Chapter 7

He looked with a curiosity not unmixed with pain at that woman whom he had loved truly enough to suffer love's pangs,--the innocents say to die of it. He tried to find again in the depths of those gray eyes, sparkling and malicious, the old burning passion, extinguished without leaving even a fragment of its embers. To think that he had risked his life for that woman; that he should have sacrificed his name; that he should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love of this blasé Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had agreeably affected him.

Marianne evidently understood what was passing in Guy's mind. She smiled strangely. Buried in the armchair, whose back supported her own, and half-bending her fair neck that reclined on the lace-covered head-rest, she looked at Lissac fixedly with an odd expression, the sidelong glance of a woman, that seems to be her keenest scrutiny.

Through her half-closed lashes he seemed to feel that a malicious glance embraced him. The mobile nostrils of her delicate nose dilated with a nervous trembling that intensified the mocking smile betrayed by her curling lips. Her hands were resting upon her plump arms, and with a trembling motion of the fingers beat a feverish little march as if she were playing a scale on a keyboard.

Guy sought to evoke from the well-set, gracefully reclining form, from the half-sly and half-concealed glance, from the palpitating nostrils, something that reminded him of his former ecstasies. Again he saw, shadowed by the chin, that part of her neck where he loved to bury his brow and to rest his lips, greedily, lingeringly, as when one sips a liqueur. A strange emotion seized him. All that had not yet been gratified of his shattered, but not wholly destroyed love, surged within him.

Were it fancy or reminiscence, beside this woman he still felt as of old, a feeling that oppressed his heart and caused him that delightful sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet odor floated around Marianne, reminding Lissac of the intoxicating perfume of vanished days, an irritating odor as of new-mown hay.

He said nothing, while she awaited his remarks with curiosity. Guy's mute interrogation possibly embarrassed her, for she suddenly shook her head and rose to her feet.

"May one smoke here?" she said, as she opened a Russia leather cigarette-case bearing her monogram.

"What next?" said Guy, lighting a sponge steeped in alcohol that stood in a silver holder and offering it to Marianne.

She quickly closed her fine teeth on the end of the paper cigarette that she had rolled between her fingers and lighted it at the flame. The gleam of the alcohol brightened her eyes and slightly flushed her pale cheeks, which Guy regarded with strange feelings.

"Your invention is an odd one!" she said, as she returned him the little sponge upon which a tongue of blue flame played.

He extinguished it, and abandoning himself to the disturbing charm of reminiscences, watched Marianne who was already half-enveloped in a light cloud of smoke.

"There is one thing you do not know," he said. "More than once--on my honor--at the corner of the street, at some chance meeting, my old Parisian heart has beaten wildly on seeing in some coquettish outline, or in some fair hair falling loosely over an otter-skin cloak, or in some fair, vanishing profile with a pearl set in the lobe of the ear, something that resembled you. Those fur toques with little feathers that everybody wears now, you wore before any one else, on your fair head. Whenever I see one, I follow it. On my word, though, not for her. The fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been scattered. It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only one, Marianne, who has felt the anguish and heart-fluttering that I have experienced. Often have I found my eyes moist after such an experience; but if it were winter, I attributed my tears simply to a cold. Tell me, Marianne, was it really the cold that moistened my eyes?"

Marianne laughed.

"Come, but you are idyllic, my dear Guy," said she, looking at Lissac.

"Melancholy, nothing more."

"Let us say elegiac. Those little fits have come upon you rather late in the day, have they not? A little valerian and quinine, made up into silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy."

"You are making fun of me."

"No," she said. "But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot along for such a distance behind plumed toques--it was so easy not to take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a creditor."

Guy could not refrain from smiling.

"Ah! it is because--I loved you too dearly!"

"I know that!" exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her elegance, of an artist's model giving a pupil a retort. "A madrigal that has not answered, no; does it rain?"

"I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?" said Lissac.

"Do not doubt it, my dear friend. It is always stupid to deprive one's self of the woman who adores one. Such rarities are not common."

"You remember, dear Marianne," said Guy, "the day when you boldly wrote upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly: 'To him I love more than every one else in the world?'"

"Yes," said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward. "Such things as that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity."

"And you were sincere?"

"On the faith of an honest man," she answered laughingly.

"And yet I have been assured since that time, that you adored another before that one."

