CHAPTER III

It was about half-past ten in the morning when Madame Chazel received a small packet from the Baron de Querne. It contained two books—two new novels—and a letter, the last being similar to all those that a man of the world may write to a woman with whom he is on friendly terms. But the postscript pressed as with a hand upon her heart. It ran as follows:

"If your country friend decides to come to Paris, the best furnished apartments that I have seen are at 16, Rue de Stockholm. They are on the second floor, to the right."

Yes, Helen was seized with inward trepidation on reading these simple lines. In proportion as her action drew closer to her—the action that would for ever separate her future and her past—the fever which had been preying upon her since the previous evening had increased still more. She had just left her bath, and, wrapped in a dressing-gown of pure white, was crouched on a low chair beside the fire, her naked feet in slippers, her form unconstrained by the flexible material, and her hair rolled in a great twist about her neck. She shivered in her wool-lined robe, and, with Armand's letter in her fingers, gazed now at the paper, the mere touch of which overwhelmed her, and now around the room—a refuge which she preferred even to the little drawing-room, as enabling her to retire into a domain that was all her own.

She had been so pleased at the time of their settling in Paris to obtain this room all to herself! She had during so many nights known the torture of sleeping beside a man whom she did not love, and if sleeping side by side, almost breath to breath, forms the delight of blissful passion, physical aversion, on the other hand, is augmented by such intimacy, until it becomes a species of animal hatred. Alfred's movements, the sound of his breathing, the mere existence of his person, angered her and hurt her, in the hours that she spent thus beside him, when silence hung heavy upon their rest, and she lay awake quivering and in revolt. When requesting this separation of rooms she certainly had not foreseen that the solitude of her couch would one day avail her as a weapon against material partition, that terrible ransom for adultery which prudent women accept as a security. It is a rare thing for those who deceive their husbands to sleep apart from them. They would rather not have to carry with them to their lover the anxiety due to a watchfulness but little reconcilable with complete pleasure.

But Helen was not capable of such calculations. The most charming trait in her character was a spontaneity that might draw her into very great perils, but that at least always preserved her from a foulness which is more degrading than anything else—reflection in the midst of error. At this very moment, as she sat crouching upon her low chair, she did not think about the consequences of her approaching action, nor did she reason—she felt. The presence of Armand's letter caused her to be visited with excessive emotion. She scarcely so much as listened to the noise that her little boy made in playing beside her bed. The child was shaking his flaxen ringlets, and shouting and running about. He had set two chairs beside each other, and was creeping between them, pretending that he was a railway train passing through a tunnel.

Since she had been in love with Armand, Helen had experienced strange feelings of sadness in the presence of her little Henry, and she had reproached herself for them as for a lack of tenderness, attributing them to remorse. In reality, her sorrow was due to the discovery in her son of an astonishing likeness to her husband. Even in his games the child recalled the conversation of the father, who from principle gave him for books nothing but scientific works, and then he had Alfred Chazel's eyes and his awkwardness in using his hands, and had only his mother's mouth and forehead. She spoiled him all the more for her consciousness of what she had taken from him to give to another! The child continued to play, looking sometimes towards his mother. The latter, at one moment, heaving a deep sigh, crumpled up the paper that she held in her hand, and flung it into the fire.

The note had grown intolerable to her. She told herself, indeed, that it was more prudent on her lover's part to write to her in this tone of formal politeness, but it was such prudence as freezes, and in Helen's then unnerved condition she had need of a letter whose every phrase acts upon the reader's heart like invisible and caressing lips. The crumpled paper, letter and envelope together, rolled into the fire, and the child left the two chairs with which he was playing to come to his mother's side and watch it burn.

"What are you looking at there, darling?" Helen said to him.

"At the nuns, mamma," he replied. So he called the luminous dots that run across the black surface of paper consumed by fire. These dots were in his eyes nuns distractedly traversing their burnt cloister. "How they hurry," he said; "how frightened they are! Oh! that one, mamma, look at that one! The convent is falling down. They are all dead."

Madame Chazel felt herself incapable of enduring this merriment. The whole odious nature of her moral situation had just been rendered palpable to her by a petty, insignificant fact, that of her son making a plaything of the letter in which her lover made an appointment with her for their first secret meeting. She would have been so glad to have held her home life, the maternal obligations of which she would fulfil to the utmost, distinct from the other, from that life of passion upon which she was entering, carried away by something stronger than her reason, something so obscure to herself and yet so real. Was this distinction, then, altogether impossible, seeing that on the very first day all that she would have wished apart were being blended together?

