In the society in which she moved, Annette was extremely successful. She was much sought after by the majority of the young men. The young girls, many of whom were prettier than she, did not take very kindly to this. They had the more reason to be galled because Annette did not seem to make any great effort to please. Distrait and a little distant, she did nothing to pique the interest or flatter the vanity of the men who sought her out. Calmly installed in a corner of the drawing-room, she let them come to her, without appearing to note their presence, listened smilingly (they were never sure that she had heard) and, when she answered, she uttered only pleasant commonplaces. However, they all came, and tried to charm her: the worldly, the brilliant, and the respectable young men.
The jealous ones liked to believe that Annette was playing a deep game, that her indifference was only the ruse of a practised coquette; they remarked that for some time now Annette's rather cold correctness of dress had given place to elegant toilettes, in which the fantastic note, they said, was skilfully calculated to relieve the monotony of her sleepy homeliness. Malicious tongues added that it was her fortune more than her face that was courted. But, as regards the toilettes, their charming artifice should not be attributed to Annette: Sylvie's taste and wit were solely responsible. And, no doubt, she was a "good catch," but if her little court took cognizance of the fact, as it surely did, it was only the nuance of respect which marked their attentions that might be attributed to this consideration. Had she been less well provided by fortune, they would have pursued her no less but more boldly.
The allurement was deeper. Annette, without being a coquette, was well enough served by her instincts. Rich and strong, there was no need of anyone telling them what had to be done; their action was sure, for the will had no part in it. While Annette, smiling indolently as though submerged in her inner life, was allowing herself to be carried on the pleasant tide of a vague revery, on a voluptuous wave, that did not prevent her hearing and seeing,—her body was speaking for her: a powerful attraction was emanating from her eyes and mouth and strong, young limbs, from the youth of her being, charged with love like a flowering glycine. The charm was so strong that no one seeing her (at least, no one but a woman) could dream that she was homely. And if she spoke little, only a few casual words are needed in an empty conversation to evoke unusual mental horizons. Then too, she offered herself no less to the desires of those who sought the soul, than to the covetousness of those who had recognized in this dormant body (sleeping water) a wealth of pleasure unknown to itself.
She did not seem to see; but she saw perfectly well. It is a feminine gift. In Annette it was complemented by a vigorous intuition which often goes with strong vitality, and which, without words or gestures, immediately penetrates the speech of being to being. When she seemed distrait, it meant that she was listening to this language. Dark forest of hearts! . . . They were—they and she—on the hunt. Each sought his track. Having drifted for a time from one to another, Annette chose her own.
The young men among whom her choice lay belonged to that rich, intelligent, active bourgeoisie, advanced in ideas (at least they thought them advanced), of which Raoul Rivière had been a member. It was shortly after the Dreyfus Affair, which had brought together men belonging to different orders of thought, who yet found themselves united by a common instinct of social justice. This instinct, as later became apparent, was not very enduring. So far as it was concerned, social justice was limited to a single injustice. One example among thousands was Rivière himself, who had lost no sleep over the iniquities of the world, who had even been capable of concluding with no pangs of conscience some profitable business with the Sultan, when His Highness was coolly engineering, amid the silence of a complaisant Europe, the first Armenian massacre,—yet who, quite sincerely, had been completely bowled over by the famous Affair. One cannot ask too much of men! When they have fought for justice, once in their lives, they are winded. They have been just on at least one occasion; one must be grateful for that. They are grateful themselves. Rivière's society, the families whose sons were now Annette's suitors, had no doubt concerning the merit they had acquired in the championship of Right, nor concerning the inutility of refreshing this merit by new efforts. They remained, once for all, the crew of Progress, with folded arms.
