Complete Works of Emile Zola (130 page)

A violent desire suddenly seized her. She made no effort to struggle against this irresistible longing.

She got quietly out of bed, with infinite precautions, so as not to wake William. When she had put her feet on the carpet, she looked at him uneasily, dreading lest he should ask her where she was going. But he was asleep, his eyes still full of tears. Then, she went and looked for the night-lamp and passed into the sitting-room, trembling when the floor creaked beneath her bare feet.

She walked straight to the album, opened it on a little table, and sat down before James’s portrait. It was James that she came to look for. Her shoulders covered with her loose hair, wrapping herself up shiveringly in her long nightdress, she gazed long at the portrait in the yellow flickering light of the lamp. A deep silence fell around her, and as she listened, starting with sudden and groundless fears, she could hear nothing but William’s feverish breathing in the next room.

James no longer appeared to her to have his mocking look of the morning. His bare neck and arms, and his open shirt no longer irritated her memories. The man was dead; his portrait had assumed an indefinable softened expression of friendship and Madeleine felt soothed as she gazed on him. He was smiling at her with his old cordial smile, and even his careless attitude touched her deeply. The young fellow, astride on a chair, smoking his clay pipe, seemed to be forgiving her good-naturedly. He was as she had known him, a good fellow in death; he looked as if she had opened the door of their room in the Rue Soufflot, and James in his light-hearted, off-hand way was getting forgiveness for his peccadillos by his gay spirits.

Her tears became less bitter, she forgot herself in the contemplation of him who was no more. Henceforth this portrait would be a relic, and she thought she had nothing to fear from it. Then, she remembered her struggles of the morning, her indecision, her anxiety to know what to do. Poor James, at the moment of her distress at seeing him rise up between herself and her lover, had seemed to have sent her the news of his death to tell her to live in peace. He would come no more to disturb her in her new love; he seemed to authorise her to bury deep in her heart the secret of their intimacy. Why make William suffer? and why not seek for happiness again? She ought to keep silent out of pity, out of affection. James’s portrait murmured: “Go, try to be happy, my child. I am no longer near you. I will never appear before you as your living shame. Your lover is a child. I have befriended him, and I implore you to befriend him in your turn. If you are good, just think of me sometimes.”

Madeleine’s mind was made up. She would say nothing, she would not be more cruel than fate which had wished to conceal her first lover’s name from William. Besides, had he not said so himself? James’s memory would live in his mind, and it must live there elevated and serene. It would be doing wrong to speak. When she had sworn to preserve silence, it seemed to her that the portrait thanked her for her resolution.

She kissed the likeness.

Day was breaking when she went back to bed. William, worn out, was still slumbering. She fell asleep at last, comforted, nursed by distant hope. They would forget this day of anguish, they would come back to their beloved state of bliss and love.

But their dream was over. The peacefulness of their first acquaintance was never more to lull them in their retreat in the Rue de Boulogne. During the days that followed, the rueful phantom of the shipwreck haunted the house, casting around them a gloomy sadness. They forgot their kisses, they would sit for a whole morning side by side, hardly saying a word, absorbed in their sad memories. James’s death had entered into their genial solitude like an icy blast; now they shuddered, and it seemed to there as if the little rooms, where they had lived the day before on each other’s knees, were large, dilapidated and exposed to every wind. The silence and the seclusion which they had sought, caused them a vague feeling of terror. They found themselves too lonely. One day, William could not restrain a cruel remark.

“This house is really like a grave,” he exclaimed, “it is enough to stifle one.”