"Go and play with Miette," she said to her son, "I have a slight headache."

Miette was the little boy's nurse. A lady's maid, a cook, and a man-servant completed the personnel of the household. Miette, who had come from the country with her employers, had taken care of Henry from his earliest infancy. At night, to send him to sleep, she used to sing canticles to him, one especially of which delighted and terrified him:

"What is Messiah?" he would ask his nurse.

"He is Antichrist," she used to reply.

"When will He come?" asked the child.

"At the end of the world."

"In how many years?"

"Seven," said the nurse.

"Then I shall be twelve years old," Henry would calculate.

This astonishing prediction had so struck him the night before, that at the mere mention of his nurse's name, he began to tell it to his mother. At any other time this confidence would have amused her, but while speaking he had in his bright grey eyes a look that the young woman knew only too well.

"Don't be frightened," she said, "for you are good, and go and play."

The little boy cast a glance at the fire where the black residue alone marked the site of the burnt convent; at the chairs whose backs were no longer the walls of a deep tunnel; at his mother, to know whether he might not remain. Unconsciously he was affected by the sadness overspreading her face. By one of those almost animal intuitions peculiar to extremely sensitive children, he discerned that his presence was vexing to his mother. He kissed her hand, and then suddenly burst into tears.

"What is the matter, my angel, what is the matter?" said Helen, pressing him in her arms and covering him with kisses.

"I thought you were angry with me," he said. Then, warmed by her caresses, he said: "I am going, mamma; I will be good."

"Have children presentiments?" Helen asked of herself when she was left alone. "One would think he were conscious that something unusual is taking place." And with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting upon her closed hands, she relapsed into the state of fever that had kept her awake the whole night. The nacreous bruise that encircled her eyes too clearly revealed this sleeplessness. On rising, she had looked at herself in the glass, and said to herself:

"I am not pretty—I shall not please him."

What had been preying upon her had been neither prudish reasoning nor moral reflection. It was a sort of ardent languor. She could see Armand in her thought, and as it were a wave of blood, but having greater heat, surged to her heart, her throat choked a little, and her will tottered. It was not only her first intrigue, in the sense in which the world understands the term, but it was her first love. Helen Chazel, while still Mademoiselle de Vaivre, had endured one of the most painful trials that can weigh upon youth. She had been persecuted by a step-mother who hated her, while believing that she was only bringing her up well and correcting her. The De Vaivres lived in a kind of château, four miles from Bourges, and this had been a prison to the young girl. The father, a weak man, who cherished an innocent mania for an archaeological collection, patiently and complacently gathered together, had never suspected the mute drama played between step-mother and step-daughter for twelve years.

Madame de Vaivre loved her husband, and, without herself comprehending as much, was jealous of the dead wife, that first wife whose grace she saw renewed in the features of the child, in her smiles and in her gestures. Nothing is so dangerous as an evil feeling of the existence of which we are not quite aware. To gratify it we discover all kinds of excuses which enable us to feed our hatred without losing our self-esteem. It was thus that Madame de Vaivre, having taken Helen's education in hand, made every lesson and every admonition a means for torture.

This woman, pretty and refined, but unfeeling, very solicitous about propriety in consequence of the lengthened sojournings at Paris with her father, who had been an official deputy under the July monarchy, was withal minutely devout, and instinctively unkind, like all persons who are accustomed never to admit the just sensibilities of others. When Alfred Chazel had come to be intimate with Monsieur de Vaivre, owing to their common taste for excavations and antiquities, she had with joy perceived that he was falling in love with Helen. It afforded her a secret pleasure to marry her step-daughter to a man who had no fortune, and, the dowry being very small, to condemn her for years to a middling existence. Death, which takes as little account of our evil calculations as of our great intentions, had taken in hand to render abortive this woman's hateful anticipation, through which poor Helen had seen no more clearly than Monsieur de Vaivre himself.

