Then he remembered how often he had been afraid he would not love her for ever, how deeply he had engraved in his memory, so that nothing would ever efface them from it, her cheeks always proffered to his lips, her forehead, her little hands, her grave eyes, her adored features. And suddenly, realizing they were awoken from their oh-so-sweet calm by the desire for another man, he tried not to think about them and saw all the more obstinately her proffered cheeks, her forehead, her little hands – oh! her little hands! those too! – her grave eyes, her detested features.
From this day onwards, at first horrified at the thought of entering on such a path, he never left Françoise, kept a close eye on her everyday life, accompanied her when she went out paying visits, following her when she went shopping, waiting a whole hour at shop doors for her. If he had been able to imagine that he was thus preventing her from deceiving him in the material sense, he would doubtless have abandoned the attempt, afraid lest she view him with horror; but she allowed him to do all this with so much joy at being able to have him near her the whole time that this joy little by little spread to him, and slowly filled him with a trust and certainty that no material proof could have given him, like those people in prey to a hallucination who are sometimes cured by making them touch the armchair or the living person occupying the place which they thought was occupied by a phantom, and thus chasing the phantom away from the real world by virtue of the very reality that will no longer afford it any room.
In this way Honoré, by shedding light on all of Françoise’s daytime activities and mentally filling them with definite occupations, managed to suppress those gaps and those shadows in which the evil spirits of jealousy and doubt that assailed him every evening came to lie in ambush. He could sleep again, his sufferings were more infrequent and shorter, and if he then summoned her over, a few moments of her presence could calm him down for an entire night.
3
The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.
– Emerson*
The salon of Madame Seaune, née the Princess of Galaise-Orlandes, of whom we have spoken in the first part of this narrative under her first name, Françoise, is even today one of the most sought-after salons in Paris. In a society where the title of Duchess would not have set her apart from a host of other women, her bourgeois name is as distinctive as a beauty spot on a face, and in exchange for the title she lost when she married M. Seaune, she has acquired the prestige of having voluntarily renounced such a lofty glory for a well-born imagination, white peacocks, black swans, white violets and captive queens.
Mme Seaune has held many receptions this year and last year, but her salon was closed for the three preceding years – those which followed the death of Honoré de Tenvres.
The friends of Honoré, who had rejoiced to see him little by little recover his erstwhile healthy looks and his gaiety, now constantly met him in the company of Madame Seaune and attributed his new lease of life to this relationship that they imagined to be a recent development.
It was barely two months after Honoré’s complete recovery that there occurred the accident in the avenue in the Bois de Boulogne, in which he had both his legs broken under a runaway horse.
The accident happened on the first Tuesday in May; peritonitis set in on the Sunday. Honoré received the sacraments on Monday and passed away on the same Monday at six o’clock in the evening. But from the Tuesday, the day of the accident, to the Sunday evening, he was the only one to think that he was dying.
On the Tuesday, at around six o’clock, after his wounds had first been dressed, he asked to be left alone, but requested that he be shown the calling cards of the people who had already come to enquire how he was.
That very morning, more than eight hours previously, he had been walking down the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne. He had breathed his joy in and out, in the air with its fresh breeze and its sunlight, he had recognized that joy deep in the eyes of the women who admiringly followed his rapid handsome figure, momentarily lost sight of it as his capricious gaiety took another turn, then effortlessly regained it as the galloping and steaming horses overtook it, and tasted it in his youthful and avid mouth watering in the sweet air – the same profound joy that made life so beautiful that morning, the life of the sun, the shade, the sky, the stones, the easterly wind and the trees, trees as majestic as men standing erect, and as restful as women asleep in their glittering immobility.
One moment he had looked to see what time it was, retraced his steps, and then… then it had happened. In a second, the horse that he had not even seen had broken both his legs. It did not seem to him in the slightest that this second needed to have turned out necessarily the way it did. At that same second he could easily have been a little farther on, or a little less far, or the horse could have been diverted from its course, or, if it had been raining, he would have gone home, or, if he had not looked to see what time it was, he would not have retraced his steps and would have carried on as far as the waterfall.
And yet the thing that might just as well not have happened (so much so that he could pretend for a moment that it was merely a dream) was something real, and was now part of his life, without him being able to change a thing about it by mere force of will. He had two broken legs and a bruised stomach. Oh, the accident in itself was not so very extraordinary; he remembered that, not a week ago, during dinner at the home of Dr S, they had been talking about C, who had been wounded in the same way by a runaway horse.
When they asked how the patient was doing, the Doctor had replied, “He’s in a bad way.” Honoré had persisted, asked questions about the wound, and the Doctor had replied, in a self-important, pedantic and melancholy tone of voice, “But it’s not just the wound; you have to look at the whole picture; his sons are a worry to him; he doesn’t have the same high position he used to have; the attacks of the newspapers have dealt him quite a blow.
I only wish I was wrong, but he’s in a damn awful state.” Having said those words, as the Doctor felt that he, on the contrary, was in an excellent state, healthier, cleverer and more admired than ever, as Honoré knew that Françoise loved him more and more deeply, that the world had accepted their relationship and bowed down no less to their happiness than to the greatness of character of Françoise; and as finally the wife of Dr S, shaken at the thought of the wretched end and the loneliness of C, forbade, as a measure of hygiene, both herself and her children from thinking of sad events or even going to funerals, everyone repeated one last time, “Poor old C***, he’s in a bad way”, while swallowing a last glass of champagne and sensing, from the pleasure they derived from drinking it, that “they were in an excellent way”.
But this was not at all the same thing. Honoré now felt submerged by the thought of his unhappy fate, as he had often been by that of the fate of others, but now he could no longer find any firm footing within himself. He felt the ground of good health slipping away from under his feet – that ground on which grow our highest resolutions and our most graceful joys, just as oaks and violets have their roots in the black damp earth; and at each step