He was sorry for it directly he had spoken, and, taking Madeleine’s hand, he added:

“Forgive me. I shall forget him, and I will be yours again.” He was in earnest, but he was not aware that the same dream rarely comes twice. When they had got over their dejection, they had lost the blind confidence of their early acquaintance. Madeleine especially was quite changed. She had just evoked the past, and she could no longer surrender herself to William’s embraces like one who knew nothing. Life had inflicted a wound on her, it would do so again, and she must, she thought, be on her guard against the wounds that threatened her. Before, she hardly thought of the shame attached to her title of mistress; it seemed to her natural to be loved, she herself loved, smilingly, forgetting the world. Now, her pride had been hurt, she was feeling again the anguish she had felt in the Rue Soufflot, and she looked upon her lover as an enemy who was robbing her of her self-respect. There was a something which made her feel that she was not in her proper sphere in the Rue de Boulogne. The thought, “I am a kept woman,” presented itself to her in all its nakedness and made her burn like a hot iron; she rushed off, and shut herself up in a room, and there wept bitterly, almost heart-broken.  William often made her presents, for he was fond of giving. At the beginning she had received these presents with the joy of a child at the gift of a plaything. The value of the object made little difference. She was happy that her lover was constantly thinking of her, and she accepted jewels as mere keep-sakes. After the shock which awoke her from her dream, she was strangely troubled at seeing herself dressed in robes of silk and adorned with diamonds that she had not paid for herself. Her life from that time was a continual bitterness, for she was hurt at the sight of this luxury which did not belong to her. She was pained by the lace-work and the softness of her bed, and by the rich furniture in the house. She looked upon everything about her as the price of her shame.

“I am selling myself,” she would think sometimes, with a horrible oppression at her heart.

William, on one of their gloomy days, brought her a bracelet. She grew pale at the sight of the jewel and did not utter a word.

The young man, astonished not to see her fling her arms round his neck, as in the old days, said to her gently:

“You don’t like this bracelet, perhaps?”

She was silent for a moment; then in a trembling voice she said:

“My dear, you spend a lot of money on me. You do wrong. I don’t want all these presents and I should love you quite as much if you gave me nothing.”

She restrained a sob. William drew her quietly towards him, surprised and vexed, yet not daring to divine the cause of her paleness.

“What is the matter with you?” he answered. “Madeleine, those are horrid thoughts — Are you not my wife?”

She looked him in the face, and her steady, almost stern gaze, said plainly: “No, I am not your wife.” Had she dared, she would have proposed to him to pay for her food and dress out of her little income. Since her fall, her pride had become refractory; she felt that everything wounded her feelings and that irritated her all the more.

A few days after, William brought her a dress and she said to him with a nervous smile:

“Thank you; but, in future, let me buy these things. You don’t understand anything about them, and they cheat you.”

From that time she made her purchases herself. When her lover wanted to refund her the money that she had spent, she contrived a little plot to refuse it. Thus she was always on her guard, always making little attacks to defend her pride which was so easily wounded by a trifle. The truth was that life was beginning to prove unbearable to her in the Rue de Boulogne. She loved William, but she had made, herself so wretched by her daily revolts, that she would fancy that she did not love him, though this could not prevent her from feeling greatly distressed when she thought that he might leave her as James had done. Then she would weep for hours and ask herself into what new shame she would fall then.

William could see perfectly well that her eyes were at times red with weeping. He could guess in part the wounds that she was inflicting on herself. He would have wished to be kind, to console her by becoming more affectionate towards her, and yet, in spite of himself, he was becoming more distressed and more feverish every day. Why did she weep like that? was she unhappy with him? was she regretting a lover? This last thought made him very wretched. He too was losing the faith and blind confidence he used to have. He was thinking of that period of Madeleine’s past history of which he knew nothing, of which he wished to know nothing, and which however he could not help thinking of incessantly. The painful doubts that he had felt on the night of their walk at Verrières seized him again and tortured him. He felt anxious about the years gone by, he watched Madeleine in order to detect a confession in her gestures, or in her looks; then, when he thought that he could perceive a smile that he could not account for, he was distressed that she could be thinking of anything but himself. Now that she was his, she ought to be his without reserve. He would say to himself that his love ought to be sufficient to satisfy her. He would not admit of any ground for her reveries, and he felt himself painfully hurt by her passing fits of indifference. Often, when she was by his side, she was not listening to him; she would let him talk on, staring vacantly around, absorbed in secret thoughts; then he would stop talking, he would think himself slighted, and a sudden feeling of pride would change his love almost into disdain. “My heart is deceived,” he would think; “this woman is not worthy of me; she has already seen too much of life to be able to reward me for my affections.”

