Books: Cosmopolis, v2
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Paul Bourget >> Cosmopolis, v2
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Boleslas, notwithstanding the paroxysm of lucid fury which he suffered at
that moment, and which rendered him capable of the worst violence, had on
his part a knowledge of the complete insensibility in which his presence
left her. He had seen her so often, in the course of their long liaison,
arrive at their morning rendezvous at that hour, in similar toilettes,
so fresh, so supple, so youthful in her maturity, so eager for kisses,
tender and ardent. She had now in her blue eyes, in her smile, in her
entire person, some thing at once so gracious and so inaccessible, which
gives to an abandoned lover the mad longing to strike, to murder, a woman
who smiles at him with such a smile. At the same time she was so
beautiful in the morning light, subdued by the lowered blinds, that she
inspired him with an equal desire to clasp her in his arms whether she
would or no. He had recognized, when she entered the room, the aroma of
a preparation which she had used in her bath, and that trifle alone had
aroused his passion far more than when the servant told him Madame Steno
was engaged, and he wondered whether she was not alone with Maitland.
Those impassioned, but suppressed, feelings trembled in the accent of the
very simple phrase with which he greeted her. At certain moments, words
are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered. And to the
Countess that of the young man was terrible.
"I am disturbing you?" he asked, bowing and barely touching with the
tips of his fingers the hand she had extended to him on entering.
"Excuse me, I thought you alone. Will you be pleased to name another
time for the conversation which I take the liberty of demanding?"
"No, no," she replied, not permitting him to finish his sentence. "I was
with Peppino Ardea, who will await me," said she, gently. "Moreover, you
know I am in all things for the immediate. When one has something to
say, it should be said, one, two, three?.... First, there is not much to
say, and then it is better said.... There is nothing that will sooner
render difficult easy explanations and embroil the best of friends than
delay and maintaining silence."
"I am very happy to find you in such a mind," replied Boleslas, with a
sarcasm which distorted his handsome face into a smile of atrocious
hatred. The good-nature displayed by her cut him to the heart, and he
continued, already less self-possessed: "It is indeed an explanation
which I think I have the right to ask of you, and which I have come to
claim."
"To claim, my dear?" said the Countess, looking him fixedly in the face
without lowering her proud eyes, in which those imperative words had
kindled a flame.
If she had been admirable the preceding evening in facing as she had done
the return of her discarded lover, on coming direct from the tete-a-tete
with her new one, perhaps, at that moment, she was doubly so, when she
did not have her group of intimate friends to support her. She was not
sure that the madman who confronted her was not armed, and she believed
him perfectly capable of killing her, while she could not defend herself.
But a part had to be played sooner or later, and she played it without
flinching. She had not spoken an untruth in saying to Peppino Ardea:
"I know only one way: to see one's aim and to march directly to it." She
wanted a definitive rupture with Boleslas. Why should she hesitate as to
the means?
She was silent, seeking for words. He continued:
"Will you permit me to go back three months, although that is, it seems,
a long space of time for a woman's memory? I do not know whether you
recall our last meeting? Pardon, I meant to say the last but one, since
we met last night. Do you concede that the manner in which we parted
then did not presage the manner in which we met?"
"I concede it," said the Countess, with a gleam of angry pride in her
eyes, "although I do not very much like your style of expression. It is
the second time you have addressed me as an accuser, and if you assume
that attitude it will be useless to continue."
"Catherine!".... That cry of the young man, whose anger was increasing,
decided her whom he thus addressed to precipitate the issue of a
conversation in which each reply was to be a fresh burst of rancor.
"Well?" she inquired, crossing her arms in a manner so imperious that
he paused in his menace, and she continued: "Listen, Boleslas, we have
talked ten minutes without saying anything, because neither of us has the
courage to put the question such as we know and feel it to be. Instead
of writing to me, as you did, letters which rendered replies impossible
to me; instead of returning to Rome and hiding yourself like a
malefactor; instead of coming to my home last night with that threatening
face; instead of approaching me this morning with the solemnity of a
judge, why did you not question me simply, frankly, as one who knows that
I have loved him very, very much?.... Having been lovers, is that a
reason for detesting each other when we cease those relations?"
"'When we cease those relations!'" replied Gorka. "So you no longer love
me? Ah, I knew it; I guessed it after the first week of that fatal
absence! But to think that you should tell it to me some day like that,
in that calm voice which is a horrible blasphemy for our entire past.
No, I do not believe it. I do not yet believe it. Ah, it is too
infamous."
