Books: The Red Lily, v3
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Anatole France >> The Red Lily, v3
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Philippe Dechartre, infatuated with the architecture of the fifteenth
century in France, had reproduced there very cleverly the characteristics
of a private house of the time of Louis XII. That house, begun in the
middle of the Second Empire, had not been finished. The builder of so
many castles died without being able to finish his own house. It was
better thus. Conceived in a manner which had then its distinction and
its value, but which seems to-day banal and outlandish, having lost
little by little its large frame of gardens, cramped now between the
walls of the tall buildings, Philippe Dechartre's little house, by the
roughness of its stones, by the naive heaviness of its windows, by the
simplicity of the roof, which the architect's widow had caused to be
covered with little expense, by all the lucky accidents of the unfinished
and unpremeditated, corrected the lack of grace of its new and affected
antiquity and archeologic romanticism, and harmonized with the humbleness
of a district made ugly by progress of population.
In fine, notwithstanding its appearance of ruin and its green drapery,
that little house had its charm. Suddenly and instinctively, Therese
discovered in it other harmonies. In the elegant negligence which
extended from the walls covered with vines to the darkened panes of the
studio, and even in the bent tree, the bark of which studded with its
shells the wild grass of the courtyard, she divined the mind of the
master, nonchalant, not skilful in preserving, living in the long
solitude of passionate men. She had in her joy a sort of grief at
observing this careless state in which her lover left things around him.
She found in it a sort of grace and nobility, but also a spirit of
indifference contrary to her own nature, opposite to the interested and
careful mind of the Montessuys. At once she thought that, without
spoiling the pensive softness of that rough corner, she would bring to it
her well-ordered activity; she would have sand thrown in the alley, and
in the angle wherein a little sunlight came she would put the gayety of
flowers. She looked sympathetically at a statue which had come there
from some park, a Flora, lying on the earth, eaten by black moss, her two
arms lying by her sides. She thought of raising her soon, of making of
her a centrepiece for a fountain. Dechartre, who for an hour had been
watching for her coming, joyful, anxious, trembling in his agitated
happiness, descended the steps. In the fresh shade of the vestibule,
wherein she divined confusedly the severe splendor of bronze and marble
statues, she stopped, troubled by the beatings of her heart, which
throbbed with all its might in her chest. He pressed her in his arms and
kissed her. She heard him, through the tumult of her temples, recalling
to her the short delights of the day before. She saw again the lion of
the Atlas on the carpet, and returned to Jacques his kisses with
delicious slowness. He led her, by a wooden stairway, into the vast hall
which had served formerly as a workshop, where he designed and modelled
his figures, and, above all, read; he liked reading as if it were opium.
Pale-tinted Gothic tapestries, which let one perceive in a marvellous
forest a lady at the feet of whom a unicorn lay on the grass, extended
above cabinets to the painted beams of the ceiling. He led her to a large
and low divan, loaded with cushions covered with sumptuous fragments of
Spanish and Byzantine cloaks; but she sat in an armchair. "You are here!
You are here! The world may come to an end."
She replied "Formerly I thought of the end of the world, but I was not
afraid of it. Monsieur Lagrange had promised it to me, and I was waiting
for it. When I did not know you, I felt so lonely." She looked at the
tables loaded with vases and statuettes, the tapestries, the confused and
splendid mass of weapons, the animals, the marbles, the paintings, the
ancient books. "You have beautiful things."
"Most of them come from my father, who lived in the golden age of
collectors. These histories of the unicorn, the complete series of which
is at Cluny, were found by my father in 1851 in an inn."
But, curious and disappointed, she said: "I see nothing that you have
done; not a statue, not one of those wax figures which are prized so
highly in England, not a figurine nor a plaque nor a medal."
"If you think I could find any pleasure in living among my works! I know
my figures too well--they weary me. Whatever is without secret lacks
charm." She looked at him with affected spite.
"You had not told me that one had lost all charm when one had no more
secrets."
He put his arm around her waist.
"Ah! The things that live are only too mysterious; and you remain for
me, my beloved, an enigma, the unknown sense of which contains the light
of life. Do not fear to give yourself to me. I shall desire you always,
but I never shall know you. Does one ever possess what one loves? Are
kisses, caresses, anything else than the effort of a delightful despair?
