Part 2

Little boys, less early developed, generally take their first communion a year later than little girls of their age. This was a custom; he did not feel humiliated by it. Nevertheless, he would have liked very much to share in the mysteries into which his friend was about to be initiated. He felt a mingled jealousy and fear.

“I only hope,” he told himself, “that He does her no harm!”

At last the great day arrived. He saw his little friend pale and winsome in a cloud of muslin. These two whitenesses were charming. Drawing near to her, he murmured:

“How I love you!”

She lowered her eyes and rolled in her white-gloved fingers the beads of her mother-of-pearl chaplet. She walked on without answer, without so much as looking at him. He was sad throughout the ceremony. The recital of acts stirred him a trifle, but at the sound of his friend’s voice his heart broke:

“Oh, my sole possession, my treasure, my life, my paradise, my love, my All, I wish to receive You with a heart aflame with love.... Oh, my treasure, I wish to live and die in a continual union with You!... My well-beloved has given Himself all to me I give myself likewise all to Him. Oh, my Jesus, I desire no longer to belong to myself. I would be yours alone. Let my senses belong to You and may they no longer serve for aught but to give You pleasure....”

“Ungrateful wretch!” he thought. He stirred with anger. Then he recalled the charming hours spent with his friend--their games, their laughter, those long kisses that put them out of breath, those embraces out of which they came blushing, with scorching skin and moist eyes....

“And now all these pleasures she is to give to another! And I’m left all alone.... She loves me no more....”

The little girl had the honor of speaking again after the communion. She returned to her place, the first one in the white procession, kneeled with her head in her hands and remained for a long time absorbed. A powerful emotion crushed her. She felt at once grieved and happy:

“He is within me, I feel Him in my heart.... My heart swells.... I stifle, but it is with happiness.... I am beloved, I am beloved.... Is it Thou, my love? Oh! Stay in my arms, clasp me tightly yet again! Ah! I feel bad.... My head is in a whirl.... Ah! Ah! What a feeling! Now I will declare my love for Him unafraid. I am well content, deeply proud.... Thou lovest me, say? He loves me.”

She arose and spoke:

“Oh loving Savior, I have given myself to You and You have given Yourself to me. I wish to sacrifice to You all the pleasures of the earth; I sacrifice to you my body, my soul, my will. I have only these to offer You, alas! If I had more, I would give You more. I would gladly die for you.... Kindle me with Your love! But I am not satisfied with a spark, I want a flame, I want a thousand flames, I want a conflagration that shall on the instant destroy within me all attachment to earthly creatures.... Vain creatures, leave me; you will never again behold me. Ask no more for my affection. My heart belongs entirely to my well-beloved....”

“She loves me no more,” he said to himself. “She will never love me again.”

He wept. The persons near him believed that it was through pious emotion.

At last mass was over and the seats were heard to move about on the lower floor of the church. The little girl who had been reborn through love felt likewise devoured by hunger. Then she began to think of her house, her parents, her friend, the beautiful table set for the celebration, aglitter with flowers, with crystal and silver; she thought of the kitchen, of the cook. Surely a good plate of soup was getting cold for her.

“After that, I’ll eat a nice tart.... My friend will be there, eager to serve me attentively.... I love him so.... While waiting for vespers we’ll take a stroll, we’ll pick flowers, only white flowers, as white as my veil, as my heart. I’m so happy!”

The little boy had run to his friend’s house, where his family was dining that day. He had gone to notify the cook, and, in the pantry, on a corner of the table, there had been laid aside specially two plates of soup, two royal patties and two glasses of wine.

When the little girl arrived he took her by the hand and she let him pull her along. At the sight of the dainty banquet her little feminine heart melted with tenderness. She threw herself around the little boy’s neck and hugging him with all her might, said:

“You know, Jesus is my mystic husband, but that isn’t going to last long. While he loves me, tell me what you want, for He’ll refuse his little wife nothing.”

“I want you to love me as before.”

“Here,” she said.

She gave him her lips.

“Are you satisfied? Let’s eat, now. I’m as hungry as a bear.”

