so little, a mere nothing, a moment of tenderness, a sudden fit of melancholy, a longing to open your arms wide, to cherish, to fondle someone: we all feel like that sometimes.
“You know my husband, and you know how much I love him; but he is middle-aged and sensible and has no understanding of the tender other emotions that sway a woman’s heart. He is always, always the same, always kind, always smiling, always amiable, always perfect. Oh! how sometimes I have wanted him to clasp me roughly in his arms, to give me one of those slow, sweet kisses in which two beings intermingle, which are like silent avowals! How I have wanted him to be foolish, to be weak, to need me, to need my caresses, and my tears!
“All this is very silly, but we women are like that. We can’t help it.
“And yet I had never the faintest intention of being unfaithful. Now, I have done it, without love, without any reason whatever, without anything, simply because the moon was shining one night on the Lake of Lucerne.
“During the month that we were travelling together, my husband, with his calm indifference, damped all my enthusiasm, and dashed all my hopes. As the four coach-horses galloped down the mountainside at sunrise, the view of the transparent morning haze, the long valleys, the woods, the streams and the villages made me clap my hands with delight and I said: ‘How beautiful, how beautiful it is, my darling, please kiss me!’ He only replied with a smile of chilly kindliness and a slight shrug of the shoulders: ‘Because you like the landscape is no reason why we should kiss each other.’ That cut me to the heart.
“I do think that when people love each other they ought to want to love each other in the presence of things so beautiful that one’s whole being is set ablaze. In fact I was bubbling over with poetry which his presence forced me to suppress. How can I explain it? I was almost like a boiler filled with steam and hermetically sealed.
“One evening (we had been four days at an hotel at Fluelen) Robert, who had a headache, went to bed as soon as dinner was over, and I went for a walk by the lake alone.
“The night was like fairyland. The round moon hung in the middle of the heavens: the crests of the tall mountains, covered with snow, looked as if they were wearing silver crowns, and the rippling water of the lake was alive with little streaks of light. The air was soft and sweet with that penetrating warmth that destroys all power of resistance and fills one with unexpected weakness. Under this influence one’s feelings are hypersensitive and over-responsive; they are aflame in a second, and passionately active! I sat on the grass and gazed at the vast, melancholy, profoundly lovely lake, and was suddenly aware that what I so keenly desired was love. I was in revolt against the gloomy dullness of my life. What! would it never be my lot to wander along a moonbathed bank with a man I loved? Was I never to feel the ecstasy of those soul-stirring, delicious, intoxicating kisses which lovers exchanged in the sweetness of a night that seems to have been made for love? Was I never to be feverishly embraced in longing arms, in the moonlit shadow of a summer’s night? And I burst into tears like a crazy woman! Then a sound came from somewhere behind and I looked up to see a man gazing at me. He recognised me as I turned my head, and, coming forward, said: ‘You are crying, Madame?’
“It was a young barrister who was travelling with his mother and whom we had met occasionally. His eyes had often followed me.
“I was too upset to find any answer, so I got up at once and said I felt ill.
“He talked about our journey, walking by my side, quite naturally and simply. He expressed in words all that I felt: he understood all the things that left me breathless with delight, only much better than I did myself, and then suddenly he recited some of de Musset’s poetry. I gasped for breath; I felt that the mountains themselves, the lake, the moonlight, all were singing of things ineffably sweet. …
“And then it happened, I can’t say how or why, in a kind of hallucination. As for him … I only saw him again the next day as we were leaving.
“He gave me his card! …”
And Madame Létoré fell back into her sister’s arms, moaning piteously.
Then Madame Roubère, dignified and serious, gently said: “You see, my dear, there are times when we are in love, not with any man, but with love itself. That night the moonlight was your real lover.”
A Cock Crowed
Madame Berthe d’Avancelles up to that time had resisted all the prayers of her despairing admirer, Baron Joseph de Croissard. In Paris during the winter he had pursued her ardently, and now he was giving fêtes and shooting parties in her honour at his château at Carville, in Normandy.
Monsieur d’Avancelles, her husband, saw nothing and knew nothing, as usual. It was said that he lived apart from his wife on account of physical weakness, for which Madame d’Avancelles would not pardon him. He was a stout, bald little man, with short arms, legs, neck, nose and everything else, while Madame d’Avancelles, on the contrary, was a tall, dark and determined young woman, who laughed loudly in her husband’s face, while he called her openly “Mrs. Housewife,” and who looked at the broad shoulders, strong build and fair moustaches of her recognized admirer, Baron Joseph de Croissard, with a certain amount of tenderness.
She had not, however, granted him anything as yet. The Baron was ruining himself for her, and there was a constant round of fêtes, hunting parties and new pleasures, to which he invited the neighbouring nobility. All day long the hounds
