“Exactly. He married her … he married her … as a man does marry, dammit, because he’s a fool!”
“But what else?”
“What else … what else, my friend? There is nothing else. A man is an ass because he’s an ass. And besides, you know very well that painters are particularly given to ridiculous marriages; almost all of them marry models, old mistresses, even women whose encounters with men have made them slightly shop-soiled. Why is it? Who knows? One would suppose, on the contrary, that the constant society of that flock of imbeciles called models ought to have filled men with a lasting disgust for that brand of female. Not at all. After making them pose, they marry them. Read Alphonse Daudet’s little book, which is so true, so cruel and so fine: Les Femmes d’Artistes.
“Fate, in a very special and terrible form, had its way with the couple you see there. The little woman staged a comedy, or rather a terrifying drama. She risked all to gain all, in short. Was she sincere? Did she love Jean? Can one ever be sure of that? Could anyone say for certain what is carefully planned and what is spontaneous in the things women do? Their sincerity reflects faithfully a constant change of mood. They are impassioned, wicked, devoted, admirable, depraved, in obedience to uncontrollable emotions. They lie the whole time, neither wishing it, knowing it, nor understanding that they are lying, and they have, with it and in spite of it, an absolute freshness of emotions and sentiments which they evidence in violent, unexpected, incomprehensible, crazy resolutions, that confound our reasoning, our customary calculations and our egoistic habits of thought. The abrupt and unpremeditated nature of their decisions makes them always for us undecipherable enigmas. We are always wondering: ‘Are they sincere? Are they false?’
“But, my friend, they are at once sincere and false, because it is their nature to be both to the utmost and to be neither the one nor the other.
“Think of the methods the most honest of them use to get what they want from us. Their methods are both complicated and simple. So complicated that we never guess them beforehand, so simple that after we have fallen victims we can’t help being surprised at it and saying to ourselves: ‘What, did she play a crude trick like that on me?’
“And they are always successful, my dear fellow, especially when it is marriage they are after.
“But listen to Summer’s story.
“The little woman is a model, of course. She posed for him. She was pretty, distinguished-looking too, and had, he thought, a divine figure. He fell in love with her, as a man does fall in love with a rather attractive woman whom he is constantly seeing. He imagined that he loved her with his whole heart. That’s an odd phenomenon. As soon as a man desires a woman, he is sincerely convinced that he could never tire of her for the rest of his life. He knows quite well that the thing has happened to him already; that disgust always follows possession; that the necessary condition of being able to spend the whole of one’s life with another being is not a brutish, physical appetite, quickly sated, but a similarity of mind, temperament and disposition. He must be able to decide whether the charm that holds him comes from the corporeal form, from a sort of drunkenness of the senses, or from a deeper spiritual beauty.
“Well, he imagined that he loved her; he made her a host of promises of faithfulness and he took her to live with him.
“She was really a nice little thing, and had that graceful puckish charm our Parisian little ladies so often have. She chattered like a magpie, she prattled, she said absurd things that seemed witty because of the droll way she uttered them. The gracious gestures she used every moment were well calculated to charm the eye of a painter. When she lifted her arms, when she stooped, when she stepped into a carriage, when she held out her hand to you, her movements were perfectly proportioned and harmonious.
“For three months, Jean never noticed that at bottom she was just like all other models.
“They rented a little house at Andrésy for the summer.
“I was there one evening, when the first doubts stirred in my friend’s mind.
“It was a radiant night, and we chose to walk along the river bank. The moon poured a rain of light on the rippling water, scattered its broken yellow rays over eddies and running water, and all the wide slow-moving reeds.
“We walked along the bank; the vague sense of exaltation born of such romantic nights had rather gone to our heads. We would have liked to achieve superhuman tasks, to love unknown creatures of rare poetic kind. We felt stirring in us ecstasies, desires, strange aspirations. And we were silent, filled with the serene living coolness of lovely night, with the cool beauty of the moon that seems to run through one’s body, filling it full, flooding the mind, lending it fragrance, drowning it in sweet content.
“All at once Joséphine (she was called Joséphine) uttered a cry:
“ ‘Oh, did you see the great big fish that jumped over there?’
“He answered carelessly, not looking:
“ ‘Yes, darling.’
“She was annoyed:
“ ‘No, you didn’t see it, seeing that you had your back to it.’
“He smiled:
“ ‘Yes, that’s true. It is so lovely that I am not thinking of anything.’
“She was silent; but a moment later she was seized with a desire to talk, and she asked:
“ ‘Shall you go to Paris tomorrow?’
“ ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ he said deliberately.
“She was irritated again:
“ ‘Do you think it’s amusing, walking with nothing to say? People talk, unless they’re idiots.’
“He did not answer. Then, well aware, thanks to her perverse woman’s instinct, that she would exasperate him, she began to sing that maddening air with which our ears and minds have been wearied for the last two years:
