CHAPTER VI

“Ah! did he work the infallible pistol trick on you?” Jacques said with a burst of his loudest laughter when we met the following day. “That is very good. He looked you in the face to make you understand that if you court Madam de Bonnivet, you run the risk of getting in your head one of the bullets with which the husband every day salutes the sheet-iron man at the range. He did better with me. He took me to see the targets.”

This conversation took place at the breakfast-table, for Jacques had called on the following morning as soon as his four pages were finished to ask for the classic egg and cutlet, a thing he had never done before. This curious haste proved to me how interested he was in the success of his man?uvre in diplomatic gallantry. I had not received him very cordially.

“Tricks like that are not very attractive,” I said to him; “you force me to accept an invitation to dinner which is odious to me, on purpose to meet you there, and then you do not turn up.”

“But you must admit that it was very jolly!” he replied in such a gay tone that I had not the 150heart to be angry any more. After he had very minutely questioned me as to the diverse attitudes of different persons, concluding with the ridiculous warning of Senneterre the Jealous, he said seriously—

“You noticed nothing in particular then, even you who know how to see? Yes, you painters do not understand, but you know how to see. Nothing in the intercourse of Machault and Queen Anne, for instance?”

“Stop,” I replied; “certainly when he warned me that Senneterre had met you, Machault gave me a singular look. Why do you ask me that? Is he paying court to her too?”

“I think, if she has already risked a false step, it is with Machault.”

“With Machault?” I cried. “With Machault, the drunken colossus, the gladiator in black, the fencing machine, while she herself is such a fine woman, though a little too angular for my taste, and so aristocratic? It is not possible. The other day, too, you told me that you thought she was true to her husband.”

“Ah, my dear fellow!” he said with a nod, “you do not know that when one wishes to find out of whom an ideal woman, a siren, a madonna, an angel, is the mistress, one must first think of the most vulgar person of her own circle. There has been a good deal of gossip about her, I know, and she knows that I know. I have not concealed the fact from her. Consequently, the presence of Machault last evening was designed to produce 151upon me exactly the same effect which I produced upon her by my absence. I took the initiative, and I was right. Besides,” he added with almost hateful acrimony in his voice, “one of two things, either she has already had lovers and she is a jade. In that case I should be the greatest of fools if I did not have her in my turn. Or else she has not had lovers and is a coquette who will not make me go the same way as the others.”

“If you are not wasting your time,” I replied to him, “I shall be very surprised. I studied her yesterday, and as you admit the eagle eyes of our profession, let me tell you that I have diagnosed in her the signs of the most complete absence of temperament, which are a little throat, small hips, skin without down, thin lips, the lower one receding a little, hard and lean nostrils, and metallic voice. I would wager that she has no palate, and that she does not know what she eats or drinks. She is a creature all intellect without a shadow of sensuality.”

“But these cold women have just as many intrigues as the others!” he interrupted. “You do not know that class then? They give themselves, not to surrender themselves, but to take others. When it is necessary for them to grip a lover tightly, a lover they need, they do so with their person the more easily since the pleasure of it is a matter of indifference to them. They know that possession detaches some men and attaches others. It is simply a question of persuading them that one is of the kind who become attached 152in this way, when one is not. Then, too, there are cold women who are hunters, and then! Sometimes I place Madam de Bonnivet in the first group, sometimes in the second. I do not pretend to solve the riddle of this sphinx. But failing the answer to the riddle of this sphinx, I will have the sphinx in person, or my name is not Jacques Molan. Then, as you have helped me and are just, you shall have a reward. You will no longer reproach me with that dinner in the Rue des écuries d’Artois. You shall be paid for your unpleasant task. What time is it? Half-past one. Prepare to see in ten minutes Mademoiselle Camille Favier herself enter with her respectable mother to arrange about the portrait. Is not that good of me? But I have been better still, and I have not told her where you dined yesterday.”

