The emotion experienced by Camille during this dramatic adventure, suddenly determined upon, thanks to her presence of mind, in a theatrical catastrophe, had been so strong that directly she was out of sight of the two men she felt like fainting. All she could do was to get into a cab and drive to the Rue de la Barouillére. There a real attack of nervous fever prostrated her and made her go to bed. So it was not from her that I learned this episode in which she played a part so naturally, spontaneously, magnanimously, and generously. It was a noble part which suited the noble heart revealed by her beautiful blue eyes, by her proud mouth, and by her well bred and charming personality! Otherwise, had she been well enough to get out, on the day following this dreadful day she would have hastened to me to complete her sorrowful confidence of her first surprise by her second confidence of her heroic sacrifice for her most unworthy lover. But persons capable of acting as she had acted do not boast.
It was Molan himself who first told me the details of these almost incredible scenes—at least those 215he knew, Camille herself having since completed them. The subtle feline person had two reasons for making me acquainted with this adventure, in which he still played a flattering part—current morality being taken for granted—of a man loved to distraction by one of the most elegant and courted women in Paris, and to martyrdom by one of the prettiest actresses not only in Paris but in Europe. The first of these two reasons was his natural fatuity, and the second his interest. He was afraid that after such an experience the devotion of the Blue Duchess would shrink from another ordeal, that of acting a comedy at the house of the rival she had saved. Now he considered, not without good reason, that Camille’s presence at Madam de Bonnivet’s party was the indispensable conclusion of the scene in the Place Saint Fran?ois Xavier. The husband’s suspicions must have been strongly aroused to have gone to the extremity of espionage, and there was no answer to this phrase with which Molan completed his disclosure.
“As long as Bonnivet does not see these two women face to face, his suspicion may be again aroused, and suspicion is like apoplexy, the first attack can be cured but there is no remedy for the second.”
His theory was right. But while he retailed it to me, as a conclusion, my thoughts were only for the real drama he had just narrated. I can still hear myself crying, “Oh, the wretches!” When he described to me Camille in the anteroom of 216the suite of rooms, while Madam de Bonnivet was listening to her repeated ringing of the bell, pale with terror, I can realize to-day that this story of Jacques’ was most indelicate on his part, for he must needs begin by this phrase. “First of all I will tell you the whole truth. I am Madam de Bonnivet’s lover.” I was no longer astonished at my colleague’s cynicism. When he had finished, the misery of this adventure overwhelmed me with sorrow, and there were tears in my voice when I asked him—
“And after that you want Camille to act at that woman’s house?”
“She must,” he replied, “and I am relying upon you to ask her.”
“Upon me,” I cried, “you must be mad.”
“Not a bit,” he went on. “It is very simple. While listening to you she will only think of the risk I have run and say 'yes.’ That is the a. b. c. of jealousy.”
“But if she refuses. You seem to think she has no malice against you.”
“Not a bit,” he replied with his frightful smile; “either I am quite ignorant of the human heart, or else she has never loved me so much, since I have never treated her so badly.”
“If she does not tell me the story you have just told me, how am I to turn the conversation?”
“She will tell you; then be the first to begin. Confess that I have told you in the madness of my emotion and remorse. It will not be a lie, for it is a fact that in the cab yesterday while I looked 217at Camille sitting in her corner with fixed gaze and excited face, I would have given everything to love her at that moment as she loved me. Explain that I was not thinking of the other woman. I called upon the latter to-day. What a woman, my dear friend, and how the crack of the whip of danger made her vibrate! I found her with her husband after breakfast, and he left us together after a quarter of an hour’s affectionate talk, which proves that his suspicion is at any rate a little allayed. That man does not know how to pretend. Lately he has hardly shaken hands with me. We did not abuse his complaisance and we were right, for I met him returning home, as I was leaving twenty minutes later, to find out how long my visit had lasted. There was just time for Anne to give me the two or three most indispensable items of information. You admire Camille’s courage, don’t you? But what will you say to the presence of mind of this great lady who was indeed risking something, her life perhaps, her honour without a doubt, her position and everything which constitutes her reasons for existence. Do you know where she went when she was able to escape. She drove straight to a furrier’s, where she purchased an astrakhan jacket as like the other one as possible. She had no money to pay for it and did not like to leave her name. The idea struck her to go to her jeweller and borrow the money. She pretended that she had lost her purse, and then returned to the furrier’s to pay for her jacket, picked up 218her own carriage, which, she had left at a friend’s house and ordered to meet her outside the shops near the Louvre, and reappeared at home dressed as she was when she went out. These are the true details. Would you believe them? Her visit to the jeweller’s and furrier’s moved me very much. How frightened she must have been at risking them. Now all she has to do is to tell her maid a lie to account for the difference of jackets. A mistake after calling or trying on, that is all. But every fresh little lie is a new landmark if the husband pursues his inquiries. This man would shrink from questioning the servants. That is what saved us this time. He will have had me followed, not his wife, but I was imprudent enough to accompany her to the rooms. My luck makes me frightened,” he added seriously, after being silent for a time.