BLUE

She was a princess. A sister of the queen; she lived at her side and shared her honors. But the fancy of the princess, suggested less pompous pleasures to her, and she gladly would visit one of her ladies in waiting whose husband was a simple member of the bodyguard and moreover an excellent gentleman--young, handsome, witty, tender.

The princess had been married in her country to a prince who might become king, if several generations were to disappear in some cataclysm. They had never loved each other. The princess, too, who was at times mocking and always proud, was reputed to have a heart of iron. She had been showered with plenty of homage, but had accepted no one. Now she would scoff, now she would assume a glacial tone. She was fond only of her toilette, gaming and domination. What pleased her about the guard was that he accepted her smiles as commands; then, she always won at _vingt-et-un_; and her gowns and her diamonds eclipsed all other adornments and all other gowns. The guard had never displayed for her any feeling other than a deep respect.

As she was blonde, she liked blue stuffs, blue flowers, sapphires, as blue as her eyes, so that people began to call her the Blue Princess. The name, which seemed to have come out of a fairy tale, pleasured her. One day, hearing the sad confidences of her lady in waiting, she felt a certain languor steal through her thoughts and into her limbs, and she said: “My soul is a blue bird.” This phrase, which she repeated several times, restored all her serenity, so beautiful it was. Then she looked about her:

“So your husband is away, my dear? I believe he hasn’t come to pay his respects to me.”

“My husband seems absent to you today, but isn’t he absent every day?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t he every day absent from himself?”

“My poor friend, that signifies that he neglects you.”

“He no longer loves me.”

“Truly, this is fine behavior. But it’s impossible. Besides, I’ll not allow it. I don’t want my friend to be unhappy. He is going to get orders from me.”

“Ah, madame! You believe, then, that hearts may be commanded?”

“Why, without a doubt. Was I consulted when they married me off--me, a princess? I was told to love my husband, and I loved him.”

“How long?”

“Why, I should have loved him always, had he wished it. He did not wish it.”

“So you see.”

“He did not wish it, or perhaps he could not. The marriage gave me no pleasure; he reproached me for my coldness, and I wept. Since that moment we have never met without witnesses. At first I felt exceedingly humiliated, then I appreciated the quietude of solitary nights. I am very happy to be a girl again. But since my experience I understand somewhat the less all games, dramas and comedies of love.... Then you find amusement, do you, in the conjugal ceremony?”

The lady gazed at her mistress with respectful, sorrowful irony.

Then she said:

“I fear lest my husband has some lady-love upon his mind, or some light-o’-love.”

“Light-o’-love?” repeated the princess. “The word’s a pretty one. Light-o’-love. That can hardly be serious, can it?”

“Serious? No. Light-o’-love passes and love remains. But I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a genuine love passion that takes him from me. I’m afraid, really.”

“I understand almost nothing of all this,” said the princess, “but I should be glad to see you as happy as I myself am. As far as that is concerned, I need only the life that goes by and that I breathe. As for you, since you need love, I’ll do my best, I repeat, to help you. The word of his princess will touch his heart.... Eh! My good friend, perhaps it is I whom he adores?”

“Perhaps, alas!”

“Why ‘alas’? If it is I, you are saved.”

At this moment the guard entered and advanced to salute the princess.

“Monsieur,” she said to him, “I will receive you at six o’clock at the palace, in private audience.”

She arose and left.

Everybody followed the example of the princess, and man and wife were left face to face, both exceedingly uneasy.

“Madame,” said the husband, “so you have displeased the princess? So it’s to you that I owe this insult?”

“Insult? What do you mean? The lady of your thoughts makes a private appointment for you and yet you complain?”

He was at a loss for reply, for this was the first time that his wife had referred to feelings which he had imagined he held well hidden in his heart.

“The lady of my thoughts,” he answered, brutally, “is my career, and you have doubtless ruined that with your prating.”

“I’m no gossip.”

“You’re stupid.”

“Ah! Leave me. You don’t deserve to be loved.”

