CHAPTER V. A DINNER ‘EN FAMILLE’

She dined that night alone with her husband. The narrow table had not

the basket with golden eagles and winged Victorys. The candelabra did

not light Oudry’s paintings. While he talked of the events of the day,

she fell into a sad reverie. It seemed to her that she floated in a

mist. It was a peaceful and almost sweet suffering. She saw vaguely

through the clouds the little room of the Rue Spontini transported by

angels to one of the summits of the Himalaya Mountains, and Robert Le

Menil--in the quaking of a sort of world’s end--had disappeared while

putting on his gloves. She felt her pulse to see whether she were

feverish. A rattle of silverware on the table awoke her. She heard her

husband saying:

“My dear friend Gavaut delivered to-day, in the Chamber, an excellent

speech on the question of the reserve funds. It’s extraordinary how his

ideas have become healthy and just. Oh, he has improved a great deal.”

She could not refrain from smiling.

“But Gavaut, my friend, is a poor devil who never thought of anything

except escaping from the crowd of those who are dying of hunger.

Gavaut never had any ideas except at his elbows. Does anybody take him

seriously in the political world? You may be sure that he never gave an

illusion to any woman, not even his wife. And yet to produce that sort

of illusion a man does not need much.” She added, brusquely:

“You know Miss Bell has invited me to spend a month with her at Fiesole.

I have accepted; I am going.”

Less astonished than discontented, he asked her with whom she was going.

At once she answered:

“With Madame Marmet.”

There was no objection to make. Madame Marmet was a proper companion,

and it was appropriate for her to visit Italy, where her husband had

made some excavations. He asked only:

“Have you invited her? When are you going?”

“Next week.”

He had the wisdom not to make any objection, judging that opposition

would only make her capriciousness firmer, and fearing to give impetus

to that foolish idea. He said:

“Surely, to travel is an agreeable pastime. I thought that we might in

the spring visit the Caucasus and Turkestan. There is an interesting

country. General Annenkoff will place at our disposal carriages, trains,

and everything else on his railway. He is a friend of mine; he is quite

charmed with you. He will provide us with an escort of Cossacks.”

He persisted in trying to flatter her vanity, unable to realize that

her mind was not worldly. She replied, negligently, that it might be a

pleasant trip. Then he praised the mountains, the ancient cities, the

bazaars, the costumes, the armor.

He added:

“We shall take some friends with us--Princess Seniavine, General

Lariviere, perhaps Vence or Le Menil.”

She replied, with a little dry laugh, that they had time to select their

guests.

He became attentive to her wants.

“You are not eating. You will injure your health.”

Without yet believing in this prompt departure, he felt some anxiety

about it. Each had regained freedom, but he did not like to be alone. He

felt that he was himself only when his wife was there. And then, he had

decided to give two or three political dinners during the session. He

saw his party growing. This was the moment to assert himself, to make a

dazzling show. He said, mysteriously:

“Something might happen requiring the aid of all our friends. You have

not followed the march of events, Therese?”

“No, my dear.”

“I am sorry. You have judgment, liberality of mind. If you had followed

the march of events you would have been struck by the current that is

leading the country back to moderate opinions. The country is tired of

exaggerations. It rejects the men compromised by radical politics and

religious persecution. Some day or other it will be necessary to make

over a Casimir-Perier ministry with other men, and that day--”

He stopped: really she listened too inattentively.

She was thinking, sad and disenchanted. It seemed to her that the pretty

woman, who, among the warm shadows of a closed room, placed her bare

feet in the fur of the brown bear rug, and to whom her lover gave kisses

while she twisted her hair in front of a glass, was not herself, was

not even a woman that she knew well, or that she desired to know, but a

person whose affairs were of no interest to her. A pin badly set in her

hair, one of the pins from the Bohemian glass cup, fell on her neck. She

shivered.

“Yet we really must give three or four dinners to our good political

friends,” said M. Martin-Belleme. “We shall invite some of the ancient

radicals to meet the people of our circle. It will be well to find some

pretty women. We might invite Madame Berard de la Malle; there has been

no gossip about her for two years. What do you think of it?”

