therese with an air of painful tenderness which
+moved her.  Then, placing his clay and the instrument near the easel, and
+covering the figure with a wet cloth, he said to the model:
+
+"That is enough for to-day."
+
+She rose, picked up awkwardly her clothing, a handful of dark wool and
+soiled linen, and went to dress behind the screen.
+
+Meanwhile the sculptor, having dipped in the water of a green bowl his
+hands, which the tenacious clay made white, went out of the studio with
+Therese.
+
+They passed under the tree which studded the sand of the courtyard with
+the shells of its flayed bark.  She said:
+
+"You have no more faith, have you?"
+
+He led her to his room.
+
+The letter written from Dinard had already softened his painful
+impressions.  She had come at the moment when, tired of suffering,
+he felt the need of calm and of tenderness.  A few lines of handwriting
+had appeased his mind, fed on images, less susceptible to things than to
+the signs of things; but he felt a pain in his heart.
+
+In the room where everything spoke of her, where the furniture, the
+curtains, and the carpets told of their love, she murmured soft words:
+
+"You could believe--do you not know what you are?--it was folly!  How can
+a woman who has known you care for another after you?"
+
+"But before?"
+
+"Before, I was waiting for you."
+
+"And he did not attend the races at Dinard?"
+
+She did not think he had, and it was very certain she did not attend them
+herself.  Horses and horsey men bored her.
+
+"Jacques, fear no one, since you are not comparable to any one."
+
+He knew, on the contrary, how insignificant he was and how insignificant
+every one is in this world where beings, agitated like grains in a van,
+are mixed and separated by a shake of the rustic or of the god.  This
+idea of the agricultural or mystical van represented measure and order
+too well to be exactly applied to life.  It seemed to him that men were
+grains in a coffee-mill.  He had had a vivid sensation of this the day
+before, when he saw Madame Fusellier grinding coffee in her mill.
+
+Therese said to him:
+
+"Why are you not conceited?"
+
+She added few words, but she spoke with her eyes, her arms, the breath
+that made her bosom rise.
+
+In the happy surprise of seeing and hearing her, he permitted himself to
+be convinced.
+
+She asked who had said so odious a thing.
+
+He had no reason to conceal his name from her.  It was Daniel Salomon.
+
+She was not surprised.  Daniel Salomon, who passed for not having been
+the lover of any woman, wished at least to be in the confidence of all
+and know their secrets.  She guessed the reason why he had talked.
+
+"Jacques, do not be cross at what I say to you.  You are not skilful in
+concealing your sentiments.  He suspected you were in love with me, and
+he wished to be sure of it.  I am persuaded that now he has no doubt of
+our relations.  But that is indifferent to me.  On the contrary, if you
+knew better how to dissimulate, I should be less happy.  I should think
+you did not love me enough."
+
+For fear of disquieting him, she turned to other thoughts:
+
+"I have not told you how much I like your sketch.  It is Florence on the
+Arno.  Then it is we?"
+
+"Yes, I have placed in that figure the emotion of my love.  It is sad,
+and I wish it were beautiful.  You see, Therese, beauty is painful.  That
+is why, since life is beautiful, I suffer."
+
+He took out of his flannel coat his cigarette-holder, but she told him to
+dress.  She would take him to breakfast with her.  They would not quit
+each other that day.  It would be delightful.
+
+She looked at him with childish joy.  Then she became sad, thinking she
+would have to return to Dinard at the end of the week, later go to
+Joinville, and that during that time they would be separated.
+
+At Joinville, at her father's, she would cause him to be invited for a
+few days.  But they would not be free and alone there, as they were in
+Paris.
+
+"It is true," he said, "that Paris is good to us in its confused
+immensity."
+
+And he added:
+
+"Even in your absence I can not quit Paris.  It would be terrible for me
+to live in countries that do not know you.  A sky, mountains, trees,
+fountains, statues which do not know how to talk of you would have
+nothing to say to me."
+
+While he was dressing she turned the leaves of a book which she had found
+on the table.  It was The Arabian Nights.  Romantic engravings displayed
+here and there in the text grand viziers, sultanas, black tunics,
+bazaars, and caravans.
+
+She asked:
+
+"The Arabian Nights-does that amuse you?"
+
+"A great deal," he replied, tying his cravat.  "I believe as much as I
+wish in these Arabian princes whose legs become black marble, and in
+these women of the harem who wander at night in cemeteries.  These tales
+give me pleasant dreams which make me forget life.  Last night I went to
+bed in sadness and read the history of the Three Calendars."
+
+She said, with a little bitterness:
+
+"You are trying to forget.  I would not consent for anything in the world
+to lose the memory of a pain which came to me from you."
+
+They went down together to the street.  She was to take a carriage a
+little farther on and precede him at her house by a few minutes.
+
+"My husband expects you to breakfast."
+
+They talked, on the way, of insignificant things, which their love made
+great and charming.  They arranged their afternoon in advance in order to
+put into it the infinity of profound joy and of ingenious pleasure.  She
+consulted him about her gowns.  She could not decide to leave him, happy
+to walk with him in the streets, which the sun and the gayety of noon
+filled.  When they reached the Avenue des Ternes they saw before them, on
+the avenue, shops displaying side by side a magnificent abundance of
+food.  There were chains of chickens at the caterer's, and at the
+fruiterer's boxes of apricots and peaches, baskets of grapes, piles of
+pears.  Wagons filled with fruits and flowers bordered the sidewalk.
+Under the awning of a restaurant men and women were taking breakfast.
+Therese recognized among them, alone, at a small table against a laurel-
+tree in a box, Choulette lighting his pipe.
+
+Having seen her, he threw superbly a five-franc piece on the table, rose,
+and bowed.  He was grave; his long frock-coat gave him an air of decency
+and austerity.
+
+He said he should have liked to call on Madame Martin at Dinard, but he
+had been detained in the Vendee by the Marquise de Rieu.  However, he had
+issued a new edition of the Jardin Clos, augmented by the Verger de
+Sainte-Claire.  He had moved souls which were thought to be insensible,
+and had made springs come out of rocks.
+
+"So," he said, "I was, in a fashion, a Moses."
+
+He fumbled in his pocket and drew from a book a letter, worn and spotted.
+
+"This is what Madame Raymond, the Academician's wife, writes me.
+I publish what she says, because it is creditable to her."
+
+And, unfolding the thin leaves, he read:
+
+"I have made your book known to my husband, who exclaimed: 'It is pure
+spiritualism.  Here is a closed garden, which on the side of the lilies
+and white roses has, I imagine, a small gate opening on the road to the
+Academie.'"
+
+Choulette relished these phrases, mingled in his mouth with the perfume
+of whiskey, and replaced carefully the letter in its book.
+
+Madame Martin congratulated the poet on being Madame Raymond's candidate.
+
+"You should be mine, Monsieur Choulette, if I were interested in Academic
+elections.  But does the Institute excite your envy?"
+
+He kept for a few moments a solemn silence, then:
+
+"I am going now, Madame, to confer with divers notable persons of the
+political and religious worlds who reside at Neuilly.  The Marquise de
+Rieu wishes me to be a candidate, in her country, for a senatorial seat
+which has become vacant by the death of an old man, who was, they say, a
+general during his illusory life.  I shall consult with priests, women
+and children--oh, eternal wisdom!--of the Bineau Boulevard.  The
+constituency whose suffrages I shall attempt to obtain inhabits an
+undulated and wooded land wherein willows frame the fields.  And it is
+not a rare thing to find in the hollow of one of these old willows the
+skeleton of a Chouan pressing his gun against his breast and holding his
+beads in his fleshless fingers.  I shall have my programme posted on the
+bark of oaks.  I shall say 'Peace to presbyteries!  Let the day come when
+bishops, holding in their hands the wooden crook, shall make themselves
+similar to the poorest servant of the poorest parish!  It was the bishops
+who crucified Jesus Christ.  Their names were Anne and Caiph.  And they
+still retain these names before the Son of God.  While they were nailing
+Him to the cross, I was the good thief hanged by His side.'"
+
+He lifted his stick and pointed toward Neuilly:
+
+"Dechartre, my friend, do you not think the Bineau Boulevard is the dusty
+one over there, at the right?"
+
+"Farewell, Monsieur Choulette," said Therese.  "Remember me when you are
+a senator."
+
+"Madame, I do not forget you in any of my prayers, morning and evening.
+And I say to God: 'Since, in your anger, you gave to her riches and
+beauty, regard her, Lord, with kindness, and treat her in accordance with
+your sovereign mercy."
+
+And he went erect, and dragging his leg, along the populous avenue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+A LETTER FROM ROBERT
+
+Enveloped in a mantle of pink broad cloth, Therese went down the steps
+with Dechartre.  He had come in the morning to Joinville.  She had made
+him join the circle of her intimate friends, before the hunting-party to
+which she feared Le Menil had been invited, as was the custom.  The light
+air of September agitated the curls of her hair, and the sun made golden
+darts shine in the profound gray of her eyes.  Behind them, the facade of
+the palace displayed above the three arcades of the first story, in the
+intervals of the windows, on long tables, busts of Roman emperors.  The
+house was placed between two tall pavilions which their great slate roofs
+made higher, over pillars of the Ionic order.  This style betrayed the
+art of the architect Leveau, who had constructed, in 1650, the castle of
+Joinville-sur-Oise for that rich Mareuilles, creature of Mazarin, and
+fortunate accomplice of Fouquet.
+
+Therese and Jacques saw before them the flower-beds designed by Le Notre,
+the green carpet, the fountain; then the grotto with its five rustic
+arcades crowned by the tall trees on which autumn had already begun to
+spread its golden mantle.
+
+"This green geometry is beautiful," said Dechartre.
+
+"Yes," said Therese.  "But I think of the tree bent in the small
+courtyard where grass grows among the stones.  We shall build a beautiful
+fountain in it, shall we not, and put flowers in it?"
