Madame Lawrence went off to put on her coat.
“I would like to invite you to stay with me during the next act,” said Madeleine with an indifferent amiability.
“That’s very kind of you, Madame, but I can’t; I am obliged to leave.”
“Why, I’ll be all alone,” said Madeleine in an urgent tone; then suddenly, wanting almost unconsciously to apply the maxims of coquetry in the famous line from Carmen, “If I don’t love you, you’ll love me,” she went on:
“Oh, you’re quite right, and if you have an appointment, don’t keep them waiting. Good night, Monsieur.”
With a friendly smile she tried to compensate for what struck her as the implicit harshness of her permission. However, that harshness was impelled by her violent desire to keep him here, by the bitterness of her disappointment. Aimed at anyone else, her advice to leave would have been pleasant.
Madame Lawrence came back.
“Well, he’s leaving; I’ll stay with you so you won’t be alone. Did you have a tender farewell?”
“Farewell?”
“I believe that at the end of this week he’s starting his long tour of Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor.”
A child who has been breathing since birth without ever noticing it does not know how essential the unheeded air that gently swells his chest is to his life. Does he happen to be suffocating in a convulsion, a bout of fever? Desperately straining his entire being, he struggles almost for his life, for his lost tranquillity, which he will regain only with the air from which he did not realize his tranquillity was inseparable.
Similarly, the instant Madeleine learned of Lepré’s departure, of which she had been unaware, she understood only what had entered into his leaving as she felt everything that was being torn away from her.
And with a painful and gentle despondency, she gazed at Madame Lawrence without resenting her any more than a poor, suffocating patient resents his asthma while, through eyes filled with tears, he smiles at the people who pity him but cannot help him. All at once Madeleine rose:
“Come, my dear, I don’t want you to get home late on my account.”
While slipping into her coat, she spotted Lepré, and in the anguish of letting him leave without her seeing him again, she hurried down the stairs.
“I’m devastated—especially since Monsieur Lepré is going abroad—to think he could assume he might offend me.”
“Why, he’s never said that,” replied Madame Lawrence.
“He must have: since you assume it, he must assume it as well.”
“Quite the contrary.”
“I tell you it’s true,” Madeleine rejoined harshly. And as they caught up with Lepré, she said:
“Monsieur Lepré, I expect you for dinner on Thursday, at eight P.M.”
“I’m not free on Thursday, Madame.”
“Then how about Friday?”
“I’m not free on Friday either.”
“Saturday?”
“Saturday would be fine.”
“But darling, you’re forgetting that you’re to dine with Princess d’Avranches on Saturday.”
“Too bad, I’ll cancel.”
“Oh! Madame, I wouldn’t want that,” said Lepré.
“I want it,” cried Madeleine, beside herself. “I’m not going to Fanny’s no matter what, I never had any intention of going.”
Once home again, Madeleine, slowly undressing, reviewed the events of the evening. Upon reaching the moment when Lepré had refused to stay with her for the last act, she turned crimson with humiliation. The most elementary coquetry as well as the most stringent dignity commanded her to show him an extreme coldness after that.
Instead, that threefold invitation on the stairway! Indignant, she raised her head proudly and appeared so beautiful to herself in the depth of the mirror that she no longer doubted that he would love her.
Unsettled and disconsolate only because of his imminent departure, she pictured his affection, which he—she did not know why—wanted to conceal from her. He was going to confess it to her, perhaps in a letter, quite soon, and he would probably put off his departure, he would sail with her. . . . What? . . . She must not think about that. But she could see his handsome, loving face approaching her face, asking her to forgive him. “You naughty boy!” she said.
But then, perhaps he did not love her as yet; he would leave without having time to fall in love with her. . . . Disconsolate, she lowered her head, and her eyes fell upon her bodice, upon the even more languishing eyes of the wilted blossoms, which seemed ready to weep under their withered eyelids.
The thought of the brevity of her unconscious dream about him, of the brevity of their happiness if ever it materialized, was associated for her with the sadness of those flowers, which, before dying, languished on the heart that they had felt beating with her first love, her first humiliation, and her first sorrow.
The next day she wanted no other flowers in her bedroom, which was normally filled and radiant with the glory of fresh roses.
When Madame Lawrence came by, she halted before the vases where the cattleyas were finally dying and, for eyes without love, were stripped of beauty.
“What, darling, you who love flowers so much?”
Madeleine was going to say, “It seems to me that I have only begun loving them today”; she stopped, annoyed at having to explain herself and sensing that there are realities that people cannot be made to grasp if they do not already have them inside themselves.
She contented herself with smiling amiably at the reproach. The feeling that no one, perhaps not even Lepré himself, was aware of her new life gave her a rare and disconsolate pleasure of pride.
The servant brought the mail; finding no letter from Lepré, she was overwhelmed with disappointment. Upon measuring the gap between the absurdity of her disappointment, when there had not been the slightest chance of hope, and the very real and very cruel intensity of that disappointment, she understood that she had stopped living solely a life of events and facts. The veil of lies had started unrolling before her eyes for a duration that was impossible to predict.
She would now see things only through that veil, and, more than all other things, those she would have wanted to know and experience the most concretely and in the most similar way as Lepré, those that had to do with him.
Still, she had one remaining hope—that he had lied to her, that his indifference was feigned: she knew by unanimous consensus that she was one of the most beautiful women in Paris, that her reputation for wit, intelligence, elegance, her high social standing added prestige to her beauty. Lepré, on the other hand, was considered intelligent, artistic, very gentle, a very good son, but he was barely sought after and had never been successful with women; the attention she gave him was bound to strike him as something improbable and unhoped for. She was astonished and hopeful. . . .
Although Madeline would, in an instant, have subordinated all the interests and affections of her life to Lepré, she nevertheless still believed—and her judgment was fortified by the universal judgment—that, without being disagreeable, he was inferior to the remarkable men who, in the four years since the death of the Marquis de Gouvres, had been dropping by several times a day to console the widow and were thus the most precious ornament of her life.
She very keenly sensed that her inexplicable inclination, which made him a unique person for her, did not make him the equal of those other men. The reasons for her love were inside her, and if they were a bit inside him too, they were not in his intellectual superiority or even in his physical superiority. It was precisely because she loved him that no face, no smile, no conduct was as agreeable to her as his, and it was not because his face, his smile, his conduct were more agreeable that she loved him. She was acquainted with more handsome, more charming men, and she knew it.
Thus, when Lepré entered Madeleine’s drawing room on Saturday at a quarter past eight, he faced, without suspecting anything, his most passionate friend, his most clear-sighted adversary. While her beauty was armed to vanquish him, her mind was no less armed to judge him; she was ready to pick, like a bitter flower, the pleasure of finding him mediocre and ridiculously disproportionate to her love for him. She was not acting out of prudence! She quite keenly sensed that she would continually be caught again in the magic net, and that once Lepré left, her prolific imagination would repair the meshes that her too incisive mind would have torn in his presence.
And in fact, when he walked in, she was suddenly calmed; by shaking his hand, she appeared to drain him of all power. He was no longer the sole and absolute despot of her dreams; he was just a pleasant visitor.
They chatted; now all her assumptions vanished. In his fine goodness, in the bold precision of his mind, she found reasons that, while not absolutely justifying her love, explained it, at least slightly, and, by showing her that something corresponded to it in reality, made its roots plunge deeper in that reality, draw more life from it. She also noticed that he was more attractive than she had thought, with a noble and delicate Louis XIII face.
All her artistic memories of the portraits of that period were henceforth tied to the thought of her love, gave it a new existence by letting it enter the system of her artistic sensibilities.