“Yesterday’s discovery has, all the same, not destroyed Bonnivet’s jealousy, I repeat, since he returned home during my visit, and if Camille does not keep her promise his suspicion may be aroused again.”
“But with this distrust and the knowledge he possesses of your rooms,” I said, “your appointments will not be very easy to make.”
“It is for that reason that Madam de Bonnivet will not fail to keep one now. She is a curious and bored woman, and her commonplace adventure with me has at last given her the tremor,” he added smilingly. “Ah, ah, she is of the same nature as the divine marquis to some extent. But you 219don’t understand these things at all, my dear boy. As for the address of the rooms, the fact that Bonnivet knows it will make no difference. Having seen me leave there with Camille, he will never believe me capable of taking the other one to the Rue Nouvelle.”
“You will go on then without any fear?”
“Yes. I was frightened yesterday when I heard the ringing and knocking at the door, and I repeat that I am sometimes afraid of my luck. It is as stupid as believing in the evil eye, but the feeling, is stronger than I am.”
“There is no doubt that in Camille,” I replied, “you have met the only woman in Paris capable of such an action. If you had even a little bit of heart, you would spend your life in making her pardon your infamy.”
“My dear boy,” he interrupted, “then you will never understand that she only loves me like that because she understands that I do not love her. Then,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “without doubt it is a question of personality, I desire the other one and I do not desire Camille. This explanation of love is not brilliant, and if the abstractors of quintessence who subtilize upon the sentiment, like your friend Dorsenne, gave it in one of their books, they would lose their feminine clientele, their twenty-five thousand skirts I call it. I myself am neither an analyst nor a psychologist, and I maintain that this explanation is the true one.”
“So he told you everything!” Camille said 220ironically when I saw her the day after this conversation. I had written to her, to be sure and not miss her. I found her pale with eyes burning from insomnia. She was in the little drawing-room in the Rue de la Barouillére, which always looked so commonplace, poor and grey, while its canvas-covered furniture gave it the appearance of a room prepared for moving. “Did he boast also of the delicacy with which his wretch of a mistress thanked me? Here,” and she handed me a leather case with her monogram upon it, C.F., which I had noticed her fingering nervously for five minutes. I opened the case, which contained, glistening upon black velvet, a massive gold bracelet incrested with diamonds. It was one of those jewels in which the work of the goldsmith is reduced to a minimum, and of which the brutal richness makes the present an equivalent of a cheque or a roll of sovereigns. I looked at the bracelet, then I looked at Camille with a look in which she could read my surprise at the method employed by Madam de Bonnivet to pay her for her devotion.
“Yes,” the actress went on, and, in a tone of disgust which made me ill, she repeated: “Yes, that is the object which came this very evening with my coat. It is my medal for bravery,” she sneered. “My first object as soon as I go out will be to give the wretch a lesson in delicacy!”
“Be content with returning the jewel through Jacques to her,” I suggested. “A scene would be too unworthy of you. When a person has 221the whip hand, which you most certainly have, it is wise to keep it to the end.”