+
+Leaning against one of the stone lions with almost human faces, that
+guarded the steps, she turned her head toward the castle, and, looking at
+one of the windows, said:
+
+"There is your room; I went into it last night.  On the same floor, on
+the other side, at the other end, is my father's office.  A white wooden
+table, a mahogany portfolio, a decanter on the mantelpiece: his office
+when he was a young man.  Our entire fortune came from that place."
+
+Through the sand-covered paths between the flowerbeds they walked to the
+boxwood hedge which bordered the park on the southern side.  They passed
+before the orange-grove, the monumental door of which was surmounted by
+the Lorraine cross of Mareuilles, and then passed under the linden-trees
+which formed an alley on the lawn.  Statues of nymphs shivered in the
+damp shade studded with pale lights.  A pigeon, posed on the shoulder of
+one of the white women, fled.  From time to time a breath of wind
+detached a dried leaf which fell, a shell of red gold, where remained a
+drop of rain.  Therese pointed to the nymph and said:
+
+"She saw me when I was a girl and wishing to die.  I suffered from dreams
+and from fright.  I was waiting for you.  But you were so far away!"
+
+The linden alley stopped near the large basin, in the centre of which was
+a group of tritons blowing in their shells to form, when the waters
+played, a liquid diadem with flowers of foam.
+
+"It is the Joinville crown," she said.
+
+She pointed to a pathway which, starting from the basin, lost itself in
+the fields, in the direction of the rising sun.
+
+"This is my pathway.  How often I walked in it sadly!  I was sad when I
+did not know you."
+
+They found the alley which, with other lindens and other nymphs, went
+beyond.  And they followed it to the grottoes.  There was, in the rear of
+the park, a semicircle of five large niches of rocks surmounted by
+balustrades and separated by gigantic Terminus gods.  One of these gods,
+at a corner of the monument, dominated all the others by his monstrous
+nudity, and lowered on them his stony look.
+
+"When my father bought Joinville," she said, "the grottoes were only
+ruins, full of grass and vipers.  A thousand rabbits had made holes in
+them.  He restored the Terminus gods and the arcades in accordance with
+prints by Perrelle, which are preserved at the Bibliotheque Nationale.
+He was his own architect."
+
+A desire for shade and mystery led them toward the arbor near the
+grottoes.  But the noise of footsteps which they heard, coming from the
+covered alley, made them stop for a moment, and they saw, through the
+leaves, Montessuy, with his arm around the Princess Seniavine's waist.
+Quietly they were walking toward the palace.  Jacques and Therese, hiding
+behind the enormous Terminus god, waited until they had passed.
+
+Then she said to Dechartre, who was looking at her silently:
+
+"That is amazing!  I understand now why the Princess Seniavine, this
+winter, asked my father to advise her about buying horses."
+
+Yet Therese admired her father for having conquered that beautiful woman,
+who passed for being hard to please, and who was known to be wealthy,
+in spite of the embarrassments which her mad disorder had caused her.
+She asked Jacques whether he did not think the Princess was beautiful.
+He said she had elegance.  She was beautiful, doubtless.
+
+Therese led Jacques to the moss-covered steps which, ascending behind the
+grottoes, led to the Gerbe-de-l'Oise, formed of leaden reeds in the midst
+of a great pink marble vase.  Tall trees closed the park's perspective
+and stood at the beginning of the forest.  They walked under them.  They
+were silent under the faint moan of the leaves.
+
+He pressed her in his arms and placed kisses on her eyelids.  Night was
+descending, the first stars were trembling among the branches.  In the
+damp grass sighed the frog's flutes.  They went no farther.
+
+When she took with him, in darkness, the road to the palace, the taste of
+kisses and of mint remained on her lips, and in her eyes was the image of
+her lover.  She smiled under the lindens at the nymphs who had seen the
+tears of her childhood.  The Swan lifted in the sky its cross of stars,
+and the moon mirrored its slender horn in the basin of the crown.
+Insects in the grass uttered appeals to love.  At the last turn of the
+boxwood hedge, Therese and Jacques saw the triple black mass of the
+castle, and through the wide bay-windows of the first story distinguished
+moving forms in the red light.  The bell rang.
+
+Therese exclaimed:
+
+"I have hardly time to dress for dinner."
+
+And she passed swiftly between the stone lions, leaving her lover under
+the impression of a fairy-tale vision.
+
+In the drawing-room, after dinner, M. Berthier d'Eyzelles read the
+newspaper, and the Princess Seniavine played solitaire.  Therese sat, her
+eyes half closed over a book.
+
+The Princess asked whether she found what she was reading amusing.
+
+"I do not know.  I was reading and thinking.  Paul Vence is right:
+'We find only ourselves in books.'"
+
+Through the hangings came from the billiard-room the voices of the
+players and the click of the balls.
+
+"I have it!"  exclaimed the Princess, throwing down the cards.
+
+She had wagered a big sum on a horse which was running that day at the
+Chantilly races.
+
+Therese said she had received a letter from Fiesole.  Miss Bell announced
+her forthcoming marriage with Prince Eusebia Albertinelli della Spina.
+
+The Princess laughed:
+
+"There's a man who will render a service to her."
+
+"What service?"  asked Therese.
+
+"He will disgust her with men, of course."
+
+Montessuy came into the parlor joyfully.  He had won the game.
+
+He sat beside Berthier-d'Eyzelles, and, taking a newspaper from the sofa,
+said:
+
+"The Minister of Finance announces that he will propose, when the Chamber
+reassembles, his savings-bank bill."
+
+This bill was to give to savings-banks the authority to lend money to
+communes, a proceeding which would take from Montessuy's business houses
+their best customers.
+
+"Berthier," asked the financier, "are you resolutely hostile to that
+bill?"
+
+Berthier nodded.
+
+Montessuy rose, placed his hand on the Deputy's shoulder, and said:
+
+"My dear Berthier, I have an idea that the Cabinet will fall at the
+beginning of the session."
+
+He approached his daughter.
+
+"I have received an odd letter from Le Menil."
+
+Therese rose and closed the door that separated the parlor from the
+billiard-room.
+
+She was afraid of draughts, she said.
+
+"A singular letter," continued Montessuy.  "Le Menil will not come to
+Joinville.  He has bought the yacht Rosebud.  He is on the Mediterranean,
+and can not live except on the water.  It is a pity.  He is the only one
+who knows how to manage a hunt."
+
+At this instant Dechartre came into the room with Count Martin, who,
+after beating him at billiards, had acquired a great affection for him
+and was explaining to him the dangers of a personal tax based on the
+number of servants one kept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+AN UNWELCOME APPARITION
+
+A pale winter sun piercing the mists of the Seine, illuminated the dogs
+painted by Oudry on the doors of the dining room.
+
+Madame Martin had at her right Garain the Deputy, formerly Chancellor,
+also President of the Council, and at her left Senator Loyer.  At Count
+Martin-Belleme's right was Monsieur Berthier-d'Eyzelles.  It was an
+intimate and serious business gathering.  In conformity with Montessuy's
+prediction, the Cabinet had fallen four days before.  Called to the
+Elysee the same morning, Garain had accepted the task of forming a
+cabinet.  He was preparing, while taking breakfast, the combination which
+was to be submitted in the evening to the President.  And, while they
+were discussing names, Therese was reviewing within herself the images of
+her intimate life.
+
+She had returned to Paris with Count Martin at the opening of the
+parliamentary session, and since that moment had led an enchanted life.
+
+Jacques loved her; he loved her with a delicious mingling of passion and
+tenderness, of learned experience and curious ingenuity.  He was nervous,
+irritable, anxious.  But the uncertainty of his humor made his gayety
+more charming.  That artistic gayety, bursting out suddenly like a flame,
+caressed love without offending it.  And the playful wit of her lover
+made Therese marvel.  She never could have imagined the infallible taste
+which he exercised naturally in joyful caprice and in familiar fantasy.
+At first he had displayed only the monotony of passionate ardor.  That
+alone had captured her.  But since then she had discovered in him a gay
+mind, well stored and diverse, as well as the gift of agreeable flattery.
+
+"To assemble a homogeneous ministry," exclaimed Garain, "is easily said.
+Yet one must be guided by the tendencies of the various factions of the
+Chamber."
+
+He was uneasy.  He saw himself surrounded by as many snares as those
+which he had laid.  Even his collaborators became hostile to him.
+
+Count Martin wished the new ministry to satisfy the aspirations of the
+new men.
+
+"Your list is formed of personalities essentially different in origin and
+in tendency," he said.  "Yet the most important fact in the political
+history of recent years is the possibility, I should say the necessity,
+to introduce unity of views in the government of the republic.  These are
+ideas which you, my dear Garin, have expressed with rare eloquence."
+
+M. Berthier-d'Eyzelles kept silence.
+
+Senator Loyer rolled crumbs with his fingers.  He had been formerly a
+frequenter of beer-halls, and while moulding crumbs or cutting corks he
+found ideas.  He raised his red face.  And, looking at Garain with
+wrinkled eyes wherein red fire sparkled, he said:
+
+"I said it, and nobody would believe it.  The annihilation of the
+monarchical Right was for the chiefs of the Republican party an
+irreparable misfortune.  We governed formerly against it.  The real
+support of a government is the Opposition.  The Empire governed against
+the Orleanists and against us; MacMahon governed against the Republicans.
+More fortunate, we governed against the Right.  The Right--what a
+magnificent Opposition it was!  It threatened, was candid, powerless,
+great, honest, unpopular!  We should have nursed it.  We did not know how
+to do that.  And then, of course, everything wears out.  Yet it is always
+necessary to govern against something.  There are to-day only Socialists
+to give us the support which the Right lent us fifteen years ago with so
+constant a generosity.  But they are too weak.  We should reenforce them,
+make of them a political party.  To do this at the present hour is the
+first duty of a State minister."
+
+Garain, who was not cynical, made no answer.
+
+"Garain, do you not yet know," asked Count Martin, "whether with the
+Premiership you are to take the Seals or the Interior?"
+
+Garain replied that his decision would depend on the choice which some
+one else would make.  The presence of that personage in the Cabinet was
+necessary, and he hesitated between two portfolios.  Garain sacrificed
+his personal convenience to superior interests.
