Short Fiction

but went quickly downstairs.

Then, very excited, he sank back into a chair and waited.

He waited a long, long time, and as angry voices reached him from downstairs he decided to go down.

Very indignant, Madame Poinçot was standing up, ready to leave the room, while her husband was holding her by her dress, explaining: “But can’t you understand you are bringing ruin on your daughters, your daughters, our children!” She replied stubbornly: “I will not go back to your house.”

Renoldi realised what had happened and went in, his hopes dashed, and gasped: “What? She refuses?”

She turned towards him⁠—shamefacedly refraining from using the familiar “thou” in the presence of her legitimate spouse⁠—and said: “Do you know what he is asking me to do? He wants me to go back and live with him!” She sneered contemptuously at the man almost on his knees before her.

Then Renoldi, with the determination of a gambler playing his last stake, began to talk to her, pleading for them all in turn. And when he paused in the effort to find some fresh argument, Monsieur Poinçot, at his wit’s end, murmured⁠—instinctively speaking as he had spoken to her in the past: “Come, come, Delphine, think of your daughters!”

She swept them both into a glance of sovereign contempt and, making her escape, shouted: “You are a pair of wretches.”

Left alone, they gazed at each other, both equally crestfallen, equally stricken. Monsieur Poinçot picked up his hat, which had fallen on the floor, flicked the dust off his knees with his hand, then, while Renoldi was showing him to the door, with a gesture of despair he exclaimed, bowing:

“We are both very unhappy indeed, Monsieur.”

Then he left the house with a slow, heavy step.

Mad?

Am I mad or jealous? I know not which, but I suffer horribly. I committed a crime, it is true, a mad crime, but are not insane jealousy, passionate love, betrayed and lost, and the terrible pain I endure, enough to make anyone commit a crime, without actually being a criminal?

Oh! I have suffered, suffered continually, acutely, terribly. I have loved this woman to madness⁠—and yet, is it true? Did I love her? No, no! She owned me body and soul, I was, and am, her plaything, she ruled me by her smile, her look, the divine form of her body. I fight against the domination of her physical appearance, but the woman contained in that body, I despise, hate and execrate. I always have hated, despised and execrated her, for she is but an impure, perfidious, bestial, filthy creature, the woman of perdition, the treacherous sensual animal, in whom there is no soul; she is the human animal, even less than that, she is but a mass of soft flesh in which dwells infamy!

The first few months of our union were deliciously strange. In her arms I was exhausted by the frenzy of insatiable desire. Her eyes drew my lips as though they could quench my thirst. They were gray at noon, shaded green at twilight, and blue at sunrise. I am not mad. I swear they were of these three colours. In moments of love they were blue as though they had been bruised; the pupils dilated and nervous. Her lips trembled and often the tip of her pink moist tongue could be seen, quivering like that of a snake. Her heavy eyelids would be slowly raised, revealing that ardent, languorous look which used to madden me. When I took her in my arms I used to gaze into her eyes, trembling, seized not only with an unceasing desire to possess her, but also to kill this beast.

When she walked across the room each step resounded in my heart, and when she began to undress, her dress falling from her, and emerged infamous but radiant from the white mass of linen and lace, I felt in all my limbs, in my legs and arms, in my panting chest, an infinite and cowardly weakness.

One day I saw that she was tired of me. I saw it in her eyes on waking. Leaning over her I awaited this first look of hers every morning. I awaited it, filled with hatred, rage, and contempt for this sleeping brute whose slave I was. But when she fixed those pale, limpid blue eyes upon me, that languishing glance, tired with the lassitude of recent caresses, a rapid fire consumed me, exasperating my desires.

When she opened her eyes that day I saw a dull, indifferent look; a look devoid of desire, and I knew then she was tired of me. I saw it, knew it, felt it, and understood immediately that all was over, and each hour and minute proved to me that I was right. When I beckoned her with my arms and lips she shrank from me.

“Leave me alone,” she said. “You are horrid! Will you never leave me alone?”

Then I became jealous, slyly, suspiciously, secretly jealous, like a dog. I knew she would soon be aroused again, that another man would excite her passions. I was insanely jealous; but I am not insane, no indeed! I watched her and waited; not that she had betrayed me, but she was cold and indifferent.

At times she would say:

“Men disgust me!” Alas! it was too true.

Then I became jealous of her own existence, of her indifference, of her nights alone, of her actions, of her thoughts, which I knew to be impure, jealous of all that my imagination suspected; and when she awakened sometimes with that same look of lassitude which used to follow our ardent nights, as though some desire had haunted her mind and stirred her passions, I suffocated with anger, and an irresistible desire to choke her, to break her with my knee, to seize her by the throat, and make her confess the shameful secrets of her heart took hold of me.

Am I insane? No.

One night I saw that she was happy. I felt, in fact I was convinced, that a