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. She ordered a photograph from Amsterdam, the picture of a young man who resembled Lepré.
She ran into him a few days later. His mother was seriously ill; his trip was put off. She told him that she now had a picture on her table, a portrait that reminded her of him. He appeared moved but cold. She was deeply pained, but consoled herself with the thought that he at least understood her attention though he did not enjoy it.
Loving a boor who did not realize it would have been even crueler. So, mentally reproaching him for his indifference, she wanted to see the men who were enamored of her, with whom she had been indifferent and coquettish; she wanted to see them again in order to show them the ingenious and tender compassion that she would have at least wanted to obtain from him. But when she encountered them, they all had the horrible defect of not being Lepré, and the sight of them merely irritated her.
She wrote to him; four days wore by without a response; then she received a letter that any other woman would have found friendly but that drove Madeleine to despair. He wrote:
“My mother has improved; I am leaving in three weeks; until then, my life is quite full, but I will try to call on you once to pay my respects.”
Was it jealousy of everything that “filled his life,” preventing her from penetrating it, was it sorrow that he was going abroad and that he would come by only once, or even the greater sorrow that he did not feel the need to come and visit her ten times a day before his departure: she could no longer stay at home; she hastily donned a hat, went out, and, hurrying, on foot, along the streets that led to him, she nurtured the absurd hope that, by some miracle she was counting on, he would appear to her at the corner of a square, radiant with tenderness, and that a single glance of his would explain everything to her.
All at once she spotted him walking, chatting gaily with friends. But now she was embarrassed; she believed he would guess that she was looking for him, and so she brusquely stepped into a shop. During the next few days she no longer looked for him; she avoided places where she might run into him—she maintained this final coquetry toward him, this final dignity for herself.
One morning, she was sitting alone in the Tuileries, on the waterside terrace. She let her sorrow float, spread out, relax more freely on the broader horizon, she let it pick flowers, spring forth with the hollyhocks, the fountains, and the columns, gallop behind the dragoons leaving the Quartier d’Orsay, she let her sorrow drift on the Seine and soar with the swallows across the pale sky.
It was the fifth day since the friendly letter that had devastated her.
All at once she saw Lepré’s fat, white poodle, which he allowed to go out alone every morning. She had joked about it, had said to him that one day somebody would kidnap it. The animal recognized her and came over. After five days of repressing her emotions, she was utterly overwhelmed with a wild need to see Lepré. Seizing the animal in her arms and shaking with sobs, she hugged it for a long time, with all her strength; then, unpinning the nosegay of violets from her bodice and attaching it to the dog’s collar, she let the animal go.
But, calmed by that crisis, also mollified, and feeling better, she
