Books: The Red Lily, v3

A >> Anatole France >> The Red Lily, v3

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

This etext was produced by David Widger

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them. D.W.]

THE RED LILY

By ANATOLE FRANCE

BOOK 3.

CHAPTER XXIII

"ONE IS NEVER KIND WHEN ONE IS IN LOVE"

The next day, in the hidden pavilion of the Via Alfieri, she found him
preoccupied. She tried to distract him with ardent gayety, with the
sweetness of pressing intimacy, with superb humility. But he remained
sombre. He had all night meditated, labored over, and recognized his
sadness. He had found reasons for suffering. His thought had brought
together the hand that dropped a letter in the post-box before the bronze
San Marco and the dreadful unknown who had been seen at the station. Now
Jacques Dechartre gave a face and a name to the cause of his suffering.
In the grandmother's armchair where Therese had been seated on the day of
her welcome, and which she had this time offered to him, he was assailed
by painful images; while she, bent over one of his arms, enveloped him
with her warm embrace and her loving heart. She divined too well what he
was suffering to ask it of him simply.

In order to bring him back to pleasanter ideas, she recalled the secrets
of the room where they were and reminiscences of their walks through the
city. She was gracefully familiar.

"The little spoon you gave me, the little red lily spoon, I use for my
tea in the morning. And I know by the pleasure I feel at seeing it when
I wake how much I love you."

Then, as he replied only in sentences sad and evasive, she said:

"I am near you, but you do not care for me. You are preoccupied by some
idea that I do not fathom. Yet I am alive, and an idea is nothing."

"An idea is nothing? Do you think so? One may be wretched or happy for
an idea; one may live and one may die for an idea. Well, I am thinking."

"Of what are you thinking?"

"Why do you ask? You know very well I am thinking of what I heard last
night, which you had concealed from me. I am thinking of your meeting at
the station, which was not due to chance, but which a letter had caused,
a letter dropped--remember!--in the postbox of San Michele. Oh, I do not
reproach you for it. I have not the right. But why did you give
yourself to me if you were not free?"

She thought she must tell an untruth.

"You mean some one whom I met at the station yesterday? I assure you it
was the most ordinary meeting in the world."

He was painfully impressed with the fact that she did not dare to name
the one she spoke of. He, too, avoided pronouncing that name.

"Therese, he had not come for you? You did not know he was in Florence?
He is nothing more to you than a man whom you meet socially? He is not
the one who, when absent, made you say to me, 'I can not?' He is nothing
to you?"

She replied resolutely:

"He comes to my house at times. He was introduced to me by General
Lariviere. I have nothing more to say to you about him. I assure you he
is of no interest to me, and I can not conceive what may be in your mind
about him."

She felt a sort of satisfaction at repudiating the man who had insisted
against her; with so much harshness and violence, upon his rights of
ownership. But she was in haste to get out of her tortuous path. She
rose and looked at her lover, with beautiful, tender, and grave eyes.

"Listen to me: the day when I gave my heart to you, my life was yours
wholly. If a doubt or a suspicion comes to you, question me. The
present is yours, and you know well there is only you, you alone, in it.
As for my past, if you knew what nothingness it was you would be glad.
I do not think another woman made as I was, to love, would have brought
to you a mind newer to love than is mine. That I swear to you. The
years that were spent without you--I did not live! Let us not talk of
them. There is nothing in them of which I should be ashamed. To regret
them is another thing. I regret to have known you so late. Why did you
not come sooner? You could have known me five years ago as easily as to-
day. But, believe me, we should not tire ourselves with speaking of time
that has gone. Remember Lohengrin. If you love me, I am for you like
the swan's knight. I have asked nothing of you. I have wanted to know
nothing. I have not chided you about Mademoiselle Jeanne Tancrede.
I saw you loved me, that you were suffering, and it was enough--because
I loved you."

"A woman can not be jealous in the same manner as a man, nor feel what
makes us suffer."

"I do not know that. Why can not she?"