He had hardly told me of this visit, so disturbing to me, in his joking way, when the servant said that two ladies were waiting for me in the studio. God! how my heart beat when I was about to enter the presence of the woman I had sworn to avoid! How my heart beats even now at my vivid and precise recollection of this meeting long ago! I believe that I can see the two of them, mother and daughter, in the crude light of that bright January day which filled, by means of the large glass bay, the studio with a cold pale light. Madam Favier, more placid and smiling than ever, walked from canvas to canvas, looking at them with her great laughing eyes. She would suddenly ask me what was the net cost of a picture, and what 153did it fetch, with as much simplicity as if it were a question of a dress or a curio. Camille sat down opposite a copy of “L’Allégorie du Printemps,” which I had made in Florence so lovingly. In the long and supple dancers of the divine Sandro, who lent with tender grace their blonde and dreamy though bitter faces, the little Blue Duchess could recognize her sisters. She did not see them, absorbed as she was in a memory, the nature of which I could easily guess, seeing that she had not acted the previous evening, and had found a way to spend that free evening with Jacques, thanks to a complaisant cousin. It hurt me to detect around her tender, almost blood-shot eyes a pearly halo of lassitude, and on her mouth tremors which told of happiness. But what made me feel worse still was that Jacques, directly he came in, copied the photographs I had used to make my dream-picture of her—that chimerical picture of my week of folly, which happily I had put aside and well concealed; and at the moment Camille was greeting me with a slightly embarrassed smile, he displayed those instructive pictures and said maliciously—

“You can see, mademoiselle, that if Vincent has not been to see you again as he promised, he has not forgotten you.”

“It was to better prepare the studies for my future picture,” I stammered. “The great painter Lenbach does so.”

“Who contradicted you?” Molan went on even more maliciously.

154“Oh! you have not picked out the best ones,” the mother interrupted as she showed her daughter the photograph I loved best. “You see,” she said, “that in spite of your prohibition, this picture which is such a bad likeness of you is still being sold. Come, now, is it anything like her? I ask you to decide the point, M. La Croix.”

“I was three years younger,” Camille said, “and he did not know me then.” Taking the photograph she looked at it in her turn. Then putting it by the side of her face so that I could see the model and the portrait at the same time, she asked me: “Have I changed very much?”

Poor little Blue Duchess, the sincere lover of the least loving of my friends, romantic child stranded by an ironical caprice of fate in the profession most fatal to mystery, silence and solitude, when the pretty, delicate flowers of your woman’s soul needed a warm atmosphere of protective intimacy, say, did you suspect my emotion when I looked at your face, paled by the pleasures of the previous evening, smiling at me thus by the side of another face, the face of the innocent child you were once, when I might have loved you as my betrothed wife? No, certainly you did not. For you were good; and if you had guessed what I suffered, you would not have imposed upon me this useless ordeal. You would not on that visit have arranged with me the details of that series of sittings which began the following day and were for me a strange and sorrowful Calvary! Yes, however, perhaps you did guess, for there was sadness 155and pity in your smile—sorrow for yourself and pity for me. You saw so clearly from that moment that I bore an affection for you which was too quickly awakened to be the reasonable and simple friendship of a comrade! You saw it without wishing to admit it, for love is an egoist. Yours had need of being related, to be encouraged in its hopes, comforted in its doubts, and pitied in its grief. Who would have rendered you the service of lending himself as a complaisant echo of your passion like I did? If it cost me my rest for weeks and weeks; if on your departure from my studio after each sitting, just as after your first visit, I remained for hours struggling against the bitterness of which I have not yet emptied my heart, you did not wish to know, and I had not the strength to condemn you to do so. After all, you made me feel, as Jacques used to say, and there will come a time perhaps when, passing my memories in review, I shall bless you for the tears I shed, sometimes as if I were no more than eighteen, on your account, who did not see them. Had you seen them, you would have refused to believe in them, to preserve the right to initiate me into the inner tragedy in which you then lived, and which by a counter stroke, alas! was not spared me.

If I allowed these impressions to go on, I should fill the pages with groans like this, and never reach the tragedy itself, or rather the tragic comedy, in which I played the part of the ancient Chorus, the ineffectual witness of catastrophies, who deplored them without preventing them. Let us 156employ the only remedy for this useless elegy. Let us note the little facts clearly. I have mentioned that this visit of mother and daughter had as its object the arrangement of a series of sittings. I have also mentioned that the first of these sittings was placed for the following day.

