On the half-light of the room, with its closed shutters, Annette was sitting on her bed, smiling, with her white dressing-gown wrapped about her. Her unbound hair, which she had just washed, covered her shoulders. Through the open windows could be seen the motionless, golden warmth of an August mid-afternoon; without observing it, one felt out there the torpor of the Jardin de Boulogne sleeping in the sunlight. Annette shared in this beatitude. She could rest there for hours, stretched out, without stirring, without thinking, without needing to think. It was enough for her to know that there were two of her; and she did not even make an effort to talk with the "little one" who was inside her, because—of this she was sure—he felt what she felt, they understood one another without speaking. Waves of tenderness passed through the happy somnolence of her body. And then she relapsed again into a happy smile.
But if her mind was drowsy, her senses had retained a marvelous clairvoyance; they followed from moment to moment the fine vibrations of the air and the light. . . . A fragrant odor of strawberries in the garden. . . . She enjoyed it with her nostrils and her tongue. Her amused ear caught the slightest sound, the leaves brushed by a breeze, a footstep on the gravel, a voice in the street, a bell ringing for vespers. And the rumble ascending from the great crowds: Paris in 1900 . . . the summer of the Exposition. In the vat of the Champ de Mars thousands of human grapes were fermenting in the sun. . . . Far enough away, yet close enough to the monstrous bubbling to feel its presence and to be safe from it, Annette rejoiced in the contrast of the peace and the shade of her nest. Vain tumult! The truth dwells within me. . . .
Her hearing, subtle and wandering like that of a cat, seized upon every sound that passed, one after another, and idly let it fall again; from the floor below she caught the ring of the door-bell and recognized the little steps of Sylvie, who was always in a hurry. Annette would have preferred to be left alone. But she was so solidly settled in her happiness that, no matter who came, nothing could disturb her.
It was only eight days since Sylvie had received her news. Since last spring she had heard nothing from her sister. A personal adventure that had not affected her very much had yet been enough to fill her thoughts: she had not realized how long the silence had been. But when the affair was settled and she found her mind free again, with time to think of it, she began to be troubled. She went to her aunt at the Boulogne house for news. She was very much surprised to hear that Annette had come back some time before. She was rather inclined to give the forgetful soul a good snubbing, but Annette tactfully turned her to another subject that surprised her; gently but feelingly, she had simply told her the whole story. Sylvie found it very difficult to listen to the end. That Annette, the sensible Annette, had done this mad thing and refused to marry afterwards, no, it was unheard of, she simply wouldn't tolerate it! . . . This little Lucretia was scandalized. She railed at Annette; she called her an idiot. Annette remained calm. It was plain that nothing could make her change her mind. Sylvie realized that she had no hold on this obstinate soul: she would have liked to give her a good whipping! . . . But how was it possible to remain angry with such a lovable person who listened as you spoke with such a disarming smile! And then the mysterious charm of this maternity. . . . Sylvie anathematized it as a calamity, but she was too much a woman not to be touched. . . .
And to-day she had come again, with her mind made up to give Annette a good raking over the coals, to break down her stupid resistance, to oblige her to insist on marriage. . . . "If you don't, if you don't, I shall be furious! . . ." She came in like a gust of wind, smelling of rice-powder and battle. And to make a start, without saying good-morning, she began scolding about this mad way of passing one's days, shut up in the dark. But catching sight of the happy eyes of Annette, who stretched out her arms to her, she ran to her and hugged her. She went on scolding: "Fool! Silly! Arch-fool! . . . With her sweeping hair over her long white dressing-gown she looks like an angel. . . . But what a mistake it would be to think she was! . . . The sanctimonious wretch! The little scamp! . . ."
She shook her. Weariedly, contentedly, Annette let her have her way. Sylvie stopped in the middle of her tirade, took her sister's forehead between her hands and pushed back her hair. "She is fresh, she is pink, never have I seen her with such beautiful color. And that look of triumph! Good reason for it! Aren't you ashamed?"
"Not in the least!" said Annette. "I am happier than I have ever been before. And so strong, so well. For the first time in my life I feel complete, I desire nothing more. This longing that is going to be fulfilled for a child goes back so far in my life! Ever since I was a child myself. . . . Yes, when I was seven years old I was already dreaming of it."
"That's a fib," said Sylvie. "Only six months ago you told me you had never felt that maternity was your vocation."
"Do you really think that? Did I really say that?" said Annette, disconcerted. "It's true, I did say it. But I haven't lied, just the same, either now or then. . . . How explain it? I am not pretending. I remember clearly."
"I know how it is," said Sylvie. "When I have a fancy for something, I often immediately remember that I have never wanted anything but that since the day I was born."
Annette frowned; she was not satisfied. "The nature I feel to-day is my real nature. It always has been, but I didn't dare confess it to myself before the time came; I was afraid I was mistaken. Now . . . Oh! now, I see that it is even more beautiful than I had hoped. And it is my whole self. I want nothing more."
"When you wanted Roger or Tullio," said Sylvie maliciously, "you wanted nothing more."
"Oh, you don't understand anything! . . . Can the two things be compared? When I was in love (what you call 'love'), it wasn't I who wished it, I was forced. . . . How I suffered from that force that held me, without being able to resist it! . . . And now you see how my little one has come to my rescue when I was struggling in the bonds of the misery they call love, how he came, how he has saved me. My little liberator!"
Sylvie began to laugh. She had not in the least understood her sister's reasons. But she did not need any reasons to understand her maternal instinct: on that subject the two sisters would always be in accord. They began to chat affectionately about the little unknown creature (was it going to be a man or a woman?)—discussing a thousand nothings, serious and foolish, about its coming, things about which a woman never wearies of chattering.
They had been talking this way for a long time when Sylvie remembered that she had come to administer her lesson, not to sing a duet. "Annette," she said, "enough of this nonsense! There is a time for everything. Roger owes you marriage, and you must insist on it."
Annette made a weary gesture. "Why go back to that? I have told you that Roger offered it to me and that I refused."
"Well, when one has been stupid one should recognize it and change."
"I have no desire to change."
"Why don't you want to? You loved this man. I am sure you still love him. What has happened?"
Annette was unwilling to reply. Sylvie insisted, tactlessly seeking for the deep, personal reasons for their disagreement. Annette made an impatient gesture. Sylvie looked at her, astonished. Annette's expression was angry, her brows were knitted, her eyes full of irritation.
"What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing," said Annette, turning aside hastily.
Sylvie had touched a wound that she wanted to forget. Through an inconsistency she could not have explained, but which came from the depths of her nature, she who rejoiced at the coming of the child bore a grudge against the man who had given it to her; she could not forgive herself because her senses had been taken by surprise, because of the passion that had betrayed her in this way—she could not forgive the man who had seized such an opportunity. This instinctive recoil had been the true, hidden reason (hidden from her as from the others) for her flight from Roger and her refusal to see him again. In the depths of her being she hated him because she had loved him. But as her mind was straightforward she repressed these instincts which she felt to be evil. Why was Sylvie forcing her to become aware of them? . . .
Sylvie looked at her and insisted no more. Annette, calm again, ashamed of what she had allowed to become visible, of what she had seen herself, tried to change the subject and said quietly, "I don't want to marry. I am not made for these exclusive bonds. You may tell me that millions of women get used to them, that I exaggerate their seriousness. But I am made in such a way that I take everything seriously. If I give myself, I give myself, too much, and then I am smothered; I feel as if I were drowning with a stone around my neck. Perhaps I am not strong enough. My personality is not firmly established. Ties that are too close are bind-weeds that drain my energy; and there is not enough left for me. I try to please the 'other person,' to be like the image of what he wants me to be, and this ends badly. For in renouncing too much of one's nature one loses one's self-respect and cannot live any more; or one revolts and causes suffering. No, I am an egoist, Sylvie. I was made to live alone."
(Although she was not in any sense lying, she was uttering pretexts that masked the truth from herself.)
"You amuse me," said Sylvie. "You are the last woman to live without love."
"I hate it," said Annette. "But it will not catch me again now. I am protected from it."
"Beautifully protected!" said Sylvie. "He won't protect you in the least; you will have to protect him. You don't want to bind yourself, but have you thought of the fetters this little bundle is going to mean for you?"
"Happiness! With my arms filled, these arms that have been empty so long!"
"You are talking without thinking. Who is going to bring him up?"
"I."
"What about the father? He has rights over his child."
A new cloud of irritation passed over Annette's brows. . . . Rights! Rights over his child! . . . His child! The child of that man, that blind moment which he has already forgotten and which binds me for life! . . . Never! . . . My child is mine! . . . She said, "My child belongs to me."
"He will belong to whom he likes."
"Oh, I know whom he's going to like!"
"Seducer! And suppose that, in spite of everything, he reproaches you some day for depriving him of a father!"
"I shall fill his heart so full that there won't remain the tiniest place for regrets for anyone else."
"You are a monster of egoism."
"I said I was."
"You will be punished."
"Well, so much the worse for me if I can't make him love me! What's to prevent me from loving him and why shouldn't he love me?"
"If you really love him you should think first of his future. Plenty of other people have been obliged to accept a disagreeable marriage for the sake of the child."
"You revolt me," said Annette, "praising those women who condemn themselves to a false marriage, sometimes one built on hatred, out of love for the child. You remind me of that mother who told her daughter she had endured hell for her sake by remaining married. The daughter replied: 'Do you think hell is a good home for a child?'"
"The child needs a father."
"But how about the thousands of people who have gone without one? How many have never known one at all! How many have lost their fathers in early childhood and have been brought up by their mothers alone! Are they inferior to other people? The child needs a protecting love. Why should not mine be enough?"
"You overestimate your strength. Do you know what is awaiting you?"
"I know, I know! The little arms of a child about my neck."
"But do you know the price the world will make you pay for it? It would be much better for you to be married and an adulteress four times over than to have people brand you with the name of an unmarried mother. To dare to assume the pains and responsibilities of motherhood without having first accepted the stamp of their official marriage is something for which a woman of their class is never pardoned. It would be all right for me. What people like myself do is of no consequence. Your bourgeois people even find that it pays to have things so. They are ready enough to praise free love in the working-class, as they do in Louise, but a girl of the bourgeoisie belongs in a private preserve. You are their property. They can buy you by contract, before a lawyer; you can't give yourself in the presence of heaven and say, 'It's my right.' Good Lord, where would we end if property revolted against its master and said, 'I am free! Let anyone who wishes come and cultivate me.'"
Even when she was indignant Sylvie could not speak seriously.
Annette smiled and said, "Customs are made by man. I know. He condemns the woman who dares to have her children outside of marriage without dedicating herself for life to the father of her children. But for many women this means slavery, for they do not love their husbands. Many a woman would remain free and alone with her little ones if she had the courage. I shall try to have it."
Sylvie said, with a touch of pity, "Poor innocent! Your life has been shielded from hardships by the double windows of this bourgeoisie that shuts you in with its prejudices—and its privileges also. Once you leave it, you will never be allowed to enter it again, and you will have a glimpse then of what life is!"
"Well, Sylvie, that's only fair; you are right in saying that I have been privileged; it will be good for me to have my share in what you suffer."
"Too late! One must learn that in childhood. At your age it's no longer possible. Luckily you are rich, you will never know material suffering. But the other, moral suffering . . . your class will cast you out, public opinion will condemn you, every day you will have to endure some little insult. . . . You have a proud and tender heart. It will bleed."
"It will bleed, but one enjoys happiness all the more if one has to pay for it. I want nothing but health and an honest mind. Public opinion has no terrors for me."
"But what if your child suffers from it?"
"Would they dare? Well, we shall fight together against the cowards."
Sitting upright again on her bed, she shook her hair like a lioness.
Sylvie studied her, did her best to preserve her look of severity, was unable to do so, laughed, shrugged her shoulders and sighed, "Poor little idiot!"
Annette coaxingly asked her, "Will you help us?"
Sylvie hugged her furiously. And she shook her fist at the wall. "Beware, anyone who touches you!"
She left. Annette, fatigued by the discussion, fell back into her reverie. This time she had won in the encounter with her sister. But one disturbing thing remained from the conversation, one word uttered by Sylvie . . . Would the child some day reproach her? . . .
Stretched out on her back, with her hands crossed over her breast, she listened to what was within her. The tiny creature was beginning to stir. Annette, with her lips closed, spoke to him as she had so often done. She asked him if she was doing right in keeping him for herself alone; she begged him instantly to tell her if she was right, if he was satisfied: for she would do nothing for which he could blame her. Whereupon the child, naturally enough, replied that she was doing right, that he was satisfied. He said he wanted to be hers, hers alone, and that in order to dedicate herself to him she should remain free and live with him alone. She and he. . . .
Annette laughed with happiness. Her heart was so full that she could not speak. And with her head heavy and intoxicated with her joy she fell asleep. . . .
As soon as Annette's condition began to be visible, Sylvie obliged her sister to move away from Paris. It was the beginning of autumn; before long her friends would be coming back from their vacations. Surprisingly enough, Annette offered no resistance. She was not afraid of public opinion, but anything that might mean discord just now would have been intolerable to her; nothing must disturb her harmony!
She allowed herself to be conducted by Sylvie to a place on the Côte d'Azure, but she did not stay there. It offered her no peaceful seclusion. The neighborhood of the sea made her feel uncomfortable. Annette was a landswoman. She could marvel at the ocean, but she could not live on familiar terms with it. She submitted to the powerful fascination of its breath, but this breath was not beneficial to her. It reawoke in her too many hidden anxieties; it aroused what she did not wish to be conscious of . . . not yet, not now. . . . There are beings whom we do not love because, they say, we are afraid to love them. (Does that mean we do love them?) Annette fought against the sea because she was fighting against herself, against a dangerous Annette from whom she was trying to escape. . . .
She set out again northward, to the neighborhood of the Savoyard lakes, and took quarters for the winter in a little town at the foot of the mountains. Sylvie was only informed after she was settled. Kept in Paris by her work, she could only make her sister brief, occasional visits, and it troubled her to know that Annette was alone in this forsaken spot. But Annette, during this time, could not be alone enough, nor could the spot be sufficiently forsaken. She would have found a hermitage delightful. The richer her inner life was, the more need she felt for a clear, soundless atmosphere. She did not suffer, as Sylvie supposed, from being abandoned to strange hands in her condition. In the first place, she had so much affection to give that no one seemed to her a stranger, and, as sympathy attracts sympathy, she did not long remain a stranger to anyone else. It was not that the country-people, who had little curiosity, put themselves out to know her. They bowed back and forth, exchanged a few cordial words as they passed, or from their doorsteps or over the hedges. They wished each other well. Probably in case of need she could not have counted too far on this good will, but, such as it was, it still meant a good deal in the daily round. The days were lighter for it. Annette found the cool kindness of these good souls, of whom she knew nothing and who left her alone, more to her taste than the tyrannical exactions of relatives and friends who assume over us the rights of heavy-handed guardians.
Mid-November. . . . Sitting by the window, sewing, she looked out at the new-fallen snow over the fields and the white-capped trees. But her eyes returned to a wedding announcement. . . . The marriage of Roger Brissot to a young girl of the political world in Paris. (Annette knew her.) . . . Roger had lost no time. The Brissot ladies, angered by Annette's flight, had hastened to bring about another wedding before people should begin to gossip about their son's discomfiture, and Roger, in his resentment, had accepted their choice. Annette could feel no surprise, nor could she complain. She forced herself to think that she was glad for poor Roger's sake. But the news disturbed her more than she would have wished. So many memories quivered in her soul and her flesh! And there, in that flesh, was the life brought into being by him. . . . In the depths of the shadow, the agitations of those former days were stirring. . . . No, no, Annette would not allow them to come out into the open! She felt an aversion for those fevers of the past. Everything that was sensual wearied her. Disgust, revolt. And that animosity. (She acknowledged it now.) The echo of the ancestral hatred of the female for the male who has fertilized her.
She sewed; she sewed; she wanted to forget. Often when she was nervous and saw a dangerous cloud gathering on the horizon, she had recourse to the prayer-wheel of work. She sewed, and her thoughts slipped back into their proper order.
So they slipped back to-day. After half an hour of silent application, her anxiety had passed, her smile had reappeared. As Annette lifted the forehead that was bent over her work, her eyes were peaceful and she said, "So be it!"
The sun laughed over the snow. Annette left her work and dressed to go out. Her ankles and her feet were a little swollen and she had to force herself to walk; but once she was outside she found that she enjoyed it. For her little companion was with her as she strolled along. He was making his presence known now. In the evening especially he measured the dimensions of his nest; he groped about in all directions.
"Heavens, how narrow this is!" he seemed to say. "Is it never going to end?"
Then he went to sleep again. By day, when she was out walking, he was well-behaved. But he seemed to be looking out through his mother's eyes, for to these eyes everything appeared to be new. What fresh colors! Nature had just placed them on the canvas. Annette's cheeks too had a beautiful color. Her heart beat more vigorously and her blood ran. She enjoyed every odor, every taste; when nobody was looking she would eat a little snow by the roadside. Delicious! She remembered that as a child she had done the same thing when her nurse's back was turned. And she sucked the stems of the damp, frozen reeds. She had a shiver of epicurean delight down the whole length of her throat; as the snowflakes melted on her tongue, she too melted with the luxurious pleasure of it.
After she had walked for an hour or two in the country, along the snowy roads, alone yet not alone, alone but with all the company in the world, under the grey canopy of the winter sky, listening to the song of her own springtime, she turned back towards the town, her cheeks whipped red by the cold wind, her eyes shining. Before the baker's window she would yield to the attraction of some dainty made of chocolate or honey. (What a glutton the little fellow was!) Then she would go and sit down, at nightfall, in the church, before an altar, dark and golden like the honey. And she who had no practical religion, no religious faith—or thought she had no faith—would remain there till they closed the doors, dreaming, praying, loving. Night fell; the altar-lamps, faintly swinging, collected the last gleams in the darkness. Annette became stiff, chilly, a little numb in her woolen overcoat as she warmed herself at her own sun. A holy calm was within her. She was dreaming for the child of a life enveloped in sweetness, in silence—in her own loving arms.
On one of the first days of the year the child was born. A boy. Sylvie arrived just in time to welcome him. In spite of her suffering, which drew from her an occasional groan—no tears, Annette, interested, absorbed, was a little disappointed to find, surprisingly, that she was more present at the event than the cause of it. The great emotion she had expected had not appeared. When travail begins, one is caught in a trap. No means of escaping: one has to go through with it. One resigns oneself and bends all one's strength to reach the end as quickly as possible. One's mind is clear, but one's energy is entirely occupied in enduring the pain. One scarcely thinks of the child at all. No room for tender or exalted feelings. Those that have previously filled one's heart vanish. It is truly hard, harsh "labor," a labor of the flesh and the muscles, wholly physical, with nothing beautiful or beneficent about it. Up to the very moment when one's liberation comes, when one feels the little body slip from one's own body . . . At last!
Then, instantly, one's joy returns. With her teeth chattering, worn out, almost collapsing at the bottom of an Arctic ocean, Annette stretched out her cold hands to grasp and press to her own bruised limbs her living fruit—her dearly beloved.
There were no longer two of her now. They were no longer two in one, as before. A fragment of herself was detached in space like a little satellite, drawn by gravity about a star, an additional tiny force the effect of which was immense in the psychic atmosphere. A strange thing that, in this new couple formed by the segmentation of a being, the larger should depend more for support upon the smaller than the smaller upon the larger. Its wailing cry, through its very weakness, was a source of strength for Annette. Oh, the wealth that comes to us from a loved one who cannot exist without us! Annette, with her stiffened breasts, at which the little animal greedily tugged, eagerly poured into the body of her son the flood of milk and hope with which she was swollen.
Then began to unroll the first touching cycle of the vita nuova, that discovery of the world, as old as the world, which every mother experiences again as she bends over the cradle. The tireless watcher awaiting with beating heart the awakening of her Sleeping Beauty. In his sapphire eyes, with their violet depths, Annette found herself reflected—they were so brilliant. What did it see, this gaze, as indefinite and limitless as the great blue eye of heaven—empty or profound, one couldn't say which? And what sudden shadows were cast upon this pure mirror by those clouds of suffering, those invisible furies, those unknown passions, come heaven knows whence! Was it from her past or from his future? The face or the reverse of the same medal. . . . "You are what I have been. I am what you will be. What will you be? What am I?". . . Annette questioned herself in the eyes of her sphinx. And as she observed this consciousness rising hourly from the depths, she lived over again, without realizing it, in this homunculus, the birth of humanity.
One by one little Marc opened his windows to the world. There began to pass over the uniform surface of his liquid stare more definite gleams, like a flock of birds seeking for a place to alight. After a few weeks the flower of a smile appeared on the living shrub. And then the birds that had settled there began to chirp. Forgotten was the tragic nightmare of the first days, forgotten the terror of the unknown earth, the cries of the being brutally dragged from the maternal shell, cast naked and bruised into the cruel light. The little man was comforted and took possession of life. And he found it good. He explored it, touched and tasted it greedily with his mouth, his eyes, his feet, his hands, his back. He gloried in his prize, playing in astonishment with the sounds that emerged from his pipe. One prize more, his voice! He listened to himself singing. But his singing did not give him more delight than it gave his mother. Annette was intoxicated by it. This little stream of a voice made her heart melt. The shrill cries that rose from the instrument gave her an exquisite pleasure as they pierced her ear.
"Cry louder, my darling! Yes, assert the life that is in you!"
He asserted it with an energy that had no need of encouragement. Joy, anger, whims, he protested them loudly in every key. Annette, who was a novice in motherhood and a scandalously bad educator, found it all charming; she did not have the strength to resist these tyrannical appeals. She would get up ten times during the night rather than hear him groan. And from dawn to dark she let him cling to her breast like a greedy leech. The child could not have been happier, but it was not very good for her.
