“Because I cannot. I was to blame. I shall not be guilty a second time.”
At that he begged and implored her, tortured with desire, maddened with the need to possess her utterly, in the deep abandon of nights of love.
“No, I cannot,” she replied obstinately. “No, I cannot.”
He grew more and more eager and excited. He promised to marry her.
“No,” she said again, and left him.
He did not see her for eight days. He could not continue to meet her, and, as he did not know her address, he thought her lost forever.
On the evening of the ninth day his doorbell rang. He went to open the door. It was she. She flung herself into his arms and resisted no longer. For three months she was his mistress. He began to weary of her, when she told him that she was with child. At that he had only one idea left in his head: to break with her at all costs.
Unable to tell her frankly what he meant to do, not knowing how to deal with the situation or what to say, wild with apprehension, and with the fear of the growing child, he made a desperate move. He decamped one night and disappeared.
The blow was so cruel that she made no search for the man who had deserted her in this fashion. She flung herself at her mother’s knees and confessed her misfortune to her; a few months later she gave birth to a son.
The years slipped by. François Tessier grew old, without suffering any change in his manner of life. He led the monotonous and dismal existence of a bureaucrat, without hope or expectation. Every day he rose at the same hour, went down the same streets, walked through the same door past the same hall-porter, entered the same office, sat down on the same seat, and worked at the same task. He was alone in the world, alone by day in the midst of his indifferent colleagues, alone at night in his bachelor lodgings. Every month he saved up a hundred francs for his old age.
Every Sunday he went for a walk along the Champs-Élysées, to watch the world of fashion go by, the carriages and the pretty women.
Next day he would say to his comrades in duress:
“It was a wonderful sight outside the park yesterday.”
One Sunday it chanced that he took a new way and went into the Parc Monceau. It was a bright summer morning. Nurses and mothers, seated on the benches at the side of the paths, were watching the children playing in front of them.
François Tessier shivered suddenly. A woman passed him, holding two children by the hand, a little boy of about ten, and a little girl of four. It was she.
He walked on for another hundred yards, and then sank into a chair, choked with emotion. She had not recognised him. Then he went back, trying to see her again. She was sitting down now. The boy was standing beside her, charmingly decorous, and the little girl was making mud pies. It was she, it was certainly she. She had the grave demeanour of a lady; her dress was simple, her bearing full of dignity and assurance.
He watched her from a distance, not daring to come close. The little boy raised his head. François Tessier felt himself trembling. This was his son, past all manner of doubt. He gazed at him, and fancied that he recognised himself as he might look in an old photograph.
He stayed hidden behind a tree, waiting for her to go, so that he might follow.
He did not sleep that night. The thought of the child racked him more than any other. His son! Oh! if he could only know, be sure! But what would he have done?
He had seen her house, he made inquiries, he learnt that she was married to a neighbour, a good man of high moral principles, touched by her misery. Knowing her sin and forgiving it, he had even acknowledged the child, his, François Tessier’s child.
Every Sunday he revisited the Parc Monceau. Every Sunday he saw her, and each time the mad, irresistible longing came to him to take his son in his arms, cover him with kisses, and carry him off, steal him.
He suffered terribly in his wretched loneliness, an old bachelor with nothing to love; he suffered a frightful anguish, torn by a fatherly love made up of remorse, longing, jealousy, and that need of small creatures to love which nature has implanted in the secret depths of every human being.
At last he decided to make a desperate effort, and, going up to her one day as she was entering the park, stood in her way, and said, with livid face and quivering lips:
“Don’t you recognise me?”
She raised her eyes, looked at him, uttered a scream of fear and horror, and, seizing her two children by the hand, fled, dragging them after her.
He went home to weep.
More months went by. He saw her no more. But he suffered day and night, gnawed and devoured by love for his child.
To embrace his son he would have died, would have committed murder, accomplished any task, braved any danger, attempted any perilous enterprise.
He wrote to her. She did not answer. After twenty letters he realised that he could not hope to move her. Then he took a desperate resolution; ready to receive a pistol bullet in his heart if he failed, he wrote a short note to her husband:
“Sir,
“My name must be an abhorred one to you. But I am so wretched, so tortured with remorse, that I have no hope except in you.
“I ask only for ten minutes’ talk with you.
Next day he received the answer:
“Sir,
“I shall expect you at five o’clock on Tuesday.”
As he mounted the staircase, François Tessier paused on every step, so furious was the beating of his heart. It was a hurrying clamour within his chest, a galloping animal, a dull
