CHAPTER IX

The emotion experienced by Camille during this dramatic adventure, suddenly determined upon, thanks to her presence of mind, in a theatrical catastrophe, had been so strong that directly she was out of sight of the two men she felt like fainting. All she could do was to get into a cab and drive to the Rue de la Barouillére. There a real attack of nervous fever prostrated her and made her go to bed. So it was not from her that I learned this episode in which she played a part so naturally, spontaneously, magnanimously, and generously. It was a noble part which suited the noble heart revealed by her beautiful blue eyes, by her proud mouth, and by her well bred and charming personality! Otherwise, had she been well enough to get out, on the day following this dreadful day she would have hastened to me to complete her sorrowful confidence of her first surprise by her second confidence of her heroic sacrifice for her most unworthy lover. But persons capable of acting as she had acted do not boast.

It was Molan himself who first told me the details of these almost incredible scenes—at least those 215he knew, Camille herself having since completed them. The subtle feline person had two reasons for making me acquainted with this adventure, in which he still played a flattering part—current morality being taken for granted—of a man loved to distraction by one of the most elegant and courted women in Paris, and to martyrdom by one of the prettiest actresses not only in Paris but in Europe. The first of these two reasons was his natural fatuity, and the second his interest. He was afraid that after such an experience the devotion of the Blue Duchess would shrink from another ordeal, that of acting a comedy at the house of the rival she had saved. Now he considered, not without good reason, that Camille’s presence at Madam de Bonnivet’s party was the indispensable conclusion of the scene in the Place Saint Fran?ois Xavier. The husband’s suspicions must have been strongly aroused to have gone to the extremity of espionage, and there was no answer to this phrase with which Molan completed his disclosure.

“As long as Bonnivet does not see these two women face to face, his suspicion may be again aroused, and suspicion is like apoplexy, the first attack can be cured but there is no remedy for the second.”

His theory was right. But while he retailed it to me, as a conclusion, my thoughts were only for the real drama he had just narrated. I can still hear myself crying, “Oh, the wretches!” When he described to me Camille in the anteroom of 216the suite of rooms, while Madam de Bonnivet was listening to her repeated ringing of the bell, pale with terror, I can realize to-day that this story of Jacques’ was most indelicate on his part, for he must needs begin by this phrase. “First of all I will tell you the whole truth. I am Madam de Bonnivet’s lover.” I was no longer astonished at my colleague’s cynicism. When he had finished, the misery of this adventure overwhelmed me with sorrow, and there were tears in my voice when I asked him—

“And after that you want Camille to act at that woman’s house?”

“She must,” he replied, “and I am relying upon you to ask her.”

“Upon me,” I cried, “you must be mad.”

“Not a bit,” he went on. “It is very simple. While listening to you she will only think of the risk I have run and say 'yes.’ That is the a. b. c. of jealousy.”

“But if she refuses. You seem to think she has no malice against you.”

“Not a bit,” he replied with his frightful smile; “either I am quite ignorant of the human heart, or else she has never loved me so much, since I have never treated her so badly.”

“If she does not tell me the story you have just told me, how am I to turn the conversation?”

“She will tell you; then be the first to begin. Confess that I have told you in the madness of my emotion and remorse. It will not be a lie, for it is a fact that in the cab yesterday while I looked 217at Camille sitting in her corner with fixed gaze and excited face, I would have given everything to love her at that moment as she loved me. Explain that I was not thinking of the other woman. I called upon the latter to-day. What a woman, my dear friend, and how the crack of the whip of danger made her vibrate! I found her with her husband after breakfast, and he left us together after a quarter of an hour’s affectionate talk, which proves that his suspicion is at any rate a little allayed. That man does not know how to pretend. Lately he has hardly shaken hands with me. We did not abuse his complaisance and we were right, for I met him returning home, as I was leaving twenty minutes later, to find out how long my visit had lasted. There was just time for Anne to give me the two or three most indispensable items of information. You admire Camille’s courage, don’t you? But what will you say to the presence of mind of this great lady who was indeed risking something, her life perhaps, her honour without a doubt, her position and everything which constitutes her reasons for existence. Do you know where she went when she was able to escape. She drove straight to a furrier’s, where she purchased an astrakhan jacket as like the other one as possible. She had no money to pay for it and did not like to leave her name. The idea struck her to go to her jeweller and borrow the money. She pretended that she had lost her purse, and then returned to the furrier’s to pay for her jacket, picked up 218her own carriage, which, she had left at a friend’s house and ordered to meet her outside the shops near the Louvre, and reappeared at home dressed as she was when she went out. These are the true details. Would you believe them? Her visit to the jeweller’s and furrier’s moved me very much. How frightened she must have been at risking them. Now all she has to do is to tell her maid a lie to account for the difference of jackets. A mistake after calling or trying on, that is all. But every fresh little lie is a new landmark if the husband pursues his inquiries. This man would shrink from questioning the servants. That is what saved us this time. He will have had me followed, not his wife, but I was imprudent enough to accompany her to the rooms. My luck makes me frightened,” he added seriously, after being silent for a time.