When she saw her sister again in the spring, Sylvie found her thinner, and she was disturbed. Annette still seemed to be just as happy, but her expression had become a little feverish; the tears came into her eyes at any affectionate word. She admitted that she did not sleep enough, that she did not know how to get proper help, and she felt inadequate before the practical difficulties that arose in regard to the care and health of the child. She said all this, affecting to laugh at her faint-heartedness, but the fine assurance she had felt at the outset had vanished. She was startled to discover that she was not as robust as she had thought; as she had never been ill, she had not known the limits of her strength, and she believed she could use it uncalculatingly. She realized now that these limits were narrow and that she could not pass them with impunity. What a fragile thing life is! At other times this realization would not have affected her. But now that her life was double, and someone else, even more fragile than herself, depended upon this fragile thing. . . . Heavens, what would happen if she disappeared? During her sleepless nights Annette turned this fear over in her mind many a time. . . . She listened to her sleeping child, and at the least change in its respiration, a slightly quicker breath, a cry or even a silence, her own heart stopped beating. And as soon as this anxiety had once entered it took up its abode in her. Annette no longer knew the solemn, carefree calm of the night hours when the motionless body and the thought-free mind, dreaming without sleeping, floated like water-flowers, motionless, on the nocturnal pond. An Elysian quietude, in which the grace that is granted one is only felt by the heart after it has been lost. Henceforth, the watching soul is distrustful every moment. In the most confident moments apprehension lies concealed.
Sylvie was not mistaken. Under Annette's valiant smile, as she joked about her weakness, she perceived how physically disordered she was, perceived her animal need of joining her own kind again. She decided that Annette should leave her retreat and come back and settle in some house in the country a few hours from Paris where Sylvie could see her almost every day and the news of her return would not become known. Annette had no objection, but she insisted upon returning boldly to her own house in Paris. She would not hear of any opposition to this. In vain Sylvie pointed out to her that it would be most unwise, that her peace of mind would be endangered. Annette was immovable. Her pride would not endure anything that looked like running away in the face of public opinion. During the happy year when she had been brooding over the child, she had not thought of public opinion. She had lived alone with her happiness; there was no room for a third person. For several months her happiness had not diminished; she would have liked the world to know of it, and it was painful to her to admit to herself that she must hide it. The constant thought of this had hurt her. What, did she have to conceal as something shameful this jewel that was all her pride? She would seem to be denying it!
"Deny you, my treasure!" She kissed him passionately. "I should not have run away. I should have forced people to accept you from the very beginning. But no more of this secrecy! I shall show you to people and say, 'Look at my beautiful baby! You other mothers haven't anything like him, have you?'”
She returned to Paris and settled there. The daughter of Raoul Rivière knew very well that it would not be so easy to induce people to accept her situation. But although she had inherited her father's contemptuous attitude towards the world, she had not acquired from him the habit of yielding outwardly to its prejudices in order to escape from it all the more effectively. She meant to face it down and get the better of it.
Her first experience was favorable enough. In Annette's absence her old Aunt Victorine had remained in charge of the house, as she had done now for many years. This diminutive person of more than sixty had a fresh complexion, unwrinkled cheeks and tight little ringlets close about her face. Calm, gentle, inoffensive, excessively timid, she had kept herself sheltered from everything that might have disturbed her. From her childhood Annette had always seen this Dame Trot of an aunt about the house, looking after all the bothersome domestic duties, seeing that everything was clean and comfortable and watching over the kitchen (for she was an epicure), playing the part of an old family servant for whom, just because she was part of the household furniture, nobody put himself out. Her opinions had no weight; as a matter of fact, she had none. In the course of the thirty years she had passed under her brother's roof Aunt Victorine might have seen and heard strange things. But she had seen nothing, heard nothing. It would have required force to make her see what she did not wish to see. Raoul had taken no precautions. In his circle of intimates he called her the deaf-mute of his seraglio. He made fun of her to her face, fooled her, was rude to her, called her a blockhead, made her cry, and then coaxed her back into a good humor, gave her a noisy smack on both cheeks and induced her to coddle him as if he had been a big boy. She had remembered him as a man with a heart of gold, indeed as a saint—which would have amused him very much in his grave if, for a Raoul Rivière, a tireless lover of the superficial things of this world, anything that lay beneath had been worth so much as a smile.
It would not have been difficult for Annette to impress upon Aunt Victorine's eyes an equally advantageous image of her personality. She had inherited, along with the house, the worship which the old family tabby rendered to the master. The only thing that was necessary was not to disturb her illusions. Annette hesitated a long time before making up her mind to do so. She had kept her aunt in ignorance of her adventure. In leaving Paris she had used her health and her desire to travel as a pretext. Far as this was from corresponding with the facts, her aunt had appeared to believe it; she was not inquisitive and shrank from hearing anything that might upset her. But, sooner or later, she had to know the truth. Sylvie, after the child's birth, undertook to inform her. The poor woman was completely taken aback. It was very hard for her to understand the situation; she had never been brought face to face with anything of the kind. She sent Annette several frantic letters, so incoherent that Annette might have thought—at her age people have no pity—that Aunt Victorine herself had just had the baby. She consoled her as best she could. Sylvie was convinced that the old lady would leave the house. But to leave the house was the last thought that could have entered Aunt Victorine's head. For the rest, her mind was thrown into the most inextricable confusion. She was quite incapable of giving any advice, for advice was what she herself needed. The only thing she could do was to lament. But one does not live by lamentation, and, as one has to live in spite of everything, she ended by discovering in Annette's misfortune a trial sent by heaven. She was beginning to get used to it, in the absence of her niece, whose removal kept the disgraceful occurrence at a distance, when Annette announced that she was coming back.
Annette was deeply moved on her return home. Sylvie had come to the station to meet her. Aunt Victorine could not make up her mind to do this; and, when she heard the house-door opening, she precipitately mounted the stairs which she had half descended and ran and shut herself up in her room. There Annette found her in tears. Her aunt, throwing her arms about her, repeated, "My poor child! How is it possible? How is it possible?"
Annette, more disturbed than she wished to appear, assumed an air of assurance and said bluntly, with a laugh, "There will be time enough to explain it all. Let's go down to dinner now."
The old lady allowed herself to be led downstairs. She continued to whimper. Annette said to her, "Hush, hush, dear aunt! You mustn't cry."
Her aunt tried to remember what she had wanted to say. There were a good many things, lamentations, rebukes, questions, exclamations. But out of them all she could extract nothing: nothing emerged but one great sigh after another. Annette took her at once into the presence of the baby, who was sleeping blissfully, its whole little body relaxed and plump, its head thrown back. She fell into an ecstasy and clasped her hands: the old retainer's heart instantly swore fealty to the new head of the house. From this moment, young once more, she attached herself to the chariot of the little god. At times she remembered that, in spite of all, he was an object of scandal, and she found herself in confusion again. Annette, talking with an affected indifference, watched with the corner of her eye the good old face that was growing so long. "Come, what's the matter?" she asked. "You must give some reason."
Once more Aunt Victorine began her confused lamentations.
"Yes," said Annette, drumming with her fingers. "Yes . . . But, after all, what's to be done? Would you like to have us lose our dear little boy?"
(She knew very well what she was doing in making a point of this coaxing "our.")
Her superstitious aunt, quite upset, protested, "Annette, don't say that. It's dangerous. How can you say such things?"
"Well, then, you mustn't look that way. As long as our little one is here, as long as he has come, what are we going to do about it? What better can we do than to love him and be happy?"
Her aunt might have replied, "Yes, but why should he have come?" But she no longer had the strength to wish him away. Morality might have wished it. The world and religion. Dignity and peace of mind. Peace of mind, above all, perhaps. Her innermost thought, which she did not confess to herself, was, "Heaven help us! If only that unhappy child had not told me anything about it!"
In the end, as it was impossible to reconcile contradictory thoughts, Aunt Victorine ceased to think at all. Abandoning herself to instinct, she became the old hen that has spent her life bringing up the chicks of others. She accepted it.
But Annette had no particular reason to congratulate herself. There are allies who bring more trouble than help. Through her aunt, annoyances from outside speedily began to reach Annette. Madame Victorine was a gossip, and she lent her ear to everything the neighborhood had to say about her niece's return. She would come running home, bathed in tears, to repeat it to Annette. Annette would scold her affectionately, but she could not help being affected by this stupid tittle-tattle. When the old woman came in she would wonder now with a shiver, "What is she going to tell me this time?"
She forbade her to talk. But when her aunt was silent, it was even worse, thanks to what she did not say, her sighs, her look of distress. And Annette was storing up an increasing irritation against this poisonous public opinion which she pretended to ignore.
If she had been prudent she would at least have avoided occasions for coming in contact with it. But she was too much alive to be prudent. People are only prudent when they have suffered from not being so. Human nature is so made that Annette, who contemptuously turned her back on the judgment of the world, burned to know what people were saying behind her back. And, dreading every morning that the day would not pass without bringing her the echo of some disturbing remark, she was ready to go out in search of them when no such remarks came. She was spared the trouble. From her family, from her cousins of both sexes, with whom she maintained only the most distant connection, she received scandalized letters and lectures that she could hardly endure. Their claim to pose as judges of her conduct and champions of the family honor should have seemed less irritating than grotesque to one who, like Annette, had been only too well informed by her father about the secret history of the family and knew how to take the measure of these Aristarchuses. But Annette was in no laughing mood: she would seize her pen and send off a biting reply, which added spite to their other motives for condemning her and rendered the latter implacable.
These austere censors could invoke as an excuse for their intervention the much abused but still customary rights of relationship. But what rights did strangers have to be severe with her, strangers who were not harmed in any way because she did as she chose with herself? Meeting in the street some amiable society woman in whose drawing-room she had once been received, she would stop to exchange a few civil words. The other, looking her over curiously and letting her talk, scarcely answering herself, would presently pass on with a cold politeness. One woman, to whom Annette had written asking for some information, did not reply. Pursuing her inquiry, Annette wrote to a friend of her mother's, an old lady whom she respected and who had shown some affectionate feeling for herself; she suggested going to see her. In reply came an embarrassed letter, expressing regret that the latter was unable to receive her: she was leaving Paris. These little constantly repeated affronts wounded Annette's sensibility. She was afraid of other rebuffs, but the strange thing was that this fear led her nervously to provoke them.
For example, in the case of her friend Lucile Cordier. The two young women had known each other for a long time. In the society where they moved Lucile was the person whom Annette liked best; and without being very intimate they had always enjoyed seeing each other. Annette learned from her aunt that Lucile's sister was going to be married. She had had no word of this from Lucile. She wrote to congratulate her. Lucile remained silent. Annette knew she ought not to insist. And yet she did insist, through a strange need of being sure, of suffering.
She went to Lucile's house. There was a sound of voices in the drawing-room. It was her day at home. Annette remembered this just as she entered the room. It was too late to turn back. The conversation was animated. A dozen persons, almost all known to Annette. At her appearance the voices stopped point-blank. Only for a few seconds. Annette, anxious, but feeling that she was committed to a fight, entered. With a smile on her lips, without looking to right or left, she went up to Lucile. Lucile rose, embarrassed. Small and blonde, with half-open, caressing, gentle and yet shrewd eyes, a tired little smile, a mouse-like expression and rather prominent teeth, lively, indifferent to people and ideas while appearing to be devoted to the former and attached to the latter, she was cautious, weak, and not very frank; she liked to please; she was anxious not to fall out with anyone and to get along with everyone. So far as she was concerned, Annette's conduct had not troubled her at all. Her sharp, inquisitive nose, always on the alert, was amused by scandal. The adventure struck her as absurd and would merely have diverted her if, from the worldly point of view, it had not been embarrassing. When Annette wrote to her that she was coming back, Lucile had thought, "What bad luck! How am I going to answer her?"
She did not want to hurt Annette. On the other hand, she did not wish to run the risk of being misjudged. Not being able to think of anything to say in reply, she had put it off from day to day. She expected to see Annette, but later (there was no hurry about it!)—when people would not know about it. This did not prevent her from talking at Annette's expense and assuming a scandalized air when she was with others.
And now Annette's sudden appearance placed her—("This is too much!")—under the obligation of making an immediate choice. Lucile was much more angry with Annette for playing this mean trick on her than for having had a child. ("Two, if she likes, if she would only leave me alone!")
With a furious little light in her eyes that was quickly extinguished, she took the hand that Annette held out to her, answering her smile with that honeyed smile of her own which Annette knew so well. (No one could resist its tender seductiveness.) It lasted only for a moment. With all those eyes flashing about her, with every ear alert, Lucile at once perceived the irony of the company. Instantly her expression froze; after a few words of welcome she affectedly resumed the interrupted conversation, and with an unexpressed understanding everyone began to talk again.
Annette, left outside the conversation, realized that she was rejected. But she did not accept this at all. She knew the weakness of Lucile's character. Armed with her proud smile, seated in the midst of a group which, without appearing to see her, seemed to be wholly occupied in exchanging words that were as empty as they were lively, she glanced about with her calm eyes at everybody in the room. The glances of the others, meeting hers, turned aside to avoid her. One pair of eyes, however, did not have time to escape. They remained fixed upon her, full of annoyance and spite. Annette recognized the large doll-like face of Marie-Louise de Baudru, the daughter of a rich lawyer, the wife of a judge, whose family had always remained socially on cordial terms with the Rivières while cherishing towards them a deep-seated antipathy. Marie-Louise de Baudru incarnated in her stout person the most substantial qualities of the upper bourgeoisie: order, probity, the lack of curiosity, of charity, especially of intelligence, all the legal virtues, a firm verbal faith, empty as a butcher's shop of doubts and thought, and the religious worship of propriety, all the proprieties, her family, her property, her country, her Church, her moral code, her tradition and her negations. In short, a massive and compact ego like a block obstructing the sun. No room, near her, for the tub of Diogenes! Nothing was so repugnant to the Baudrus as independence of any kind, religious, moral, intellectual, political or social. A natural aversion! They confounded all its forms under the common taunt of "anarchism." This anarchism they had always suspected in the Rivières. And instinctively Marie-Louise, like the rest of her family, had distrusted Annette. She could not pardon the liberty which Annette had enjoyed in her education and her life as a young girl. There may have been a touch of envy in these unkind judgments. One sole consideration kept her from expressing them, the Rivières' fortune. Wealth commands esteem: it is one of the pillars—the firmest—of the social order. But this is on condition that it does not disturb the basis of everything, the legally established family. The supporters of society are on the watch there: hands off! Annette had struck at the cardinal principles. The watch-dog had awakened, though it held its peace, for it does not bark in society. But its look spoke for it, Annette perceived the bitterest scorn in that of Marie-Louise de Baudru. Her eyes rested calmly on those of her plump judge; and, addressing her with a little familiar bow, she forced her to respond. Marie-Louise, choking with anger at not being able to resist the injunction, bowed also, avenging herself by giving her coldest look. Annette had already turned indifferently away, and her eyes, which were making the tour of the drawing-room, returned to Lucile.
Quite unembarrassed, she threw herself into the conversation that had begun. She cut into the story Lucile was telling with a general remark and obliged her to reply. They had to make room for her. They could not help listening to her politely, with interest and even pleasure, for she was so witty. But they did not reply, their minds wandered, they talked about other things. The conversation died away, started up again in little bursts, jumping from subject to subject. In the silence Annette heard herself talking in a detached tone, and she listened to her own voice as if it were that of a stranger: true woman that she was, fine, sensitive and proud, she missed none of these little humiliations. Accustomed from childhood to understand and use the equivocal language of drawing-rooms, she could divine, under the veil of deliberate inattentiveness, dubious smiles, disingenuous politeness, the wounds that were intended for her. She was hurt, but she laughed, and she went on talking. The others were thinking, "What poise that girl has!"
Lucile took advantage of the departure of one of the guests to accompany her to the door and escape from Annette. The latter found herself abandoned to a group that had made up its mind to ignore her. Giving up any attempt to prolong the ordeal, she was on the point of rising to leave in turn when, crossing the drawing-room, Marcel Franck approached her. He had come in some time before, though she had not noticed him, for all her attention was occupied by her effort not to yield to the discouragement that was overcoming her. And as, with a humorous pity, he watched her talking, he admired her pride. He said to himself, "What made you come here and brave these idiots? Crazy little thing! It's enough to wring one's heart."
He decided to lend her a helping hand. He bowed to her pleasantly. Annette's grateful eyes lighted up. Everybody about them became silent, all those hard, watching faces. "Well," he said, "so the globe-trotter is back again. Have you had enough of 'contemplé son azur, ô Méditerranée'?"
He wanted to turn the conversation to some harmless subject. But what demon drove her on? Pride, the instinct of bravado, or simply frankness? She replied gaily, "So far as the azure is concerned, I have scarcely contemplated anything for months but my baby's eyes."
A little breeze of irony passed over those who were near them. Smiles and glances were discreetly exchanged. But Marie-Louise de Baudru rose indignantly; red, with her stout breast swollen with enough angry contempt to burst her gown, she pushed back her chair and, without bowing to anyone, started for the door and went out. The temperature of the drawing-room fell several degrees. Annette remained alone in her corner with Marcel Franck. He looked at her, sorry for her, half banteringly, and murmured, "You are imprudent."
"How imprudent?" she asked in a clear voice.
She seemed to be looking for something at her feet. Then she rose, without haste, and, coldly bowing and bowed to, went out.
No one who saw her in the street, walking along with her rhythmic step, her head high, her cool, correct, indifferent air, would have suspected the storm of contempt that was making her wounded heart leap. But, once in the Boulogne house, she shut herself up in her room with the child and pressed him to her with bitter tears. And she laughed defiantly.
There were plenty of interesting houses in Paris where Annette would have been honorably received—especially in the society that should have been familiar to the daughter of Rivière the architect, among those artists who live on the fringe of social Philistia, who, though they are endowed with the traditional family spirit, have no prejudices and carry the bourgeois virtues even into free unions. But Annette had little acquaintance among the women of the artistic world. With a very orderly mind and reserved manners that were anything but Bohemian, she had little taste for their habits and conversation, though she had plenty of respect for their great qualities of courage, good nature and endurance. For it is certainly true that in ordinary life relations are founded much less on respect than on a community of instincts and habits. Besides, Raoul Rivière had long ago dropped his old companions. As soon as his success had permitted him to enter the sphere of wealth and official honors, this man of strong appetites had broken with the haud aurea mediocritas. He had been too intelligent not to appreciate the society of men who worked more than that of the Parisian drawing-rooms which he criticized among his intimates with cruel irony, but he had established himself in the latter because it gave him a wider pasturage. He had managed to escape secretly into other and very mixed circles, where he was able to satisfy his passion for pleasure and his need of unrestrained independence, for he led a double or triple life. But few were aware of this, and his daughter had had no knowledge of anything but his outward and business life.
Annette's social circle was virtually limited to this rich and more or less distinguished upper bourgeoisie which, as a new reigning class, has ended by diligent effort in creating for itself a shadow of tradition. Indeed, along with the other attributes of power, it has purchased the lamp of enlightenment—a lamp, however, that only shines from under a heavy shade and dreads nothing so much as being moved, nothing so much as the enlarging of the illumined circle on the table; for the least change of position threatens to destroy its certitudes. Annette, who instinctively loved the light, had sought for it where she could, in those university studies which in her set were regarded as pretentious. But the light she had found there had been much filtered; it was the light of lecture-rooms and libraries, refracted, never direct. There Annette had acquired a certain boldness of thought that was entirely abstract and did not prevent the best of her comrades from being timid and completely chaotic in the face of reality. Another film was interposed between her eyes and the daylight outside, her fortune. In spite of all she could do, this barrier separated her from the general community. Annette did not suspect how shut in she was. That is the other side of wealth: it is a privileged enclosure, but an enclosure none the less, a garden that is walled in.
And this was not all. Now that she had to leave her circle, Annette, who, for a long time, had fearlessly considered what was awaiting her, did not want to do so. Let him who disapproves of the illogical condemn her! Man—woman still less—is not all of a piece, especially at those transitional ages when the instincts of revolt and rebirth are mingled with the conservative habits that paralyze them. One cannot at a stroke liberate oneself from the prejudices of one's environment and the needs one has acquired. Even the freest souls cannot do so. One has regrets, doubts, one wants to lose nothing, one wants to have everything. Annette, in her sincerity, with her need of love, with her need of being free, with her desire not to be false, was still anxious not to sacrifice her acquired advantages. She was willing to withdraw from her social set; she could not endure being rejected by it; she could not accept the idea of forfeiting it. And her youthful pride, which life had not yet forced to lower its crest, refused to seek asylum in another environment that was socially more humble, even if she respected it more. This, in the eyes of the world, would have been to admit that she was conquered. It was better to be isolated than déclassée.
Trifling as these considerations were, they were not unreasonable. In the struggle between the conventions of a class and one of its revolting members who braves them, the class, which forms a solid block against the imprudent soul as it casts him forth, drives him elsewhere and watches for his weaknesses in order to justify its interdiction.
In the world of Nature as soon as a symptom of weakness appears, and some creature reveals itself as an object of prey, spider-webs are stretched about it. There is nothing unfair about this, nothing sinister. It is merely the natural law. Nature is always hunting. Everyone in turn is hunter or hunted. Annette was the hunted.
The hunters made their appearance. All unsuspecting, Annette received a call from her friend Marcel Franck.
She was alone in the house. The baby had gone out for his daily airing; her aunt was with him. Annette, who was rather tired, was resting in her room. She was not expecting to see anyone, but when Marcel's card was brought to her she gladly sent word for him to come in. She was grateful to him for having taken her part at Lucile's. Not that he had compromised himself. But she had not expected that.
Stretched out in her chaise longue, she received him unceremoniously as an old friend. She was still in her morning négligé. Since she had become a mother, she had lost her devotion to order and the meticulous correctness that Sylvie had teased her about. Marcel was the last person to mind this. He found her prettier than ever, with a fresh, attractive plumpness, a gentle languor, a dewy look in her eyes which were softened with happiness. Annette talked quite without reserve; she was pleased to see once more the discerning confidant of her old hesitations. She liked his intelligence, his intellectual tact; he inspired confidence in her. Franck revealed all his old cordiality and fine comprehension, but from the beginning of the conversation she was struck by the suggestion of a new familiarity in his manner.
They recalled their last meeting before Annette's unfortunate visit at the Brissots' in Burgundy, and Annette agreed that Marcel had seen all too clearly what was going to happen. She was anxious to speak of the impossibility of her marriage to Roger, but a blush spread over her face as it occurred to her that Marcel looked at the whole matter in quite a different way and considered it a joke. Marcel remarked mischievously, "You saw it as well as I." And he laughed at the turn the adventure had taken.