On the following day Camille arrived, not accompanied by her mother, but alone. It was so almost always during the four weeks which this painting lasted, but during the whole of this time the work did not succeed in interesting the artist in me, for my attention was too much absorbed by the adorable child’s confidences, confidences which were ceaselessly interrupted, repeated and prolonged by the interruptions till the details were multiplied and complicated to infinity. Yes, many little facts come into my mind in trying to recall these private sittings which were always somewhat bitter to me. This liberty proved to me how many favourable opportunities her intrigue with Jacques had obtained. Too many little scenes recur to me, and too many multiple and over-lapping impressions which my memory is apt to confuse. It is like a tangled skein of thread I am trying in vain to unravel. Let us see if I can reduce them to some kind of order in classifying them.

These recollections, which are so numerous and so similar that they become mixed, are distributed, when I reflect, into three distinct groups; and these groups mark the stages of this purely moral drama, in which Camille, Jacques and Madam de 157Bonnivet were engaged, in its progress to a real and terrible drama. When I reflect again, it was the difference between these three groups of emotions which justified me in not making a success of this portrait. Had I been an artist who was an imperturbable master of execution, in place of being what I am, half an amateur, always uncertain, and a sort of “Adolphe” of the brush, all intention and touches, all scratching out and alteration, I should not have been able to execute a unique canvas under such conditions. It was not a woman I had before me during these too long and too short sittings, it was three women.

One after the other I will resuscitate these three women, I will make them pose before my eyes, according to the taste of my memory, as if the irreparable, and such an irreparable, were not between us! One after the other they come back to sit in this studio where I am writing these lines. One after the other I listen to them telling me, the first her joy, the second her sorrow, and the third the fury of her jealousy and the fever of her indignation; and yet to-day I do not know before which of the three women, and during which of the three periods I suffered the most, my suffering being the greater because I was obliged to be silent; and behind each of the confidences little Favier gave me, whether she were happy, melancholy, or angry, I could see the hard silhouette of the elegant rival, to whose caprices this joy, sorrow or anger were subordinated. Oh, God! what punishment for hybrid sentiments, those 158sentiments which have not the courage to go to the end in the logic of sacrifice or gratification, I experienced during those sittings! But still I would like to begin them again. I am writing of misery again and composing more elegies. Let me get on with the facts, facts, facts!

The first period, that of joy, was not of long duration. The scene which marked its culminating point took place on the fourth of these sittings. The scene, though a fine expression, merely consisted of a conversation without any other incident than Camille’s entry into the studio with a bunch of roses—large, heavy roses of all shades—some pale with the dewy pallor of her face, others blonde and almost of the same golden tint as her beautiful hair, others as red as her pretty mouth with its lower lip so tightly rolled, others dark, which by contrast appeared to light up her bloodless colour that morning. The question was, which of these flowers I should choose for her to hold in her hand. I wished to paint her in an absolute unity of tone, like Gainsborough’s blue boy. She had to stand wearing a dress of blue gauze, that of her part, with blue silk mittens, blue velvet at the neck, blue ribbons at the sleeves, her feet in blue satin shoes, with no jewels but sapphires and turquoises on a ground of peacock blue velvetine, with no head-dress but the blonde cloud of her fine hair, with the back of one of her hands resting upon her supple hip, while she offered a rose with her other hand.

“It is my youth that I will offer Jacques,” she 159said to me that morning while we studied the pose together; “my twenty-two years and my happiness. I am so happy now!”

“You don’t experience any more evil temptations, then?” I asked.

“Do you remember?” she replied, laughing and blushing at the same time. “No, I don’t feel them now. I turned Tournade out of my dressing-room, and pretty quickly, I can assure you. But do you know what pleases me most? I never see that ugly woman now; you remember, Madam de Bonnivet. She does not come to the theatre, and the other day Jacques ought to have dined with her, but he did not go. I am quite sure of that, for he wrote his letter of excuse in my presence. It was the evening Bressoré could not act: there was a change of bill and I was free for the evening. I wanted so badly to ask him if we could spend it together, but I did not dare. He suggested it himself, and now every day I have a fresh proof of his tenderness. He is coming for me presently to take me to lunch. Ah! how I love him, how I love him! How proud I am of loving him!”

