“To you, as to some infinitely rare men of genius, love is not what Nature made it—a vehement necessity, with acute but transient delights attached to its satisfaction, and then death; you regard it as what Christianity has made it: an ideal realm full of noble sentiments, of immense small things, of poetry and spiritual sensations, of sacrifices, flowers of morality, enchanting harmonies, placed far above all vulgar grossness, but whither two beings joined to be one angel are carried up on the wings of pleasure. This was what I hoped for; I thought I held one of the keys which open the door that is shut to so many persons, and through which we soar into infinitude. You were there already! And so I was deceived.
“I am going back to misery in my vast prison, Paris. Such a deception at the beginning of my career would have been enough to make me flee from woman; now, it fills my soul with such disenchantment as casts me forever into appalling solitude; I shall be destitute even of the faith which helped the Holy Fathers to people it with sacred visions.—This, my dear Camille, is what a superior nature brings us to. We may each of us sing the terrible chant that a poet has put into the mouth of Moses addressing the Almighty:
“O Lord! Thou hast made me powerful and alone!”
At this moment Calyste came in.
“I ought to let you know that I am here,” said he.
Mademoiselle des Touches looked absolutely terrified; a sudden color flushed her calm features with a fiery red. All through the scene she was handsomer than she had ever been in her life.
“We thought you had gone, Calyste,” said Claude; “but this involuntary indiscretion on both sides will have done no harm; perhaps you will feel more free at les Touches now that you know Félicité so completely. Her silence shows me that I was not mistaken as to the part she intended that I should play. She loves you, as I told you; but she loves you for yourself, and not for herself—a feeling which few women are fitted to conceive of or to cling to: very few of them know the delights of pain kept alive by desire. It is one of the grander passions reserved for men;—but she is somewhat of a man,” he added, with a smile. “Your passion for Béatrix will torture her and make her happy, both at once.”
Tears rose to Mademoiselle des Touches’ eyes; she dared not look either at the merciless Claude or the ingenuous Calyste. She was frightened at having been understood; she had not supposed that any man, whatever his gifts, could divine such a torment of refined feeling, such lofty heroism as hers. And Calyste, seeing her so humiliated at finding her magnanimity betrayed, sympathized with the agitation of the woman he had placed so high, and whom he beheld so stricken. By an irresistible impulse, he fell at Camille’s feet and kissed her hands, hiding his tear-washed face in them.
“Claude!” she cried, “do not desert me; what will become of me?”
“What have you to fear?” replied the critic. “Calyste already loves the Marquise like a madman. You can certainly have no stronger barrier between him and yourself than this passion fanned into life by your own act. It is quite as effectual as I could be. Yesterday there was danger for you and for him; but today everything will give you maternal joys,” and he gave her a mocking glance. “You will be proud of his triumphs.”
Félicité looked at Calyste, who, at these words, raised his head with a hasty movement. Claude Vignon was sufficiently revenged by the pleasure he took in seeing their confusion.
“You pushed him towards Madame de Rochefide,” Vignon went on; “he is now under the spell. You have dug your own grave. If you had but trusted yourself to me, you would have avoided the disasters that await you.”
“Disasters!” cried Camille Maupin, raising Calyste’s head to the level of her own, kissing his hair, and wetting it with her tears. “No, Calyste. Forget all you have just heard, and count me for nothing!”
She stood up in front of the two men, drawn to her full height, quelling them by the lightnings that flashed from her eyes in which all her soul shone.
“While Claude was speaking,” she went on, “I saw all the beauty, the dignity of hopeless love; is it not the only sentiment that brings us near to God?—Do not love me, Calyste; but I—I will love you as no other woman can ever love!”
It was the wildest cry that ever a wounded eagle sent out from his eyrie. Claude, on one knee, took her hand and kissed it.
“Now go, my dear boy,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to Calyste; “your mother may be uneasy.”
Calyste returned to Guérande at a leisurely pace, turning round to see the light which shone from the windows of Béatrix’s rooms. He was himself surprised that he felt so little pity for Camille; he was almost annoyed with her for having deprived him of fifteen months of happiness. And again, now and then, he felt the same thrill in himself that Camille had just caused him, he felt the tears she had shed on his hair, he suffered in her suffering, he fancied he could hear the moans—for, no doubt, she was moaning—of this wonderful woman for whom he had so longed a few days since.
As he opened the courtyard gate at home, where all was silent, he saw through the window his mother working by the primitive lamp while waiting for him. Tears rose to his eyes at the sight.
“What more has happened?” asked Fanny, her face expressive of terrible anxiety. Calyste’s only reply was to clasp his mother in his arms and kiss
