CHAPTER XV

COLETTE'S SPITE

This delightful existence had been going on for about two months with nothing to break its sweet monotony but the pain of parting and the joy of meeting when, one morning, just as René was about to proceed to the Rue des Dames, Françoise handed him a letter that made him start, for on it he recognised Claude Larcher's handwriting. By calling at Larcher's rooms René had learnt from Ferdinand that the writer had stopped at Florence and then at Pisa. He had even sent him a letter to each of these towns addressed _poste restante_, but had received no reply. He saw by the postmark that Claude was now in Venice, and with feelings of intense curiosity he tore open the envelope, reading the contents as he strolled down to the river through the quiet suburban streets on this fair spring morn that was as fresh and bright as his own love.

'Venice, Palais Dario: April, 1879.

'My DEAR RENÉ,--I am writing you these lines from your Venice--from that Venice whence you evoked the cruel features of your Cœlia and the sweet face of your Beatrice; and as this fairy-like city is, as it always was, the land of improbabilities, the city of the Undines, which on these Eastern shores are called sirens, I have, like Byron, discovered a small furnished suite in a most delightful little palace on the Grand Canal, a _palazzino_ with marble medallions on its façade, all ornamented, carved, and engraved, and leaning as badly as I do on my bad days. As I scribble this letter I have the blue waters of the Canal Grande under my window and around me the peace of this great city--the Cora Pearl of the Adriatic, a wretched play-writer would say--like the silence of a dream. My dear fellow, why have I brought my battered old heart here of all places--here, where I feel it beat louder and stronger in the sweet stillness? I must tell you that it is two o'clock, that I have just breakfasted at Florian's under the arcades after having been to San Giorgio in Bragora to look at a divine Cima, that I am to dine to-night with two ladies directly descended from the Doges--fair as the creations of Veronese--and some Russians as amusing as our friend Beyle's Korazoff, and that, instead of feeling elated, I have come home to look at Her Portrait--with a capital H and a capital P--the portrait of Colette! René, René, why am I not seated in my stall at the Théâtre Français, gazing at her as Camille in "On ne badine pas avec l'amour"--a divine play, as bitter as "Adolphe," yet as sweet as the music of Mozart? Do you remember her smile as she holds her pretty head on one side and says, "Are you sure that a woman lies with all her soul when her tongue lies?" Do you remember Perdican and these words: "Pride, thou most fatal of human counsellors, why art thou come between this maid and me?" All my story--all our story lies in those few words. Only it happens that I am the real Perdican of the play, having in my soul that source of idealism and love, ever flowing in spite of experience, ever pure in spite of so many sins! And she, my Camille, has been stained by so much shame that nought can wash her clean! Alas! how sadly the world treated my flower--when I wished to inhale its fragrance I found instead a smell as of the grave.

'Come, come, it was not to write you such stuff that I sat down before my balcony, through the carving of which I can see the gondolas pass. They glide and slant and turn about, looking so pretty with their slim, funereal shapes. If each of these floating biers carried away one of my dead dreams, what an interminable procession there would be on the dreary waters! Would that I were an etcher! I know what Dance of Death I would engrave--a flight of these black barques in the twilight, with white skeletons as gondoliers at the prow and poop, and a row of ruined palaces for a background. Under it I should write: "Such is my heart!" After a youth more down-trodden than the grapes in the wine-tubs, and when I had just emerged from the miserable drudgery of my profession, it was this horrible slavery of love that stared me in the face--this love with its basis of hatred and contempt! Why, just Heaven!--why? Who could have guessed on that July evening when this madness began that I was entering upon one of the most solemn periods of my life? I had been dining alone after a hard day's work, and, in order to get a little fresh air and pass the time until ten o'clock, I was just strolling wherever my fancy took me, gazing idly at the passers-by. What invisible demon led my steps to the Comédie Française? Why did I go up into the green-room, where I had not been for months, to shake hands with old Farguet, about whom I did not care a rap? Why had I such a ready flow of wit and such brilliant repartee at my command at that very moment--I who, at fashionable dinners, had frequently found myself as dumb as the carp _à la Chambord_ on the dish? Why was Colette there in that adorable costume that belongs to the old _répertoire_? She was playing Rosine in the "Barber of Seville," and I went to the front to hear her sing the air, "When Love brings us spring again." Why did she look at me as she sang it, and show such real emotion that I dared scarcely believe it was meant for me? Why had she those lips, those eyes, that face on which might be read the sufferings of a conquered Psyche, a prey to love? How passionately we loved each other from that very first evening! And it was only the second time we had met. Can you understand how I was mad enough to expect fidelity from a girl who had thrown herself at me in that fashion? As soon as I got back behind the scenes she invited me into her dressing-room, and before we had been there a quarter of an hour her lips were pressed to mine in most painful ecstasy. Fool that I was! I ought to have taken her for what she was--a charming courtesan--and remembered that women are just the same to others as they are to us. Instead of which--