What answer could I make to such phrases, and what could I do but allow her to remain enraptured by this illusion as she was enraptured by the scent of the roses which she inhaled, closing as she did so her clear azure eyes—another note of blue in the harmony which I sought? What could I do but suffer in silence at the idea that this recrudescence of tenderness in the sensual and complex Molan was, without doubt, a trick. Some 160harshness on the other woman’s part was certainly the cause of it. Camille took for the marks of passionate ardour the fever of excitation into which Madam de Bonnivet had thrown Jacques without gratifying it. When a woman has, as the pretty actress so nicely put it, her twenty years of age and her youth to offer, she cannot guess that in her arms her lover is thinking of another woman, and exalting his senses by her image! That morning I kept silent as to what I knew. To make her laugh and keep myself from weeping, I told her the story of a real duchess of the eighteenth century, who wished to give her miniature to her lover before he took the field with the troops. She went to the painter with her eyes so fatigued by the tender folly of her good-bye that the painter declared he would not continue the portrait if she did not become more virtuous, for her beauty had changed so.

“Ah!” the duchess said as she put her arms round her lover’s neck in the painter’s presence, “if that is the case, then life is too short to have one’s portrait painted.”

“Ah! how true what he has just been saying is, Jacques!” Camille cried as she went to meet Jacques who came in at that moment. I can see her now leaning her loving head upon the knave’s shoulder, the latter being condescending, indulgent, almost tender, because I was there to assist at this foolish explosion of affection. This picture is a very good résumé of the first period which might be entitled: Camille happy!

Camille sad! That was title of the second 161period which began almost immediately and lasted much longer. The scene which sums up the period in my memory is one quite unlike that of the roses, the scent of which she inhaled with such confident ecstasy, and that of the kiss she gave Jacques with such charming shamelessness. This time it was about the eleventh or twelfth sitting. I had noticed for some days that my model’s expression had changed. I had not dared to question her, for I was just as much afraid to learn that Jacques treated her well as that he treated her badly. That morning she was to come at half-past ten, and it was not ten yet. I was engaged in looking through a portfolio of drawings after the old Florentine masters, without succeeding in engrossing myself in their study. That is what takes the place of opium with me in my bad moments. Usually merely looking at these sketches recalls to me the frescoes of Ghirlandajo, of Benozzo, of Fra Filippo Lippi, of Signorelli, and many others; I find intact in me that fervour for the ideal which made me almost mad in my youth, when I went from little town to little town, from church to church, and from cloister to cloister.

In those days a half-effaced silhouette of the Madonna, hardly visible upon a bit of wall eaten up by the sun, was enough to make me happy for an afternoon. The profiles of virgins dreamed by the old Tuscans, the bent figures of their young lords in their puffy doublets, the minute horizons in their vast landscapes, with battlements and campaniles upon the eminences, roads bordered 162by cypress trees and valleys glistening with running water—all this charm of primitive art was there imprisoned in this portfolio of sketches and ready to emerge from it to charm my fantasy. But my imagination was elsewhere, occupied with this problem in ?sthetics very far distant from the frescoes and convents of Pisa or Sienne. “Camille was very sad again yesterday. Has the absurd Jacques resumed with the absurd Madam de Bonnivet?” That was what I was asking myself, instead of by the help of my sketches revisiting Italy, dear divine Italy, the land of beauty.

The reply to my question as to the cause of Camille’s sadness was given me by Molan himself. I had not had any private conversation with him since our chance breakfast on the day previous to the first sitting. I did not expect to see him enter my studio that morning more than any other morning, knowing his rule to write four pages before midday, and the vigour with which this methodical purveyor of literature conformed to it. So when his voice disturbed me I was for a moment really apprehensive. The servant had opened the door without me hearing him, reclining as I was upon a divan turning over the portfolio of sketches as if I were rendered unconscious by my excess of anxiety. I had no time to form an hypothesis in my own mind. My unexpected visitor had realized my astonishment from my face, and he anticipated my questions by saying—

“Yes, here I am! You did not expect me, did you? Make your mind easy, I am not come to 163inform you that Camille has asphyxiated herself with a coke fire of the latest fashion, nor that she has thrown herself into the Seine because of my bad conduct. By the way, the portrait is not a bad one. You have made progress, much progress, with it. But that is not the reason of my visit. Camille will be here directly, and I want you to tell her that I dined with you last evening, and that we did not separate till one o’clock this morning!”

