The clock chimed half-past seven. He left.
On his return home, Honoré kept repeating to himself, “My mother, my brother, my country” – he stopped – “yes, my country!… My little seashell, my little tree,” and he could not restrain a laugh as he uttered these words that they had so quickly adopted for their own ends, those little words that can seem empty and that they had filled with infinite meaning. Trusting unthinkingly in the fertile and inventive genius of their love, they had little by little seen it endow them with a language of their own, as if they were an entire nation to be given weapons, games and laws.
As he dressed for dinner, his thought hung effortlessly on the moment when he would see her again, just as a gymnast already touches the still-distant trapeze towards which he is flying, or just as a musical phrase seems to reach the chord that will resolve it and is already pulling it towards itself, by virtue of the very distance between them, with all the strength of the desire that promises that phrase and summons it into being. Thus it was that Honoré had over the past year been wishing his life away, hurrying forward, as soon as it was morning, to the time in the afternoon when he would see her. And his days in reality were not composed of twelve or fourteen different hours, but of the four or five half-hours that he longed for and then looked back on.
Honoré had already been at the home of the Princesse d’Alériouvre for a few minutes, when Mme Seaune came in. She greeted her hostess and the different guests, and seemed less to wish Honoré a good evening than to take his hand as she might have done in the middle of a conversation. If their relationship had been public knowledge, it might have seemed as if they had arrived together, and that she had waited for a few moments outside the door so as not to come in at the same time as him.
But even if they had not seen each other for two days (which over the last year had not happened a single time), they would still not have experienced that joyful surprise at being reunited which lies behind every friendly hello, since, unable to go five minutes without thinking of each other, they could never actually meet again, since they never separated.
During the dinner, each time they spoke to each other, their manners surpassed in vivacity and gentleness those of a mere pair of friends, but were imbued with a majestic and natural respect that is unknown among lovers. They thus appeared similar to those gods who, according to fable, lived in disguise among men, or like two angels whose fraternal familiarity exalts the joy, but does not diminish the respect that is inspired in them by the shared nobility of their origins and their mysterious blood.
At the same time as it yielded to the powerful scent of the irises and roses that reigned languidly on the table, the air was gradually imbued with the perfume of the tenderness that Honoré and Françoise naturally emitted. At certain moments, it seemed to spread its fragrance with a violence even more delicious than its habitual gentleness, a violence that nature had not allowed them to moderate any more than it has allowed a heliotrope in the sun to do so, or lilacs blooming in the rain.
Thus it was that their tenderness, not being secret, was all the more mysterious. Everyone could approach it, just as everyone can approach those impenetrable and defenceless bracelets on the wrists of a woman in love, which bear written in unknown and visible characters the name that gives life or death, whose meaning they seem ceaselessly to offer to the curious and disappointed eyes that cannot grasp it.
“How much longer will I continue to love her?” Honoré asked himself as he rose from table. He recalled how many passions, which at their birth he had thought immortal, had in fact lasted only a short time, and the certainty that this passion would one day end cast a shadow over his tenderness.
Then he remembered how, that very morning, while he was at Mass, as the priest was reading the Gospel and saying, “Jesus, stretching out his hand, told them: That creature is my brother, and my mother also and all my family,” he had for a moment held out his entire soul to God, trembling but erect, like a palm tree, and had prayed, “My God! My God! Give me the grace to love her for ever. My God, this is the only grace I ask of you, grant me, my God, you who can ensure it, grant me that I may love her for ever!”
Now, in one of those altogether physical hours when the soul effaces itself within us behind the stomach busy digesting, behind the skin which is still rejoicing in its recent ablution and its clean underwear, and the mouth that enjoys a smoke, and the eye which feasts on naked shoulders and gleaming lights, he repeated his prayer with less intensity, doubtful that a miracle would come to disturb the psychological law of his inconstancy, a law as impossible to break as the physical laws of gravity or death.
She saw his preoccupied eyes, rose and, coming up to him (he hadn’t seen her), as they were quite some distance away from the others, she said to him in that drawling, whimpering tone of voice, the tone of a small child which always made him laugh, and as if he had just spoken to her:
“What?”
He started to laugh and told her:
“Don’t say another word, or I’ll kiss you, d’you hear, I’ll kiss you in front of everybody!”
She started to laugh, then, assuming her sad and discontented voice again, to amuse him, she said:
“Yes, yes, that’s just fine, you weren’t thinking of me in the slightest!”
And he, gazing at her and laughing, replied:
“How easily you tell lies!” And, gently, he added, “You naughty, naughty girl!”
She left him and went over to talk to the others. Honoré reflected, “When I feel my heart growing detached from her, I’ll try to withdraw it so gently that she won’t feel a thing. I will still be just as tender, just as respectful. I will conceal from her the new love which will have replaced my love for her in my heart just as carefully as I conceal from her right now the pleasures which my body enjoys here and there without her and separate from her.” (He glanced towards the Princess d’Alériouvre.)
And for her part, he would let her gradually settle her affections elsewhere, and start a new life. He would not be jealous, and would even point out the men who would seem to him to offer her a more decent or a more glorious homage. The more he imagined Françoise as another woman whom he did not love, but all of whose charm and wit he appreciated as a connoisseur, the more did sharing her seem the noble and easy thing to do. The words “tolerant and warm friendship”, and “a fine act of charity performed for the worthiest of recipients, giving them the best thing one has”, came and hovered on his slack, serene lips.
Just then, Françoise, seeing that it was ten o’clock, bade everyone goodnight and left. Honoré accompanied her to her carriage, imprudently kissed her in the darkness and came back in.
Three hours later, Honoré was walking home with M. de Buivres, whose return from Tonkin* had been celebrated that evening. Honoré was asking him about the Princesse d’Alériouvre, who, having been left a widow at more or less the same age as Françoise, was much more beautiful than her. Honoré, without being in love with her, would have greatly enjoyed the pleasure of possessing her if he could have been certain of doing so without Françoise finding out and being hurt.
“Nobody knows much about her,” said M. de Buivres, “or at least nobody knew much when I went away – I haven’t seen anybody since I got back.”
“In short, there weren’t any easy pickings this evening,” concluded Honoré.
“No, not much,” replied M. de Buivres; and as Honoré had reached his door, the conversation was about to end when M. de Buivres added:
“Except for Madame Seaune, to whom you must have been introduced, since you were there at dinner. If you fancy her, it can easily be arranged. But she wouldn’t tell me as much!”
“I’ve never heard anyone say what you’ve just told me,” said Honoré.
“You’re young,” said M. de Buivres, “and anyway, this evening there was someone there who had a bit of a fling with her, I think that’s beyond dispute: that young chap François de Gouvres. He says she’s pretty hot-blooded! But it appears she hasn’t got much of a figure. He decided he didn’t want to continue. I bet that, as we’re speaking, she’s living it up somewhere or other. Did you notice how she always leaves social gatherings early?”
“But ever since she’s been widowed, she’s lived in the same house as her brother, and she wouldn’t risk the concierge telling everyone she comes back in the middle of the night.”
“But my dear boy, between ten o’clock and one in the morning, there’s plenty of time to get up to all sorts of things! And then,