“But, my dear, since I am to go next week--”

This filled him with consternation.

They went, both silent and moody, into the drawing-room, where Paul

Vence was waiting. He often came in the evening.

She extended her hand to him.

“I am very glad to see you. I am going out of town. Paris is cold and

bleak. This weather tires and saddens me. I am going to Florence, for

six weeks, to visit Miss Bell.”

M. Martin-Belleme then lifted his eyes to heaven.

Vence asked whether she had been in Italy often.

“Three times; but I saw nothing. This time I wish to see, to throw

myself into things. From Florence I shall take walks into Tuscany, into

Umbria. And, finally, I shall go to Venice.”

“You will do well. Venice suggests the peace of the Sabbath-day in the

grand week of creative and divine Italy.”

“Your friend Dechartre talked very prettily to me of Venice, of the

atmosphere of Venice, which sows pearls.”

“Yes, at Venice the sky is a colorist. Florence inspires the mind. An

old author has said: ‘The sky of Florence is light and subtle, and feeds

the beautiful ideas of men.’ I have lived delicious days in Tuscany. I

wish I could live them again.”

“Come and see me there.”

He sighed.

The newspaper, books, and his daily work prevented him.

M. Martin-Belleme said everyone should bow before such reasons, and that

one was too happy to read the articles and the fine books written by M.

Paul Vence to have any wish to take him from his work.

“Oh, my books! One never says in a book what one wishes to say. It is

impossible to express one’s self. I know how to talk with my pen as well

as any other person; but, after all, to talk or to write, what futile

occupations! How wretchedly inadequate are the little signs which form

syllables, words, and phrases. What becomes of the idea, the beautiful

idea, which these miserable hieroglyphics hide? What does the reader

make of my writing? A series of false sense, of counter sense, and

of nonsense. To read, to hear, is to translate. There are beautiful

translations, perhaps. There are no faithful translations. Why should

I care for the admiration which they give to my books, since it is what

they themselves see in them that they admire? Every reader substitutes

his visions in the place of ours. We furnish him with the means to

quicken his imagination. It is a horrible thing to be a cause of such

exercises. It is an infamous profession.”

“You are jesting,” said M. Martin-Belleme.

“I do not think so,” said Therese. “He recognizes that one mind is

impenetrable to another mind, and he suffers from this. He feels that he

is alone when he is thinking, alone when he is writing. Whatever one may

do, one is always alone in the world. That is what he wishes to say. He

is right. You may always explain: you never are understood.”

“There are signs--” said Paul Vence.

“Don’t you think, Monsieur Vence, that signs also are a form of

hieroglyphics? Give me news of Monsieur Choulette. I do not see him any

more.”

Vence replied that Choulette was very busy in forming the Third Order of

Saint Francis.

“The idea, Madame, came to him in a marvellous fashion one day when he

had gone to call on his Maria in the street where she lives, behind

the public hospital--a street always damp, the houses on which are

tottering. You must know that he considers Maria the saint and martyr

who is responsible for the sins of the people.

“He pulled the bell-rope, made greasy by two centuries of visitors.

Either because the martyr was at the wine-shop, where she is familiarly

known, or because she was busy in her room, she did not open the door.

Choulette rang for a long time, and so violently that the bellrope

remained in his hand. Skilful at understanding symbols and the hidden

meaning of things, he understood at once that this rope had not been

detached without the permission of spiritual powers. He made of it

a belt, and realized that he had been chosen to lead back into its

primitive purity the Third Order of Saint Francis. He renounced the

beauty of women, the delights of poetry, the brightness of glory, and

studied the life and the doctrine of Saint Francis. However, he has sold

to his editor a book entitled ‘Les Blandices’, which contains, he says,

the description of all sorts of loves. He flatters himself that in it

he has shown himself a criminal with some elegance. But far from harming

his mystic undertakings, this book favors them in this sense, that,

corrected by his later work, he will become honest and exemplary; and

the gold that he has received in payment, which would not have been paid

to him for a more chaste volume, will serve for a pilgrimage to Assisi.”

Madame Martin asked how much of this story was really true. Vence

replied that she must not try to learn.

He confessed that he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that

the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the

literal and Judaic sense.