“You have conceived the brilliant idea of involving me in your lies,” I replied irritably “I thought I told you the part did not suit me.”

“I know,” he said in a half apologetic tone obviously destined to wheedle me, “and I understand your scruples so thoroughly that I have left you in peace all this time. But matters progress in the other direction, and if you had been able to assist me, Bonnivet would no longer pass under the Arc de Triomphe. Excuse the pleasantry worthy of the late Paul de Kock. But this time it is not on my account, but for Camille’s sake; I want to spare her an unnecessary sorrow. Have you noticed how sad she has been lately?”

“Yes, and thought it was a sorrow of your making.”

“You are turning to psychology,” he replied not without irony. “It is very much out of fashion, I warn you. But don’t let us exchange epigrams,” he went on seriously. “The little one will be here to pose directly, and if I met her we should be lost. I will put you in possession of the facts in five minutes. I must first tell you that she is again 164on the track of my flirtation with Queen Anne, on whom, in parenthesis, you have not called and left your card. By the way, give me one and I will leave it for you on my next visit. As the flirtation is at the moment very accentuated, Camille is very, very jealous and very distrustful. In short, yesterday there was the inverse of the other comedy. You recall the dinner trick, don’t you? I received about four o’clock two notes, one from Madam de B—— signifying that ... But the contents of this note would make you jump if I told them to you. In reality you are very na?ve and still believe in a woman’s modesty. Confine yourself to the knowledge that in her husband’s absence—he has been called into the country to see a sick relative—Queen Anne had arranged to dine and spend the evening with me. The other note was from Camille, to tell me that in the absence of her mother, who was also called into the country by a sick relative, knowing that I was disengaged for the evening, she had arranged for us to dine and return home together after La Duchesse Curtain.

“So you naturally preferred Madam de B——, and told Camille that you were dining with me?”

“I have not told you everything,” he said. “I thought it better to receive the note too late. For I might have gone out at four o’clock and not have returned to dinner? She will be here directly. Be careful not to mention my visit this morning. Say incidentally, without appearing to intend to do so, that you had some friends to dinner yesterday, and that I was among them. She 165believes you. When she reaches home she will find a wire from 'yours truly’ confirming the story, and the trick is done, unless Senneterre——”

“What has Senneterre to do with it?” I asked.

“I told you that he was Queen Anne’s platonic lover, and you observed it yourself; he is platonic, and as jealous as if he had the right to be so. Consequently he detests me. He goes still further and watches me. The idea has occurred to him to join hands with Camille. He had the audacity to ask me, in an off-hand way, to introduce him, and four or five times afterwards I found him in her dressing-room. Has she not mentioned it to you? No. He is quite likely to have told her, before last evening, as if by accident, that Bonnivet was leaving Paris with the sole object of letting her loose at me and of putting a spoke in the wheel of the carriage in which Queen Anne has at last consented to ride. Do not be too scandalized, we have only got as far as the carriage. There is no question, too, between us of what some women of the world call so quaintly, 'the little crime.’ But it is a quarter past ten and I must go. drop me a line this afternoon.”

“What about this morning’s four pages?” I asked as I accompanied him to the door.

“I have given myself a holiday,” he replied; “my two-act comedy is finished, and if I bring off this coup I shall give myself quite ten days’ holiday. What do you think of my luck? How fortunate that this adventure with Queen Anne 166should have happened this month, between two periods of work?”

