Ses maux les plus cruels sont ceux qu’il se fait lui-même .
BALZAC.
[This quotation is presumably from the seventeenth century letter writer, Guez de Balzac, whom Beyle in Henri Brulard compares with Chateaubriand.—— C. K. R. M.]
Armance might perhaps have been taken in by these polite overtures, but she did not stop to think about the Commander; she had other grounds for anxiety.
Now that there was no longer any obstacle in the way of his marriage, Octave was given to fits of sombre ill-temper which he found difficulty in concealing; he pleaded a series of violent headaches, and would go out riding by himself in the woods of Ecoucn and Senlis. He would sometimes cover seven or eight leagues at a gallop. These symptoms appeared ominous to Armance; she remarked that at certain moments he gazed at her with eyes in which suspicion was more evident than love.
It was true that these fits of sombre ill-temper ended as often as not in transports of love and in a passionate abandonment which she had never observed in him in the days of their happiness . It was thus that she was beginning to describe, in her letters to Méry de Tersan, the time that had passed between Octave’s injury and her own fatal act of imprudence in hiding in the closet by the Commander’s room.
Since the announcement of her marriage, Armance had had the consolation of being able to open her heart to her dearest friend. Méry, brought up in a far from united family which was always being torn asunder by fresh intrigues, was quite capable of giving her sound advice.
During one of these long walks which she took with Octave in the garden of the mansion, beneath Madame de Malivert’s windows, Armance said to him one day: “There is something so extraordinary in your sadness that I, who love you and you alone in the world, have found it necessary to seek the advice of a friend before venturing to speak to you as I am going now to speak. You were happier before that cruel night when I was so imprudent, and I have no need to tell you that all my own happiness has vanished far more rapidly than yours. I have a suggestion to make to you: let us return to a state of perfect happiness and to that pleasant intimacy which was the delight of my life, after I knew that you loved me, until that fatal idea arose of our marriage. I shall take upon myself entire responsibility for so odd a change. I shall tell people that I have made a vow never to marry. They will condemn the idea, it will impair the good opinion that some of my friends are kind enough to hold of me; what do I care? Public opinion is after all important to a girl with money only so long as she thinks of marry ing; and I certainly shall never marry.” Octave’s only answer was to take her hand, while tears streamed from his eyes in abundance. “Oh, my dear angel,” he said to her, “how far superior you are to me!” The sight of these tears on the face of a man not ordinarily subject to that weakness combined with so simple a speech to destroy all Armance’s resolution.
At length she said to him with an effort: “Answer me, my friend. Accept a proposal which is going to restore my happiness. We shall continue to spend our time together just as much as before.” She saw a servant approaching them. “The luncheon bell is going to ring,” she went on in some distress, “your father will be arriving from Paris, afterwards I shall not have another opportunity of speaking to you, and if I do not speak to you I shall be unhappy and agitated all day, for I shall be a little doubtful of you.” “You! Doubtful of me!” said Octave gazing at her in a way which for a moment banished all her fears.
After walking for some minutes in silence: “No, Octave,” Armance went on, “I am not doubtful of you; if I doubted your love, I hope that God would grant me the blessing of death; but after all you have been less happy since your marriage was settled.” “I shall talk to you as I should to myself,” said Octave impetuously. “There are moments in which I am far more happy, for now at last I have the certainty that nothing in the world can separate me from you; I shall be able to see you and to talk to you at every hour of the day, but ,” he went on... and fell into one of those moods of gloomy silence which filled Armance with despair.
The dread of hearing the luncheon bell, which was going to separate them for the rest of the day perhaps, gave her for the second time the courage to break in upon Octave’s musings: “But what, dear?” she asked him, “tell me all; that fearful but is making me a hundred times more wretched than anything you could add to it.”
“Very well!” said Octave stopping short, turning to face her and gazing fixedly at her, no longer with the gaze of a lover but so as to be able to read her thoughts, “you shall know all; death itself would be less painful to me than the story which I have to tell you, but also I love you far more than life. Do I need to swear to you, no longer as your lover” (and at that moment his eyes were indeed no longer the eyes of a lover) “but as an honourable man and as I should swear to your father, if heaven in its mercy had spared him to us, do I need to swear to you that I love you and you only in the world, as I have never loved before and shall never love again? To be parted from you would be death to me and a hundred times worse than death; but I have a fearful secret which I have never confided to any one, this secret will explain to you my fatal vagaries.”
As he stammered rather than spoke these words, Octave’s features contracted, there was a hint of madness in his eyes; one would have said he no longer saw Armance; his lips twitched convulsively. Armance, more wretched than he, leaned upon the tub of an orange tree; she shuddered on recognising that fatal orange tree by which she had fainted when Octave spoke harshly to her after the night he had spent in the forest. Octave had stopped and stood facing her as though horror-stricken and not daring to continue. His startled eyes gazed fixedly in front of him as though he beheld a vision of a monster.
