He thought crudely, “I wish you would get to hell out of here,” and aloud he asked politely if she had need of his services.
“She was so mysterious, so enticing,” he resumed to himself. “Her eyes, remote, deep as space, and reflecting cemeteries and festivals at the same time. And she has shown herself up for all she is, within an hour. I have seen a new Hyacinthe, talking like a silly little milliner in heat. All the nastinesses of women unite in her to exasperate me.”
After a thoughtful silence he concluded, “I must be young indeed to have lost my head the way I did.”
As if echoing his thought, Mme. Chantelouve, coming out through the portière, laughed nervously and said, “A woman of my age doing a mad thing like that!” She looked at him, and though he forced a smile she understood.
“You will sleep tonight,” she said, sadly, alluding to Durtal’s former complaints of sleeplessness on her account.
He begged her to sit down and warm herself, but she said she was not cold.
“Why, in spite of the warmth of the room you were cold as ice!”
“Oh, I am always that way. Winter and summer my flesh is chilly.”
He thought that in August this frigid body might be agreeable, but now!
He offered her some bonbons, which she refused, then she said she would take a sip of the alkermes, which he poured into a tiny silver goblet. She took just a drop, and amicably they discussed the taste of this preparation, in which she recognized an aroma of clove, tempered by flower of cinnamon moistened with distillate of rose water.
Then he became silent.
“My poor dear,” she said, “how I should love him if he were more confiding and not always on his guard.”
He asked her to explain herself.
“Why, I mean that you can’t forget yourself and simply let yourself be loved. Alas, you were reasoning all the time—”
“I was not!”
She kissed him tenderly. “You see I love you, anyway.” And he was surprised to see how sad and moved she looked, and he observed a sort of frightened gratitude in her eyes.
“She is easily satisfied,” he said to himself.
“What are you thinking about?”
“You!”
She sighed. Then, “What time is it?”
“Half past ten.”
“I must go. He is waiting for me. No, don’t say anything—”
She passed her hands over her cheeks. He seized her gently by the waist and kissed her, holding her thus enlaced until they were at the door.
“You will come again soon, won’t you?”
“Yes. … Yes.”
He returned to the fireside.
“Oof! it’s done,” he thought, in a whirl of confused emotions. His vanity was satisfied, his selfesteem was no longer bleeding, he had attained his ends and possessed this woman. Moreover, her spell over him had lost its force. He was regaining his entire liberty of mind, but who could tell what trouble this liaison had yet in store for him? Then, in spite of everything, he softened.
After all, what could he reproach her with? She loved as well as she could. She was, indeed, ardent and plaintive. Even this dualism of a mistress who was a low cocotte in bed and a fine lady when dressed—or no, too intelligent to be called a fine lady—was a delectable pimento. Her carnal appetites were excessive and bizarre. What, then, was the matter with him?
And at last he quite justly accused himself. It was his own fault if everything was spoiled. He lacked appetite. He was not really tormented except by a cerebral erethism. He was used up in body, filed away in soul, inept at love, weary of tendernesses even before he received them and disgusted when he had. His heart was dead and could not be revived. And his mania for thinking, thinking! previsualizing an incident so vividly that actual enactment was an anticlimax—but probably would not be if his mind would leave him alone and not be always jeering at his efforts. For a man in his state of spiritual impoverishment all, save art, was but a recreation more or less boring, a diversion more or less vain. “Ah, poor woman, I am afraid she is going to get pretty sick of me. If only she would consent to come no more! But no, she doesn’t deserve to be treated in that fashion,” and, seized by pity, he swore to himself that the next time she visited him he would caress her and try to persuade her that the disillusion which he had so ill concealed did not exist.
He tried to spread up the bed, get the tousled blankets together, and plump the pillows, then he lay down.
He put out his lamp. In the darkness his distress increased. With death in his heart he said to himself, “Yes, I was right in declaring that the only women you can continue to love are those you lose.
“To learn, three years later, when the woman is inaccessible, chaste and married, dead, perhaps, or out of France—to learn that she loved you, though you had not dared believe it while she was near you, ah, that’s the dream! These real and intangible loves, these loves made up of melancholy and distant regrets, are the only ones that count. Because there is no flesh in them, no earthly leaven.
“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.”
XIV
From this scene he had learned an alarming lesson: that the flesh domineers the soul and refuses to admit any schism. The flesh decisively does not intend that one shall get along without it and indulge in out-of-the-world pleasures