"It is possible," said Marianne with sudden bitterness; "but, in the life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have derived."

In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.

Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger who had come there to tempt him. In her languishing and, as it were, abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost mistress, the forgotten one, assumed in his eyes the relish of a caprice and an adventure. And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a passion formerly suddenly severed.

He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace that his feelings prompted.

Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for the future:

"Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?"

Lissac smiled.

"Come," she said, "nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have already often turned over."

"The romance of my life," whispered Lissac in Marianne's ear.

"The more reason that it should not be read again. It is true there are books one never reads but once. And for that reason, probably, one never forgets them."

She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac's surprised eyes.

"Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly--we have both heartily laughed at it--of the 'caprices of Marianne.' Do you know what I am, my dear Guy? Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly your mistress? Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable _ennui_, I yawn my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of dislocating my jaw. The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools. It is to have the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible. A thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add. The pure, fresh spring that should slake my thirst has not yet gushed."

She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were attacked with a fit of coughing. From time to time, she blew away a cloud of smoke that escaped from her lips, for she had resumed her cigarette, or with the tip of her nail struck her papelito, knocking the ashes on the carpet.

Moved and greatly puzzled, but no longer thinking of the temptation of a moment before, Guy looked at her and nodded his head gravely, like a physician who finds a patient's illness more serious than the latter is willing to acknowledge.

"You are very unhappy, Marianne!" he remarked.

"I? Nonsense! Weary, disgusted, bored, yes; but not unhappy. There is still something great in misery. That can be battled against. It is like thunder. But the rain, the eternal rain, incessantly falling, with its liquid mud, that--ah! that, ugh! that is crushing. And in my life it rains, it rains with terrible constancy."

As she uttered these words, she stretched her arms out with a movement that expressed boundless weariness and disclosed to Guy the dull dejection that followed a great deception and a hopeless fall.

"Life? My life? A mere millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I abandon to others--whom I have abandoned, thank God! for I am satiated at length and have now no lover, nor do I desire one. I desire to be my own mistress, in short, and not the mistress of any person. I have but one desire, hear--"

"What?" asked Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his feelings vacillating between doubt and pity.

"My pleasure," Marianne replied, "is to shut myself up alone in a little room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name, whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves, everything, in fact, a secret. I shall cloister myself. I shall stretch myself out on a reclining-chair and think that if, by chance,--as happens sometimes--an aneurism, a congestion, or I don't know what, should strike me down in that solitude, no one would know who I am, nobody, nobody, and my body would be taken to the Morgue, or to the grave, it matters little to me, that body of which the little otter-trimmed toques recall to you the graceful, serpentine line. Ah! those plans are not very lively, are they? Well, my dear, such are my good moments. Judge of the others, then."

Lissac was profoundly stirred and very greatly puzzled. To call on him: that implied a need of him. But there was no attempt to find the marker at the place where the romance had been interrupted: therefore the visit was not to renew the relations that had been severed, yet not broken.

What, then, brought this creature, still charming and giddy, whose heart was gnawed and wrung with grief? And was she the woman--Guy knew her so well!--to return thus, only to conjure up the vanished recollections, to communicate the secret of her present sorrows and to permit Lissac to inhale the odor of a departed perfume, more airy than the blue smoke-wreaths that escaped from her cigarette?

After entrusting Guy with the secret of her yearning for solitude, she again indulged in her sickly smile, and still looking at Guy:

"You are, I am told, a constant guest at Sabine Marsy's receptions?" she said abruptly.

"Yes," replied Lissac. "But I have no great liking for political salons."

"It is a political centre, and yet not, seemingly. It is about to become a scientific one, if one may believe the reporters--Monsieur de Rosas is announced.--By the way, my dear Guy, you still see Monsieur de Rosas!"

While Marianne uttered this name with an indifferent tone, she slightly bent her head in order to scrutinize Guy.

He did not reply at once, seeking first to discover what object Marianne had in speaking to him about De Rosas. In a vague way he surmised that the great Castilian noble counted for something in Marianne's visit.

"I always see him when he is in Paris," he said after a moment's pause.

"Then you will see him very soon, for he will arrive to-morrow."

"Who told you that?"

"The newspapers. You don't read the newspapers, then?--He is returning from the East. Madame Marsy is bent on his narrating his travels, on the occasion of a special soirée. A lecture! Our Rosas must have altered immensely. He was wild enough of old."