“Yesterday’s discovery has, all the same, not destroyed Bonnivet’s jealousy, I repeat, since he returned home during my visit, and if Camille does not keep her promise his suspicion may be aroused again.”

“But with this distrust and the knowledge he possesses of your rooms,” I said, “your appointments will not be very easy to make.”

“It is for that reason that Madam de Bonnivet will not fail to keep one now. She is a curious and bored woman, and her commonplace adventure with me has at last given her the tremor,” he added smilingly. “Ah, ah, she is of the same nature as the divine marquis to some extent. But you 219don’t understand these things at all, my dear boy. As for the address of the rooms, the fact that Bonnivet knows it will make no difference. Having seen me leave there with Camille, he will never believe me capable of taking the other one to the Rue Nouvelle.”

“You will go on then without any fear?”

“Yes. I was frightened yesterday when I heard the ringing and knocking at the door, and I repeat that I am sometimes afraid of my luck. It is as stupid as believing in the evil eye, but the feeling, is stronger than I am.”

“There is no doubt that in Camille,” I replied, “you have met the only woman in Paris capable of such an action. If you had even a little bit of heart, you would spend your life in making her pardon your infamy.”

“My dear boy,” he interrupted, “then you will never understand that she only loves me like that because she understands that I do not love her. Then,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “without doubt it is a question of personality, I desire the other one and I do not desire Camille. This explanation of love is not brilliant, and if the abstractors of quintessence who subtilize upon the sentiment, like your friend Dorsenne, gave it in one of their books, they would lose their feminine clientele, their twenty-five thousand skirts I call it. I myself am neither an analyst nor a psychologist, and I maintain that this explanation is the true one.”

“So he told you everything!” Camille said 220ironically when I saw her the day after this conversation. I had written to her, to be sure and not miss her. I found her pale with eyes burning from insomnia. She was in the little drawing-room in the Rue de la Barouillére, which always looked so commonplace, poor and grey, while its canvas-covered furniture gave it the appearance of a room prepared for moving. “Did he boast also of the delicacy with which his wretch of a mistress thanked me? Here,” and she handed me a leather case with her monogram upon it, C.F., which I had noticed her fingering nervously for five minutes. I opened the case, which contained, glistening upon black velvet, a massive gold bracelet incrested with diamonds. It was one of those jewels in which the work of the goldsmith is reduced to a minimum, and of which the brutal richness makes the present an equivalent of a cheque or a roll of sovereigns. I looked at the bracelet, then I looked at Camille with a look in which she could read my surprise at the method employed by Madam de Bonnivet to pay her for her devotion.

“Yes,” the actress went on, and, in a tone of disgust which made me ill, she repeated: “Yes, that is the object which came this very evening with my coat. It is my medal for bravery,” she sneered. “My first object as soon as I go out will be to give the wretch a lesson in delicacy!”

“Be content with returning the jewel through Jacques to her,” I suggested. “A scene would be too unworthy of you. When a person has 221the whip hand, which you most certainly have, it is wise to keep it to the end.”