He had the air of being a sort of accomplice. Annette was confused, and she concealed her feeling with a touch of irony. Marcel went a step further: "You saw it much better than I did. We men are absurd enough to believe that we can teach women out of our own precious wisdom, and we get caught instead when, with their insidious voices, their big, beautiful eyes, they anxiously ask us what they ought to do. They know very well. They flatter our folly. We love to teach, but they can give us cards and spades. When I foretold that you would not be caught in the Brissots' net, I never suspected that you would escape from its meshes in such a masterly way. It was a wonderful stroke. Well done! What can't you do when you set your mind on it! I compliment you on your courage." Annette listened to this with a feeling of embarrassment. How strange it was! She had undertaken to vindicate her right to behave as she had done; the other day, at Lucile's, she had been ready to affirm it against the whole universe. But it made her uncomfortable to hear herself praised in this tone by Marcel. Her modesty and her dignity were hurt. "Don't compliment me," she said. "I have less courage than you think. I didn't desire in advance what has happened. I never thought of it."
Then, seized with a scruple and too proud to lie, she continued, "I am mistaken. Yes, I did think of it. But only to fear it, not to desire it. And that is what remains incomprehensible to me. How could I have let it happen, the thing I feared, that I didn't want?"
"Quite natural," said Marcel. "What we fear hypnotizes us. After all, it doesn't follow that because we fear a thing we don't desire it. But everyone does not dare to do what he is afraid to do. You did dare. You dared to make a mistake. One has to make mistakes in life. We learn through our mistakes, and we must learn. Only, while you were daring, I do think, my friend, that you might have taken precautions. Your partner seems to me very much to blame for having left you with this burden to bear."
Annette, a little shocked, said, "It is not a burden to me."
Marcel supposed that Annette in her generosity wanted to excuse Roger. "You still love him?" he asked.
"Whom?" Annette asked.
"Good!" said Marcel, laughing. "Evidently you don't still love him."
"I love my baby," said Annette. "The rest belongs to the past. And, as for the past, one no longer feels sure that it ever existed. One doesn't understand it any more. It's sad."
"That has its charm too," said Marcel.
"Not for me," said Annette. "I am not a dilettante. But my son is the present, and it is a present that will last longer than I."
"The present that repulses us, the present to which we in turn shall be the past some day."
"So much the worse for me!" said Annette. "Even so, it will be good to be trampled on by his little feet."
Marcel laughed at this passionate outburst. "You can't understand me," said Annette. "You have not seen Marc, my little masterpiece. And even if you saw him, you wouldn't know how to look at him. You are a good judge of pictures, statues, useless knick-knacks. You couldn't judge that unique marvel, the body of a little child. It would do no good for me to describe him to you."
She did describe him, however, lovingly and at length. She laughed at her own ardent, exaggerated expressions, but she could not keep them back. She broke off as she saw Marcel's indulgent, bantering look. "I am boring you. Excuse me! You don't understand, do you?"
"Of course." Marcel understood. Marcel understood everything. Everyone to his own taste. He would not dispute that.
"In short," he said, "to sum it up, you have blossomed out into maternity. You have flown in the face of public order and the family as established by law. And, far from regretting it, you defy authority."
"What authority?" Annette asked. "I defy nothing."
"Well, then, public opinion, tradition, the Code Napoléon."
"I have nothing to do with all these things."
"That's the worst kind of defiance, the kind people will never pardon. But so be it! You have broken with everything, you have rid yourself of the whole clan. What are you going to do now?"
"Just what I did before."
Marcel looked sceptical.
"What, do you think I can't live as I used to do?"
"It would hardly be worth while. And besides . . ."
Marcel unhappily recalled the call at Lucile's: if she wished to resume her old place in society Annette would meet with little success. She knew this: it was unnecessary for anyone to tell her, and in her wounded pride she had no desire to repeat the experience. But she was surprised by Marcel's insistence in pointing this out to her; he was usually more tactful.
"Well," she said, "it matters very little now that I have my child."
"But you can't reduce your existence merely to him."
"I don't think that would be reducing it. Enlarging it, I should say. I see a world in him, a world that is going to grow. I shall grow with it."
With much solicitude and no less irony, Marcel set to work to prove to her that this world would not be enough for a nature as eager and exacting as hers. With knitted brows and a pang at her heart Annette listened to him. Mentally, in her irritation, she protested, "No, no!"
She could not help being anxious, however, when she remembered that once before Marcel had had such clear foresight. But why was he so bent upon convincing her of it? Why should he take so much trouble to prove to her that she should profit by the liberty she had won, that she should not be afraid of living on the fringe of society? (He called it "outside and above the bourgeois conventions.")
There were in Annette two or three Annettes who always bore one another company. As a general thing, only one spoke while the others listened. Just now two of them were speaking at once: the passionate, sentimental Annette who was the victim of her impressions and their willing dupe, and another who observed and was amused at the hidden motives of the heart. She had good eyes. She saw through Marcel. They had changed places. Formerly it had been he who read her secret thoughts. To-day, to-day there had come to Annette (just when?—exactly from the moment of her 'metamorphosis') an insight into souls and their secret movements—intermittent, to be sure—the novelty of which surprised and amused her in the midst of her anxieties.
Stretched out in her chair, with her head thrown back, her arms behind her neck and her mouth slightly open, she studied the ceiling; but out of the corner of her half-closed eyes she watched Marcel as he talked. She could have uttered in advance the words he was about to say; she could have sworn what was going to happen. With an amused curiosity that was a little sarcastic, for which she reproached herself, she let him go on.
(One must see and know, as he said just now, one must learn . . . learn. . . .)
She was learning to understand a friend.
(Yes, I understand you. . . . An Annette fallen from the tree would be good to pick up again. He is gently shaking the tree to make her tumble off. He is speculating on Annette's confusion. And yet he is in love with her. Yes, he is certainly in love with her. Not very bright, brother man! His voice begins to have a coaxing sound. See how tender he is growing. And now, look out! I wager he is going to bend over me.)
Several seconds in advance she foresaw Marcel's blond beard leaning towards her; she foresaw the caressing mouth that was about to alight on hers. She wanted to spare him the humiliation. And just at the exact moment she rose, and, with her outstretched hands, gently pushed Marcel's shoulders away.
"Good-bye, my friend," she said.
Marcel looked into those penetrating eyes that were scrutinizing him with a little malice in their depths. He smiled. He had been mistaken. But it had been a good battle. He was perfectly aware that, with all the calmness in the world, he had been given his dismissal. And yet, of this he was sure, Annette's feeling towards him was not one of indifference. Let whoever could understand it! The strange girl was escaping him.
Marcel did not reappear, and Annette took no steps to bring him back. They were still friends, but each was angry with the other. Just because Annette's feeling towards Marcel was not one of indifference, she was touched by what she had seen in him. She was not offended by this; it was the old story . . . Too old a story! . . . No, Annette had no grievance against Marcel. Only, only she could not forget what had happened! That is the way it is with forgivenesses granted by the mind which the heart does not ratify. Secretly bitter, she was forced to recognize, even more through Marcel's too free attempt than through the harsh welcome she had encountered in Lucile's drawing-room, that her situation was changed. She realized that she was no longer protected by the conventional consideration that society accords to those of its members who appear to submit to its laws. She would have to defend herself alone. She was exposed.
She closed her door to the world. She took care not to tell Sylvie of the experiences she had had; Sylvie had predicted them and she would be triumphant. She kept her secret and shut herself up with her child. She had decided henceforth to live only for him.
When little Marc came back from his airing in the evening, after Marcel's call, she welcomed him with transports. He laughed when he saw her and stretched out to her his four wriggling paws. She fell on him as a starved wolf falls on its prey; she devoured him with kisses; she pretended to eat every morsel of his body; she thrust his little feet into her mouth; and as she undressed him she tickled him from head to foot with her lips. "Yum-yum! I'm going to eat you up! That fool!" she exclaimed, calling him to witness. "That fool who had the impudence to tell me that you would not be enough for me! What insolence! You not enough for me, my king, my little god! Tell me that you are my little god! And what am I then? The little god's mother! The world belongs to us! All the things we are going to do together! See everything, have everything, try everything, taste everything, create everything!"
And indeed they did create everything. To discover and to create, are they not the same thing? To invent is to find. One finds what one invents, one discovers what one creates, what one dreams of, what one draws up from the fish-pond of one's musings. For the two of them, mother and child, it was the hour of great discoveries. The first words of the little boy, the game of exploration, when one measures the world with one's arms and legs. Every morning Annette, with her child, set out for conquest. She enjoyed it as much as he, perhaps more. It seemed to her that she was reliving her own childhood, but with complete consciousness and complete joy. He, the gay little soul, was full of joy too. He was a beautiful child, healthy, chubby all over, a little pink pig just ready for the spit. ("What else could you expect?" as Sylvie said.) In his plump, elastic body there was too much compressed force; he was like a rubber ball that insists upon bouncing. Every new contact with life threw him into a clamorous delight. The enormous power of dreaming that belongs to every baby amplified his discoveries and prolonged the vibrations of happiness into veritable chimes of bells. Annette was never behind him; it was as if they were having a contest as to who should be the happiest and make the most noise. Sylvie said that Annette was crazy, but she would have behaved the same way herself. And after this tumult they would both have hours of absolute, delicious, exhausted silence. The little one, tired out after so much movement, slept obliviously. Annette was dropping with fatigue, but for a long time she would refuse to go to sleep in order to enjoy the other's slumber; and the fire of her love, driven back into her heart, hidden like the light of a candle behind one's hand so as not to awaken the little sleeper, burned with a long silent flame that rose upward to heaven. She prayed . . . Mary beside the manger . . . She prayed to the child.
These months were still beautiful and shining. But they were not as pure as those of the previous year. Less limpid. They were full of an exalted, excessive joy that was a little exaggerated.
A vigorous, healthy nature like Annette's must create, perpetually create, create with its whole being, body and spirit. Create, or else brood over the creation that is to be. It is a necessity, and happiness comes only through satisfying it. Every creative period has its own limited field, and its rising force follows a trajectory that descends again sharply. Annette had passed the summit of the curve. Nevertheless, the transport of creation persists in the mother for a very long time after childbirth. Suckling prolongs the transfusion of the blood, and invisible bonds keep the two bodies in communication. The creative abundance of the spirit of the infant compensates for the impoverishment of the spirit of the mother. The river that is running out tries to replenish itself from the stream that is flowing over. It becomes a torrent so as to merge with the little torrent. But strive as it may, the little one outruns it. The child was already withdrawing into the distance. Annette had difficulty in following him.
Before he was able to frame a complete sentence he already had his little hidden thoughts, cupboards of which he kept the keys. Heaven knew what he concealed there: his reflexions on people, his scraps of reasoning, odds and ends of images, sensations, play-words the sound of which amused him, though he did not know what they meant, a singing monologue that had no sequence, no end, no beginning. He was perfectly well aware, perhaps not of what he was hiding, but that he was hiding something. For the more one tried to find out what he was thinking, the more mischievously he refused to let one know. He even amused himself sometimes putting one off the track; with his little tongue, which was as clumsy as his hands, as it stumbled about among the syllables, he was already trying to lie, to mystify people. It was a pleasure to prove his own importance to others and to himself by making fun of those who tried to penetrate into his private domain. This scrap of a being, scarcely born, had the fundamental instinct of the mine that is not yours—of "You shan't have any of my peanuts." His whole wealth lay in fragments of thoughts: he built walls to hide them from his mother's eyes. And she, with that lack of foresight which is common to all mothers, was proud that he knew so well how to say the No with which he so early manifested his personality. She haughtily proclaimed, "He has a will of iron."
She thought she had forged this iron herself. But against whom?
Against herself, to begin with; for, in the eyes of this little ego, she was the not-I, the external world, a habitable external world, of course, warm, soft and milky, that one could exploit, that one wanted to dominate. External to the I . . . I am not it. I possess it. But it does not possess me!
No, she did not possess him! She began to feel it; this Lilliputian intended to belong to no one but himself. He needed her, but she needed him: the child's instinct told him so. In all probability, this instinct, guarded by his egocentricity, told him that she needed him much more and that it was therefore quite fair for him to abuse it. And, heaven knows, this was true: she did need him much more.
"Well, fair or not, abuse me, little monster! Just the same, it's no use, you can't get along without me for a long time yet. I hold you. There, I plunge you into your bath. Protest, young carp! . . . He looks insulted; his mouth is open, as if this little personage were choking with indignation at being treated like a bundle. . . . And I turn you and turn you again! Heavens, what music! You are going to be a singer, my son. Well, cry out your do-re-me. Bravo! You do the singing, but it's I who make you dance. . . . Isn't it a shame for me to abuse your weakness in this way? Oh, how mean this mother is! Poor midget! Well, you'll avenge yourself on her when you are grown up. Meanwhile, protest! In spite of your dignity, look, I'm going to kiss you on your little behind."
He kicked. She laughed. But it was in vain she held him; she held only the shell. The animal within escaped into his burrow. Every day he became more difficult to grasp. It was a loving chase, a passionate struggle. But it was a struggle, a chase. One had to keep one's wind.
The thousand little regular attentions that a baby demands fill the days. Simple, monotonous as they are, they do not allow one to think of anything else. Aside from him, always him, one's mind is in shivers. The swiftest thought is interrupted ten times over. The child invades everything; this little mass of flesh blocks one's horizon. Annette did not complain. She did not even have time to regret it. She lived in a plenitude of busy fatigue that was a blessing to her at first, but that gradually became an obscure weariness. One's strength is used up, one's soul wanders aimlessly: it does not stay where one has left it. It follows its way like a sleep-walker, and when it awakens it does not know where it is. Annette woke up one day conscious of a load of fatigue that had been accumulating for months, and an indefinable shadow mingled with the joy that dwelt in her.
She was unwilling to attribute this to anything but physical exhaustion; and to prove to herself that her happiness was in no way altered she manifested it in more clamorous effusions than were necessary. Especially before others, as if she were afraid that they would discover in her what she did not wish to be seen. This exaggerated gaiety was followed later, when she was alone, by depression. Sadness? No. An obscure uneasiness, a vague restlessness, the feeling, which she repressed, of a partial dissatisfaction. Not that she expected anything from outside (she could still get along without that), but she suffered from the unemployment of a part of her nature. Certain forces of the mind had been at a standstill for a long time; the economy of her being had undergone a disturbance. Annette, deprived of society, driven back upon herself alone and feeling the sting of a nostalgia that she tried to stifle, tried to find a resource in the company of books. But the volumes remained open at the same page; the brain had become unaccustomed to the effort of following the unfolding chain of the words; the continual breaks which the constant preoccupation with the child made in her thought dislocated her attention and shook it, somnolent and enervated as it was, as a moored ship dances on the current without the power either to advance or to remain still. Instead of reacting, Annette remained shut up in herself, musing drowsily over the open book; or she tried to divert herself in a flood of passionate nonsense with the child. Sylvie, who saw that she could not find expression for her multiple energy with the little one, said to her, "You should go out more, take exercise, walk as you used to do."
For the sake of peace, Annette said she would go out, but she did not budge. She had a reason which she kept to herself: she was afraid of meeting her old friends and exposing herself to some slight, some coldly distant greeting. A superficial reason which she gave herself. In former times she would have ignored these petty offences, but now she had a neurasthenic tendency to avoid all contacts. Then why not leave Paris and live in the country, as Sylvie advised? She did not say she would not, but she did nothing; it involved making a decision, and she was not willing to stir from her torpor.
So she allowed her motionless days to float along, without a wave, like a becalmed sea that is preparing to ebb. An interlude, an apparent arrest in the eternal rhythm of respiration: the breath is suspended. Joy is tiptoeing away. Trouble is approaching on muffled feet. The trouble has not yet come. But a nescio quid warns one: "Do not move!" It is waiting outside the door.
It entered. But it was not what she had expected. It is useless to attempt to foresee happiness or trouble. When they arrive they are never what we have looked for.
One night when, suspended between sky and sea, on the borders of happiness and melancholy, Annette was skirting the cape of sleep, without knowing whether she was on this side of it or that, she became aware of a danger. Unaware whence it was coming or what it was, she collected her strength to fly to the help of the child who was sleeping near her. For already her consciousness, which never slept without one ear open, had realized that he was threatened. She forced herself to awaken and listened anxiously. She was not mistaken. Even when she was sound asleep the slightest alteration in the breathing of the dear little creature reached her. The respiration of the child was hurried; by a mysterious osmosis, Annette felt the oppression in her own chest. She turned on the light and leaned over the cradle. The little one was not awake; he was sleeping uneasily; his face was not red, which seemed to the mother a reassuring symptom; she touched his body, found the skin dry, the extremities cold; she covered him more warmly. This seemed to quiet him. She watched him for a few minutes, then turned out the light, trying to persuade herself that the alarm would not be repeated. But after a brief respite the hoarse breathing began again. Annette deceived herself as long as she possibly could. "No, he is not breathing harder or more quickly. It's only that I am agitated."
As if her will could impose itself upon the child, she forced herself to remain motionless. But it was no longer possible to doubt. The oppression was increasing, the breath came more quickly. And with a fit of coughing the child woke up and began to cry. Annette leaped out of bed. She took the child in her arms. He was burning, his face was pale, his lips were blue. Annette was distracted. She called Aunt Victorine, who only added her own agitation to the scene. That very day the telephone had been disconnected for repairs, and there was no way of communicating with the doctor. There was no druggist in the neighborhood. The Boulogne house was isolated; the maid was unwilling to run through the deserted streets at this hour of the night. They would have to wait for morning. And the sickness was growing worse. It was enough to make one lose one's head. Annette very nearly did so; but knowing that she must not she did not. Her aunt, whimpering, fluttered like a fly about the globe of a lamp. Annette said to her harshly, "It does no good to groan. Help me! Or, if you can't do anything, go to sleep and leave me alone. I will save him by myself."
Her aunt, petrified by this, recovered her composure; her long experience as a watcher at sickbeds dispelled Annette's most terrible apprehension, that of diphtheria. Annette retained an unspoken doubt; so did her aunt. One may always be mistaken. And even if it was not diphtheria, there were so many other mortal disorders. Not to know what it was added still more to their fright. But whether or not Annette's heart was frozen with terror, her movements were calm and just what they should have been. Without knowing it, moved by the maternal instinct alone, she did exactly the right thing for the child. (So the doctor told her the next day.) She did not leave him lying on his back for long, she changed his position, she struggled against his fits of suffocation. What neither experience nor science could have taught her the love within her dictated, for she suffered what he suffered. She suffered more. She regarded herself as responsible for it.
Responsible! The tension of an ordeal, especially of an illness that strikes a beloved being, often creates a superstitious state of mind in which one needs to accuse oneself for the suffering of the innocent one. Annette not only reproached herself for not having watched over the child, for having been imprudent with him, but she discovered that she had criminal thoughts in the back of her mind: a passing weariness of the child, the shadow of an unconfessed regret that her life should have been swamped in his. Was it quite certain that she had really felt and repressed this regret, this weariness? No doubt, since they emerged at this moment. But who could say whether she had not invented them through this need she felt, when she was powerless to act in a practical way, to act in thought, even if it meant turning her desperate energies against herself?
She turned them also against the great Enemy, against the unknown God. As she saw the little swollen face, as she breathed her breath into him, softly raising him in her hands with careful movements, she passionately asked his pardon for having brought him into the world, stolen him away from peace, thrown him into this life a prey to suffering, to mischance, to the evil hazards of heaven knew what blind master! And with her flesh creeping, like an animal at the entrance of his burrow, she growled, she sniffed the approach of the great murderous deities; she prepared to fight with them for her child, she bared her teeth. Like every mother whose child is threatened, she was the eternal Niobe who, in order to turn the mortal shaft against herself, hurls her furious defiance at the Murderer.
But no one in Annette's household divined this silent battle.
In the morning the doctor came; he complimented her on her presence of mind and the first steps she had taken—so different from what sometimes happens when an anxious affection spoils everything by its awkwardness. But she only grasped from his words what he said about the epidemics of grippe and measles that were raging in Paris and the possibility that her child had caught the germs of bronchial pneumonia. In refusing to leave Paris, as she had promised to do, she had thus been guilty towards the child. She judged herself pitilessly. This sentence she passed on herself had at least the advantage of limiting the field of her responsibility, for it dispelled any other remorse.
At the first news, Sylvie had arrived hastily, and the little patient had plenty of attention. But Annette, refusing to leave her place, took hardly any rest and remained in the breach during the days, the nights, the days. The perspiration on the little body and its burning suffocation melted her own being. The illness kneaded them into one mass. The child seemed to be aware of this, for in the moments when the fear of an attack of coughing contracted his sides his eyes rested, heavy with reproaches and an appeal for help, on the eyes of the mother. He seemed to be saying, "It's going to hurt me again! There it is coming back! Save me!"
And, pressing him to her, she would reply, "Yes, I shall save you! Don't be afraid, it's not going to get you!"
The attack came, and the child strangled. But he was not alone. She stiffened with him in order to break the noose. He felt that she was struggling, that she, the great protectress, would not abandon him; and the reassuring sound of her gentle voice and the pressure of her fingers gave him confidence, said to him, "I am here."
As he cried and struck the air with his little arms, he knew she would fight it.
And she did fight it, the nameless thing. The illness yielded. The noose relaxed. And the little birdlike body of the child, still palpitating, abandoned itself to the hands that had saved it. How good it was to breathe, the two of them, after that plunge into the depths! The wave of air that streamed through the mouth of the child bathed the throat of the mother and swelled her breasts with an icy pleasure.
These respites were of short duration. The struggle continued, alternating with periods of exhaustion. His condition was improving when the child had a sudden relapse from some unknown cause. His faithful watchers naturally tormented themselves all the more, accusing themselves of some moment of forgetfulness that had threatened his recovery. Annette said to herself, "If he dies, I shall kill myself."
For many nights she had been used to going without sleep; she kept it up as long as the child needed her aid, but during the hours when he slept and her own mind, reassured, might have made the most of this and relaxed, her spirit was more uneasy than ever. It vibrated like a telegraph-wire in the wind. Impossible to close her eyes. It was dangerous for her to lie there facing her distracted brain. Annette would turn on the light again and try to fix her mind upon some definite line of thought in order to escape from this vertigo. But it was only to turn over and over all sorts of superstitious, childish, extravagant ideas—or so they appeared to a mind that was accustomed to rational methods. She told herself that if calamity hung over her it was because she had been too completely happy, and it seemed to her that if her son was to recover she must suffer in some other direction. An obscure, powerful belief in some painful compensation, mounting up from the depths of time. Primitive peoples, in order to placate the ferocious bargaining god, the god who never gives something for nothing and demands cash payments, used to sacrifice their first-born: they purchased with this ransom the safety of the rest of their fortunes. And for her first-born Annette would gladly have given her life and all her wealth.
"Take my all," she said, "but let him live!"
Then at once she thought, "This is absurd. Nobody is listening to me."