All that the young girl understood on the day that Chazel asked her in marriage was that she would be free from her step-mother's tyranny. She had a plain perception of that from which she was escaping. As to marriage and its physical realities, what could she have known of them? Thus, on leaving the church, she found herself in a moral situation that was full of peril. Her childhood, spent, as it had been, beneath continual oppression, had to an excessive degree developed within her a taste for the romantic—a power, that is, of fashioning beforehand an image of life with which the reality is subsequently compared. Through her joy at deliverance, her future marriage showed to her like a paradise of delight.

Misfortune had it that Alfred Chazel should be one of those men who, with all kindness, all delicacy even, at the bottom of their hearts, are for ever ignorant of a woman's nature. The consummation of the marriage was to Helen something as hateful as it had been unexpected—like a tribute paid to clumsy brutality. The result was that she received her husband's endearments with a repugnance that was imperfectly dissembled, and that added to the timidity of a man already timid by nature and awkwardly impassioned, as those who have not slackened the initial ardour of their youth in facile intrigues often are. Alfred was secretly afraid of showing his tenderness to his wife, and he concealed from her the intensity of a love that would perhaps have touched her had she been able to perceive it.

Moral divorce between husband and wife has nearly always physiological divorce for its first and hidden cause. If community in voluptuousness is the most powerful agent for the fusion of temperaments, the torturing possession of a woman by a man remains the certain origin of unconquerable antipathy. It came to pass in the Chazel household, as in all similar households, that this first antipathy was heightened from week to week by reason of the fact that two beings, condemned to live side by side, unceasingly afford each other grounds for more love or greater hatred. Do not all the petty events of life render them every minute more present to each other? The divergence in tastes, ideas, and habits that parted Alfred from Helen, would have provided the latter, had she loved her husband, with pretexts for a loving education. Not loving him, she found in them only reasons for separating from him still more.

Alfred Chazel was in fact a son of the people, and in spite of the intellectual refinement of two generations, his peasant origin showed itself again in him in clumsiness of gesture and attitude. He was not vulgar, and at the same time he was lacking in manner. Helen, on the contrary, came of a noble family, and her step-mother's continual superintendence had developed to an extreme in her a sense of detailed particularity concerning her person and everything about her. Her husband's manner of eating shocked her; his manner of going and coming and sitting down—a certain slowness in grasping all that constituted the material side of life. When it was needful to accomplish a rapid and precise movement, during a walk, or at table, or in a shop, he would pause for a moment, with lips slightly gaping, and with a startled demeanour, like a peasant passing through a terminus in a large town.

Alfred, moreover, was fond of saying that he was an absent man, and that the external world had no existence for him; and it was true, for two influences had contributed to uproot him from the said external world—the sudden transition of his family from one social class into another, and the nature of his mathematical studies. His wife had never been able to ensure that the cord of his eyeglass should not be broken, and then knotted in several places, that the collar of his overcoat should be kept down, his silk hat brushed, and his cravat properly tied. The carelessness characteristic of men of thought was visible in his entire person.

Helen would have blushed with indignation and shame had she been told of the part played by these trifles in her conjugal aversion. But is not the life of the heart, like physical life, a summing of the infinitely little? Moreover, these minute facts, which formed a mass in their totality, symbolised an essential ground for dissociation between the husband and wife, namely, the absolute distinction between the minds of both. Helen's instruction had not been of a very solid kind; she had not been fortified by that sum of positive learning which alone is able to balance intense development of thought. Thus, all her reading as a girl and as a young woman had been directed towards those works of imagination for which Alfred professed the innocent contempt of a scientist whose literary culture is almost non-existent. It appeared extraordinary to him, and he used ingenuously to say so, that in an age of chemistry, steam, and electricity, intelligent beings should occupy themselves with the composition of such trash. Hence, in conversation, husband and wife had not a single opinion in common. Alfred was quite sensible that an abyss, growing constantly more impassable, was yawning between Helen and himself, and he was pained by it, but in the way that he would have been pained by an incomprehensible misfortune.

"What does she want to make her happy?" he would ask himself, and then he would in thought draw up a list of the conditions for happiness that were realised about his wife: "We have money, and a dear child; she wished to live in Paris, and here we are; I give her every freedom; I have the most absolute confidence in her; I do her honour by my position; everything smiles upon us and flatters us—and she is not happy!"

No, Helen had not been happy, and on the morning of this winter day, which was to prove to her a date that could never be forgotten, she felt her whole melancholy past surging back upon her. A thousand scenes showed themselves, and she discerned that through them all she had been advancing towards the hour at which, as she believed, her true life would begin. Often at Bourges, while walking with her husband along the Seraucourt promenade, she had asked herself whether she should ever, ever be acquainted with happiness, with the warm radiancy within her of a light that might illumine the cold darkness in which she languished. Her husband conversed with her about his plans, his college life, and his companions, with the calmness which he displayed in all matters, holding it a principle that a man should look at life on its good side, should be submissive, and accept.

These talks prostrated her with sadness. She sighed vaguely after an infinitude of emotion which she conceived to be possible, and the tokens, the reflection of which she discovered in a few phrases in the novels of her reading when they treated of love. Of all the emotions of life this was the only one with which she was unacquainted. She had been a daughter, and had loved her father, but her affection had been cruelly deceived. She had been a sister, but little Adèle, Monsieur de Vaivre's daughter by his second marriage, resembled her mother, and Helen had never been able to become unreservedly attached to her. She had had friends, but it had always seemed to her that these friends did not feel as she did, and she had never ventured to speak to them of what touched her most closely, of what was dearest to her heart. She would have been pious had not the sight of her step-mother's piety given her an aversion to religious practices which, as she saw only too clearly, might be made a justification for the worst egotism. She was a mother, and she loved her son; but, as formerly, in the case of her little sister, a resemblance checked her in her feeling. Little Henry recalled Alfred too much at certain moments.

Then it was, when she had fathomed the bankruptcy of her first youth, that her imagination pictured to her the dawn of a reparative feeling; and what could this mysterious feeling be if it were not that one with which she was unacquainted, and the sweetness, power and happiness of which were celebrated by all?

"But no," she said to herself, "it is a crime to love when one is not free."

Then she recalled conversations heard on her friends' "days" at Bourges, and the manner in which people spoke of a doctor's wife who had eloped with a young Conseiller de Préfecture. And then she met with men who had so little resemblance to the image that she had formed of him whom she might have loved! She remembered the painful surprise which had been caused her by that very Monsieur de Varades, of whom De Querne had heard. She had believed in the genuineness of his sympathy. He came to see her. They used to have a little music together. Then, had he not offered violence to her one evening when they were alone in the house? She had said nothing to her husband from dread of a scandal and a duel; but she had never received the young officer again when alone. She did not suspect that he had revenged himself upon her by saying that she had been his mistress.

By what familiarities had she challenged the audacity of this garrison Don Juan? Yet she was not a coquette. The feeling that sprang up within her in the presence of a stranger was rather an apprehension of offence than a desire to please. She had been as little of a coquette with Armand de Querne. If there was a man whom she would have refrained from approaching with a desire to seduce, it was assuredly he. Her husband had so often extolled him to her.

"When we were at college, Armand and I," or, "Armand used to say to me," or, "Armand wrote to me." And so on.

Helen had anticipated another and a more pretentious Alfred. She had told herself that some day, if ever she left the country, she would be obliged to endure in her home the presence of this friend, who would be a hostile judge, and would raise fresh difficulties between her husband and herself. If they were separated for so many reasons the one from the other, her own reserve and Alfred's good nature at least prevented the separation from breaking out in scenes and disputes. What would be the outcome of the intrusion of Alfred's old chum into their home, she almost anxiously asked herself on the occasion of her first visit to Paris.

Her rapid interview with Monsieur de Querne had modified the colouring of these fears. He had come to take the Chazels to their hotel, and all three had dined together in a restaurant on the Boulevards. Helen had been surprised by Armand's outward appearance, and by the contrast that he presented to the carelessness of Alfred; but further, the young man's questions, his keen way of looking, the irony that tinted his slightest expressions, together with an indefinable shade of contempt for Alfred, which a woman's acuteness could not but remark, had disconcerted her, causing her a slight shiver of mistrust. She would have wished never to see the man again. She had been unable to refrain from mentioning this antipathy to her husband, and he had replied: "He looks like that, but he is such a good fellow, and then he has been so unfortunate." And he told his wife about Armand's childhood, his guardian's selfishness, his youthful melancholy, and he commiserated him for other mysterious sufferings.

"He has not understood life well. He was rich. He has not employed his fine powers. He has said nothing to me, but I always believed that he had experienced a deep passion."

