And Geneviève wrote:
Monsieur,
You know how I seek all opportunities to bring pleasure to my friend Madame de Breyves, whom you have, no doubt, already encountered. When we have talked about the cello, she has on several occasions expressed her regret at never having heard Monsieur de Laléande, who is such a good friend of yours. Would you care to have him play for her and for me? Now that the season is over, it will not be too great an imposition on you and it will be extremely generous on your part.
With all my best wishes,
Alériouvre Buivres
“Deliver this letter immediately to Monsieur de Grumello,” Françoise told a servant. “Don’t wait for an answer, but make sure you hand it to him personally.”
The next day Geneviève sent Madame de Breyves Monsieur de Grumello’s reply:
Madame,
I would have been more delighted than you can suppose to carry out your wishes and those of Madame de Breyves, whom I know slightly and for whom I feel the keenest and most respectful devotion. I am therefore dreadfully sorry to inform you that, by an unfortunate fluke, Monsieur de Laléande departed just two days ago for Biarritz, where he plans, alas, to spend several months.
Very truly yours, etc.
Grumello
Françoise, deathly white, dashed to her room to lock herself in. She barely made it. Sobs were already shattering on her lips, tears were streaming. Fully engrossed, until now, in picturing romantic ways of seeing him and getting to know him and certain she would carry them out as soon as she wished, she had been living on that yearning and that hope, without, perhaps, realizing it. But this desire had implanted itself into her by sending out a thousand imperceptible roots, which had plunged into all her most unconscious minutes of happiness or melancholy, filling them with a new sap without her knowing where it came from. And now this desire had been ripped out and tossed away as impossible. She felt lacerated, suffering horribly in her entire self, which had been suddenly uprooted; and from the depths of her sorrow through the abruptly exposed lies of her hope, she saw the reality of her love.
Day by day Françoise withdrew further and further from all her pleasures, and a heart haunted by a jealous grief that never left her for a moment was the only thing she could offer her most intense delights, the very ones she savored in her bonds with her mother and Geneviève or in her musical hours, her hours of reading, and her outings. Infinite was the pain caused by the impossibility of her going to Biarritz and, even had it been possible, by her absolute determination not to let a rash step compromise all the prestige she might have in the eyes of Monsieur de Laléande.
A poor little victim of torture without knowing why, she was frightened at the thought that this illness could drag on for months until a remedy was found for a condition that would not let her sleep peacefully or dream freely. She was also worried about not knowing whether he might pass through Paris, soon perhaps, without her finding out. And emboldened by the fear of again letting happiness slip by so closely, she sent a domestic to question Monsieur de Laléande’s concierge. The concierge knew nothing.
And realizing that no sail of hope would henceforth emerge on the horizon of this sea of grief, which stretched ad infinitum and beyond which there seemed to be nothing but the end of the earth, Françoise sensed she was going to do insane things, but she did not know what, perhaps write to him; and so she became her own physician: to calm down a bit she took the liberty of trying to have him learn that she had wanted to see him; she therefore wrote Monsieur de Grumello:
Monsieur,
Madame de Buivres has told me about your generous idea. How grateful and deeply moved I am! But something worries me. Does Monsieur de Laléande consider me indiscreet? If you do not know, please ask him and get back to me once you know the full truth. I am very curious, and you will be doing me a great favor. Thank you again, Monsieur.
With my very best wishes,
Voragynes Breyves
One hour later a servant brought her this letter:
Madame,
Do not worry, Monsieur de Laléande has not learned that you wished to hear him play. I asked him on which days he could come and perform in my home but I did not tell him for whom. He replied from Biarritz that he would not come back before the month of January. And please do not thank me. My greatest pleasure would be to give you a little pleasure. . . .
Grumello
There was nothing more to do. She did nothing more, she grew sadder and sadder, and she felt remorse at being sad, at saddening her mother. She spent a few days in the country, then went to Trouville. There she heard some people talking about Monsieur de Laléande’s social ambitions, and when a prince, vying for her favor, asked her, “What can I do to please you?”, she almost chuckled when imagining how astonished he would be at her sincere response; and she gathered, in order to savor it, all the intoxicating bitterness there was in the irony of that contrast between all the great and difficult things that people had always done to please her and this so easy and so impossible little thing that would have restored her peace of mind, her health, her happiness, and the happiness of her loved ones.
She had a bit of solace only when among her domestics, who admired her immensely and, feeling her misery, served her without venturing to speak. Their respectful and mournful silence spoke to her about Monsieur de Laléande. She reveled in their silence and had them serve lunch very slowly in order to delay the moment when her friends would come, when she would have to stifle her emotions. She wanted to retain the bittersweet taste of all the sadness surrounding her because of him. She would have wanted to see more people dominated by him, to ease her pain by feeling that what occupied so much of her heart was taking up a little space around her; she would have liked to have energetic beasts wasting away with her affliction. For moments at a time she desperately yearned to write to him, have someone else write to him, bring shame upon herself, “nothing mattered to her.”
But precisely for the sake of her love, it was better to preserve her social standing, which could someday give her greater authority over him, if that day ever came. And if a brief intimate relationship with him broke the spell he had cast over her (she did not want to, she could not, believe it, even imagine it for an instant; but her more astute mind perceived that cruel fate through the blindness of her heart), she would remain without any support in the world. And if some other love came her way, she would lack the resources that she at least now possessed, the power that, at their return to Paris, would make it so easy for her to have an intimate relationship with Monsieur de Laléande.
Trying to step back from her own feelings and examine them like an object under investigation, she told herself: “I know he’s mediocre and I’ve always thought so. That’s my opinion of him; it hasn’t varied. My heart may be confused now, but it can’t change my mind. It’s only a trifle, and this trifle is what I live for. I live for Jacques de Laléande!”
But then, having spoken his name, she could see him, this time through an involuntary and unanalyzed association, and her bliss and her sorrow were so great that she felt that his being a trifle was unimportant since he made her feel tortures and delights compared with which all others were nothing. And while she figured that all this would fade once she got to know him, she gave this mirage the full realities of her pain and her joy.
A phrase she had heard from Die Meistersinger, at Princess d’A.’s soirée, had the power to evoke Monsieur de Laléande with utmost precision: “Dem Vogel, der heut sang, dem war der Schnabel hold gewachsen” (The bird that sang today, its beak was sweet). She had unwittingly made that phrase his actual leitmotif and, hearing it one day at a concert in Trouville, she had burst into tears. From time to time, not so often as to make it pall, she would lock herself in her bedroom, to which the piano had been moved, and she would play that phrase, closing her eyes the better to see him; it was her only intoxicating joy, ending in disillusion; it was the opium she could not do without.
Sometimes pausing and listening to the flow of her distress the way one leans over to hear the sweet and incessant lament of a wellspring, she would muse about her atrocious dilemma: one alternative being her future shame, which would lead to the despair of her loved ones; the other alternative (if she did not give in) being her eternal sorrow; and she would curse herself for having so expertly dosed her love with the pleasure and the pain that she had not managed to reject immediately as an unbearable poison or to recover from subsequently. First she cursed her eyes, or perhaps before them her