'Let us leave this road, my dear René, for I perceive a finger-post on which is written "To despair," like the posts in that forest of Fontainebleau where I took her one summer morning in a dog-cart drawn by a black horse named Cerberus. I can see the horse now, with a fox-tail hanging down over his forehead, and my Colette beside me, looking pale, but so beautiful. When was she not beautiful to me? But let us leave, I say, this fatal road, and come to the present, of which I owe you an account, since you have been good enough to write me several such nice letters. When I left you in the Rue Coëtlogon and hied me off to Italy--it sounds like a song!--I wanted to see whether I could do without her. Well, the experiment has been made--and has failed. I cannot. I have argued with myself, and I have struggled long and hard. Since my departure I have got up not ten--but twenty, thirty times, and sworn not to think of her during the whole of that day. It's all right for a quarter of an hour, for half an hour even. But at the end of that time I see her again. I see her eyes and her mouth, I see those gestures I have seen in none other--the pretty way she had, for instance, of laying her head on my shoulder when I held her in my arms, and then, wherever I may be, I am obliged to stop and lean against a wall, so sharp is the pain that pierces my heart. Would you believe that I had to leave Florence because I spent my time in the "Uffizi" before Botticelli's "Madonna Incoronata," a photo of which you have seen in my rooms? I have sometimes taken a cab from the other end of the town in order to reach the gallery before closing time, so that I might gaze upon the canvas once more. The angel on the right, the one that lifts the curtain, is the very image of her, and wears that look which has so often made me pity Colette and bewail her misfortune when I ought to have killed her.

'So I left Florence and came to Pisa, the dead city whose sweet silence had enchanted me in days gone by. I had taken an immense fancy to the square in which stand the Dome, the Baptistery, and the Belfry, with a cemetery wall and the remains of a battlemented rampart to enclose it. Then there was the shore of the Gombo two hours distant--a sandy desert among the pines--and the yellow Arno flowing sluggishly by! My room looked out upon the dreary river, but it was full of sunshine, warm and clear, and I had come there filled with a glorious plan. An old maxim of Goethe had come into my mind, "Poetry is deliverance!" "I will try it," I said to myself, and I swore not to leave Pisa before I had turned my grief into literature. Perhaps, in making bubbles out of the tears I had already shed, I might forget to shed fresh ones. These bubbles grew into a story which I called _Analysis._ You have no doubt read it in the _Revue parisienne._ Don't you think it as good as anything I have done? As you see, it is the whole story of my sad love; every detail is absolutely correct, from the episode of the letter to my jealousy of the Sapphos. What do you think of Colette--isn't she well drawn? And of me? Alas! my dear fellow, would that I had obtained peace of mind by besmirching the image of her I have so loved, by dragging in the dirt the idol once adorned with freshest roses, by dishonouring the dear past with all the strength at my command! Hear the result of this noble effort--I had no sooner posted the manuscript of this story than I went home and wrote to Colette asking her to forgive me. An excellent joke, this maxim of Goethe--a sublime Philistine and a Jupiter, as they used to style him! I have plunged a pen into my wound to use my blood for ink, and I have only poisoned myself afresh. If I am to be cured at all, time is the only thing that will cure me. But, after all, why be cured?

'Yes, why? I have been proud--I am proud no longer. I have struggled against the passion that abased me--I will struggle no more. If I had the cancer in my cheek, should I be ashamed of it? Well, I have a cancer in my soul, and make no attempt to check its growth. Listen to the end of my story. Colette did not answer my letter. Could I expect her to be kind to me after my behaviour? I had already begun to humble myself by writing to her. I went on doing so. Then I commenced to feel such delight as I had never felt before--that of degrading myself before her, of letting her trample upon my manly dignity. I wrote to her a second, a third, a fourth time.

