Useless Beauty
I
A fashionable victoria, drawn by two magnificent black horses, stood at the doorstep of the mansion. It was about half past five on an evening towards the end of June, and between the gables which fenced the courtyard, gleamed the sky, full of bright light, heat and brilliance.
The Comtesse de Mascaret appeared on the doorstep exactly at the moment in which her husband, who was coming home, reached the gateway. He stopped for several seconds to watch his wife, and turned a little pale. She was very lovely, supple, noticeable for her long oval face, her complexion of old ivory, and her large grey eyes and black hair: she stepped into the carriage without glancing at him, without even appearing to have seen him, with a grace so extraordinarily well-bred that the hideous jealousy by which he had been so long devoured tore at his heart afresh. He went up to her, and, bowing:
“You’re going for a drive?” he said.
She let four words slip through her scornful lips:
“You see for yourself.”
“The park?”
“Probably.”
“May I be allowed to come with you?”
“The carriage is yours.”
Without surprise at the tone in which she answered him, he stepped in and seated himself beside his wife; then he gave the order: “The park.”
The footman leaped on to the seat beside the coachman and the horses, as they always did, pawed and tossed their heads until they had turned into the street.
The couple remained side by side without speaking. He sought how to begin the conversation, but she maintained so obstinately hard an expression that he did not dare.
At last, he stealthily slid his hand towards the gloved hand of his wife and touched it as if by accident, but the gesture that she made in withdrawing her arm was so swift and so expressive of disgust that he hesitated anxiously, in spite of his habitual authority and despotism.
At length he muttered:
“Gabrielle.”
Without turning her head, she asked:
“What do you want?”
“You are perfectly adorable.”
She made no answer, and remained leaning back in the carriage with the expression of an infuriated queen.
By now they were going up the Champs-Élysées, towards the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile. The enormous monument at the bottom of the long avenue, spread out its colossal arch against a fiery sky. The sun seemed to fall on it, scattering from the horizon a flaming dust.
And the flood of carriages, splashed with the rays of the sun on copper fittings and on the silver plating and crystal of harness and lamps, was flowing in a double stream towards the park and the city.
The Comte de Mascaret began again:
“Dear Gabrielle.”
Then, unable to stand it any longer, she replied in an exasperated voice:
“Oh, leave me alone, I beg you. I have no longer liberty to be alone in my carriage now.”
He pretended not to have heard, and went on:
“I have never seen you look as pretty as you do today.”
She was nearly at the end of her patience and replied, with an anger which she could contain no longer:
“You are making a mistake in noticing it, for I give you my word that I’ll never be yours again.”
He was obviously stunned and overwhelmed, and, his customary violence getting the better of him, he flung a “What’s that you say?” which revealed more of the brutal master than of the man in love.
In a low voice, although the servants could hear nothing amid the deafening rumbling of the wheels, she repeated:
“What’s that you say? What’s that you say? How well I recognise you! You want me to tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell you everything?”
“Yes.”
“Everything that I have held in my heart since I became the victim of your ferocious egoism?”
He turned scarlet with astonishment and rage. He muttered between his clenched teeth:
“Yes, go on.”
He was a man of tall build, with broad shoulders, with a great tawny beard, a handsome man, a nobleman, a man of the world who passed for a perfect husband and an excellent father.
For the first time since they had left the house, she turned towards him and looked him full in the face.
“Well, you are going to hear some unpleasant things, but you may as well know that I am ready for anything, that I will outface everybody, that I fear nothing, and today, you less than anybody.”
He too looked her in the face, and a storm of anger shook him already. He whispered:
“You must be mad.”
“No, but I will no longer be the victim of the detestable torture of maternity that you have made me undergo these last eleven years! I wish to live as a woman in society should, as I have the right, as all wives have the right.”