It was no use. The old atavistic instinct continued to scent, somewhere about her, the presence of the jealous God. And, holding on, bargaining bitterly, she said, "Let us make an agreement. I am willing to pay on the spot. The child is mine. Take your choice of the rest!"
As if to justify her superstition, events took Annette at her word. One morning, when Aunt Victorine had gone to the lawyer's to get some money that he should have sent them some time before, she came back in tears. That very morning Annette had had the joy of being finally reassured about her child's health. The doctor had just left: this time he had announced that the child was definitely convalescent. Annette, in a transport of happiness, but still trembling, hardly dared to believe in her newly recovered happiness. At this moment she saw the door opening and at the first glance perceived her aunt's broken look. Her heart throbbed as she thought, "What new misfortune has befallen us?"
The old lady could hardly speak. At last she said, "The office is closed. M. Grenu has disappeared."
Annette's whole fortune was in his charge. For a moment she did not understand. Then—explain it if you can—her face cleared. She was relieved. She thought, "Is that all?"
So there it was, the saving calamity! The enemy had taken his portion.
A moment afterward she shrugged her shoulders at her silliness. But in spite of her irony she continued to say to it, "Was that enough? Are you satisfied? Now that I have paid, I owe you nothing more."
She smiled. Poor humanity, clutching at its morsel of happiness and seeing it unceasingly, unceasingly escaping, tries to conclude a pact with blind nature, which it creates in its own image.
"In my image? This envious, rapacious, cruel nature. Is it posable that I resemble it? Who knows? Who can say, 'I am not that'?”
Annette was ruined. She could not yet estimate the extent of her ruin. But when the first moment of aberration had passed, when she coldly examined the situation, she had to admit that she thoroughly deserved it.
She was quite capable of attending to her affairs. Like her father, she had a good hard head; figures had no terrors for her. When one comes of a line of peasants and shrewd, energetic tradesfolk, one must make an actual effort to lose one's assurance in practical matters. But she had been spared all thought about material things as long as her father was alive; and since then she had passed through a long crisis in which the inner travail of her emotional life had held her captive. In this rather abnormal state, maintained by the idleness made possible by her fortune, she had felt a rather unhealthy disgust at paying any attention to her property. It should be said boldly that the idealism of the inner life which despises money as parasitical forgets that it has the right to do so only when it gives up money. The idealism that grows out of a soil of wealth and professes to have no interest in it is the worst form of parasitism.
To escape from the boredom of managing her fortune, she had turned the whole administration of it over to the excellent M. Grenu, her lawyer. An old family friend, a respected man whose honor and professional standing were well known, M. Grenu had for thirty years overseen all the Rivières' affairs as they passed through his office. It was true that Raoul had not allowed any one to manage them without consulting him. However much confidence he may have placed in his lawyer, he never allowed him to make out a deed without verifying every period and comma himself. But after taking all precautions, he did have confidence in him, and when a man of his shrewdness has confidence in another the other must deserve it. M. Grenu did deserve it. As much as anybody in the world (when the precautions were taken) . . .
The rôle of lay confessor, which the lawyer is called upon to play in a family, had placed M. Grenu in possession of many of the Rivières' household secrets. He had been unaware of very few of Raoul's escapades or Mme. Rivière's sorrows. To the former he had lent a sympathetic ear, to the latter an ear equally complacent. As an advisor of the wife he appreciated her virtues; as the companion of Raoul, he appreciated the latter's vices (they were virtues too, Gallic virtues); and it was said that he was not above joining in some of Raoul's select parties. M. Grenu was a little grizzled man in his sixties, delicate in appearance, with a fresh complexion, excessively correct, malicious and smooth-tongued, a good fellow, an amusing actor; he liked to tell stories and would begin in a low, faint voice so that people would take pains to listen to him, a voice so soft that it seemed to be dying; then, when he had won from the audience a pitying silence, he would gradually spread out into a sonorous volume of sound that a big clarinet might have envied, and he would not abandon the stop till the final note when he had finished his song. He was a lawyer of the old school, but a weak man, attracted by the new ways, a good paterfamilias, an old-fashioned bourgeois, proud of being able to count a number of actresses, high livers and light women among his clientele, and it was his hobby to speak of himself as old and even to act so, exaggeratedly; but he was very much afraid of being taken at his word and in secret applied himself ardently to showing that he was livelier than all these young folks and could leave them far behind.
He had known Annette since her childhood, and he had taken her affairs very sincerely to heart. It seemed to him natural that she should confide in him after the death of her parents. With professional correctness, at first, he had scrupulously kept her posted; he was unwilling to do anything without her consent—which only bored Annette. Then he induced her to give him a special power of attorney for this or that transaction of which Annette heard (scarcely heard) a very vague account. And finally it was taken for granted that, since Annette made frequent trips away from Paris, often without leaving her address, M. Grenu would look out for her interests as best he could without consulting her. Thus everything went well: the lawyer took charge of everything, collected Annette's income and provided her with money as she needed it. At last, in order to regularize the situation, he caused her to give him a general power of attorney. . . . Water flowed under the bridges. . . . It was more than a year since Annette had seen M. Grenu, who, punctually, at the beginning of each quarter, turned over to her the amount that was due. Living alone, away from Parisian society, no longer reading the newspapers, she did not hear of events until long after they had happened. Old M. Grenu had tried to be too clever. Without any personal spirit of greed, he had allowed himself to be caught by his fondness for speculation; to increase the funds of his clients, he involved them in risky enterprises in which they were capsized. Then in his attempts to make up their losses he ruined them. Without warning Annette, he had not only disposed of all her ready money and the personal property of which he had charge, but, by certain subterfuges that were permitted by the elastic form of the power of attorney, he had mortgaged the Boulogne house and the house in Burgundy. When all was lost he fled before the ridicule which he knew would follow his downfall and which would perhaps have been more intolerable to him than dishonor.
To crown the misfortune, Annette, entirely absorbed in the child's illness, had not opened her correspondence for several weeks. She had not replied to the letters of the mortgage-holders or the court summons that followed. It was during the days of the child's relapse. Annette had lost her head. Not realizing that they were addressed to her and not to her agent, she sent the papers off without reading them to the lawyer, who did not read them either—for a good reason. He was on the run. When at last the recovery of her child left her mind free enough to examine the situation, the judicial procedure had advanced so far that, in Annette's failure to satisfy the demands of the creditors, the latter had won the right to have the mortgaged property put up for sale. Annette, awakened from her torpor, had to face this stunning blow; with the energy that was restored in an instant and the practical intelligence, inherited from her father, that made up for her inexperience, she fought with a vigor and a clearness of mind which the judge admired even while he decided against her: for her good excuses did not alter the fact that before the law her case was bad. Annette herself saw at once that she had lost in advance, but her fighting instinct, which coolly admitted her defeat, unjust as it was, could not admit it without resistance. Besides, she was concerned now for her child's property. She defended it, step by step, with the tenacity of a rude, shrewd peasant who, bracing her legs at the gate of her field, bars the road to intruders, trying to gain time even though she knows they are coming in. But what could she do? In her inability to pay the sum that was demanded, and not wishing to ask aid from her relatives or from the old friends who would probably have refused it in some humiliating way, she could not stop the sale. Her ingenious, stubborn energy only succeeded in obtaining the suspension, for a limited time, of the proceedings of expropriation, without any hope of preventing their execution after a brief delay.
Annette would have had some excuse if she had been overwhelmed by this catastrophe. Sylvie, who had not been personally injured by it, now burst into lamentations, now angrily talked of nothing but law-suits, law-suits, law-suits. Annette, on the contrary, seemed to have recovered her equilibrium through this very event. The ordeal had cleared the air. The soft, sentimental atmosphere that for two or three years had been cloying her heart was dissipated. When Annette was certain that the situation could not be changed, she accepted it. Without useless recriminations. Unlike Sylvie, who heaped the harshest maledictions on the lawyer's head, she found no comfort in blaming M. Grenu. The old man was in the water. So was she. But she had her youthful arms, and she could swim. Perhaps this thought was not even entirely unpleasant to her. Strange as it may seem, along with the distress of her ruin she had at bottom an inquisitive desire for adventure and even a secret pleasure in putting her unused energies to the test. Raoul would have understood her, Raoul who, at the height of his success, had been seized at moments with a fancy for destroying his life's work just to have the pleasure of rebuilding it.
She prepared now to leave the Boulogne house. The property in Burgundy had already been sold, hastily, on absurd terms. It was certain that the total sale would scarcely cover the debt and the costs, and that, if there remained an available surplus, it would not be enough for the maintenance of Annette and her family; she would have to look for new resources. For the moment, the main thing was to reduce expenses and settle in some very modest establishment. Annette set out to look for an apartment. Sylvie found one for her on the fourth floor of her own house. (She lived on the entresol.) The rooms were small and opened on the court, but they were clean and quiet. It was impossible to bring all the furniture from the Boulogne house here. Annette wanted to keep only what was absolutely necessary. But Aunt Victorine, weeping, begged her to preserve everything. Annette remonstrated that it was not reasonable, in their present situation, to assume the expense of a store-room. They must make a choice, and the old lady begged for each object. Annette firmly chose; aside from the furniture that was to follow them to the new apartment, she kept a few pieces that were particularly dear to her aunt, and the rest were sold.
Sylvie was struck by Annette's insensibility. But it was impossible to suppose that the courageous girl did not feel a little sad. She loved this house which she had to leave. . . . How many memories she had! How many dreams! But she repressed them. She well knew that she could not entertain them with impunity. They were too much, they would have taken everything; she needed all her strength at this moment.
Just once, taken by surprise, she gave way before their assault. It was one afternoon, shortly before the movers were to come. Her aunt was at church and Marc was at Sylvie's. Annette, alone in the Boulogne house, where everything spoke of their approaching departure, was kneeling on a half-rolled rug, folding up a tapestry that had been taken down. Occupied with her task, while her active hands came and went, her head was busy calculating about the new arrangements. But she still had room for dreams; for her eye, floating for an instant far from the present vision, fastened in its mistiness upon a design in the tapestry which her hands were rolling up: it recognized this design. A motif of pale flowers, almost worn away; butterflies' wings, detached petals? It mattered little; but Annette's eyes as a child had fallen there, and on this canvas they had embroidered the tapestry of the days that had fled. And this tapestry had suddenly emerged from the night. Annette's hands ceased to wander; her mind, for one moment more, persisted in repeating the figures of which it had lost the thread, then was still. And Annette, letting herself slip down upon the floor, with her forehead on the roll of the rug and her face in her hands, lay there with her knees drawn up, abandoned herself to the wind and the flood, set sail. . . . She did not voyage towards any particular country. . . . Such a mass of memories—lived? dreamed?—how distinguish between them? Dizzy symphony of a moment of silence! It contained much more than the substance of a life. In active thought, the consciousness, when it believes it takes possession of our inner world, only seizes the crest of the wave at the moment when the sun-ray gilds it. Reverie alone perceives the moving abyss and its torrential rhythm, those innumerable drops, scudding along on the wind of the ages, seeds of thought of the beings from whom we spring and who will spring from us, that formidable chorus of hopes and regrets whose trembling hands stretch out towards the past or the future. Indefinable harmony that forms the tissue of an illuminated second, and that sometimes a shock is enough to awaken. A bouquet of pale flowers had just evoked it in Annette.
When she pulled herself together, after a long silence, she rose hastily, and with hands that were suddenly awkward, hasty, trembling, she finished folding up the tapestry without looking at it. She did not quite finish it, she threw it into a box, incompletely rolled, and fled from the room. . . . No, she did not want to stay with these thoughts! It was better to escape from them. Later she would have time enough to regret the past, when she would herself belong to the past . . . later, in the twilight of her life. For the moment, she was too full of the future, she must see it through. Her dreams lay ahead of her. "I don't want to know what is behind me; I must not turn around."
She walked down the street, hastening her steps, tense, looking neither to right nor left . . . the years, the years, the life that was coming . . . that of her child, her own, the new life, the Annette of to-morrow.
She had this vision in her eyes on the evening when she established herself in Sylvie's house. Sylvie, as soon as her shop was closed, hastened to climb up to her sister's apartment to distract her from the regrets she supposed the latter must be feeling. She found her walking back and forth in her narrow room, not at all tired after the exhausting day, trying to make her too diminutive cupboards hold her clothes and her linen. Unsuccessful in this, perched on a stool, with her arms full of sheets, looking at the filled shelves, she was meditating another plan, whistling like a boy a Wagnerian fanfare that she absent-mindedly travestied, giving it a burlesque turn. Sylvie looked at her and said, "Annette, I admire you." (She did not mean quite as much as this.)
"Why?" asked Annette.
"If I were in your place, how I should rage!"
Annette began to laugh. Absorbed in her work, she made a sign to her sister to be silent.
"I think I've got it," she said.
She buried her head and her arms in the cupboard, arranging, disarranging, rummaging.
"I said so," she remarked, "and I have."
(She was addressing a cupboard that was full, arranged, conquered.)
She descended, victorious, from the stool.
"Rage, Sylvie?" she said. (She was holding her by the chin.) "When you were a child you played at building houses with dominoes. When the house fell, did you get angry?"
"I banged the dominoes on the floor," said Sylvie.
"And I said, Biff! I'll build another."
"You'll have to admit that you shook the table!"
"Well, I wouldn't swear I didn't," said Annette.
Sylvie called her an anarchist.
"What!" said Annette. "Isn't that just what you are?"
Sylvie was not. She could laugh at order and authority when she wanted to do so, but she felt the need of order and authority. Even if it was only to apply them to other people. For her, as for others, there was no pleasure in revolting unless it was against some authority. And as for order, Sylvie was well supplied with it. She did not cavil at the established order except in so far as it was not her own. She did not reproach it for being established. An order should be established. Since she too was established, as an employer, directing her own business, she was all for a stable order. Annette made this discovery with surprise. Nor was this the only discovery she made. You do not know another human being unless you see him in that everyday activity which brings his energies to a head and reveals his natural movements and gestures. Annette had never seen Sylvie except during her idle times, her times of relaxation. Who can judge of a cat stretched out on a soft cushion? You must see it on the warpath with its back arched and the green fire in its eyes.
Annette was now seeing Sylvie in her own field, the portion of earth she had cleared for herself in the Parisian jungle. The little business woman had taken her trade seriously, and she was second to no one in the art of managing her affairs. Annette could observe her at leisure and close by; for, during the first weeks that followed her moving, she took her meals with Sylvie; it had been agreed that they should keep house together until the settling was entirely finished. Annette, to keep her own end up, tried to make herself useful, sharing in some of the tasks of the workshop. Thus she saw Sylvie at all hours of the day, now with the customers, now with the workers, now alone for a private talk, and she observed in her sister traits she had not known, or which had become accentuated in the last two or three years.
The coaxing Sylvie, under her charming smile, no longer concealed from the penetrating eyes of Annette a rather cold nature which, amid all its entanglements, knew where it was going. She had a small personnel of working-girls whom she managed with superlative skill. With her keen observation and her winning ways, she had chosen and drawn to herself hearts that had no other attachments. Such, for instance, was her chief assistant, Olympe, who was much older than she, more expert in the craft, an excellent worker, but entirely without ideas, and unable to take care of herself. She had come from the country and was lost in Paris, victimized and laughed at by men, women, her employers and her fellow-workers. She was intelligent enough to see this, but she did not have the strength to resist it, and she had been looking for some one who, without taking advantage of her, would make use of her work and free her from the responsibility of managing herself. It had needed no effort on Sylvie's part to bring her into line. Sylvie was merely obliged to take care that there should be a good understanding among the rival devotions that she had aroused in her personnel, making skilful use of their antagonisms in order to stimulate their zeal and, like a wise government, uniting competitors in the patriotism of the common work. The pride of the little establishment and the desire to distinguish themselves in the eyes of the young mistress delivered them over to her cunning domination, which often made them work till they were exhausted. She set the example, and no one complained. Her affectionate taunts, the droll mockery at which they would burst out laughing, would reinvigorate the weary team and make them hold out to the end. Proud of their employer, they loved her jealously; while she, who stimulated their enthusiasm, remained indifferent to them herself. In the evening, after they had left, she talked about them to her sister in a tone of cold detachment that shocked Annette. For the rest, she was ready to do them a good turn in case of need, and she never left them in the lurch if she found them ill or in difficulties. But whether they were ill or not, if she did not see them she forgot them. She had no time to think of the absent. She had no time to love very long. A perpetual activity occupied all her moments: the care of her person, housekeeping, meals, business, trying on dresses, gossip, love affairs, amusements. And everything—even to the (never very long) periods of silence, when, between the bustle of the day and her sleep at night, she found herself alone face to face with herself—everything about her was precise. Not a cranny for dreams. When she observed herself, it was with the clear and curious eye that watches others and looks upon oneself as a passer-by. A minimum of inner life: everything projected into acts and words. The need that Annette felt for moral confession found no consideration here. Annette was embarrassed in this perpetual midday. No shadow. Or, if it existed—and it exists in every soul—the door was closed tight upon it. Sylvie was not interested in what might be behind the door. Her only concern was to administer her little domain punctiliously, enjoying everything, her work and her pleasures, but everything at its own time so that nothing should be lost; consequently, she was without passions or any great excesses, for this activity, this perpetual going from one thing to another, not only did not lend itself to anything of the kind, but even destroyed its possibility in advance. No danger that her lovers would make her lose her head.
The truth was that she did not love anything very much. She loved whole-heartedly only one soul, Annette. And how strange this was! Why in the world did she love this big girl who had nothing, or virtually nothing, in common with her?
Ah, that "virtually nothing" was a great deal; who knows but that it was the most important thing of all?—the tie of blood. This does not always count for much between people of the same family. But when it does count, what a mysterious strength it has! It is a voice that whispers to us, "That other person is a part of me. Moulded in another shape, the substance is the same. I recognize myself in a different form and possessed by an alien soul."
And one wants to capture oneself in this usurper double attraction, a triple attraction: the attraction of resemblance, the attraction of opposition, of the war of conquest, which is not the least of the three.
What forces there were binding Annette and Sylvie together! Pride, independence, orderliness, will, the life of the senses! Of these two spirits, the one turned inward, the other outward—the two hemispheres of the soul. They were constituted of almost the same elements, but each, for deep, obscure reasons that sprang from the essence of their personality, repressed one half, wished only to see one half, that which emerged or that which was submerged. The uniting of the two sisters in a common life disturbed the habitual consciousness that each had of herself. Their mutual affection was tinged with hostility. And the warmer the affection was, the keener was the hidden hostility, for they realized how hopelessly unlike they were. Annette was more expert in reading her buried thoughts, and she was also more sincere: she was able to judge them and repress them. The time had passed when she had wished to absorb Sylvie in her imperious love. But Sylvie still had a secret desire to dominate her elder sister, and she was not displeased that circumstances had given her an opportunity to affirm her superiority. It was a sort of revenge for the inequalities of their lot during the girlhood of the two sisters. This unconfessed feeling, together with her real affection, gave her a sense of satisfaction which she concealed as she saw Annette working under her direction in the shop. She would have liked to have her on her pay roll. She put her in charge of receiving her customers and making charcoal designs for embroidered trimmings; she tried to persuade her that she could look forward to some important position and even to being her partner later on in the business.
Annette, who saw what Sylvie was driving at, had no intention of tying herself down. She let the offer drop, and when Sylvie pressed her she replied that she was not fitted for this work. Upon this Sylvie asked her ironically for what work she was fitted. This was a tender point with her. When one has never had to work for a living and necessity drives one to do so, it is painful not to know what work one is fitted for, not even to know whether, in spite of one's education, one is fitted for any work. But she had to face the question. Annette did not want to remain dependent on Sylvie. Of course Sylvie would never have shown that she felt this dependence: she enjoyed helping her sister. But if she was happy in spending for Annette, she knew what she was spending; her right hand was never unaware of what her left hand gave. Annette was still less unaware of it. She could not endure the thought that Sylvie, as she made up her accounts, mentally wrote her down as her debtor. . . . The devil take all money! Should it be considered between two hearts that love each other? Annette and Sylvie did not consider it in their hearts. But it was a consideration in their life. People do not live by love alone. They live by money too.
This was a truth which Annette had ignored a little too much. She was to lose no time in learning it.
She started out in search of a position, saying nothing about it to Sylvie. Her first idea was to go to see the principal of the school for young girls where she had studied. As an intelligent student who was rich and the daughter of an influential father, she had been a favorite of Mme. Abraham, and she felt certain of her sympathy. This remarkable woman—one of the first to organize the teaching of women in France—had rare qualities of energy and judgment that were complemented—or mitigated, according to the case—by a very cold political sense which many men might have envied. She was disinterested personally, but she was far from being so where her school was concerned. She was a freethinker, and, although she did not parade the fact, she was not without a certain contemptuous anti-clericalism that could do her no harm with her clientele, the daughters of the radical bourgeoisie and young Jewesses. But in place of the dogmas she rejected she had established a civic morality which, although it lacked basis and certitude, was no less strict and commanding. (It was even more so, for the more arbitrary a rule is the more rigid it becomes.) Annette, thanks to her position in society, was intimate with the principal and had her confidence. It amused her to tease the latter about her famous official morality, and Mme. Abraham, who was sceptical by nature, found no difficulty in smiling at the whims of this saucy young thing. She smiled at them, yes, indeed, when they talked together behind her closed door. But as soon as the door was open and Mme. Abraham was reinstated in her title and her official rank, she was as firm as iron in her belief in the Tables of the laic Law, the product of the highly reasonable morality of a few republican pedagogues. It was enough to say that, if her naked conscience was indifferent to conventional morality, her clothed conscience—her usual conscience—severely blamed Annette's behavior. For she knew about it; the adventure had gone the rounds of society.
But she did not yet know of her ruin. And when Annette called, she took care not to reveal her thoughts: her first business was to find out the reasons for this call and whether the school might reap any advantage from it. She therefore gave her a pleasant though rather reserved greeting. But scarcely had she learned that Annette had come to ask a favor than she remembered the scandal and her smile froze. One can easily accept money from a person of whom one doesn't approve, but one cannot decently give it to such a person. It was easy for Mme. Abraham to find compelling reasons for averting a candidacy that was so impolitic. There was no position in the school; and, when Annette asked for a recommendation to other institutions, Mme. Abraham did not even take the trouble to make vague promises. She was very diplomatic when she was negotiating with anyone who was on top of the wheel of fortune, but she instantly ceased to be so when the wheel had flung them down. A serious mistake in diplomacy! For sometimes those who are down to-day are on top to-morrow, and good diplomacy looks out for the future. Mme. Abraham considered nothing but the present. At present Annette was drowning; it was a pity, but Mme. Abraham was not in the habit of fishing out those who were in the water. She did not disguise her coldness, and, when Annette failed to abandon her tone of calm self-possession and henceforth misplaced equality, Mme. Abraham, in order to bring her back to a more exact sense of her distance, declared that she could not conscientiously recommend her. Annette, who was burning with indignation, was on the point of expressing it. A flash of anger passed over her, but it was extinguished in contempt. She was seized by one of those rather diabolical whims of her younger days, an itching desire to mock. She rose, saying, "Well, think of me if you establish a course in the new morality."