“No,” she proudly said, “there will be no scene between us. I would not have one. I will go and sell the bracelet to a jeweller, then I will go to a church, spend the money in charity, and Madam de Bonnivet will receive with her jacket two little pieces of paper—one the jeweller’s bill, and a note from the priest saying, 'Received for the poor, from Madam de Bonnivet, so much.’ This infamous adventure will at least have served to put a fire on a fireless hearth and a loaf of bread on an empty table.”
“Suppose the husband is there when the messenger arrives?” I asked.
“She must explain it the best way she can,” Camille said, and a gleam of cruelty passed into her blue eyes, which deepened in colour almost to black. “Do you think I should have moved my little finger to help her the day before yesterday, if it had not been necessary to save her to save Jacques? Ah! that Jacques has not even called to inquire after me this morning. He knows, too, that I have not acted for two consecutive evenings. He knows me and that emotion makes me ill. Vincent,” she added, taking my hand in her feverish grasp, “never love. It is such madness to have a heart in this cruel world. From Jacques I have not even had a note, two words upon his card, the little sign of politeness one owes to a suffering friend.”
“You are not just,” I told her, “he fears to 222face you. It is very natural. He is too conscious of his faults, and, you see, he has sent me to find out how you are.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head dolefully, “he came to see you, because he needed you for something. Confess to me what it was? From the first I told you that you do not know how to lie or scheme. Oh, God! how nice it would be to love some one like you, not in the way I love you, as a friend, but in the other way! Come, confess that you have a commission from Jacques for me.”
“Well, yes,” I replied after a second’s hesitation. There was such uprightness in this strange girl, such a rare nobility of sentiment emanated from her whole being! To finesse with her seemed to me a real shame. I therefore gave her, simply and sadly, Jacques’ message: simply, because I reckoned, and rightly, too, that the surest way to influence her was to state the facts without any phrasing; sadly, because I felt the hardness of this new demand of Molan’s. I also realized its necessity. When I had finished, tears came into her blue eyes.
“So,” she said, with an even more bitter expression and a disenchanted smile, in which there was much love, though it was for ever poisoned by contempt, “he has thought of that, to save this woman again! He finds that I have not sacrificed myself enough. Besides, it is logical. When one has begun, as I did, one must go on to the end. I will go.” With her forehead crossed 223by a wrinkle of resolution, her eyes hard, and her mouth ugly, she went on: “Very well, Vincent. You have repeated his words to me, and I thank you. That must have cost you something, too! You owed me that frankness. You promise to exactly repeat mine to him, do you not? Tell M. Molan, then, that I will act at Madam de Bonnivet’s as is arranged. Yes, I will act there, and no one, you understand, shall suspect with what feelings. But it is on one condition—tell him that, too, and if he does not keep it, I will break my promise: I forbid him, you understand, I forbid him to write or speak to me from this time onward. He will talk to me at that woman’s house just sufficiently to prevent anything being noticed. That must be all. I shall not know him afterwards, you understand. After this last act he is dead to me. Perhaps I shall really die myself,” she added in a stifled voice, “but it is all over between us.”
She made a gesture with her hands as of tearing up an invisible agreement. Her eyes closed for a moment. Her features contracted with a twitch of pain, and then this creature, so feminine in her grace and mobility, assumed a tender look and a gentle smile as she got up and said to me—
“Leave me now, friend. Don’t come to see me again before I let you know. We will finish the picture later on. I love and esteem you very much, and feel real sympathy for you. But,” her voice was stifled as she concluded, “but I 224must forget, all the same, to try and live.” Then with a proud little inclination of her blonde head and a courageous shrug of her slender shoulders, she concluded: “I am not to be pitied. I have my art left.”