"Why?" interrupted the Countess, raising her head with still more
haughtiness.... "There is only one thing infamous in love, and that is
a falsehood. Ah, I know it. You men are not accustomed to meeting true
women, who have the respect, the religion of their sentiment. I have
that respect; I practise that religion. I repeat that I loved you a
great deal, Boleslas. I did not hide it from you formerly. I was as
loyal to you as truth itself. I have the consciousness of being so
still, in offering you, as I do, a firm friendship, the friendship of man
for man, who only asks to prove to you the sincerity of his devotion."
"I, a friendship with you, I--I--I?" exclaimed Boleslas. "Have I had
enough patience in listening to you as I have listened? I heard you lie
to me and scented the lie in the same breath. Why do you not ask me as
well to form a friendship for him with whom you have replaced me? Ah, so
you think I am blind, and you fancy I did not see that Maitland near you,
and that I did not know at the first glance what part he was playing in
your life? You did not think I might have good reasons for returning as
I did? You did not know that one does not dally with one whom one loves
as I love you?.... It is not true.... You have not been loyal to me,
since you took this man for a lover while you were still my mistress.
You had not the right, no, no, no, you had not the right!.... And what
a man!.... If it had been Ardea, Dorsenne, no matter whom, that I might
not blush for you.... But that brute, that idiot, who has nothing in his
favor, neither good looks, birth, elegance, mind nor talent, for he has
none--he has nothing but his neck and shoulders of a bull.... It is as
if you had deceived me with a lackey.... No..... it is too terrible....
Ah, Catherine, swear to me that it is not true. Tell me that you no
longer love me, I will submit, I will go away, I will accept all,
provided that you swear to me you do not love that man--swear, swear!"...
he added, grasping her hands with such violence that she uttered a slight
exclamation, and, disengaging herself, said to him:
"Cease; you pain me. You are mad, Gorka; that can be your sole
excuse.... I have nothing to swear to you. What I feel, what I think,
what I do no longer concerns you after what I have told you.... Believe
what it pleases you to believe.... But," and the irritation of an
enamored woman, wounded in the man she adores, possessed her, "you shall
not speak twice of one of my friends as you have just spoken. You have
deeply offended me, and I will not pardon you. In place of the
friendship I offered you so honestly, we will have no further connections
excepting those of society. That is what you desired.... Try not to
render them impossible to yourself. Be correct at least in form.
Remember you have a wife, I have a daughter, and that we owe it to them
to spare them the knowledge of this unhappy rupture.... God is my
witness, I wished to have it otherwise."
"My wife! Your daughter!" cried Boleslas with bitterness. "This is
indeed the hour to remember them and to put them between you and my just
vengeance! They never troubled you formerly, the two poor creatures,
when you began to win my love?.... It was convenient for you that they
should be friends! And I lent myself to it!.... I accepted such
baseness--that to-day you might take shelter behind the two innocents!...
No, it shall not be.... you shall not escape me thus. Since it is the
only point on which I can strike you, I will strike you there. I hold
you by that means, do you hear, and I will keep you. Either you dismiss
that man, or I will no longer respect anything. My wife shall know all!
Her! So much the better! For some time I have been stifled by my
lies.... Your daughter, too, shall know all. She shall judge you now as
she would judge you one day."
As he spoke he advanced to her with a manner so cruel that she recoiled.
A few more moments and the man would have carried out his threat.
He was about to strike her, to break objects around him, to call forth
a terrible scandal. She had the presence of mind of an audacity more
courageous still. An electric bell was near at hand. She pressed it,
while Gorka said to her, with a scornful laugh, "That was the only
affront left you to offer me--to summon your servants to defend you."
"You are mistaken," she replied. "I am not afraid. I repeat you are
mad, and I simply wish to prove it to you by recalling you to the reality
of your situation.... Bid Mademoiselle Alba come down," said she to the
footman whom her ring had summoned. That phrase was the drop of cold
water which suddenly broke the furious jet of vapor. She had found the
only means of putting an end to the terrible scene. For, notwithstanding
his menace, she knew that Maud's husband always recoiled before the young
girl, the friend of his wife, of whose delicacy and sensibility he was
aware.
Gorka was capable of the most dangerous and most cruel deeds, in an
excess of passion augmented by vanity.