Helen would have been much astonished if any one had revealed to her that the species of agony with which her thought rested upon the probable secret nature of this disquieting personage, comprised that form of anxiety which often precedes love. The settlement at Paris had taken place, and Armand had begun to visit them, at first in their furnished rooms, and then in the little house in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. It was he who had found it for them, he who courteously offered his assistance in the countless goings and comings necessitated by the furnishing of the new home. In the constant interviews thus brought about, whether in a shop, or while walking together from one tradesman's to another, or when driving in a carriage, as often happened, Helen learnt to know all the delightful outward qualities possessed by Armand. Unlike the men, all of them occupied with science or self-advancement, who met at her husband's house, he appeared to attach only a secondary importance to acquired merits or positive learning. Questions of feeling alone interested him.

In all the men that she had seen, Helen had encountered the same idea about love, namely, that it pertained to youth, was to be relegated to the background, and that rational people should never weigh it against family or professional interests. Her discussions with Armand revealed to her a man who had reflected a great deal about the mutual relations of the sexes. He possessed that imagination of heart which women so readily confuse with genuine sensibility, together with that experience of amorous life which lends to libertines their prestige even with the most virtuous. The expression of melancholy which was familiar to him seemed to say that this experience had been purchased at the cost of cruel deceptions. It was these unknown griefs that completed the work of seduction which had begun in timorous astonishment, and been continued in the admiration of the provincial for the Parisian; for the superiority of judgment concerning life which distinguished the young man, corresponded to too many stifled aspirations on Helen's part, to leave her indifferent to it. It was he whose taste she perceived scattered over the walls of her little drawing-room; he who had chosen that old tapestry and hung it in its corner; he who had chosen this piece of furniture or that piece of material from among several others. This softened admiration, which led her to say to herself: "What a happiness it would be to comfort him for all that he has suffered," had soon ended in the hope that her presence was really sweet to him, for he was occupied about her with visible sympathy.

At different times she had heard him tell her:

"I had an invitation to Madame So-and-so's this evening, but I broke my engagement in order to spend the evening with you."

One day, on the occasion of one of those insignificant events which in the heart's darkness are as tiny lights revealing an immense gulf, she had confessed to herself that she loved him. Armand, who was to have come to dinner in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, had sent a note of excuse to the effect that he was unwell. She had sent Alfred to see him, and Alfred had found nobody in the Rue Lincoln. By the sorrow that the young woman experienced, she recognised the extent of the interest that she took in Monsieur de Querne, and, to her misfortune, she recognised it at a moment when, upon one of those petty troubles, which are great disasters in love, she must inevitably doubt whether her feeling was returned. Instead of striving against this love, as she would have done had she believed herself loved, she said to herself:

"Why has he not kept his promise? With whom has he spent the evening?"

When she saw him again, he spoke somewhat hardly to her, and she suffered a disconcerted countenance to be seen. He gently took her hand, and she burst into tears. From that hour she ceased to be capable of concealing the disquiet with which the mere sight of Armand inspired her. She began to enter upon that stage wherein the soul finds itself ceaselessly divided between the sight of the direst misfortune and of the highest felicity. How is it possible to reason then? Armand, who knew love's halting-places too well not to perceive the progress that he was making in Helen's heart, was adroit enough to show her that he doubted her feelings towards himself, and that he was unhappy on account of this doubt.

He thus led her in succession to tell him that she loved him, to let him take her hands, her arms, her waist, and to lend her cheek, her eyes, her lips to kisses. Nothing could be more opposed than these progressive familiarities to the ideas that Helen entertained respecting the manner in which a woman ought to behave towards a man when she loves. She considered, as do all truly loyal natures, that a slight deception is morally equivalent to one that is complete. But she yielded to the faintest expression of pain in the young man's eyes with a weakness for which she reproached herself on each occasion, only to relapse once more.

"Ah! do not be pained; what does it matter if I ruin myself?" such was the translation of the poor woman's looks, the words that she uttered in a whisper.

She had not spoken falsely when putting to him the sorrowful question:

"You will at least be happy?"

And now, within a few hours of the moment when she would be entirely his, it was this hope and this uncertainty that floated above all else.

"Ah!" she thought, "if only I may see that light in his eyes! Afterwards I shall become what I may. What matter if I have given him that?"