Suddenly turning pale again, he stammered:
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, yes, you do. It is now three months since my last child was born, and as I still have all my beauty—which, in spite of your efforts, it is practically impossible to ruin, as you recognised just now when you saw me on the doorstep—you realise that it is time I became enceinte again.”
“You are out of your mind.”
“No. I am thirty and have seven children. We’ve been married for eleven years, and you hope that this will go on for another ten, after which you will cease from being jealous.”
He seized her arm, and squeezing it:
“I am not going to allow you to talk to me like this any longer.
“And I shall talk to you to the end, until I have finished everything I have got to tell you. If you try to stop me, I shall raise my voice loud enough to be understood by the two servants on the box. I only let you sit beside me for this purpose, because I should have these witnesses who would compel you to listen to me and to keep a tight rein on yourself. Now listen to me. You have always been distasteful to me and I have always let you see it, for I have never lied. You married me against my will, you brought pressure to bear on my parents, who were shamed into giving me to you because you were very rich. They forced me to it by making me cry.
“So, having bought me, from the moment when I was in your power, when I began to become a companion ready to attach myself to you, to forget your campaign of intimidation and coercion, in remembering only that I ought to be a devoted wife and to love you as much as it was possible for me to do, you became jealous, yes, as no other man has ever been, the jealousy of a spy, base, ignoble, degrading to yourself and insulting to me. I had only been married eight months when you suspected me of every treachery. You even let me hear you say so. What shame! And since you could not prevent me from being beautiful and pleasing, from being spoken of in drawing rooms and even in the papers as being one of the prettiest women in Paris, you sought what you could discover to cut me off from flirtations, and so you hit on this abominable idea of making me pass my life in a state of perpetual pregnancy, until the time came when I should disgust every man. Oh, don’t deny it. For a long time I understood nothing, then I guessed. You boasted of it even to your own sister, who told me, because she loves me and was horrified by your peasant grossness.
“Think of our battles, doors broken open, locks forced. Think of the existence to which you have condemned me these eleven years, the existence of a brood mare in a stud. Then, the moment I became pregnant, you too lost your taste for me, and I would not see you for months. I was sent into the country to the family seat, to grass, to pasture, to have my baby. And when I reappeared, fresh and beautiful, indestructible, as alluring as ever, and as ever the centre of attraction, hoping at last that I was going to live for a short time like a young wealthy society woman, jealousy overtook you again, and once more you began to pursue me with the infamous and hateful desire by which you are tortured at this moment as you sit beside me. It is not the desire to possess me—I would never refuse myself to you—it is the desire to deform me.
“It is of old standing, this abominable and quite mysterious thing, the full implication of which I was so long in realising (but I have grown quick to note your acts and thoughts): you are attached to your children by all the security which they have given you during the time I carried them in my body. You made your affection for them with all the aversion that you had for me, with all your shameful fears, momentarily set at rest, and with joy at seeing me grown big.
“Oh, how often have I felt that joy in you, recognised it in your eyes, guessed it. You love your children as victories and not as flesh of your flesh. They are victories over me, over my youth, over my beauty, over my charm, over the compliments paid to me, and over those whispered round me and left unspoken. And you are proud of it: you parade with them, you take them to ride in a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne, and on donkeys at Montmorency. You escort them to the theatre in the afternoon so that people shall see you in the middle of them, and say: ‘What a good father!’ and repeat it …”
He had seized her wrist with savage brutality, and was gripping it so violently that she fell silent, a groan tearing her throat.
And speaking very softly he said:
“I love my children, do you hear! What you have just told me is a shameful thing for a mother to have said. But you are mine. I am the master … your master … I can exact from you what I like, when I like … and I have the law … on my side.”
He tried to crush her fingers in the pincer-like pressure of his heavy masculine fist. Livid with pain, she struggled in vain to withdraw her hand from this vice that was grinding it; and the suffering made her gasp for breath, and tears came to her eyes.
“You realise that I am the master,” he said, “the stronger.”