He had in him a chivalrous element which would paralyze his frenzy before
Alba. As for the immorality of that combination of defence which
involved her daughter in her rupture with a vindictive lover, the
Countess did not think of that. She often said: "She is my comrade, she
is my friend.".... And she thought so. To lean upon her in that
critical moment was only natural to her. In the tempest of indignation
which shook Gorka, the sudden appeal to innocent Alba appeared to him the
last degree of cynicism. During the short space of time which elapsed
between the departure of the footman and the arrival of the young girl,
he only uttered these words, repeating them as he paced the floor, while
his former mistress defied him with her bold gaze:
"I scorn you, I scorn you; ah, how I scorn you!" Then, when he heard the
door open: "We will resume our conversation, Madame."
"When you wish," replied Countess Steno, and to her daughter, who
entered, she said: "You know the carriage is to come at ten minutes to
eleven, and it is now the quarter. Are you ready?"
"You can see," replied the young girl, displaying her pearl-gray gloves,
which she was just buttoning, while on her head a large hat of black
tulle made a dark and transparent aureole around her fair head. Her
delicate bust was displayed to advantage in the corsage Maitland had
chosen for her portrait, a sort of cuirass of a dark-blue material,
finished at the neck and wrists with bands of velvet of a darker shade.
The fine lines of cuffs and a collar gave to that pure face a grace of
youth younger than her age.
She had evidently come at her mother's call, with the haste and the smile
of that age. Then, to see Gorka's expression and the feverish brilliance
of the Countess's eyes had given her what she called, in an odd but very
appropriate way, the sensation of "a needle in the heart," of a sharp,
fine point, which entered her breast to the left. She had slept a sleep
so profound, after the soiree of the day before, on which she had thought
she perceived in her mother's attitude between the Polish count and the
American painter a proof of certain innocence.
She admired her mother so much, she thought her so intelligent, so
beautiful, so good, that to doubt her was a thought not to be borne!
There were times when she doubted her. A terrible conversation about the
Countess, overheard in a ballroom, a conversation between two men, who
did not know Alba to be behind them, had formed the principal part of the
doubt, which, by turns, had increased and diminished, which had abandoned
and tortured her, according to the signs, as little decisive as Madame
Steno's tranquillity of the preceding day or her confusion that morning.
It was only an impression, very rapid, instantaneous, the prick of a
needle, which merely leaves after it a drop of blood, and yet she had a
smile with which to say to Boleslas:
"How did Maud rest? How is she this morning? And my little friend Luc?"
"They are very well," replied Gorka. The last stage of his fury,
suddenly arrested by the presence of the young girl, was manifested, but
only to the Countess, by the simple phrase to which his eyes and his
voice lent an extreme bitterness: "I found them as I left them.... Ah!
They love me dearly.... I leave you to Peppino, Countess," added he,
walking toward the door. "Mademoiselle, I will bear your love to Maud."
....He had regained all the courtesy which a long line of savage 'grands
seigneurs', but 'grands seigneurs' nevertheless, had instilled in him.
If his bow to Madame Steno was very ceremonious, he put a special grace
in the low bow with which he took leave of the Contessina. It was merely
a trifle, but the Countess was keen enough to perceive it. She was
touched by it, she whom despair, fury, and threats had found so
impassive. For an instant she was vaguely humiliated by the success
which she had gained over the man whom she would, voluntarily, five
minutes before, have had cast out of doors by her servants. She was
silent, oblivious even of her daughter's presence, until the latter
recalled her to herself by saying:
"Shall I put on my veil and fetch my parasol?"
"You can join me in the office, whither I am going to talk with Ardea,"
replied her mother; adding, "I shall perhaps have some news to tell you
in the carriage which will give you pleasure!".... She had again her
bright smile, and she did not mistrust while she resumed her conversation
with Peppino that poor Alba, on reentering her chamber, wiped from her
pale cheeks two large tears, and that she opened, to re-read it, the
infamous anonymous letter received the day before. She knew by heart all
the perfidious phrases. Must it not have been that the mind which had
composed them was blinded by vengeance to such a degree that it had no
scruples about laying before the innocent child a denunciation which ran
thus:
"A true friend of Mademoiselle Steno warns her that she is
compromised, more than a marriageable young girl should be, in
playing, with regard to M. Maitland the role she has already played
with regard to M. Goyka. There are conditions of blindness so
voluntary that they become complicity."
