Books: The Red Lily, v1
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Anatole France >> The Red Lily, v1
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Madame Martin smiled.
"We know, Monsieur Le Menil, that at Madame Meillan's you are preoccupied
by the women more than by the Academicians. You escorted Princess
Seniavine to the buffet and talked to her about wolves."
"What wolves?"
"Wolves, and forests blackened by winter. We thought that with so pretty
a woman your conversation was rather savage!"
Paul Vence rose.
"So you permit, Madame, that I should bring my friend Dechartre? He has
a great desire to know you, and I hope he will not displease you. There
is life in his mind. He is full of ideas."
"Oh, I do not ask for so much," Madame Martin said. "People that are
natural and show themselves as they are rarely bore me, and sometimes
they amuse me."
When Paul Vence had gone, Le Menil listened until the noise of footsteps
had vanished; then, coming nearer:
"To-morrow, at three o'clock? Do you still love me?"
He asked her to reply while they were alone. She answered that it was
late, that she expected no more visitors, and that no one except her
husband would come.
He entreated. Then she said:
"I shall be free to-morrow all day. Wait for me at three o'clock."
He thanked her with a look. Then, placing himself on at the other side
of the chimney, he asked who was that Dechartre whom she wished
introduced to her.
"I do not wish him to be introduced to me. He is to be introduced to me.
He is a sculptor."
He deplored the fact that she needed to see new faces, adding:
"A sculptor? They are usually brutal."
"Oh, but this one does so little sculpture! But if it annoys you that I
should meet him, I will not do so."
"I should be sorry if society took any part of the time you might give to
me."
"My friend, you can not complain of that. I did not even go to Madame
Meillan's yesterday."
"You are right to show yourself there as little as possible. It is not a
house for you."
He explained. All the women that went there had had some spicy adventure
which was known and talked about. Besides, Madame Meillan favored
intrigue. He gave examples. Madame Martin, however, her hands extended
on the arms of the chair in charming restfulness, her head inclined,
looked at the dying embers in the grate. Her thoughtful mood had flown.
Nothing of it remained on her face, a little saddened, nor in her languid
body, more desirable than ever in the quiescence of her mind. She kept
for a while a profound immobility, which added to her personal attraction
the charm of things that art had created.
He asked her of what she was thinking. Escaping the magic of the blaze
in the ashes, she said:
"We will go to-morrow, if you wish, to far distant places, to the odd
districts where the poor people live. I like the old streets where
misery dwells."
He promised to satisfy her taste, although he let her know that he
thought it absurd. The walks that she led him sometimes bored him, and
he thought them dangerous. People might see them.
"And since we have been successful until now in not causing gossip--"
She shook her head.
"Do you think that people have not talked about us? Whether they know or
do not know, they talk. Not everything is known, but everything is
said."
She relapsed into her dream. He thought her discontented, cross, for
some reason which she would not tell. He bent upon her beautiful, grave
eyes which reflected the light of the grate. But she reassured him.
"I do not know whether any one talks about me. And what do I care?
Nothing matters."
He left her. He was going to dine at the club, where a friend was
waiting for him. She followed him with her eyes, with peaceful sympathy.
Then she began again to read in the ashes.
She saw in them the days of her childhood; the castle wherein she had
passed the sweet, sad summers; the dark and humid park; the pond where
slept the green water; the marble nymphs under the chestnut-trees, and
the bench on which she had wept and desired death. To-day she still
ignored the cause of her youthful despair, when the ardent awakening of
her imagination threw her into a troubled maze of desires and of fears.
When she was a child, life frightened her. And now she knew that life is
not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope; that it is a very ordinary
thing. She should have known this. She thought:
"I saw mamma; she was good, very simple, and not very happy. I dreamed
of a destiny different from hers. Why? I felt around me the insipid
taste of life, and seemed to inhale the future like a salt and pungent
aroma. Why? What did I want, and what did I expect? Was I not warned
enough of the sadness of everything?"
She had been born rich, in the brilliancy of a fortune too new. She was
a daughter of that Montessuy, who, at first a clerk in a Parisian bank,
founded and governed two great establishments, brought to sustain them
the resources of a brilliant mind, invincible force of character, a rare
alliance of cleverness and honesty, and treated with the Government as if
he were a foreign power. She had grown up in the historical castle of
Joinville, bought, restored, and magnificently furnished by her father.