When I embrace you, I am still searching for you, and I never have you;
since I want you always, since in you I expect the impossible and the
infinite. What you are, the devil knows if I shall ever know! Because I
have modelled a few bad figures I am not a sculptor; I am rather a sort
of poet and philosopher who seeks for subjects of anxiety and torment in
nature. The sentiment of form is not sufficient for me. My colleagues
laugh at me because I have not their simplicity. They are right. And
that brute Choulette is right too, when he says we ought to live without
thinking and without desiring. Our friend the cobbler of Santa Maria
Novella, who knows nothing of what might make him unjust and unfortunate,
is a master of the art of living. I ought to love you naively, without
that sort of metaphysics which is passional and makes me absurd and
wicked. There is nothing good except to ignore and to forget. Come,
come, I have thought of you too cruelly in the tortures of your absence;
come, my beloved! I must forget you with you. It is with you only that
I can forget you and lose myself."
He took her in his arms and, lifting her veil, kissed her on the lips.
A little frightened in that vast, unknown hall, embarrassed by the look
of strange things, she drew the black tulle to her chin.
"Here! You can not think of it."
He said they were alone.
"Alone? And the man with terrible moustaches who opened the door?"
He smiled:
"That is Fusellier, my father's former servant. He and his wife take
charge of the house. Do not be afraid. They remain in their box. You
shall see Madame Fusellier; she is inclined to familiarity. I warn you."
"My friend, why has Monsieur Fusellier, a janitor, moustaches like a
Tartar?"
"My dear, nature gave them to him. I am not sorry that he has the air of
a sergeant-major and gives me the illusion of being a country neighbor."
Seated on the corner of the divan, he drew her to his knees and gave to
her kisses which she returned.
She rose quickly.
"Show me the other rooms. I am curious. I wish to see everything."
He escorted her to the second story. Aquarelles by Philippe Dechartre
covered the walls of the corridor. He opened the door and made her enter
a room furnished with white mahogany:
It was his mother's room. He kept it intact in its past. Uninhabited
for nine years, the, room had not the air of being resigned to its
solitude. The mirror waited for the old lady's glance, and on the onyx
clock a pensive Sappho was lonely because she did not hear the noise of
the pendulum.
There were two portraits on the walls. One by Ricard represented
Philippe Dechartre, very pale, with rumpled hair, and eyes lost in a
romantic dream. The other showed a middle-aged woman, almost beautiful
in her ardent slightness. It was Madame Philippe Dechartre.
"My poor mother's room is like me," said Jacques; "it remembers."
"You resemble your mother," said Therese; "you have her eyes. Paul Vence
told me she adored you."
"Yes," he replied, smilingly. "My mother was excellent, intelligent,
exquisite, marvellously absurd. Her madness was maternal love. She did
not give me a moment of rest. She tormented herself and tormented me."
Therese looked at a bronze figure by Carpeaux, placed on the chiffonier.
"You recognize," said Dechartre, "the Prince Imperial by his ears, which
are like the wings of a zephyr, and which enliven his cold visage. This
bronze is a gift of Napoleon III. My parents went to Compiegne. My
father, while the court was at Fontainebleau, made the plan of the
castle, and designed the gallery. In the morning the Emperor would come,
in his frock-coat, and smoking his meerschaum pipe, to sit near him like
a penguin on a rock. At that time I went to day-school. I listened to
his stories at table, and I have not forgotten them. The Emperor stayed
there, peaceful and quiet, interrupting his long silence with few words
smothered under his big moustache; then he roused himself a little and
explained his ideas of machinery. He was an inventor. He would draw a
pencil from his pocket and make drawings on my father's designs. He
spoiled in that way two or three studies a week. He liked my father a
great deal, and promised works and honors to him which never came. The
Emperor was kind, but he had no influence, as mamma said. At that time I
was a little boy. Since then a vague sympathy has remained in me for
that man, who was lacking in genius, but whose mind was affectionate and
beautiful, and who carried through great adventures a simple courage and
a gentle fatalism. Then he is sympathetic to me because he has been
combated and insulted by people who were eager to take his place, and who
had not, as he had, in the depths of their souls, a love for the people.
We have seen them in power since then. Heavens, how ugly they are!
