He folded the letter and scrawled the address.
Then he held the sealed envelope in his hand and reflected.
“Of course I am a fool to answer her. Who knows what situations a thing like this is going to lead to? I am well aware that whoever she be, a woman is an incubator of sorrow and annoyance. If she is good she is probably stupid, or perhaps she is an invalid, or perhaps she is so disastrously fecund that she gets pregnant if you look at her. If she is bad, one may expect to be dragged through every disgusting kind of degradation. Oh, whatever you do, you’re in for it.”
He regurgitated the memories of his youthful amours. Deception. Disenchantment. How pitilessly base a woman is while she is young!
“… To be thinking of things like that now at my age! As if I had any need of a woman now!”
But in spite of all, his pseudonymous correspondent interested him.
“Who knows? Perhaps she is good-looking, or at least not very ill-looking. It doesn’t cost me anything to find out.”
He reread her letter. No misspelling. The handwriting not commercial. Her ideas about his book were mediocre enough, but who would expect her to be a critic? “Discreet scent of heliotrope,” he added, sniffing the envelope.
“Oh, well, let’s have our little fling.”
And as he went out to get some breakfast he left his reply with the concierge.
VII
“If this continues I shall lose my mind,” murmured Durtal as he sat in front of his table reperusing the letters which he had been receiving from that woman for the last week. She was an indefatigable letter-writer, and since she had begun her advances he had not had time to answer one letter before another arrived.
“My!” he said, “let’s try and see just where we do stand. After that ungracious answer to her first note she immediately sends me this:
“ ‘Monsieur,
“ ‘This is a farewell. If I were weak enough to write you any more letters they would become as tedious as the life I lead. Anyway, have I not had the best part of you, in that hesitant letter of yours which shook me out of my lethargy for an instant? Like yourself, monsieur, I know, alas! that nothing happens, and that our only certain joys are those we dream of. So, in spite of my feverish desire to know you, I fear that you were right in saying that a meeting would be for both of us the source of regrets to which we ought not voluntarily expose ourselves. …’
“Then what bears witness to the perfect futility of this exordium is the way the missive ends:
“ ‘If you should take the fancy to write me, you can safely address your letters “Mme. Maubel, rue Littré, general delivery.” I shall be passing the rue Littré post-office Monday. If you wish to let matters remain just where they are—and thus cause me a great deal of pain—will you not tell me so, frankly?’
“Whereupon I was simple-minded enough to compose an epistle as ambiguous as the first, concealing my furtive advances under an apparent reluctance, thus letting her know that I was securely hooked. As her third note proves:
“ ‘Never accuse yourself, monsieur—I repress a tenderer name which rises to my lips—of being unable to give me consolation. Weary, disabused, as we are, and done with it all, let us sometimes permit our souls to speak to each other—low, very low—as I have spoken to you this night, for henceforth my thought is going to follow you wherever you are.’
“Four pages of the same tune,” he said, turning the leaves, “but this is better:
“ ‘Tonight, my unknown friend, one word only. I have passed a horrible day, my nerves in revolt and crying out against the petty sufferings they are subjected to every minute. A slamming door, a harsh or squeaky voice floating up to me out of the street. … Yet there are whole hours when I am so far from being sensitive that if the house were burning I should not move. Am I about to send you a page of comic lamentations? Ah, when one has not the gift of rendering one’s grief superbly and transforming it into literary or musical passages which weep magnificently, the best thing is to keep still about it.
“ ‘I bid you a silent goodnight. As on the first day, I am harassed by the conflict of the desire to see you and the dread of touching a dream lest it perish. Ah, yes, you spoke truly. Miserable, miserable wretches that we are, our timorous souls are so afraid of any reality that they dare not think a sympathy which has taken possession of them capable of surviving an interview with the person who gave it birth. Yet, in spite of this fine casuistry, I simply must confess to you—no, no, nothing. Guess if you can, and forgive me for this banal letter. Or rather, read between the lines, and perhaps you will find there a little bit of my heart and a great deal of what I leave unsaid.
“ ‘A foolish letter with “I” written all over it. Who would suspect that while I wrote it my sole thought was of You?’ ”
“So far, so good. This woman at least piqued my curiosity. And what peculiar ink,” he thought. It was myrtle green, very thin, very pale. With his fingernail he detached some of the fine dust of rice powder, perfumed with heliotrope, clinging to the seal of the letters.
“She must be blonde,” he went on, examining the tint of the powder, “for it isn’t the ‘Rachel’ shade that brunettes use. Now up to that point everything had been going nicely, but then and there I spoiled it. Moved by I know not what folly, I wrote her a yet more roundabout letter, which, however, was very pressing. In attempting to fan her flame I kindled myself—for a spectre—and at once I received this:
