Part 10

I have waited in vain for such a moment and have tried unsuccessfully to lead up to a repetition of it. We have often ridden together through the avenue of elms at sunset on lovely evenings; the trees had the same verdure, the birds sang the same song, but to us the sun seemed dull, the foliage withered: the song of the birds had a harsh, discordant sound, we were no longer in harmony with it all. We brought our horses to a walk and we tried the same kiss.--Alas! only our lips met and it was only the spectre of the former kiss.--The beautiful, the sublime, the divine, the only real kiss I have given and received in my whole life had flown away forever. Since that day I have always had an inexpressibly sad feeling on returning from the forest. Rosette, light-hearted madcap that she naturally is, cannot avoid the feeling and her reverie betrays itself by a sweet little pout, which is at least as attractive as a smile.

Scarcely anything but the fumes of wine and a great blaze of candles enable me to shake off these fits of depression. We both drink like men condemned to death, silently and glass after glass, until we have swallowed the necessary amount; then we begin to laugh and mock most heartily at what we call our sentimentality.

We laugh--because we cannot weep. Ah! who will succeed in sowing a tear in my parched eye?

Why did I enjoy that evening so? It would be very hard for me to say. I was the same man, Rosette the same woman. It was not my first experience on horse-back, nor hers; we had already watched the sun set and the spectacle had touched us no more than a picture, which one admires or not according as the colors are more or less brilliant. There is more than one avenue of elms and chestnuts in the world, and that was not the first one we had ridden through; what then caused us to find such a sovereign fascination there, what metamorphosed the dead leaves into topazes, the green leaves into emeralds, gilded all those whirling atoms and changed into pearls all the drops of water scattered over the greensward, what imparted such sweet melody to the tones of a bell that was usually discordant and to the twittering of countless young birds?--There must have been a very penetrating flavor of poesy in the air, as even our horses seemed to catch the scent of it.

And yet nothing in the world could be more pastoral and more simple: a few trees, a few clouds, five or six clumps of wild thyme, a woman, and a sunbeam over all like a gold chevron on a coat of arms.--There was neither surprise nor bewilderment in my sensations. I knew perfectly well where I was. I had never been to that precise spot, but I remembered perfectly the shape of the trees and the position of the clouds, the white dove that flew across the sky I had seen flying in the same direction; the little silvery bell, which I then heard for the first time, had often tinkled in my ears, and its voice seemed to me like the voice of a friend; although I had never been there, I had many times passed through that avenue with princesses mounted on unicorns; my most voluptuous dreams rode there every evening and my desires had exchanged kisses absolutely like the one exchanged by myself and Rosette.--There was nothing new to me in that kiss; but it was as I had thought it would be. It was perhaps the only time in my life that I have not been disappointed and that the real has seemed to me as beautiful as the ideal.--If I could find a woman, a landscape, a building, anything that corresponded as closely to my desires as that moment corresponded to the moment I had dreamed of, I should have no reason to envy the gods, and I would gladly renounce my box in paradise.--But, in truth, I do not believe that any man of flesh and blood could have an hour of such exquisite enjoyment; two kisses like that would pump a whole life dry and leave a complete void in a heart and a body.--But no such consideration as that would stop me; for, not being able to prolong my life indefinitely, I am ready to die, and I should prefer to die of pleasure rather than of old age or ennui.

But that woman doesn't exist.--Yes, she does exist; it may be that only a wall separates us.--Perhaps I jostled her in the street yesterday or to-day.

In what does Rosette fall short of being that woman? In this, that I do not believe she is. By what fatality do I always have for mistresses, women that I do not love? Her neck is smooth enough to set off the most beautifully-wrought necklaces; her fingers are taper enough to do honor to the loveliest and richest rings; the ruby would blush with pleasure to gleam on the pink lobe of her delicate ear; the cestus of Venus would fit her waist; but Love alone has the secret of tying his mother's scarf.

All Rosette's merit is in herself, I have attributed nothing to her that she has not. I have not cast over her beauty the veil of perfection with which love envelops the loved one;--the veil of Isis is transparent beside that veil. Naught but satiety can raise the corner of it.

I do not love Rosette; at least my love for her, if I have any, does not resemble the ideal I have formed of love. It may be that my ideal is not a just one, I do not dare to say. Certain it is that it makes me insensible to the merits of other women, and I have desired no other with any consistency since I have had her. If she has any reason to be jealous, it is of phantoms only, about which she worries very little, and yet her most formidable rival is my imagination; that is something which, with all her shrewdness, she will probably never discover.

If women only knew!--How many infidelities the least fickle lover is guilty of to the most adored mistress!--It is to be presumed that they pay us back in full and more; but they do as we do and say nothing. A mistress is a necessary subject, who ordinarily disappears under flourishes and embroidery. Very often the kisses you give her are not for her; you embrace the idea of another woman in her person, and she profits not infrequently--if it can be called profiting--by the desires aroused by another. Ah! my poor Rosette, how many times you have served as a body to my dreams and given reality to your rivals; to how many infidelities have you unwittingly been accessory! If you could have imagined, at times when my arms clasped you so tightly, when my mouth was most closely united to yours, that your beauty and your love had nothing to do with my passion, that the thought of you was a hundred leagues from my mind; what if some one had told you that those eyes, veiled with amorous languor, were cast down simply in order not to look at you and not to banish the illusion that you served only to complete, and that, instead of being a mistress, you were simply an instrument of lust, a means of assuaging a desire impossible of realization!

O divine creatures, ye lovely virgins, slender and diaphanous, who lower your periwinkle eyes and clasp your lily hand in the pictures with golden backgrounds of the old German masters, ye stained-glass saints, ye missal martyrs who smile so sweetly amid the convolutions of the arabesques, and come forth so fresh and fair from the flower-bells!--O ye lovely courtesans lying all naked in your hair on beds strewn with roses, beneath great purple curtains, with your bracelets and necklaces of huge pearls, your fan and your mirrors, gleaming in the shadow in the fiery rays of the setting sun!--ye dark-skinned maidens of Titian, who display so wantonly your undulating hips, your firm, round thighs, your polished breasts and your supple and muscular loins!--ye antique goddesses, who rear your white phantoms in the shady corners of gardens!--ye are a part of my seraglio; I have possessed you all in turn.--Sainte Ursule, I have kissed your hands on the fair hands of Rosette; I have toyed with the black hair of the Muranese and Rosette never had such a hard task to rearrange her hair: I have been with you more than Acteon was, O virgin Diana, and I have not been changed to a stag: it was I who replaced your handsome Endymion!--What a multitude of rivals whom she does not suspect and upon whom she cannot be revenged! yet they are not all painted or carved!

Women, when you notice that your lover is more affectionate than usual, that he presses you in his arms with unwonted emotion; when he rests his head upon your knees and raises it to look at you with moist and wandering eyes; when enjoyment serves only to augment his desire and he stifles your voice with his kisses as if he dreaded to hear it, be sure that he simply does not know that you are there; that he has, at that moment, an assignation with a chimera which you make palpable, and whose part you play.--Many chamber-maids have profited by the love that queens inspire.--Many women have profited by the love that goddesses inspire, and a commonplace reality has often served as the pedestal for an ideal idol. That is why poets habitually take dirty trollops for mistresses.--You can lie ten years with a woman without ever seeing her; that is the history of many great geniuses, whose ignoble or obscure connections have caused the world to wonder.

I have been unfaithful to Rosette in no other way than that. I have been false to her only for pictures and statues and she has been equally concerned in the treachery. I have not the slightest material sin upon my conscience with which to reproach myself. I am, in that respect, as white as the snow-capped Jungfrau, and yet, while not in love with anybody, I would like to be with some one. I do not seek the opportunity, but I shall not be sorry if it comes; if it should come, I might not use it, perhaps, for I have an innate conviction that it would be the same with another, and I prefer that it should be so with Rosette than with any other; for, take away the woman, I still have a jolly companion, witty, and very agreeably depraved; and that consideration is not one of the least of those that restrain me, for, in losing the mistress, I might be distressed to find that I had lost the friend.