The lady in waiting fled, brimming with a sad anger. But, in defiance of all reason, she hoped that the intercession of the princess would prove fruitful, and she spent the rest of that day weeping softly.

The guard adored the princess secretly and without hope. Timid and violent, he saved his timidity for his divinity, his violence for his wife; but when he had been brutal he would be overwhelmed with shame and his timidity would cause him much suffering. He was almost always unhappy. Thus, for some time he had been seeking in ambition a remedy for his ills. He had just spent the afternoon in executing the most humiliating errands for the king’s mistress, who was troubled by the attentions of a lover of inferior station whom she had dismissed. The guard, in exchange for a note three lines long, was to receive a captain’s brevet. He had the note in his wallet and it was supposed to be delivered to the mistress at exactly six o’clock.

Love, curiosity and disquietude triumphed over ambition. He went to dress for the occasion, perfumed himself and ran to the interview, saying to himself: “Perhaps it’s a rendez-vouz.”

The princess, instead of letting him dance attendance, was herself waiting for him when he arrived, and not without impatience. She was prettier than ever, because more pale, with sparkling eyes. Her face was as tender as a cluster of white lilacs hidden beneath the leaves, but these leaves were blonde: her coiffure, in most artistic disarray, let a few curly tresses droop to her shoulders.

“Come nearer,” she said in a sorrowing voice. “Come nearer. Stand here, beside me. I am suffering, and can speak only in the lowest tones. And then, it’s the friend, the friend of your wife who receives you--not the princess. Now, then: I have become aware that you no longer love Elizabeth and that gives me pain. Have you really ceased to love her?”

“Alas!”

“And how about your sense of duty, of your honor?”

“My honor?”

“Yes. You had vowed to her, besides conjugal fidelity, an eternal tenderness....”

“She believed it.... Perhaps I, too, believed.”

“It’s wrong to abandon her, to torment her.... She is weeping at this moment, I am sure....”

“I am not bad to her.”

“Very well. Promise me never to cause her displeasure again.”

“I will never voluntarily cause her displeasure.”

“Good. But promise me more. Promise me....”

She seemed oppressed, and her voice sank so low that, in order to hear it, the guard had to lean toward the princess, almost grazing her tresses. This man, although he was accustomed to all the dissemblances of the courtly folk, suffered frightfully. To love the princess from afar had seemed to him a sweet torture in comparison to the agony which, at this moment, was stirred in him by desire. Were she any other woman, either he would have fallen to his knees or taken to flight; with the princess, he must remain, keep silent and preserve the attitude of a soldier receiving orders.

“Promise me,” resumed the princess, “that you will be kind to her, very kind, and that you will love her again....”

The guard said nothing.

“You promise?”

Still he said nothing.

“Then it’s no longer possible? All is then over between you? Have you any serious fault to find with her?”

“I have no fault to find. I no longer love her. That is all.”

“Let her not discover this, at least!”

“I was hoping that she would never discover it.”

“One may cease loving a woman, then, without her discovering?”

“It is hard. I lacked the necessary skill. What is too easy, alas, is to love a woman without her discovering it.”

“Oh! You really think so?”

“I am sure of it. She whom I love has never suspected my love and will never suspect it.”

“Sir guard,” said the princess, “sir soldier man, you are a child. She whom you love knows your love....”

“Alas!” he said, incredulously.

“... and she loves you,” she added, giving him her two hands.

He threw himself upon the gift, but he was still undecided, so troubled that he panted.

“Kiss them, my child,” said the princess. “Kiss me, you who love me, you who have desired me so long in the secret chamber of your heart. Kiss your blue princess, kiss your love.”

On the next morning the maid said to her mistress:

“Oh! Madame has a blue spot upon her throat.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. It’s a mark. But so strange! Now it’s here, now there. It appears, it vanishes. On my throat, it’s true, and on my heart....”

“Perhaps that’s why they call Madame the blue princess?” continued the innocent woman.

“Go, see if my lady-in-waiting is there.”

The princess, left for a moment by herself, gazed feelingly at her blue spot.