I knew that Camille was incapable of breaking a promise made with such seriousness as to be almost solemnity. She had that trait common to all persons, men or women, who attach great importance to their feelings: a fastidious scrupulousness in keeping unwritten agreements, reciprocal engagements. Therefore I insisted with the greatest energy upon Jacques conforming strictly to the condition which the actress had imposed upon him, and I myself, great though the cost was to me, had the courage to observe with the greatest rigour the programme of absence and silence, the wisdom of which I understood. Around certain moral fevers, just as around certain physical ones, there is darkness, suppression of motion, and a total suspension of life. In spite of my absolute faith in Camille’s word, I was not without uneasiness when I repaired a few days later to Madam de Bonnivet’s party. I knew that the poor Blue Duchess, if not quite restored to health, was at least well enough to reappear at the theatre. When I say that I followed the programme drawn up by her with the greatest rigour, I must add that I allowed myself once to go and see her act without, as I thought, breaking the agreement, since she did not see me sitting in the pit, and I had a feeling of relief at seeing that there was no 225difference in her acting. I came to the conclusion that she had taken to her art again, as she had said to me, to that cult of the theatre which had been the na?ve enthusiasm of the dreams of her youth. I hoped that that love which never deceives would cure the wound made by the other. But in the carriage which conveyed Jacques and I to the club, where we again dined together, this confidence gave place to apprehension, in spite of my companion’s optimism, he having become once more a person of an imperturbable assurance, which seemed born to man?uvre in false situations.
“I am curious,” he said to me, “to know what she has prepared for her audience of swells. She has promised the great scene from La Duchesse Blue with Bressoré, and then a few monologues and imitations. You don’t know her in that light, do you? She has like every actor or actress her monkey side.”
“Imitations!” I repeated. “Fashionable people are admirable. They no sooner have in their hands an artist of talent than they become possessed of a single idea, to degrade that talent by forcing the possessor to become a plaything for them. If it is a painter like Miraut, they order from him portraits with a disgusting want of expression to put upon bon-bon boxes! If he is a man of letters like you, they make him write bad prose and verse at a moment’s notice! If he is a musician, he has to produce a piece for the piano at once! In the case of an actress like Camille, 226with ardour, temperament, and passion, they make a parade of her. Good God, what foolishness it is! What is going to happen to-night?”
“Would you prefer,” sneered the dramatic author, “to hear the plaints of Iphigenia or of Esther proclaimed ten paces away from a buffet laden with foie gras sandwiches, punch, orangeade, chocolate and iced champagne? On my word of honour you seem to me admirable! But if you had the lightest tint of that transcendental irony, without which life does not present the slightest savour, you would find it exquisite that my pretty Blue Duchess has saved the honour, and perhaps the life, of my adorable Queen Anne, and that they met face to face—one playing her part as a fashionable Parisian hostess, respected and worshipped; the other giving her performance before an audience of the idle; while I myself am the third person. My only regret for the beauty of the situation is that I did not have an appointment with both during the day. Would you believe it? Since these happenings I desire Camille again, and I would retake her if I did not fear to spoil her masterpiece. Yes, the masterpiece of her rupture. For she has discovered it; there is no denying it. If André Mareuil had not laid down his humorous pen to become a Commissioner of Police, if he were still writing his Art de rompre instead of drawing up regulations, I should submit the case to him. Have you ever thought of a more divine method of a mistress ridding herself of her lover and leaving in his mind 227an exquisite memory? That is the ideal end of love.”
“Try at least to be ashamed of your egoism,” I interrupted. I realized that he was amusing himself by making my na?veté display itself, and that he was joking. But actually the fact that he was unable to jest on such an occasion angered me, and I continued, touching his breast as I did so: “Have you, then, absolutely nothing there but a ream of paper and a bottle of ink, for the idea of this love, devotion and sorrow, only to inspire you with one more paradox instead of bringing tears from your eyes?”
“One must never judge what is visible,” he replied with sudden seriousness which contrasted strangely with his former flippancy. Did he conceal in an inner fold of his heart, poisoned though it was with social vanity, commercial calculations and literary ambitions, a tender corner, too small to be ever exalted into complete passion, but sufficiently alive to sometimes bleed, and had I touched the secret wound? Or was his one of those complicated natures which keep just enough sensibility to suffer because they have no more? These two latter hypothesis are not irreconcilable in such a complex nature. They would at least explain the anomaly of a talent for accurate human observation, being associated with such implacable hardness of heart and a systematic and utilitarian depravity of mind. Never had the astounding contrast between Jacques’ person and his work struck me as it did in that rapidly moving 228carriage. He was the first to break a silence which had lasted for a few minutes by saying—he was without doubt replying to a thought my reproaches had suggest............