Three more weeks had passed, and the never-ending picture had undergone so many touches that it was a little less advanced than before. It is the certain sign that an artistic creation will not result: work destroys it instead of improving it, and it is a proof, too, that we do not accomplish works worthy of the name, they are made in us, without effort, without will, almost unknown to us. The sittings, too, became more and more irregular. Camille began to rehearse the piece to follow La Duchesse Blue, and sometimes from one excuse, sometimes another, one day because she was fatigued, another because she was studying her part, she found a way of putting off half her visits to the studio. When she did sit it was under very different conditions to the first sittings. Her tête-à-tête with me had been a necessity to her at the time of her sweet confidences and even at the time of her tender uneasy complaints. A fear came to her now that her jealousy of her rival would endow her with an acute character of suspicious inquiry.
Not once during the three weeks, the anxious expectancy of which I am summarizing here, did 171she come alone to the studio. Sometimes her mother, sometimes her cousin, sometimes a companion accompanied her. I should have known nothing of her but for guessing at her troubles from the very pronounced alteration in her face and her increasing nervousness on the one hand, and for having, on the other hand, three conversations with Jacques which were very brief but well calculated to edify me as to the cause of the poor Blue Duchess’ terrible trouble.
“Don’t talk to me of her,” he said on the first occasion with angry harshness; “I should be unjust, for she loves me after all. But what a character she has! what a character!”
“Ah! so she still continues to play to you her comedy of the beautiful soul unappreciated,” he jeered on the second occasion. “Come, don’t let us talk about her any more.”
On the last occasion he said violently: “As you are so interested in her, I am going to give you a commission. If she wants to reach the stage when I shall not recognize her if I meet her, you can tell her she is well on the way to it. If I did not need her for my new comedy I should not do so now.”
On neither of these three occasions had I insisted on knowing more. His harshness, irony and violence made me a prey to a very strange fear. I apprehended with real anguish the moment when he would say in his own way. “It is all over. Madam de Bonnivet is my mistress.” Under any circumstances it is saddening to receive such confidences. At least I have always felt it so. It is 172so repugnant to me as to almost become painful. Is it a result of the prudery with which Jacques reproached me? Is it a persistent prejudice, the remains of a conventional imposition before the woman’s modesty, as he also pretended?
I don’t think I am either prude or dupe. I see rather, in this aversion for certain confessions which no longer allow any doubt as to certain faults, first of all an excess of jealousy—why not?—and then the drawing back before brutal reality which is in me a malady. Actually it is without a doubt a relic of respectable and pious youth, and the evidence that a woman who has been well brought up, who is married, is a mother, and holds a position, has degraded herself to the physical filth of a gallant adventure is intolerable to me. In its way this apprehension was the more illogical and foolish as my comrade’s indiscretion had edified me as regards the flirting and coquetry of which Madam de Bonnivet was capable. Between coquetry, even foolishly light, and precision of the last detail there is an abyss. In conclusion, if ever Jacques came to pronounce to me that cruel phrase: “It is all over. Madam de Bonnivet is my mistress,” I should have to see Camille with that phrase in my memory, and then the reply to her questions would become to me a real penance. To know nothing, on the other hand, was to retain the right to reply to the poor actress without lying to her.
This voluntary ignorance did not prevent me from realizing that the whole of Camille’s drama 173of sentiment was acted on this single point: on the degree of intimacy established between Molan and Queen Anne depended the sad remnant of happiness, the last charity of love which the poor child still enjoyed. So although I tried not to find out anything definite as to the result of the intrigue between Jacques and Madam de Bonnivet, I did nothing but think of it, multiplying the hypotheses for and against the latter’s absolute downfall. Alas! they were almost all for it. How was I to wait for the revelation which put an end to my uncertainty in a startling and entirely unexpected way?
It was towards the close of a February afternoon. Camille had missed three set appointments without sending me a word of apology. I had spent several hours, not in my studio, but in a little room adjoining it which I adorned with the title of library. I keep there a number of books which a painter, caring for his art alone, ought not to have. Why is it that a poet and a novelist, even the most plastic, can teach an artist who must live by his eyes and the reproduction of forms? It is true I was not engaged in reading but in dreaming, glasses in hand, before the half-burnt fire. The lamp, which had been brought in by a servant, lit up half the room. I abandoned myself to that nervous languor which resolves itself into, at such an hour, in such a season and such a light, a half unconscious semi-intoxication. Anything accidental in us is removed at such times. We seem to touch the bottom of our fund of sensibility, the nerve itself of the internal organ through which we 174suffer and enjoy, and the pulp which composes our being.
