The Awakening
During the three years that she had been married, she had not left the Val de Ciré, where her husband possessed two cotton-mills. She led a quiet life, and, although without children, she was quite happy in her house among the trees, which the work-people called the “château.”
Although Monsieur Vasseur was considerably older than she was, he was very kind. She loved him, and no guilty thought had ever entered her mind.
Her mother came and spent every summer at Ciré, and then returned to Paris for the winter, as soon as the leaves began to fall.
Jeanne coughed a little every autumn, for the narrow valley through which the river wound was very foggy for five months in the year. First of all, slight mists hung over the meadows, making all the low-lying ground look like a large pond, out of which the roofs of the houses rose. Then a white vapour, which rose like a tide, enveloped everything, turning the valley into a phantom land, through which men moved like ghosts, without recognizing each other ten yards off, and the trees, wreathed in mist and dripping with moisture, rose up through it.
But the people who went along the neighbouring hills, and looked down upon the deep, white depression of the valley, saw the two huge chimneys of Monsieur Vasseur’s factories rising above the mist below. Day and night they vomited forth two long trails of black smoke, the sole indication that people were living in the hollow, which looked as if it were filled with a cloud of cotton.
That year, when October came, the medical men advised the young woman to go and spend the winter in Paris with her mother, as the air of the valley was dangerous for her weak chest, and she went. For a month or so, she thought continually of the house which she had left, the home to which she seemed rooted, the well-known furniture and quiet ways of which she loved so much. But by degrees she grew accustomed to her new life, and got to like entertainments, dinner and evening parties, and balls.
Till then she had retained her girlish manners, had been undecided and rather sluggish, walked languidly, and had a tired smile, but now she became animated and merry, and was always ready for pleasure. Men paid her marked attentions, and she was amused at their talk and made fun of their gallantries, as she felt sure that she could resist them, for she was rather disgusted with love from what she had learned of it in marriage.
The idea of giving up her body to the coarse caresses of such bearded creatures made her laugh with pity and give a slight shudder of repugnance.
She asked herself how women could consent to degrading contacts with strangers, the more so as they were already obliged to endure them with their legitimate husbands. She would have loved her husband much more if they had lived together like two friends, and had restricted themselves to chaste kisses, which are the caresses of the soul.
But she was much amused by their compliments, by the desire which showed itself in their eyes, a desire she did not share, by declarations of love whispered into her ear as they were returning to the drawing room after some grand dinner, by words murmured so low that she almost had to guess them, words which left her blood quite cool, and her heart untouched, while gratifying her unconscious coquetry, kindling a flame of pleasure within her, making her lips open, her eyes grow bright, and her woman’s heart, to which homage was due, quiver with delight.
She was fond of those tête-à-tête in the dusk when a man grows pressing, hesitates, trembles and falls on his knees. It was a delicious and new pleasure to her to know that they felt a passion which left her quite unmoved, able to say no by a shake of the head and by pursing her lips, able to withdraw her hands, to get up and calmly ring for lights, and to see the man who had been trembling at her feet get up, confused and furious when he heard the footman coming.
She often uttered a hard laugh, which froze the most burning words, and said harsh things, which fell like a jet of icy water on the most ardent protestations, while the intonations of her voice were enough to make any man who really loved her kill himself. There were two especially who made obstinate love to her.
They did not at all resemble one another. One of them, Paul Péronel, was tall, a man of the world, gallant and enterprising, one who was accustomed to successful love affairs, knew how to wait, and when to seize his opportunity.
The other, Monsieur d’Avancelle, quivered when he came near her, scarcely ventured to express his love, but followed her like a shadow, and gave utterance to his hopeless desire by distracted looks, and the assiduity of his attentions to her. She called the former “Captain Fracasse,” and the latter “Faithful Sheep,” and in the end made him a kind of servant and treated him as if he had been her slave.
She would have been much amused if anybody had told her that she would love him, and yet she did love him, after a singular fashion. As she saw him continually, she had grown accustomed to his voice, to his gestures, and to his manner, just as one grows accustomed to those with whom one meets continually. Often his face haunted her in her dreams, and she saw him as he really was; gentle, delicate in all his actions, humble, but passionately in love. She would awake full of these dreams, fancying that she still heard him and felt him near her, until one night (most likely she was feverish) she saw herself alone with him in a small wood, where they were both sitting on the grass. He was saying charming things to her, while he pressed and kissed her hands. She could feel the warmth of his skin and of his breath and she was stroking his hair in a very natural manner.