With minds sufficiently at peace, besides, as regarded the international landscape, in this fleeting hour when civic conflicts had nearly extinguished national hatreds—save for the old ember of anglophobia, still kept smoking by the Boer war,—possessed of a diluted and not at all militaristic patriotism,—given to tolerance and good humor, because they were well off, belonging to the victorious party,—they gave the impression of an easy-going society, broad in its morality, vaguely humanitarian, more certainly utilitarian and sceptical, with no very great principles and no very great prejudices. . . . (They need not have prided themselves on that! . . .) They counted in their ranks a number of liberal Catholics, not a few Protestants, a greater number of Jews, and a quantity of solid middle-class Frenchmen who were indifferent to all religions, having found a substitute in a political doctrine that bore various labels, but did not stray very far from the republicanism which, having endured for thirty years, was beginning to be a form, the most practical form, of conservatism. Socialism, too, was represented; but by the rich and intellectual young bourgeois that had been won over by the golden tongue and example of Jaurès. He was still on his honeymoon with the Republic.
Annette was never seriously interested in politics. Her active inner life left her no time for it. But, like the others, she had passed through her hours of exaltation during the Affair. Her love for her father modeled her in the image of his feelings. She was predisposed, by the fire in her heart and by the instinct of liberty that she carried in her blood, to find herself always on the side of the oppressed. So she had known moments of passionate emotion when Zola and Picquart faced the great Beast—unchained public opinion; and it is not impossible that, like more than one young girl, when she passed by the Cherche-Midi prison, her heart beat for the man who was shut within. But there was little reason in these feelings, and Annette had not been able to bring herself to a critical examination of the Affair. Politics repelled her; when she had attempted to study them at close range, she had immediately been turned aside by a mixture of boredom and repugnance which she did not seek to analyse. Her viewpoint was too honest not to have glimpsed the amount of pettiness and malpractise that was shared almost equally by both sides. Less sincere than her eyes, her heart wished to continue to believe that the party which upheld ideas of justice must be composed of the justest men. And she reproached herself for what she called her laziness in not becoming better acquainted with their activities. That is why she made herself maintain an attitude of sympathetic waiting towards them,—as when hearing the execution of a page of new music that is guaranteed by an accepted name, a respectful listener, who does not understand it, gives credit to beauties that he will discover later, perhaps. . . .
Annette, being loyal, believed in the virtue of labels, ignorant of the fact that the fraud is nowhere more current than in the commerce of ideas. She still attributed some reality to the fabricated isms, whose stamp distinguishes the various political faiths; and she was attracted by those proclaimed by the advanced parties. A secret illusion made her hope that it was on this side that she had the best chance of meeting her mate. Accustomed to the open air, she went in the direction of those who sought it, like herself, outside the old prejudices, ancient follies, and suffocation of the house of the past. She spoke no evil of the old dwelling. It had sheltered the lives and dreams of generations. But the air was vitiated. Remain there who would! One must breathe. And her eyes sought the friend who would help her construct her own house, sanely and clear-sightedly.
In the drawing-rooms that she frequented there was no lack of young men quite capable, it seemed, of understanding and aiding her. With or without labels, many had daring minds. But an evil fate willed that their daring should not be directed towards the same horizons as hers. In the words of the philosopher, the elan vital is limited. It never exercises itself, simultaneously, in all directions. Infinitely rare are the spirits that throw their light all around them as they walk. The majority of those who have succeeded in lighting their lanterns (and they are not numerous!) focus their searchlights straight ahead, upon one point, a single point; and around them they do not see a speck. One may even say that an advance in one direction is almost always paid for by a retreat in another. Many a one who is a revolutionary in politics is an imitative conservative in art. And if he is deprived of a handful of his prejudices (those that he values least) he will only clasp the others more avariciously to his breast.
Nowhere is the unevenness of this jolting march more clearly visible than in the moral evolution of the two sexes. The woman who forces herself to break with the errors of the past and who enters upon one of the paths leading to the new society rarely ever encounters the man who also wishes to found a new world. He takes another route. And if their climbing paths must finally, perhaps, come together further up the slope, for the moment they turn their backs upon each other. This divergence of aims was particularly striking in France at this period, when the feminine mind, so much longer held back, had been making, for some years, a sudden advance, of which the men of that day took no account. The women themselves did not always measure it accurately, until there came the day when the shock of personal experience revealed to them the wall that separated them from their mates. The shock was rude. Annette, to her own cost, had to discover this unhappy misunderstanding.