was thunderstruck and angry with that confiding man, who did not guess, who did not understand, the struggles of her heart.
February was a warm, bright month, and although she now avoided being alone with Monsieur d’Avancelle, she sometimes accepted his invitation to drive round the lake in the Bois de Boulogne with him, when it was dusk.
On one of those evenings, it was so warm that it seemed as if the sap in every tree and plant were rising. Their cab was going at a slow pace; it was growing dusk, and they were sitting close together, holding each other’s hands, and she said to herself:
“It is all over, I am lost!” for she felt her desires rising in her again, the imperious demand for that supreme embrace which she had undergone in her dream. Every moment their lips sought each other, clung together, and separated, only to meet again immediately.
He did not venture to go into the house with her, but left her at the door; more in love with her than ever, and half fainting.
Monsieur Paul Péronel was waiting for her in the little drawing room, without a light, and when he shook hands with her, he felt how feverish she was. He began to talk in a low, tender voice, lulling her tired mind with the charm of amorous words.
She listened to him without replying, for she was thinking of the other; she fancied she was listening to the other, and thought she felt him leaning against her, in a kind of hallucination. She saw only him, and did not remember that any other man existed on earth, and when her ears trembled at those three syllables: “I love you,” it was he, the other man, who uttered them, who kissed her hands, who strained her to his breast, like the other had done shortly before in the cab. It was he who pressed victorious kisses on her lips, it was he whom she held in her arms and embraced, to whom she was calling, with all the longings of her heart, with all the overwrought ardour of her body.
When she awoke from her dream, she uttered a terrible cry. Paul Péronel was kneeling by her and was thanking her passionately, while he covered her dishevelled hair with kisses, and she almost screamed out: “Go away! go away! go away!”
And as he did not understand what she meant, and tried to put his arm round her waist again, she writhed, as she stammered out:
“You are a wretch, and I hate you! Go away! go away!” And he got up in great surprise, took up his hat, and went.
The next day she returned to Val de Ciré, and her husband, who had not expected her for some time, blamed her for her whim.
“I could not live away from you any longer,” she said.
He found her altered in character and sadder than formerly, but when he said to her: “What is the matter with you? You seem unhappy. What do you want?” she replied:
“Nothing. Happiness exists only in our dreams in this world.”
Avancelle came to see her the next summer, and she received him without any emotion and without regret, for she suddenly perceived that she had never loved him, except in a dream, from which Paul Péronel had brutally roused her.
But the young man, who still adored her, thought as he returned to Paris:
“Women are really very strange, complicated, and inexplicable beings.”
Father Judas
The whole of this district was amazing, marked with a character of almost religious grandeur and sinister desolation.
In the centre of a quiet ring of bare hills, where nothing grew but whins and a rare, freakish oak twisted by the wind, there lay a vast wild tarn, in whose black and stagnant waters shivered thousands of reeds.
A solitary house stood on the banks of this gloomy lake, a small low house inhabited by an old boatman, Father Joseph, who lived on the proceeds of his fishing. Every week he carried his fish down to the neighbouring villages, and returned with the simple provisions necessary to his existence.
I had the whim to visit this hermit, and he offered to go and raise his nets for me.
I accepted.
His boat was a worm-eaten old tub. Thin and bony, he rowed with a quiet monotonous movement which soothed my spirit, already caught up in the melancholy of the enclosing sky.
Amid this ancient landscape, sitting in this primitive boat, steered by this man from another age, I imagined myself transported to one of the early epochs of the world.
He raised his nets, and threw the fish down at his feet with the gestures of a biblical fisherman. Then he consented to take me to the end of the marsh, and suddenly I saw, on the other bank, a ruin, a gutted hovel, on the wall of which was a cross, a huge red cross: under the last gleams of the setting sun it looked as if it were traced in blood.
“What is that?” I asked.
Instantly the man crossed himself, and answered:
“That is where Judas died.”
I was not surprised; I felt as though I might have expected this strange reply.
But I persisted:
“Judas? What Judas?”
He added: “The Wandering Jew, sir.”
I begged him to tell me this legend.
But it was better than a legend, it was a piece of history, of almost contemporary history, for Father Joseph had known the man.
Once upon a time the hut was occupied by a tall woman, a beggar of sorts, who lived on public charity.
From whom she had got this hovel, Father Joseph no longer remembered. One night an old man with a white beard, so old that he looked a centenarian twice over, and could hardly drag one foot after the other, passed by and asked this poor old woman for alms.
She answered:
“Sit down, Father, all here is for all the world, for it comes from all the world.”
He sat down on a stone in front of the house. He shared the
