I am sitting in a restaurant in the town of ———, at the seaside. It is the height of the bathing season, the carnival of salt and fresh water, and the whole world is forgetting the labour and unpleasantnesses of city life for a few weeks.
I am waiting for my breakfast, seated at a table just outside the house, under an arbour of vines and convolvulus. The sea breeze reaches me, plays with my tablecloth and sports with my hair, uniting itself to the perfume of flowers which peep [Pg 225] up, red, white, and violet, happy also in the midst of all the sunshine, greenery, and freshness.
Nearly all the tables, scattered about under the arbours or in the shade of the trees, are surrounded by happy people who have just taken their baths, fresh, with disordered hair, hungry and merry. Even human life has its good quarters of an hour.
Near me I see a teacher to whom two girls of about ten and twelve have been intrusted, and who, faithful to her trust, is giving them a noisy lesson in morality and gallantry, whilst she eats and drinks as if she were starving. I cannot imagine how she does it, but she manages not to interrupt her educational discourse, whilst she never ceases to eat and [Pg 226] drink. The pupils do not listen to her, but look at each other, slyly laughing at the inexhaustible conversation of their instructress. A little further off there are three young fellows who, having passed their examinations well, have been rewarded by a visit to the seaside. They are laughing, noisy, and giddy with youth, thoughtless, envying no living soul. One of them has just finished his breakfast, and in order to pay his bill of one franc fifty centimes he brings out a red banknote of a hundred francs, and offers it to the waiter with great pride, and in such a way that everyone can see it. It is the first he has ever had, and already that morning he has offered it at the coffeehouse [Pg 227] to pay fifteen centimes, and at the baths to pay for his ticket of fifty centimes. No one would change it, and even the waiter says he has no change; and the young fellow is happy, for he will be able to display it a fourth, a fifth, and even a sixth time.
Facing me a whole family of some seven or eight persons are eating merrily, and the children, in a chromatic scale of bright colours and different heights, range from two to fifteen years. Each one is giving utterance to its joy, clambering up and down the chairs, playing with a little dog to which they give the tid-bits on their plates. The father is red, stout, and in his shirt sleeves; he looks smilingly at his blond companion, [Pg 228] reading in her smile the reflection of all that lisping chatter, laughter, and folly which surround them.
All these people, differing in age, condition, and intellect, unite in the same merriment, which they seem to have drawn from the sea, the father of planetary life, the dispenser of spirit and energy; and all the while the golden rays of the sun shine through the vine leaves, the ivy, and convolvulus, painting with the shade and penumbra of the leaves the tablecloth, the dresses of the women, and the rosy faces of the children, throwing patches, half shades, and glistening spots on the garden sand.
I, too, a solitary observer, enjoyed all the bright sunshine and the happiness of the people, but forgot that I [Pg 229] had only looked to the right and straight before me; I turned calmly to the left, sure of finding there another scene of joy and brightness.
On the contrary, the picture was very different.
At a table just as clean and white as the others, played on capriciously by light and shade, two persons were sitting, a man and a woman.
He was about thirty, she forty-five. He was handsome, robust, with manly energy; she lame, fat, and hunch-backed. There ought to have been a neck, but there was none to be seen, for the heavy head appeared to have been put on the chest awry; and all the cruel artifices resorted to for hiding the hump behind seemed [Pg 230] made on purpose to produce another in front. Even her features were ugly, and the ill-made hands were laden with rings. Large earrings were in her ears, and a colossal locket surrounded by diamonds, inclosing the man’s portrait, was hanging in front. Husband and wife, no doubt.
She was eating, but could not have known the flavour of the food, for the mouthful went round and round between her teeth, whilst another piece on the fork was waiting in vain for its turn to enter the mouth. That poor deformed being did not cry, that is, no tears fell on her cheeks, but she blew her nose every now and then, and the eyes were moist and sad. She placed the [Pg 231] fork automatically from time to time on the plate, with the mouthful still on it, and gazed at the man lovingly, tenderly, waiting, imploring for a look.
But the look never came. With one hand he hastily conveyed the food to his mouth, and with the other held a newspaper, which he was reading with pretended interest, so as not to have the silence interrupted. He did not shed tears nor blow his nose, but he frowned, and he was also suffering one of those intense and hidden agonies to which one does not confess, but which furrow the soul like harrows of steel.
I did not remove my eyes again from that dumb and agonizing scene.
After a long interval she said to [Pg 232] him, timidly, hesitatingly, almost as if committing a crime:
“Will you take anything else?”
He started as if the voice had struck him like a blow in the face; he turned to her and twisted his mouth like one seized with a sudden and irresistible disgust.
“No, I want nothing more.”
The No was pronounced angrily and with scorn; it was, and must have been, a blow to her to whom it was addressed. He looked at her a long time, a look full of hatred, remorse, and disgust. It seemed as if he were passing in review all his companion’s ugliness, and as if until that moment he had never seen it so clearly: those wrinkles, that gray hair, that hump, the deformed neck, [Pg 233] those arms which looked like hams in sacks, and then those rings and jewels which seemed to jeer at the white, flabby flesh with their brightness. The deformity, the grotesque violation of good taste, suddenly struck that handsome and robust man, for he had sold youth and manhood to an unfortunate woman who had believed it possible to still love and be loved.
The two had plunged into the waves of the sea a little before; they had drunk of the sun’s rays too, but neither sea nor sun had been able to give happiness to these unfortunate creatures who had bartered carnal pleasures for gold, who had changed sacred love to a vile prostitution of flesh and banknotes.
[Pg 234]
She had already passed the meridian of her second youth; he was still young.
She was undressing. He was already in bed, and followed the progressive unclothing of that body with an anxious curiosity, that body once so active, so handsome and fascinating, now all submerged in the high waters of an invading corpulence.
He wished to hide his head under the counterpane, and did so, but a morbid curiosity made him put out his head again directly, and he looked.
She had read in her glass only too well the ruin of her form, and had always sought to undress alone; but this time she was obliged to do it before his eyes. She ingeniously hid the regions which had most suffered [Pg 235] wreck, and with a remnant of coquetry kept uncovered her shoulders, the ultimum moriens in the woman’s body; but diffident of herself, and fearful of those looks which seemed to pierce her through, her last garment fell from her hands to her feet, and the disasters of the wreck suddenly appeared, standing out cruelly, without pity for her or for him.
She uttered a cry and stooped down to cover herself....
He, egotistical, pitiless, forgot all the delights that this body once so fragrant of youth and beauty had given him, and exclaimed, throwing the words in her face:
“At a certain age I think a little more modesty is demanded.”
From that moment, from that evening, [Pg 236] the two were enemies, two galley slaves bound by the same chain.
?
She was reclining, rather than seated, on the sofa, with small and large cushions, which allowed her to change the frame of which she was the picture. She was smoking a cigarette, and had a French novel on her knee that could not have interested her very much, for at that moment she yawned. The yawn was cut short, or rather interrupted, by the sudden opening of the sitting-room door; no one ever entered the room in that way but him. This time it was more like him than usual: always a husband, now an angry one.
He entered with his hat on his head, [Pg 237] his stick in his hand, as if he were just going out or had just come in. The latter was the case. On returning from his walk a large envelope had been put into his hand in the anteroom. It contained a dressmaker’s bill, the third or fourth he had received in a few months. The total was very high, higher than usual, and he came into the room with the bill in his hand to make a scene.
“Come, now, come, now, my lady, when shall we finish with these accounts?”
She made no answer, but continued to smoke, only growing a little red in the face.
“It se............