Mme. Abraham looked at her, taken aback; the impertinence was all too evident. She replied dryly, "The old one is good enough for us."
"But it might not be a bad thing to enlarge it a little."
"What would you like to add to it?"
"Nothing very much," said Annette, calmly. "Freedom and humanity."
Mme. Abraham, hurt, said: "The right to love, no doubt?"
"No," said Annette, "the right to have a child."
As she went out she shrugged her shoulders at her useless bravado. . . . Stupid! . . . What was the use of making an enemy? . . . She laughed just the same as she thought of the vexed expression of her antagonist. A woman cannot resist the pleasure of slighting another. Bah! The Abraham woman would remain her enemy only until Annette had reconquered her position. And she would reconquer it!
Annette visited other institutions, but there were no positions. There were none for women. The Latin democracies are only made for men; they sometimes put feminism on their programmes, but they distrust it; they are in no hurry to furnish arms to what still remains, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the enslaved rival, a rival that will not long so remain, thanks to the tenacity of the Nordic woman. Pressure will have to be brought by the public opinion of the rest of the world to oblige them to offer a crabbed welcome to the woman who works and wishes to exercise her rights.
Annette might have been admitted, however, to two or three positions if her susceptibility had not caused her to lose them. They would have been ready to shut their eyes to her irregular situation if she herself had been willing to give them some specious explanation—that she was a widow or divorced by her own choice. But when she was questioned her absurd pride drove her to tell the facts as they were. After two or three rebuffs, she approached no more institutions, not even the University, although in the latter she had left sympathetic friends behind her and would have found minds large enough to help her without censuring her. But she was afraid of being wounded. She was still inexperienced in the country of the poor. The hands of her pride had not had time to become callous.
She looked about for a chance to give private lessons. She did not wish to seek them among the friends of her own class; she preferred to conceal her steps. She turned to those clandestine employment—those exploitative—agencies that still exist in Paris. She was not skilful enough to appear well from their point of view. She had too much disdain. They resented her fastidiousness. Instead of accepting whatever offered, like so many unhappy souls who are fortified with very few recommendations, who will teach anything that is asked of them at famine prices and work from dawn till dark, she presumed to pick and choose.
At last, through the mediation of Sylvie's customers, she found a few foreigners. She gave lessons in conversation to some Americans who treated her kindly and occasionally invited her to drive in their carriages, though they offered her an absurd remuneration, never even thinking that they ought to have paid her more. They did not hesitate to give a hundred francs for a pair of shoes, while for an hour of French they would pay a franc. (It was not impossible in those days to find people who would give lessons for fifty centimes!) Annette, who did not have the right to be exacting as yet, refused to accept this shameful treatment. But after having sought far and wide, she could find nothing better. The well-to-do bourgeoisie who, under the eye of public opinion, are willing to spend whatever is demanded for the education of their children when the teaching is public, sordidly exploit instructors in their own households. There no one sees you. You are dealing with people who are too humble to resist: for one who refuses there are ten who beg you to accept them!
Isolated, without experience, Annette was in a poor position to protect herself. But she had the practical instinct of the Rivières and she had her pride, and they would not accept the humiliating wages to which others yielded. She was not of the whining sort who complain and give in. She did not complain and she did not give in. And in the face of all expectation this attitude was successful. The human species is cowardly; Annette had a calm, rather haughty way of saying no that cut short all bargaining; people did not dare to treat her as they would have treated others, and she obtained conditions that were rather more favorable. Not greatly so. She had to go through many weary hours to earn what she spent every day. Her pupils were scattered in remote quarters, and this was before the time of the autobusses and the metro in Paris. When she came home in the evening, her feet ached and her shoes were worn out. But she was robust, and it gave her a sense of satisfaction to experience the life of toil for one's daily bread. To earn her bread was a new adventure for Annette. When she was successful in one of those little duels of the will with her exploiters, she was as well pleased with her day as a gambler who, in the pleasure of what he has won, forgets the insignificance of the stake. She learned to see men better. It was not always a pleasant sight. But everything is worth learning. She came into contact with the obscure world of toil. But her contacts were inadequate and without depth. If wealth isolates, poverty isolates no less. Every one is caught fast in his difficulties and his effort, and he sees in others not so much brothers in misery as rivals whose fortune is made at the expense of his own.
Annette divined this feeling in the women with whom she found herself thrown, and she understood it; for she was a privileged being among them. If she worked in order not to be a charge upon her sister, her sister was none the less there; she was safe from the danger of destitution. She did not know that feverish uncertainty about to-morrow. She had her child to enjoy; no one was trying to take him away from her. How compare her lot with that of this woman whose story she had learned—a teacher who had been dismissed because she, like Annette, had had the hardihood to be a mother. It was true that she had been tolerated at first on condition that she kept her maternity secret. Exiled in a post of disgrace, in the depths of the country, she had had to separate from the child of her own flesh. But she could not keep herself from running to him when he was ill. The secret was out, and the virtuous countryside made ferocious sport of her. The authorities of the university of course upheld the popular decree and threw into the street the two rebels against the code. And it was with them that Annette was disputing their meagre livelihood. She took care not to apply for the position which the other woman was seeking. But she was chosen. Just because she sought positions less eagerly, because she had less need of them. People have little respect for those who are hungry. And then the poor souls whom she supplanted treated her as an intruder who was robbing them. They knew they were unjust; but it is comforting to be unjust when you are a victim of injustice. Annette became familiar with that greatest of all wars—the war of the workers, not against nature or circumstances, nor against the rich for taking their bread away from them—the war of the workers against the workers who are snatching the bread from each other, the crumbs that have fallen from the table of the rich or from that sordid Crœsus, the State. That is the misery of miseries, most felt by women, and especially those of to-day. For they are still incapable of organization. They remain in the state of primitive warfare, the individual against the individual; instead of pooling their difficulties, they multiply them.
Annette hardened herself, and although her heart bled her eyes were aflame with joy. She strode on, sustained in her ungrateful work by its novelty, the energy she had to spend—and the thought of her child, which illumined the whole day.
Marc spent the day in Sylvie's workshop. Aunt Victorine had flickered out shortly after they were settled. She had not been able to survive the ruin of the old home, the loss of the old furniture, the habits of a peaceful half-century. Since Annette was out of the house till evening, Sylvie took charge of the child. He was the darling of the workshop, petted by the customers and the workers, rummaging about on all fours, sitting under a table, collecting hooks and eyes and scraps of chiffon, winding skeins of silk, rolling balls, stuffing himself with sweets and smothered with kisses. He was a little boy of three or four, with golden auburn hair like Annette's, and he had been rather pale ever since his illness. Life for him was a perpetual spectacle. Sylvie could remember her own first experiences when, sitting under her mother's counter, she had listened to the customers. But the great personages, from the tops of their stilts, have too utterly different a field of vision to know what catches the eyes of a child. And its rosy ears. . . . There was quite enough to keep them busy in the workshop! Every tongue was loosened, laughing, bold, brazen. Prudery was no weakness of Sylvie and her flock. Plenty of laughing, plenty of gossip, makes the needle fly. No one thought of the child. Was it possible that he understood? He did not understand (in all probability), but he grasped things, he let nothing escape him. The child collected everything, touched everything, tasted everything. Woe to whatever lay in his way! Sprawling under a chair, he put in his mouth whatever fell from above, scraps of biscuit, buttons, fruit-stones; and he also put words there. Without knowing what they meant. Exactly, in order to find out! And he munched away and sang.
"Little pig!"
An apprentice would snatch from his fingers a ribbon he was sucking, or perhaps experimentally burying in his nose. But no one took from him the words he had swallowed. He was doing nothing with them for the present; there was nothing he could do with them. But they were not lost.
Routed out from under the furniture and the petticoats, where he was absorbed in curious studies of the fidgeting feet and the imprisoned toes curled up in their shoes, dragged back to the conventions, to his normal position in the world of grown-ups, he would remain motionless, soberly seated on a low stool between Sylvie's legs. Or, since his aunt rarely kept still, between some other pair of knees. He would lean his cheek against the warm cloth and watch, with his nose in the air and his head thrown back, those bending faces with their puckered eyes, their quick, shining, moving pupils, those mouths, biting the thread; he saw the saliva and the lower lips—they seemed to be the upper ones—gnawed by the teeth, the undersides of the nostrils, covered with little red streaks and trembling as the words came, and the fingers that flew with their needles. Suddenly a hand would tickle his chin: there was a thimble at the end of it that gave him a cold feeling in his neck. Here, as ever, nothing was lost on him; these warm and cold contacts, this downy glow, these lights that reddened and these shadows that turned to amber the bits of living flesh, yes, and this feminine odor. . . . He was certainly not aware of it himself, but that multiple consciousness, that many-faceted consciousness which is spread about the whole periphery of a child, registered everything that passed over its little printer's-roller. . . . These women never suspected that their images, complete from head to foot, were being imprinted on this little sensitive plate. But he saw them only fragmentarily: pieces were missing, as in a puzzle in which the parts are mixed up. From this resulted his strange, fleeting preferences, as lively as they were varied, which seemed capricious but were really due to his deep-seated predisposition. A clever person might have said what it was in each of these women that attracted him. He was like a regular household pet: it was the gentleness of the hands rather than the whole person that he liked. And it was the totality of these sweetnesses, the home, the workshop. He was frankly an egoist. (And rightfully: the little builder has to assemble his ego first of all.) A sincere egoist, even in his blandishments. For he was blandishing: he wanted to please and he enjoyed giving pleasure, but only to those whom he had chosen.
From the very beginning his great favorite had been Sylvie. The instinct of the domestic animal in him had at once perceived that she was the god of the household, the master who dispensed food and kisses and was responsible for the tone of the day, and whom it was a good thing to propitiate. But it was better still to be propitiated by her. And the child had observed that this privilege had been accorded to him. It never occurred to him that it might not be deserved. Thus he received without surprise but with satisfaction the agreeable and flattering homage that was rendered to him by the sovereign of the workshop. Sylvie spoiled him, adored him, went into ecstasies over his gestures, his steps, his words, his intelligence, his beauty, his mouth, his eyes, his nose; she held him up to the admiration of her customers and preened herself on his account as if he had been her own chick.
To tell the truth, she also called him, "Little blackguard! Silly little fool!" And sometimes she tweaked his nose, slapped him, gave him a spanking. But from her he did not take this as an offence; although he protested loudly, he did not even find it too disagreeable. May not any one be struck by the hand of the queen? From any one else, from one of the girls in the workroom, heavens above, he would never have permitted it! Even without her sceptre, Sylvie had a charm for him. In his feminine puzzle, made up of this group and that, she had provided him with the greatest number of parts; he loved to press against her dress, with his head against her stomach, to listen to her voice (he could hear her laughing all through her body), or clamber up her hips till he had reached the summit; and then, with his two arms knotted about her neck, he would rub his nose, his lips and his eyes against her soft cheek, close to her ears, among the little blonde curls that had such a nice smell. What the eye is for the mind of grown-ups, the sense of touch is for that of children. It is the talisman that permits one to see over the wall and weave within oneself the dream of things one believes one sees, the illusion of life. The child spun his web. And without knowing what these blonde curls were, or what this cheek was, this voice, this laugh, this Sylvie or this "I," he thought, "This is mine.”
Annette would come home in the evening. She would be famished. All day she had walked in a waterless desert, a world without love. All day she had walked with her eyes turned towards the spring which, in the evening, she would find again. She heard it rippling; in anticipation she would dip her lips in it; a passer-by in the street might have taken as intended for him the smile which this beautiful woman who was hastening along addressed to the image of her child. As she approached Sylvie's house, her steps quickened like those of a horse that scents the oats; and when at last she entered, laughing with greedy love, no matter how tired she was she went upstairs at a run. The door opened; she dashed in and threw herself on the child; she caught him up in her hands, squeezed him, devoured him furiously, his eye, his nose, under his nose, wherever she happened to alight, whatever part she could reach, and her mad joy expressed itself noisily. As for him, as he played about or amused himself soberly, comfortably settled on the padded sofa, drawing lines with a piece of chalk or mixing up threads of various colors, he was none too pleased by this invasion. This great rough woman who came in without any warning, seized him, pulled him about, shouted in his ear, stifled him with kisses . . . he didn't like it at all! To be disposed of without his permission made him indignant. He wouldn't allow it. He was cross and he struggled; but this only made her shake him, fondle him, laugh and cry all the more furiously. . . . Everything about her displeased him: this lack of consideration, this noise, this violence. . . . He quite understood that she ought to love him, admire him and even kiss him. But she should have had better manners! Where had she come from? Sylvie and her girls were more ladylike. When they played with him, even when they laughed or exclaimed, they didn't make such a racket and seize you and hug you in this brutal way. He was astonished that Sylvie, who knew so well how to give her subjects a dressing down, should never give this ill-bred person a lesson in deportment, that she did not protect him from such familiarities. On the contrary, Sylvia assumed with Annette a tone of affectionate equality which she did not have for any one else, and she said to Marc, "Come, be good! Kiss your mother!"
His mother! Of course, he knew it. But that was no excuse. Yes, she too was a domestic power. He was still too close to the warmth of the breast not to have kept on his epicurean mouth the sugary taste of milk, not to have kept in his birdlike body the golden shadow of the wing that sheltered him. Even more recent were the nights of illness when the invisible enemy had seized the throat of the fledgling and the head of the great protectress had bent over him. Of course, of course! But now he no longer needed this. If he preserved these memories and a hundred others that were stored away in his granary, he had no use for them at present. Later, perhaps, he would see. . . . Every moment now brought him a new gift; he had enough to do to gather them all in. A child is ungrateful by nature. Mens momentanea. Do you imagine he has time to remember what was good yesterday? What is good for him is what is good to-day. To-day Annette had made the great mistake of allowing herself to be eclipsed by others who were more agreeable and even more serviceable in Marc's eyes. Instead of going off, heaven knew where, and making her unseemly appearances in the evening, why didn't she stay here like Sylvia and the others, busy all day with Marc and paying court to him? It was her loss. So he barely condescended to accept Annette's effusions, responding to the rain of silly, loving questions with a bored and distant Yes, No, Good Morning, Good Evening; and then, flying from the downpour and wiping his cheek, he would return to his play or to Sylvie's knees.
Annette could not help seeing that Marc preferred Sylvie to herself. Sylvie saw it even more clearly. They laughed about it together, and both pretended not to attach a shadow of importance to it. But deep in their hearts Sylvie was flattered and Annette was jealous. They took good care not to confess this to each other. Like a good girl, Sylvie forced the ungracious child to kiss Annette. Annette found little joy in these forced embraces; Sylvie found more. She did not tell herself that she was stealing from the garden of the poor, and that later she would royally return some of the fruit. But what one keeps to oneself in order not to load oneself with troublesome scruples, one only tastes the better with one's closed mouth. And although she had no unkind feeling, Sylvie found more pleasure in making the child fondle her and in displaying her power over him in Annette's presence. Annette, pretending to joke, would say, in a careless tone, "Out of sight, out of mind." But her heart did not take it as a joke. There was no joke about it. Annette had no humor save that of the intellect. Her love was as foolish as that of a dumb creature. It was painful to be a woman among women and to be obliged to hide one's feelings. People would only laugh at you if you showed your poor famished heart. Annette, when she was with other people, acted as if her love were an old story; she talked about her day, the people she had seen, what she had learned, said and done—in short, everything that was indifferent to her. (Oh, how indifferent!)
But at night, by herself, in her apartment, alone with her child, she could give free rein to the torment she felt. To her joy, too, her torrential passion. No need to take precautions any longer. There was no one from whom to hide herself. She had her son entirely at her mercy. She abused her power a little; she wearied him with her wild affection. Since here, away from Sylvie, he no longer had the upper hand, the little politician did not show his annoyance: till morning came he would have to humor this extravagant mother. He used strategy; he pretended to fall asleep. He did not have to pretend very much; sleep came quickly after his full days. All the same, it had not quite come when, like a lamb in his mother's arms, with his eyes closed, Marc would seem to be overwhelmed by it. Annette, interrupting her prattle, was obliged to carry him to bed; and the little comedian, in the half-sleep down which he let himself slip, step by step, down which he slid on the banisters to the foot, laughed in his sleeve as he watched through his eyelashes the credulous Mamma who was mutely adoring him. He had a sense of his superiority, he was grateful to her for it; and sometimes in a transport he would even throw his little arms about her neck as she knelt beside him. By a surprise like that Annette was repaid for her troubles. But the stingy child did not repeat it often, and Annette had to fall asleep hungry. It was not before she had turned over in bed many times to listen to the child's breathing as her thoughts revolved feverishly. He had not kissed her nicely, and she said to herself, "He doesn't love me.”
Her heart would shrink. But she would at once correct herself. "What nonsense I'm inventing!" The idea had to be repressed at once. How could one live with it? No, it wasn't true. . . . The good little creature she was accusing! She hastily sought among her memories for the best she had, for the pretty tricks of the child, for his lovable ways. At the images she called up she would have liked to snatch him out of his bed and kiss him. . . . But hush! She mustn't wake him up. That delicious little breath. . . . My treasure! . . . How good it will all be later!
For as the present was decidedly meagre, Annette made up for it by inventing a future of motherly intimacy with her son that conformed with her desires. She needed an idol to absorb the energies of her nature. For some time now they had been troubling her again.
It was no longer a restless melancholy, that neurasthenic depression which had preceded her child's illness and which the illness had dissipated—those days of a life that was at a standstill, in which she felt emptied of energy and interest: the becalmed sea before the flow of the tide.
This was the return of the oceanic flood. It announced itself by a roaring of the waves, a nocturnal resurgence. For a time maternity had satisfied the passionate elements of her nature. The material fatigue of a working life had set up a dam against them. But, gathering in the shadow, they beat against the rock. The soul, which as it grows climbs up the spiral of life, found itself returning to a state bordering on that from which it had passed, four or five years before, between the burning summer of the hotel in the Grisons and the spring of love with Roger Brissot. Bordering on it, but not the same. One returns on the spiral above the past; one does not descend to it again. Annette's nature had ripened. There was no longer in her agitation any of the blind ingenuousness of the young girl. She was a woman; her desires were keen and definite. She knew whither they led. And if she did not wish to know, it was precisely because she did know. Her will had matured no less than her flesh. Everything about her had become richer, and everything had assumed an accent of passion.
The reappearance of these familiar demons, these dreaded demons, was like a midday when a storm is gathering. A heavy silence, a silence big with the tempest to come. It followed the careless joys and the careless sorrows of the young morning. The shadows slipped unceasingly over Annette's face. She had become tense. When she was in company or off her guard, when she was not distracted by the child's presence, she would fall into a dumb silence, with a line between her brows. When she became aware of this, she would slip noiselessly away. Any one who had been disturbed about her would have found her in her room, setting it in order, making her bed, turning the mattress, polishing the furniture or the floor, using more movements than were necessary, but not succeeding in stifling the spirit that resounded within her. She would stop in the midst of something she was doing, upright on a chair, a bit of chiffon in her hand, or leaning on the window-sill. Then she would forget everything, not only the past but the present as well, the dead and the living, even her child. She saw without seeing, she heard without hearing, she thought without thinking. A flame that burned in empty space. A sail in the wind of the open sea. She felt the great breath that passed through her limbs, and the ship vibrated with all its masts. And then from the boundless void emerged the face of the things that surrounded her. From the court of the house over which Annette was leaning mounted the familiar sounds; she recognized the voice of the child talking and singing. But her reverie was not interrupted; it took another course. It was the song of a bird on a summer afternoon. O sunny heart, what an amount of life you still have to give! Take the world into your open arms! Too much plunder! . . . Her consciousness relaxed its grip; she fell back into the incandescent gulf where there was no longer any song, any child's voice, any Annette . . . nothing but a powerful vibration of sunlight. . . .
Annette awakened, leaning on her elbow on the window-sill.
But at night the tormenting dreams that had disappeared since Marc's birth took up their abode in her. They came in groups of three or four, ceaselessly succeeding one another. Annette rolled from one to another, layer after layer of them. She would get up in the morning fatigued, feverish; she had lived ten nights in one. And she did not want to recall what she had dreamed.
Those who saw Annette frequently had observed her anxious brow and her absorbed eyes; they did not understand this sudden change, but they were not disturbed by it; they attributed it to external causes, material difficulties. For Annette these periods of anxiety were a season of deep renewal. She could not do justice to them, for they brought with them the weight of gestation, which was more agonizing than that of maternity. It was a maternity indeed, that of the buried soul. The human being is wrapped up like a seed in the depths of matter, in the amalgam of humus and human loam where the generations have left their debris. The labor of a great life consists in disengaging it. For this childbirth a whole lifetime is necessary, and often the midwife is death.
Annette had the secret anguish of the unknown being who was to emerge from her some day and rend her. Overcome by fits of shame, she would shut herself up in a tumultuous retreat, face to face with the immanent Being; and their relations were hostile. The air was charged with electricity; its gusts rose and fell in the immobility. She realized her danger. In vain had her consciousness left in the shadow the thing that disturbed her. "In the shadow" meant in herself, in her own home. And to feel her home peopled from top to bottom with beings whom she did not know was far from reassuring.
"All that. . . . I am all that. . . . But what does it want of me? . . . What do I myself desire?"
In reply, she said to herself, "You have nothing more to desire. You possess."
Her stiffened will turned all the violence of her love upon the child. These continual recurrences of maternal passion were not very fortunate. Abnormal, excessive, unhealthy—(for this passion sprang from an impossible attempt to turn into a path that was not theirs alien and insistent instincts)—they could only end in disappointment. She repelled the child. Marc would not submit to being monopolized in this way. He no longer concealed his ill-will from his mother. He thought her a bore and he told her so in cross little monologues which happily Annette did not hear, but which Sylvie overheard one day. She scolded him for it, bursting out laughing at the same time. Marc, in a corner by the door, was talking to the wall, saying, as he made little impatient gestures, "That woman makes me tired!”