“Lord, how happy I am!” she said to herself. “And how cunning! And how stupid is my friend! To confide her love troubles! Poor Ariane, without you, I should perhaps never have known anything. Those glances which I took for the signs of an ardent, respectful attachment were love!... But here she comes....”

The lady-in-waiting entered excitedly.

“Ah! Princess? I had to stay up for him till four in the morning! I am beside myself! All is lost.”

“There! Can’t you ever be reasonable? On the contrary, all is settled.”

“Ah! Thanks!”

“Listen to me. I received his confession. It was difficult, it was long. At last I know the truth. It’s a light-o’-love. The person who has turned your husband’s head is a humble actress of no consequence. Men take them, drop them, pick them up again. This one had already passed through many hands, and among others, through my husband’s.... You see, you and I have a family relationship.... Now then. An actress is hardly ever free during the day time. Her liberty begins when that of other women ends, at midnight. So I have decided that your husband’s duties shall be shifted to my palace from midnight to four in the morning.... Naturally he will receive compensation, for that’s an arduous task.... His future is assured, and his happiness.... Is he ambitious? Yes. Very well. Would he like a title? A decoration? At first I’ll attach him to my personal suite. As soon as there is an opening, in six months, in three, he will be made my aide-de-camp, my secretary. He will leave me only to court you, happy wife. Between the two of us we will keep watch over him....”

“How good you are!”

“Am I not, indeed?”

“You are kindness itself.”

“You are beautiful. You are, and that is worth more.”

“Beautiful? Who is more beautiful than you?”

“Flatterer! I am thirty and you are twenty-five.... Alas! I have renounced everything. You will love me, at least?”

“I have always loved you. Henceforth I will adore you. My life belongs to you. I will devote myself to you until death, and my husband, too, I fondly hope.”

“I, too, hope so. I have perhaps delivered him from a grave peril, from an unhappy love, for what joy can one find in the adventure that he was engaged in?”

“When he comes to his right senses he will be deeply grateful to you.... Yesterday evening, that is to say this morning, he was greatly troubled. When he returned, I thought him drunk. He stared at me out of wandering eyes. As soon as he entered his room he bolted the door and I heard him cry out: ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’...”

“He said nothing else?”

“I don’t think so. He is not very talkative.”

“A precious virtue. What would you say of a husband who imparted humiliating confidences?... There _are_ some like that.... Mine, for example....”

“You were indeed unhappy!”

“Yes and no. I never think of it any more The present exalts my heart.... To bring happiness to those you love and who love you,--can anything in the world equal that?”

“You are adorable!”

“And I am adored.”

“Oh! Yes.”

“My dear friend!”

She did not withhold her hand, which the lady in waiting covered with kisses.

“They are superimposed,” she thought, “but the last does not efface the first. Your lips, poor couple, still meet in fervor, but upon my skin.... It is indeed curious....”

“Ah!” she resumed, aloud, “now that you are sure to rediscover your happiness one day or another, I hope that you will be prudent. According to the tales confided to me, your husband has been a trifle fatigued by conjugal joys. Men don’t like to have advances made to them....”

“Oh! Between husband and wife! Never mind. I will be discreet, generous friend....”

“More generous than you think! For, after all, your husband is very seductive. He is young, younger than I,--handsome, ardent, passionate....”

“He was.”

“He still is, you may be sure, and you will notice it soon enough. If I had not renounced everything, if I were not a princess.... In your place I should be jealous.”

“Ah! Lord, I know your heart too well.”

“Then you will go home in full confidence? Yet a mite sad.”

“Yet a mite.”

“But the clouds are scattering, the sky is beginning to turn blue again?”

“Yes.”

“As blue as my soul, my tender darling, as blue as my heart.”

And she thrust her finger into her bosom, toward the spot of the blue bruise that so enchanted her amorous flesh.

VIOLET

_L’heure violette._

Leo Larguier.