Montessuy made life give all it could yield. An instinctive and powerful
atheist, he wanted all the goods of this world and all the desirable
things that earth produces. He accumulated pictures by old masters, and
precious sculptures. At fifty he had known all the most beautiful women
of the stage, and many in society. He enjoyed everything worldly with
the brutality of his temperament and the shrewdness of his mind.
Poor Madame Montessuy, economical and careful, languished at Joinville,
delicate and poor, under the frowns of twelve gigantic caryatides which
held a ceiling on which Lebrun had painted the Titans struck by Jupiter.
There, in the iron cot, placed at the foot of the large bed, she died one
night of sadness and exhaustion, never having loved anything on earth
except her husband and her little drawing-room in the Rue Maubeuge.
She never had had any intimacy with her daughter, whom she felt
instinctively too different from herself, too free, too bold at heart;
and she divined in Therese, although she was sweet and good, the strong
Montessuy blood, the ardor which had made her suffer so much, and which
she forgave in her husband, but not in her daughter.
But Montessuy recognized his daughter and loved her. Like most hearty,
full-blooded men, he had hours of charming gayety. Although he lived out
of his house a great deal, he breakfasted with her almost every day, and
sometimes took her out walking. He understood gowns and furbelows. He
instructed and formed Therese. He amused her. Near her, his instinct
for conquest inspired him still. He desired to win always, and he won
his daughter. He separated her from her mother. Therese admired him,
she adored him.
In her dream she saw him as the unique joy of her childhood. She was
persuaded that no man in the world was as amiable as her father.
At her entrance in life, she despaired at once of finding elsewhere so
rich a nature, such a plenitude of active and thinking forces. This
discouragement had followed her in the choice of a husband, and perhaps
later in a secret and freer choice.
She had not really selected her husband. She did not know: she had
permitted herself to be married by her father, who, then a widower,
embarrassed by the care of a girl, had wished to do things quickly and
well. He considered the exterior advantages, estimated the eighty years
of imperial nobility which Count Martin brought. The idea never came to
him that she might wish to find love in marriage.
He flattered himself that she would find in it the satisfaction of the
luxurious desires which he attributed to her, the joy of making a display
of grandeur, the vulgar pride, the material domination, which were for
him all the value of life, as he had no ideas on the subject of the
happiness of a true woman, although he was sure that his daughter would
remain virtuous.
While thinking of his absurd yet natural faith in her, which accorded so
badly with his own experiences and ideas regarding women, she smiled with
melancholy irony. And she admired her father the more.
After all, she was not so badly married. Her husband was as good as any
other man. He had become quite bearable. Of all that she read in the
ashes, in the veiled softness of the lamps, of all her reminiscences,
that of their married life was the most vague. She found a few isolated
traits of it, some absurd images, a fleeting and fastidious impression.
The time had not seemed long and had left nothing behind. Six years had
passed, and she did not even remember how she had regained her liberty,
so prompt and easy had been her conquest of that husband, cold, sickly,
selfish, and polite; of that man dried up and yellowed by business and
politics, laborious, ambitious, and commonplace. He liked women only
through vanity, and he never had loved his wife. The separation had been
frank and complete. And since then, strangers to each other, they felt
a tacit, mutual gratitude for their freedom. She would have had some
affection for him if she had not found him hypocritical and too subtle in
the art of obtaining her signature when he needed money for enterprises
that were more for ostentation than real benefit. The man with whom she
dined and talked every day had no significance for her.
With her cheek in her hand, before the grate, as if she questioned a
sibyl, she saw again the face of the Marquis de Re. She saw it so
precisely that it surprised her. The Marquis de Re had been presented to
her by her father, who admired him, and he appeared to her grand and
dazzling for his thirty years of intimate triumphs and mundane glories.
His adventures followed him like a procession. He had captivated three
generations of women, and had left in the heart of all those whom he had
loved an imperishable memory. His virile grace, his quiet elegance, and
his habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth far beyond the ordinary
term of years. He noticed particularly the young Countess Martin. The
homage of this expert flattered her. She thought of him now with
pleasure. He had a marvellous art of conversation. He amused her. She
let him see it, and at once he promised to himself, in his heroic
frivolity, to finish worthily his happy life by the subjugation of this
young woman whom he appreciated above every one else, and who evidently
admired him. He displayed, to capture her, the most learned stratagems.
