Short Fiction

how I was suffering. I endured his caresses without even realising what he was doing, without thinking about it at all.

But all at once a sudden spasm seized me, the most extraordinary and awful spasm. I uttered one frightful cry, and repulsing my husband, who was holding me closely, I leaped out of bed and threw myself on my face near the door. It was madness, a dreadful madness. I was lost.

Henry, utterly distracted, lifted me up and begged me to tell him what was the matter. But I would not speak. I was resigned now. I waited for death. I knew that after a few hours’ respite, another spasm would seize me, then another, until the last one, which would be fatal.

I let him carry me back to bed. Towards daybreak, my husband’s irritating obsessions brought on a fresh attack, which lasted longer than the first. I felt a wild impulse to rend, bite, scream; it was terrible, but less disagreeable than I would have believed.

Towards eight o’clock in the morning, I fell asleep for the first time for four nights.

At eleven o’clock, a beloved voice woke me. It was mamma: my letter had alarmed her, and she had come hurrying to see me. She held a large hamper in her hand and suddenly I heard barks coming from it. I snatched it, quite distraught, and wild with hope. I opened it, and Bijou jumped on to the bed; he caressed me, and frisked about, and rolled on my pillow, quite mad with joy.

Well, my darling, believe me or not, as you like⁠ ⁠… I only understood next day.

What tricks our imagination can play us! To think what I imagined! Tell me, isn’t it too stupid?⁠ ⁠…

I have never, you understand, don’t you, confessed to anyone the tortures I suffered during those four days. Suppose my husband had known. He makes enough fun of me already over our Dieppe adventure. For the matter of that, his jests don’t trouble me much. I am used to them. One gets used to everything in this life.⁠ ⁠…

Caresses

No, my friend, do not think any more of it. What you ask of me revolts and disgusts me. It is as if God⁠—for I believe in God⁠—had wanted to spoil every good thing that He made by attaching some horrible thing to it. He had given us love, the divinest thing the world ever knew, but, finding it too lovely and too fine for us, He imagined our senses, shameful, vile, revolting, brutal senses, senses that He seems to have fashioned in malicious jest and linked with the excretions of our bodies; He has conceived them in such a way that we cannot think of it without blushing, can only speak of it in hushed voices. The dreadful thing they do is wrapped in shame. It hides away, disgusts our souls, offends our eyes; despised by morality, hounded down by law, it consummates itself in darkness, as if it were a criminal.

Never speak to me of it, never!

I do not know whether I love you, but I know that your nearness pleases me, that your glance is sweet to me and your voice caresses my heart. From the day you had of me the frailness you desire, you would become hateful to me. The delicate bond that holds us to each other would be broken. An infamous abyss would lie between us.

Let us stay as we are. And⁠ ⁠… love me if you will, I will let you.

Your friend,

Geneviève

Madame, will you allow me also to speak to you with brutal frankness, without polite euphemisms, as I would speak to a friend who was anxious to take on himself a lifelong vow?

Neither do I know whether I love you. I should be sure of it only after the thing that so revolts you.

Have you forgotten Musset’s poem:

Je me souviens encor de ces spasmes terribles,
De ces baisers muets, de ces muscles ardents,
De cet être absorbé, blême et serrant les dents.
S’ils ne sont pas divins, ces moments sont horribles.12

We experience that sense of horror and overwhelming disgust only when the madness of our blood has led us into casual adventures. But when a woman is the being we have chosen, entirely charming and infinitely desirable, as you are for me, the caress of love becomes the sharpest, most complete and supremest pleasure.

This caress, madame, is the proof of love. If our passion dies after that fierce embrace, we have been deceiving ourselves. If it grows, we love.

A philosopher, who did not practise his doctrines, has put us on our guard against this snare of nature’s. Nature desires new life, he says, and to compel us to create it, has set the double bait of love and pleasure round the snare. And he adds: “As soon as we have let ourselves be taken, as soon as the momentary madness has left us, we are filled with a profound sadness, understanding the trick that has deceived us, seeing, feeling, touching the secret hidden cause that has driven us in spite of ourselves.”

That is often true, very often. Then we go away, in utter revulsion. Nature has conquered us, has thrown us against our will into arms that were opened for us because she willed them to open.

Yes, I know the cold savage kisses pressed on strange lips, the fixed burning gaze into eyes that one has never seen before and will never see again, and all that I can’t tell, all that sears our mind with a bitter grief.

But if this hazy cloud of affection that we call love has closed round two human beings, if they never cease to think long of each other, and, when they are separated, to remember one another, all the time, day and night, hiding in their hearts the beloved’s features and his smile and the sound of his voice; if they have been obsessed, possessed by the absent form whose