They called her the old maid, and yet, though she was both a maid and old, she looked like neither one nor the other. Her appearance suggested a widow just past her prime. She always dressed in black, with a profusion of embroidery, ornaments and violet ribbons. Most frequently a bouquet of pale violets would bedeck her corsage and would be repeated, artificially, upon her hat. The scent of violets floated through her garden, her house and her heart: her soft eyes were two beautiful violets. The old maid was jolly and religious; and the curates were not slow in adducing this as a proof that good humor is the inseparable companion of virtue and piety: “Just see the old maid. Heaven is in her soul and in her eyes.” Her eyes were indeed of the sweetest, and a smile, at once celestial and childish, would scatter its benediction over the pink plenitude of her countenance. She was, in every aspect, plump, but not to excess, and the entire effect revealed that restful suavity of definite architectural structures.

A single token betrayed her age--the color of her hair. Their very ashen blond had become even more faded when she reached forty, dissolving into the shade of tawny linen which the years, those skilful laundresses, bleach at each springtime a little.

In short, the old maid was an agreeable canoness.

Toward that period in which she had to undergo the great feminine crisis, her fortune, through the establishment of a railroad that cut across one of her farms, rose considerably. Then, her head being troubled by vapors, she felt a desire to move. She made distant pilgrimages, but only in the company of a lady friend, and at her leisure. Having seen the provinces and some new faces, she felt different; her curiosity, too long dormant, awoke. A literary ecclesiastic loaned her some books of history. The novel treats only of possible loves, while history speaks of real loves attested by letters and relics. The old maid was surprised; one day she dreamed for a long time before the picture of a handsome worldly cardinal which decorated a serious book.

_Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse._[A]

[A] Translator’s Note--This is the famous line from Dante’s Inferno,--episode of Paolo and Francesca. “Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.”

She had not married, through piety, having, at the hands of a priest implacable before all terrestrial pleasures, taken a vow to consecrate herself to the Lord. Her mother, informed of this, wept and threatened to die; then the daughter deferred, postponing this abandonment of the world until her mother should have departed. But the years, without abating her piety, had little by little effaced in her spirit even the memory of this vow, and when she had found herself free to fulfill it, she had no longer thought of it. The fanatical priest was dead. The hour of marriage was dead, too. Having refused all the eligibles of the region, she had become, without noticing it, the old maid; and now that she did realize it, it was too late. Besides, she was happy thus, and happier still since she had taken to dreaming.

So the old maid was dreaming, one beautiful twilight toward the end of September, as she shelled peas in her garden together with her servant. One could descry the little town, reclining like a lazy lass along the river bank; one of her arms, half bare, rose toward the station; the other was lost in a forest; her head was formed by the church; her body, the city; and her legs, the suburbs. And all this dozed, even the station, between two cries.

The old maid was dreaming so well that her servant, wearied of not obtaining any replies to her talk, had ceased speaking; she was dreaming so well that, at the sound of the front-door bell, she started and half rose with a bewildered air.

The visitor did not correspond to her dream. She recognized one of her girlhood companions, a poor woman who lived in the country, married to a petty notary and burdened with children. An urchin of some twelve years, garbed in a sorry gray uniform, followed this figure, with humble mien and his cap in his hands.

The reception was a cold one, but the poor woman was so amiable and she brought such pretty rustic flowers and such large plums, that the old maid rediscovered her smile. The youngster was introduced to her; he was going, on the following day, to enter the town academy as a pensioner. Now, the parents, who were too busy and not wealthy, could come all that distance to see him only three or four times per year, perhaps. What was desired of her was, that if it did not inconvenience her too greatly, she should board during holidays this youngster, who was so well-behaved, so gentle, so respectful, and so well advanced in his studies, since he had just won a scholarship.

The old maid consented. This seemed to her at first an act of charity.

“If I can’t attend to it,” she said, “Rosalie will hunt him up and see after him. She’ll take him to my Pine farm in good weather. He’ll drink milk. Is he fond of milk?”

“Oh!” replied the mother, “very much. Thank the mademoiselle.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle.”

At the sound of this sweet voice, already almost masculine, the old maid looked at the youngster.

That was all. As night had fallen the peas were brought in, and the old maid, summoned by the Angelus, went off to church.

Rosalie, toward the middle of October, went to the academy. The boy was given to her.