But she escaped him very easily.
She yielded, two years later, to Robert Le Menil, who had desired her
ardently, with all the warmth of his youth, with all the simplicity of
his mind. She said to herself: "I gave myself to him because he loved
me." It was the truth. The truth was, also, that a dumb yet powerful
instinct had impelled her, and that she had obeyed the hidden impulse of
her being. But even this was not her real self; what awakened her nature
at last was the fact that she believed in the sincerity of his sentiment.
She had yielded as soon as she had felt that she was loved. She had
given herself, quickly, simply. He thought that she had yielded easily.
He was mistaken. She had felt the discouragement which the irreparable
gives, and that sort of shame which comes of having suddenly something to
conceal. Everything that had been whispered before her about other women
resounded in her burning ears. But, proud and delicate, she took care to
hide the value of the gift she was making. He never suspected her moral
uneasiness, which lasted only a few days, and was replaced by perfect
tranquillity. After three years she defended her conduct as innocent and
natural.
Having done harm to no one, she had no regrets. She was content. She
was in love, she was loved. Doubtless she had not felt the intoxication
she had expected, but does one ever feel it? She was the friend of the
good and honest fellow, much liked by women who passed for disdainful and
hard to please, and he had a true affection for her. The pleasure she
gave him and the joy of being beautiful for him attached her to this
friend. He made life for her not continually delightful, but easy to
bear, and at times agreeable.
That which she had not divined in her solitude, notwithstanding vague
yearnings and apparently causeless sadness, he had revealed to her. She
knew herself when she knew him. It was a happy astonishment. Their
sympathies were not in their minds. Her inclination toward him was
simple and frank, and at this moment she found pleasure in the idea of
meeting him the next day in the little apartment where they had met for
three years. With a shake of the head and a shrug of her shoulders,
coarser than one would have expected from this exquisite woman, sitting
alone by the dying fire, she said to herself: "There! I need love!"
CHAPTER II
"ONE CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE YOUNG!"
It was no longer daylight when they came out of the little apartment in
the Rue Spontini. Robert Le Menil made a sign to a coachman, and entered
the carriage with Therese. Close together, they rolled among the vague
shadows, cut by sudden lights, through the ghostly city, having in their
minds only sweet and vanishing impressions while everything around them
seemed confused and fleeting.
The carriage approached the Pont-Neuf. They stepped out. A dry cold
made vivid the sombre January weather. Under her veil Therese joyfully
inhaled the wind which swept on the hardened soil a dust white as salt.
She was glad to wander freely among unknown things. She liked to see the
stony landscape which the clearness of the air made distinct; to walk
quickly and firmly on the quay where the trees displayed the black
tracery of their branches on the horizon reddened by the smoke of the
city; to look at the Seine. In the sky the first stars appeared.
"One would think that the wind would put them out," she said.
He observed, too, that they scintillated a great deal. He did not think
it was a sign of rain, as the peasants believe. He had observed, on the
contrary, that nine times in ten the scintillation of stars was an augury
of fine weather.
Near the little bridge they found old iron-shops lighted by smoky lamps.
She ran into them. She turned a corner and went into a shop in which
queer stuffs were hanging. Behind the dirty panes a lighted candle
showed pots, porcelain vases, a clarinet, and a bride's wreath.
He did not understand what pleasure she found in her search.
"These shops are full of vermin. What can you find interesting in them?"
"Everything. I think of the poor bride whose wreath is under that globe.
The dinner occurred at Maillot. There was a policeman in the procession.
There is one in almost all the bridal processions one sees in the park on
Saturdays. Don't they move you, my friend, all these poor, ridiculous,
miserable beings who contribute to the grandeur of the past?"
Among cups decorated with flowers she discovered a little knife, the
ivory handle of which represented a tall, thin woman with her hair
arranged a la Maintenon. She bought it for a few sous. It pleased her,
because she already had a fork like it. Le Menil confessed that he had
no taste for such things, but said that his aunt knew a great deal about
them. At Caen all the merchants knew her. She had restored and
furnished her house in proper style. This house was noted as early as
1690. In one of its halls were white cases full of books. His aunt had
wished to put them in order. She had found frivolous books in them,
ornamented with engravings so unconventional that she had burned them.
"Is she silly, your aunt?" asked Therese.
For a long time his anecdotes about his aunt had made her impatient.
Her friend had in the country a mother, sisters, aunts, and numerous
relatives whom she did not know and who irritated her. He talked of them
with admiration. It annoyed her that he often visited them. When he
came back, she imagined that he carried with him the odor of things that
had been packed up for years. He was astonished, naively, and he
suffered from her antipathy to them.
He said nothing. The sight of a public-house, the panes of which were
flaming, recalled to him the poet Choulette, who passed for a drunkard.
He asked her if she still saw that Choulette, who called on her wearing
a mackintosh and a red muffler.
It annoyed her that he spoke like General Lariviere. She did not say
that she had not seen Choulette since autumn, and that he neglected her
with the capriciousness of a man not in society.
"He has wit," she said, "fantasy, and an original temperament. He
pleases me."
And as he reproached her for having an odd taste, she replied:
"I haven't a taste, I have tastes. You do not disapprove of them all,
I suppose."
He replied that he did not criticise her. He was only afraid that she
might do herself harm by receiving a Bohemian who was not welcome in
respectable houses.
She exclaimed:
"Not welcome in respectable houses--Choulette? Don't you know that he
goes every year for a month to the Marquise de Rieu? Yes, to the
Marquise de Rieu, the Catholic, the royalist. But since Choulette
interests you, listen to his latest adventure. Paul Vence related it to
me. I understand it better in this street, where there are shirts and
flowerpots at the windows.
"This winter, one night when it was raining, Choulette went into a
public-house in a street the name of which I have forgotten, but which
must resemble this one, and met there an unfortunate girl whom the
waiters would not have noticed, and whom he liked for her humility. Her
name was Maria. The name was not hers. She found it nailed on her door
at the top of the stairway where she went to lodge. Choulette was
touched by this perfection of poverty and infamy. He called her his
sister, and kissed her hands. Since then he has not quitted her a
moment. He takes her to the coffee-houses of the Latin Quarter where the
rich students read their reviews. He says sweet things to her. He
weeps, she weeps. They drink; and when they are drunk, they fight. He
loves her. He calls her his chaste one, his cross and his salvation.
She was barefooted; he gave her yarn and knitting-needles that she might
make stockings. And he made shoes for this unfortunate girl himself,
with enormous nails. He teaches her verses that are easy to understand.
He is afraid of altering her moral beauty by taking her out of the shame
where she lives in perfect simplicity and admirable destitution."
Le Menil shrugged his shoulders.
"But that Choulette is crazy, and Paul Vence has no right to tell you
such stories. I am not austere, assuredly; but there are immoralities
that disgust me." They were walking at random. She fell into a dream.
"Yes, morality, I know--duty! But duty--it takes the devil to discover
it. I can assure you that I do not know where duty is. It's like a
young lady's turtle at Joinville. We spent all the evening looking for
it under the furniture, and when we had found it, we went to bed."
He thought there was some truth in what she said. He would think about
it when alone.
"I regret sometimes that I did not remain in the army. I know what you
are going to say--one becomes a brute in that profession. Doubtless, but
one knows exactly what one has to do, and that is a great deal in life.
I think that my uncle's life is very beautiful and very agreeable. But
now that everybody is in the army, there are neither officers nor
soldiers. It all looks like a railway station on Sunday. My uncle knew
personally all the officers and all the soldiers of his brigade.
Nowadays, how can you expect an officer to know his men?"
She had ceased to listen. She was looking at a woman selling fried
potatoes. She realized that she was hungry and wished to eat fried
potatoes.
He remonstrated:
"Nobody knows how they are cooked."
But he had to buy two sous' worth of fried potatoes, and to see that the
woman put salt on them.
While Therese was eating them, he led her into deserted streets far from
the gaslights. Soon they found themselves in front of the cathedral.
The moon silvered the roofs.
"Notre Dame," she said. "See, it is as heavy as an elephant yet as
delicate as an insect. The moon climbs over it and looks at it with a
monkey's maliciousness. She does not look like the country moon at
Joinville. At Joinville I have a path--a flat path--with the moon at the
end of it. She is not there every night; but she returns faithfully,
full, red, familiar. She is a country neighbor. I go seriously to meet
her. But this moon of Paris I should not like to know. She is not
respectable company. Oh, the things that she has seen during the time
she has been roaming around the roofs!"
He smiled a tender smile.
"Oh, your little path where you walked alone and that you liked because
the sky was at the end of it! I see it as if I were there."
It was at the Joinville castle that he had seen her for the first time,
and had at once loved her. It was there, one night, that he had told her
of his love, to which she had listened, dumb, with a pained expression on
her mouth and a vague look in her eyes.
The reminiscence of this little path where she walked alone moved him,
troubled him, made him live again the enchanted hours of his first
desires and hopes. He tried to find her hand in her muff and pressed her
slim wrist under the fur.
A little girl carrying violets saw that they were lovers, and offered
flowers to them. He bought a two-sous' bouquet and offered it to
Therese.
She was walking toward the cathedral. She was thinking: "It is like an
enormous beast--a beast of the Apocalypse."
At the other end of the bridge a flower-woman, wrinkled, bearded, gray
with years and dust, followed them with her basket full of mimosas and
roses. Therese, who held her violets and was trying to slip them into
her waist, said, joyfully:
"Thank you, I have some."
"One can see that you are young," the old woman shouted with a wicked
air, as she went away.
Therese understood at once, and a smile came to her lips and eyes. They
were passing near the porch, before the stone figures that wear sceptres
and crowns.
"Let us go in," she said.
He did not wish to go in. He declared that the door was closed. She
pushed it, and slipped into the immense nave, where the inanimate trees
of the columns ascended in darkness. In the rear, candles were moving in
front of spectre-like priests, under the last reverberations of the
organs. She trembled in the silence, and said:
"The sadness of churches at night moves me; I feel in them the grandeur
of nothingness."
He replied:
"We must believe in something. If there were no God, if our souls were
not immortal, it would be too sad."
She remained for a while immovable under the curtains of shadow hanging
from the arches. Then she said:
"My poor friend, we do not know what to do with this life, which is so
short, and yet you desire another life which shall never finish."
In the carriage that took them back he said gayly that he had passed
a fine afternoon. He kissed her, satisfied with her and with himself.
But his good-humor was not communicated to her. The last moments they
passed together were spoiled for her always by the presentiment that he
would not say at parting the thing that he should say. Ordinarily, he
quitted her brusquely, as if what had happened were not to last. At
every one of their partings she had a confused feeling that they were
parting forever. She suffered from this in advance and became irritable.
Under the trees he took her hand and kissed her.
"Is it not rare, Therese, to love as we love each other?"
"Rare? I don't know; but I think that you love me."
"And you?"
"I, too, love you."
"And you will love me always?"
"What does one ever know?"
And seeing the face of her lover darken:
"Would you be more content with a woman who would swear to love only you
for all time?"
He remained anxious, with a wretched air. She was kind and she reassured
him:
"You know very well, my friend, that I am not fickle."
Almost at the end of the lane they said good-by. He kept the carriage to
return to the Rue Royale. He was to dine at the club and go to the
theatre, and had no time to lose.
Therese returned home on foot. Opposite the Trocadero she remembered
what the old flower-woman had said: "One can see that you are young."
The words came back to her with a significance not immoral but sad. "One
can see that you are young!" Yes, she was young, she was loved, and she
was bored to death.
CHAPTER III
A DISCUSSION ON THE LITTLE CORPORAL
In the centre of the table flowers were disposed in a basket of gilded
bronze, decorated with eagles, stars, and bees, and handles formed like
horns of plenty. On its sides winged Victorys supported the branches of
candelabra. This centrepiece of the Empire style had been given by
Napoleon, in 1812, to Count Martin de l'Aisne, grandfather of the present
Count Martin-Belleme. Martin de l'Aisne, a deputy to the Legislative
Corps in 1809, was appointed the following year member of the Committee
on Finance, the assiduous and secret works of which suited his laborious
temperament. Although a Liberal, he pleased the Emperor by his
application and his exact honesty. For two years he was under a rain of
favors. In 1813 he formed part of the moderate majority which approved
the report in which Laine censured power and misfortune, by giving to the
Empire tardy advice. January 1, 1814, he went with his colleagues to
the Tuileries. The Emperor received them in a terrifying manner.
He charged on their ranks. Violent and sombre, in the horror of his
present strength and of his coming fall, he stunned them with his anger
and his contempt.
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