He affirmed that at least Choulette was publishing Les Blandices, and

desired to visit the cell and the grave of St. Francis.

“Then,” exclaimed Madame Martin, “I will take him to Italy with me. Find

him, Monsieur Vence, and bring him to me. I am going next week.”

M. Martin then excused himself, not being able to remain longer. He had

to finish a report which was to be laid before the Chamber the next day.

Madame Martin said that nobody interested her so much as Choulette. Paul

Vence said that he was a singular specimen of humanity.

“He is not very different from the saints of whose extraordinary lives

we read. He is as sincere as they. He has an exquisite delicacy of

sentiment and a terrible violence of mind. If he shocks one by many of

his acts, the reason is that he is weaker, less supported, or perhaps

less closely observed. And then there are unworthy saints, just as there

are bad angels: Choulette is a worldly saint, that is all. But his poems

are true poems, and much finer than those written by the bishops of the

seventeenth century.”

She interrupted him:

“While I think of it, I wish to congratulate you on your friend

Dechartre. He has a charming mind.”

She added:

“Perhaps he is a little too timid.”

Vence reminded her that he had told her she would find Dechartre

interesting.

“I know him by heart; he has been my friend since our childhood.”

“You knew his parents?”

“Yes. He is the only son of Philippe Dechartre.”

“The architect?”

“The architect who, under Napoleon III, restored so many castles and

churches in Touraine and the Orleanais. He had taste and knowledge.

Solitary and quiet in his life, he had the imprudence to attack

Viollet-le-Duc, then all-powerful. He reproached him with trying to

reestablish buildings in their primitive plan, as they had been, or

as they might have been, at the beginning. Philippe Dechartre, on the

contrary, wished that everything which the lapse of centuries had added

to a church, an abbey, or a castle should be respected. To abolish

anachronisms and restore a building to its primitive unity, seemed to

him to be a scientific barbarity as culpable as that of ignorance. He

said: ‘It is a crime to efface the successive imprints made in stone

by the hands of our ancestors. New stones cut in old style are false

witnesses.’ He wished to limit the task of the archaeologic architect to

that of supporting and consolidating walls. He was right. Everybody said

that he was wrong. He achieved his ruin by dying young, while his rival

triumphed. He bequeathed an honest fortune to his widow and his son.

Jacques Dechartre was brought up by his mother, who adored him. I do

not think that maternal tenderness ever was more impetuous. Jacques is a

charming fellow; but he is a spoiled child.”

“Yet he appears so indifferent, so easy to understand, so distant from

everything.”

“Do not rely on this. He has a tormented and tormenting imagination.”

“Does he like women?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh, it isn’t with any idea of match-making.”

“Yes, he likes them. I told you that he was an egoist. Only selfish men

really love women. After the death of his mother, he had a long liaison

with a well-known actress, Jeanne Tancrede.”

Madame Martin remembered Jeanne Tancrede; not very pretty, but graceful

with a certain slowness of action in playing romantic roles.

“They lived almost together in a little house at Auteuil,” Paul Vence

continued. “I often called on them. I found him lost in his dreams,

forgetting to model a figure drying under its cloths, alone with

himself, pursuing his idea, absolutely incapable of listening to

anybody; she, studying her roles, her complexion burned by rouge, her

eyes tender, pretty because of her intelligence and her activity. She

complained to me that he was inattentive, cross, and unreasonable. She

loved him and deceived him only to obtain roles. And when she deceived

him, it was done on the spur of the moment. Afterward she never thought

of it. A typical woman! But she was imprudent; she smiled upon Joseph

Springer in the hope that he would make her a member of the Comedie

Francaise. Dechartre left her. Now she finds it more practical to live

with her managers, and Jacques finds it more agreeable to travel.”

“Does he regret her?”

“How can one know the things that agitate a mind anxious and mobile,

selfish and passionate, desirous to surrender itself, prompt in

disengaging itself, liking itself most of all among the beautiful things

that it finds in the world?”

Brusquely she changed the subject.

“And your novel, Monsieur Vence?”