He had loosed his grasp a little. She replied:
“You believe I am a pious woman?”
Surprised, he stammered:
“Of course.”
“You think that I believe in God?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think that I could lie in swearing an oath to you before an altar that holds the body of Christ?”
“No.”
“Will you accompany me into a church?”
“What to do?”
“You’ll see. Will you come?”
“If you insist, yes.”
She raised her voice, calling:
“Philippe.”
The coachman, bending his neck slightly, without taking his eyes off the horses, seemed to turn only his ear towards his mistress, who went on:
“Drive to the Church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule.”
And the victoria, which had just reached the entrance to the park, turned back in the direction of Paris.
Wife and husband exchanged no further word during their new journey. Then, when the carriage had stopped before the entrance to the church, Mme. de Mascaret, jumping out, went in, followed a few paces behind by the comte.
She went without a pause, straight to the railings of the choir, and falling on her knees beside a chair, hid her face in her hands and prayed. She prayed for a long time, and, standing beside her, he saw at last that she was crying. She cried silently, as women cry in moments of terrible poignant grief. It was a sort of shudder that ran through her body and ended in a little sob, hidden and stifled under her fingers.
But the Comte de Mascaret decided that the situation was lasting too long, and he touched her on the shoulder.
The contact roused her as if it had burnt her. Standing up, she looked him straight in the eyes:
“This is what I have to say to you. I’m not afraid, you can do what you like. You can kill me if that is what you want to do. One of your children is not yours. I swear it to you before God who hears me in this place. It was the only revenge I could take on you, against your abominable masculine tyranny, against the forced labour of procreation to which you have condemned me. Who was my lover? You will never know. You will suspect the whole world. You will not discover him. I gave myself to him without love and without pleasure, solely to deceive you. And he too made me a mother. Who is the child? You will never know. I have seven children; find out the one! I had intended to tell you this later, since one is not avenged on a man by deceiving him until he knows it. You have forced me to confess it to you today: I have finished.”
And she fled through the church, towards the door open on the street, expecting to hear behind her the swift footsteps of the husband she had defied, and to lie crushed on the pavement under the stunning blow of his fist.
But she heard nothing and reached the carriage. She climbed in at one bound, shaken with anguish, fainting with fear, and cried to the coachman:
“Home.”
The horses set off at a quick trot.
II
Shut in her room, the Comtesse de Mascaret waited for her dinner hour as a condemned man waits for the hour of his execution. What would he do? Had he come in? Despotic and ungovernable as he was, ready for any violence, what had he meditated, what had he planned, what resolved? There was no sound in the house, and she looked at the hands of her watch every moment. Her maid had come to dress her for the evening; then she had gone.
Eight o’clock struck, and almost on the instant, there was a double knock at the door.
“Come in.”
The butler appeared, and said:
“Dinner is served, madame.”
“Is the comte in?”
“Yes, madam. M. le comte is in the dining room.”
For a moment or two, she had some thought of arming herself with a little revolver that she had bought some time previously, in view of the drama she was preparing in her heart. But she remembered that all the children would be there: and she took nothing but a bottle of salts.
When she entered the dining room, her husband was waiting, standing near his chair. They bowed slightly to each other and sat down. Then the children took their places, too. The three boys, with their tutor, the Abbé Marin, were on their mother’s right hand: the three girls, with the English governess, Miss Smith, were on her left. The youngest child, aged three months, stayed alone in her room with her nurse.
The three girls, all fair, of whom the eldest was ten, wore blue frocks and were like exquisite dolls. The youngest was not three years old. They were all very pretty already and they gave promise of becoming as lovely as their mother.
The three boys, two brown-haired, and the eldest, aged nine, already very dark, seemed likely to grow into vigorous big-built men, with broad shoulders. The whole family seemed to come of one stock, healthy and active.
The abbé pronounced benediction, as always when no one had been invited to dinner, for the children did not come to the table when there were guests. Then they began dinner.