Senator Loyer, for instance, who at your house, in the smoking-room,
filled his pockets with cigars, and invited me to do likewise. That
Loyer is a bad man, harsh to the unfortunate, to the weak, and to the
humble. And Garain, don't you think his mind is disgusting? Do you
remember the first time I dined at your house and we talked of Napoleon?
Your hair, twisted above your neck, and shot through by a diamond arrow,
was adorable. Paul Vence said subtle things. Garain did not understand.
You asked for my opinion."
"It was to make you shine. I was already conceited for you."
"Oh, I never could say a single phrase before people who are so serious.
Yet I had a great desire to say that Napoleon III pleased me more than
Napoleon I; that I thought him more touching; but perhaps that idea would
have produced a bad effect. But I am not so destitute of talent as to
care about politics."
He looked around the room, and at the furniture with familiar tenderness.
He opened a drawer:
"Here are mamma's eye-glasses. How she searched for these eye-glasses!
Now I will show you my room. If it is not in order you must excuse
Madame Fusellier, who is trained to respect my disorder."
The curtains at the windows were down. He did not lift them. After an
hour she drew back the red satin draperies; rays of light dazzled her
eyes and fell on her floating hair. She looked for a mirror and found
only a looking-glass of Venice, dull in its wide ebony border. Rising on
the tips of her toes to see herself in it, she said:
"Is that sombre and far-away spectre I? The women who have looked at
themselves in this glass can not have complimented you on it."
As she was taking pins from the table she noticed a little bronze figure
which she had not yet seen. It was an old Italian work of Flemish taste:
a nude woman, with short legs and heavy stomach, who apparently ran with
an arm extended. She thought the figure had a droll air. She asked what
she was doing.
"She is doing what Madame Mundanity does on the portal of the cathedral
at Basle."
But Therese, who had been at Basle, did not know Madame Mundanity. She
looked at the figure again, did not understand, and asked:
"Is it something very bad? How can a thing shown on the portal of a
church be so difficult to tell here?"
Suddenly an anxiety came to her:
"What will Monsieur and Madame Fusellier think of me?"
Then, discovering on the wall a medallion wherein Dechartre had modelled
the profile of a girl, amusing and vicious:
"What is that?"
"That is Clara, a newspaper girl. She brought the Figaro to me every
morning. She had dimples in her cheeks, nests for kisses. One day I
said to her: 'I will make your portrait.' She came, one summer morning,
with earrings and rings which she had bought at the Neuilly fair. I
never saw her again. I do not know what has become of her. She was too
instinctive to become a fashionable demi-mondaine. Shall I take it out?"
"No; it looks very well in that corner. I am not jealous of Clara."
It was time to return home, and she could not decide to go. She put her
arms around her lover's neck.
"Oh, I love you! And then, you have been to-day good-natured and gay.
Gayety becomes you so well. I should like to make you gay always. I
need joy almost as much as love; and who will give me joy if you do not?"
CHAPTER XXVII
THE PRIMROSE PATH
After her return to Paris, for six weeks Therese lived in the ardent half
sleep of happiness, and prolonged delightfully her thoughtless dream.
She went to see Jacques every day in the little house shaded by a tree;
and when they had at last parted at night, she took away with her adored
reminiscences. They had the same tastes; they yielded to the same
fantasies. The same capricious thoughts carried them away. They found
pleasure in running to the suburbs that border the city, the streets
where the wine-shops are shaded by acacia, the stony roads where the
grass grows at the foot of walls, the little woods and the fields over
which extended the blue sky striped by the smoke of manufactories. She
was happy to feel him near her in this region where she did not know
herself, and where she gave to herself the illusion of being lost with
him.
One day they had taken the boat that she had seen pass so often under her
windows. She was not afraid of being recognized. Her danger was not
great, and, since she was in love, she had lost prudence. They saw
shores which little by little grew gay, escaping the dusty aridity of the
suburbs; they went by islands with bouquets of trees shading taverns,
and innumerable boats tied under willows. They debarked at Bas-Meudon.
As she said she was warm and thirsty, he made her enter a wine-shop.
It was a building with wooden galleries, which solitude made to appear
larger, and which slept in rustic peace, waiting for Sunday to fill it
with the laughter of girls, the cries of boatmen, the odor of fried fish,
and the smoke of stews.