I felt in the twilight that I loved Camille as I imagine one must love after death, if anything of our poor heart survives in the great mute darkness. I told myself that I ought to go and see her, that there was in the excess of my discretion apparent indifference. I evoked her and spoke to her, telling her what I had never told her, and what I should not dare to tell her. It was at the moment, when this opium of my dream-passion most deeply engulfed me, that I was snatched with a start from my dream by the sudden arrival of her who was its chief character. My servant, whom I had told that I could see no one, entered the room to tell me, with an air of embarrassment, that Mademoiselle Favier was asking for me, that he had answered her according to his instructions, and that she had sat down in the anteroom, declaring that she would not go without seeing me.
“Is she alone?” I asked.
“Quite alone,” he answered with the familiarity of a bachelor’s servant who has been in the same situation for twenty years—he saw my father die and I am quite familiar with him. “I must tell you though, sir, that she seems to be in great trouble. She is as white as a sheet; her voice is changed, broken, and choked. One would think she cannot talk. It is a great shame, considering how young and pretty she is!”
“Ah, well, show her in,” I said, “but no one else, you understand.”
175“Even if M. Molan comes to see you too, sir?” he inquired.
“Even if M. Molan calls,” I replied.
The good fellow smiled the smile of an accomplice, which on any other occasion I should have interpreted as a proof that he had guessed the ill-concealed secret of my feelings. I did not have time to reflect upon his greater or less penetration. Camille was already in the studio, and the image of despair was before me, a despair verging on madness. I said to her as I made her sit down: “Whatever is the matter?” and sat down myself. She signed to me to ask her no questions, as it was impossible for her to reply. She put her hand upon her breast and closed her eyes, as if internal anguish there in her breast was inflicting upon her suffering greater than she could bear. For a moment I thought she was about to expire, so frightful was the convulsive pallor of her face. When her eyes opened I could see that no tear moistened her blue eyes, eyes which were now quite sombre. The flame of the most savage passion burned in them. Then in a raucous and almost bass voice, as if a hand had clutched her throat, she said to me as she pressed her fingers on her forehead in bewilderment—
“There is a God, as I have found you. If you had not been at home I think I should have lost my reason. Give me your hand, I want to clasp it, to feel that I am not dreaming, that you are there, a friend. My sufferings are so great.”
“Yes, a friend,” I replied, trying to calm her, 176“a true friend ready to help you, to listen to you, to advise you, and to prevent you, too, from giving way to your fancies.”
“Do not speak like that,” she interrupted, freeing her hand as she drew back with almost hateful aversion, “or else I shall think you are in the plot to lie to me. No. This man deceives you as he has me. You believe in him as I have done. He would be ashamed to show himself in his true colours before the honourable man you are. Listen.” She seized my arm again and came so near me that I could feel the feverish heat of her rapid breath. “Do you know where I, Camille Favier, have come from; I, the recognized mistress of Jacques? I have come from a chamber where that wretch, Madam de Bonnivet, has given herself to him, where the bed is still in disorder and warm from their two bodies. Oh, what a hideous thing it is!”
“Impossible!” I murmured, overwhelmed with fright at the words I had just listened to and the tone in which they were spoken. “You have been the dupe of an anonymous letter or a fancied resemblance.”
“Listen again,” she went on almost tragically, and her fingers bit into my flesh, so furious was their grasp. “For a week I have had no doubt as to the relations between Jacques and this woman. Suddenly he had become tender to me with that tenderness which a mistress never mistakes. He was humouring me. There was a certain expression in his eyes when he looked at me. I would 177have liked to snatch away that look to read what was behind it. Then I found around his eyes that voluptuous hollow I knew in him too well. I recognized in his whole being that exhausted languor which he used to have in the days gone by when we loved passionately, and he avoided our appointments. He always had an excuse to change and postpone them. You see, I am talking to you as I feel. It is brutal, but what I am telling you is true, as I have always told the truth to him and to you. It was I, you understand, who asked for these appointments, I who did the hunting, while he refused me and escaped from me. Is any other proof of a lover’s deception necessary? But this week I began again to doubt. I received a visit from this woman’s husband. She had the audacity to send him to me! He came with Senneterre to ask me to act at a grand affair they are having next Monday.”