"A shy fellow, which is quite different. But," asked Lissac after a moment, "what about Rosas?"

"Tell me, in the first place, that you know perfectly well that he will arrive to-morrow."

"I know it through the reporters, as you say. To-day, it is through the reporters that one learns news of one's friends."

"The important fact is that you know him, and it is because I am particularly anxious to hear Monsieur de Rosas that I come to ask you to present me at Madame Marsy's."

"Oh! that is it?" Guy began.

"Yes, that is it. I am weary. I am crazy over the Orient. You remember Félicien David's _Desert_ that I used to play for you on the piano? I would like to hear this story of travel. It would make me forget Paris."

"You shall hear it, my dear Marianne. Madame Marsy asked me to introduce Vaudrey to her the other evening. You ask me to present you to Madame Marsy. I am both crimp and introducer; but I am delighted to introduce you to a salon that you will, I trust, find less gloomy than your little room of the Jardin des Plantes. In fact, I thought you were one of Sabine Marsy's friends. Did I dream so?"

"I have occasionally met her, and have found her very agreeable. She invited me to call on her, but I have not dared--my hunger for solitude--my den yonder--"

"Is the little room forbidden ground, is one absolutely prohibited from seeing it?" said Guy with a smile.

"It is not forbidden, but it is difficult. Moreover, I have nothing hidden from my friends," said Marianne, "on one condition, which is, that they are my friends--"

She emphasized the words: "Nothing but my friends."

"Friendship," said Guy, "is all very well, it is very good, very agreeable, but--"

"But--?"

"Love--"

"Do not mention that to me! That takes wings, b-r-r! Like swallows. It flits. It leaves for Italy. But friendship--"

She extended her small firm hand as rigid as steel.

"When you desire to visit me over there, I shall be at home. I will give you the address. But it is not Guy who will come, but Monsieur de Lissac, remember. Is that understood?"

"I should be very silly if I answered _yes_."

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

"Compliments! How foolish you are! Keep that sort of talk for others. It is a long time since they were addressed to me."

She took that man's face between her hands and kissed his cheeks in a frank, friendly way. Guy became somewhat pale.

"I have loved you, and truly, that is enough. Do not complain or ask aught besides."

Ah! what an eager desire now prompted him to possess her again, to find in her his mistress once more, to restrain her from leaving until she had become his, as of old.

She had already thrown her cloak over her shoulders, and said, as she gently pushed open the door:

"So it is agreed? I am to go to Madame Marsy's?"

"To Madame Marsy's. I will have an invitation sent you."

"And I will call for you and take you. Yes, I, here, like a jolly companion. Or I'll go with my uncle. You will present me to Rosas. We shall see if he recognizes me."

She burst out laughing. "You will also introduce me--since that is your occupation--" and here her smile disclosed her pretty, almost mischievous-looking teeth--"to Monsieur Vaudrey, your comrade. A minister! Such people are always useful for something. _Addio, caro!_"

Guy de Lissac had hardly taken two steps toward Marianne before she had vanished behind the heavy folds of the Japanese portière that fell in its place behind her. He opened the door. Mademoiselle Kayser was already in the hall, with her hand on the handle of the door.

"At nine o'clock I shall be with you," she said to Lissac as she disappeared.

She waved a salutation, the valet de chambre hastened to open the door, and her outline, that for a moment stood out in the light of the staircase, vanished. Guy was almost angry, and returned to his room.

Now that she had left, he opened his window quickly. It seemed to him that a little blue smoke escaped from the room, the cloud emitted by Marianne's cigarette. And with this bluish vapor also disappeared the odor of new-mown hay, bearing with it the passing intoxication that for a moment threatened to ensnare this disabused man.

The cold outside air, the bright sunshine, entered in quivering rays. Without, the snow-covered roofs stood out clearly against a soft blue sky, limpid and springlike. Light wreaths of smoke floated upward in the bracing atmosphere.

Guy freely inhaled this buoyant atmosphere that chased away the blended odor of tobacco and that exhaled from the woman. It seemed to him that a sort of band had been torn from his brow which, but a moment ago, felt compressed. The fresh breeze bore away all trace of Marianne's kisses.

"Must I always be a child?" he thought. "It is not on my account that she came here, but on Rosas's. Our friends' friends are our lovers. Egad! on my word, I was almost taken in again, nevertheless! Compelled, in order to cut adrift again, to make another journey to Italy,--at my age."