This audacious person was quite right to talk of his luck. Had he been a moment later in going out he would have met his poor mistress on my staircase. Camille, who was usually a little later than half-past ten in arriving, was this morning early. The old Breton clock, to whose monotonous voice I had so long listened in my studio like a constant and never-heeded warning not to waste work-time in reverie, made the time twenty-five minutes past ten. When the charming girl appeared I could see at a glance that she was again experiencing an acute crisis of sorrow. Insomnia had encircled her eyes with bluish rings. Fever had cracked and dried up her lips, which were generally so fresh, young and full. A sombre flame burned in the depths of her eyes. Insomnia had made her cheeks livid, and with her fingers she was mechanically twisting a little cambric handkerchief with red flowers on it from which her teeth had torn all shape. I had before me the living image of jealousy and despair. What a contrast with the victorious smile I had just seen hovering around the lips and in the eyes of the man who had caused that pain and thought as much of it as of his first article! I realized once more that morning how easily pity leads to lies. The unhappy creature had hardly taken off her hat and cloak before I began to chide her in our usual friendly joking tone.

“I don’t think we shall do any work to-day,” 167I said to her, “little Blue Duchess, and I am much afraid it will not be for the same motive which made the other Duchess say, a hundred years ago, that life is too short to have one’s portrait painted; but I will say it is too short for the troubles you are making for yourself. You have been crying, confess?”

“No,” she replied evasively. “But I did not close my eyes all night. I did not even go to bed.”

“Jacques will scold you when I tell him of your conduct, and I warn you that I shall report it.”

“Jacques,” she said, knitting the blonde bar of her pretty lashes. “He looks after me well, does Jacques,” and she shrugged her shoulders as she repeated: “He looks after me well!”

“You are again unjust,” I said with my heart pierced by remorse at my own tender hypocrisy. “You ought to have heard him talk about you last evening after dinner!”

“Last evening?” she replied, raising her head and her drooping shoulders with a movement which shamed me. It betrayed such passionate gratitude. “Did you see Jacques last evening then?”

“He stopped to dinner,” I said, “and we separated at an impossible hour after midnight.”

“Is that true?” she asked in an almost raucous voice; and she supplicatingly said: “Tell me that it is true and I will believe you. But don’t lie to me. From you it would be too horrible.” She seized my hand in hers as she said: “Do not be offended. I know that you would not lend yourself 168to deceive me and that you are my friend. I will explain it to you now how I heard that Bonnivet, you know, the husband of that horrible woman, was away. Then I got the idea into my head that they would take advantage of his absence, Jacques and her, to spend the evening together; I freed myself by lying to my mother, the first time I have done so, and I wrote a note to him asking him to dine with me. I was well punished for my two lies. He did not reply. Repeat to me that I was foolish, that he was with you last evening, not with her. O God! let me weep. It does me so much good. Oh, thank God he was not with her, not with her!”

As she talked to me like this every word entered my conscience like the most cruel reproach. She then burst into tears, and the tears which flowed down her thin cheeks were long, abundant tears which she wiped with her poor little handkerchief on which the edges of her teeth had left traces of her nervousness and anguish. I experienced, as I watched her genuine tears flow, poignant remorse for my falseness. It was no longer possible for me to go back on what I had said, and ninety-nine men out of a hundred in acting as I had done would have believed that they were doing right. I myself had enough evidence to realize that this passage from pity to lies, which had been so natural to me, constituted a real crime in the presence of such profound passion. The heart which loves and suffers has a right to know the entire truth whatever it may be. The thankful 169smiles which Camille gave me through her tears were almost physically intolerable to me. Besides, one does not deceive for long the lucidity of justified jealousy. Can it be blinded even for a minute? It is soothed by being misled as regards the facts. What are facts? When a woman feels herself to be loved even the most convincing count for nothing. When a woman feels, as Camille did, treachery hovering around her in the atmosphere, illusion is no sooner produced on one point than lucidity awakens on another. The person goes on searching in the dark for a proof which is always forthcoming, very often by a chance which is all the more grievous as it is not considered. No. If it were to begin over again at the risk of playing in my own eyes the obvious part of the cruel wretch, I would not lend myself to that cowardly lying charity to which I leant myself that morning. The only result of it was to render more painful the scene, to the recital of which I have now come, the scene which marks the definite entrance into the third period, that of furious certainty and exasperated despair.