+
+Senator Loyer made a wry face.  He wanted the Seals.  It was a long-
+cherished desire.  A teacher of law under the Empire, he gave, in cafes,
+lessons that were appreciated.  He had the sense of chicanery.  Having
+begun his political fortune with articles skilfully written in order to
+attract to himself prosecution, suits, and several weeks of imprisonment,
+he had considered the press as a weapon of opposition which every good
+government should break.  Since September 4, 1870, he had had the
+ambition to become Keeper of the Seals, so that everybody might see how
+the old Bohemian who formerly explained the code while dining on
+sauerkraut, would appear as supreme chief of the magistracy.
+
+Idiots by the dozen had climbed over his back.  Now having become aged in
+the ordinary honors of the Senate, unpolished, married to a brewery girl,
+poor, lazy, disillusioned, his old Jacobin spirit and his sincere
+contempt for the people surviving his ambition, made of him a good man
+for the Government.  This time, as a part of the Garain combination, he
+imagined he held the Department of Justice.  And his protector, who would
+not give it to him, was an unfortunate rival.  He laughed, while moulding
+a dog from a piece of bread.
+
+M. Berthier-d'Eyzelles, calm and grave, caressed his handsome white
+beard.
+
+"Do you not think, Monsieur Garain, that it would be well to give a place
+in the Cabinet to the men who have followed from the beginning the
+political principles toward which we are directing ourselves to-day?"
+
+"They lost themselves in doing it," replied Garam, impatiently.  "The
+politician never should be in advance of circumstances.  It is an error
+to be in the right too soon.  Thinkers are not men of business.  And
+then--let us talk frankly--if you want a Ministry of the Left Centre
+variety, say so: I will retire.  But I warn you that neither the Chamber
+nor the country will sustain you."
+
+"It is evident," said Count Martin, "that we must be sure of a majority."
+
+"With my list, we have a majority," said Garain.  "It is the minority
+which sustained the Ministry against us.  Gentlemen, I appeal to your
+devotion."
+
+And the laborious distribution of the portfolios began again.  Count
+Martin received, in the first place, the Public Works, which he refused,
+for lack of competency, and afterward the Foreign Affairs, which he
+accepted without objection.
+
+But M. Berthier-d'Eyzelles, to whom Garain offered Commerce and
+Agriculture, reserved his decision.
+
+Loyer got the Colonies.  He seemed very busy trying to make his bread dog
+stand on the cloth.  Yet he was looking out of the corners of his little
+wrinkled eyelids at the Countess Martin and thinking that she was
+desirable.  He vaguely thought of the pleasure of meeting her again.
+
+Leaving Garain to his combination, he was preoccupied by his fair
+hostess, trying to divine her tastes and her habits, asking her whether
+she went to the theatre, and if she ever went at night to the coffee-
+house with her husband.  And Therese was beginning to think he was more
+interesting than the others, with his apparent ignorance of her world and
+his superb cynicism.
+
+Gamin arose.  He had to see several persons before submitting his list to
+the President of the Republic.  Count Martin offered his carriage, but
+Garain had one.
+
+"Do you not think," asked Count Martin, "that the President might object
+to some names?"
+
+"The President," replied Garain, "will be inspired by the necessities of
+the situation."
+
+He had already gone out of the door when he struck his forehead with his
+hand.
+
+"We have forgotten the Ministry of War."
+
+"We shall easily find somebody for it among the generals," said Count
+Martin.
+
+"Ah," exclaimed Garain, "you believe the choice of a minister of war is
+easy.  It is clear you have not, like me, been a member of three cabinets
+and President of the Council.  In my cabinets, and during my presidency
+the greatest difficulties came from the Ministry of War.  Generals are
+all alike.  You know the one I chose for the cabinet that I formed.  When
+we took him, he knew nothing of affairs.  He hardly knew there were two
+Chambers.  We had to explain to him all the wheels of parliamentary
+machinery; we had to teach him that there were an army committee, finance
+committee, subcommittees, presidents of committees, a budget.  He asked
+that all this information be written for him on a piece of paper.  His
+ignorance of men and of things amazed and alarmed us.  In a fortnight he
+knew the most subtle tricks of the trade; he knew personally all the
+senators and all the deputies, and was intriguing with them against us.
+If it had not been for President Grevy's help, he would have overthrown
+us.  And he was a very ordinary general, a general like any other.  Oh,
+no; do not think that the portfolio of war may be given hastily, without
+reflection."
+
+And Garain still shivered at the thought of his former colleague.
+
+Therese rose.  Senator Loyer offered his arm to her, with the graceful
+attitude that he had learned forty years before at Bullier's dancing-
+hall.  She left the politicians in the drawing-room, and hastened to meet
+Dechartre.
+
+A rosy mist covered the Seine, the stone quays, and the gilded trees.
+The red sun threw into the cloudy sky the last glories of the year.
+Therese, as she went out, relished the sharpness of the air and the dying
+splendor of the day.  Since her return to Paris, happy, she found
+pleasure every morning in the changes of the weather.  It seemed to her,
+in her generous selfishness, that it was for her the wind blew in the
+trees, or the fine, gray rain wet the horizon of the avenues; for her, so
+that she might say, as she entered the little house of the Ternes, "It is
+windy; it is raining; the weather is pleasant;" mingling thus the ocean
+of things in the intimacy of her love.  And every day was beautiful for
+her, since each one brought her to the arms of her beloved.
+
+While on her way that day to the little house of the Ternes she thought
+of her unexpected happiness, so full and so secure.  She walked in the
+last glory of the sun already touched by winter, and said to herself:
+
+"He loves me; I believe he loves me entirely.  To love is easier and more
+natural for him than for other men.  They have in life ideas they think
+superior to love--faith, habits, interests.  They believe in God, or in
+duties, or in themselves.  He believes in me only.  I am his God, his
+duty, and his life."
+
+Then she thought:
+
+"It is true, too, that he needs nobody, not even me.  His thoughts alone
+are a magnificent world in which he could easily live by himself.  But I
+can not live without him.  What would become of me if I did not have
+him?"
+
+She was not alarmed by the violent passion that he had for her.  She
+recalled that she had said to him one day: "Your love for me is only
+sensual.  I do not complain of it; it is perhaps the only true love."
+And he had replied: "It is also the only grand and strong love.  It has
+its measure and its weapons.  It is full of meaning and of images.  It is
+violent and mysterious.  It attaches itself to the flesh and to the soul
+of the flesh.  The rest is only illusion and untruth."  She was almost
+tranquil in her joy.  Suspicions and anxieties had fled like the mists of
+a summer storm.  The worst weather of their love had come when they had
+been separated from each other.  One should never leave the one whom one
+loves.
+
+At the corner of the Avenue Marceau and of the Rue Galilee, she divined
+rather than recognized a shadow that had passed by her, a forgotten form.
+She thought, she wished to think, she was mistaken.  The one whom she
+thought she had seen existed no longer, never had existed.  It was a
+spectre seen in the limbo of another world, in the darkness of a half
+light.  And she continued to walk, retaining of this ill-defined meeting
+an impression of coldness, of vague embarrassment, and of pain in the
+heart.
+
+As she proceeded along the avenue she saw coming toward her newspaper
+carriers holding the evening sheets announcing the new Cabinet.  She
+traversed the square; her steps followed the happy impatience of her
+desire.  She had visions of Jacques waiting for her at the foot of the
+stairway, among the marble figures; taking her in his arms and carrying
+her, trembling from kisses, to that room full of shadows and of delights,
+where the sweetness of life made her forget life.
+
+But in the solitude of the Avenue MacMahon, the shadow which she had seen
+at the corner of the Rue Galilee came near her with a directness that was
+unmistakable.
+
+She recognized Robert Le Menil, who, having followed her from the quay,
+was stopping her at the most quiet and secure place.
+
+His air, his attitude, expressed the simplicity of motive which had
+formerly pleased Therese.  His face, naturally harsh, darkened by
+sunburn, somewhat hollowed, but calm, expressed profound suffering.
+
+"I must speak to you."
+
+She slackened her pace.  He walked by her side.
+
+"I have tried to forget you.  After what had happened it was natural, was
+it not?  I have done all I could.  It was better to forget you, surely;
+but I could not.  So I bought a boat, and I have been travelling for six
+months.  You know, perhaps?"
+
+She made a sign that she knew.
+
+He continued:
+
+"The Rosebud, a beautiful yacht.  There were six men in the crew.
+I manoeuvred with them.  It was a pastime."
+
+He paused.  She was walking slowly, saddened, and, above all, annoyed.
+It seemed to her an absurd and painful thing, beyond all expression, to
+have to listen to such words from a stranger.
+
+He continued:
+
+"What I suffered on that boat I should be ashamed to tell you."
+
+She felt he spoke the truth.
+
+"Oh, I forgive you--I have reflected alone a great deal.  I passed many
+nights and days on the divan of the deckhouse, turning always the same
+ideas in my mind.  For six months I have thought more than I ever did in
+my life.  Do not laugh.  There is nothing like suffering to enlarge the
+mind.  I understand that if I have lost you the fault is mine.  I should
+have known how to keep you.  And I said to myself: 'I did not know.  Oh;
+if I could only begin again!'  By dint of thinking and of suffering, I
+understand.  I know now that I did not sufficiently share your tastes and
+your ideas.  You are a superior woman.  I did not notice it before,
+because it was not for that that I loved you.  Without suspecting it, I
+irritated you."
+
+She shook her head.  He insisted.
+
+"Yes, yes, I often wounded your feelings.  I did not consider your
+delicacy.  There were misunderstandings between us.  The reason was, we
+have not the same temperament.  And then, I did not know how to amuse
+you.  I did not know how to give you the amusement you need.  I did not
+procure for you the pleasures that a woman as intelligent as you
+requires."
+
+So simple and so true was he in his regrets and in his pain, she found
+him worthy of sympathy.  She said to him, softly:
+
+"My friend, I never had reason to complain of you."