We are quite different in our dreams to what we are in real life. She felt full of love for him, full of calm and deep love, and was happy in stroking his forehead and in holding him against her. Gradually he put his arms around her, kissed her eyes and her cheeks without her attempting to get away from him; their lips met, and she yielded. It was a moment of intense and superhuman happiness, ideal yet sensual, maddening and unforgettable, such ecstasies are unknown in real life. She awoke thrilled and confused, and she could not go asleep again, she felt so obsessed and possessed by him.
When she saw him again, unconscious of the agitation that he had caused her, she felt that she grew red, and while he was telling her of his love, she was continually recalling to mind their previous meeting, without being able to get rid of the recollection of their delicious embrace in her dream.
She loved him, loved him with a strange tenderness, refined but sensual, chiefly from the remembrance of her dream, although she dreaded the accomplishment of the desires which had arisen in her mind.
At last he perceived it, and then she told him everything, even to the dread of his kisses, and she made him swear that he would respect her, and he did so. They spent long hours of transcendental love together, during which their souls alone embraced, and when they separated, they were enervated, weak, and feverish.
Sometimes their lips met, and with closed eyes they revelled in that long, yet chaste caress. She felt, however, that he could not resist much longer, and as she did not wish to yield, she wrote and told her husband that she wanted to come to him, and to return to her tranquil, solitary life. But in reply, he wrote her a very kind letter, and strongly advised her not to return in the middle of the winter, and so expose herself to the sudden change of climate, and to the icy mists of the valley, and she was thunderstruck and angry with that confiding man, who did not guess, who did not understand, the struggles of her heart.
February was a warm, bright month, and although she now avoided being alone with Monsieur d’Avancelle, she sometimes accepted his invitation to drive round the lake in the Bois de Boulogne with him, when it was dusk.
On one of those evenings, it was so warm that it seemed as if the sap in every tree and plant were rising. Their cab was going at a slow pace; it was growing dusk, and they were sitting close together, holding each other’s hands, and she said to herself:
“It is all over, I am lost!” for she felt her desires rising in her again, the imperious demand for that supreme embrace which she had undergone in her dream. Every moment their lips sought each other, clung together, and separated, only to meet again immediately.
He did not venture to go into the house with her, but left her at the door; more in love with her than ever, and half fainting.
Monsieur Paul Péronel was waiting for her in the little drawing room, without a light, and when he shook hands with her, he felt how feverish she was. He began to talk in a low, tender voice, lulling her tired mind with the charm of amorous words.
She listened to him without replying, for she was thinking of the other; she fancied she was listening to the other, and thought she felt him leaning against her, in a kind of hallucination. She saw only him, and did not remember that any other man existed on earth, and when her ears trembled at those three syllables: “I love you,” it was he, the other man, who uttered them, who kissed her hands, who strained her to his breast, like the other had done shortly before in the cab. It was he who pressed victorious kisses on her lips, it was he whom she held in her arms and embraced, to whom she was calling, with all the longings of her heart, with all the overwrought ardour of her body.
When she awoke from her dream, she uttered a terrible cry. Paul Péronel was kneeling by her and was thanking her passionately, while he covered her dishevelled hair with kisses, and she almost screamed out: “Go away! go away! go away!”
And as he did not understand what she meant, and tried to put his arm round her waist again, she writhed, as she stammered out:
“You are a wretch, and I hate you! Go away! go away!” And he got up in great surprise, took up his hat, and went.
The next day she returned to Val de Ciré, and her husband, who had not expected her for some time, blamed her for her whim.
“I could not live away from you any longer,” she said.
He found her altered in character and sadder than formerly, but when he said to her: “What is the matter with you? You seem unhappy. What do you want?” she replied:
“Nothing. Happiness exists only in our dreams in this world.”
Avancelle came to see her the next summer, and she received him without any emotion and without regret, for she suddenly perceived that she had never loved him, except in a dream, from which Paul Péronel had brutally roused her.
But the young man, who still adored her, thought as he returned to Paris:
“Women are really very strange, complicated, and inexplicable beings.”