I used to sit for hours and watch the unhappy man, and I fancied terrible tragedies, some fatal love affair, a noble life bungled, crushed and ruined by that woman with the owl face. I pictured to myself this living corpse as beautiful, young and strong. … Perhaps he had been an artist once upon a time, a scientist, or simply a happy and kindhearted man. And tall and upright, with a gaze full of hope, he marched towards glory or happiness. … One day he met that woman at the house of a friend … and that woman, too, wore a perfumed veil, a small muff, an otter skin cap, a heavenly smile, and an air of angelic sweetness. … And forthwith he fell in love with her. … I followed step by step the development of his love affair, I counted up his weaknesses, his moments of cowardice, his growing downfalls up to the time of his sinking into this armchair for cripples and paralytics.
And what I imagined his life was to him, my own life was to me, those were my own feelings, it was my own dread of the future, my own anguish. … Little by little my hallucination took on a singular physical form, and it was myself that I saw in this velvet cap, in this morning robe with this battered body, this murky beard, and Juliette who stood over my shoulder like an owl. …
Juliette! … She walked about in the study, weary of body, her whole figure betraying boredom, yawning and sighing. She could not think of anything to distract her. Most often she would place the card table not far from me and lose herself in the card combinations of a complicated “patience,” or she would stretch herself out on the sofa, spread a napkin over her dress, place upon it some tiny instruments of tortoise shell, microscopic containers of ointment, and begin polishing her nails, fiercely filing them and making them shine more lustrously than agate. She would examine them every five minutes, looking for the reflection of her image in the polished surfaces:
“Look my dear! Aren’t they beautiful! And you, too, Spy, look at your mistress’ pretty nails.”
The light friction of the nail brush, the imperceptible creaking of the sofa, Juliette’s remarks, her conversation with Spy—all this was sufficient to put to rout the few ideas which I strove to bring together. My thoughts would turn immediately to ordinary matters, and I meditated upon painful things and lived sorrowful things over again. … Juliette. … Did I love her? Many times this question arose in my mind, pregnant with horrible doubt. … Had I not been deceived by the stupefaction of my senses? … Was not this thing which I took for love, the ephemeral and fleeting manifestation of a pleasure as yet untasted? … Juliette! … Of course I loved her. …
But this Juliette whom I loved, was she not altogether different, was she not the Juliette that I had myself created, that had been born of my own imagination, that had originated in my own brains, whom I had endowed with a soul, with a spark of divinity, whom I had fashioned into being with the ideal essence of angels? … And did I not still love her as one does a beautiful book, a beautiful verse, a beautiful statue, a visible and tangible realization of an artist’s dream! … But this other Juliette! … This one here? … This pretty, senseless, ignorant animal, this knickknack, this piece of cloth, this nothing? …
I studied her carefully while she was polishing her nails. … Oh, how I would have liked to break this neck and sound its emptiness, to open this heart and probe its nothingness! And I said to myself: “What sort of a life will mine be with this woman whose tastes are only for pleasure, who is happy only when she is dressed up, whose every wish costs a fortune, who in spite of her chaste appearance, has an instinctive predilection for vice; who used to leave unhappy Malterre every evening, without a single regret, without a single thought; who will leave me tomorrow, perhaps; this woman who is a living denial of my aspirations, of my ideals; who will never, never enter into my intellectual life; and lastly this woman who already weighs upon my intelligence like folly, upon my whole being like a crime.”
I had a notion to flee, to tell Juliette: “I am going out, I’ll be back in an hour,” and never to return to this house where the very ceiling was more oppressive to me than the lid of a coffin, where the air stifled me, where the very furniture seemed to say to me: “Leave this place” … But no! … I loved her, and it was this very Juliette that I loved, not the other one who has gone the way of all dreams! … I loved her with all her qualities which made me suffer, I loved her in spite of all her lack of understanding, I loved
