His lovely eyes shone softly over his fresh cheeks; he slowly twisted his moustache. I realized I was doomed and I had no strength to resist. I said, shivering:
“Yes, I’d enjoy that.”
It was when saying those words, perhaps even earlier, when drinking my second glass of champagne, that I committed the truly responsible act, the abominable act. After that, I merely let myself go. We locked both doors, and he embraced me, breathing on my cheeks and fondling my entire body. Then, while pleasure gripped me tighter and tighter, I felt an infinite sadness and desolation awakening at the bottom of my heart; I seemed to be causing my mother’s soul to weep, the soul of my guardian angel, the soul of God. I had always shuddered in horror when reading those accounts of the tortures that villains inflict on animals, on their own wives, their children; it now confusedly struck me that in every lustful and sinful act there is as much ferocity in the bodily part that is delighting in the pleasure, and that we have as many good intentions and, in us, as many pure angels are martyred and are weeping.
Soon my uncles would be finishing their card game and coming back. We had to anticipate them; I would never stumble again, it was the last time. . . . Then I saw myself in the mirror above the fireplace. All that hazy anguish of my soul was painted not on my features, but on my entire face, from my sparkling eyes to my blazing cheeks and my parted lips, exhaled a stupid and brutal sensual pleasure. I then thought of the horror that anyone who had just watched me kissing my mother with melancholy tenderness would now see me transformed into a beast. But in the mirror, Jacques’s mouth, covetous under his moustache, instantly arose against my face. Shaken in my innermost being, I leaned my head against his, when, in front of me, I saw my mother (yes, I am telling you what happened—listen to me because I can tell you), on the balcony outside the window; I saw my mother gaping at me. I do not know if she cried out, I heard nothing; but she fell back, catching her head between the two bars of the railing.
This is not the last time I am telling you this; I have told you: I almost missed, my aim was good but my shot was clumsy. However, the bullet could not be extracted, and the complications in my heart began. Still I can remain like this for one more week and I will not be able to stop mulling over the beginning and to see the end. I would rather my mother had seen me commit other crimes, including this one, so long as she had not seen my joyous expression in the mirror. No, she could not have seen it. . . . It was a coincidence. . . . She had suffered a stroke a minute before seeing me. . . . She had not seen my joy. . . . That is out of the question! God, who knew everything, would not have wanted it.
A Dinner in High Society
But Fundianus, who shared the happiness of that banquet with you? I’m dying to know.
—HORACE: SATIRES
Honoré was late; he greeted his host and hostess and the people he knew, he was introduced to the rest, and they all went in to dinner. Several moments later, his neighbor, a very young man, asked him to name the others and tell him something about them. Honoré had never met him in society. He was very handsome. The mistress of the house kept darting ardent glances at him, which sufficiently indicated why she had invited him and that he would soon become part of her circle. Honoré saw him as a future power; but with no envy and out of kindness and courtesy, he set about answering him.
He looked around. Two diners across from him were not on speaking terms: with good but clumsy intentions, they had been invited and placed side by side because they were both involved in literature. But to this foremost reason for mutual hatred they added a more personal one. The older man, as a relative—doubly hypnotized—of Monsieur Paul Desjardins and Monsieur de Vogüé, affected a scornful silence toward the younger man, who, as a favorite disciple of Monsieur Maurice Barrès, maintained a stance of irony toward his neighbor. Moreover, each man’s malevolence quite involuntarily exaggerated the other’s importance, as if the chief of villains were confronting the king of imbeciles.
Further away, a superb Spanish woman was eating ravenously. That evening, serious person that she was, she had unhesitatingly sacrificed a rendezvous to the probability of advancing her social career by dining in a fashionable home. And indeed, she had every prospect of success with her calculations. Madame Fremer’s snobbery was, for her female friends, and that of her female friends was, for her, like mutual insurance against sinking into the bourgeoisie. But as luck would have it, on this particular evening Madame Fremer was ridding herself of a stock of people whom she had been unable to invite to her dinners, but to whom she insisted on being polite for various reasons and whom she had gathered almost higgledy-piggledy.
The event was crowned by a duchess, but the Spanish woman had already met her and could get nothing more out of her. So she exchanged irritated glances with her husband, whose guttural voice could perpetually be heard at soirées, asking at five-minute intervals that were quite filled with other kettles of fish: “Would you present me to the duke?” “Monsieur le duc, would you present me to the duchess?” “Madame la duchesse, may I present my wife?”
Fuming at having to waste his time, he was nevertheless resigned to starting a conversation with his neighbor, the host’s business partner. For over a year now Fremer had been begging his wife to invite him. She had finally yielded and had tucked him away between the señora’s husband and a humanist. The humanist, who read too much, ate too much. He quoted and burped, and these two complaints were equally repugnant to his neighbor, a self-made aristocrat, Madame Lenoir.
Having quickly turned the conversation to the Prince de Buivres’s victories at Dahomey, she said in a deeply moved voice: “The dear boy, how delighted I am that he is honoring our family.”
She was indeed a cousin of the de Buivres, who, all of them younger than she, treated her with the deference that was due her age, her allegiance to the royal family, her massive fortune, and the unfailing barrenness of her three marriages. She had transferred to all the de Buivres whatever family sentiments she might possess. She felt personally ashamed of the de Buivres whose vile deeds had earned him a court-appointed guardianship, and around her right-minded brow, on monarchist bandeaux, she naturally wore the laurels of the de Buivres who was a general. An intruder in this previously closed family, she had become its head and virtually its dowager.
She felt truly exiled in modern society and she always spoke tearfully about the “elderly noblemen of the old days.” Her snobbery was all imagination and, moreover, was all the imagination she had. With names rich in history and glory exerting a singular power over her sensitive soul, she felt the same unbiased pleasure whether dining with princes or reading memoirs of the Old Regime. Always sporting the same grapevines, her coiffure was as steadfast as her principles. Her eyes sparkled with stupidity. Her smiling face was noble, her gesticulation excessive and meaningless. Putting her trust in God, she displayed the same optimistic excitement on the eve of a garden party or on the eve of a revolution, whereby her hasty gestures seemed to exorcise radicalism or inclement weather.
Her neighbor, the humanist, was speaking to her with a fatiguing elegance and a dreadful glibness; he kept quoting Homer in order to excuse his own bouts of gluttony and drunkenness in other people’s eyes and to poeticize them in his own eyes. His narrow brow was wreathed with invisible roses, ancient and yet fresh. But with an equable politesse, which came easily to Madame Lenoir (since she viewed it as the exercise of her power and the respect, so rare today, for old traditions), she spoke to Monsieur Fremer’s associate every five minutes. Still, the associate had nothing to complain about: at the opposite end of the table, Madame Fremer accorded him the most charming flattery. She wanted this dinner to count for several years and, determined not to dig up this spoilsport for a long time, she buried him under flowers.
As for Monsieur Fremer: working at his bank all day, dragged into society by his wife every evening or kept at home when they entertained, always ready to bite anyone’s head off, always muzzled, he eventually developed, even in the most trivial circumstances, an expression that blended stifled annoyance, sullen resignation, pent-up exasperation, and profound brutishness. Tonight, however, the financier’s usual expression gave way to a cordial satisfaction whenever his eyes met his associate’s. Even though he could not stand him in everyday life, he felt fleeting but sincere affection for him, not because he could easily dazzle him with his wealth, but because he felt the same vague fraternity that we experience at the