+
+He continued:
+
+"All I have said to you is true.  I understood this when I was alone in
+my boat.  I have spent hours on it to which I would not condemn my worst
+enemy.  Often I felt like throwing myself into the water.  I did not do
+it.  Was it because I have religious principles or family sentiments, or
+because I have no courage?  I do not know.  The reason is, perhaps, that
+from a distance you held me to life.  I was attracted by you, since I am
+here.  For two days I have been watching you.  I did not wish to reappear
+at your house.  I should not have found you alone; I should not have been
+able to talk to you.  And then you would have been forced to receive me.
+I thought it better to speak to you in the street.  The idea came to me
+on the boat.  I said to myself: 'In the street she will listen to me only
+if she wishes, as she wished four years ago in the park of Joinville, you
+know, under the statues, near the crown.'"
+
+He continued, with a sigh:
+
+"Yes, as at Joinville, since all is to be begun again.  For two days I
+have been watching you.  Yesterday it was raining; you went out in a
+carriage.  I might have followed you and learned where you were going if
+I wished to do it.  I did not do it.  I do not wish to do what would
+displease you."
+
+She extended her hand to him.
+
+"I thank you.  I knew I should not regret the trust I have placed in
+you."
+
+Alarmed, impatient, fearing what more he might say, she tried to escape
+him.
+
+"Farewell!  You have all life before you.  You should be happy.
+Appreciate it, and do not torment yourself about things that are not
+worth the trouble."
+
+He stopped her with a look.  His face had changed to the violent and
+resolute expression which she knew.
+
+"I have told you I must speak to you.  Listen to me for a minute."
+
+She was thinking of Jacques, who was waiting for her.  An occasional
+passer-by looked at her and went on his way.  She stopped under the black
+branches of a tree, and waited with pity and fright in her soul.
+
+He said:
+
+"I forgive you and forget everything.  Take me back.  I will promise
+never to say a word of the past."
+
+She shuddered, and made a movement of surprise and distaste so natural
+that he stopped.  Then, after a moment of reflection:
+
+"My proposition to you is not an ordinary one, I know it well.  But I
+have reflected.  I have thought of everything.  It is the only possible
+thing.  Think of it, Therese, and do not reply at once."
+
+"It would be wrong to deceive you.  I can not, I will not do what you
+say; and you know the reason why."
+
+A cab was passing slowly near them.  She made a sign to the coachman to
+stop.  Le Menil kept her a moment longer.
+
+"I knew you would say this to me, and that is the reason why I say to
+you, do not reply at once."
+
+Her fingers on the handle of the door, she turned on him the glance of
+her gray eyes.
+
+It was a painful moment for him.  He recalled the time when he saw those
+charming gray eyes gleam under half-closed lids.  He smothered a sob, and
+murmured:
+
+"Listen; I can not live without you.  I love you.  It is now that I love
+you.  Formerly I did not know."
+
+And while she gave to the coachman, haphazard, the address of a tailor,
+Le Menil went away.
+
+The meeting gave her much uneasiness and anxiety.  Since she was forced
+to meet him again, she would have preferred to see him violent and
+brutal, as he had been at Florence.  At the corner of the avenue she said
+to the coachman:
+
+"To the Ternes."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+THE RED LILY
+
+It was Friday, at the opera.  The curtain had fallen on Faust's
+laboratory.  From the orchestra, opera-glasses were raised in a surveying
+of the gold and purple theatre.  The sombre drapery of the boxes framed
+the dazzling heads and bare shoulders of women.  The amphitheatre bent
+above the parquette its garland of diamonds, hair, gauze, and satin.
+In the proscenium boxes were the wife of the Austrian Ambassador and the
+Duchess Gladwin; in the amphitheatre Berthe d'Osigny and Jane Tulle, the
+latter made famous the day before by the suicide of one of her lovers;
+in the boxes, Madame Berard de La Malle, her eyes lowered, her long
+eyelashes shading her pure cheeks; Princess Seniavine, who, looking
+superb, concealed under her fan panther--like yawnings; Madame de
+Morlaine, between two young women whom she was training in the elegances
+of the mind; Madame Meillan, resting assured on thirty years of sovereign
+beauty; Madame Berthierd'Eyzelles, erect under iron-gray hair sparkling
+with diamonds.  The bloom of her cheeks heightened the austere dignity of
+her attitude.  She was attracting much notice.  It had been learned in
+the morning that, after the failure of Garain's latest combination,
+M. Berthier-d'Eyzelles had, undertaken the task of forming a Ministry.
+The papers published lists with the name of Martin-Belleme for the
+treasury, and the opera-glasses were turned toward the still empty box of
+the Countess Martin.
+
+A murmur of voices filled the hall.  In the third rank of the parquette,
+General Lariviere, standing at his place, was talking with General de La
+Briche.
+
+"I will do as you do, my old comrade, I will go and plant cabbages in
+Touraine."
+
+He was in one of his moments of melancholy, when nothingness appeared to
+him to be the end of life.  He had flattered Garain, and Garain, thinking
+him too clever, had preferred for Minister of War a shortsighted and
+national artillery general.  At least, the General relished the pleasure
+of seeing Garain abandoned, betrayed by his friends Berthier-d'Eyzelles
+and Martin-Belleme.  It made him laugh even to the wrinkles of his small
+eyes.  He laughed in profile.  Weary of a long life of dissimulation, he
+gave to himself suddenly the joy of expressing his thoughts.
+
+"You see, my good La Briche, they make fools of us with their civil army,
+which costs a great deal, and is worth nothing.  Small armies are the
+only good ones.  This was the opinion of Napoleon I, who knew."
+
+"It is true, it is very true," sighed General de La Briche, with tears in
+his eyes.
+
+Montessuy passed before them; Lariviere extended his hand to him.
+
+"They say, Montessuy, that you are the one who checked Garain.  Accept my
+compliments."
+
+Montessuy denied that he had exercised any political influence.  He was
+not a senator nor a deputy, nor a councillor-general.  And, looking
+through his glasses at the hall:
+
+"See, Lariviere, in that box at the right, a very beautiful woman, a
+brunette."
+
+And he took his seat quietly, relishing the sweets of power.
+
+However, in the hall, in the corridors, the names of the new Ministers
+went from mouth to mouth in the midst of profound indifference: President
+of the Council and Minister of the Interior, Berthier-d'Eyzelles; justice
+and Religions, Loyer; Treasury, Martin-Belleme.  All the ministers were
+known except those of Commerce, War, and the Navy, who were not yet
+designated.
+
+The curtain was raised on the wine-shop of Bacchus.  The students were
+singing their second chorus when Madame Martin appeared in her box.  Her
+white gown had sleeves like wings, and on the drapery of her corsage, at
+the left breast, shone a large ruby lily.
+
+Miss Bell sat near her, in a green velvet Queen Anne gown.  Betrothed to
+Prince Eusebio Albertinelli della Spina, she had come to Paris to order
+her trousseau.
+
+In the movement and the noise of the kermess she said:
+
+"Darling, you have left at Florence a friend who retains the charm of
+your memory.  It is Professor Arrighi.  He reserves for you the praise-
+which he says is the most beautiful.  He says you are a musical creature.
+But how could Professor Arrighi forget you, darling, since the trees in
+the garden have not forgotten you?  Their unleaved branches lament your
+absence.  Even they regret you, darling."
+
+"Tell them," said Therese, "that I have of Fiesole a delightful
+reminiscence, which I shall always keep."
+
+In the rear of the opera-box M. Martin-Belleme was explaining in a low
+voice his ideas to Joseph Springer and to Duviquet.  He was saying:
+"France's signature is the best in the world."  He was inclined to
+prudence in financial matters.
+
+And Miss Bell said:
+
+"Darling, I will tell the trees of Fiesole that you regret them and that
+you will soon come to visit them on their hills.  But I ask you, do you
+see Monsieur Dechartre in Paris?  I should like to see him very much.
+I like him because his mind is graceful.  Darling, the mind of Monsieur
+Dechartre is full of grace and elegance."
+
+Therese replied M. Jacques Dechartre was doubtless in the theatre, and
+that he would not fail to come and salute Miss Bell.
+
+The curtain fell on the gayety of the waltz scene.  Visitors crowded the
+foyers.  Financiers, artists, deputies met in the anteroom adjoining the
+box.  They surrounded M. Martin-Belleme, murmured polite congratulations,
+made graceful gestures to him, and crowded one another in order to shake
+his hand.  Joseph Schmoll, coughing, complaining, blind and deaf, made
+his way through the throng and reached Madame Martin.  He took her hand
+and said:
+
+"They say your husband is appointed Minister.  Is it true?"
+
+She knew they were talking of it, but she did not think he had been
+appointed yet.  Her husband was there, why not ask him?
+
+Sensitive to literal truths only, Schmoll said:
+
+"Your husband is not yet a Minister?  When he is appointed, I will ask
+you for an interview.  It is an affair of the highest importance."
+
+He paused, throwing from his gold spectacles the glances of a blind man
+and of a visionary, which kept him, despite the brutal exactitude of his
+temperament, in a sort of mystical state of mind.  He asked, brusquely:
+
+"Were you in Italy this year, Madame?"
+
+And, without giving her time to answer:
+
+"I know, I know.  You went to Rome.  You have looked at the arch of the
+infamous Titus, that execrable monument, where one may see the seven-
+branched candlestick among the spoils of the Jews.  Well, Madame, it is a
+shame to the world that that monument remains standing in the city of
+Rome, where the Popes have subsisted only through the art of the Jews,
+financiers and money-changers.  The Jews brought to Italy the science of
+Greece and of the Orient.  The Renaissance, Madame, is the work of
+Israel.  That is the truth, certain but misunderstood."
+
+And he went through the crowd of visitors, crushing hats as he passed.
+
+Princess Seniavine looked at her friend from her box with the curiosity
+that the beauty of women at times excited in her.  She made a sign to
+Paul Vence who was near her:
+
+"Do you not think Madame Martin is extraordinarily beautiful this year?"
+
+In the lobby, full of light and gold, General de La Briche asked
+Lariviere:
+
+"Did you see my nephew?"
+
+"Your nephew, Le Menil?"
+
+"Yes--Robert.  He was in the theatre a moment ago."