“I have reached the last chapter, Madame. My little workingman has been

guillotined. He died with that indifference of virgins without desire,

who never have felt on their lips the warm taste of life. The

journals and the public approve the act of justice which has just been

accomplished. But in another garret, another workingman, sober, sad, and

a chemist, swears to himself that he will commit an expiatory murder.”

He rose and said good-night.

She called him back.

“Monsieur Vence, you know that I was serious. Bring Choulette to me.”

When she went up to her room, her husband was waiting for her, in his

red-brown plush robe, with a sort of doge’s cap framing his pale and

hollow face. He had an air of gravity. Behind him, by the open door of

his workroom, appeared under the lamp a mass of documents bound in blue,

a collection of the annual budgets. Before she could reach her room he

motioned that he wished to speak to her.

“My dear, I can not understand you. You are very inconsequential. It

does you a great deal of harm. You intend to leave your home without any

reason, without even a pretext. And you wish to run through Europe with

whom? With a Bohemian, a drunkard--that man Choulette.”

She replied that she should travel with Madame Marmet, in which there

could be nothing objectionable.

“But you announce your going to everybody, yet you do not even know

whether Madame Marmet can accompany you.”

“Oh, Madame Marmet will soon pack her boxes. Nothing keeps her in Paris

except her dog. She will leave it to you; you may take care of it.”

“Does your father know of your project?”

It was his last resource to invoke the authority of Montessuy. He knew

that his wife feared to displease her father. He insisted:

“Your father is full of sense and tact. I have been happy to find him

agreeing with me several times in the advices which I have permitted

myself to give you. He thinks as I do, that Madame Meillan’s house is

not a fit place for you to visit. The company that meets there is mixed,

and the mistress of the house favors intrigue. You are wrong, I must

say, not to take account of what people think. I am mistaken if your

father does not think it singular that you should go away with so much

frivolity, and the absence will be the more remarked, my dear, since

circumstances have made me eminent in the course of this legislature. My

merit has nothing to do with the case, surely. But if you had consented

to listen to me at dinner I should have demonstrated to you that the

group of politicians to which I belong has almost reached power. In such

a moment you should not renounce your duties as mistress of the house.

You must understand this yourself.”

She replied “You annoy me.” And, turning her back to him, she shut the

door of her room between them. That night in her bed she opened a book,

as she always did before going to sleep. It was a novel. She was turning

the leaves with indifference, when her eyes fell on these lines:

“Love is like devotion: it comes late. A woman is hardly in love or

devout at twenty, unless she has a special disposition to be either, a

sort of native sanctity. Women who are predestined to love, themselves

struggle a long time against that grace of love which is more terrible

than the thunderbolt that fell on the road to Damascus. A woman oftenest

yields to the passion of love only when age or solitude does not

frighten her. Passion is an arid and burning desert. Passion is profane

asceticism, as harsh as religious asceticism. Great woman lovers are as

rare as great penitent women. Those who know life well know that women

do not easily bind themselves in the chains of real love. They know that

nothing is less common than sacrifice among them. And consider how much

a worldly woman must sacrifice when she is in love--liberty, quietness,

the charming play of a free mind, coquetry, amusement, pleasure--she

loses everything.

“Coquetry is permissible. One may conciliate that with all the

exigencies of fashionable life. Not so love. Love is the least mundane

of passions, the most anti-social, the most savage, the most barbarous.

So the world judges it more severely than mere gallantry or looseness

of manners. In one sense the world is right. A woman in love betrays

her nature and fails in her function, which is to be admired by all men,

like a work of art. A woman is a work of art, the most marvellous that

man’s industry ever has produced. A woman is a wonderful artifice, due

to the concourse of all the arts mechanical and of all the arts liberal.

She is the work of everybody, she belongs to the world.”

Therese closed the book and thought that these ideas were only the

dreams of novelists who did not know life. She knew very well that there

was in reality neither a Carmel of passion nor a chain of love, nor

a beautiful and terrible vocation against which the predestined

one resisted in vain; she knew very well that love was only a brief

intoxication from which one recovered a little sadder. And yet, perhaps,

she did not know everything; perhaps there were loves in which one was

deliciously lost. She put out her lamp. The dreams of her first youth

came back to her.