"Why? Because there is not in the blood, in the flesh of a woman that
absurd and generous fury for ownership, that primitive instinct of which
man has made a right. Man is the god who wants his mate to himself.
Since time immemorial woman is accustomed to sharing men's love. It is
the past, the obscure past, that determines our passions. We are already
so old when we are born! Jealousy, for a woman, is only a wound to her
own self-love. For a man it is a torture as profound as moral suffering,
as continuous as physical suffering. You ask the reason why? Because,
in spite of my submission and of my respect, in spite of the alarm you
cause me, you are matter and I am the idea; you are the thing and I am
the mind; you are the clay and I am the artisan. Do not complain of
this. Near the perfect amphora, surrounded with garlands, what is the
rude and humble potter? The amphora is tranquil and beautiful; he is
wretched; he is tormented; he wills; he suffers; for to will is to
suffer. Yes, I am jealous. I know what there is in my jealousy. When I
examine it, I find in it hereditary prejudices, savage conceit, sickly
susceptibility, a mingling of rudest violence and cruel feebleness,
imbecile and wicked revolt against the laws of life and of society. But
it does not matter that I know it for what it is: it exists and it
torments me. I am the chemist who, studying the properties of an acid
which he has drunk, knows how it was combined and what salts form it.
Nevertheless the acid burns him, and will burn him to the bone."

"My love, you are absurd."

"Yes, I am absurd. I feel it better than you feel it yourself. To
desire a woman in all the brilliancy of her beauty and her wit, mistress
of herself, who knows and who dares; more beautiful in that and more
desirable, and whose choice is free, voluntary, deliberate; to desire
her, to love her for what she is, and to suffer because she is not
puerile candor nor pale innocence, which would be shocking in her if it
were possible to find them there; to ask her at the same time that she be
herself and not be herself; to adore her as life has made her, and regret
bitterly that life, which has made her so beautiful, has touched her--
Oh, this is absurd! I love you! I love you with all that you bring to
me of sensations, of habits, with all that comes of your experiences,
with all that comes from him-perhaps, from them-how do I know? These
things are my delight and they are my torture. There must be a profound
sense in the public idiocy which says that love like ours is guilty. Joy
is guilty when it is immense. That is the reason why I suffer, my
beloved."

She knelt before him, took his hands, and drew him to her.

"I do not wish you to suffer; I will not have it. It would be folly.
I love you, and never have loved any one but you. You may believe me; I
do not lie."

He kissed her forehead.

"If you deceived me, my dear, I should not reproach you for that; on the
contrary, I should be grateful to you. Nothing is so legitimate, so
human, as to deceive pain. What would become of us if women had not for
us the pity of untruth? Lie, my beloved, lie for the sake of charity.
Give me the dream that colors black sorrow. Lie; have no scruples. You
will only add another illusion to the illusion of love and beauty."

He sighed:

"Oh, common-sense, common wisdom!"

She asked him what he meant, and what common wisdom was. He said it was
a sensible proverb, but brutal, which it was better not to repeat.

"Repeat it all the same."

"You wish me to say it to you: 'Kissed lips do not lose their
freshness.'"

And he added:

"It is true that love preserves beauty, and that the beauty of women is
fed on caresses as bees are fed on flowers."

She placed on his lips a pledge in a kiss.

"I swear to you I never loved any one but you. Oh, no, it is not
caresses that have preserved the few charms which I am happy to have in
order to offer them to you. I love you! I love you!"

But he still remembered the letter dropped in the post-box, and the
unknown person met at the station.

"If you loved me truly, you would love only me."

She rose, indignant:

"Then you believe I love another? What you are saying is monstrous. Is
that what you think of me? And you say you love me! I pity you, because
you are insane."

"True, I am insane."

She, kneeling, with the supple palms of her hands enveloped his temples
and his cheeks. He said again that he was mad to be anxious about a
chance and commonplace meeting. She forced him to believe her, or,
rather, to forget. He no longer saw or knew anything. His vanished
bitterness and anger left him nothing but the harsh desire to forget
everything, to make her forget everything.

She asked him why he was sad.

"You were happy a moment ago. Why are you not happy now?"

And as he shook his head and said nothing:

"Speak! I like your complaints better than your silence."

Then he said:

"You wish to know? Do not be angry. I suffer now more than ever,
because I know now what you are capable of giving."

She withdrew brusquely from his arms and, with eyes full of pain and
reproach, said:

"You can believe that I ever was to another what I am to you! You wound
me in my most susceptible sentiment, in my love for you. I do not
forgive you for this. I love you! I never have loved any one except
you. I never have suffered except through you. Be content. You do me a
great deal of harm. How can you be so unkind?"

"Therese, one is never kind when one is in love."

She remained for a long time immovable and dreamy. Her face flushed, and
a tear rose to her eyes.

"Therese, you are weeping!"

"Forgive me, my heart, it is the first time that I have loved and that I
have been really loved. I am afraid."

CHAPTER XXIV

CHOULETTE'S AMBITION

While the rolling of arriving boxes filled the Bell villa; while Pauline,
loaded with parcels, lightly came down the steps; while good Madame
Marmet, with tranquil vigilance, supervised everything; and while Miss
Bell finished dressing in her room, Therese, dressed in gray, resting on
the terrace, looked once again at the Flower City.

She had decided to return home. Her husband recalled her in every one of
his letters. If, as he asked her to do, she returned to Paris in the
first days of May, they might give two or three dinners, followed by
receptions. His political group was supported by public opinion. The
tide was pushing him along, and Garain thought the Countess Martin's
drawing-room might exercise an excellent influence on the future of the
country. These reasons moved her not; but she felt a desire to be
agreeable to her husband. She had received the day before a letter from
her father, Monsieur Montessuy, who, without sharing the political views
of his son-in-law and without giving any advice to his daughter,
insinuated that society was beginning to gossip of the Countess Martin's
mysterious sojourn at Florence among poets and artists. The Bell villa
took, from a distance, an air of sentimental fantasy. She felt herself
that she was too closely observed at Resole. Madame Marmet annoyed her.
Prince Albertinelli disquieted her. The meetings in the pavilion of the
Via Alfieri had become difficult and dangerous. Professor Arrighi, whom
the Prince often met, had seen her one night as she was walking through
the deserted streets leaning on Dechartre. Professor Arrighi, author of
a treatise on agriculture, was the most amiable of wise men. He had
turned his beautiful, heroic face, and said, only the next day, to the
young woman "Formerly, I could discern from a long distance the coming of
a beautiful woman. Now that I have gone beyond the age to be viewed
favorably by women, heaven has pity on me. Heaven prevents my seeing
them. My eyes are very bad. The most charming face I can no longer
recognize." She had understood, and heeded the warning. She wished now
to conceal her joy in the vastness of Paris.

Vivian, to whom she had announced her departure, had asked her to remain
a few days longer. But Therese suspected that her friend was still
shocked by the advice she had received one night in the lemon-decorated
room; that, at least, she did not enjoy herself entirely in the
familiarity of a confidante who disapproved of her choice, and whom the
Prince had represented to her as a coquette, and perhaps worse. The date
of her departure had been fixed for May 5th.

The day shone brilliant, pure, and charming on the Arno valley. Therese,
dreamy, saw from the terrace the immense morning rose placed in the blue
cup of Florence. She leaned forward to discover, at the foot of the
flowery hills, the imperceptible point where she had known infinite joys.
There the cemetery garden made a small, sombre spot near which she
divined the Via Alfieri. She saw herself again in the room wherein,
doubtless, she never would enter again. The hours there passed had for
her the sadness of a dream. She felt her eyes becoming veiled, her knees
weaken, and her soul shudder. It seemed to her that life was no longer
in her, and that she had left it in that corner where she saw the black
pines raise their immovable summits. She reproached herself for feeling
anxiety without reason, when, on the contrary, she should be reassured
and joyful. She knew she would meet Jacques Dechartre in Paris. They
would have liked to arrive there at the same time, or, rather, to go
there together. They had thought it indispensable that he should remain
three or four days longer in Florence, but their meeting would not be
retarded beyond that. They had appointed a rendezvous, and she rejoiced
in the thought of it. She wore her love mingled with her being and
running in her blood. Still, a part of herself remained in the pavilion
decorated with goats and nymphs a part of herself which never would
return to her. In the full ardor of life, she was dying for things
infinitely delicate and precious. She recalled that Dechartre had said
to her: "Love likes charms. I gathered from the terrace the leaves of a
tree that you had admired." Why had she not thought of taking a stone of
the pavilion wherein she had forgotten the world?

A shout from Pauline drew her from her thoughts. Choulette, jumping from
a bush, had suddenly kissed the maid, who was carrying overcoats and bags
into the carriage. Now he was running through the alleys, joyful, his
ears standing out like horns. He bowed to the Countess Martin.

"I have, then, to say farewell to you, Madame."

He intended to remain in Italy. A lady was calling him, he said: it was
Rome. He wanted to see the cardinals. One of them, whom people praised
as an old man full of sense, would perhaps share the ideas of the
socialist and revolutionary church. Choulette had his aim: to plant on
the ruins of an unjust and cruel civilization the Cross of Calvary, not
dead and bare, but vivid, and with its flowery arms embracing the world.
He was founding with that design an order and a newspaper. Madame Martin
knew the order. The newspaper was to be sold for one cent, and to be
written in rhythmic phrases. It was a newspaper to be sung. Verse,
simple, violent, or joyful, was the only language that suited the people.
Prose pleased only people whose intelligence was very subtle. He had
seen anarchists in the taverns of the Rue Saint Jacques. They spent
their evenings reciting and listening to romances.

And he added:

"A newspaper which shall be at the same time a song-book will touch the
soul of the people. People say I have genius. I do not know whether
they are right. But it must be admitted that I have a practical mind."

Miss Bell came down the steps, putting on her gloves:

"Oh, darling, the city and the mountains and the sky wish you to lament
your departure. They make themselves beautiful to-day in order to make
you regret quitting them and desire to see them again."

But Choulette, whom the dryness of the Tuscan climate tired, regretted
green Umbria and its humid sky. He recalled Assisi. He said:

"There are woods and rocks, a fair sky and white clouds. I have walked
there in the footsteps of good Saint Francis, and I transcribed his
canticle to the sun in old French rhymes, simple and poor."

Madame Martin said she would like to hear it. Miss Bell was already
listening, and her face wore the fervent expression of an angel
sculptured by Mino.

Choulette told them it was a rustic and artless work. The verses were
not trying to be beautiful. They were simple, although uneven, for the
sake of lightness. Then, in a slow and monotonous voice, he recited the
canticle.

"Oh, Monsieur Choulette," said Miss Bell, "this canticle goes up to
heaven, like the hermit in the Campo Santo of Pisa, whom some one saw
going up the mountain that the goats liked. I will tell you. The old
hermit went up, leaning on the staff of faith, and his step was unequal
because the crutch, being on one side, gave one of his feet an advantage
over the other. That is the reason why your verses are unequal. I have
understood it."

The poet accepted this praise, persuaded that he had unwittingly deserved
it.

"You have faith, Monsieur Choulette," said Therese. "Of what use is it
to you if not to write beautiful verses?"

"Faith serves me to commit sin, Madame."

"Oh, we commit sins without that."

Madame Marmet appeared, equipped for the journey, in the tranquil joy of
returning to her pretty apartment, her little dog Toby, her old friend
Lagrange, and to see again, after the Etruscans of Fiesole, the skeleton
warrior who, among the bonbon boxes, looked out of the window.

Miss Bell escorted her friends to the station in her carriage.

CHAPTER XXV

"WE ARE ROBBING LIFE"

Dechartre came to the carriage to salute the two travellers. Separated
from him, Therese felt what he was to her: he had given to her a new
taste of life, delicious and so vivid, so real, that she felt it on her
lips. She lived under a charm in the dream of seeing him again, and was
surprised when Madame Marmet, along the journey, said: "I think we are
passing the frontier," or "Rose-bushes are in bloom by the seaside."
She was joyful when, after a night at the hotel in Marseilles, she saw
the gray olive-trees in the stony fields, then the mulberry-trees and the
distant profile of Mount Pilate, and the Rhone, and Lyons, and then the
familiar landscapes, the trees raising their summits into bouquets
clothed in tender green, and the lines of poplars beside the rivers.
She enjoyed the plenitude of the hours she lived and the astonishment of
profound joys. And it was with the smile of a sleeper suddenly awakened
that, at the station in Paris, in the light of the station, she greeted
her husband, who was glad to see her. When she kissed Madame Marmet,
she told her that she thanked her with all her heart. And truly she was
grateful to all things, like M. Choulette's St. Francis.

In the coupe, which followed the quays in the luminous dust of the
setting sun, she listened without impatience to her husband confiding to
her his successes as an orator, the intentions of his parliamentary
groups, his projects, his hopes, and the necessity to give two or three
political dinners. She closed her eyes in order to think better. She
said to herself: "I shall have a letter to-morrow, and shall see him
again within eight days." When the coupe passed on the bridge, she
looked at the water, which seemed to roll flames; at the smoky arches;
at the rows of trees; at the heads of the chestnut-trees in bloom on the
Cours-la-Reine; all these familiar aspects seemed to be clothed for her
in novel magnificence. It seemed to her that her love had given a new
color to the universe. And she asked herself whether the trees and the
stones recognized her. She was thinking; "How is it that my silence, my
eyes, and heaven and earth do not tell my dear secret?"

M. Martin-Belleme, thinking she was a little tired, advised her to rest.
And at night, closeted in her room, in the silence wherein she heard the
palpitations of her heart, she wrote to the absent one a letter full of
these words, which are similar to flowers in their perpetual novelty:
"I love you. I am waiting for you. I am happy. I feel you are near me.
There is nobody except you and me in the world. I see from my window a
blue star which trembles, and I look at it, thinking that you see it in
Florence. I have put on my table the little red lily spoon. Come!
Come!" And she found thus, fresh in her mind, the eternal sensations and
images.

For a week she lived an inward life, feeling within her the soft warmth
which remained of the days passed in the Via Alfieri, breathing the
kisses which she had received, and loving herself for being loved. She
took delicate care and displayed attentive taste in new gowns. It was to
herself, too, that she was pleasing. Madly anxious when there was
nothing for her at the postoffice, trembling and joyful when she received
through the small window a letter wherein she recognized the large
handwriting of her beloved, she devoured her reminiscences, her desires,
and her hopes. Thus the hours passed quickly.

The morning of the day when he was to arrive seemed to her to be odiously
long. She was at the station before the train arrived. A delay had been
signalled. It weighed heavily upon her. Optimist in her projects, and
placing by force, like her father, faith on the side of her will, that
delay which she had not foreseen seemed to her to be treason. The gray
light, which the three-quarters of an hour filtered through the window-
panes of the station, fell on her like the rays of an immense hour-glass
which measured for her the minutes of happiness lost. She was lamenting
her fate, when, in the red light of the sun, she saw the locomotive of
the express stop, monstrous and docile, on the quay, and, in the crowd of
travellers coming out of the carriages, Jacques approached her. He was
looking at her with that sort of sombre and violent joy which she had
often observed in him. He said:

"At last, here you are. I feared to die before seeing you again. You do
not know, I did not know myself, what torture it is to live a week away
from you. I have returned to the little pavilion of the Via Alfieri. In
the room you know, in front of the old pastel, I have wept for love and
rage."

She looked at him tenderly.

"And I, do you not think that I called you, that I wanted you, that when
alone I extended my arms toward you? I had hidden your letters in the
chiffonier where my jewels are. I read them at night: it was delicious,
but it was imprudent. Your letters were yourself--too much and not
enough."

They traversed the court where fiacres rolled away loaded with boxes.
She asked whether they were to take a carriage.

He made no answer. He seemed not to hear. She said:

"I went to see your house; I did not dare go in. I looked through the
grille and saw windows hidden in rose-bushes in the rear of a yard,
behind a tree, and I said: 'It is there !' I never have been so moved."

He was not listening to her nor looking at her. He walked quickly with
her along the paved street, and through a narrow stairway reached a
deserted street near the station. There, between wood and coal yards,
was a hotel with a restaurant on the first floor and tables on the
sidewalk. Under the painted sign were white curtains at the windows.
Dechartre stopped before the small door and pushed Therese into the
obscure alley. She asked:

"Where are you leading me? What is the time? I must be home at half-
past seven. We are mad."

When they left the house, she said:

"Jacques, my darling, we are too happy; we are robbing life."

CHAPTER XXVI

IN DECHARTRE'S STUDIO

A fiacre brought her, the next day, to a populous street, half sad, half
gay, with walls of gardens in the intervals of new houses, and stopped at
the point where the sidewalk passes under the arcade of a mansion of the
Regency, covered now with dust and oblivion, and fantastically placed
across the street. Here and there green branches lent gayety to that
city corner. Therese, while ringing at the door, saw in the limited
perspective of the houses a pulley at a window and a gilt key, the sign
of a locksmith. Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to
her. Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle. A servant
with a military look opened the door. She found herself in a yard
covered with sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the
janitor's box with bird-cages at the windows. On that side rose, under a
green trellis, the mansard of the neighboring house. A sculptor's studio
backed on it its glass-covered roof, which showed plaster figures asleep
in the dust. At the right, the wall that closed the yard bore debris of
monuments, broken bases of columnettes. In the rear, the house, not very
large, showed the six windows of its facade, half hidden by vines and
rosebushes.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6