+
+La Briche remained pensive for a moment.  Then he said:
+
+"He came this summer to Semanville.  I thought him odd.  A charming
+fellow, frank and intelligent.  But he ought to have some occupation,
+some aim in life."
+
+The bell which announced the end of an intermission between the acts had
+hushed.  In the foyer the two old men were walking alone.
+
+"An aim in life," repeated La Briche, tall, thin, and bent, while his
+companion, lightened and rejuvenated, hastened within, fearing to miss a
+scene.
+
+Marguerite, in the garden, was spinning and singing.  When she had
+finished, Miss Bell said to Madame Martin:
+
+"Darling, Monsieur Choulette has written me a perfectly beautiful letter.
+He has told me that he is very celebrated.  And I am glad to know it.
+He said also: 'The glory of other poets reposes in myrrh and aromatic
+plants.  Mine bleeds and moans under a rain of stones and of oyster-
+shells.'  Do the French, my love, really throw stones at Monsieur
+Choulette?"
+
+While Therese reassured Miss Bell, Loyer, imperious and somewhat noisy,
+caused the door of the box to be opened.  He appeared wet and spattered
+with mud.
+
+"I come from the Elysee," he said.
+
+He had the gallantry to announce to Madame Martin, first, the good news
+he was bringing:
+
+"The decrees are signed.  Your husband has the Finances.  It is a good
+portfolio."
+
+"The President of the Republic," inquired M. Martin--Belleme, "made no
+objection when my name was pronounced?"
+
+"No; Berthier praised the hereditary property of the Martins, your
+caution, and the links with which you are attached to certain
+personalities in the financial world whose concurrence may be useful to
+the government.  And the President, in accordance with Garain's happy
+expression, was inspired by the necessities of the situation.  He has
+signed."
+
+On Count Martin's yellowed face two or three wrinkles appeared.  He was
+smiling.
+
+"The decree," continued Loyer, "will be published tomorrow.
+I accompanied myself the clerk who took it to the printer.  It was surer.
+In Grevy's time, and Grevy was not an idiot, decrees were intercepted in
+the journey from the Elysee to the Quai Voltaire."
+
+And Loyer threw himself on a chair.  There, enjoying the view of Madame
+Martin, he continued:
+
+"People will not say, as they did in the time of my poor friend Gambetta,
+that the republic is lacking in women.  You will give us fine festivals,
+Madame, in the salons of the Ministry."
+
+Marguerite, looking at herself in the mirror, with her necklace and
+earrings, was singing the jewel song.
+
+"We shall have to compose the declaration," said Count Martin.  "I have
+thought of it.  For my department I have found, I think, a fine formula."
+
+Loyer shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"My dear Martin, we have nothing essential to change in the declaration
+of the preceding Cabinet; the situation is unchanged."
+
+He struck his forehead with his hand.
+
+"Oh, I had forgotten.  We have made your friend, old Lariviere, Minister
+of War, without consulting him.  I have to warn him."
+
+He thought he could find him in the boulevard cafe, where military men
+go.  But Count Martin knew the General was in the theatre.
+
+"I must find him," said Loyer.
+
+Bowing to Therese, he said:
+
+"You permit me, Countess, to take your husband?"
+
+They had just gone out when Jacques Dechartre and Paul Vence came into
+the box.
+
+"I congratulate you, Madame," said Paul Vence.
+
+But she turned toward Dechartre:
+
+"I hope you have not come to congratulate me, too."
+
+Paul Vence asked her if she would move into the apartments of the
+Ministry.
+
+"Oh, no," she replied.
+
+"At least, Madame," said Paul Vence, "you will go to the balls at the
+Elysees, and we shall admire the art with which you retain your
+mysterious charm."
+
+"Changes in cabinets," said Madame Martin, "inspire you, Monsieur Vence,
+with very frivolous reflections."
+
+"Madame," continued Paul Vence, "I shall not say like Renan, my beloved
+master: 'What does Sirius care?' because somebody would reply with reason
+'What does little Earth care for big Sirius?'  But I am always surprised
+when people who are adult, and even old, let themselves be deluded by the
+illusion of power, as if hunger, love, and death, all the ignoble or
+sublime necessities of life, did not exercise on men an empire too
+sovereign to leave them anything other than power written on paper and an
+empire of words.  And, what is still more marvellous, people imagine they
+have other chiefs of state and other ministers than their miseries, their
+desires, and their imbecility.  He was a wise man who said: 'Let us give
+to men irony and pity as witnesses and judges.'"
+
+"But, Monsieur Vence," said Madame Martin, laughingly, "you are the man
+who wrote that.  I read it."
+
+The two Ministers looked vainly in the theatre and in the corridors for
+the General.  On the advice of the ushers, they went behind the scenes.
+
+Two ballet-dancers were standing sadly, with a foot on the bar placed
+against the wall.  Here and there men in evening dress and women in gauze
+formed groups almost silent.
+
+Loyer and Martin-Belleme, when they entered, took off their hats.  They
+saw, in the rear of the hall, Lariviere with a pretty girl whose pink
+tunic, held by a gold belt, was open at the hips.
+
+She held in her hand a gilt pasteboard cup.  When they were near her,
+they heard her say to the General:
+
+"You are old, to be sure, but I think you do as much as he does."
+
+And she was pointing disdainfully to a grinning young man, with a
+gardenia in his button-hole, who stood near them.
+
+Loyer motioned to the General that he wished to speak to him, and,
+pushing him against the bar, said:
+
+"I have the pleasure to announce to you that you have been appointed
+Minister of War."
+
+Lariviere, distrustful, said nothing.  That badly dressed man with long
+hair, who, under his dusty coat, resembled a clown, inspired so little
+confidence in him that he suspected a snare, perhaps a bad joke.
+
+"Monsieur Loyer is Keeper of the Seals," said Count Martin.
+
+"General, you cannot refuse," Loyer said.  "I have said you will accept.
+If you hesitate, it will be favoring the offensive return of Garain.  He
+is a traitor."
+
+"My dear colleague, you exaggerate," said Count Martin; "but Garain,
+perhaps, is lacking a little in frankness.  And the General's support is
+urgent."
+
+"The Fatherland before everything," replied Lariviere with emotion.
+
+"You know, General," continued Loyer, "the existing laws are to be
+applied with moderation."
+
+He looked at the two dancers who were extending their short and muscular
+legs on the bar.
+
+Lariviere murmured:
+
+"The army's patriotism is excellent; the good-will of the chiefs is at
+the height of the most critical circumstances."
+
+Loyer tapped his shoulder.
+
+"My dear colleague, there is some use in having big armies."
+
+"I believe as you do," replied Lariviere; "the present army fills the
+superior necessities of national defence."
+
+"The use of big armies," continued Loyer, "is to make war impossible.
+One would be crazy to engage in a war these immeasurable forces, the
+management of which surpasses all human faculty.  Is not this your
+opinion, General?"
+
+General Lariviere winked.
+
+"The situation," he said, "exacts circumspection.  We are facing a
+perilous unknown."
+
+Then Loyer, looking at his war colleague with cynical contempt, said:
+
+"In the very improbable case of a war, don't you think, my dear
+colleague, that the real generals would be the station-masters?"
+
+The three Ministers went out by the private stairway.  The President of
+the Council was waiting for them.
+
+The last act had begun; Madame Martin had in her box only Dechartre and
+Miss Bell.  Miss Bell was saying:
+
+"I rejoice, darling, I am exalted, at the thought that you wear on your
+heart the red lily of Florence.  Monsieur Dechartre, whose soul is
+artistic, must be very glad, too, to see at your corsage that charming
+jewel.
+
+"I should like to know the jeweller that made it, darling.  This lily is
+lithe and supple like an iris.  Oh, it is elegant, magnificent, and
+cruel.  Have you noticed, my love, that beautiful jewels have an air of
+magnificent cruelty?"
+
+"My jeweller," said Therese, "is here, and you have named him; it is
+Monsieur Dechartre who designed this jewel."
+
+The door of the box was opened.  Therese half turned her head and saw in
+the shadow Le Menil, who was bowing to her with his brusque suppleness.
+
+"Transmit, I pray you, Madame, my congratulations to your husband."
+
+He complimented her on her fine appearance.  He spoke to Miss Bell a few
+courteous and precise words.
+
+Therese listened anxiously, her mouth half open in the painful effort to
+say insignificant things in reply.  He asked her whether she had had a
+good season at Joinville.  He would have liked to go in the hunting time,
+but could not.  He had gone to the Mediterranean, then he had hunted at
+Semanville.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur Le Menil," said Miss Bell, "you have wandered on the blue
+sea.  Have you seen sirens?"
+
+No, he had not seen sirens, but for three days a dolphin had swum in the
+yacht's wake.
+
+Miss Bell asked him if that dolphin liked music.
+
+He thought not.
+
+"Dolphins," he said, "are very ordinary fish that sailors call sea-geese,
+because they have goose-shaped heads."
+
+But Miss Bell would not believe that the monster which had earned the
+poet Arion had a goose-shaped head.
+
+"Monsieur Le Menil, if next year a dolphin comes to swim near your boat,
+I pray you play to him on the flute the Delphic Hymn to Apollo.  Do you
+like the sea, Monsieur Le Menil?"
+
+"I prefer the woods."
+
+Self-contained, simple, he talked quietly.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur Le Menil, I know you like woods where the hares dance in
+the moonlight."
+
+Dechartre, pale, rose and went out.
+
+The church scene was on.  Marguerite, kneeling, was wringing her hands,
+and her head drooped with the weight of her long tresses.  The voices of
+the organ and the chorus sang the death-song.
+
+"Oh, darling, do you know that that death-song, which is sung only in the
+Catholic churches, comes from a Franciscan hermitage?  It sounds like the
+wind which blows in winter in the trees on the summit of the Alverno."
+
+Therese did not hear.  Her soul had followed Dechartre through the door
+of her box.