'My novel appeared, and I wrote to her again--letters in which I delighted in humbling myself, letters that she might show about and say: "He has left me, he insults me, and yet see how he loves me!" Should not those very insults have proved to her how much I loved her? You don't know her, René; you don't know how proud she is, in spite of all her faults. What pain that wretched novel must have caused her I scarcely dare to think, and that, too, is why I dare not come back. In my present state of mind I could not possibly face a scene such as we used to have, and to live longer without her is equally beyond me. I have therefore decided, my dear René, to ask you to go and speak to her. I know that she has always liked you, and that she is really grateful to you for the pretty _rôle_ you wrote her. I know that she will believe you when you say to her, "Claude can stand it no longer--have pity on him." Tell her, too, René, that she need have no fear of my horrible temper. The rebellious Larcher she could not bear exists no longer. To be near her, to live in her shadow, to have her near me, I will tolerate all, all--you understand. Our last months together were not all honey, it is true, but what a paradise they were compared with this Inferno of absence! And we had our happy hours, too--those afternoons we spent together in her rooms in the Rue de Rivoli, overlooking the gardens of the Tuileries. The bustle of the great city went on around us as I held my darling pressed to my heart. See how my hand trembles only to think of it! If I have ever done you a service in the past, as you say I have, be my friend now and call on her, show her this letter, speak to her, appeal to her heart. Ask her to say that she forgives me and that I may come back to her. Good-bye. I await your reply in agony, and you know what torture that machine is capable of suffering which calls itself your old friend.

'C. L.

'P.S.--Go to the _Revue_ office and ask for five copies of my story; I can get rid of them here.'

'How like him!' said René, after having read this strange epistle, which was nothing but a bundle of the different elements that made up Claude's composite personality. Childish sincerity wedded to a taste for dramatic display; a love of posing even when suffering bitter anguish; most susceptible professional vanity and an absolute lack of all pretensions; profound self-knowledge and total inability to govern himself--all this was there. 'I shall go to the theatre to-night if Colette is playing,' said René to himself. He bought a paper and saw her name in the list for that evening. 'But,' he thought, 'how will she receive me?'

He was so interested in what would happen and so moved by his dear friend's grief that he could not help telling Suzanne all about it as soon as he reached the trysting-place. He even gave her the letter to read, and as she handed it back to him she said: 'Poor fellow!' adding, in an indifferent tone, 'Haven't you really ever mentioned me when talking together?'

'Yes, once, quite casually,' replied René, with some hesitation. Since he had become Suzanne's lover he had never forgiven himself for the question he had put to Claude about her--the unfortunate question which had drawn down upon him the sarcasm of his friend.

Suzanne mistook the cause of his hesitation and returned to the charge. 'I am sure that he said something nasty about me?'

'Indeed, he didn't,' replied René, in a tone of assurance. He was too well acquainted with the play of Suzanne's face not to have remarked the look of anxiety in her eyes as she put her second question, and he, in his turn, now asked: 'How you distrust him! Why?'

'Why?' she repeated with a smile; 'because I love you so dearly, René, and men are so bad.' Then, wishing to entirely destroy the effect that her excessive distrust might have produced in the poet, she added, 'You must go and see Mademoiselle Rigaud.'

'Certainly I must,' said René; 'I intend going to-night And you?' he asked, as he often did, 'how are you going to spend your evening?'

'I am going to the theatre, too,' she replied; 'but not behind the scenes. My husband wants to take me to the Gymnase. Why do you put me in mind of it? I shall be quite miserable enough when I'm there all alone with him. . . Come, give me a nice kiss.'

That voice, sweet as the sweetest music, was still in the poet's ears, and his soul was still troubled by those kisses, more intoxicating than strong drink, when about nine that night he entered the stage door of the Théâtre Français in order to reach the celebrated green-room. He cast a glance round the doorkeeper's lodge, remembering that the room had been one of the stations in Claude's Calvary. Frequently, when entering the theatre together, Larcher would say to his friend as he pointed to the pigeon-hole that contained Colette's letters: 'If I stole them I should perhaps know the truth.'

'How happy I am,' thought René, 'not to know that terrible malady called suspicion!' And he smiled as he ascended the staircase, whose walls are covered with the portraits of actors and actresses of a bygone age. There, fixed on the canvas, are the grinning faces of past Scapins--there the Célimènes, who lived and loved long years ago, still smile down upon us. These reminders of mirth for ever vanished, of passions for ever stilled, of once happy generations for ever gone, have something strangely sad about them for the dreamers who feel their life, like all life, slipping away, and who realise the brevity of human joys.

