Unfortunately, after a few meetings at a friend’s house, he fell in love with a young actress, a student from the Conservatoire who had made a brilliant first appearance at the Odéon.
He fell in love with the violence and passion of a man destined to believe in absolute ideas. He fell in love, seeing her through the medium of the romantic part in which she had won great success the day she appeared in public for the first time.
She was pretty, naturally perverse, with the ways of a spoilt child that he called her angel-ways. She gained complete ascendancy over him, turning him into a raging maniac, a frenzied lunatic, one of those miserable beings whom the glance or the skirt of a woman consumes at the stake of a mortal passion. He made her his mistress, forced her to leave the stage, and loved her for four years with an ever-growing passion. Indeed, he would have married her in spite of his name and the family tradition of honour had he not suddenly discovered that she was deceiving him with the friend who had introduced them to each other.
The blow fell with all the more force because she was enceinte and he was awaiting the child’s birth to make up his mind to get married.
When he possessed all the proofs—letters accidentally found in a drawer—he accused her of infidelity, treachery, and double-dealing, with the brutality of a semi-savage.
But this child of the Paris streets, impudent and vicious, feeling as sure of her second lover as she did of Vilbois, as bold as those viragoes of the revolution who climb the barricades out of sheer bravado, defied and insulted him, pointing to her condition when she saw him raise his hand.
He stopped and turned pale, remembering that a child of his was there within that polluted flesh, in that defiled body, that unclean creature: his child!
He threw himself at her to destroy them both, to blot out the double shame. Frightened at the ruin of her future, stumbling about under the force of his blows and seeing his foot ready to kick the swollen womb with its human embryo, she cried with hands outstretched to save herself:
“Don’t kill me. It is not yours, it is his.”
He started back, stupefied and overcome, his anger momentarily fading, while his foot hovered in midair, and he stammered:
“What … what are you saying?”
Wild with fright at the signal of death she had caught in his eyes and at the man’s terrifying gesture, she repeated:
“It is not yours, it is his.”
Quite overwrought, he muttered between clenched teeth:
“The child?”
“Yes.”
“You are lying.”
And again he lifted his foot for a crushing blow, while his mistress, now on her knees, tried to move away, murmuring all the time:
“But I tell you it is his. If it was yours, would not I have had it long ago?”
This argument struck him as being truth itself. In one of those flashes of thought when all the arguments on a question are seen together in a blinding clearness, precise, unanswerable, conclusive, irresistible, he was convinced, he knew that he was not the father of the wretched waif-child she was carrying; and relieved, freed, suddenly almost at rest, he gave up the idea of killing the jade.
He said more gently:
“Get up, go away, never let me see you again.”
Quite subdued, she obeyed and went away.
He never saw her again.
He went away too. Down to the South, to the sun, and stayed in a village in the middle of a valley on the Mediterranean. He was attracted by an inn facing the sea, took a room there, in which he stayed for eighteen months, lost in grief and despair, and living in complete isolation. He lived there obsessed by the memory of the woman who had betrayed him, of her charm, her physical appearance, her unbelievable witchery, and filled with longing for her presence, her caressings.
He wandered through the valleys of Provence, seeking relief for his aching head with its burden of memory in the sun that filtered gently through the dull grey leaves of the olive-trees.
In this solitude of suffering the old piety, the steadied fervour of his early faith, revived in his heart. Religion, which had once seemed to him a refuge from the unknown, now appeared as a haven of escape from life’s treachery and cruelty. He had never lost the habit of prayer, to prayer he therefore clung in his great sorrow, going regularly to the darkened church at dusk, where a solitary speck of light shone down the chancel from the lamp, the holy guardian of the sanctuary and symbol of the Divine Presence.
To Him he confided his trouble, to his God, telling Him all about his sorrow. He craved for advice, pity, help, protection, consolation, putting more and more feeling into his prayers, which grew in fervour from day to day.
His wounded heart, ravaged by carnal love, was bare and throbbing, longing for tenderness, and little by little, through prayer and piety, by giving himself up to that secret communion of the devout with the Saviour who brings consolation and is a sure refuge to those in distress, the love of God entered in him and drove out the intruder.
He went back to his early plans and decided that what remained of the life he had intended to devote to the Lord in its youth and purity should now be given to the Church.
He became a priest.