“I have an invitation to it,” I interrupted, suddenly recollecting that I had received an invitation for it. “I was astonished at it, but I understand now. It was an account of you.”
“Ah, well! you will not see me there,” she replied in a tone which froze my heart, it was so ferocious, “and I have an idea that this function will not take place.” Then with rising anger she said: “Now, see how innocent I am still! When the fool of a husband asked me that, and I said 'yes,’ seeing that Jacques displayed no emotion, it seemed to me impossible that this woman could 178really be his mistress. I did not believe it of her, nor did I believe that he was her lover. I knew she was a famous coquette, and you remember how I judged him? But this was on her part such insolent audacity, and on his shameful cowardice! No. Had you come yourself, even this morning, to tell me that she was his mistress, I should not have believed it.”
She was so agonized at what she was preparing to tell that she had to stop again. Her hands, which had let go of me again, trembled and her eyes closed from her excessive suffering.
“And now?” I said to her.
“Now?” She burst into a nervous laugh. “Now I know of what they are capable, he in particular. She is a woman of the world who has lovers. But for him to have done what he has done! Oh, the wretch, the wicked monster! I am going mad as I talk to you. But listen, listen,” she repeated in a frenzy, as if she feared I should interrupt her story. “To-day at two o’clock there was to have been a rehearsal of the new comedy by Dorsenne at the theatre. He is altering an act and the rehearsal was countermanded. I did not hear of it till I got to the theatre. For that reason I found myself about two o’clock in the Rue de la Chausée d’Antin with the afternoon before me. I had one or two calls to make in the neighbourhood. I started, and then some clumsy person trod on my skirt, tearing a flounce almost off. Look.” She showed me that a large piece of the bottom of her skirt was torn. “It happened 179at the top of the Rue de Clichy near the Rue Nouvelle.”
She had looked at me as she pronounced and emphasized these last few words, as if they ought to awaken in me an association of ideas. She saw that I made no sign. A look of astonishment passed over her face and she continued—
“Does that name tell you nothing? I thought that Jacques, who confides in you, would have told you that as well. Well”—she dropped her voice still lower, “that is where we have our place of meeting. When he became my lover, I should so much have liked to have belonged to him at his own place, among the objects in the midst of which he lived, so that at every minute, every second, these mute witnesses of our happiness would recall me to his memory! He did not wish it to be so. I understand the reason to-day; he was already thinking of the rupture. At that time I believed everything he told me, and did everything he asked me to do. He assured me that the rooms in the Rue Nouvelle had been fitted up by him for me alone, and that he had put there the old furniture from the room in which he wrote his early books: the room he lived in before moving to the Place Delaborde. How stupid I was! How stupid I was! But it is abominable to lie to a poor girl who has only her heart, who surrenders it entirely as well as her person and would despise herself for any distrust as if it were a crime! Ah! it is very easy to deceive any one who surrenders herself like that.”
180“But are you sure he deceived you?” I asked.
“Am I sure of it? You too—-” she replied in tones of passionate irony. “Besides, I defy you to defend him when you hear the whole story. I was, as I have just told you, near the Rue Nouvelle with my dress torn. I must add, too, that in my foolishness I had left all sorts of little things belonging to me in the rooms there, even needles and silk. It had been one of my dreams, too, that this place might become a beloved refuge for both of us, where Jacques would work at some beautiful love-drama, written near me and for me, while I should be there to employ myself—as his wife! It occurred to me to go there and mend my torn flounce. I want you to believe me when I swear to you that there was no idea of spying mixed up in my plan.”
“I know it,” I replied to her, and to spare her the details of a confidence which I saw caused her great physical suffering, I asked her: “And you found the room in disorder as you told me?”
“It was more terrible,” she said, and then had to remain silent for a second to gain strength to............