Often had René experienced this feeling of vague sadness; it came over him again now, in spite of himself, and made him hasten to the green-room, expecting to find a good many acquaintances there with whom he might exchange a few words of greeting. But he found the place entirely given up to two actors in Louis XIV. costumes, their heads adorned with enormous wigs, their legs incased in red stockings, and their feet cramped in high-heeled shoes. They were engaged in a political argument, and took no notice of the poet, who heard one of them, a long, thin, bilious-looking creature, say to the other, a round, red-faced individual, 'All the misfortunes of our country arise from the fact that people do not take sufficient interest in politics.'

'What a pity Larcher isn't here!' thought René as he caught these words; he knew what pleasure they would have given his friend, the exclamation that would have escaped him--'This is grand!'--and how he would have clapped his hands with delight. Everything in this part of the theatre reminded him of Claude, who had so often accompanied him there. They had sat together in the little green-room, now empty. Together they had descended the few steps that lead behind the scenes, and, slipping in between the properties, had mingled with the actors and actresses standing in the narrow passage waiting for their calls.

Colette was not there, and René determined to go up the steep staircase and along the interminable corridors lined with private dressing-rooms. He at length reached the door that bore the name of Mademoiselle Rigaud; he knocked, feebly at first, but conversation was probably going on inside, and he was not heard. He had to knock louder. 'Come in!' cried a shrill voice, which he recognised; it was the same that could make itself so sweet to recite:

If kisses for kisses the roses could pay . . .

On opening the door the visitor entered a tiny ante-room, which communicated with a tiny dressing-room. René lifted the gilt-embroidered curtain of black satin that divided the two miniature apartments, and found himself in an atmosphere overheated by the lamps and the presence of six people; five of these were men, two in evening dress being evidently 'swells,' and the other three friends of the actress of a slightly inferior order. One of the two black-coated gentlemen was Salvaney, but he did not recognise René. He and his friend were the only two who were seated. The ottoman on which they sat had been recovered with an old Chinese dress of pink satin; it was Claude who had given Colette that dress, and who, in the heyday of their love, had presided over the arrangement of the whole dressing-room. He had ransacked Paris to collect the panels set in bamboo frames which adorned the walls. Three of these panels bore figures of Chinese women painted on pale silk. The widest, which, like the heavy curtain, was of black satin, represented a flight of white birds amidst peach blossoms and lilies of the valley. Bright-coloured fans and bunches of peacock's feathers distributed here and there, and a great gilt dragon with enamelled eyes suspended from the ceiling, helped to give this pretty little cabin an air of charming originality.

Colette, with her hair all undone and her bare arms emerging from the wide sleeves of a loose bright blue dressing-gown, was 'making up' under the gaze of the five men. Before her, on the dressing-table, stood a whole row of pots filled with different salves. There were other pots, containing white, yellow, and pink powder, and a few saucers filled with long 'tragedy' pins, while hare's feet covered with paint, enormous powder puffs, black pencils, and small sponges lay scattered all about. The actress could see who entered by looking in the large glass before her. Recognising the author of the 'Sigisbée,' she half turned and showed him her hands covered with vaseline as an apology for not offering him one, and by the look she gave him René understood how prudent Claude had been in not coming back without some previous understanding.

'Good evening!' she cried. 'Why, I thought you were dead, but I see by your face that you've only had an excess of happiness. I'm playing you to-morrow, you know. Sit down, if you can find room.' And before René had time to reply she turned to Salvaney, saying: 'Well, I will if you like. Come for me to-morrow at twelve. Aline will be there, and we'll go and have lunch together first.'

Having uttered these words, she darted another look at René. The lines of her mouth deepened, and her charming face suddenly assumed an expression of intense cruelty. The words had really been hurled in defiance at Claude through his most intimate friend. This friend would certainly repeat them to the jealous lover. It was just as if she had shouted through space to the man whom she could not forget in spite of his flight and his insults: 'You are not here, and so I do exactly what will cause you most pain.'

She then exchanged a few words with the other visitors, recommending some poor fellow in whom she was interested to one, importuning another for the insertion of a complimentary notice in some paper, returning to Salvaney to ask him for a tip for the next races, until at last, having wiped her hands, she rose and said, 'And now, my dear fellows, it is very kind of you to stay, but'--pointing to the door--'I am going to dress, so you must go. No, not you,' she went on, speaking to René, and not minding the others, 'I want to talk to you for a minute.' As soon as they were alone, and she was again seated before the glass pencilling her eyebrows, she asked, 'Have you read Claude's infamous work?'