She had reached this point in her reflections when a kiss made her start. Alfred had just come in to bid her good morning. Having gone out before eight o'clock he had not yet seen her, and finding her so pretty in the robe of soft material that showed the outline of her graceful shoulders, and bust, and the lines of her legs terminating in the white, blue-veined, naked feet in their black slippers, he could not refrain from approaching her and stealing a kiss from the sweet place on her neck, between the ear and nape. This was such a surprise to her on emerging from the universe of ideas in which she had just been absorbed, that she gave a slight scream.

"Lazy, chilly, timorous creature," said Chazel, who strove to jest in order to banish the angry expression which his caresses had just called up upon that charming face. "Do you know what o'clock it is? A quarter to twelve. You will never be ready for breakfast. What are you reading?" he continued, taking up the two volumes sent by Monsieur de Querne which were lying on the table; "more novels—but they are not cut. What have you been doing all the morning?"

"I have been settling papers and making up accounts."

How many of these little falsehoods her lips had uttered, and not one, even the slightest and most innocent of them, that did not cost her a cruel effort.

"Will you ring for Julia?" she resumed. "I am going to have my hair dressed, and I shall be ready in ten minutes."

"I am not in your way if I remain here?" he said.

"Not particularly—for the present," she replied, and already she had passed into her dressing-room. She had put on a light cambric wrapper, and was unfastening her beautiful chestnut hair, combing it herself. Alfred remained on his feet, leaning against one of the leaves of the door and reading a newspaper which he had taken out of his pocket. The mere rustling of the paper irritated Helen's nerves, because it recalled this man's presence to her, and his presence appeared at this moment a profanation. Ah! if Armand had been there instead of the other, how charming she would have found it to associate him thus with the coquettish portion of the mysterious attentions to her beauty. But such familiarity in one whom they do not love is so displeasing to women, that even prostitutes are pained by it. In all, whether virtuous or not, modesty is the beginning and the ending of love. Alfred had never understood this. He was still in love with Helen; and these sudden intrusions upon her privacy procured him a dumb happiness that was composed of timid desires and furtive contemplations. Over the top of his open newspaper he watched the white hands passing backwards and forwards among the yielding hair, and the graceful shape of the arms which the wide sleeves, when thrown back by certain movements, allowed to be seen.

How he would have liked to handle that hair which she always denied to him! And she too looked at her hair with happiness, in spite of the pain which her husband caused her by remaining there, for she perceived that it was as long and as wave-like as when she had been a young girl. Every time that she paid attention to her beauty now, she studied herself with childish anxiety, spying out the slightest wrinkle on her temples, about her lips, around her neck, asking herself whether she was still pretty enough to intoxicate the man she loved, and she smiled at herself in the glass as she twined her hair, and leaning forward a little she saw in a corner of the same glass the reflection of her husband's face with a blaze in his eyes—that swift gleam of desire which she knew and hated well. She shivered as though she had awoke to find herself exposed naked in a public square, blushed violently, and said:

"I do not know why Julia is not here. Ring again, please, and leave me."

She got up, pushed Alfred away, shut the door, and when alone, felt the tears come.

"Ah!" she said to herself; "I do not truly love him. Ought not these trifles to be sweet to me since I endure them for his sake?"

Such were her thoughts as she sat at the breakfast table, dressed now in a dark-coloured dress, and wearing boots—the boots in which she was presently, and in a very short time, for the time-piece hanging on the wall was pointing to thirty-five minutes past twelve—to walk to that Rue de Stockholm which she had not known even by name before receiving her lover's note. Where was it? What would the house look like? At the mere thought of it, an intoxicating, burning fluid seem to course through her veins. To remain quiet was a torture to her, and as for eating, she was unequal to it. It seemed to her that her throat was so choked that not even a piece of bread would pass through it. Little Henry was talking to his father, and the latter, on failing to receive even a reply from her to two or three questions, said:

"How strange you are to-day. Are you not well?"

"I?" she said. "Why I am as cheerful and merry as possible," and she began to laugh and to talk in a loud tone. "Can he suspect anything?" she asked herself; "but what matter if he does?"

"What are you going to do this afternoon?" asked Alfred again mechanically.

"Will you take me with you, mamma?" said Henry.

