Short Fiction

threw in his path.

At the end of half an hour, we separated, agreeing to see each other again often, and he gave me his address after having invited me to dine with him on the next day but one.

I forgot the hour and arrived too early: he had not come in. A correct and silent servant showed me into a beautiful drawing room, a rather dim, intimate, studied room. I felt at home there, as in my own house. How often I have remarked the effect of the place in which one lives on one’s mind and disposition. There are rooms where one always feels stupid: there are others, on the contrary, where one always feels alert. Some rooms sadden us, although they are light, white and gilded: others make for gaiety, although they are hung in quiet colours. Our eye, like our heart, has its hates and its likings, which often it does not openly declare to us, imposing them secretly and stealthily on our imaginations. The harmony of furniture and walls, the style of our whole surroundings, acts instantly on our intellectual nature as the air of forest, sea or mountain modifies our physical nature.

I was seated on a divan completely covered with cushions, and I felt suddenly sustained, borne up, held in place by these small silk-covered sacks of feathers, as if the form and place of my body had been impressed beforehand on this furniture.

Then I looked round. There was nothing startling in the room; it was filled with lovely unobtrusive things, furniture at once rare and simple, oriental curtains that did not seem to have come from the Louvre but from the interior of a harem, and facing me, the portrait of a woman. It was a portrait of medium size, showing the head and upper part of the body, and the hands holding a book. She was young, bareheaded, her hair arranged in smooth folds, and she was smiling with a faint sadness. It may have been because she was bareheaded, or it may well have been due to the effect of her very artless charm, but never had a woman’s portrait seemed to me so much at home as did this portrait in this place. Almost all those I know are definitely on show, whether the lady is in elaborate dress, with her hair becomingly arranged and an air of being fully conscious that she is posing before the painter in the first place, and ultimately before all the people who will look at her, or whether she has adopted an attitude of abandon, and attired herself with careful informality.

Some are standing, majestic creatures, in all their beauty, with an air of hauteur which they cannot have sustained for long in the ordinary course of their lives; others languish in the immobility of the painted canvas; and all of them have some trifle, a flower or a jewel, a fold of their gown or their lips, which one feels to have been arranged by the painter, for the sake of an effect. Whether they wear a hat, a lace scarf on their head, or simply their hair, they convey the impression of something just a little unnatural. Why? One doesn’t know, since one does not know them at all, but the impression is there. They have the air of paying a visit somewhere, among people whom they wish to please: before whom they wish to appear to their best advantage: and they have studied their attitude, sometimes a modest one, sometimes arrogant.

What shall I say of this portrait? She was in her own home and alone. Yes, she was alone, for she was smiling as people smile when they think in solitude on something at once sad and sweet, and not as they smile when they are being looked at. She was so much alone and so much in her own place, that she created solitude in this huge room, absolute solitude. She dwelt in it, filled it, she alone gave it life: a crowd of people might enter there, and all of them speak, laugh, even sing: she would be there, forever alone, smiling a solitary smile, and alone she would bring it alive with her pictured gaze.

Her gaze was unique, too. It was turned directly to me, caressing and steady, but it did not see me. All portraits know that they are being contemplated, and they answer with their eyes, with eyes that see, and think, that follow us unwinkingly from the moment we enter the room where they inhabit until the moment we leave it.

This portrait did not see me, did not see anything, although its glance was bent directly on me. I recalled Baudelaire’s amazing line:

Et tes yeux attirants comme ceux d’un portrait.32

They did indeed attract me in an irresistible fashion, they disturbed me in some strange, powerful, novel way, these painted eyes that had lived, that perhaps were still living. Oh, what infinite soothing charm⁠—like a passing breeze, seductive as the fading sky of a rose and blue and lilac twilight, and faintly melancholy like the night that follows on its heels⁠—came from that sombre frame and those impenetrable eyes. Those eyes, those eyes created by a few strokes of the brush, held in their depths the mystery of that which seems to be and is not, of that which a woman’s look can express, of that which wakes in our hearts the first stirring of love.

The door opened. M. Milial came in. He apologised for being late. I apologised for being early. Then I said to him:

“Is it indiscreet to ask you who this woman is?”

He answered:

“It is my mother, who died very young.”

And at that I understand whence came this man’s inexplicable charm.

Hautot and His Son

I

In front of the building, half farmhouse, half manor house⁠—one of those semi-feudal country dwellings of mixed character now occupied by wealthy farmers⁠—the dogs chained to the