They went up the creaking stairway, shaped like a ladder, and in a first-
story room a maid servant brought wine and biscuits to them. On the
mantelpiece, at one of the corners of the room, was an oval mirror in a
flower-covered frame. Through the open window one saw the Seine, its
green shores, and the hills in the distance bathed with warm air. The
trembling peace of a summer evening filled the sky, the earth, and the
water.
Therese looked at the running river. The boat passed on the water, and
when the wake which it left reached the shore it seemed as if the house
rocked like a vessel.
"I like the water," said Therese. "How happy I am!"
Their lips met.
Lost in the enchanted despair of love, time was not marked for them
except by the cool plash of the water, which at intervals broke under the
half-open window. To the caressing praise of her lover she replied:
"It is true I was made for love. I love myself because you love me."
Certainly, he loved her; and it was not possible for him to explain to
himself why he loved her with ardent piety, with a sort of sacred fury.
It was not because of her beauty, although it was rare and infinitely
precious. She had exquisite lines, but lines follow movement, and escape
incessantly; they are lost and found again; they cause aesthetic joys and
despair. A beautiful line is the lightning which deliciously wounds the
eyes. One admires and one is surprised. What makes one love is a soft
and terrible force, more powerful than beauty. One finds one woman among
a thousand whom one wants always. Therese was that woman whom one can
not leave or betray.
She exclaimed, joyfully:
"I never shall be forsaken?"
She asked why he did not make her bust, since he thought her beautiful.
"Why? Because I am an ordinary sculptor, and I know it; which is not the
faculty of an ordinary mind. But if you wish to think that I am a great
artist, I will give you other reasons. To create a figure that will
live, one must take the model like common material from which one will
extract the beauty, press it, crush it, and obtain its essence. There is
nothing in you that is not precious to me. If I made your bust I should
be servilely attached to these things which are everything to me because
they are something of you. I should stubbornly attach myself to the
details, and should not succeed in composing a finished figure."
She looked at him astonished.
He continued:
"From memory I might. I tried a pencil sketch." As she wished to see
it, he showed it to her. It was on an album leaf, a very simple sketch.
She did not recognize herself in it, and thought he had represented her
with a kind of soul that she did not have.
"Ah, is that the way in which you see me? Is that the way in which you
love me?"
He closed the album.
"No; this is only a note. But I think the note is just. It is probable
you do not see yourself exactly as I see you. Every human creature is a
different being for every one that looks at it."
He added, with a sort of gayety:
"In that sense one may say one woman never belonged to two men. That is
one of Paul Vence's ideas."
"I think it is true," said Therese.
It was seven o'clock. She said she must go. Every day she returned home
later. Her husband had noticed it. He had said: "We are the last to
arrive at all the dinners; there is a fatality about it!" But, detained
every day in the Chamber of Deputies, where the budget was being
discussed, and absorbed by the work of a subcommittee of which he was the
chairman, state reasons excused Therese's lack of punctuality. She
recalled smilingly a night when she had arrived at Madame Garain's at
half-past eight. She had feared to cause a scandal. But it was a day of
great affairs. Her husband came from the Chamber at nine o'clock only,
with Garain. They dined in morning dress. They had saved the Ministry.
Then she fell into a dream.
"When the Chamber shall be adjourned, my friend, I shall not have a
pretext to remain in Paris. My father does not understand my devotion to
my husband which makes me stay in Paris. In a week I shall have to go to
Dinard. What will become of me without you?"
She clasped her hands and looked at him with a sadness infinitely tender.
But he, more sombre, said:
"It is I, Therese, it is I who must ask anxiously, What will become of me
without you? When you leave me alone I am assailed by painful thoughts;
black ideas come and sit in a circle around me."
She asked him what those ideas were.
He replied:
"My beloved, I have already told you: I have to forget you with you.
When you are gone, your memory will torment me. I have to pay for the
happiness you give me."
CHAPTER XXVIII
NEWS OF LE MENIL
The blue sea, studded with pink shoals, threw its silvery fringe softly
on the fine sand of the beach, along the amphitheatre terminated by two
golden horns. The beauty of the day threw a ray of sunlight on the tomb
of Chateaubriand. In a room where a balcony looked out upon the beach,
the ocean, the islands, and the promontories, Therese was reading the
letters which she had found in the morning at the St. Malo post-office,
and which she had not opened in the boat, loaded with passengers. At
once, after breakfast, she had closeted herself in her room, and there,
her letters unfolded on her knees, she relished hastily her furtive joy.