IV

Do you know that it will soon be five months, yes, fully five months, five eternities that I have been the titular Celadon of Madame Rosette? That is admirable to the last degree. I would not have believed myself to be so constant, nor would she, I will wager. We are in very truth a couple of plucked pigeons, for only turtle-doves are capable of such affection. How we have cooed! how we have pecked at each other! what pictures of clinging ivy! what a charming existence _à deux!_ Nothing could be more touching, and our two poor little hearts might have been placed on a dial pierced by the same spit, and as though trembling in a gust of wind.

Five months' tête-à-tête, so to speak, for we see each other every day and almost every night--the door being always closed to visitors; doesn't it make your flesh creep simply to think of it? Well! to the glory of the incomparable Rosette be it said, I am not greatly bored, and those months will doubtless prove to be the most agreeable in my life. I do not think it would be possible to entertain more constantly and more successfully a man who has no passion in his heart, and God knows what pitiable idleness it is that is attributable to an empty heart! You cannot imagine that woman's expedients. She began by taking them from her mind, then from her heart, for she loves me to adoration.--With what skill she makes the most of the slightest spark and how well she knows how to fan it into a conflagration! how adroitly she guides the slightest impulses of the heart! how she transforms languor into tender reverie! and by what roundabout roads does she bring back to her the mind that is slipping away!--It is marvellous!--And I admire her as one of the greatest geniuses imaginable.

I have been to her house in very bad humor, sulky, looking for a quarrel. I have no idea how the witch did it, but in a very few minutes she had compelled me to say flattering things to her, although I hadn't the slightest desire to do it, to kiss her hands and laugh with all my heart, although I was horribly angry. Can you conceive of such tyranny as that?--However, adroit as she is, the tête-à-tête cannot last much longer, and in the course of the last fortnight I have frequently done what I never did before--open the books on the chimney and on the table and read a few lines during the pauses in the conversation. Rosette has noticed it, it has alarmed her so that she has had hard work to dissemble her feelings, and she has taken all the books out of her room. I confess that I regret them, although I dare not ask for them.--The other day--an alarming symptom!--some one called while we were together, and instead of flying into a rage as I used to do at the beginning, I was conscious of a sort of pleasure. I was almost affable: I kept up the conversation when Rosette tried to let it languish so that monsieur would take his leave, and when he had gone I ventured to say that he didn't lack wit and that he was a very agreeable fellow. Rosette reminded me that only two months before I had found the same man intensely stupid and the most annoying idiot on earth, to which I had no reply to make, for I did actually say it; and I was right, too, despite the apparent contradiction: for the first time he disturbed a charming tête-à-tête, and the second he came to the assistance of a conversation that was exhausted and running dry--on one side at least--and spared me for that day a tender scene that I was tired of acting.

That is the point at which we now are; it is a serious state of things, especially when one of the two is still in love and is clinging desperately to the remains of the other's love. I am in great perplexity. Although I am not in love with Rosette, I am very, very fond of her, and I should hate to do anything to cause her pain. I wish her to believe, as long as possible, that I love her.

In gratitude for all the hours to which she has lent wings, in gratitude for the love she has given me for pleasure, I wish it.--I shall deceive her; but is not pleasurable deceit preferable to painful truth?--for I shall never have the heart to tell her that I do not love her. The empty shadow of love on which she is feeding seems to her so adorable and so dear, she embraces the pale spectre with such rapture and effusion that I do not dare cause it to vanish; and, yet I am afraid that she will discover at last that it is only a phantom. This morning we had an interview which I propose to repeat in dramatic form for greater accuracy, and which makes me fear that I cannot prolong our liaison very long.