The comtesse, in the grip of an emotion she had not anticipated, sat with downcast eyes, while the count scrutinised both the three boys and the three girls, with questioning eyes that wandered from one head to another, disturbed and wretched. Suddenly, as he replaced his thin-stemmed glass in front of him, he broke it, and the red liquid spread upon the tablecloth. At the slight noise made by this slight accident, the comtesse started so violently that she jumped in her chair. They looked at each other for the first time. Then, from moment to moment, in spite of themselves, in spite of the revulsion of body and mind with which every glance they exchanged overwhelmed them, they continued to cross glances like exchanging shots.
The abbé, feeling that some constraint, of which he did not guess the cause, existed, tried to raise a conversation. He scattered subjects round him, but his useless attempts did not hatch out one idea or bring one word to birth.
The comtesse, urged by her woman’s tact, fell back instinctively on her social training, and tried two or three times to answer him: but in vain. She found no words in the confusion of her thoughts; and in the silence of the vast room where the only sounds were the slight ones made by the knives and forks and plates, her voice almost frightened her.
Suddenly, leaning towards her, her husband said:
“Here in this room, in the middle of your children, will you swear to the truth of what you have just told me?”
The hatred that had fermented in her veins broke suddenly out, and answering the question determinedly as she answered his glance, she lifted her two hands, the right towards the heads of her sons, the left towards her daughters’, and in a firm, resolute and unfaltering voice, said:
“On my children’s heads, I swear that I have told you the truth.”
He got up, and flinging his napkin on the table with a gesture of exasperation, he turned away, pushing his chair against the wall; then went out without another word.
Thereupon she drew a deep breath, as if she had won a first victory, and went on in a calm voice:
“Don’t take any notice, my darlings, your father has just suffered a great sorrow. And he is still very unhappy. It will pass off in a few days.”
Then she talked to the abbé; she talked to Miss Smith; for her children she found loving words, little kindnesses, the gentle indulgent mother ways that gladden childish hearts.
When dinner was over, she went into the drawing room with the whole family. She made the elder ones chatter, told stories to the young ones, and when it was time for them all to go to bed, she pressed lingering kisses on them, and then sending them away to sleep, she returned to her bedroom alone.
She waited, without the least doubt that he would come. And now that her children were far from her, she determined to defend her mortal body as she had defended her life as a society woman; and in the pocket of her gown she hid the little loaded revolver that she had bought some days before.
Hours passed; clocks struck. All the noises of the house died down. Only the carriages continued to rush down the streets with a confused rumbling, faint and far off through the thickness of the walls.
She waited, wide-awake and poised, not afraid of him now, prepared for anything and almost triumphant, since she had found for him a torture that he would feel every moment throughout his life.
But the first gleam of daylight had slipped through the fringed border of her curtains, and still he had not come to her. Then, stunned, she realised that he was not coming. Locking her door and thrusting across it the safety bolt that she had had fixed, she went to bed at last and lay there with wide-open eyes, thinking, unable to understand now, unable to guess what he was going to do.
Her maid, bringing in her tea, gave her a letter from her husband. He informed her that he was going on a very long voyage and announced in a postscript that his lawyer would supply her with all the money she required for her expenses.
III
It was at the Opéra, during an entr’acte of Robert le Diable. In the stalls, men stood up, hats on their heads, low-cut waistcoats revealing white shirts on which shone gold or jewelled studs, and looked round at the boxes full of women in evening dress, covered with diamonds and pearls, displayed in this brilliantly lighted greenhouse where lovely faces and gleaming shoulders seemed blossoming for all eyes to gaze on, in the midst of the music and the human voices.
Two friends, their backs turned to the orchestra, were quizzing, as they talked, all this gallery of elegance, all this exhibition of true or artificial charm, jewels, luxury and ostentation that spread itself in a circle round the great theatre.