People are always writing the history of the events of a life. They imagine they see the life itself in them, but in reality these events are only its outer covering. The life itself is within. The events act upon it only in so far as it has chosen them; one might be tempted to say it has produced them, and in many cases this is the exact truth. Twenty events take place each month under our eyes; they do not count for us because we have nothing to do with them. But when one of them touches us, it is a safe wager that we have gone halfway to meet it; and if the shock loosens a spring in us, it is because the spring is wound up and awaiting the shock.
Towards the end of 1904, Annette's moral tension gave way, and the transformations it brought about in her seemed to coincide with certain changes which, at the same moment, took place in her.
Sylvie married. She was twenty-six years old; she had had enough of the joys of liberty; she decided that the moment had come to enjoy those of a home. She took her time making her choice. The stuff of which a lover is made does not need to be lasting; it only needs to be pleasing. But a good husband must be made of sound, durable material. Of course it was important for Sylvie that he should be attractive too. But there are ways and ways of being attractive. In choosing a husband one doesn't have to lose one's head. Sylvie consulted her common sense and even her social sense. Her business was going well. Her establishment, Sylvie: Robes et manteaux, had acquired, along with a select clientele of the fairly well-to-do bourgeoisie, a justified reputation for elegance and style at moderate prices. She had reached a point in her business where she could go no further alone. To advance she would be obliged to associate other forces with her own and add to her seamstress's workshop a tailor's shop that would enable her to enlarge the circle of her operations.
Without taking any one into her confidence she looked about for some one who would fall in with her plans. She made her choice soberly; and once it was made she decided to marry. Love would come later. It should have its proper place: Sylvie would not marry a man whom she could not love. But love must await its turn. Business came first.
The name of the object of her choice was Selve (Leopold); and no sooner had she cast her eye upon him than the little business woman decided on the name, the beacon-light of the new establishment, Selve et Sylvie. But although, for a woman, a name is never unimportant, Sylvie was not so foolish as to be satisfied with a name alone; and Selve (Leopold) was a good match. No longer very young, looking all of his thirty-five years, a rather handsome man in the popular style, rather ugly, in fact, but solidly built, with reddish blond hair and a florid complexion, he was the head cutter at a great tailoring establishment, skilful in his craft, earning a good income, steady, anything but dissipated. Sylvie had taken his measure; the question was settled—in Sylvie's mind. She had not consulted Selve about it. But the assent of the man she had chosen was the last thing to trouble her. She took it upon herself to win this.
Selve himself would never have sought anything of the kind. He was devoted to his own welfare and his own habits, a good soul, not at all ambitious and rather egoistical, and he had made up his mind to remain unmarried. It would not have occurred to him to quit his lucrative position as second fiddle, which entailed no responsibility, with an employer who knew his value. Sylvie upset his plans and his peace of mind in the twinkling of an eye. She met him—she took pains to meet him—at an exhibition whither she had gone, as he had, to study the modes they were both going to contribute to launch. She was surrounded by admirers, and without paying any attention to Selve she began to distribute her smiles and clever repartees to three or four young men who were very much taken with her. Suddenly, Selve, observing with some annoyance this grace and wit that were not for him, perceived that he had become the object of her attentions. She was speaking now only for him; the others had ceased to count. He was all the more affected by this instantaneous change because he attributed it to his own personal merit. With this stroke he was caught. Farewell to his resolutions!
A little while after this, Sylvie begged Annette to join her in the evening after dinner at a time when there would be no one in the workroom.
"I've asked you to come," she said, "because I'm expecting some one."
Annette was surprised. "What! You need me? Can't you receive him alone?" Sylvie said soberly, "I think it would look better."
"This attack of propriety has come rather late."
"Better late than never," said Sylvie, diplomatically.
"Nonsense! Try that on somebody else."
"Just what I'm doing," said Sylvie.
Annette shook her finger at her. "You have some one up your sleeve. Well, who is this someone?"
"Here he is now."
Selve (Leopold) was ringing the bell. He seemed to be annoyed at not finding Sylvie alone, but as a well-bred man he put a good face on the situation. It was not easy for him to appear to advantage alone in the presence of two young gossips who were alarming enough anyway and were evidently in each other's confidence. He felt that these two pairs of eyes were watching him. After a few rather heavy gallantries, of which, as a matter of politeness, Annette had her share, he began to talk about business, the trade, the strenuous life he led. Annette, with an air of being interested, charitably asked him a few questions. He became more confident and told about the difficulties of his career, his disappointments, his success, missing no opportunity to place himself in a good light. He seemed simple, cordial, self-sufficient; he played with all his cards on the table. Sylvie, who was more cautious, watched his play before playing herself. Annette, who was soon relegated to the background, where she followed the game, was less surprised at the competence of her sister than at the humbleness of her choice. It would have been easy for Sylvie to make a more brilliant match; she had simply not wished to do so. She distrusted men who were too handsome and too clever. It goes without saying that she would not have chosen a goose or a fool. In medio. . . . What she wanted was a prudent second in command, not someone who would command her. She knew that in marriage everybody has to give something and wants to get something: it is a question of supply and demand. For herself she demanded the right to remain the mistress in her own household. And what did he demand? Ah, poor fellow, to be loved for himself, just for himself. He was not conceited; he knew well enough that he was neither handsome nor attractive. But it was his weakness to wish to be married for love. Ridiculous, wasn't it? He shrugged his shoulders at the idea, for he was no fool, this big, ingenuous creature who was familiar enough with life and sceptical, as three out of every four Frenchmen are, where women were concerned. But the need of the heart is so strong! That stupid need! "Why shouldn't I be loved? I'm as good as others who are." So, by turns, he was almost humble and almost fatuous. And always begging. This was not very clever of him, and it was even worse that he allowed it to be seen. For she had seen him very clearly, the sharp-eyed minx. And to those big, blue, round, rather prominent eyes that were always asking, "Do you love me?"—her soft eyes responded neither with a Yes nor with a No. For uncertainty is like fuel to love.
When the sisters found themselves alone again, Annette said to Sylvie, "Don't play with him too much!"
"Why not?" said Sylvie, wondering. "The stakes are worth the trouble."
"Then it's serious?"
"Very serious."
"I can't imagine you married."
"Really? I dare say you will see me so two or three times."
"I don't like you to laugh at these things."
"What would one laugh at, my dear Salvation Army lassie? Come, Mrs. General Booth"—she pronounced it "Botte"—"don't knit your beautiful brows. I'm not thinking of changing before I've even tried it. I am marrying in the hope that it's for good. But if it doesn't last, one must be able to resign oneself."
"I am not anxious about you," said Annette.
"Really? I thank you for his sake. Has he made a conquest of you?"
"He isn't good enough for you, Sylvie. But I shouldn't want you to make this good man suffer some day."
Sylvie smiled and looked at her teeth in the mirror.
"Suffer! Everybody makes the other person suffer. That's nothing. Of course he will suffer, poor man! I shouldn't mind being in his place. Come, don't disturb yourself about him. Do you think I don't know the value of my Adonis? It isn't dazzling, but it amounts to a good deal. I know what I'm about. I shan't tell him, for it doesn't do to spoil men. It allows them to think they have rights over us. But privately I shall not forget it. I shan't do myself the wrong of doing him a wrong. And if I don't promise never to make him angry—which might be an excellent way of making him a little thinner—I shan't put him on the grill unless it is necessary. Of course, assuming that I have no reason to complain of him. Otherwise it would serve him right to give him his due. And I pay in cash. I am an honest business woman; I don't deceive my customers any more than is necessary for me to live. Unless they try to get the best of me. Then I get the best of them. Don't I!"
"To think," Annette exclaimed, "that you never can get her to talk seriously!"
"Life would not be endurable," said Sylvie, "if one had to say serious things seriously!"
Leopold was not long in coming back again, and Sylvie did not leave him languishing. She had quickly made the tour of the enemy's positions, reconnoitered behind his defensive works and discovered his arms, his baggage and his supplies before giving herself in good earnest. She had no difficulty in leading him to adopt her own plans. Till his last day Leopold was to preserve the illusion that it was he who had conceived the idea of establishing the great dressmaking establishment of Selve et Sylvie.
The marriage was arranged for the middle of January, a time when work would be rather slack. The preceding weeks were a joyous time in the workroom. The radiant Leopold regaled the whole band, took them to the theatre and the movies. They all had such a need for laughter! When one of them was married, it was as if she brought marriage into the house. And each of the others greeted the visitor with a whispered "Don't forget! The next time it will be my turn. . . ."
Annette was caught up in the general joy. Instead of feeling the deprivation of her own life, she asked herself what had become of her troubles. They slipped away as a chemise slips down one's thighs. O youthful body, sorrow cannot cling to you! Not that this marriage gave her any satisfaction. She had loved her sister too tenderly not to feel rather sad to see her going still further away from her. And it was not pleasant to see such a pretty girl giving herself to this rather vulgar man. Annette had had other dreams for Sylvie. But with our dreams other people have nothing to do. Their way of being happy is their own, not ours. And they are right.
Sylvie was satisfied. Leopold's affection, the admiration which he showed for her, touched her vanity and gradually her heart. As she had said to her sister, she appreciated the serious character of the man she had chosen. He would be a steadfast companion who would not interfere with her. She had no intention of abusing him—though one never knew!—but she was certain that she would never have to give him any minute account of her behavior. Leopold made no attempt to learn about Sylvie's past; he trusted her, and this pleased her. His experience of life had left Leopold with few illusions; above all, it had left him not unwilling to compromise; it inclined him to assume for his own use and accept for that of others, as a rule of conduct, the cordial egoism of an honest, sceptical, affectionate man who was not exacting and did not ask of others more than he himself could give.
Sylvie, indeed, found herself much closer to him than to Annette. She loved Annette more; but, as she said to herself, laughing, she would never have married a masculine Annette. No, that would have turned out badly.
Selve inspired her with a feeling of complete security. This restful impression dispensed her from thinking about him: she thought of the wedding, of the dress she was making, of her future household, and she made great plans for the business. It was perfectly satisfying.
The wedding took place one radiant winter day. Selve carried off all his friends to the woods of Vincennes. They separated into jolly groups. Annette gaily mingled with them. In former times she would have been sensitive to the noisy and rather vulgar side of these rejoicings, but she was not so now. She laughed with these bold young men, these hearty girls who were giving themselves a day of merriment between their days of toil. She took part in their sports, and she enchanted everybody with her enthusiasm. Sylvie, who had known her as cold and contemptuous, watched her running and amusing herself in this frank way. There she was playing blindman's buff, with her eyes under the bandage, red with excitement, her mouth open and laughing, her chin in the air, as if to seize the light as it flew past, her arms stretched out before her and her hands like wings, striding along with great steps, stumbling, laughing her prettiest. . . . What was the beautiful, vigorous body of this passionate blind girl going to seize? Who was going to seize her? More than one person who was watching her might have had this thought. But Annette seemed to be thinking only of her game. What had become of the cares that had weighed upon her yesterday? Of her anxious, tense, absorbed air? . . . What elasticity she had! . . . Sylvie congratulated herself on having succeeded in distracting Annette from her troubles, and she was overjoyed at this. But Annette knew very well that the cause lay much further back. She was not disburdened of her cares because she was laughing at the wedding. She was laughing at the wedding because she was disburdened.
What had happened? It was a strange thing and one that was not the work of a day, although on this day it appeared so.
One Sunday morning, a few weeks before this, she had been sitting half-clad before her dressing-table. She took a long time over her toilet on Sunday, for on other days she was obliged to go out so early. She was weary with the accumulated fatigue of the week. The child, who had just got up, had slipped out of the room to find his aunt. He was very much interested in the wedding, and he amused Sylvie by the reflexions which, as a man of experience, he expressed on this subject. Leopold petted him; as a way of courting Sylvie, he courted her little lap-dog. And Marc, flattered and proud of his importance, passed all his time in the apartment below, remaining with his mother very reluctantly. Annette was bitterly disheartened by this. But this morning her weariness swept away her sadness and even mingled with it a secret feeling that lightened it. She sighed, however, from habit. She was feeling that mingled fatigue and enjoyment which came from knowing that she could, thank heaven, stretch out at full length on this Sunday without having to stir. . . . Sunday! In former days Annette had never dreamed how precious it was.
"How weary I am, how weary I am! How good it is not to budge! If I were sitting in the most uncomfortable position, leaning on my elbow in some tiresome way, I shouldn't move. I could sleep for a thousand years. There is a charm in this that holds you. One's afraid of breaking it. Let's not stir. How good it is!"
She saw through the window, on the roof opposite, a stream of smoke coming from the baker's chimney. It was carried off by the wind, in spirals, bright and gay, stretching out, rolling, running and dancing against the blue sky. Annette's eyes laughed and her spirit danced in the meadows of the air—borne along in the wake of the mad arabesques. All the weight of the earth had slipped away from her. Her spirit felt naked in the wind and the sun. Annette sang in a low voice. . . . And suddenly there appeared before her the enraptured eyes of a young man who had looked at her the day before in an omnibus. She did not know him, and in all probability she would never see him again. But this look, which she had surprised as she suddenly turned her head—he did not think he was being seen—confessed so naïvely how charmed he was that ever since a fresh joy had remained in her heart. She pretended to herself that she did not know the cause of this; but as her mirror returned to her the image of her smile, she saw herself with the eyes of the one who would love her some day. . . . What has become of you, my worries? I can still hear them murmuring fitfully, far, far away.
"Enough, enough! No more of this. One must be reasonable."
There was nothing new in what Annette said to herself. Twenty times she had said it. But although she did as she said, she expected nothing from it. Success does not always depend on being reasonable. Reason is a good counsellor, but counsellors do not guarantee payment. And the heart is only convinced by the reasons of the heart.
She had no lack of these now. Annette was willing to see how absurd were the demands made by her maternal love. But if she was ready to do this, it was because other stifled aspirations had risen to the surface. She could no longer deny them; she no longer wished to do so. And once she had given them this tacit acquiescence, Annette felt liberated. The voice of her reawakened youth said to her, "Nothing is lost. You still have the right to be happy. Your life is just beginning."
The world revived. Everything had a savor again. Even on dull days she had her luminous moments of escape. Annette formed no plans for the future. She abandoned herself to the happiness, whatever it might be, of a future that she had recaptured. Yes, yes, she was young, young as the young year. . . . A whole life before her, . . . There would never be enough of it.
One of those gay, precocious months of February that have so much charm in Paris. Spring is not yet in the sky or in the heart, but everything is pure, pure light, the limpid joy of a child that has awakened. The beautiful dawn of the year is beginning, and before the birds have reappeared one hears them coming. As from the summit of a tower lost in the clear sky, one sees them, clouds of wings, swarms of swallows. They are coming, they are crossing the seas. And already some of them are singing in my heart.
Like every healthy being, Annette loved all the seasons. In adapting herself to them, she shared in their secret energies. Those of the springtime exalted her.
She went along, happy to be walking, happy to be working, carrying home with her a wholesome fatigue and a hearty appetite. She was interested in everything, filled with a new curiosity about the things of the mind which for four years she had abandoned, about books, music; and sometimes in the evening, although she was half dead, she would go out and run to the other end of Paris to use a ticket to some concert. Sylvie envied her; she herself was in the early stages of pregnancy, and it was far from pleasant.
In her evening walks, Annette was followed more than once. She did not notice this: absent-minded, dreaming, amused, she would suddenly stop in the midst of her soliloquy with the feeling that she was dragging something along at her heels. She would wake up and look curiously at the thing that was whispering to her, shrug her shoulders or make a face and start off briskly saying, "What an old idiot!"
The idiot was often young, and Annette thought, "In a dozen years Marc may be like this."
She stopped indignantly. The false Marc received the wrath of the eyes which she turned upon the other, and he did not persist. The eyes began to laugh. The idea of seeing Marc in such a situation, a big handsome boy, amused her in spite of everything. But her maternal pride was hurt. She scolded herself for the observation she had made. Or rather she scolded Marc.
"Young scamp!" she muttered. "When I get home I'll pull his ears." (She did pull them.)
These little adventures entertained her. At first, that is. But when they kept on. . . .
"Oh, what a pest! This is tiresome. Am I never to be allowed to walk in peace any more? Because you look to the right, to the left, in the simplest, most harmless way, because you laugh as you walk along, people have to suspect you are thinking of love! I know love, I have seen enough of it. The fools who imagine one can't get along without them! It never occurs to them that one can be happy without them, just because it's a fine day and one is young and has the little one needs. Let them think what they like! Am I thinking of them? Of them! Haven't they ever looked at themselves?"
She herself looked at them; and as she was in a state of grace (that is, of gay freedom) she certainly did not idealize them. Far from it. She asked herself how one could possibly fall in love with a man. Man was certainly not a beautiful animal. One would have to have lost one's head to find him attractive. And the daughter of Rivière, who was a good Frenchwoman, of the strong classical type, a reader of Rabelais and Molière, repeated to herself Dorine's remark to Tartuffe.
She made fun of love. (Ah, how she deceived herself!) She defied it, and she carried it in her heart. Sly and apparently asleep, it was awaiting its hour. These little skirmishes were preparations for the real attack. The enemy was approaching. The friend. . . .
Who could have suspected him? Anyone else, perhaps. But this man—what an idea!
Julien Dumont was just about the age of Annette, between twenty-nine and thirty years old. Of middling height, with a slight stoop, a rather sad face and one that would have been unattractive without the fine, brown, gentle, serious eyes that were humbly caressing when one overcame their shyness, a bony forehead, with a depression in the middle, a big nose, pronounced cheek-bones, a short black beard, an affectionate mouth that was concealed under a very long moustache—it was Julien's almost invariable habit to conceal whatever was least ugly about him—the dull, old-ivory complexion of a man who has been nourished more by books than by sunlight. A face that lacked neither intelligence nor goodness, but was rather depressed and languid, a face that life and the passions had not yet marked. In his whole appearance there was something walled-in, something despondent.
He was more ingenuous and inexperienced than Annette, who was still a good deal so herself. For, in spite of her brief experience, an experience that had been more violent than extensive, she did not know very much about the world of love. It is true that the intuition she owed to her father and her talks with Sylvie, which sometimes quite equalled those of the Queen of Navarre, had not left her ignorant of anything. But the lesson is badly learned which the heart has not studied at its own expense. Words are not of the same stuff as reality. And one sometimes fails to recognize what one has read about when one meets it in life. Annette, who had been well taught, had almost everything to learn. Julien had to learn everything.
He had lived without love. We hesitate in France to speak of "innocents" of this kind: they provoke the easy pleasantries of an intelligent race that does not vary to any great extent in the forms of its wit. There are many of these innocents. Whether it is the result of religious scruples, or moral puritanism, or a deep-seated and sometimes unwholesome timidity, or (and this is most frequently the case) an overwhelming burden of work that absorbs their years of youth, a life of poverty, toil, a repugnance for vulgar love affairs, a respect for the future, for the one who is coming (who is not coming)—in every case, no doubt, a certain cold-bloodedness lies at the bottom of their attitude. The Nordic heart is slow to awaken, though this may mean, not that the passions are going to lack force in the future, but merely that they are gathering and being held in reserve. There are many of these innocents, and the happy young people about them pay no attention to them. Innocents are left empty-handed; they are left out of everything. Julien knew scarcely anything about life except through his intelligence.
The child of a bourgeois family, poor, laborious, which included only his two parents, the father an obscure professor who had worked himself to death, the mother devoted to her son, who returned the devotion, deeply religious, a practising Catholic, a believer, with liberal ideas, an unbroken, monotonous life of labor, coldly illumined by the severe joy of conscience and habit, with no interest in politics, a distaste for every sort of public activity, a profound love of the hidden, inner, domestic life, he was a truly honest, modest soul, with a sense of the value of the strong, humble virtues. And deep down in his heart was a flower of poetry.
He was an assistant teacher of science at a lycée. He had known Annette years before at the University, when they were twenty. From the very first he had been attracted by her. But Annette, who was rich at that time, popular, radiant with youth and happy egoism, carelessly distant, intimidated Julien. Her bolder companions assumed with her the place that he would have liked to take. He envied them, but he did not try to rival them; he considered himself inferior, ugly, awkward, ill-dressed; he was unable to express himself and gave a false idea of his intelligence and his sincerity. The sense of his physical uncouthness paralysed him all the more because he was susceptible to beauty, and Annette inspired in him an unexpressed emotion. For he thought her beautiful; unlike his companions who paid court to her, he did not have a sufficiently free mind to observe cavalierly the imperfections that accompanied her attractions, the strongly marked eyebrows, the prominent eyes, the short nose. He did not see these details. But he alone of all these young men grasped the harmony of this living form, he alone understood it; for, although most people stop at the mere external pattern, every form expresses an inner meaning. Julien did not separate in his own mind Annette's eyes, her forehead, her heavy eyebrows from her energy of character and vigorous mentality. He saw her from a distance, simply, summarily; but he saw her truly, more truly, at this first glance, than when he came nearer and tried to know her better. He was one of those far-sighted spirits that are embarrassed at close range. Sometimes they have genius and stumble at every step.
Julien and Annette happened to meet again one morning in the great windowed hall on the first floor of the Library of Sainte-Geneviève. It was nearly ten years since they had seen each other, and Julien had prudently avoided thinking of the image that rose before him to-day. He lifted his eyes from his book. On the other side of the table, a few steps away, he caught sight of her reading. Over her beautiful auburn hair was a fur toque; her cloak was thrown back from her shoulders. (It was still winter, though Easter was approaching; and the hall, into which the icy air of the square filtered through the great windows, was never warm enough. Julien had kept his own coat-collar turned up, but she, with her neck exposed, did not feel the cold.) With one elbow on the table and her chin resting on the back of her hand, she had the familiar attitude which he had seen so long ago, her brow bending forward, her blond eyebrows knit, and the eyes running down the page, while she nibbled the end of her pencil. He felt again as he had felt at twenty. But it did not occur to him to get up and speak to her.
In spite of the ardor with which she had applied herself to reading, as she applied herself to everything, Annette's mind was still pursuing more than one single thought. The ideas she had come to find in a book, and that really attracted her, rarely presented themselves without a procession of images which had very little in common among themselves. She drove them away; but, as moment followed moment, the indiscreet images came back and knocked at the door. The most intellectual woman never completely forgets herself in what she is reading; the current within her is too strong. Annette interrupted her reading to open the flood-gate for a moment.