Those words, enigmatical to any one else, but to the Contessina horribly
clear, had been, like the letters of which Boleslas had told Dorsenne,
cut from a journal and pasted on a sheet of paper. How had Alba trembled
on reading that note for the first time, with an emotion increased by the
horror of feeling hovering over her and her mother a hatred so
relentless! Later in the day how much had the words exchanged with
Dorsenne comforted her, and how reassured had she been by the Countess's
imperturbability on the entrance of Boleslas Gorka! Fragile peace, which
had vanished when she saw her mother and the husband of her best friend
face to face, with traces in their eyes, in their gestures, upon their
countenances, of an angry scene! The thought "Why were they thus! What
had they said?" again occurred to her to sadden her. Suddenly she
crushed in her hand with violence the anonymous letter, which gave a
concrete form to her sorrow and her suspicion, and, lighting a taper, she
held it to the paper, which the flames soon reduced to ashes. She ran
her fingers through the debris until there was very little left, and
then, opening the window, she cast it to the winds.
She looked at her glove after doing this--her glove, a few moments
before, of so delicate a gray, now stained by the smoky dust. It was
symbolical of the stain which the letter, even when destroyed, had left
upon her mind. The gloves, too, inspired her with horror. She hastily
drew them off, and, when she descended to rejoin Madame Steno, it was not
any more possible to perceive on those hands, freshly gloved, the traces
of that tragical childishness, than it was possible to discern, beneath
the large veil which she had tied over her hat, the traces of tears.
She found the mother for whom she was suffering so much, wearing, too,
a large sun-hat, but a white one with a white veil, beneath which could
be seen her fair hair, her sparkling blue eyes and pink-and-white
complexion; her form was enveloped in a gown of a material and cut more
youthful than her daughter's, while, radiant with delight, she said to
Peppino Ardea:
"Well, I congratulate you on having made up your mind. The step shall be
taken to-day, and you will be grateful to me all your life!"
"Yet," replied the young man, "I understand myself. I shall regret my
decision all the afternoon. It is true," he added, philosophically,
"that I should regret it just as much if I had not made it."
"You have guessed that we were talking of Fanny's marriage," said Madame
Steno to her daughter several minutes later, when they were seated side
by side, like two sisters, in the victoria which was bearing them toward
Maitland's studio.
"Then," asked the Contessina, "you think it will be arranged?"
"It is arranged," gayly replied Madame Steno. "I am commissioned to make
the proposition.... How happy all three will be!.... Hafner has aimed
at it this long time! I remember how, in 1880, after his suit, he came
to see me in Venice--you and Fanny played on the balcony of the palace--
he questioned me about the Quirinal, the Vatican and society.... Then he
concluded, pointing to his daughter, 'I shall make a Roman princess of
the little one!"
The 'dogaresse' was so delighted at the thought of the success of her
negotiations, so delighted, too, to go, as she was going, to Maitland's
studio, behind her two English cobs, which trotted so briskly, that she
did not see on the sidewalk Boleslas Gorka, who watched her pass.
Alba was so troubled by that fresh proof of her mother's lack of
conscience that she did not notice Maud's husband either. Baron Hafner's
and Prince d'Ardea's manner toward Fanny had inspired her the day before
with a dolorous analogy between the atmosphere of falsehood in which that
poor girl lived and the atmosphere in which she at times thought she
herself lived. That analogy again possessed her, and she again felt the
"needle in the heart" as she recalled what she had heard before from the
Countess of the intrigue by which Baron Justus Hafner had, indeed,
ensnared his future son-in-law. She was overcome by infinite sadness,
and she lapsed into one of her usual silent moods, while the Countess
related to her Peppino's indecision. What cared she for Boleslas's anger
at that moment? What could he do to her? Gorka was fully aware of her
utter carelessness of the scene which had taken place between them, as
soon as he saw the victoria pass. For some time he remained standing,
watching the large white and black hats disappear down the Rue du Vingt
Septembre.
This thought took possession of him at once. Madame Steno and her
daughter were going to Maitland's atelier.... He had no sooner conceived
that bitter suspicion than he felt the necessity of proving it at once.
He entered a passing cab, just as Ardea, having left the Villa, Steno
after him, sauntered up, saying:
"Where are you going? May I go with you that we may have a few moments'
conversation?"
"Impossible," replied Gorka. "I have a very urgent appointment, but in
an hour I shall perhaps have occasion to ask a service of you. Where
shall I find you?"
"At home," said Peppino, "lunching."
"Very well," replied Boleslas, and, raising himself, he whispered in the
cabman's ear, in a voice too low for his friend to hear what he said:
"Ten francs for you if in five minutes you drive me to the corner of the
Rue Napoleon III and the Place de la Victor-Emmanuel."