One of them, Roger de Salins, said to his companion, Bernard Grandin:
“Look at the Comtesse de Mascaret, as lovely as ever.”
The other man turned to stare at the tall woman in the opposite box: she looked still very young, and her startling beauty seemed to draw all eyes from every corner of the theatre. Her pale complexion, with its ivory gleams, gave her the look of a statue, while in her hair, which was black as night, a slender rainbow-shaped diadem, powdered with diamonds, glittered like a milky way.
When he had looked at her for some time, Bernard Grandin replied with a humorous accent of sincere conviction:
“I’ll grant you that she’s lovely!”
“How old will she be now?”
“Wait. I can tell you exactly. I have known her since her childhood. I saw her make her entry into society as a young girl. She is … she is … thirty … thirty … thirty-six years old.”
“It’s impossible.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“She looks twenty-five.”
“She has had seven children.”
“It’s incredible.”
“They are all seven alive too, and she’s an admirable mother. I visit the house sometimes: it’s a pleasant house, very quiet and restful. She achieves the difficult art of being a mother and a social being.”
“Odd, isn’t it? And there’s never been any talk about her?”
“Never.”
“But what about her husband? He’s a strange man, isn’t he?”
“Yes and no. There may have been some little incident between them, one of those little domestic incidents that one suspects, never hearing the whole story but guessing it fairly accurately.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know anything about it myself. Mascaret is very much the man about town nowadays after having been a perfect husband. During all the time that he was a thoroughly good husband, he had a thoroughly bad disposition, suspicious and surly. Since he took to a gay life, he has become quite careless, but one feels that he has some worry, some grief, a gnawing canker of some kind: he is ageing very much, he is.”
For a few minutes the two friends philosophised on the secret troubles, impossible to understand, that differences of character or perhaps physical antipathies, unnoticed at first, can create in a family.
Roger de Salins, who was still eyeing Mme. de Mascaret, added:
“It is incomprehensible that this woman has had seven children.”
“Yes, in eleven years. After which she made an end, at the age of thirty, of her period of reproduction, in order to enter on the brilliant period of display, which seems far from finishing.”
“Poor women!”
“Why do you pity them?”
“Why? Oh, my dear, think of it! Eleven years of pregnancy for a woman like that! What a hell! It’s the whole of her youth, all her beauty, her every hope of success, the whole romantic ideal of the brilliance of life, that is sacrificed to this abominable law of reproduction which turns the normal woman into a mere egg-laying machine.”
“What’s to be done? That’s only nature!”
“Yes, but I say that nature is our enemy, that we must fight all our lives against nature, because she never ceases to force us back and back to the beast. Whatever there is of decency, of beauty, of graciousness, of idealism, on earth, was not put there by God, but by man, by man’s brain. It is we who have introduced into the created world some little grace, beauty, a charm foreign to it, and mystery, by the songs we sing of it, the interpretations we offer, by the admiration of poets, the idealisations of artists, and the explanations of scientists who are deluded but who do find ingenious reasons for phenomena. God has created only gross creatures, full of the germs of disease, who after a few years of animal development grow old in infirmity, with all the ugliness and all the impotence of human decrepitude. He made them, it seems, only to reproduce themselves in a revolting fashion and thereafter to die, like the ephemeral insects of summer evenings. I said, ‘to reproduce themselves in a revolting fashion’: I repeat it. What is indeed more shameful, more repugnant than the filthy and ridiculous act of human reproduction, from which all delicate sensibilities shrink and will always shrink in disgust? Since all the organs invented by this economical and malignant creator serve two purposes, why did he not choose others, that were not ill-suited and defiled, to which to entrust this sacred mission, the noblest and most uplifting of all human functions? The mouth that nourishes the body with material food, is also the medium of words and thoughts. The flesh is restored by it at the same time that it gives expression to the intelligence. The sense of smell, which gives the lungs their vital air, gives the brain all the perfumes in the world: the scent of flowers, woods, trees, the sea. The ear which puts us in communication with our fellow beings, has also made it possible for us to invent music, to create from its sounds imagination, happiness, the infinite, and even physical pleasure. But one would suppose that a malicious and cynical creator had wished to prevent man from ever ennobling, beautifying and idealising his relations with women. Nevertheless, man found love, which is not so bad as a reply to a God who is a cheat, and he has so endowed it with poetical conceits that woman often forgets to what contacts she is forced. Those among us who are powerless to delude ourselves by self-idealisation, have invented vice and refined debauch, which is yet another way of making a fool of God and rendering a wanton homage to beauty.
