The regulations prohibited eating in the workshops, a rule intended to secure cleanliness at work and to keep the hands in a healthy condition.
Sénécal, through a sense of duty or a longing to exercise despotic authority, shouted out to her ere he had come near her, while pointing towards a framed placard:
“I say, you girl from Bordeaux over there! read out for me Article 9!”
“Well, what then?”
“What then, mademoiselle? You’ll have to pay a fine of three francs.”
She looked him straight in the face in an impudent fashion.
“What does that signify to me? The master will take off your fine when he comes back! I laugh at you, my good man!”
Sénécal, who was walking with his hands behind his back, like an usher in the study-room, contented himself with smiling.
“Article 13, insubordination, ten francs!”
The girl from Bordeaux resumed her work. Madame Arnoux, through a sense of propriety, said nothing; but her brows contracted. Frederick murmured:
“Ha! you are very severe for a democrat!”
The other replied in a magisterial tone:
“Democracy is not the unbounded license of individualism. It is the equality of all belonging to the same community before the law, the distribution of work, order.”
“You are forgetting humanity!” said Frederick.
Madame Arnoux took his arm. Sénécal, perhaps, offended by this mark of silent approbation, went away.
Frederick experienced an immense relief. Since morning he had been looking out for the opportunity to declare itself; now it had arrived. Besides, Madame Arnoux’s spontaneous movements seemed to him to contain promises; and he asked her, as if on the pretext of warming their feet, to come up to her room. But, when he was seated close beside her, he began once more to feel embarrassed. He was at a loss for a starting-point. Sénécal, luckily, suggested an idea to his mind.
“Nothing could be more stupid,” said he, “than this punishment!”
Madame Arnoux replied: “There are certain severe measures which are indispensable!”
“What! you who are so good! Oh! I am mistaken, for you sometimes take pleasure in making other people suffer!”
“I don’t understand riddles, my friend!”
And her austere look, still more than the words she used, checked him. Frederick was determined to go on. A volume of De Musset chanced to be on the chest of drawers; he turned over some pages, then began to talk about love, about his hopes and his transports.
All this, according to Madame Arnoux, was criminal or factitious. The young man felt wounded by this negative attitude with regard to his passion, and, in order to combat it, he cited, by way of proof, the suicides which they read about every day in the newspapers, extolled the great literary types, Phèdre, Dido, Romeo, Desgrieux. He talked as if he meant to do away with himself.
The fire was no longer burning on the hearth; the rain lashed against the windowpanes. Madame Arnoux, without stirring, remained with her hands resting on the sides of her armchair. The flaps of her cap fell like the fillets of a sphinx. Her pure profile traced out its clear-cut outlines in the midst of the shadow.
He was anxious to cast himself at her feet. There was a creaking sound in the lobby, and he did not venture to carry out his intention.
He was, moreover, restrained by a kind of religious awe. That robe, mingling with the surrounding shadows, appeared to him boundless, infinite, incapable of being touched; and for this very reason his desire became intensified. But the fear of doing too much, and, again, of not doing enough, deprived him of all judgment.
“If she dislikes me,” he thought, “let her drive me away; if she cares for me, let her encourage me.”
He said, with a sigh:
“So, then, you don’t admit that a man may love—a woman?”
Madame Arnoux replied:
“Assuming that she is at liberty to marry, he may marry her; when she belongs to another, he should keep away from her.”
“So happiness is impossible?”
“No! But it is never to be found in falsehood, mental anxiety, and remorse.”
“What does it matter, if one is compensated by the enjoyment of supreme bliss?”
“The experience is too costly.”
Then he sought to assail her with irony.
“Would not virtue in that case be merely cowardice?”
“Say rather, clear-sightedness. Even for those women who might forget duty or religion, simple good sense is sufficient. A solid foundation for wisdom may be found in self-love.”
“Ah, what shop-keeping maxims these are of yours!”
“But I don’t boast of being a fine lady.”
At that moment the little boy rushed in.
“Mamma, are you coming to dinner?”
“Yes, in a moment.”
Frederick arose. At the same instant, Marthe made her appearance.
He could not make up his mind to go away, and, with a look of entreaty:
“These women you speak of are very unfeeling, then?”
“No, but deaf when it is necessary to be so.”
And she remained standing on the threshold of her room with her two children beside her. He bowed without saying a word. She mutely returned his salutation.
What he first experienced was an unspeakable astonishment. He felt crushed by this mode of impressing on him the emptiness of his hopes. It seemed to him as if he were lost, like a man who has fallen to the bottom of an abyss and knows that no help will come to him, and that he must die. He walked on, however, but at random, without looking before him. He knocked against stones; he mistook his way. A clatter of wooden shoes sounded close to his ear; it was caused by some of the working-girls who were leaving the foundry. Then he realised where he was.
The railway lamps traced on the horizon a line of flames. He arrived just as the train was starting, let himself be pushed into a carriage, and fell asleep.
An hour later on
