“Women, it seems,” she said with tearful eyes, “are fit only to love. Men have a thousand different ways of spending their energy; all we can do is to dream, and pray, and worship.”
So much love deserved a recompense. Peeping round, like a nightingale ready to alight from its branch beside a spring of water, she tried to make sure whether they were alone in this solitude, and whether no spectator lurked in the silence. Then raising her head to Raoul, who bent his to meet her, she allowed him a kiss, the first, the only, contraband kiss she was destined to give. At that instant she was happier than she had been for five years, while Raoul felt himself repaid for all that he had gone through.
They had to return to their carriages, and walked on, hardly knowing whither, along the road from Auteuil to Boulogne, moving with the even rhythmic step familiar to lovers. Confidence came to Raoul in that kiss, tendered with the modest frankness that is the outcome of a pure mind. All the evil came from society, not from this woman, who was so absolutely his. The hardships of his frenzied existence were nothing now to him; and Marie, in the ardor of her first passion, was bound, womanlike, soon to forget them, since she could not witness from hour to hour the terrible throes of a life too exceptional to be easily imagined.
Marie, penetrated by the grateful veneration, characteristic of a woman’s love, hastened with resolute and active tread along the sand-strewn alley. Like Raoul, she spoke but little, but that little came from the heart, and was full of meaning. The sky was clear; buds were forming on the larger trees, where already spots of green enlivened the delicate brown tracery; while the shrubs, birches, willows, and poplars showed their first tender and unsubstantial foliage. What heart can resist the harmony of such a scene? Love was now interpreting nature to the Countess, as it had already interpreted the ways of men.
“If only I were your first love!” she breathed.
“You are,” replied Raoul. “We have each been the first to reveal true love to the other.”
Nor did he speak falsely. In posing before this fresh young heart as a man of pure life, he became affected by the noble sentiments with which he embroidered his talk. His passion, at first a matter of policy and ambition, had become sincere. Starting from falsehood, he had arrived at truth. Add to this that all authors have a natural instinct, repressed only with effort, to admire moral beauty. Lastly, a man has but to make enough sacrifices in order to become attached to the person demanding them. Women of the world know this intuitively, just as courtesans do, and it may even be that they unconsciously act upon the knowledge.
The Countess, after her first burst of surprised gratitude, was delighted to have inspired so much devotion and been the cause of such astounding feats. The man who loved her was worthy of her. Raoul had not the least idea to what this playing at greatness would commit him. He forgot that no woman will allow her lover to fall below her ideal of him, and that nothing paltry can be suffered in a god. Marie had never heard that solution of the problem which Raoul had disclosed to his friends in the course of the supper at Véry’s. His struggles as a man of letters, forcing his way upward from the masses, had filled the first ten years of early manhood; now he was resolved to be loved by one of the queens of the fashionable world. Vanity, without which, as Chamfort said, love has no backbone, sustained his passion, and could not fail to augment it day by day.
“Can you swear to me,” said Marie, “that you are nothing, and never will be anything, to another woman?”
“My life has no space for another, even were my heart free,” was his reply, made in all sincerity, so completely had Florine dropped out of sight.
And she believed him.
When they reached the road where the carriages were waiting, Marie let go the arm of Nathan, who at once assumed a respectful attitude, as though this were a chance meeting. He walked with her, hat in hand, as far as the carriage, and then followed it down the avenue Charles X, inhaling the dust it raised, and watching the drooping feathers swaying in the wind.
In spite of Marie’s generous resolutions of sacrifice, Raoul, spurred on by passion, continued to appear wherever she went; he adored the half-vexed, half-smiling air with which she vainly tried to scold him for wasting the time he could so badly spare. Marie began to take Raoul’s work in hand, laid down what he was to do every hour in the day, and remained at home herself, so as to leave him no excuse for taking a holiday. She read his paper every morning, and she trumpeted the praises of Étienne Lousteau the feuilletonist, whom she thought charming, of Félicien Vernou, Claude Vignon, and all the staff. It was she who advised Raoul to deal generously with de Marsay when he died, and she read with dizzy pride the fine dignified tribute which he paid the late minister, while deploring his Machiavellianism and hatred of the masses. She was of course present in a stage box at the Gymnase on the first night of the play, to which Raoul was trusting for the funds of his undertaking, and which seemed to her, deceived by the hired applause,