“But the normal human being makes children like a beast mated by law.
“Look at this woman! Isn’t it abominable to think that this jewel, this pearl born to be beautiful, admired, fêted and adored, has passed eleven years of her life in giving heirs to the Comte de Mascaret!”
Bernard Grandin said, laughing:
“There’s a good deal of truth in that; but few people would understand you.”
Salins became excited.
“Do you know my conception of God?” said he. “A monstrous creative organ unknown to us, who sows millions of worlds through space as a single fish lays eggs in the sea. He creates because that is his God function: but he is ignorant of what he does, senselessly prolific, unconscious of the multitudinous combinations produced by his scattered germs. Human thought is a happy little accident born of the chances of his fecundities, a local accident, passing and unforeseen, condemned to disappear with the earth, and to begin again, perhaps, here or elsewhere, the same or different, with the new combinations of the eternal re-beginnings. It is due to this, to this little accident of intelligence, that we exist ill at ease in a state of being not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive, house, nourish and content thinking beings, and it is due to this too that we have to fight without rest, such of us as are truly refined and civilised, against what are still called the designs of Providence.”
Grandin, who was listening to him attentively, knowing of old the startling leaps of his imagination, asked him:
“So you believe that human thought is a spontaneous product of the blind parturition of God?”
“Why not? A fortuitous function of the nervous centres of our brains, similar to unforeseen chemical actions due to new combinations, similar too to a manifestation of electricity, created by friction or by unexpected contiguities, in short to all the phenomena engendered by the infinite and fecund fermentations of living matter.
“But, my dear, the proof leaps to the eye of anyone who looks round him. If human thought, willed by a conscious creator, had been intended to be that which it has become, quite different from the thought and the resignation of the beasts, exacting, questing, disturbed, tormented, would the world created to receive the creatures that we are today have been this uncomfortable little park for small beasties, this salad bed, this stony, spherical, sylvan kitchen-garden, where your shortsighted Providence had destined us to live naked, in caves or under trees, nourished by the murdered flesh of the animals, our brothers, or the raw vegetables growing in sun and rain?
“But it only requires a second’s reflection to realise that this world is not made for creatures like us. Thought, hatched and developed by a miraculous quality of the nerves of our brain cells, quite powerless, ignorant and confused as it is and will always remain, makes us all intellectuals of the world of the ideal, and miserable exiles in this world.
“Contemplate this world, in the state in which God gave it to the beings who dwell thereon. Is it not visibly and solely designed, planted and wooded for animals? What is there for us? Nothing. And for them, all: caves, trees, leafy places, rivers, watering-places, food and drink. So that fastidious people like me are never happy there. Only men who approximate to the brutes are content and satisfied. But the others, poets, squeamish creatures, dreamers, seekers, restless beings … oh, poor wretches!
“I eat cabbages and carrots, dammit, onions, turnips and radishes, because we have been constrained to accustom ourselves to them, even to acquire a taste for them, and because nothing else grows, but these things are a food fit only for rabbits and goats, as grass and clover are food for horses and cows. When I look at the ears of a field of ripe corn I don’t doubt but that it has germinated in the soil for the beaks of sparrows and larks, but not for my mouth. So when I masticate bread I am robbing the birds, as I am robbing the weasel and the fox in eating poultry. Are not quail, pigeon and partridge the natural prey of the hawk; sheep, venison and beef the prey of the great carnivorous beasts, rather than meats fattened for us to be served roasted with truffles that have been disinterred especially for us by the pigs?