Then, feeling chilly, he closed the window, laughing as he did so.

V

On the pavement of the Boulevard Malesherbes, two policemen, wrapped in their hooded coats, restrained the crowd that gathered in front of the huge double-door of the house occupied by Madame Marsy. A double row of curious idlers stood motionless, braving benumbed fingers while watching the carriages that rolled under the archway, which, after quickly depositing at the foot of the brilliantly lighted perron women enveloped in burnooses and men in white gloves, their faces half-hidden by fur collars, turned and crossed the row of approaching coupés.

For an hour past there had been a double file of carriages, and a continuous stream of guests arriving on foot, who threw their cigars at the foot of the perron, chatting as they ascended the steps, which were protected by a covering of glass. The curious pointed out the faces of well-known persons. It was said in the neighborhood that the greater part of the ministers had accepted invitations.

Madame Marsy's salons were brilliant under the blazing lights. Guests jostled each other in the lobbies. Overcoats and mantles were thrown in heaps or strung up in haste, the gloved hands reaching out as in the lobby of a theatre to receive the piece of numbered pasteboard.

"You have No. 113," said Monsieur de Lissac to Marianne, who had just entered, wearing a pale blue cloak, and leaning on his arm.

She smiled as she slipped the tiny card into her pocket.

"Oh! I am not superstitious!"

She beamed with satisfaction.

People in the hall stood aside in order to allow this pretty creature to pass by; her fair hair fell over her plump, though slender, white shoulders, and the folds of her satin skirt, falling over her magnificent hips, rustled as she walked.

Lissac, with his eyeglass fixed, and ceremoniously carrying his flattened opera-hat, advanced toward the salon, amid the greedy curiosity of the guests who contemplated the exquisite grace of the lovely girl as if they were inhaling its charm.

Madame Marsy stood at the entrance of the salon, looking attractive in a toilet of black silk which heightened her fair beauty, and, with extended hands, smilingly greeted all her guests, while the charming Madame Gerson, refined and tactful, aided her in receiving.

Sabine appeared perfectly charmed on perceiving Marianne. She had felt the influence formerly of this ready, keen and daring intelligence. She troubled herself but little about Marianne's past. Kayser's niece was received everywhere, and had not Kayser decided to accompany her? He followed in the rear of the young girl. People had not observed him. He chatted with a man about sixty years old, with a white beard and very gentle eyes who listened to him good-naturedly while thinking perhaps of something else.

"Ah! my old Ramel, how glad I am to see you!" he said with theatrical effusion.

"It is a fact that we rarely see each other. What has become of you, Kayser?"

"I? I work. I protest, you know, I have never compromised--Never--The dignity of art--"

Their voices were drowned by the hubbub of the first salon, already filled with guests; Sabine meanwhile took Marianne, whom Lissac surrendered, and led her toward a larger salon with red decorations, wherein the chairs were drawn up in lines before an empty space, forming, thanks to the voluminous folds of the curtains, a sort of stage on which, doubtless, some looked-for actor was about to appear.

Nearly all these chairs were already occupied. The lovely faces of the women were illuminated by the dazzling light. Everybody turned toward Marianne as she entered the room, under the guidance of Sabine, who led her quickly toward one of the unoccupied seats, close to the improvised stage on which, evidently, Monsieur de Rosas was going to speak.

Madame Gerson had taken her seat near Marianne, who searched her black, bright eyes with a penetrating glance in order to interrogate the thoughts of this friend of the family. Madame Gerson was delighted. Sabine, dear Sabine, had achieved a success, yes, a success! Monsieur Vaudrey was there! And Madame Vaudrey, too! And Monsieur Collard--of Nantes--the President of the Council! And Monsieur Pichereau, who, after all, had been a minister!

"That makes almost three ministers, one of whom is President of the Council! Sabine is overcome with joy, yes, absolutely crazy! Think of it: Madame Hertzfield, Sabine's rival, never had more than two ministers at a time in her salon."

She added, prattling in soft, linnet-like tones, that Madame Hertzfield's salon was losing its prestige. Only sub-prefects were created there. But Sabine's salon was the antechamber to the prefectures!

"And if you knew how charming Monsieur Vaudrey is--a delightful conversationalist--he has dined excellently--he was twice served with an entrée!"