“She’s an extraordinary girl to be the daughter of an adventuress, sprung up in that hotbed, like a beautiful plant nourished on manure, or she may be the daughter of some man of high rank, a great artist or a great nobleman, a prince or a king who found himself one night in her mother’s bed. No one can understand just what she is, or what she thinks about. But you will see her.”
Saval shouted with laughter.
“You’re in love with her,” he said.
“No, I am one of the competitors, which is not the same thing. By the way, I’ll introduce you to my most serious rivals. But I have a real chance. I have a good start, and she regards me with favour.”
“You’re in love,” repeated Saval.
“No, I’m not. She disturbs me, allures me and makes me uneasy, at once attracts me and frightens me. I distrust her as I would a trap, yet I long for her with the longing of a thirsty man for a cool drink. I feel her charm, and draw near it as nervously as if I were in the same room with a man suspected of being a clever thief. In her presence I feel an almost absurd inclination to believe in the possibility of her innocence, and a very reasonable distrust of her equally possible cunning. I feel that I am in contact with an abnormal being, a creature outside the laws of nature, delicious or detestable, I don’t know.”
For the third time Saval declared:
“You’re in love, I tell you. You speak of her with the fervour of a poet and the lyricism of a troubadour. Come now, have it out with yourself, search your heart and admit it.”
“Well, it may be so, after all. At least she’s always in my mind. Yes, perhaps I am in love. I think of her too much. I think of her when I’m falling asleep and when I wake up; that’s fairly serious. Her image haunts me, pursues me, is with me the whole time, in front of me, round me, in me. Is it love, this physical obsession? Her face is so sharply graven in my mind that I see it the moment I shut my eyes. I don’t deny that my pulses race whenever I see her. I love her, then, but in an odd fashion. I long for her passionately, yet the idea of making her my wife would seem to me a monstrous absurd folly. I am also a little afraid of her, like a bird swooped upon by a hawk. And I’m jealous of her too, jealous of all that is hidden from me in her incomprehensible heart. I’m always asking myself: ‘Is she a delightful little guttersnipe or a thoroughly bad lot?’ She says things that would make a trooper blush, but so do parrots. Sometimes she’s so brazenly indecent that I’m inclined to believe in her absolute purity, and sometimes her artlessness is so much too good to be true that I wonder if she ever was chaste. She provokes me and excites me like a harlot, and guards herself at the same time as though she were a virgin. She appears to love me, and laughs at me; in public she almost proclaims herself my mistress, and when we’re alone together she treats me as though I were her brother or her footman.
“Sometimes I imagine that she has as many lovers as her mother. Sometimes I think that she knows nothing about life, absolutely nothing.
“And she has a passion for reading novels. At present, while waiting for a more amusing position, I am her bookseller. She calls me her librarian.
“Every week the Librairie Nouvelle sends her, from me, everything that has appeared; I believe she reads through the whole lot.
“It must make a strange salad in her head.
“This literary taste may account for some of her queer ways. When you see life through a maze of fifteen thousand novels, you must get a queer impression of things and see them from an odd angle.
“As for me, I wait. It is certainly true that I have never felt towards any woman as I feel towards her.
“It’s equally certain that I shall never marry her.
“If she has had lovers, I shall make one more. If she has not, I shall be the first to take my seat in the train.
“It’s all very simple. She can’t possibly marry, ever. Who would marry the daughter of the Marquise Obardi, Octavie Bardin? Clearly no one, for any number of reasons.
“Where could she find a husband? In society? Never; the mother’s house is a public resort, and the daughter attracts the clients. One can’t marry into a family like that. In the middle classes, then? Even less. Besides, the Marquise has a good head on her shoulders; she’d never give Yvette to anyone but a man of rank, and she’ll never find him.
“In the lower classes, perhaps? Still less possible. There’s no way out of it, then. The girl belongs neither to society nor to the middle class, nor to the lower classes, nor would marriage jockey her into any one of them. She belongs, by her parentage, her birth, her upbringing, heredity, manners, habits, to the world of gilded prostitution.
“She can’t escape unless she becomes a nun, which is very unlikely, seeing that her manners and tastes are already what they are. So she has only one possible profession—love. That’s where she’ll go, if she has not already gone. She can’t escape her destiny. From being a young girl, she’ll become just a—‘woman.’ And I should very much like to be the man who brings about the transformation.
“I am waiting. There are any number of lovers. You’ll come across a Frenchman, Monsieur de Beloigne, a Russian who calls himself Prince Kravalow, and an Italian, Chevalier Valréali. These have all