“Animals have nothing to do but live here, my dear. They are in their own place, sheltered and fed, they have only to browse or hunt or eat each other, following the promptings of their instincts, for God never foresaw gentleness and peaceful way: he foresaw only the death of creatures impelled to destroy and devour each other.
“As for us! Oh, we have had to use labour, effort, patience, invention, imagination, industry, talent, and genius to make this root-bound stony soil something like a dwelling-place. Think what we have done, in spite of nature, in opposition to nature, to establish ourselves in barely tolerable conditions, hardly decent, hardly comfortable, hardly elegant, unworthy of us.
“And the more civilised, intelligent and refined we are, the more we must vanquish and tame the animal instinct that represents the will of God in us.
“Consider how we have had to invent civilisation, which includes so many things, so very many things of all kinds, from socks to telephones. Think of all the things you see every day, all the things that are useful to us in every sort of way.
“To soften our brutish fate, we have discovered and manufactured everything, beginning with houses, and going on to delicate foods, sweets, cakes, drinks, liqueurs, tapestries, clothing, ornaments, beds, hair mattresses, carriages, railways, innumerable machines: more, we have discovered science and art, writing and poetry. Yes, we have created the arts, poetry, music, painting. Everything that belongs to the imagination comes from us, and all the gay conceits of life, feminine dress and masculine talent, which has managed to make the merely reproductive existence, for which alone a divine Providence gave us life, a little more beautiful in our eyes, a little less naked, less monotonous and less harsh.
“Look at this theatre. Is there not here a human world created by us, unforeseen by the eternal Fates, unknown to Them, comprehensible to our minds alone, a gay titillation of mind and senses, created solely for us and by the feeble discontented restless animal that we are?
“Look at this woman, Mme. de Mascaret. God had made her to live in a cave, naked, or clothed in the skins of beasts. Isn’t she better like this? But, talking of her, who knows why or how her brute of a husband, having had a woman like that for a companion and especially after having been uncouth enough to make her seven times a mother, abandoned her all at once to run after loose women?”
Grandin replied:
“Oh, my dear, that’s probably the only reason. He discovered at last that sleeping in his own bed costs him too much. He has arrived by way of domestic economy at the same theories you hold philosophically.”
The bell rang three times for the last act. The two friends turned round, removed their hats and took their seats.
IV
Side by side in the brougham that took them back to their house after the performance at the Opéra, the Comte and Comtesse de Mascaret sat in silence. But suddenly the husband said to his wife:
“Gabrielle!”
“What is it?”
“Don’t you think this has lasted long enough?”
“What?”
“The abominable torture to which you have condemned me for six years.”
“Well, I can’t do anything about it.”
“At least, tell me which one it is.”
“Never.”
“Think how I can no longer see my children or feel them round me without my heart being wrung by this doubt. Tell me which it is, and I swear I will forgive and that I’ll treat it just like the others.”
“I haven’t the right to do it.”
“Don’t you see that I can’t endure this life any longer, this gnawing thought, this question that I never cease to ask myself, this question that tortures me every time I look at them? I shall go mad.”
She asked:
“So you have suffered deeply?”
“Frightfully. Would I otherwise have endured the horror of living beside you, and the still worse horror of feeling, of knowing that there is one such child among them, whom I can’t recognise, and who makes it impossible for me to love the others?”
She repeated:
“So, you really have suffered very much?”