She was to drive at two o'clock on the mall with her father, her husband,
the Princess Seniavine; Madame Berthier-d'Eyzelles, the wife of the
Deputy, and Madame Raymond, the wife of the Academician. She had two
letters that day. The first one she read exhaled a tender aroma of love.
Jacques had never displayed more simplicity, more happiness, and more
charm.
Since he had been in love with her, he said, he had walked so lightly and
was supported by such joy that his feet did not touch the earth. He had
only one fear, which was that he might be dreaming, and might awake
unknown to her. Doubtless he was only dreaming. And what a dream! He
was like one intoxicated and singing. He had not his reason, happily.
Absent, he saw her continually. "Yes, I see you near me; I see your
lashes shading eyes the gray of which is more delicious than all the blue
of the sky and the flowers; your lips, which have the taste of a
marvellous fruit; your cheeks, where laughter puts two adorable dimples;
I see you beautiful and desired, but fleeing and gliding away; and when I
open my arms, you have gone; and I see you afar on the long, long beach,
not taller than a fairy, in your pink gown, under your parasol. Oh, so
small!--small as you were one day when I saw you from the height of the
Campanile in the square at Florence. And I say to myself, as I said that
day: 'A bit of grass would suffice to hide her from me, yet she is for me
the infinite of joy and of pain.'"
He complained of the torments of absence. And he mingled with his
complaints the smiles of fortunate love. He threatened jokingly to
surprise her at Dinard. "Do not be afraid. They will not recognize me.
I shall be disguised as a vender of plaster images. It will not be a
lie. Dressed in gray tunic and trousers, my beard and face covered with
white dust, I shall ring the bell of the Montessuy villa. You may
recognize me, Therese, by the statuettes on the plank placed on my head.
They will all be cupids. There will be faithful Love, jealous Love,
tender Love, vivid Love; there will be many vivid Loves. And I shall
shout in the rude and sonorous language of the artisans of Pisa or of
Florence: 'Tutti gli Amori per la Signora Teersinal!"
The last page of this letter was tender and grave. There were pious
effusions in it which reminded Therese of the prayer-books she read when
a child. "I love you, and I love everything in you: the earth that
carries you, on which you weigh so lightly, and which you embellish; the
light that allows me to see you; the air you breathe. I like the bent
tree of my yard because you have seen it. I have walked tonight on the
avenue where I met you one winter night. I have culled a branch of the
boxwood at which you looked. In this city, where you are not, I see only
you."
He said at the end of his letter that he was to dine out. In the absence
of Madame Fusellier, who had gone to the country, he should go to a wine-
shop of the Rue Royale where he was known. And there, in the indistinct
crowd, he should be alone with her.
Therese, made languid by the softness of invisible caresses, closed her
eyes and threw back her head on the armchair. When she heard the noise
of the carriage coming near the house, she opened the second letter. As
soon as she saw the altered handwriting of it, the lines precipitate and
uneven, the distracted look of the address, she was troubled.
Its obscure beginning indicated sudden anguish and black suspicion:
"Therese, Therese, why did you give yourself to me if you were not giving
yourself to me wholly? How does it serve me that you have deceived me,
now that I know what I did not wish to know?"
She stopped; a veil came over her eyes. She thought:
"We were so happy a moment ago. What has happened? And I was so pleased
at his joy, when it had already gone; it would be better not to write,
since letters show only vanished sentiments and effaced ideas."
She read further. And seeing that he was full of jealousy, she felt
discouraged.
"If I have not proved to him that I love him with all my strength, that I
love him with all there is in me, how am I ever to persuade him of it?"
And she was impatient to discover the cause of his folly. Jacques told
it. While taking breakfast in the Rue Royale he had met a former
companion who had just returned from the seaside. They had talked
together; chance made that man speak of the Countess Martin, whom he
knew. And at once, interrupting the narration, Jacques exclaimed:
"Therese, Therese, why did you lie to me, since I was sure to learn some
day that of which I alone was ignorant? But the error is mine more than
yours. The letter which you put into the San Michele post-box, your
meeting at the Florence station, would have enlightened me if I had not
obstinately retained my illusions and disdained evidence.
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