Well, Lady Arabella satisfies the instincts, the organs, the appetites, the vices, and the virtues of the subtle matter of which we are compounded; she was the mistress of my body. Madame de Mortsauf was the wife of my soul. The love the mistress could satisfy has its limits; the matter is finite, its properties have recognized forces, it is liable to inevitable saturation; I often felt an indescribable void in Paris with Lady Dudley. Infinity is the realm of the heart; love unbounded was at Clochegourde. I was passionately in love with Lady Arabella, and certainly, though the animal in her was supreme, she had also a superior intelligence; her ironical conversation embraced everything.
But I worshiped Henriette. If at night I wept with joy, in the morning I wept with remorse. There are some women shrewd enough to conceal their jealousy under angelic sweetness; these are women who, like Lady Dudley, are past thirty. Women then know how to feel and calculate both at once; they squeeze out the juice of the present and yet think of the future; they can stifle their often quite justifiable groans with the determination of a hunter who does not feel a wound as he rides in pursuit of the bugle call.
Without ever speaking of Madame de Mortsauf, Arabella tried to kill her in my soul, where she constantly found her, and her own passion flamed higher under the breath of this ineradicable love. To triumph, if possible, by comparisons to her own advantage, she would never be suspicious, nor provoking, nor curious, as most young women are; but, like a lioness that has carried her prey in her mouth and brought it to her den to devour, she took care that nothing should disturb her happiness, and watched me like an unsubdued conquest. I wrote to Henriette under her very eyes, she never read a single line, she never made the least attempt to know the address on my letters. I was perfectly free. She seemed to have said to herself, “If I lose, I shall blame no one but myself.”
And she trusted proudly to a love so devoted that she would have laid down her life without hesitation if I had asked it of her. In fact, she made me believe that if I should abandon her she would at once kill herself.
It was a thing to hear when she sang the praises of the Indian custom for widows to burn themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre.
“Though in India the practice is a distinction reserved to the higher castes, and is consequently little appreciated by Europeans, who are incapable of perceiving the proud dignity of the privilege, you must confess,” she would say to me, “that in the dead level of our modern manners the aristocracy cannot resume its place unless by exceptional feelings. How can I show the middle class that the blood flowing in my veins is not the same as theirs, if not in dying in another way than they die? Women of no birth can have diamonds, silks, horses, even coats-of-arms, which ought to be ours alone, for a name can be purchased!—But to love, unabashed, in opposition to the law, to die for the idol she has chosen, and make a shroud of the sheets off her bed; to bring earth and heaven into subjection to a man, and thus rob the Almighty of His right to make a god, never to be false to him, not even for virtue’s sake—for to refuse him anything in the name of duty is to abandon oneself to something that is not he—whether it be another man or a mere idea, it is a betrayal!—These are the heights to which vulgar women cannot rise; they know only two roads—the highway of virtue or the miry path of the courtesan.”
She argued, you see, from pride; she flattered all my vanities by deifying them; she set me so high that she could only reach to my knees; all the fascinations of her mind found expression in her slave-like attitude and absolute submission. She would remain a whole day lounging at my feet in silence, gazing at me, waiting on my pleasure like a seraglio slave. What words can describe the first six months when I gave myself up to the enervating joys of an affection full of raptures varied by the knowledge of experience that was concealed under the vehemence of passion. Such joys, a revelation of the poetry of the senses, constitute the strong link that binds young men to women older than themselves; but this link is the convict’s chain; it leaves an indelible scar, implanting a premature distaste for fresh and innocent love rich in blossom only, which cannot serve us with alcohol in curiously chased golden cups, enriched with precious stones, sparkling with inexhaustible fires.
When I tasted the enjoyments of which I had dreamed, knowing nothing of them, which I had expressed in my nosegays, and which the union of souls makes a thousand times