He answered in a sad restrained voice:
“Don’t I tell you every day that it is an intolerable torture to me? But for that, would I have come back, would I have remained in this house, near you and near them, if I had not loved them, my children? Oh, you have behaved towards me in a shameful way. The only passion of my heart is for my children: you know it well. I feel for them as a father of olden days, as I was for you the husband of an older ideal of family life, for I remain a man of instinct, a man of nature, a man of an earlier day. Yes, I own it, you made me terribly jealous, because you are a woman of another race, another spirit, with other needs. Oh, I shall never forget the things you said to me. From that day, moreover, I cared no more what you did. I did not kill you because that would have deprived me of the last means on earth by which I could find out which of our … of your children is not mine. I have waited, but I have suffered more than you would believe, for I dare not love them now, except perhaps the eldest: I daren’t look at them now, call them, embrace them, I can’t take one of them on my knees now without wondering: ‘Is this the one?’ For six years I have been courteous to you, even kind and complaisant towards you. Tell me the truth and I give you my word that I will do nothing unkind.”
In the darkness of the carriage, he thought he could feel that she was moved, and feeling that at last she was going to speak, he said:
“I beg you to tell me, I implore you.”
She murmured:
“Perhaps I have been more guilty than you think. But I could not, I could not go on with that destestable life of continued pregnancies. There was only one way in which I could drive you from my bed. I lied before God, and I lied with my hand raised to my children’s heads, for I never deceived you.”
He seized her arm in the darkness, and gripping it as he had done on the terrible day when they drove in the park, he stammered:
“Is it true?”
“Quite true.”
But, distraught with agony, he groaned:
“Oh, I shall be a prey to new doubts that will never end. Which time did you lie, that other day or today? How can I believe you now? How can I believe a woman after that? I shall never know again what to think. I had rather you had said to me: ‘It’s Jacques,’ or ‘It’s Jeanne.’ ”
The carriage was turning into the courtyard of the house. When it drew up before the steps, the comte descended first and as always offered his arm to his wife to mount the steps.
“Can I talk to you for a few minutes?” he said.
She answered:
“I’d like you to.”
They went into a small sitting-room, and a rather surprised footman lit its candles.
Then, when they were alone, he went on:
“How am I to know the truth? I have implored you a thousand times to speak, you remained silent, impenetrable, inflexible, inexorable, and now you come to me today and tell me that you lied. For six years you have found it in your heart to let me believe a thing like that! No, it’s now you’re lying, I don’t know why, out of pity for me, perhaps?”
She replied, with a grave sincere air:
“But if I had not lied I should have had four more children in the last six years.”
He cried:
“Is it a mother talking like that?”
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t feel in the least as a mother towards children who are not born, I’m content to be the mother of those I have and to love them with all my heart. I am, we are women of the civilised world. We no longer are and we refuse to be mere females who replenish the earth.”
She rose, but he seized her hands.
“One word, only one word, Gabrielle. Will you tell me the truth?”
“I have just told you it. I have never deceived you.”
He looked her squarely in the face, so lovely as she was, with her eyes grey as cold skies. In her dusky hair, in that shadowy night of black hair, shone the diadem powdered with diamonds like a milky way. Then he felt suddenly, by some intuition he felt that this being before him was not only a woman destined to perpetuate her race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires, garnered in us by the centuries, turned aside from primitive and divine goal to wander towards a mystic beauty half-seen and intangible. So that some of them flourish only for our dreams, adorned with all the poetry, the romantic luxury, the conceits and the aesthetic charm that civilisation has gathered round woman, this statue of flesh that engenders as many fevers of the senses as immaterial appetites.
Her husband remained standing in front of her, dazed by this tardy and obscure discovery, reaching directly back to the cause of his old jealousy and understanding it hardly at all.
At last he said:
“I believe you. I feel that at this moment you are not lying: and indeed it always seemed to me before that you were lying.”
She held out her hand:
“We are friends then?”
He took this hand and kissed it, answering:
“We are friends. Thank you, Gabrielle.”
Then he went out, still looking at her, marvelling that she was still so lovely, and feeling in himself the birth of a strange emotion, an emotion perhaps more terrible than the simple love of old.