+
+In the anteroom was a noise of overthrown chairs.  It was Schmoll coming
+back.  He had learned that M. Martin-Belleme had recently been appointed
+Minister.  At once he claimed the cross of Commander of the Legion of
+Honor and a larger apartment at the Institute.  His apartment was small,
+narrow, insufficient for his wife and his five daughters.  He had been
+forced to put his workshop under the roof.  He made long complaints, and
+consented to go only after Madame Martin had promised that she would
+speak to her husband.
+
+"Monsieur Le Menil," asked Miss Bell, "shall you go yachting next year?"
+
+Le Menil thought not.  He did not intend to keep the Rosebud.  The water
+was tiresome.
+
+And calm, energetic, determined, he looked at Therese.
+
+On the stage, in Marguerite's prison, Mephistopheles sang, and the
+orchestra imitated the gallop of horses.  Therese murmured:
+
+"I have a headache.  It is too warm here."
+
+Le Menil opened the door.
+
+The clear phrase of Marguerite calling the angels ascended to heaven in
+white sparks.
+
+"Darling, I will tell you that poor Marguerite does not wish to be saved
+according to the flesh, and for that reason she is saved in spirit and in
+truth.  I believe one thing, darling, I believe firmly we shall all be
+saved.  Oh, yes, I believe in the final purification of sinners."
+
+Therese rose, tall and white, with the red flower at her breast.  Miss
+Bell, immovable, listened to the music.  Le Menil, in the anteroom, took
+Madame Martin's cloak, and, while he held it unfolded, she traversed the
+box, the anteroom, and stopped before the mirror of the half-open door.
+He placed on her bare shoulders the cape of red velvet embroidered with
+gold and lined with ermine, and said, in a low tone, but distinctly:
+
+"Therese, I love you.  Remember what I asked you the day before
+yesterday.  I shall be every day, at three o'clock, at our home, in the
+Rue Spontini."
+
+At this moment, as she made a motion with her head to receive the cloak,
+she saw Dechartre with his hand on the knob of the door.  He had heard.
+He looked at her with all the reproach and suffering that human eyes can
+contain.  Then he went into the dim corridor.  She felt hammers of fire
+beating in her chest and remained immovable on the threshold.
+
+"You were waiting for me?"  said Montessuy.  "You are left alone to-day.
+I will escort you and Miss Bell."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+A WHITE NIGHT
+
+In the carriage, and in her room, she saw again the look of her lover,
+that cruel and dolorous look.  She knew with what facility he fell into
+despair, the promptness of his will not to will.  She had seen him run
+away thus on the shore of the Arno.  Happy then in her sadness and in her
+anguish, she could run after him and say, "Come."  Now, again surrounded,
+watched, she should have found something to say, and not have let him go
+from her dumb and desolate.  She had remained surprised, stunned.  The
+accident had been so absurd and so rapid!  She had against Le Menil the
+sentiment of simple anger which malicious things cause.  She reproached
+herself bitterly for having permitted her lover to go without a word,
+without a glance, wherein she could have placed her soul.
+
+While Pauline waited to undress her, Therese walked to and fro
+impatiently.  Then she stopped suddenly.  In the obscure mirrors, wherein
+the reflections of the candles were drowned, she saw the corridor of the
+playhouse, and her beloved flying from her through it.
+
+Where was he now? What was he saying to himself alone?  It was torture
+for her not to be able to rejoin him and see him again at once.
+
+She pressed her heart with her hands; she was smothering.
+
+Pauline uttered a cry.  She saw drops of blood on the white corsage of
+her mistress.
+
+Therese, without knowing it, had pricked her hand with the red lily.
+
+She detached the emblematic jewel which she had worn before all as the
+dazzling secret of her heart, and, holding it in her fingers,
+contemplated it for a long time.  Then she saw again the days of
+Florence--the cell of San Marco, where her lover's kiss weighed
+delicately on her mouth, while, through her lowered lashes, she vaguely
+perceived again the angels and the sky painted on the wall, and the
+dazzling fountain of the ice-vender against the bright cloth; the
+pavilion of the Via Alfieri, its nymphs, its goats, and the room where
+the shepherds and the masks on the screens listened to her sighs and
+noted her long silences.
+
+No, all these things were not shadows of the past, spectres of ancient
+hours.  They were the present reality of her love.  And a word stupidly
+cast by a stranger would destroy these beautiful things!  Happily, it was
+not possible.  Her love, her lover, did not depend on such insignificant
+matters.  If only she could run to his house!  She would find him before
+the fire, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, sad.  Then she
+would run her fingers through his hair, force him to lift his head, to
+see that she loved him, that she was his treasure, palpitating with joy
+and love.
+
+She had dismissed her maid.  In her bed she thought of only one thing.
+
+It was an accident, an absurd accident.  He would understand it; he would
+know that their love had nothing to do with anything so stupid.  What
+folly for him to care about another!  As if there were other men in the
+world!
+
+M. Martin-Belleme half opened the bedroom door.  Seeing a light he went
+in.
+
+"You are not asleep, Therese?"
+
+He had been at a conference with his colleagues.  He wanted advice from
+his wife on certain points.  He needed to hear sincere words.
+
+"It is done," he said.  "You will help me, I am sure, in my situation,
+which is much envied, but very difficult and even perilous.  I owe it to
+you somewhat, since it came to me through the powerful influence of your
+father."
+
+He consulted her on the choice of a Chief of Cabinet.
+
+She advised him as best she could.  She thought he was sensible, calm,
+and not sillier than many others.
+
+He lost himself in reflections.
+
+"I have to defend before the Senate the budget voted by the Chamber of
+Deputies.  The budget contains innovations which I did not approve.  When
+I was a deputy I fought against them.  Now that I am a minister I must
+support them.  I saw things from the outside formerly.  I see them from
+the inside now, and their aspect is changed.  And, then, I am free no
+longer."
+
+He sighed:
+
+"Ah, if the people only knew the little that we can do when we are
+powerful!"
+
+He told her his impressions.  Berthier was reserved.  The others were
+impenetrable.  Loyer alone was excessively authoritative.
+
+She listened to him without attention and without impatience.  His pale
+face and voice marked for her like a clock the minutes that passed with
+intolerable slowness.
+
+Loyer had odd sallies of wit.  Immediately after he had declared his
+strict adhesion to the Concordat, he said: "Bishops are spiritual
+prefects.  I will protect them since they belong to me.  And through them
+I shall hold the guardians of souls, curates."
+
+He recalled to her that she would have to meet people who were not of her
+class and who would shock her by their vulgarity.  But his situation
+demanded that he should not disdain anybody.  At all events, he counted
+on her tact and on her devotion.
+
+She looked at him, a little astonished.
+
+"There is no hurry, my dear.  We shall see later."
+
+He was tired.  He said good-night and advised her to sleep.  She was
+ruining her health by reading all night.  He left her.
+
+She heard the noise of his footsteps, heavier than usual, while he
+traversed the library, encumbered with blue books and journals, to reach
+his room, where he would perhaps sleep.  Then she felt the weight on her
+of the night's silence.  She looked at her watch.  It was half-past one.
+
+She said to herself: "He, too, is suffering.  He looked at me with so
+much despair and anger."
+
+She was courageous and ardent.  She was impatient at being a prisoner.
+When daylight came, she would go, she would see him, she would explain
+everything to him.  It was so clear!  In the painful monotony of her
+thought, she listened  to the rolling of wagons which at long intervals
+passed on the quay.  That noise preoccupied, almost interested her.  She
+listened to the rumble, at first faint and distant, then louder, in which
+she could distinguish the rolling of the wheels, the creaking of the
+axles, the shock of horses' shoes, which, decreasing little by little,
+ended in an imperceptible murmur.
+
+And when silence returned, she fell again into her reverie.
+
+He would understand that she loved him, that she had never loved any one
+except him.  It was unfortunate that the night was so long.  She did not
+dare to look at her watch for fear of seeing in it the immobility of
+time.
+
+She rose, went to the window, and drew the curtains.  There was a pale
+light in the clouded sky.  She thought it might be the beginning of dawn.
+She looked at her watch.  It was half-past three.
+
+She returned to the window.  The sombre infinity outdoors attracted her.
+She looked.  The sidewalks shone under the gas-jets.  A gentle rain was
+falling.  Suddenly a voice ascended in the silence; acute, and then
+grave, it seemed to be made of several voices replying to one another.
+It--was a drunkard disputing with the beings of his dream, to whom he
+generously gave utterance, and whom he confounded afterward with great
+gestures and in furious sentences.  Therese could see the poor man walk
+along the parapet in his white blouse, and she could hear words recurring
+incessantly: "That is what I say to the government."
+
+Chilled, she returned to her bed.  She thought, "He is jealous, he is
+madly jealous.  It is a question of nerves and of blood.  But his love,
+too, is an affair of blood and of nerves.  His love and his jealousy are
+one and the same thing.  Another would understand.  It would be
+sufficient to please his self-love."  But he was jealous from the depth
+of his soul.  She knew this; she knew that in him jealousy was a physical
+torture, a wound enlarged by imagination.  She knew how profound the evil
+was.  She had seen him grow pale before the bronze St. Mark when she had
+thrown the letter in the box on the wall of the old Florentine house at a
+time when she was his only in dreams.
+
+She recalled his smothered complaints, his sudden fits of sadness, and
+the painful mystery of the words which he repeated frequently: "I can
+forget you only when I am with you."  She saw again the Dinard letter and
+his furious despair at a word overheard at a wine-shop table.  She felt
+that the blow had been struck accidentally at the most sensitive point,
+at the bleeding wound.  But she did not lose courage.  She would tell
+everything, she would confess everything, and all her avowals would say
+to him: "I love you.  I have never loved any one except you!"  She had
+not betrayed him.  She would tell him nothing that he had not guessed.
+She had lied so little, as little as possible, and then only not to give
+him pain.  How could he not understand?  It was better he should know
+everything, since everything meant nothing.  She represented to herself
+incessantly the same ideas, repeated to herself the same words.
+
+Her lamp gave only a smoky light.  She lighted candles.  It was six
+o'clock.  She realized that she had slept.  She ran to the window.  The
+sky was black, and mingled with the earth in a chaos of thick darkness.
