The young footman went away, then came back and asked me to follow him. He showed me into an austerely tidy room in the style of Louis Philippe, with uninteresting heavy furniture from which a small sixteen-year-old maid, very thin but rather pretty, was removing the dust covers in my honour.
Then I was left alone.
There were three portraits on the walls, one of the actress in one of her roles; one of the poet in a long, close-fitting frock-coat and frilled shirt, and one of the musician sitting at a clavichord. She was fair, charming and blue-eyed, with the mannered beauty of her age, and her mouth curved into a gracious smile; the painting was done with a patient care, detailed, elegant and lifeless.
They seemed to have an eye to their effect on posterity even then.
All three belonged to another age, to days that were no more and a generation that had passed.
A door opened and a little woman came in; old, very old, very little, with folds of white hair, white eyebrows, a veritable white mouse, moving with swift furtive steps.
She held out her hand, and said in a voice that was still clear and rich and thrilling:
“I am glad to see you. How kind it is of a young man to remember an old woman! Please sit down.”
And I told her how I had been fascinated by her house and had wanted to know the owner’s name, and how, hearing it, I had not been able to resist the desire to knock at her door.
“I am all the more delighted,” she answered, “because this is the first time that such a thing has happened. When they brought me your card, with its charming little phrase, I trembled as if they had announced an old friend not seen for twenty years. I am dead, you see, and no one remembers me, no one will think of me, until the day when I die for good; and then for three days all the papers will write about Julie Romain, with anecdotes, details, memories of my past, and enthusiastic eulogies. Then that will be the end of me.”
She paused, and, after a silence, added:
“And that won’t be long now. In a few months, in a few days, nothing will remain of this little living woman but a little skeleton.”
She lifted her eyes to her portrait, which smiled at her, smiled at this old woman, this caricature of itself; then she looked at the two men, the haughty poet and the inspired musician who seemed to say: “What has this ravaged creature to do with us?”
A poignant indefinable grief overwhelmed me, wringing my heart, grief for the living dead who go on struggling in their memories like a man drowning in deep waters.
From my chair I could see smart swiftly driven carriages rolling along the road from Nice to Monaco. Inside them sat young women, lovely, rich, happy women, and smiling complacent men. She followed my glance, guessed what I was thinking, and murmured, with a smile of resignation:
“One can’t live and have lived.”
“How wonderful your life must have been!” I said.
She sighed deeply:
“Wonderful and sweet. That is why I regret it so bitterly.”
I saw that she was in a mood to talk about herself, and very gently, with the utmost care, as if I were touching a painful wound, I began to question her.
She told me about her successes, her wild joys, her friends, the whole story of her triumphant life. I asked her:
“Did you find your keenest joys and your real happiness in the theatre?”
“Oh, no,” she said emphatically.
I smiled: she threw a sorrowful glance at the two portraits and added:
“I found it in them.”
I could not resist asking: “Which of them?”
“Both. Sometimes I even confuse them with each other when I recall the past, and besides I feel remorseful towards one of them now.”
“Then, madame, it’s not to them but to love itself that you are grateful. They were only love’s interpreters.”
“Perhaps so. But what interpreters!”
“Are you sure that you haven’t, that you wouldn’t have been as well loved, better loved, by a simple gentleman, a man who would not have been famous, who would have given you his whole life, his whole heart, all his thoughts, his every hour, his whole being; whereas those two men gave you two formidable rivals, Music and Poetry?”
She cried out passionately, in that still youthful voice of hers with its strange thrilling note:
“No, monsieur, no. Another man might have loved me better, but he wouldn’t have loved me as they did. They two sang me music and love as no one else in the world could have sung them. What ecstasy I had of them! Could another man, any other man, have drawn what they two were able to draw from sounds and words? Is it enough to love, if you can’t put into your love all the music of heaven and earth? They knew how to sweep a woman off her feet with song and words. Yes, perhaps there was more illusion than reality in our passion; but illusions lift you to the clouds while realities always leave your feet planted on the ground. Others may have loved me more, but only through them did I understand love, and know it and adore it.”
And she fell into a sudden weeping.
She wept without a sound, hopeless tears.
I pretended not to see her, and sat looking into space. After a while she went on:
“You see, monsieur, for most people the heart ages with the body. It hasn’t been so with me. My poor body is sixty-nine years old and my poor heart is twenty. … And that is why I live alone, with my flowers and my dreams.”
A long silence fell on us. She recovered her self-control and began to talk again, with a smile:
“How you would laugh at me if you knew … if you knew how I spend my evenings … when it is