"No, darling," she replied, evading a reply to her husband, "you will go to the Champs-Élysées, and I will wish you good morning as I pass, perhaps. Is it fine to-day?" she went on, although she had watched both sky and pavement with impatient anxiety since early morning. And on his replying in the affirmative she said: "You can take the carriage; I will go on foot, it will do me good."

They had a brougham that was hired by the month, and that they used in turns, he for business expeditions, and she for paying visits.

"At last!" she sighed, when she found herself alone in the little drawing-room, Alfred having left for his office, and Henry for his walk; and the distresses of the morning were succeeded by a delicious feeling of relief.

Already even, in her drawing-room, which was filled with recollections of Armand, she was surrendered unreservedly to her love. The recovery of her freedom overwhelmed her with joy such as the vision of the future could no longer take from before her mind. She evoked in thought her lover's gaze, she kindled in it that gleam of felicity which was as the stars towards which her being was uplifted.

"I am sacrificing everything for him," she thought to herself, returning for a moment to the impressions of that painful morning; "but the more I sacrifice for him the more will he feel how much I love him. And how I love him! how I love him!" she repeated aloud in exultation. She looked at her watch. "It is past one o'clock. He is to wait for me from twelve. What a surprise for him if I arrive so soon. For he does not expect me immediately."

And she hastened to put on her hat, taking a thick veil with her at the bottom of her pocket to put over her face in the cab. He had the day before recommended her to do so. And now she was already passing down the Rue Saint-Lazare, like one walking in her sleep, not daring to look at anything around her. It seemed to her that everyone could see by her figure and gait where she was going, and her elation had given place to a sort of terror—but a resolute terror, like that of a man of courage when on the way to fight his first duel—when she ventured to hail a cab in the Place de la Trinité.

"The Rue de Stockholm," she said.

"What number?" asked the man.

"I will tell you when to stop," she replied.

To get out of the cab in front of the house had just appeared to her suddenly as an impossibility. Her hands shook when she fastened on her double veil in the vehicle, which began to move forward, heavy and slow; at least it seemed to her that every revolution of the wheels lasted a minute. She looked at the shops in the Rue Saint-Lazare, as they filed past, then at the courtyard in front of the terminus, and the sight of a traveller paying his cabman set her searching in her muff in agony. What if she had forgotten her purse? No, she had forty francs, in small ten-franc pieces. So much the worse; she would give one to the man, for to wait for the change on the footpath would be too much for her.

All these emotions were painful to her feelings. She would willingly have fixed her imagination upon her lover—her lover, for she was going to be his mistress. How contemptuous the tones of her friends at Bourges used formerly to become when uttering these words in reference to some compromised woman! Then her nervous emotion proved the stronger.

"If only he does not guess what it has cost me! Ah, may my cowardly fears not spoil his happiness!"

The cab having meanwhile climbed the beginning of the ascent of the Rue de Rome, was turning down past the wall of a private garden which forms the corner of the Rue de Stockholm, and the driver leaned down from his seat to ask Helen where he was to stop.

"Here," she said.

She got out, and placed the small gold piece in the man's hand, saying to him:

"Keep it, keep it."

Then she was immediately afraid that he would guess why she did not wait for the change, and she stopped and busied herself with gazing, without reading it, at a placard affixed to the wall, until she heard the cab wheels rolling away. She followed the footpath, lifting her head with a throbbing of the heart which seemed to be driving her mad. Eight, ten—two numbers more, and she had reached the house mentioned in the note. She entered the gateway, seeing nothing. She passed in front of the porter thinking that her limbs would not support her. Her feet were giving way on the stair-carpet. One more effort, and she was at the door of the apartments on the second floor.

She leaned against this closed door. Not a sound was to be heard on the staircase; not a sound came up from the street. She could hear the beatings of her heart, and instead of ringing she remained where she was. She wanted to recover a little calmness before appearing in Armand's presence. Why had she come here? To make him happy! What, then, would be the good of letting him see how much she had suffered? Her heart beat less rapidly; she forced herself to smile; and the thought of the happiness she was about to give was already a happiness to her greater than her anguish had just been.