“No,” she proudly said, “there will be no scene between us. I would not have one. I will go and sell the bracelet to a jeweller, then I will go to a church, spend the money in charity, and Madam de Bonnivet will receive with her jacket two little pieces of paper—one the jeweller’s bill, and a note from the priest saying, 'Received for the poor, from Madam de Bonnivet, so much.’ This infamous adventure will at least have served to put a fire on a fireless hearth and a loaf of bread on an empty table.”

“Suppose the husband is there when the messenger arrives?” I asked.

“She must explain it the best way she can,” Camille said, and a gleam of cruelty passed into her blue eyes, which deepened in colour almost to black. “Do you think I should have moved my little finger to help her the day before yesterday, if it had not been necessary to save her to save Jacques? Ah! that Jacques has not even called to inquire after me this morning. He knows, too, that I have not acted for two consecutive evenings. He knows me and that emotion makes me ill. Vincent,” she added, taking my hand in her feverish grasp, “never love. It is such madness to have a heart in this cruel world. From Jacques I have not even had a note, two words upon his card, the little sign of politeness one owes to a suffering friend.”

“You are not just,” I told her, “he fears to 222face you. It is very natural. He is too conscious of his faults, and, you see, he has sent me to find out how you are.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head dolefully, “he came to see you, because he needed you for something. Confess to me what it was? From the first I told you that you do not know how to lie or scheme. Oh, God! how nice it would be to love some one like you, not in the way I love you, as a friend, but in the other way! Come, confess that you have a commission from Jacques for me.”

“Well, yes,” I replied after a second’s hesitation. There was such uprightness in this strange girl, such a rare nobility of sentiment emanated from her whole being! To finesse with her seemed to me a real shame. I therefore gave her, simply and sadly, Jacques’ message: simply, because I reckoned, and rightly, too, that the surest way to influence her was to state the facts without any phrasing; sadly, because I felt the hardness of this new demand of Molan’s. I also realized its necessity. When I had finished, tears came into her blue eyes.

“So,” she said, with an even more bitter expression and a disenchanted smile, in which there was much love, though it was for ever poisoned by contempt, “he has thought of that, to save this woman again! He finds that I have not sacrificed myself enough. Besides, it is logical. When one has begun, as I did, one must go on to the end. I will go.” With her forehead crossed 223by a wrinkle of resolution, her eyes hard, and her mouth ugly, she went on: “Very well, Vincent. You have repeated his words to me, and I thank you. That must have cost you something, too! You owed me that frankness. You promise to exactly repeat mine to him, do you not? Tell M. Molan, then, that I will act at Madam de Bonnivet’s as is arranged. Yes, I will act there, and no one, you understand, shall suspect with what feelings. But it is on one condition—tell him that, too, and if he does not keep it, I will break my promise: I forbid him, you understand, I forbid him to write or speak to me from this time onward. He will talk to me at that woman’s house just sufficiently to prevent anything being noticed. That must be all. I shall not know him afterwards, you understand. After this last act he is dead to me. Perhaps I shall really die myself,” she added in a stifled voice, “but it is all over between us.”

She made a gesture with her hands as of tearing up an invisible agreement. Her eyes closed for a moment. Her features contracted with a twitch of pain, and then this creature, so feminine in her grace and mobility, assumed a tender look and a gentle smile as she got up and said to me—

“Leave me now, friend. Don’t come to see me again before I let you know. We will finish the picture later on. I love and esteem you very much, and feel real sympathy for you. But,” her voice was stifled as she concluded, “but I 224must forget, all the same, to try and live.” Then with a proud little inclination of her blonde head and a courageous shrug of her slender shoulders, she concluded: “I am not to be pitied. I have my art left.”

