Her maid, bringing in her tea, gave her a letter from her husband. He informed her that he was going on a very long voyage and announced in a postscript that his lawyer would supply her with all the money she required for her expenses.
III
It was at the Opéra, during an entr’acte of Robert le Diable. In the stalls, men stood up, hats on their heads, low-cut waistcoats revealing white shirts on which shone gold or jewelled studs, and looked round at the boxes full of women in evening dress, covered with diamonds and pearls, displayed in this brilliantly lighted greenhouse where lovely faces and gleaming shoulders seemed blossoming for all eyes to gaze on, in the midst of the music and the human voices.
Two friends, their backs turned to the orchestra, were quizzing, as they talked, all this gallery of elegance, all this exhibition of true or artificial charm, jewels, luxury and ostentation that spread itself in a circle round the great theatre.
One of them, Roger de Salins, said to his companion, Bernard Grandin:
“Look at the Comtesse de Mascaret, as lovely as ever.”
The other man turned to stare at the tall woman in the opposite box: she looked still very young, and her startling beauty seemed to draw all eyes from every corner of the theatre. Her pale complexion, with its ivory gleams, gave her the look of a statue, while in her hair, which was black as night, a slender rainbow-shaped diadem, powdered with diamonds, glittered like a milky way.
When he had looked at her for some time, Bernard Grandin replied with a humorous accent of sincere conviction:
“I’ll grant you that she’s lovely!”
“How old will she be now?”
“Wait. I can tell you exactly. I have known her since her childhood. I saw her make her entry into society as a young girl. She is … she is … thirty … thirty … thirty-six years old.”
“It’s impossible.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“She looks twenty-five.”
“She has had seven children.”
“It’s incredible.”
“They are all seven alive too, and she’s an admirable mother. I visit the house sometimes: it’s a pleasant house, very quiet and restful. She achieves the difficult art of being a mother and a social being.”
“Odd, isn’t it? And there’s never been any talk about her?”
“Never.”
“But what about her husband? He’s a strange man, isn’t he?”
“Yes and no. There may have been some little incident between them, one of those little domestic incidents that one suspects, never hearing the whole story but guessing it fairly accurately.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know anything about it myself. Mascaret is very much the man about town nowadays after having been a perfect husband. During all the time that he was a thoroughly good husband, he had a thoroughly bad disposition, suspicious and surly. Since he took to a gay life, he has become quite careless, but one feels that he has some worry, some grief, a gnawing canker of some kind: he is ageing very much, he is.”
For a few minutes the two friends philosophised on the secret troubles, impossible to understand, that differences of character or perhaps physical antipathies, unnoticed at first, can create in a family.
Roger de Salins, who was still eyeing Mme. de Mascaret, added:
“It is incomprehensible that this woman has had seven children.”
“Yes, in eleven years. After which she made an end, at the age of thirty, of her period of reproduction, in order to enter on the brilliant period of display, which seems far from finishing.”
“Poor women!”
“Why do you pity them?”
“Why? Oh, my dear, think of it! Eleven years of pregnancy for a woman like that! What a hell! It’s the whole of her youth, all her beauty, her every hope of success, the whole romantic ideal of the brilliance of life, that is sacrificed to this abominable law of reproduction which turns the normal woman into a mere egg-laying machine.”
“What’s to be done? That’s only nature!”
“Yes, but I say that nature is our enemy, that we must fight all our lives against nature, because she never ceases to force us back and back to the beast. Whatever there is of decency, of beauty, of graciousness, of idealism, on earth, was not put there by God, but by man, by man’s brain. It is we who have introduced into the created world some little grace, beauty, a charm foreign to it, and mystery, by the songs we sing of it, the interpretations we offer, by the admiration of poets, the idealisations of artists, and the explanations of scientists who are deluded but who do find ingenious reasons for phenomena. God has created only gross creatures, full of the germs of disease, who after a few years of animal development grow old in infirmity, with all the ugliness and all the impotence of human decrepitude. He made them, it seems, only to reproduce themselves in a revolting fashion and thereafter to die, like the ephemeral insects of summer evenings. I said, ‘to reproduce themselves in a revolting fashion’: I repeat it. What is indeed more shameful, more repugnant than the filthy and ridiculous act of human reproduction, from which all delicate sensibilities shrink and will always shrink in disgust? Since all the organs invented by this economical and malignant creator serve two purposes, why did he not choose others, that were not ill-suited and defiled, to which to entrust this sacred mission, the noblest and most uplifting of all human functions? The mouth that nourishes the body with material food, is also the medium of words and thoughts. The flesh is restored by it at the same time that it gives expression to the intelligence. The sense of smell, which gives the lungs their vital air, gives the brain all the perfumes in the world: the scent of flowers, woods, trees, the sea. The ear which puts us in communication with our fellow beings, has also made it possible for us to invent music, to create from its sounds imagination, happiness, the