The man gathered up his reins, and, by some sleight-of-hand, the jaded
horse which drew the botte was suddenly transformed into a fine Roman
steed, the botte itself into a light carriage as swift as the Tuscan
carrozzelle, and the whole disappeared in a cross street, while Peppino
said to himself:
"There is a fine fellow who would do so much better to remain with his
friend Ardea than to go whither he is going. This affair will end in a
duel. If I had not to liquidate that folly," and he pointed out with the
end of his cane a placard relative to the sale of his own palace, "I
would amuse myself by taking Caterina from both of them. But those
little amusements must wait until after my marriage."
As we have seen, the cunning Prince had not been mistaken as to the
course taken by the cab Gorka had hailed. It was indeed into the
neighborhood of the atelier occupied by Maitland that the discarded lover
hastened, but not to the atelier. The madman wished to prove to himself
that the exhibition of his despair had availed him nothing, and that,
scarcely rid of him, Madame Steno had repaired to the other. What would
it avail him to know it and what would the evidence prove? Had the
Countess concealed those sittings--those convenient sittings--as the
jealous lover had told Dorsenne? The very thought of them caused the
blood to flow in his veins much more feverishly than did the thoughts of
the other meetings. For those he could still doubt, notwithstanding the
anonymous letters, notwithstanding the tete-a-tete on the terrace,
notwithstanding the insolent "Linco," whom she had addressed thus before
him, while of the long intimacies of the studio he was certain. They
maddened him, and, at the same time, by that strange contradiction which
is characteristic of all jealousy, he hungered and thirsted to prove
them.
He alighted from his cab at the corner he had named to his cabman, and
from which point he could watch the Rue Leopardi, in which was his
rival's house. It was a large structure in the Moorish style, built by
the celebrated Spanish artist, Juan Santigosa, who had been obliged to
sell all five years before--house, studio, horses, completed paintings,
sketches begun--in order to pay immense losses at gaming. Florent
Chapron had at the time bought the sort of counterfeit Alhambra, a
portion of which he rented to his brother-in-law. During the few moments
that he stood at the corner, Boleslas Gorka recalled having visited that
house the previous year, while taking, in the company of Madame Steno,
Alba, Maud, and Hafner, one of those walks of which fashionable women are
so fond in Rome as well as in Paris. An irrational instinct had rendered
the painter and his paintings antipathetic to him at their first meeting.
Had he had sufficient cause? Suddenly, on leaning forward in such a
manner as to see without being seen, he perceived a victoria which
entered the Rue Leopardi, and in that victoria the black hat of
Mademoiselle Steno and the light one of her mother. In two minutes more
the elegant carriage drew up at the Moorish structure, which gleamed
among the other buildings in that street, for the most part unfinished,
with a sort of insolent, sumptuousness.
The two ladies alighted and disappeared through the door, which closed
upon them, while the coachman started up his horses at the pace of
animals which are returning to their stable. He checked them that they
might not become overheated, and the fine cobs trembled impatiently in
their harnesses. Evidently the Countess and Alba were in the studio for
a long sitting. What had Boleslas learned that he did not already know?
Was he not ridiculous, standing upon the sidewalk of the square in the
centre of which rose the ruin of an antique reservoir, called, for a
reason more than doubtful, the trophy of Marius. With one glance the
young man took in this scene--the empty victoria turning in the opposite
direction, the large square, the ruin, the row of high houses, his cab.
He appeared to himself so absurd for being there to spy out that of which
he was only too sure, that he burst into a nervous laugh and reentered
his cab, giving his own address to the cabman: Palazzetto Doria, Place de
Venise. The cab that time started off leisurely, for the man
comprehended that the mad desire to arrive hastily no longer possessed
his fare. By a sudden metamorphosis, the swift Roman steed became a
common nag, and the vehicle a heavy machine which rumbled along the
streets. Boleslas yielded to depression, the inevitable reaction of an
excess of violence such as he had just experienced. His composure could
not last. The studio, in which was Madame Steno, began to take a clear
form in the jealous lover's mind in proportion as he drove farther from
it. In his thoughts he saw his former mistress walking about in the
framework of tapestry, armor, studies begun, as he had frequently seen
her walking in his smoking-room, with the smile upon her lips of an
amorous woman, touching the objects among which her lover lives. He saw
impassive Alba, who served as chaperon in the new intrigue of her
mother's with the same naivete she had formerly employed in shielding
their liaison. He saw Maitland with his indifferent glance of the day
before, the glance of a preferred lover, so sure of his triumph that he
did not even feel jealous of the former lover.
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