They never had an open quarrel. They continued in a state of tacit hostility. But the few bitter words they sometimes exchanged only left them more dejected and depressed.

“Your eyes are red,” William would often say to Madeleine, “what is the cause of your secret weeping?”

“I don’t weep, you are mistaken,” the young woman would reply, trying to smile.

“No, no, I am not mistaken,” was William’s answer; “I can hear you quite well sometimes in the night. Are you unhappy with me?”

She would give a shake of denial with her head, and put on a forced laugh, or the look of a persecuted woman. Then the young man would take her hands in his, and try to infuse a little warmth into them, and as these hands continued lifeless and cold, he would let go of them exclaiming:

“I am a poor lover, am I not? I don’t know how to win love — But there are some people who are never forgotten.”

Such an illusion would have a painful effect on Madeleine.

“You are cruel,” she would reply bitterly. “I can’t forget what I am, and that’s why I weep. What can you be thinking of, William?”

He would hang down his head, and she would add, earnestly:

“It would, perhaps, be better for you to know my past history. Anyhow you would know what to do, and you would no longer think about shame which does not exist. Would you like me to tell you all?”

He would vehemently ask her not to, and take her to his heart, beseeching her pardon. This scene, which took place again and again, never went any further: but an hour after, they would forget it all, and go back to their old state: William, to his selfish despair at not possessing her entire affection, Madeleine, to the regrets prompted by her pride and to the dread of being hurt.

At other times, Madeleine would throw her arms round William’s neck and shed tears unreservedly. These crises of weeping, which nothing could explain to him, were even still more painful to the young man. He did not dare to question his mistress, he consoled her, with a provoked air, which stopped her tears and made her assume a hard, implacable attitude. Then she refused to speak to him, and he had to relent so far as to sob, before they fell into each other’s arms, distressing and consoling one another mutually. And they would have been unable to say what it was that was making them wretched; they were inexpressibly sad, they knew not why; it seemed to them that they were breathing a tainted air and that a lingering, unrelenting dejection was crushing them beneath its oppressiveness.

There was no termination to a situation like this. There was only one remedy — a frank explanation. But from this Madeleine shrank, for this William was too feeble. For a month, they lived this life of oppression.

William had got James’s portrait richly framed, and this portrait, placed in the lover’s bedroom, troubled Madeleine. When she retired to rest, it would seem to her as if the eyes of the dead man were watching her get into bed. During the night, she would smother her kisses that he might not hear them. When she was dressing, in the morning, she hurried on her clothes so as not to stand naked before the photograph in broad daylight. Yet, she loved this likeness, and there was nothing painful in the distress that it caused it. Her memories of the past were less hard, yet she no longer looked on James with the eyes of a lover, but from the standpoint of a friend of his who is ashamed of the past. She even felt more modesty with regard to him than before William, and was really pained at seeing him look on at her new passions. Sometimes she thought that she ought to ask his pardon, she would forget herself before his portrait, with no other feeling but one of solace. The days when she wept, or when she had exchanged bitter words with her lover, she gazed at James with a still gentler expression. She regretted him in a vague way, forgetful of her former sufferings.

Perhaps Madeleine would have wept at last before the likeness like an inconsolable widow, had not an event transpired to lift her and William from the sorrowful life they were leading. Another month, and they would doubtless have quarrelled outright, and cursed the day of their meeting. They were saved by circumstances.

William received a letter from Véteuil summoning him in all haste. His father was dying. Madeleine, touched at his grief, clasped him in a warm, affectionate embrace, and, for an hour, they sat once more hand in hand. He set out, full of anxiety, telling the young woman that he would write and that she was to wait for his return.