She at last made up her mind to ring. The tinkling was succeeded by the sound of footsteps, the key turned in the lock, and she sank upon Armand's bosom, and was immediately drawn into a little drawing-room furnished in blue. Flames were burning in the fire-place. At the first glance Helen saw that there was no bed in the apartment. She had so dreaded the sight of this on first entering that she felt an infinite gratitude to Armand for having selected their place of meeting in such a way as to spare her this initial shock. He, meanwhile, had unfastened both her veils, taken off her bonnet, compelled her to sit down in an arm-chair beside the fire, and, kneeling in front of her, was clasping her almost madly, repeating again and again:

"Ah, my love! how sweet of you to come!"

And he gazed at her with eyes made very loving with the joy of desire that is certain of its satisfaction—the joy of desire only, for on seeing her smile at him with that easy smile to which she had compelled her countenance, in order not to displease him, he had just told himself that it was not the first time that she had come to a like meeting, and a terrible duality had been set up within him between his sensations and his thoughts.

"She has a fancy for me," he reflected; "let us take advantage of it. But why have all women a mania for telling you that you are their first lover?"

His kisses were loosening the locks of her hair, which she tried to readjust above her forehead with her hand.

"Do not be afraid," he said to her; "I have thought of everything." And he led her through the bedroom to the door of a little dressing-room, on the table in which were arranged all the articles belonging to his travelling dressing-case.

"You will be able to comb your hair again," he said.

"Oh!" she said, blushing, "you make me ashamed."

Just then he had led her into the bedroom, and as he was taking off the jacket which she wore over her dress, a small object rolled out of her pocket. It was a pocket-comb of light tortoise-shell, which Helen had taken up unreflectingly before going out, as she often did.

"She remembered that, too," he thought.

Then with loving entreaty:

"Be mine," he asked of her.

"Nay, I am yours," she replied.

A twilight prevailed in the bedroom, for he had loosed the window-curtains, as also those of the bed—of that bed which she found strength to look at for the first time. How fain would she have bidden him leave her to herself! And she turned her eyes towards him. He had begun to unfasten the buttons of her dress, and she was about to say to him, "Go away!" when she saw in his eyes that expression of felicity of which she had so often dreamed, and she suffered him, with that divine weakness whose sublime flattery so few men understand.

If a woman who loves wishes to be loved in the same degree, is it then needful that she borrow something from the methods of those creatures devoid of true sensibility, to whom their persons are but instruments of supremacy, and who surrender themselves that they may the better possess? Helen did not suspect, while Armand, intoxicated with her beauty, was sweeping her away in his arms, after warming her feet with kisses and taking from her all her attire, from her bracelets to her hair-pins—no, Helen did not suspect that, at that very moment, this man had just found in the absolute submission to his desires that had cost the poor woman so dear, a reason for not believing in her.

"Are you happy?" she asked of him an hour later, lying on his heart, and giving herself up to the languid voluptuousness that succeeds caresses; "tell me, are you happy? You see, I am."

And it was true, for she had just for the first time felt an unfamiliar emotion waking in her beneath the caresses of the man she loved so dearly.

"Oh! very happy," replied Armand, and he spoke falsely, for reviewing in thought all the slight incidents of this first meeting—the smiling entry, the presence of the comb, the compliant disrobing, the burning susceptibility of his mistress—he said again to himself that he was certainly not Helen's first lover.

And then, he secretly despised her for not having denied herself in detail. The evident absence of remorse in the woman seemed to him a proof that she had no kind of moral sense. He did not tell himself that, if she had manifested remorse, he would have treated her as a hypocrite, and meanwhile she was speaking to him.

"See," she sighed, "as soon as I saw you, I loved you. I felt that you had not had your share of happiness here below, and it was my dream to impart it to you, and to do away with all your troubles. There is a wrinkle in your forehead which I cannot endure. When you asked me to be yours and I said no, I saw that wrinkle between your eyebrows, there," she said, kissing the spot, "and then, when I said yes, the wrinkle was gone. That is why I am here, and proud of being here, for I am so proud of loving you."

"How strange it is," thought Armand, "that no woman has conscience enough to say to herself: 'I am acting disgracefully, lying, betraying; it amuses me, but it is disgraceful.' The cloth on the communion-table and the sheet on the bed of a furnished room are all one to them. There, my angel, go on with your romances," and he closed her lips with kisses. "Ah!" he thought again, "she is very pretty. If only she had wit enough to hold her tongue!"