The Marquis, having loved much, combated this belief in lively fashion:
“I tell you that one can love many times with all one’s strength and all one’s soul. You cite to me people who have killed themselves for love as proof of the impossibility of a second passion. I answer that if they had not been guilty of this foolishness of suicide, which removed them from all chance of another fall, they would have been healed; and they would have recommenced, again and again, until their natural death. It is with lovers as it is with drunkards—once a drunkard always a drunkard, once a lover, always a lover. It is simply a matter of temperament.”
They chose the doctor as arbitrator, an old Paris physician retired to the country, and begged him to give his opinion.
To be exact, he had none. As the Marquis had said, it is an affair of temperament.
“As for myself,” he continued, “I have known of one passion which lasted fifty-five years without a day of respite, and which was terminated only by death.”
The Marquis clapped his hands.
“This is beautiful,” said a lady. “And what a dream to be so loved! What happiness to live fifty-five years enveloped in a deep, living affection! How happy the person must be, how pleased with life, who was adored like that!”
The doctor smiled:
“In fact, Madame,” said he, “you are right on that point. The loved one was a man. You know him, it is Mr. Chouquet, the chemist of the village. And as for the woman, you knew her too, it is the old woman who put cane seats in chairs, and came every year to this house. But how can I make you understand the whole story?”
The enthusiasm of the women fell. On their faces a look of disgust said: “Pooh!”—as if love could only strike those fine and distinguished creatures who were worthy of the interest of fashionable people.
The doctor continued:
“I was called, three months ago, to the bedside of this old woman. She was dying. She had come here in the old carriage that served her for a house, drawn by the nag that you have often seen, and accompanied by her two great black dogs, her friends and guard. The priest was already there. She made us the executors of her will, and in order to unveil the meaning of her testament, she related the story of her life. I have never heard anything more singular or more affecting.
“Her father made chair seats and so did her mother. She had never known a home in any one place upon the earth. As a little girl, she went around ragged, verminous and dirty. They would stop beside the road at the entrance to towns, unharness the horse and let him browse; the dog would go to sleep with his nose in his paws; the little one would play in the grass while the father and mother, under the shade of the elms bordering the roadside, would mend all the old chairs in the neighbourhood.
“No one ever talked in this moving dwelling. After the necessary words to decide who should make the tour of the houses and who should call out the well-known: ‘Chairs to mend!’ they would sit down to plait the straw, face to face or side by side.
“When the child went too far away or struck up an acquaintance with some urchin in the village, the angry voice of the father would call her: ‘You come back here, you brat!’ And these were the only words of tenderness she ever heard.
“When she grew bigger they sent her around to collect the worn-out chairs to be mended. Then she made some acquaintances from place to place among the street children. Then it would be the parents of her new friends who would call brutally to their children: ‘Will you come here, you scamp! Let me catch you talking to that barefoot again!’
“Often the boys would throw stones at her. When ladies gave her a few pence she kept them carefully.
“One day—she was then eleven years old—as they were passing through this place, she met the little Chouquet behind the cemetery, weeping because some comrade had stolen two sous from him. The tears of this little well-to-do citizen, one of those fortunate ones who in her queer noddle she had thought always content and joyous, quite upset her. She went up to him, and when she learned the cause of his trouble, she poured into his hands all her savings, seven sous, which he took quite naturally, drying his tears. Then, mad with joy, she had the audacity to kiss him. As he was counting the money attentively, he allowed her to do it. Seeing that she was not repulsed or beaten, she did the same thing again. She embraced him with all her strength and all her heart. Then she ran away.
“What could have taken place in her miserable head after that? Did she attach herself to this little boy, because she had sacrificed for him her beggar’s fortune, or because she had given to him her first tender kiss? The mystery is the same for the small as for the great.
“For months she dreamed of this corner of the cemetery and of this boy. In the hope of seeing him again, she robbed her parents, keeping back a sou here and there, either from a chair seat or upon the provisions which she was sent to buy.
“When she returned here she had two francs in her pocket, but she only saw the chemist’s son, very clean behind the big coloured bottles of his father’s shop, between a red decanter and a tapeworm. She loved him there still more, charmed, aroused to ecstasy by this glory of coloured water, this apotheosis