As she thus stopped, casting about her a rather troubled glance, her eye encountered that of Julien: it was fixed upon her. The image of Julien seemed to her a part of what was passing through her mind. Then, suddenly awakening—as when, in the morning, on her pillow, she found herself all at once in the midst of life—she rose gaily and stretched out her hand to him across the table.
Julien, who was embarrassed, awkwardly went over and sat down beside her. They began to talk. Julien said little. He was stunned by this unexpected pleasure. Annette took everything into her own hands. She was delighted; a happy past reappeared before her. Julien played a very minor part in this: he was a mere link in the chain, and as the figures of the dance unfolded Julien was soon far away. But he thought he still saw himself in Annette's laughing eyes, and in his confusion he scarcely knew what he was saying to her in reply. He did his best (the clumsy soul!) to conceal the admiration she aroused in him. She still seemed beautiful to him, more beautiful than ever, but closer, more human, somehow new. . . . In what way? He knew nothing about her; the last thing he had heard was the death of her father six years before. He lived a solitary life; the gossip of Paris never reached him. . . . He asked if Annette was still living in the Boulogne house.
"What, don't you know? It's a long time since I moved away from there. Yes, they put me out of it."
He did not understand. She hastily explained, with an air of gaiety, that she had been ruined by her own fault, her indifference to business.
"It was a very good thing!" she added.
And she spoke of other matters. Not a word about her life. She had no desire to conceal it, but it was no concern of others. If Julien had insisted, asked some question, she would have replied with the exact truth. But he asked nothing, he would not have dared. His mind was lost in this one thought: she was poor, poor like himself. Already the fiery wind of hope had entered him.
To disguise his feeling he leaned, with a gruff camaraderie, over the pamphlet she had just laid down.
"What are you reading here?"
He turned the leaves. A scientific review. There was a file of them.
"Yes," said Annette, "I am trying to catch up with things. It's not easy. I have lost ground during these five years; I have to earn my living, giving lessons, and I haven't the time. I am taking advantage of Easter. No more lessons. I'm resting. I am trying to make up for lost time. I am taking double doses, you see. [She pointed to the open reviews that surrounded her.] I should like to swallow them all. But it's too much. I can't manage it; I have to learn everything all over again. Such an immense number of things have happened since I have been out of the running; they allude to works that I don't know. . . . Heavens, how quickly things move! But I shall catch up with them again! I swear I shan't be left behind on the road like a cripple. There are fine things to be seen out there. I want to see them."
Julien drank in her words. Of all she was saying what remained in his mind was this: she was earning her living under difficulties, and she was laughing. She rose in his admiration to a height which the old Annette had never attained. And she dragged him along with her. For this joy, which he did not possess, she brought to him.
They went out together. Julien was proud to find himself in the company of this beautiful woman; he could not get over his surprise that she should have remembered him so well. In the old days she had hardly seemed to notice that he existed. And here she was recalling to him little forgotten events in which he was concerned. She asked about Julien's mother. He was so touched that his embarrassment vanished; haltingly, he began to tell her about himself; he was tongue-tied. Annette listened to him with gentle irony; she would have liked to prompt him. He was still at the beginning and his assurance was coming back when she held out her hand to bid him goodbye. He had just time to ask her if she was going to be at the library again, and he was overjoyed to hear her say, "to-morrow."
Julien went home in utter confusion. He was ashamed of himself, but to-morrow he would make up for it. To-day he only wanted to think of the miracle of this friendship. On her side, Annette, who was submerged in Sylvie's environment, was pleased to have found again a comrade of her intellectual years. Not that he was very enlivening—hardly that—but he was a serious, sympathetic, honest boy. . . . What an icicle!
She had no reason the next day to change her opinion. Julien only thawed out when he was alone at home. The moment he saw Annette again, the ice at once returned. He was filled with consternation. He had prepared many things to say, prepared a conversation as he would have prepared a lecture, but under Annette's eyes nothing remained of it all. There was only a tasteless extract left of the recitation that he had warmed up in himself so many times. Even he was bored as he heard himself reeling it off. He only recovered his equilibrium when they began to discuss science and he himself was not in question. On that ground he was precise and clear and even became quite lively. Annette could have asked nothing more. Eager to learn, she pressed him with questions that interested Julien by their intelligence; she was so quick in imagining, though she often guessed wrong, and at a word she would turn up at the exact point whither he wished to lead her. He liked this attentive face, these eyes that plunged into his to reach his thought more quickly, and then suddenly lighted up. She had understood! The joy of thought shared in common, and this invisible sun and the immense perspective illumined by its light, the joy of travelling together towards discovery by new roads where he was her guide! It was delicious to talk in this way, in the peaceful seclusion of this hall of books, this church of the mind.
Delicious for him, but not for those who were near them. For he talked too loud: he had forgotten that other people existed. Annette smilingly told him that he must be silent and rose to go out. He followed her. But once in the street again, with the table and the books no longer before them, he became the same impotent soul whom Annette had seen the day before. She tried to make him talk of himself, but her labor was lost. And he could not make up his mind to leave her; he wanted to take her back to the door of her house. He was stiff, nervous, abrupt from embarrassment—at moments, unintentionally, even rather impolite. . . . He was a fearful bore! Annette, slightly irritated, thought, "How the devil can I get rid of him?"
Julien perceived the mocking curve in this mouth that said nothing. He stopped suddenly and remarked, in a tone of distress, "O forgive me, I'm boring you. . . . Yes, I know it, I know it! I am such a bore! I don't know how to talk. I am not used to it. I live alone. My mother is good, very good, but I can't tell her about my thoughts. Many of them would upset her; she wouldn't understand them. And I have never known anybody who was interested in them. I don't expect it. You have been good to listen to me so indulgently. I have let myself go on because I wanted to tell you. . . . But it isn't possible. One can't tell things, one should keep them to oneself. It isn't interesting, it isn't manly. Live and be silent. I ask your pardon for having bored you."
Annette was touched. There was real feeling in these words. This mixture of modesty and sad pride struck her; she felt the disappointment and the wounded affection under the shell of coldness. In one of those bursts of emotion which she could not resist, she was seized with a kindly pity for Julien. She said warmly, "No, no, don't regret anything. I thank you. It was quite right of you to talk"—she corrected herself with a touch of mockery that had no sharpness in it this time—"to try to talk. Yes, it isn't easy. You are not used to it. . . . Well, I'm glad you are not used to it. There are plenty of others who are! But there is nothing to prevent me from hoping that I shall make you get used to it. Are you willing? Since you have no one with whom you can talk?"
Julien was too much moved to reply, but his look expressed a gratitude that was still shy. Although it was past the hour when she should have been at home, Annette retraced her steps so that they might still have a few minutes together; and she talked to him with a kind, motherly camaraderie, in a simple, cordial tone that was like a cool hand laid on his aching forehead. Yes, he had been hurt, this big boy; with his moody air he needed to be handled very gently. He was coming back to life now. But she had to go in. . . . Annette suggested seeing him again from time to time. And they confessed that, as for the work they had done in the library, they might have done it just as well in the Luxembourg Gardens, or . . .
"Or . . . why not at my house?"
And Annette, inviting him for some Sunday soon, vanished without waiting for a reply.
Ah, how well he might have talked, now that she was no longer there! He went over the whole scene; he felt how kind Annette was. And since this man, who was so well balanced in his intellectual life, was unable to preserve any measure in the things of the heart, he slipped without transition from the thought that his feeling was destined to remain unreturned to the thought that perhaps . . .
Annette had not the least suspicion of what was taking place in Julien. The unengaging appearance of her new companion seemed a guarantee against love, and she thought that in some comic fashion it would also guarantee Julien. She respected him. She pitied him. Pitied, he became sympathetic. It was pleasant to tell herself that she could do him good; and he became more sympathetic to her. But it would never have occurred to her to be on her guard against him, still less against herself.
She had forgotten her invitation when, on the following Sunday, he came to recall it to her; and the joyous surprise with which she greeted him was not assumed. But Julien who, for a week, had been thinking of nothing but this moment, did not see the surprise and saw only the joy. And his own increased. The weather was very bad. Annette had not thought of going out this afternoon. As she was not expecting anybody; she was in négligé, and so was the apartment. The baby had been playing there. It is useless to have, as Annette had, a love of order; children oblige one to give it up, along with so many fine plans that one has formed without considering them. But Julien, referring everything to himself, saw in this disorder no artistic effect, but a sign of some intimacy that Annette wished to accord him. He came in with a beating heart, but with his mind made up to appear this time in an advantageous light; he assumed an air of assurance. It was not becoming to him, and Annette, who was annoyed at being surprised in this confusion, was angry because the intruder was so unceremonious. She at once became cold, and in an instant Julien's pride was broken. So they remained, each as stiff as the other, the one not daring to utter another word, the other waiting with an air of malicious hauteur.
"If you imagine, my dear boy, that I am going to help you to-day!"
And then she saw the ridiculous side of the situation. She saw with the corner of her eye the piteous look of the conqueror, and she laughed out loud. Suddenly relaxed, she resumed the comradely tone. Julien did not understand it at all: disconcerted but relieved, he too became natural again, and at last a friendly conversation sprang up between them.
Annette told him about her working life, and they confessed to one another that they were not made for their occupations. Julien was passionately interested in the science which he taught, but . . .
"They can't follow me! They look at me with their dull eyes blinking with sleep; there are hardly two or three who have a glimmer of understanding; the rest are a heavy mass of boredom. If you sweat blood and water, you can sometimes (not always) stir it for a moment, but it always falls back into the pond. Try to fish it out again! It's work for a well-digger. But it isn't their fault, the unhappy brats. They are just like ourselves; they are victims of the democratic mania according to which all minds absorb equally the same sum of knowledge—before the normal age when they might begin to understand! Then come the examinations, the agricultural matches, when they weigh these products of ours who are crammed with a mixture of lame words and formless notions. Most of these they hastily disgorge immediately afterwards, and they are disgusted with learning for the rest of their lives."
"Now I," said Annette, laughing, "like children very much, yes, even the most unattractive ones. I am not indifferent to any of them. I should like to have them all, I should like to hug them all. But one has to limit oneself. Isn't that so? It's enough to have one. . . ."
(She pointed to the disorderly room, but he did not understand and smiled stupidly.)
"It's a pity! When I see one who pleases me, I would like to steal him. And they all give me pleasure. There is something fresh, an infinite hope, even in the ugliest. . . . But what can I do with them? And what can they do with me? I see so little of them. They are only in my hands for an hour. And then I run to the others. And my little ones also run from hand to hand. What one hand has done the other undoes. Nothing sticks. These little formless souls, these little soulless forms, who dance the Boston and the two-step. We run about. Everyone runs about. This life is a race-course. No one ever stops. People die, they join the dead. Ah, what unhappy souls, never granting themselves a day to collect their thoughts! And they don't grant us one either, we who would so like to have it!"
Julien understood her. He had no need to learn the value of a retreat, the horror of the tumultuous world. And their understanding increased when Annette said that fortunately, in the midst of the flood, there were still a few islets where one could take refuge, the beautiful books of the poets and especially music. The poets had little attraction for Julien; their language was beyond him. He had the strange distrust of it which is common in minds that love thought and often have their own poetry, but do not perceive the deep vibrations of the music of words. The other music, the language of sounds, is more accessible to them. Julien loved it. Unfortunately, he lacked the time and the means to go and hear it.
"I lack them too," said Annette. "But I go just the same."
Julien did not have this vitality. After his working day he stayed quietly at home. He did not know how to amuse himself. He saw a piano in the room.
"Do you play?"
"Ah, it isn't easy!" said Annette, laughing. "He doesn't allow it."
Julien, vaguely troubled, asked in surprise who could prevent her in this way. Annette, with her ear alert, listened to the little steps that were tapping along as they climbed the stairs. She ran and opened the door. "See, there's the monster!"
She brought Marc in. He had returned from his aunt's.
Julien did not yet understand.
"My little boy . . . Marc, will you say good-afternoon?"
Julien was astounded. It had not even occurred to Annette that he would be surprised. She went on gaily, holding Marc, who tried to escape from her, "You see, I haven't lost my time in spite of all."
Julien did not have the wit to reply. His attention was occupied in concealing his confusion. He attempted a rather foolish smile. Marc had succeeded in slipping from his mother's hands, without having said good-afternoon. (He thought this ceremony ridiculous, and he made off, leaving his mother talking, "talking and saying nothing," well knowing that the instant after she would have forgotten it in something else. There was no continuity in women.) Four steps away from Julien, in the folds of a curtain which he twisted in his embrace, Marc looked the stranger up and down with severe eyes; and in his childish way (which was fairly accurate) he had quickly sized up the situation. Decision without appeal: he did not like Julien. The question was settled.
Julien, whose embarrassment was increased by this look from the child, tried to resume the thread of the conversation while following the thread of his own thoughts. But he only succeeded in becoming more confused. He reassured himself, however. Feebly. Annette's confident manner made it impossible for him to suspect that she was unmarried: that was out of the question. But where was the husband? Alive or dead? Annette was not in mourning. No, he was not reassured. What had become of this man? Julien did not dare to ask directly. After many detours, he finally took a chance, imagining he was very clever, and carelessly remarked, "Have you been alone very long?"
"I am not alone," said Annette. And she pointed to her child.
He learned nothing more. But since she thus admitted by implication that she was alone (with the child) and that she took it gaily, it must be because her mourning was far, very far, behind her, and she no longer thought of it. Julien's interested logic ended victoriously, "Monsieur Malbrough is dead."
Farewell to the husband! He was no longer disturbing. Julien threw one more shovelful of earth on him, and then, turning to Marc, gave the child a crooked smile. Marc was becoming sympathetic to him.
But he had not become so to Marc. He was more familiar with the constitution of the atomic bodies than with that of a child's mind. Marc fully realized that this demonstration of good nature was not natural, and the result was that he turned his back, grumbling, "I forbid him to laugh at me."
Annette, amused by Julien's useless efforts to win over the child, thought she ought to make up for Marc's ungracious greeting. She questioned Julien about his solitary life with an interest that wandered a little at first, but soon ceased to do so. Julien, who was always more sure of himself when he was sitting in the half-light of a room, talked about himself this time quite frankly. He was simple; he never, or hardly ever, posed, in spite of his desire to please. In his sincerity he revealed a candour that one seldom meets in Paris in a man of his age. When he touched upon subjects that were dear to him, he had a delicacy that veiled a restrained emotion. In these moments of abandon when, in the kindly silence of the encouraging Annette, his true inner nature seemed to blossom, a gleam of moral beauty lighted up his face. Annette looked at him attentively, and what she felt for him was no longer merely a friendly indifference.
After this they saw each other regularly on Sundays and a little oftener during the week, when they had a free moment. Julien used as a pretext the books which he lent her; it was quite necessary to accompany them with explanations so that Annette should have less difficulty in understanding them. He brought Marc some rather expensive but badly chosen presents for which the little enemy was by no means grateful to him: he thought them childish and beneath his dignity. But nothing could shake Julien's good will, firmly resolved as he was not to see anything that would disturb him. Solitary spirits who distrust the world lose all discernment, all desire to be discerning, the moment they abandon their distrust in favor of some chosen soul: they are liberated. Julien's mind, ingenious in deceiving itself, arranged to its satisfaction the memories it brought back from each of its visits: everything that Annette had said and everything that surrounded her. (Without being conscious of it, he indirectly glorified himself.) Annette's inattentiveness, her wandering replies, even the bored silences which he sometimes caused her, all rendered her more beautiful and more touching to him. And as, each time, he still discovered some new little trait, which did not accord with the portrait he had made, he kept remaking the portrait, he made it over ten times; and although the portrait no longer resembled what it had been at the beginning, Julien never admitted that there had been a change in its essential constancy. He was ready to alter his ideal of love as many times as the beloved object altered.
Annette had become aware of his love for her. She was amused by it at first, then touched, then grateful, a little, a good deal, in spite of everything. ("The least handsome boy in the world can only give what he has. Thank you, my good Julien.") Then she was a little troubled. She told herself frankly that she should not allow him to start down that slope. But it gave the boy so much happiness, and certainly it was not displeasing to her. Annette was susceptible to affection; susceptible also to gentle attentions, the flattery of tenderness. Too much so, perhaps. She confessed it. Love, the admiration she read in his eyes were for her a caress that she could not but wish to have repeated. . . . Yes, she admitted it: perhaps it was not quite right, but it was so natural! She would have to make some little effort to deprive herself of it. She did so, but she had no luck; everything she said to push Julien away from her (did she really say everything?) attracted him all the more. It was a fatality! One has to resign oneself to a fatality. She laughed at herself, while Julien, troubled, wondered if she was not laughing at him.
"Hypocrite, hypocrite! Haven't you any shame?"
She had no shame. Can one resist pleasing a heart that has surrendered itself into one's hands? It brightens one's days. And what harm does it do? What is the danger? As long as one is calm and master of oneself and desires only what is good, the good of the other person!
She did not know that one of the insidious paths through which love finds its way is the fond vanity of believing that one is necessary—that feeling which is so strong in the heart of a true woman: it satisfies her double need of doing good, which she confesses, and of pride, which she does not confess. It is so strong that when she has a well-developed soul she often prefers the man for whom she cares less, but whom she can protect, to the man for whom she cares more, but who can get along without her. Is not this the essence of maternity? Suppose the big boy were to remain the little chick as long as he lived! The woman with a mother's heart, like Annette, finds it easy to attribute to a man whose love appeals to her a charm he does not possess. Her instinct disposes her to observe only his good qualities. Julien had plenty of these. Annette rejoiced to see his timidity vanishing and his real nature, which had been repressed, expanding in the daylight with the soft happiness of the convalescent. She said to herself that hitherto no one had understood this man, not even the mother of whom he was always talking and of whom she was beginning to be jealous. As for poor Julien, he did not know himself. . . . Who would have suspected that under this rough shell there was a tender, delicate soul? . . . (She was exaggerating.) . . . He needed confidence and he had lacked it: confidence in others, confidence in himself. To believe in himself he needed another believer. Well, she believed! She believed in Julien, for Julien's sake, so much that she ended by believing in him also for her own. . . . He blossomed under her eye as a plant in the sunlight. And it is good to be the sun for somebody else. "Open, my heart!" Was it to Julien's heart or her own that she was speaking? Already she had ceased to know. For she too was blossoming as a result of the good she was doing. An abundant nature dies if it cannot nourish others from itself. "To give myself!"
Annette gave too much. She was irresistible. Julien no longer concealed his passion. And Annette—a little late—recognized that she was in danger.
When she saw love rising within her, she threw up a feeble defence; she tried not to take Julien's feelings seriously. But she did not believe herself, and all she did was to make Julien more importunate. He became pathetic.
Then she was seized with fear. She besought him not to love her, to let them remain good friends.
"Why?" he asked. "Why?"
She did not want to say. She had an instinctive fear of love; she remembered what she had suffered through it, and an intuition warned her of what she would have to suffer again. She summoned it and she drove it away from her; she desired it and she fled from it. Julien's entreaties she resisted sincerely, and in the bottom of her heart she prayed that her adversary might conquer her; resistance.
The combat would have dragged on if a certain event had not hastened the issue.
With her sister's husband Annette was on terms of the frankest friendship. This good soul, for all his slight vulgarity, lacked neither heart nor integrity. Annette respected him, and Leopold treated her with a rather ceremonious consideration. Ever since their first meetings he had gathered that she belonged to a different species from his and Sylvie's; she intimidated him. He was all the more grateful for the kindness she showed him. At the time when he was paying court to Sylvie, she had been his ally; more than once she had come to his aid when he was exposed to the ridicule of his fiancée, who was too sure of her power not to abuse it. Later she had even discreetly interposed in misunderstandings in the household, or when Sylvie yielded to sudden whims, crotchets and deviltries, now and then, escaping from her own vexations by vexing her husband. Leopold, who did not understand such things, would come and tell his troubles to Annette, who undertook to bring Sylvie back to reason. He had even gone so far as to confide to his sister-in-law more than one matter which he had not mentioned to his wife. Sylvie was not unaware of this, and she teased Annette, who took it gaily. Everything was natural and frank among the three. Leopold had never complained of the place held in his home by his wife's sister and the little boy, though they were often rather in the way; he thought, in fact, that Sylvie did not do enough to help Annette, whose courage he admired; and he spoiled the child. Annette, who knew through Sylvie what Leopold thought, was grateful to him.
The period of Sylvie's pregnancy was not, for those about her, especially the husband, a happy time. Frequent discords drove Leopold and his consort apart. Not that Sylvie meant to get along without him. She thought very little about her maternity and was unwilling to make any change in her manner of living. But he did think about it. Those long months of gestation were far from being for her what they had been for Annette, an endless dream of languid happiness that was finished too soon. Sylvie was not made to brood on dreams. She was impatient and had no intention of giving up one of her duties, one of her rights or one of her pleasures: she overtaxed herself. Her health was affected by her nervous state, and her character did not gain by it. When one is tormented, one is glad to torment others. Sylvie, who was uncomfortable, was indignant because her husband was not; and she undertook to make him so. She harassed him with her teasing, malicious, perpetually changing moods. She was even (unexpectedly enough) jealously amorous, though this did not prevent her from abusing him. There were days when he did not know which way to turn.
Annette was at hand to receive his lamentations. He would climb up to her floor, complaining; she would listen to him patiently, and she found a way to make him laugh at his little misfortunes. These meetings, as they went on, established between them a sort of complicity, for they had so many feelings in common. And sometimes, in Sylvie's presence, they would exchange a malicious glance. Perfectly honest, both of them, they took no precautions and abandoned themselves to a familiarity which, if it was innocent, was not entirely harmless. Annette did not dream that there was any risk, and these friendly coquetries amused her. Leopold was captivated by them; he asked for nothing better. He had been attracted for a long time by the radiant force of joy that issued from her. Just at that moment Annette was discovering Julien's love, and it troubled her deliciously. The rest of the world was all a haze. When she had just seen Julien, and Leopold was talking to her, she listened to Leopold and replied to him, but it was to Julien that she was smiling. Leopold had no means of guessing this.
He knew what he wanted. He resisted like a decent fellow. But a decent fellow is a man. He should not play with fire.
One Sunday in May the four of them, Sylvie, Annette, Leopold and little Marc, went for a walk in the direction of Sceaux. After an hour of strolling, Sylvie, who was a little tired, sat down at the foot of a slope and said, "Well, young people, climb it if you want to! You will find us still here."