“Dear friend,” said Armance, “I was more unhappy when you spoke cruelly to me by this same orange tree months ago; at that time I doubted your love. What am I saying?” she corrected herself with passion. “On that fatal day I was certain that you did not love me. Ah! my friend, how far happier I am today!”
The accent of truth with which Armance uttered these last words seemed to moderate the bitter, angry grief to which Octave was a prey. Armance, forgetful of her customary reserve, clasped his hand passionately and urged him to speak; her face came for a moment so close to his that he could feel her warm breath. This sensation moved him to tenderness; speech became easy to him.
“Yes, dear friend,” he said to her, gazing at length into her eyes, “I adore you, you need not doubt my love; but what is the man who adores you? He is a monster .”
With these words, Octave’s tenderness seemed to forsake him; all at once he flew into a fury, tore himself irom the arms of Armance who tried in vain to hold him back, and took to his heels. Armance remained motionless. At that instant the bell rang for luncheon. More dead than alive, she had only to shew her face before Madame de Malivert to obtain leave not to remain at table. Octave’s servant came in a moment later to say that a sudden engagement had obliged his master to set off at a gallop for Paris.
The party at luncheon was silent and chilly; the only happy person was the Commander. Struck by this simultaneous absence of both the voung people, he detected tears of anxiety in his sister’s eyes; he felt a momentary jov. It seemed to him that the affair of the marriage was no longer going quite so well: “marriages have been broken off later than this,” he said to himself, and the intensity of his preoccupation prevented him from making himself agreeable to Mesdames d’Aumale and de Bonnivet. The arrival of the Marquis, who had come from Paris, notwithstanding a threatening of gout, and shewed great annoyance at not finding Octave whom he had warned of his coming, increased the Commander’s joy. “The moment is auspicious,” he told himself, “for making the voice of reason heard.” As soon as luncheon was over, Mesdames d’Aumale and de Bonnivet went upstairs to their rooms; Madame de Malivert disappeared into Armance’s room, and the Commander was animated, that is to say happy, for an hour and a quarter, which he employed in trying to shake his brother-inlaw’s determination in the matter of Octave’s marriage.
There was a strong vein of honesty underlying everything that the old Marquis said in reply. “The indemnity belongs to your sister,” he said; “I myself am a pauper. It is this indemnity which makes it possible for us to think of establishing Octave in life; your sister is more anxious than he, I think, for this marriage with Armance, who, for that matter, has some fortune of her own; in all this I can do nothing, as a man of honour, but express my opinion; it would be impossible for me to speak with authority; I should have the air of wishing to deprive my wife of the pleasure of spending the rest of her life with her dearest friend.”
Madame de Malivert had found Armance greatly agitated but scarcely communicative. Urged by the call of affection, Armance spoke in the vaguest terms of a trifling quarrel, such as occurs at times between people who are most fervently in love. “I am sure that Octave is to blame,” said Madame de Malivert as she rose to go, “otherwise you would tell me all;” and she left Armance to herself. This was doing her a great service. It soon became plain to her that Octave had committed some serious crime, the dread consequences of which he might perhaps have exaggerated, and that as a man of honour he would not allow her to unite her destiny with that of one who was perhaps a murderer, without letting her know the whole truth.
Dare we say that this explanation of Octave’s eccentricity restored his cousin to a sort of tranquillity? She went down to the garden, half hoping to find him there. She felt herself at that moment entirely rid of the profound jealousy which Madame d’Aumale had inspired in her; she did not, it is true, admit to herself that this might account for the state of blissful emotion in which she found herself. She felt herself transported by the most tender and most generous pity.
“If we have to leave France,” she said to herself, “and go into banishment far away, were it even in America, well, away we shall go,” she said to herself with joy, “and the sooner the better.” And her imagination began to wander, picturing a life of complete solitude on a desert island, ideas too romantic and, what is more, too familiar on the pages of novels to be recorded here. Neither on that day nor on the next did Octave put in an appearance: only on the evening of the second day Armance received a letter dated from Paris. Never had she been so happy. The most burning, the most abandoned passion glowed in this letter. “Ah! If he had been here at the moment when he wrote, he would have told me all.” Octave let it be understood that he was detained in Paris because he was ashamed to tell her his secret. “It is not at every moment,” the letter went on, “that I shall have the courage to utter that fatal word, even to you, for it may destroy the sentiments which you deign to feel for me and which are everything to me. Do not press me upon this subject, dear friend.” Armance made haste to reply to him by a servant who was waiting. “Your greatest crime,” she told him, “is your remaining away from us,” and she was no less surprised than joyful when, half an hour after writing to him, she saw Octave appear, he having come out to await her answer at Lab............