The scene is Rosette's bed. A sunbeam streams through the curtains: it is ten o'clock. Rosette has one arm under my neck and lies perfectly still for fear of waking me. From time to time she rises a little on her elbow and leans over my face, holding her breath. I see all this through my eyelashes, for I have been awake an hour. Rosette's night-dress has a neck ruffle of Malines lace which is all torn: it has been a stormy night; her hair protrudes in disorder from under her little cap. She is as pretty as a woman can be, when one doesn't love her and is lying in bed with her.

ROSETTE (_seeing that I am awake)._

Oh! sleepyhead!

I (_yawning_).

Ah-h-h!

ROSETTE.

Don't yawn like that or I won't kiss you for a week.

I.

Oh!

ROSETTE.

It seems, monsieur, that you don't care much whether I kiss you or not.

I.

Yes, I do.

ROSETTE.

How indifferently you say it!--All right; you can depend upon it that I won't touch you with the end of my lips for a week to come.--To-day is Tuesday: not till next Tuesday.

I.

Nonsense!

ROSETTE.

What's that? nonsense?

I.

Yes, nonsense! you'll kiss me before night, or I shall die.

ROSETTE.

You die! What a silly fellow!--I have spoiled you, monsieur.

I.

I shall live.--I am not silly and you have not spoiled me--quite the contrary. In the first place I demand the instant suppression of _monsieur;_ I know you well enough for you to call me by my name and speak in the language of intimates.

ROSETTE.

I have spoiled you, D'Albert.

I.

Very good.--Now put your mouth over here.

ROSETTE.

No, next Tuesday.

I.

Well, well! has it come to this, that we exchange caresses, calendar in hand? We are both a little too young for that.--Come, your mouth, my child, or I shall get a crick in my neck.

ROSETTE.

No.

I.

Ah! you want me to force you, mignonne; _pardieu_! then I will force you. The thing is feasible, although perhaps it has never been done.

ROSETTE.

Impertinent!

I.

Notice, my lovely one, that I was courteous enough to say _perhaps;_ that was very good of me.--But we are getting away from the subject. Put down your head. Hoity-toity! what is all this, my favorite sultana? and what means the sulky expression on your face? It is a pleasure to kiss a smile and not a pout.

ROSETTE. (_stooping to kiss me)._

How do you expect me to laugh? you say such harsh things to me!

I.

My purpose is to say very tender things to you. Why should I say harsh things?

ROSETTE.

I don't know; but you do say them.

I.

You mistake meaningless jests for harshness.

ROSETTE.

Meaningless! You call it meaningless, do you? everything has a meaning in love. I tell you I would rather have you beat me than laugh as you do.

I.

Then you would like to see me weep?

ROSETTE.

You always go from one extreme to the other. No one asks you to weep, but to talk reasonably and drop that tone of persiflage that becomes you so ill.

I.

It is impossible for me to talk reasonably and not joke; I'll beat you, if that's what you want!

ROSETTE.

Do it.

I (_giving her a little tap or two on the shoulder)._

I would rather cut off my own head than mar your adorable little body and make blue stripes on that lovely white back.--However much a woman may enjoy being beaten, my goddess, I swear that you shan't be.

ROSETTE.

You don't love me any more.

I.

That doesn't follow very logically from what precedes; it's almost as logical as to say: "It rains, so don't give me my umbrella;" or: "It's cold, open the window."

ROSETTE.

You don't love me, you have never loved me.

I.

Aha! the plot thickens; you don't love me any more and you have never loved me. That is rather contradictory; how can I cease to do a thing which I never began to do?--You see, my little queen, you don't know what you are saying and you are perfectly ridiculous.

ROSETTE.