She remained behind with the child. Annette and Leopold went gaily on. Annette was animated, joyous, the best of company. Leopold, with his jolly talk, eased the moral tension in which Julien's love and his intellectual conversation held her. The path wound between the long wall of a great estate and a rise of ground covered with flowering bushes. Through the holes in the hedges they saw, as they climbed, the sloping orchards with their white and pink tufts.
A fantastic sky, with the busy clouds racing over its delicate blue. The laughing wind, like a young dog, bit them by fits and starts. Annette was walking ahead, picking flowers, singing. Leopold was following her; he watched her bending over, watched her robust frame under the tightly fitting dress, her bare hands, her bare neck, reddened by the lash of the wind, and amid the foaming hair the red shell of her ear, the tip of which looked like a drop of blood. The slope rose again to the right, and the road formed a passage in which the rushing wind streamed down upon them. Annette, without turning, asked her companion a question. He did not reply. She went on, bending over, picking flowers and talking. And as she joked with Leopold, who was silent, it suddenly occurred to her that there was something dangerous in this silence. She let her flowers fall. She straightened herself, but she did not have time to turn when . . . she almost fell. He had clasped her in his arms. She had been brutally seized, and she felt on her neck a panting breath. An eager mouth was kissing her throat, her cheeks. Instantly stiffening, bracing herself, with all her unconscious fighting forces collected, with her chest and her spine she furiously shook the man who had seized her: she broke his hold and found herself face to face with the aggressor. Her eyes flamed with anger, but he did not relax his grip. A rough struggle followed, like that of animals that hate each other. Rough and brief. Annette, whose outraged instincts gave her an added strength, violently repulsed the man, and he tripped and stumbled. He remained there before her, doubly humiliated, panting, scarlet, and they looked at each other with rage in their eyes. Not a word was said. Suddenly Annette clambered up the bank, crept through a hole in the hedge to the other side, and fled. Leopold, who had come to his senses, called after her. She stopped twenty paces away and would not let him approach. They redescended the hill on different sides of the hedge, keeping their distances, on their guard, hostile and ashamed. Leopold, in a changed voice, implored Annette to come back, begged her pardon. Annette turned a deaf ear towards him, but she heard him: the confusion of this voice reached her through the barrier of her bitterness. She slackened her pace.
"Annette!" he besought her. "Annette! Don't run away! I don't want to pursue you. See, I'm staying here, I shan't come near you. I've behaved like a brute. I'm ashamed, ashamed. Call me any names you like, but don't run away. I shall never touch you again, not even with the tip of my finger. I'm disgusted with myself. I ask your pardon on my knees!"
He knelt down awkwardly on the pebbles. He looked utterly wretched. He was ridiculous.
Annette, who was listening to him in cold silence, motionless, with her face turned away, threw him a side-glance without looking at him. She saw this humiliated man. She was touched by his humiliation; her warm heart had the faculty of opening to the emotions of others as if they were her own, and she blushed at Leopold's shame. She made a movement towards him and said, "Get up!"
He rose, and she instinctively recoiled a few steps. "You are still afraid," he said. "You will never forgive me."
"Don't speak of it any more," she answered dryly. "It's ended."
They descended the road again. Annette was dumb and frozen. He had difficulty in keeping silent. He was mortified, and he was trying to justify himself. But he was not very eloquent, the poor man. His style was not exactly noble. "I am a dirty cur!" he repeated angrily.
Annette, still agitated, repressed a smile. Her mind was in a tumult, and she found difficulty in calming it. She felt at the same time the loathsomeness and the absurdity of the scene. She had not forgiven him, and she was ready to pity the man who was accusing himself so pathetically beside her. He continued to flounder. She listened to him with bitterness, compassion, irony. He struggled to explain "this filthy madness that passes through your body." . . . Yes, this madness, she knew it, although it was not the time to tell him so. But he looked so wretched that, in spite of herself, she said to him, "I know. One is mad sometimes. What's done is done."
They continued on their way, without speaking, their hearts heavy, sad and embarrassed. Just as they were arriving at the spot where they had left Sylvie, Annette made a gesture as if she were about to hold out her hand to Leopold. But instead of doing so, she said, "I've forgotten it."
He was relieved, though he was still troubled. Like a schoolboy caught in some misdemeanor, he asked, "You won't say anything about it?"
Annette gave him a little pitying smile.
No, she said nothing. But at the first glance the sharp eye of Sylvie had seen it all. She asked no questions. They spoke of other things. And while all three, to hide their thoughts, made a great parade of chattering all the way home, Sylvie observed the two others.
From that day forward Annette and Leopold were never again alone together. The jealous one was always watching; Annette too was on her guard. In spite of herself she allowed her distrust to be viable. And Leopold, who was hurt, brooded over his unconfessed bitterness.
Annette's eyes were opened. She could no longer remain undistrustful of herself and others. She could no longer pass along, laughing, as she had done before, heedless, because she did not seek them, of the desires she aroused. Society being as it is, customs being as they are, her situation as a single woman, young and free, not only exposed her to pursuit, but legitimized it. No one could believe that she had freed herself, in the boldest fashion, in order to shut herself up afterwards in a widowhood the constancy of which was without an object. She imagined she had changed with maternity, and no doubt maternity was a great flame. But another flame still burned in her. She tried to forget it, because she was afraid of it; and she imagined that no one saw it. But this was not so; in spite of her, the fire of love burned on. And other people, if not she, were in danger of being its victims. Leopold's adventure had shown her this. It was hideous. She was revolted by it. In the disillusioned eyes of one who is not in love, the act of love seems a grotesque or disgusting bestiality. As Annette saw it, Leopold's attempt was both. But Annette did not have a calm conscience. She had fanned these desires. She remembered her thoughtless coquetries, her arts, the provocations she had given him. What had driven her into them? That repressed force, that inner fire which she was obliged to foster or stifle. Stifle it one cannot, one should not! It is the sunlight of life. Without it, everything is plunged in shadow. But at least it should not consume that to which it ought to give life, like the chariot that was given into the hands of Phaëton. Let it follow its regular course through the sky! Marriage then? After having so long avoided it, the perception of the dangers that menaced her led her to tell herself that a marriage of affection and esteem, of calm sympathy, would be a bulwark against the demons of the heart and a protection against pursuit from without. The more she convinced herself (and everything conspired to convince her: her material and moral security, the attraction of a home and the solicitations of her heart), the less resistance she opposed to Julien's supplications. In order to yield to them, she went over all the reasons she had for loving him. But she did not wait for these reasons in order to love him. For already there had begun within her that construction of the mind which creates an exalted vision of the chosen one. Julien had preceded her in this, but as she had a richer and more passionate nature she had soon outdistanced him.
No longer on her guard, surrendering to the ardor of her frank nature, she used none of those artifices with which a cleverer woman masks her defeat when her heart is captured and she allows people to believe that she is still mistress of it. Annette had made a gift of hers. She told Julien. And from that very moment Julien began to be uneasy.
He knew very little about women. They fascinated him and disconcerted him. Rather than know them he preferred to judge them. He idealized some, he condemned others. Towards those who fell into neither of the two categories he remained indifferent. Very young men—and Julien, owing to the slightness of his experience, had remained very young—are always hasty in their judgments. As they are full of themselves and their desires, they seek in others only for what they wish to find. Whether on the moral or the carnal side, naïve persons are like roués in one respect: when they love they are always thinking of themselves and never of the woman. They refuse to see that she exists outside of them. Love is the one test that can teach them. It teaches the few who are capable of learning—but generally to their cost and that of their partners; for when at last they know it is too late. The naïve astonishment, old as the ages, that bewails the irreducible duality which is the bitter fruit of love, that disappointed dream of unity, is the usual result of this initial misunderstanding. For what does "love" mean if it is not "loving someone else"? Without possessing the egoism of Roger Brissot, Julien, through ignorance, had no less difficulty in getting outside of himself; and he had a still more limited view of the feminine universe. He needed to be led prudently by the hand.
Prudent was the one thing Annette was not by nature, and love did not teach her. It gave her the need of a generous confidence. Now that she was sure of loving and being loved, she concealed nothing. Nothing in the man she loved could have repelled her: why should she paint herself up? She was healthy-minded, and she did not blush at being what she was. Whoever loved her should see her as she was! She had clearly seen Julien's naïveté, his lack of understanding, his alarm. She found a tender and malicious pleasure in them. She was glad that she was the first to reveal to him a feminine soul.
One day she went to surprise him in his apartment. His mother opened the door. An old lady, with gray hair tightly drawn across a calm brow that was lighted up by two severe, watchful eyes, she inspected Annette with a distrustful politeness and showed her into a neat, cold little drawing-room with horsehair furniture.
Dull family photographs and pictures from museums added a finishing touch to the freezing atmosphere of the room. Annette waited alone. After a whispered consultation in the adjoining bedroom, Julien dashed in. He was delighted and he was frightened; he did not know what to say. He spoke absent-mindedly. They were sitting in uncomfortable chairs with stiff backs that thwarted every natural movement. Between them was one of those drawing-room tables that you cannot lean upon, tables with sharp edges that hurt your knees. The cold glitter of the carpetless floor and the dead faces under glass, like plants in a herbarium, congealed the words on their lips and made them lower their voices. This drawing-room absolutely froze Annette. Was Julien going to keep her here during the whole of her call? She asked him if he did not want to show her the room where he worked. He could not refuse, he even wanted to do so. But he looked so hesitant that she said, "Would you rather not?"
He protested, explaining that it was not in order, and took her in. It was in much better order than her own rooms had been at the time of Julien's first call, but there was no air of gaiety in Julien's room. It served him both for working and sleeping. Books, a well-known engraving that represented Pasteur, papers on the chairs, a pipe on the table, a student's bed. She noticed overhead a little crucifix with a branch of boxwood. Settled in the badly upholstered arm-chair, she tried to put her host at his ease by gaily recalling to him the memory of their student days. She talked without prudery of what they both knew. But he was distrait, embarrassed by her presence and her freedom of speech; he seemed preoccupied with what was going on in the next room. Annette, embarrassed by contagion, held out bravely and succeeded in making him forget the "what will she think of it?" At last he became quite lively and they had a good laugh. When she got up to go he became awkward again, leading her out. In the corridor they passed the mother's room; the door was ajar; Mme. Dumont, from discretion or in order not to have to speak to the stranger, pretended not to see them. The two women had only exchanged a glance, and they were enemies already. Mme. Dumont, the mother, was shocked by the call of this bold girl with her free and easy ways, her dear voice, her laughter, her animation: she scented danger. And Annette, who, during the visit, had perceived between Julien and herself this invisible presence, had felt angry: passing the room of the old lady who turned her back on her, she spoke and laughed more loudly still. And she jealously thought, "I'm going to take him away from her."
A week later, Julien came in turn, one evening, after dinner. He had had his first discussion with his mother on the subject of Annette; and he meant to assert his will. They were alone. Leopold had taken little Marc to the circus. When Julien left her, a little before eleven o'clock, Annette suggested walking back with him for the pleasure of enjoying together the fresh night air. But when they reached his door, Julien was troubled at the idea of leaving Annette to return alone. She made fun of his fear. None the less, he masted on going back with her again, and she did not protest. She would have him all the longer with her! So they returned by the most roundabout way; and without quite knowing how they got there, they found themselves on a steep bank of the Seine. It was a June night. They sat down on a bench. The poplars rustled above the dark water in which were spread the reddish and yellow lights of the lamps on the bridges. The sky was far away, the stars were feeble, as if the monstrous city had drawn all the life out of them. The darkness was above and the light below. They were silent. Words could no longer express their thoughts, but, without looking at each other, each read the other's mind. Julien's desire set Annette's heart aflame; but his timidity kept him bound and motionless, and he did not dare even to lift his eyes to her. She smiled and watched him, without turning her head, as she kept her eyes upon the red reflexions on the river; he could not make up his mind! Then she leaned towards him and kissed him.
Drunk with love and gratitude, he kissed her in return, while the insidious point of a dull anxiety fastened itself in his brain. A harsh remark of his mother's: "These bold, poverty-stricken girls who are trying to find somebody to marry them. . . ." He had pulled it angrily out not long before, but the tip of the sting had remained under the skin. He was ashamed. Mentally he asked Annette's pardon. He knew that the insulting suspicion was false. He believed in her religiously, but he was troubled. And each new visit troubled him more. Annette's freedom, the freedom of her manners, the freedom of her ideas, the freedom of her opinions on every kind of subject—especially on social morality—her calm lack of prejudices, terrified him. He was as narrow in his way of thinking as in his dress, rather dull in his ideas, inclined to severity. She, on the other hand, was generously indulgent and full of laughter. It did not occur to him that she might be as much of a Puritan as he where she herself was concerned, while with an ironical tolerance she applied to others their own measure. Tolerance and irony disconcerted him. She saw this; and when he expressed himself on some question with an unjust and excessive harshness she did not attempt to oppose his way of thinking; she smiled at this naïve rigidity which did not displease her. Her smile disturbed Julien more than her words. He had the impression that she knew more than he. It was true. But how much more? And just what did she know? What experience had she had?
Like his mother—and some of his mother's spiteful remarks had contributed to make him so—this man of fine but impoverished vitality was vaguely alarmed by the brilliant health, the radiance of this woman. He had the most ardent desire for her, but he was afraid of her. In the walks they took together he felt that he cut a poor figure. Annette's perfect poise in every company added to his embarrassment. And although she would have liked this embarrassment if she had observed it, he was humiliated by it. But she did not observe it. She was utterly absorbed in the song within her. Annette mistakenly thought that no one but herself heard this song; and she did not see Julien's anxious glance when he asked himself, "At whom, at what, is she laughing?"
She seemed so far away!
He did not cease to see—he saw more clearly than ever—her great intellectual force, her moral energy. At the same time she remained for him a dangerous enigma. He was divided between two opposite feelings, an invincible attraction and an obscure mistrust that were like a remnant of the primitive instinct that recalls to the man and the woman of to-day the original enmity of the sexes, for which the carnal union was a form of combat. That suspicious instinct of defence is strongest perhaps in a man like Julien who is at once keenly intelligent and poor in experience. As it is impossible for him to see a woman just as she is, he sees her now too simply, now as full of snares.
Annette contributed to these oscillations of thought by her way of alternately saying everything and saying nothing, of revealing everything and concealing everything, her bursts of passionate expansiveness and her hermetic silences, which sometimes lasted during a good half of their walk. . . . These terrible silences—what man has not suffered from them?—during which the life of the companion who walks at your side goes down into those regions that you will never know! . . . Not that as a usual thing they cover very profound secrets. If you plunged into them you would find that they did not rise above your heel. But whatever the depth may be, the sheet of silence is opaque: the eye cannot penetrate it. And the tormented spirit of the man has plenty of time to conjure up all sorts of alarming mysteries. The idea would never have entered the head of a Julien that he might be the author of them, that if a woman is silent it is often because she knows so well how little the man understands her. Annette's silence, which was ironical and a little weary on some days, tolerated a false interpretation of her feelings on the part of her lover, for she knew that he loved the false and did not love the true.
"If you wish . . . As you wish! . . . Of course. I am not as I am. I am as you see me."
But these silences of acquiescence only lasted for a time. From the moment Annette perceived that there might be danger in frank explanations (since Julien was unable to understand them) and that it would be more prudent to hold her peace, she spoke. To be silent in order to avoid uselessly annoying Julien, yes. But to deceive him, no. And if there was danger in speaking, all the more reason. That was the time when you couldn't avoid speaking any longer. The greater the risk, the greater was the pride that desired to brave it. This test of love made her heart beat. If the test succeeded, she would love Julien all the more. If it did not succeed? . . . It would succeed. Didn't Julien love her? Let come what might!
She played the game loyally. But there are some men who would prefer to have their partners cheat. When Sylvie learned of Julien's love and the plan for the marriage, she scolded Annette: good heavens, she wasn't thinking of telling the whole truth? Of course it was absolutely necessary for him to learn a part of it. When they were married the official records would be sure to enlighten him. But there was always a way of dressing up the truth. Since this boy loved her he would close his eyes. She had only not to open them! To do so would be really too stupid! Later there would be time to tell each other everything. . . . Sylvie spoke honestly out of her experience. She wished her sister's welfare. (She wished her own too; she would not have been displeased to see them out of her house with all possible speed.) From her point of view one didn't owe the truth to everyone, especially to one's fiancé: it was enough to love him! Annette's truth, of course, was innocent, but men are weak. They cannot endure the full truth. It has to be given to them in small doses. . . .
Annette listened to Sylvie calmly and spoke of something else. Useless to reply: it would only make her more obstinate. Sylvie's morality was not hers, and she preferred not to say what she thought of it. Sylvie was Sylvie. She loved her. . . . But what a look she would have given anyone else who had spoken to her so!
"Poor Sylvie! . . . She judges men from those she has known. But my Julien belongs to another species. He loves me as I am. He will love me as I was. I have nothing to conceal from him. I have never done him an injury. If any injury was done I did it to myself alone."
Fully considering the risks, but trusting in Julien's magnanimity, she made up her mind to speak. She brought up the subject of her past life. With a common modesty, they had always avoided this topic. But more than once, Annette had read in Julien's eyes what he burned and trembled to ask, what he wanted both to know and not to know.
She placed her hand tenderly on Julien's hand and said, "My friend, you have always been so adorably discreet with me. I thank you for it. I love you. . . . But I must tell you at last something you don't know about me, something that I have been. You must know me. I am not free from reproach."
He made an apprehensive gesture that protested against what she was going to say, as if he half wished to prevent it. She smiled.
"Don't be afraid! I haven't committed any great crimes. At least I shouldn't call them so. But perhaps I am too indulgent to myself, for the world regards these matters differently. It is for you to judge. I believe in your judgment. I am what you decide I am."
She began to tell her story. More frightened than she wanted to appear, she had prepared in advance what she intended to say. But simple as she imagined it would be to utter this, it was very painful to her. To overcome this constraint she made herself appear more free from emotion than she was. She even revealed at moments a touch of irony, directed at herself, which scarcely corresponded with the anxiety this recital stirred in her: she resorted to it in order to protect herself. . . . Julien did not understand it at all. He saw in this attitude only a shocking light-mindedness and lack of conscience.
She said first that she was not married. Julien had feared this. To tell the truth, he had even been silently sure of it. But he had always hoped that the contrary would turn out to be the case, and that Annette should tell him this, that doubt should no longer be possible, filled him with consternation. Intensely Catholic at heart, under his superficial liberalism, he had not freed himself from the idea of sin. Instantly he thought of his mother: she would never accept it. He foresaw a struggle. He was very much in love. In spite of the grief that Annette's confession caused him, in spite of the real fall her past weakness signified for him, the "error" of her whom he loved, he loved her, he was ready, in order to have her, to fight against his mother's opposition. But someone must help him; Annette must second him. He was weak; to endure the combat, he needed to summon all his strength, not the least element of which was the strength of illusion. He needed to idealize Annette, and if Annette had been clever she would have helped him to do so.
She saw the grief which her words caused. She had expected it; she was sorry for it, but she could not spare him. Since they were to live together, each would have to take his share of the trials and even the errors of the other. But she did not suspect the conflict that was taking place in him; and if she had thought of it, she would have remained confident of the victory of love.
"My poor Julien," she said, "I am giving you pain. Forgive me. It is hard for me too. You believed that I was better than I am. You gave me a higher place, too high, in your mind. . . . I am a woman. I am weak. . . . At least, if I have made a mistake, I have never deceived anyone else. I have always acted in good faith. I have always done that."
"Yes," he said hastily. "I'm sure of it. He deceived you, didn't he?"
"Who?" asked Annette.
"That wretch. . . . Forgive me! . . . That man who left you."
"No, don't accuse him," she said. "I am the guilty one."
She attached to this word "guilty" only the sense of a warm regret for the pain she was causing him, but he seized upon it greedily. In his confusion he longed to hold fast to the idea that Annette was the victim of a seduction and that she had repented. . . . He had an extreme need of this notion of "repenting"; it was for him a kind of compensation for the hurt he had suffered, a balm for the wound it could not heal but could render endurable; it gave him a moral superiority over Annette of which—to be fair to him—he would never have made use. In short, since he had no doubt about Annette's sin, he also had none about the need of repentance. His Christian nature was imbued with both these ideas. The most liberal Christian never frees himself from them.
But Annette had sprung from a race with a different kind of soul. The Rivières might be pure or impure, in the sense that Christian morality attaches to this word; but if they were pure it was not in obedience to an invisible God or his too visible representatives and their Tables of the Law. It was because they loved purity as moral cleanliness, as beauty. And if they were impure they regarded it as an affair between themselves and their own consciences, not the consciences of others. Annette could not admit that she must give an account of herself to others. If she confessed herself to Julien, it was a gift of love that she was making him. In all honesty, she owed him merely an account of her life. But of her inner life she did not owe him any account. She gave it to him of her own free will. She saw now that Julien would have preferred to have her embellish the truth. But she was too proud to profit by a lying excuse of which she felt no need. On the contrary, when she understood what he wanted her to say she took pains to make it clear that she had given herself to her lover.
Julien, who was completely upset, would not listen to her.
"No, no, I don't believe you," he said. "You are too generous. Don't accuse yourself to defend that man who deserves nothing but contempt."
"But I'm not accusing anyone," she said simply.
Her words struck against his consciousness, but he refused to understand.
"You are trying to exonerate him."
"I am not exonerating him. No one's to blame."
Julien struggled. "Annette, I implore you not to talk that way."
"Why?"
"You know very well it's wrong!"
"I know nothing of the kind."
"What? You don't regret anything?"
"I regret making you unhappy. But I didn't know you then, my friend. I was free and alone; I had no obligations except to myself."
"Is that nothing?" he thought. He did not dare to say it.
"But still you regret it?" he said, insistently. "You know very well you made a mistake."
He did not want to accuse her. But he so longed to have her accuse herself.
"Perhaps," she said.
"Perhaps," he took her up, dejectedly.
"I don't know," said Annette.
She saw where Julien wanted to lead her. Perhaps she had made a mistake, if yielding to a transport of sincere love and pity was a mistake. Perhaps, yes. "But if in my heart I can regret a sincere error, I don't need to excuse myself for it. My heart has remained alone with its suffering, communing with it alone in the silence. It must commune now with its regrets. They concern nobody. . . . Regrets? . . . Let's be honest to the end! There are no regrets!" After reflecting, she said, "I don't think I made a mistake."