'No,' replied René, 'but I have received a letter from him; he is terribly unhappy.'

'Oh! haven't you read it?' cried Colette, interrupting him. 'Well, read it! You will see what a cad your friend is!' Crossing her arms, she turned to face the poet, the angry glitter in her eyes intensified by their painted rings and by the artificial pallor of her cheeks. 'Tell me, is it right for a man to insult a woman? What have I done to this gentleman? I refused to slavishly obey his whims, to cut off all my friends, and lead the life of a dog! Did he imagine that I was his wife? Did he keep me? Did I ask him for an account of what he did? And even if I had been in the wrong, was that why he must go and tell the public all the lies he can invent about me? He's a cad, I tell you--a low cad! You can write and tell him so from me, and tell him that I shall spit in his face when I see him! Your fine gentleman treated me like a drab, did he? Well, he shall find out how the drab takes her revenge! Not yet, Mélanie,' she said, as the dresser came in, 'I'll call you in a quarter of an hour.'

'But if he did not love you,' replied René, taking advantage of this interruption, 'he would not carry on in this fashion. He is maddened by grief.'

'Oh! don't come to me with such rubbish,' cried Colette, shrugging her shoulders and again setting to work on her eyebrows; 'do you think that creature has got a heart? And he's no friend of yours, my dear fellow. If you had heard him making fun of your love affairs you would know what to think of him.'

'Of my love affairs?' repeated René, in blank astonishment.

'Come, come,' said the actress, with a nasty laugh, 'it's no use trying to bluff me; but when you want a confidant, choose a better one than your friend Monsieur Larcher?'

'I don't understand you,' replied the poet, his heart beating fast; 'I have never made a confidant of him.'

'Then he must have invented the story of your being in love with Madame Moraines, that pretty, fair woman, the mistress of old Desforges. Well, that beats all!' exclaimed the cruel actress, with the bitter and ironical laugh of a creature whose pride has been deeply wounded. The unhappy Claude, who in his tender moments forgot what he thought of Colette in his lucid ones, had simply said to her on the morrow of René's visit, 'Poor Vincy is in love.' 'With whom?' she had asked. And he had told her.

Colette was well acquainted with the rumours that were afloat concerning Suzanne and the Baron, thanks to the habit most fast men have of retailing Society scandal, be it true or not, to the _demi-mondaines_ whom they frequent. In alluding to René's love affair with Madame Moraines, the actress, beside herself with passion, had spoken almost at random, in order to lower Larcher in his friend's esteem. Seeing the effect that her words had produced on the latter, she continued the theme. To torture the man she had before her, and in whose features she could read the suffering she caused, was to satisfy to a certain extent her thirst for revenge against the other, knowing, as she did, how dear the poet was to Claude.

'Claude did not tell you that,' cried René, excitedly, 'and if he were here he would forbid you to slander a woman whom he knows to be worthy of your respect.'

'Of my respect!' repeated Colette, with a shrill, nervous laugh. 'What do you take me for, my dear fellow? Of my respect! Because she has a husband to hide her shame and help her spend the old man's money? Of my respect! Because she wants a higher wage than the girl in the street who hasn't the price of a dinner? Do you believe in them, these Society women? And look here,' she cried, rising in her fury and betraying her low extraction by the way in which she jerked her head and blinked her eyes, 'if you don't like me telling you that she is your mistress and the Baron's too, go and fight it out with Claude. It'll furnish my fine gentleman with copy. Are you beginning to have the same opinion about him as I have? Between you and me, my boy--just you keep your eyes open. Worthy of my respect! Ha! ha! ha! No--that's a bit too thick. Well, good-bye. This time I am going to dress in earnest. Mélanie!' she cried, opening the door, 'Mélanie! Give Claude my compliments,' she added, as a parting shot, 'and tell him that trifling with Colette is as dangerous as trifling with love.'

With this allusion to the play so enthusiastically mentioned by Claude in his letter, she pushed René out of her room, and as she closed the door broke out once more into silvery but cruel, mocking laughter--laughter that was a strange mixture of affectation and hatred, of a courtesan's nonchalance and the vengeance of a slighted mistress.