I knew that Camille was incapable of breaking a promise made with such seriousness as to be almost solemnity. She had that trait common to all persons, men or women, who attach great importance to their feelings: a fastidious scrupulousness in keeping unwritten agreements, reciprocal engagements. Therefore I insisted with the greatest energy upon Jacques conforming strictly to the condition which the actress had imposed upon him, and I myself, great though the cost was to me, had the courage to observe with the greatest rigour the programme of absence and silence, the wisdom of which I understood. Around certain moral fevers, just as around certain physical ones, there is darkness, suppression of motion, and a total suspension of life. In spite of my absolute faith in Camille’s word, I was not without uneasiness when I repaired a few days later to Madam de Bonnivet’s party. I knew that the poor Blue Duchess, if not quite restored to health, was at least well enough to reappear at the theatre. When I say that I followed the programme drawn up by her with the greatest rigour, I must add that I allowed myself once to go and see her act without, as I thought, breaking the agreement, since she did not see me sitting in the pit, and I had a feeling of relief at seeing that there was no 225difference in her acting. I came to the conclusion that she had taken to her art again, as she had said to me, to that cult of the theatre which had been the na?ve enthusiasm of the dreams of her youth. I hoped that that love which never deceives would cure the wound made by the other. But in the carriage which conveyed Jacques and I to the club, where we again dined together, this confidence gave place to apprehension, in spite of my companion’s optimism, he having become once more a person of an imperturbable assurance, which seemed born to man?uvre in false situations.

“I am curious,” he said to me, “to know what she has prepared for her audience of swells. She has promised the great scene from La Duchesse Blue with Bressoré, and then a few monologues and imitations. You don’t know her in that light, do you? She has like every actor or actress her monkey side.”

“Imitations!” I repeated. “Fashionable people are admirable. They no sooner have in their hands an artist of talent than they become possessed of a single idea, to degrade that talent by forcing the possessor to become a plaything for them. If it is a painter like Miraut, they order from him portraits with a disgusting want of expression to put upon bon-bon boxes! If he is a man of letters like you, they make him write bad prose and verse at a moment’s notice! If he is a musician, he has to produce a piece for the piano at once! In the case of an actress like Camille, 226with ardour, temperament, and passion, they make a parade of her. Good God, what foolishness it is! What is going to happen to-night?”

“Would you prefer,” sneered the dramatic author, “to hear the plaints of Iphigenia or of Esther proclaimed ten paces away from a buffet laden with foie gras sandwiches, punch, orangeade, chocolate and iced champagne? On my word of honour you seem to me admirable! But if you had the lightest tint of that transcendental irony, without which life does not present the slightest savour, you would find it exquisite that my pretty Blue Duchess has saved the honour, and perhaps the life, of my adorable Queen Anne, and that they met face to face—one playing her part as a fashionable Parisian hostess, respected and worshipped; the other giving her performance before an audience of the idle; while I myself am the third person. My only regret for the beauty of the situation is that I did not have an appointment with both during the day. Would you believe it? Since these happenings I desire Camille again, and I would retake her if I did not fear to spoil her masterpiece. Yes, the masterpiece of her rupture. For she has discovered it; there is no denying it. If André Mareuil had not laid down his humorous pen to become a Commissioner of Police, if he were still writing his Art de rompre instead of drawing up regulations, I should submit the case to him. Have you ever thought of a more divine method of a mistress ridding herself of her lover and leaving in his mind 227an exquisite memory? That is the ideal end of love.”

“Try at least to be ashamed of your egoism,” I interrupted. I realized that he was amusing himself by making my na?veté display itself, and that he was joking. But actually the fact that he was unable to jest on such an occasion angered me, and I continued, touching his breast as I did so: “Have you, then, absolutely nothing there but a ream of paper and a bottle of ink, for the idea of this love, devotion and sorrow, only to inspire you with one more paradox instead of bringing tears from your eyes?”

“One must never judge what is visible,” he replied with sudden seriousness which contrasted strangely with his former flippancy. Did he conceal in an inner fold of his heart, poisoned though it was with social vanity, commercial calculations and literary ambitions, a tender corner, too small to be ever exalted into complete passion, but sufficiently alive to sometimes bleed, and had I touched the secret wound? Or was his one of those complicated natures which keep just enough sensibility to suffer because they have no more? These two latter hypothesis are not irreconcilable in such a complex nature. They would at least explain the anomaly of a talent for accurate human observation, being associated with such implacable hardness of heart and a systematic and utilitarian depravity of mind. Never had the astounding contrast between Jacques’ person and his work struck me as it did in that rapidly moving 228carriage. He was the first to break a silence which had lasted for a few minutes by saying—he was without doubt replying to a thought my reproaches had suggested to him—

“Besides, if it were to begin again, I should have prevented that party. It is useless. I don’t know what fresh information Bonnivet has received, but he is charming to me and his wife. I found both of them the other day examining two ornaments their jeweller had just brought. In parenthesis, what do you think of this conjugal scene? She was clasping around her neck a necklace of pearls and looking at herself in the glass, while her husband said to me—to me!—as she showed me another one: 'Which one do you prefer?’ She experienced a keen pleasure at this high comedy scene. I saw that her eyes were shining like the pearls in the necklace. At what price had she purchased this renewal of confidence?”

