That evening, she would be attending a dinner; the guests probably included many artists and athletes who knew Lepré. She wanted to know if he had a mistress, any kind of attachment that prevented him from getting close to Madeleine, that explained his extraordinary behavior. She would suffer greatly upon finding out, but at least she would know, and perhaps she might hope that in time her beauty would carry the day. She went out, determined to inquire immediately, but then, stricken with fear, she lost her nerve.
In the last moment, upon arriving, she was impelled less by the desire to know the truth than by the need to speak to others about him, that sad charm of vainly conjuring him up wherever she was without him. After dinner she said to two men who were near her, and whose conversation was quite free:
“Tell me, do you know Lepré well?”
“We’ve been running into him every day forever, but we’re not very close.”
“Is he a charming man?”
“He’s a charming man.”
“Well, perhaps you can tell me. . . . Don’t feel obligated to be too benevolent—you see, I have a very important reason for asking. A girl I love with all my heart likes him a bit. Is he a man whom a woman could marry with an easy mind?”
Her two interlocutors paused for a moment, embarrassed:
“No, that’s out of the question.”
Madeleine, very courageously, went on, all the more quickly to get it over with:
“Does he have any long-term attachment?”
“No, but still, it’s impossible.”
“Tell me why, seriously, I beg you.”
“No.”
“But still, it would be better to tell her after all. Otherwise she might imagine worse things or silly things.”
“Very well! This is it, and I don’t think we’re hurting Lepré in any way by revealing it. First of all, you are not to repeat it; besides, the whole of Paris knows about it anyway; and as for marrying, he’s far too honest and sensitive to even consider it. Lepré is a charming fellow, but he has one vice. He loves the vile women that are found in the gutter, he’s crazy about them; he occasionally spends whole nights in the industrial suburbs or on the outer boulevards, running the risk of getting killed eventually; and not only is he crazy about them, but he loves only them.
The most ravishing socialite, the most ideal girl leave him absolutely indifferent. He can’t even pay them any attention. His pleasures, his preoccupations, his life are somewhere else. People who didn’t know him well used to say that with his exquisite nature a great love would rescue him. But for that he would have to be capable of experiencing it, and he’s incapable of doing so. His father was already like that, and if it doesn’t happen to Lepré’s sons, then only because he won’t have any.”
At eight the next evening, Madeline was informed that Monsieur Lepré was in the drawing room. She went in; the windows were open, the lamps were not yet lit, and he was waiting on the balcony. Not far from there, several houses surrounded by gardens rested in the gentle evening light, distant, Oriental, and pious, as if this had been Jerusalem. The rare, caressing light gave each object a brand-new and almost poignant value.
A luminous wheelbarrow in the middle of the dark street was as touching as, there, a bit further, the somber and already nocturnal trunk of a chestnut tree under its foliage, which was still basking in the final rays. At the end of the avenue the sunset was gloriously bowing like an arch of triumph decked out with celestial flags of gold and green. In the neighboring window, heads were absorbed in reading with familiar solemnity. Walking over to Lepré, Madeleine felt the appeased sweetness of all these things mellow her heart, half open it, make it languish, and she held back her tears.
He, however, more handsome tonight and more charming, displayed sensitive kindness such as he had never exhibited to her before. Then they had an earnest conversation, and now she first discovered how sublime his intelligence was. If he was not popular socially, it was precisely because the truths he was seeking lay beyond the visual horizon of intelligent people and because the truths of high minds are ridiculous errors down here.
His goodness, incidentally, sometimes lent them an enchanting poetry the way the sun gracefully colors the high summits. And he was so genial with her, he acted so grateful for her goodness that, feeling she had never loved him this much and abandoning all hope of his requiting her love, she suddenly and joyously envisaged the prospect of a purely friendly intimacy that would enable her to see him every day; she inventively and joyfully revealed the plan to him.
He, however, said that he was very busy and could hardly spare more than one day every two weeks. She had told him enough to make him understand she loved him—had he wanted to understand. And had he, timid as he was, felt a particle of love for her, he would have come up with even negligible words of friendship. Her sickly gaze was focused so intently on him that she would have promptly made out those words and greedily feasted on them.
She wanted to stop Lepré, who kept talking about his demanding agenda, his crowded life, but suddenly her gaze plunged so deep into her adversary’s heart that it could have plunged into the infinite horizon of the sky that stretched out before her, and she felt the futility of words. She held her tongue, then she said:
“Yes, I understand, you’re very busy.”
And at the end of the evening, when they were parting, he said:
“May I call on you to say goodbye?”
And she gently replied: “No, my friend, I’m somewhat busy; I think we should leave things as they are.”
She waited for a word; he did not utter it, and she said:
“Goodbye.”
Then she waited for a letter, in vain. So she wrote him that it was preferable for her to be frank, that she may have led him to believe she liked him, that this was not the case, that she would rather not see him as often as she had requested with imprudent friendliness.
He replied that he had never really believed in anything more than her friendship, for which she was famous, and which he had never meant to abuse to the point of coming so often and bothering her.
Then she wrote him that she loved him, that she would never love anyone but him. He replied that she must be joking.
She stopped writing to him, but not, at first, thinking about him. Then that also stopped. Two years later, weighed down by her widowhood, she married the Duke de Mortagne, who was handsome and witty and who, until Madeleine’s death—for over forty years, that is—filled her life with a glory and affection that she never failed to appreciate.
The end