+Then she was curious to know exactly at what hour the sun would rise.
+She had had no idea of this.  She thought only that nights were long in
+December.  She did not think of looking at the calendar.  The heavy step
+of workmen walking in squads, the noise of wagons of milkmen and
+marketmen, came to her ear like sounds of good augury.  She shuddered at
+this first awakening of the city.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+"I SEE THE OTHER WITH YOU ALWAYS!"
+
+At nine o'clock, in the yard of the little house, she observed M.
+Fusellier sweeping, in the rain, while smoking his pipe.  Madame
+Fusellier came out of her box.  Both looked embarrassed.  Madame
+Fusellier was the first to speak:
+
+"Monsieur Jacques is not at home."  And, as Therese remained silent,
+immovable, Fusellier came near her with his broom, hiding with his left
+hand his pipe behind his back
+
+"Monsieur Jacques has not yet come home."
+
+"I will wait for him," said Therese.
+
+Madame Fusellier led her to the parlor, where she lighted the fire.  As
+the wood smoked and would not flame, she remained bent, with her hands on
+her knees.
+
+"It is the rain," she said, "which causes the smoke."
+
+Madame Martin said it was not worth while to make a fire, that she did
+not feel cold.
+
+She saw herself in the glass.
+
+She was livid, with glowing spots on her cheeks.  Then only she felt that
+her feet were frozen.  She approached the fire.  Madame Fusellier, seeing
+her anxious, spoke softly to her:
+
+"Monsieur Jacques will come soon.  Let Madame warm herself while waiting
+for him."
+
+A dim light fell with the rain on the glass ceiling.
+
+Upon the wall, the lady with the unicorn was not beautiful among the
+cavaliers in a forest full of flowers and birds.  Therese was repeating
+to herself the words: "He has not yet come home."  And by dint of saying
+this she lost the meaning of it.  With burning eyes she looked at the
+door.
+
+She remained thus without a movement, without a thought, for a time the
+duration of which she did not know; perhaps half an hour.  The noise of a
+footstep came to her, the door was opened.  He came in.  She saw that he
+was wet with rain and mud, and burning with fever.
+
+She fixed on him a look so sincere and so frank that it struck him.
+But almost at once he recalled within himself all his sufferings.
+
+He said to her:
+
+"What do you want of me?  You have done me all the harm you could do me."
+
+Fatigue gave him an air of gentleness.  It frightened her.
+
+"Jacques, listen to me!"
+
+He motioned to her that he wished to hear nothing from her.
+
+"Jacques, listen to me.  I have not deceived you.  Oh, no, I have not
+deceived you.  Was it possible?  Was it--"
+
+He interrupted her:
+
+"Have some pity for me.  Do not make me suffer again.  Leave me, I pray
+you.  If you knew the night I have passed, you would not have the courage
+to torment me again."
+
+He let himself fall on the divan. He had walked all night.  Not to suffer
+too much, he had tried to find diversions.  On the Bercy Quay he had
+looked at the moon floating in the clouds.  For an hour he had seen it
+veil itself and reappear.  Then he had counted the windows of houses with
+minute care.  The rain began to fall.  He had gone to the market and had
+drunk whiskey in a wine-room.  A big girl who squinted had said to him,
+"You don't look happy."  He had fallen half asleep on the leather bench.
+It had been a moment of oblivion.  The images of that painful night
+passed before his eyes.  He said: "I recalled the night of the Arno.  You
+have spoiled for me all the joy and beauty in the world." He asked her to
+leave him alone.  In his lassitude he had a great pity for himself.  He
+would have liked to sleep--not to die; he held death in horror--but to
+sleep and never to wake again.  Yet, before him, as desirable as
+formerly, despite the painful fixity of her dry eyes, and more mysterious
+than ever, he saw her.  His hatred was vivified by suffering.
+
+She extended her arms to him. "Listen to me, Jacques." He motioned to her
+that it was useless for her to speak.  Yet he wished to listen to her,
+and already he was listening with avidity.  He detested and rejected in
+advance what she would say, but nothing else in the world interested him.
+
+She said:
+
+"You may have believed I was betraying you, that I was not living for you
+alone.  But can you not understand anything?  You do not see that if that
+man were my lover it would not have been necessary for him to talk to me
+at the play-house in that box; he would have a thousand other ways of
+meeting me.  Oh, no, my friend, I assure you that since the day when I
+had the happiness to meet you, I have been yours entirely.  Could I have
+been another's?  What you imagine is monstrous.  But I love you, I love
+you!  I love only you.  I never have loved any one except you."
+
+He replied slowly, with cruel heaviness:
+
+"'I shall be every day, at three o'clock, at our home, in the Rue
+Spontini.' It was not a lover, your lover, who said these things?  No!
+it was a stranger, an unknown person."
+
+She straightened herself, and with painful gravity said:
+
+"Yes, I had been his.  You knew it.  I have denied it, I have told an
+untruth, not to irritate or grieve you.  I saw you so anxious.  But I
+lied so little and so badly.  You knew.  Do not reproach me for it.  You
+knew; you often spoke to me of the past, and then one day somebody told
+you at the restaurant--and you imagined much more than ever happened.
+While telling an untruth, I was not deceiving you.  If you knew the
+little that he was in my life!  There!  I did not know you.  I did not
+know you were to come.  I was lonely."
+
+She fell on her knees.
+
+"I was wrong.  I should have waited for you.  But if you knew how slight
+a matter that was in my life!"
+
+And with her voice modulated to a soft and singing complaint she said:
+
+"Why did you not come sooner, why?"
+
+She dragged herself to him, tried to take his hands.  He repelled her.
+
+"I was stupid.  I did not think.  I did not know.  I did not wish to
+know."
+
+He rose and exclaimed, in an explosion of hatred:
+
+"I did not wish him to be that man."
+
+She sat in the place which he had left, and there, plaintively, in a low
+voice, she explained the past.  In that time she lived in a world
+horribly commonplace.  She had yielded, but she had regretted at once.
+If he but knew the sadness of her life he would not be jealous.  He would
+pity her.  She shook her head and said, looking at him through the
+falling locks of her hair:
+
+"I am talking to you of another woman.  There is nothing in common
+between that woman and me.  I exist only since I have known you, since I
+have belonged to you."
+
+He walked about the room madly.  He laughed painfully.
+
+"Yes; but while you loved me, the other woman--the one who was not you?"
+
+She looked at him indignantly:
+
+"Can you believe--"
+
+"Did you not see him again at Florence?  Did you not accompany him to the
+station?"
+
+She told him that he had come to Italy to find her; that she had seen
+him; that she had broken with him; that he had gone, irritated, and that
+since then he was trying to win her back; but that she had not even paid
+any attention to him.
+
+"My beloved, I see, I know, only you in the world."  He shook his head.
+
+"I do not believe you."
+
+She revolted.
+
+"I have told you everything.  Accuse me, condemn me, but do not offend me
+in my love for you."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Leave me.  You have harmed me too much.  I have loved you so much that
+all the pain which you could have given me I would have taken, kept,
+loved; but this is too hideous.  I hate it.  Leave me.  I am suffering
+too much.  Farewell!"
+
+She stood erect.
+
+"I have come.  It is my happiness, it is my life, I am fighting for.  I
+will not go."
+
+And she said again all that she had already said.  Violent and sincere,
+sure of herself, she explained how she had broken the tie which was
+already loose and irritated her; how since the day when she had loved him
+she had been his only, without regret, without a wandering look or
+thought.  But in speaking to him of another she irritated him.  And he
+shouted at her:
+
+"I do not believe you."
+
+She only repeated her declarations.
+
+And suddenly, instinctively, she looked at her watch:
+
+"Oh, it is noon!"
+
+She had often given that cry of alarm when the farewell hour had
+surprised them.  And Jacques shuddered at the phrase which was so
+familiar, so painful, and was this time so desperate.  For a few minutes
+more she said ardent words and shed tears.  Then she left him; she had
+gained nothing.
+
+At her house she found in the waiting-room the marketwoman, who had come
+to present a bouquet to her.  She remembered that her husband was a State
+minister.  There were telegrams, visiting-cards and letters,
+congratulations and solicitations.  Madame Marmet wrote to recommend her
+nephew to General Lariviere.
+
+She went into the dining-room and fell in a chair.  M. Martin-Belleme was
+just finishing his breakfast.  He was expected at the Cabinet Council and
+at the former Finance Minister's, to whom he owed a call.
+
+"Do not forget, my dear friend, to call on Madame Berthier d'Eyzelles.
+You know how sensitive she is."
+
+She made no answer.  While he was dipping his fingers in the glass bowl,
+he saw she was so tired that he dared not say any more.  He found himself
+in the presence of a secret which he did not wish to know; in presence of
+an intimate suffering which one word would reveal.  He felt anxiety,
+fear, and a certain respect.
+
+He threw down his napkin.
+
+"Excuse me, dear."
+
+He went out.
+
+She tried to eat, but could swallow nothing.
+
+At two o'clock she returned to the little house of the Ternes.  She found
+Jacques in his room.  He was smoking a wooden pipe.  A cup of coffee
+almost empty was on the table.  He looked at her with a harshness that
+chilled her.  She dared not talk, feeling that everything that she could
+say would offend and irritate him, and yet she knew that in remaining
+discreet and dumb she intensified his anger.  He knew that she would
+return; he had waited for her with impatience.  A sudden light came to
+her, and she saw that she had done wrong to come; that if she had been
+absent he would have desired, wanted, called for her, perhaps.  But it
+was too late; and, at all events, she was not trying to be crafty.
+
+She said to him:
+
+"You see I have returned.  I could not do otherwise.  And then it was
+natural, since I love you.  And you know it."
+
+She knew very well that all she could say would only irritate him.  He
+asked her whether that was the way she spoke in the Rue Spontini.
+
+She looked at him with sadness.
+
+"Jacques, you have often told me that there were hatred and anger in your
+heart against me.  You like to make me suffer.  I can see it."
+
+With ardent patience, at length, she told him her entire life, the little
+that she had put into it; the sadness of the past; and how, since he had
+known her, she had lived only through him and in him.