“But,” I said, “did not a scene like this, and the conclusion you drew from it, make you take your hat and stick and go away, never to return?”

“You are not, and never will be, intellectual, my dear boy,” he replied. “Understand that there is a sort of bitter and ferocious joy in despising what one desires, just as there is in enjoying what one hates. That is how Queen Anne holds me fast, perhaps for a long time, just as I hold her fast by the attraction of the danger involved. We have already, since the affair, revisited the rooms in the Rue Nouvelle; would you believe it? Decidedly there is no tincture of cantharides like fear?”

229“That is folly,” I cried, “to tempt fate like that!”

“Quite right,” he said with a shrug of the shoulders, “but one must live to write. There is a play in this story, and I will not miss it.”

We reached Madam de Bonnivet’s house, and found a long string of carriages already in the street. I was to find a great difference between the almost familiar reception of the other evening and my reception now. It seemed as if Jacques had in those few minutes tried to give a complete representation of the different phases of character of this human lighthouse. While we ascended the carved wooden staircase, with its wealth of pictures, busts, tapestry, and ancient stuffs, he whispered to me this last expression, which had nothing cunning nor dandified about it, but was simply the childish vanity of the middle-class gentleman engaged in a love affair—

“You must admit that my friend is not badly housed?”

I am quite sure that at that moment the carpets upon which his pumps rested warmed a secret place in his heart. I am certain that the lustre on that staircase illuminated the darkest depths of his snobbish conceit. I am sure that a conqueror’s pride swelled his chest as he said to himself in these luxurious surroundings: “I am her lover.” He had become during the last few weeks too transparent for this shade of his sensibility to escape me. Each of his words was like the striking of a clock, the works of which are in a glass 230case. When the sound strikes the ear one can see the little cogwheels bite the large ones and the complicated mechanism at work.

The hall doors had opened, and Jacques and myself were at once separated. The spectacle, which this room, vaulted like a chapel and unknown to me, and the two drawing-rooms opening from it presented, awakened the painter in me, the man used to vibrating by a look. In a corner of the hall a little platform had been erected, which was empty just then. There were perhaps fifty women sitting with a like number of men, all in evening dress, and the women’s jewels sparkled in their blonde or dark hair and on their naked shoulders. The entire range of colours was displayed in these various toilettes, which were heightened by their contrast with the black coats and the details which had on my first visit to this house so displeased me, the too composite character of the decorations, blended and harmonized as they were in this light with the aid of the moving crowd. Fans were waving, eyes shining, faces were animated by questions and answers, and Queen Anne, towards whom I went to pay my respects, really had in her white evening dress the majestic air of a princess worshipped by her courtiers.

As I approached her, I thought of the mortal peril she had been in the other week. There seemed to me no more trace of it in her pale azure eyes than there was of jealousy upon Bonnivet’s beaming face. For the first, and, without doubt, 231the last time in my life, I was supplied with positive information about a fashionable intrigue. Usually one does not know the history of these fine gentlemen and beautiful ladies except from a vague “they say.” A woman is suspected of having so and so for a lover, and a man is suspected of having so and so as his mistress. This suspicion, which to people of their class is equivalent to certainty, is not reduced to exactness. The street and number of the house where they meet is not known. It is not known under what circumstances they start for the rendezvous. A door remains open to doubt, and if not open it is ajar.