I longed so to have you love me that I helped to deceive myself. It is easy to believe what one desires; but now I see that I am mistaken. You made a mistake yourself; you mistook liking for love and desire for passion. It's something that happens every day. I bear you no ill will for it: it wasn't your fault that you weren't in love with me; my own lack of charm is all that I have to blame. I ought to have been prettier, more playful, more of a flirt; I ought to have tried to rise to your level, O my poet! instead of trying to pull you down to mine: I was afraid of losing you among the clouds, and I dreaded lest your head should steal your heart from me. I imprisoned you in my love and I thought that, if I gave myself to you utterly, you would keep a little something of me--

I.

Move away a little, Rosette; your leg burns me--you're like a hot coal.

ROSETTE.

If I annoy you, I'll get up.--Ah! stony heart, drops of water pierce the stone, but my tears have no effect on you. (_She weeps_).

I.

If you weep like that, you will certainly make a bathtub of our bed.--A bathtub, did I say? an ocean.--Can you swim, Rosette?

ROSETTE.

Villain!

I.

Oho! now I am a villain! You flatter me, Rosette, I haven't that honor. I am a blithesome bourgeois, alas! and I have never committed the least crime; I have done a foolish thing, perhaps, in loving you to distraction; that is all.--Are you absolutely determined to make me repent that?--I have loved you and I love you now as much as I can. Since I have been your lover I have always walked in your shadow: I have given you all my time, my days and my nights. I have indulged in no high-flown phrases with you because I don't care for them except when they are written; but I have given you a thousand proofs of my affection. I won't speak of the most scrupulous fidelity, for that goes without saying; but I have lost a pound and three-quarters since you have been my mistress. What more do you want? Here I am in your bed; I was here yesterday, I shall be here to-morrow. Is that the way a man acts with a woman he doesn't love? I do whatever you want; you say: "Go," and I go; "stay," and I stay; I am the most admirable lover in the world, it seems to me.

ROSETTE.

That is just what I complain of--you are the most perfect lover in the world.

I.

What have you to reproach me for?

ROSETTE.

Nothing; and I would prefer to have some reason to complain of you.

I.

This is an extraordinary quarrel.

ROSETTE.

It's much worse than that.--You don't love me.--I can do nothing about it, nor can you.--What remedy have I for that? Certainly I would prefer to have something to forgive you for.--I would scold you; you would apologize as best you could and we should make up.

I.

That would be all clear gain for you. The greater the crime, the more imposing the reparation.

ROSETTE.

You know very well, monsieur, that I am not yet reduced to that, and that if I chose, at this moment, although you don't love me and we are quarrelling--

I.

Yes, I agree that it is purely the result of your kindness of heart.--Be a little kind now; that would be better than syllogizing over our heads as we are doing.

ROSETTE.

You want to cut short a conversation that embarrasses you; but by your leave, my good friend, we will be content with talking.

I.

That's a cheap repast.--I assure you that you are making a mistake, for you are distractingly pretty, and I have sensations.

ROSETTE.

Which you can describe some other time.

I.

Aha! my adorable, you have become a little Hyrcanian tigress, have you? your cruelty to-day is beyond words!--Have you been taken with the fever to set yourself up as a vestal? It would be an amusing whim.

ROSETTE.

Why not? stranger whims have been known; but this much is sure, I shall be a vestal so far as you are concerned.--Understand, monsieur, that I give myself only to people who love me or who I think love me.--You are in neither position.--Allow me to rise.

I.

If you rise, I shall rise too.--You will have the trouble of going back to bed, that's all.

ROSETTE.

Let me go!

I.

_Pardieu_, no!

Rosette (_struggling)._

Oh! you shall let me go!

I.

I venture, madame, to assure you of the contrary.

ROSETTE (_seeing that she is not the stronger)._

All right! I will stay! you squeeze my arms so tight!--What do you want of me?

I.

I think you know.--I would not allow myself to put in words what I allow myself to do; I have too much respect for decency.

ROSETTE (_already beyond the power to defend herself_).

On condition that you will love me dearly--I surrender.

I.

It's a little late to strike your flag, when the enemy is already in the citadel.

ROSETTE (_half swooning, throwing her arms around my neck_).

Unconditionally. I rely on your generosity.

I.

You do well.