+
+The words fell as limpid as her look.  She sat near him.  He listened to
+her with bitter avidity.  Cruel with himself, he wished to know
+everything about her last meetings with the other.  She reported
+faithfully the events of the Great Britain Hotel; but she changed the
+scene to the outside, in an alley of the Casino, from fear that the image
+of their sad interview in a closed room should irritate her lover.  Then
+she explained the meeting at the station.  She had not wished to cause
+despair to a suffering man who was so violent.  But since then she had
+had no news from him until the day when he spoke to her on the street.
+She repeated what she had replied to him.  Two days later she had seen
+him at the opera, in her box.  Certainly, she had not encouraged him to
+come.  It was the truth.
+
+It was the truth.  But the old poison, slowly accumulating in his mind,
+burned him.  She made the past, the irreparable past, present to him, by
+her avowals.  He saw images of it which tortured him.  He said:
+
+"I do not believe you."
+
+And he added:
+
+"And if I believed you, I could not see you again, because of the idea
+that you have loved that man.  I have told you, I have written to you,
+you remember, that I did not wish him to be that man.  And since--"
+
+He stopped.
+
+She said:
+
+"You know very well that since then nothing has happened."
+
+He replied, with violence:
+
+"Since then I have seen him."
+
+They remained silent for a long time.  Then she said, surprised and
+plaintive:
+
+"But, my friend, you should have thought that a woman such as I, married
+as I was--every day one sees women bring to their lovers a past darker
+than mine and yet they inspire love.  Ah, my past--if you knew how
+insignificant it was!"
+
+"I know what you can give.  One can not forgive to you what one may
+forgive to another."
+
+"But, my friend, I am like others."
+
+"No, you are not like others.  To you one can not forgive anything."
+
+He talked with set teeth.  His eyes, which she had seen so large, glowing
+with tenderness, were now dry, harsh, narrowed between wrinkled lids and
+cast a new glance at her.  He frightened her.  She went to the rear of
+the room, sat on a chair, and there she remained, trembling, for a long
+time, smothered by her sobs.  Then she broke into tears.
+
+He sighed:
+
+"Why did I ever know you?"
+
+She replied, weeping:
+
+"I do not regret having known you.  I am dying of it, and I do not regret
+it.  I have loved."
+
+He stubbornly continued to make her suffer.  He felt that he was playing
+an odious part, but he could not stop.
+
+"It is possible, after all, that you have loved me too."
+
+She answered, with soft bitterness:
+
+"But I have loved only you.  I have loved you too much.  And it is for
+that you are punishing me.  Oh, can you think that I was to another what
+I have been to you?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+She looked at him without force and without courage.
+
+"It is true that you do not believe me."
+
+She added softly:
+
+"If I killed myself would you believe me?"
+
+"No, I would not believe you."
+
+She wiped her cheeks with her handkerchief; then, lifting her eyes,
+shining through her tears, she said:
+
+"Then, all is at an end!"
+
+She rose, saw again in the room the thousand things with which she had
+lived in laughing intimacy, which she had regarded as hers, now suddenly
+become nothing to her, and confronting her as a stranger and an enemy.
+She saw again the nude woman who made, while running, the gesture which
+had not been explained to her; the Florentine models which recalled to
+her Fiesole and the enchanted hours of Italy; the profile sketch by
+Dechartre of the girl who laughed in her pretty pathetic thinness.  She
+stopped a moment sympathetically in front of that little newspaper girl
+who had come there too, and had disappeared, carried away in the
+irresistible current of life and of events.
+
+She repeated:
+
+"Then all is at an end?"
+
+He remained silent.
+
+The twilight made the room dim.
+
+"What will become of me?"  she asked.
+
+"And what will become of me?"  he replied.
+
+They looked at each other with sympathy, because each was moved with
+self-pity.
+
+Therese said again:
+
+"And I, who feared to grow old in your eyes, for fear our beautiful love
+should end!  It would have been better if it had never come.  Yes, it
+would be better if I had not been born.  What a presentiment was that
+which came to me, when a child, under the lindens of Joinville, before
+the marble nymphs!  I wished to die then."
+
+Her arms fell, and clasping her hands she lifted her eyes; her wet glance
+threw a light in the shadows.
+
+"Is there not a way of my making you feel that what I am saying to you
+is true?  That never since I have been yours, never--  But how could I?
+The very idea of it seems horrible, absurd.  Do you know me so little?"
+
+He shook his head sadly. "I do not know you."
+
+She questioned once more with her eyes all the objects in the room.
+
+"But then, what we have been to each other was vain, useless.  Men and
+women break themselves against one another; they do not mingle."
+
+She revolted.  It was not possible that he should not feel what he was to
+her.  And, in the ardor of her love, she threw herself on him and
+smothered him with kisses and tears. He forgot everything, and took her
+in his arms--sobbing, weak, yet happy--and clasped her close with the
+fierceness of desire.  With her head leaning back against the pillow, she
+smiled through her tears.  Then, brusquely he disengaged himself.
+
+"I do not see you alone.  I see the other with you always." She looked at
+him, dumb, indignant, desperate.  Then, feeling that all was indeed at an
+end, she cast around her a surprised glance of her unseeing eyes, and
+went slowly away.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Does one ever possess what one loves?
+Each was moved with self-pity
+Everybody knows about that
+(Housemaid) is trained to respect my disorder
+I can forget you only when I am with you
+I have to pay for the happiness you give me
+I love myself because you love me
+Ideas they think superior to love--faith, habits, interests
+Immobility of time
+It is an error to be in the right too soon
+It was torture for her not to be able to rejoin him
+Kissses and caresses are the effort of a delightful despair
+Let us give to men irony and pity as witnesses and judges
+Little that we can do when we are powerful
+Love is a soft and terrible force, more powerful than beauty
+Nothing is so legitimate, so human, as to deceive pain
+One is never kind when one is in love
+One should never leave the one whom one loves
+Seemed to him that men were grains in a coffee-mill
+Since she was in love, she had lost prudence
+That absurd and generous fury for ownership
+The politician never should be in advance of circumstances
+The real support of a government is the Opposition
+There is nothing good except to ignore and to forget
+We are too happy; we are robbing life
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Red Lily, v3
+by Anatole France
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE RED LILY, ENTIRE:
+
+A woman is frank when she does not lie uselessly
+A hero must be human.  Napoleon was human
+Anti-Semitism is making fearful progress everywhere
+Brilliancy of a fortune too new
+Curious to know her face of that day
+Disappointed her to escape the danger she had feared
+Do you think that people have not talked about us?
+Does not wish one to treat it with either timidity or brutality
+Does one ever possess what one loves?
+Each had regained freedom, but he did not like to be alone
+Each was moved with self-pity
+Everybody knows about that
+Fringe which makes an unlovely border to the city
+Gave value to her affability by not squandering it
+He could not imagine that often words are the same as actions
+He studied until the last moment
+He is not intelligent enough to doubt
+He does not bear ill-will to those whom he persecutes
+He knew now the divine malady of love
+Her husband had become quite bearable
+His habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth
+(Housemaid) is trained to respect my disorder
+I love myself because you love me
+I can forget you only when I am with you
+I wished to spoil our past
+I feel in them (churches) the grandeur of nothingness
+I have to pay for the happiness you give me
+I gave myself to him because he loved me
+I haven't a taste, I have tastes
+I have known things which I know no more
+I do not desire your friendship
+Ideas they think superior to love--faith, habits, interests
+Immobility of time
+Impatient at praise which was not destined for himself
+Incapable of conceiving that one might talk without an object
+It was torture for her not to be able to rejoin him
+It is an error to be in the right too soon
+It was too late: she did not wish to win
+Jealous without having the right to be jealous
+Kissses and caresses are the effort of a delightful despair
+Knew that life is not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope
+Laughing in every wrinkle of his face
+Learn to live without desire
+Let us give to men irony and pity as witnesses and judges
+Life as a whole is too vast and too remote
+Life is made up of just such trifles
+Life is not a great thing
+Little that we can do when we are powerful
+Love is a soft and terrible force, more powerful than beauty
+Love was only a brief intoxication
+Lovers never separate kindly
+Made life give all it could yield
+Magnificent air of those beggars of whom small towns are proud
+Miserable beings who contribute to the grandeur of the past
+Nobody troubled himself about that originality
+None but fools resisted the current
+Not everything is known, but everything is said
+Nothing is so legitimate, so human, as to deceive pain
+One would think that the wind would put them out: the stars
+One who first thought of pasting a canvas on a panel
+One is never kind when one is in love
+One should never leave the one whom one loves
+Picturesquely ugly
+Recesses of her mind which she preferred not to open
+Relatives whom she did not know and who irritated her
+Seemed to him that men were grains in a coffee-mill
+She pleased society by appearing to find pleasure in it
+She is happy, since she likes to remember
+Should like better to do an immoral thing than a cruel one
+Simple people who doubt neither themselves nor others
+Since she was in love, she had lost prudence
+So well satisfied with his reply that he repeated it twice
+Superior men sometimes lack cleverness
+That sort of cold charity which is called altruism
+That if we live the reason is that we hope
+That absurd and generous fury for ownership
+The most radical breviary of scepticism since Montaigne
+The door of one's room opens on the infinite
+The past is the only human reality -- Everything that is, is past
+The one whom you will love and who will love you will harm you
+The violent pleasure of losing
+The discouragement which the irreparable gives
+The real support of a government is the Opposition
+The politician never should be in advance of circumstances
+There is nothing good except to ignore and to forget
+There are many grand and strong things which you do not feel
+They are the coffin saying: 'I am the cradle'
+To be beautiful, must a woman have that thin form
+Trying to make Therese admire what she did not know
+Umbrellas, like black turtles under the watery skies
+Unfortunate creature who is the plaything of life
+Was I not warned enough of the sadness of everything?
+We are too happy; we are robbing life
+What will be the use of having tormented ourselves in this world
+Whether they know or do not know, they talk
+Women do not always confess it, but it is always their fault
+You must take me with my own soul!
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Red Lily, entire
+by Anatole France
+
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