As I bowed to Madam de Bonnivet and received her greeting in the form of an amiable commonplace, I could see this haughty head on the pillow in the chamber of adultery, and the terror of her disturbed features when the continuous ringing of the bell and the repeated knocking at the door had warned her of her danger. The contrast was so sharp that for the first time I understood the unhealthy attraction which this to some extent double existence exercises over certain imaginations, and why women or men who have tasted these sensations no longer find any relish in others. Such profound and perilous deception procures something like an evil intoxication, the pleasure of a really superior and almost demoniac hypocrisy, to the man or woman who lie in that fashion. To this kind of infernal falsehood belonged the phrase which Madam de Bonnivet used to close our rapid and uninteresting conversation.

232“There is some one who would not forgive me for detaining you any longer,” she said, and the point of her fan indicated a direction which my glance followed. I saw Camille Favier, whom at that moment Jacques was approaching. “Go and speak to her,” she continued, “and tell your friend Molan that I have a little commission for him while I think of it.”

I was prepared, on arriving that evening, to encounter much coolness in this woman, who was depraved by coldness a coquette through egoism, and curious even as regards vice through idleness. I had not even thought the audacity of such a phrase addressed by her to me who knew everything possible. In spite of my firm intention not to allow my impressions to appear, she read my astonishment in my face. Her half-closed eyes darted at me the most incisive look which has ever fathomed the soul of a man to its depths. Without doubt, regarding her liaison with Molan, she thought I had only one of those hypotheses, which I was unable to verify, one of those hypotheses which grow around those so-called mysteries, Parisian love affairs, and that I could not very well conceal my deductions. The acuteness of her eyes became dulled into indulgent irony, and I left her to obey the order she had given me, but in part only. She had obviously calculated, with her habit of relying upon the evil sentiments of her intimates, that I should be only too happy to convey her message to Jacques in Camille’s presence, to make their quarrel all the worse and 233put my friend in a somewhat false position. She was to find out that a good fellow of a painter did not lend himself to this pleasantry. I approached the two lovers as if the beautiful enemy of the pretty actress had not entrusted me with any commission. They were only exchanging, according to agreement, the most indispensable polite phrases in a loud voice—

“Have you come to this corner of Bohemia, then?” Molan said, my presence restoring his natural assurance to him; “it is quite natural that you should.”

“Do not boast,” I replied in a tone of banter with a foundation of truth to it similar to the one he affected. “It is a long time since you passed as a man of the world.”

“Big words!” he said still gaily. “I am off. Don’t talk too much ill of your friend Jacques, and do not monopolize her too much,” he added, turning to me; “she must do a little flirting to be a success with the men.”

He went away with the renewed desire, of which he had spoken to me, shining in his eyes. Camille had bowed as he went without speaking, but with a smile in which I, who knew her so well, could read so much suffering and disgust. She fanned herself nervously, while I looked at her with an emotion which I did not endeavour to conceal. We were in our out-of-the-way corner like two outcasts, though our sorrowful tête-à-tête was very brief! Senneterre was already on his way towards us from the other end of the hall 234with a young man who had asked to be introduced to Camille. Those two minutes sufficed for us to exchange a few phrases which redoubled my impression of danger. It had continually increased ever since I had entered the house.

“So you are come,” the actress said, “thank you;” and in a supplicating tone she added: “Do not leave me this evening, if you love me a little.”

“Don’t you feel well?” I asked.

“I have presumed too much upon my strength,” she replied. “I was quite well up to the moment I was presented to this woman and heard her voice. Oh! that voice! Then Jacques came in, and I felt ill. Look, he is going to her. They are talking, and are alone. Go and tell him that he must not trample too much upon my heart. I am exhausted, and can bear no more.”

She pronounced these last few words hesitatingly, and forced herself to smile, a convulsive smile like a nervous tremor. I do not think that I have ever seen her so beautiful. The absence of jewels in the midst of these well-dressed women and the simplicity of her toilette in these luxurious surroundings gave her something like a tragic character. I had no time to reply, for the professional “beater” was there with his stereotyped phrase—

“Mademoiselle, allow me to present to you my young friend, Roland de Bréves, one of your most passionate admirers.”

“With what selections are you going to charm 235us with this evening, mademoiselle?” the young noodle asked Camille, who was still vibrating with emotion. “It is rare good fortune to hear you in society; Madam de Bonnivet will make many people jealous.”

“Really there is no occasion for it, sir,” Camille replied, and to correct his impertinence added: “I shall give a scene from La Duchesse Blue with Bressoré, and then three or four fragments. Besides, your curiosity will soon be satisfied, for I can see Bressoré coming. He was acting this evening in the new play, but he has got away early. What luck!”

“What good fortune for us,” her questioner said, “who will hear you all the sooner!”

“No,” she brutally said, “for me to be able to go to bed all the sooner.”

She turned her back on the young man, who was disconcerted by the harshness of this strange reply, to exchange a few equally amiable words with another gentleman who greeted her. The insolence of the phrases she uttered, she who was usually so gracious, proved quite well that she was hardly mistress of herself. Of what an outburst she would be capable if Madam de Bonnivet, as her attitude towards Jacques at that moment made me fear, gave too bold a display of coquetry. My anxiety was suddenly borne to its highest pitch. I understood that in insisting upon Camille figuring at this party, the cruel woman had not only proposed to put her husband’s suspicions at rest for ever. For that she relied upon 236other weapons. The dominant trait of her implacable nature was vanity, and this vanity wished to have the actress at her mercy, to revenge herself for the two humiliations she could not forget—the insulting heroism at the rooms, and the return of the bill for the bracelet with the receipt from the priest of Saint Fran?ois Xaviers.

Wounded in her most secret susceptibilities, she had promised herself that for two or three hours she would keep her rival, who was then in her employ, at her house, to inflame her again and again with the most poignant and powerless jealousy, and leave herself free to pardon her after the punishment and forget her, and also the man of letters whom she had taken from the actress. He had already ceased to interest her, now that he no longer represented another women whose happiness she wished to steal. She would soon give proof of it, and also that the fop was bragging when he thought that he had awakened her to the pleasure of love. In spite of so many and such disturbing emotions, she had left his arms as insensible, as far off as ever that total ravishment by person which metamorphoses a coquette into a slave and enslaves her to the man who has initiated her into this complete intoxication. She acted, however, during this evening as if she had loved Jacques. The desire of torturing the woman by whom she had been so strangely saved and wounded was strong enough in her blasé heart to equal physical pleasure. I gained this evidence upon the spot by watching her in the 237distance talking, while I was making my way towards the spot where she was laughing with Jacques, though my progress was interrupted at intervals by Machault, further on by Miraut, and then by Bonnivet.

The first of the three said to me: “I have not seen you at the school of arms lately. You missed the Italian fencer, San Giobbe. He is really wonderful.”

“You did not tell me the other day,” the second said, “that you were painting Camille Favier’s portrait. It is very underhand of you to treat your old master in that way!”

“Ah well, M. La Croix,” Bonnivet asked, “are you going to hang anything at the next exhibition?”

I felt inclined to answer the incorrigible fencer: “It is not a question of assaults, parade and laughable combats; do you not see that there is a prospect of a real duel, actual sword thrusts, and the sacrifice of some one’s life?” To my dear master I felt inclined to say: “I shall not make you sell a picture more, shall I? Why play the part with me of a protector who is interested in the work of one of his pupils? Spare me this comedy, and let me try to prevent a catastrophe.” To the husband I would like to have said: “If you had watched over your wife more carefully in the beginning she would not be what she is, and this drama would not be enacted in your drawing-room.” In place of those replies, in each case I uttered a few vain, untruthful words. My 238desire was to reach Jacques soon enough at least to prevent him being in the vicinity of Madam de Bonnivet while the acting was going on. Perhaps I should succeed, as I was only a couple of paces away from him, when Queen Anne, as if she had guessed that I was this time bearing a message from her rival and should deliver it, decided to call me, and said in a tone of imperceptible raillery—

“Let me present you to the woman in Paris who knows most about the primitive Italians about whom you were talking to me the other evening.”

“Really, sir,” the person to whom I was to be thus linked, an insupportable blue stocking, whose name, if my memory does not deceive me, was Madam de Sermoise, said, “do you admire those idealist masters who are so little appreciated in our days of gross realism? But we shall return to them, and to a noble and lofty art. You have been to Pisa, of course, to Sienna, to San Gemigorano and Perugia?”

O sweet little red and golden towns of lovely green Tuscany, which indent with your towers the heights of the slopes planted with vines and olives! O generous artists with whom I lived so long, and whose visions are to me still my soul’s daily bread! Pardon me if I blasphemed your memory and your cult in replying as I did to the odious pedant. I declared to her that her hostess was making fun of her. I told her that I was a member of the grotesquely modern school of art. But my indignation did not last. Madam de Bonnivet had 239just asked Camille Favier and Bressoré to begin. She gave the signal for the guests to take their seats before the space reserved for the two actors who were to play; and she made Jacques Molan sit by her side, saying loud enough for me to hear—

“Every honour shall be shown to the author!”

Then followed a few moments of general disturbance of couches and chairs, the occupation of the seats by the women, leaving almost all the men to stand, and the gradual establishment of silence. In the midst of the last of the whispering came the sudden sound of the voices of the two performers, the dialogue, and the discreet applause of the audience of people of leisure; but I hardly noticed the details so did my heart beat, and does still to-day, at the recollection of that long-past hour.

Knowing as I did the minutest expressions of Camille’s mobile face, the slightest shades of her gestures, the most tenuous inflections of her voice, I had realized from the first words of the scene that she had lost control of herself. Madam de Bonnivet had seen it too. She affected, while bowing her head at the fine points and being the first to applaud, to lean towards Jacques a little too far, to speak to him in low tones, and render him that public homage which was the simple politeness of an admirer of the fashionable author! But to Camille, the wronged and desperate mistress, the insolence of this attitude was too atrocious, and it was impossible for the actress to bear it without taking her revenge. I believed at 240first that she would try to humiliate her formidable rival by her success, so much eloquence and passion did she display in the short scene she was acting.

After that was ended, when she was asked to recite one or two pieces, I thought she would restrict her vengeance to sharing a little of her success with two of Jacques’ colleagues, of whom he is jealous, unless she chose these two poems because in reciting them she was also solacing her own poor deserted heart. One of these poems was by René Vincy, and the other was an unpublished sonnet by Claude Larcher which I had copied for her. Dear Claude! How beautiful Camille was while she recited this elegy which had for me so many moving souvenirs of my dead friend’s sorrow. She recited one or two other pieces, and then quickly and in a joking way which reassured me for a second, she began to give those imitations which are always ignoble and sometimes vulgar. The divine Julia Bartet, the suffering and finely vibrating Tanagra in Antigone, the supple and poignant Réjane in Germinie Lacerteux, the pathetic Jane Hading in Sapho, the sprightly Jeanne Granier and the tragic Marthe Brandés were in turn the pretext for a mimicry which testified to a study of the art of these famous artists so profound as to be almost a science, and to that monkeyish frolic of which Molan had spoken, till having announced Sarah Bernhardt in Phédre, a shiver went through my whole frame.

She began and I suddenly recalled Adrienne Lecouvreur and the scene in which the actress, 241seeing Maurice de Saxe, whom she loved, flirting with the Duchess de Bouillon during a drawing-room performance, recited those same lines of Racine’s and ended by applying to her in a loud voice the imprecation of the poet’s incestuous queen. Had Camille, an actress like Adrienne, in love, too, like her, like her betrayed under circumstances which I suddenly realized were very similar, coolly premeditated the same vengeance? Or did the excess of her anger inspire her all at once with this manner of outraging her unworthy lover and his mistress? I could distinctly see now upon her face a terrible intention, and I listened to her with my eyes fixed upon Jacques as she uttered that admirable line—
“The heart is full of sighs it has not uttered.”

But her overpowering emotion already prevented from imitating the accent of the admirable Sarah. She pronounced in her own way and on her own behalf the poet’s lines, and advanced to the edge of the little stage with the denunciatory gesture which is in Adrienne Lecouvreur. Her arms were pointed towards Madam de Bonnivet. She darted at her enemy a look of mad jealousy as she uttered the irreparable words—

“I know my wickedness ?none, and am not one of those bold women who, enjoying in crime a shameful peace, have learned to keep an unblushing face.”