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“You don’t love me as I love you,” she murmured.
“Oh, why do you say—”
She interrupted him, saying, “No, in me you love, as you put it so well before dinner, a woman who satisfies the wants of your heart, a woman who’s never caused you pain and who’s managed to put a little happiness into your life. That I know, that I feel. Yes, I have the consciousness, the deep joy of having been good and useful and helpful to you. And you’ve loved, you still love, all that you find in me: my solicitude for you, my admiration, my desire to please you, my passion—the complete gift I’ve made to you of myself. But that’s not me you love, don’t you understand that? Oh! I feel that the way you feel a cold draft. In me you love so many things—my beauty, which is fading, my devotion, the wit people say they find in me, the opinion the world has of me, the opinion I have of you in my heart—but that’s not me, that’s nothing of myself. Can’t you understand that?”
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Then she was possessed with a sudden, irresistible desire to go away, to leave at once by the first train, to quit the country where one perceived too clearly by the strong light of the fields the indelible traces of sorrow and years. In Paris one lives in the half shadow of apartments, where heavy curtains, even at midday, admit only a mellow light. She would be beautiful again there, with the pallor one needs in that dim, discriminating glimmer. Then Annette’s face passed before her eyes, her hair a little rumpled, when she was playing lawn tennis. She comprehended then the unacknowledged anxiety from which her soul had suffered. She was not jealous of the beauty of her daughter. No, assuredly! But she did feel, she confessed for the first time, that she must never again appear at her side in bright sunlight.
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Yet the countess reproached him with being jealous of the marquis. Was it true? He again examined his conscience severely, and ascertained that in truth he was a little jealous. What was astonishing about that, after all? Are we not at every instant jealous of men who pay their court to no matter what woman? Do we not in the street, the restaurant, the theater, feel a sort of enmity against the gentleman who is passing or who enters with a beautiful woman on his arm? Every possessor of a woman is a rival. It is a man who has won, a conqueror, who is envied by the other men. And then, without entering into these physiological considerations, if it was natural that he should have for Annette a sympathy rendered somewhat too active by his love for her mother, was it not therefore natural that he should feel rising within him a little animal hatred of the future husband? He would have no difficulty in overcoming this ignoble person.
“By the way,” she said, “I studied something for you before mother died, but you haven’t heard it yet. I’ll play it when the little one’s finished. I want you to hear how strange it is.”
The countess had real talent, and a subtle comprehension of the emotion that flows through sound. It had always been one of her surest powers over the painter’s sensibility.
As soon as Annette had finished Schumann’s Pastoral Symphony, the countess rose, took her place, and awakened a strange melody through her fingers, a melody of which every phrase seemed a complaint, even manifold complaints, changing, numerous, then interrupted by a single note, continually recurring, dropping into the evident melody, shattering it like an incessant, persecuting cry, the insatiable call of importunity.
But Olivier was looking at Annette, who had just seated herself in front of him, and he heard nothing, understood nothing.
destroyed by this
He returned home, uneasy with himself. When he had gone to bed he felt that sleep would never come, for a fever ran through his veins, and the spirit of reverie was fermenting in his heart. Fearing that enervating insomnia induced by the soul’s agitation, he thought he would try a book. How many times the briefest reading had served him as a narcotic! He got up and stepped into the library to choose a profitable and soporific book, but his mind, aroused in spite of itself, eager for any emotion whatever, sought on the shelves an author’s name that would respond to his state of exaltation and expectancy. Balzac, whom he adored, said nothing to him; he disdained Hugo, scorned Lamartine who invariably left him moved, and pounced upon Musset, the poet of youth. He took a volume and carried it to bed, to read a few pages at random.
When he returned to bed he began to drink, with a drunkard’s thirst, those flowing verses of an inspired poet who, like a bird, sang the dawn of existence, and with breath only for the morning, was silent at the glaring light of day—verses of a poet who was, above all, a man intoxicated with life, breathing rapture in glowing and simple ecstasies of love, the echo of all young hearts bewildered with desire.
relatable ha ha
They walked rapidly through the crowd that at five o’clock follows the summer evenings. Men turned around to look at Annette and whispered indistinct words of admiration as they passed. It was the first time since her mourning, since black was adding that brilliancy to her daughter’s beauty, that the countess had gone out with her in Paris, and the sensation of that street success, that roused attention, those whispered compliments, that little eddy of flattering emotion which the passing of a pretty woman leaves in a crowd of men, oppressed her heart little by little with the same painful shrinking she had experienced the other evening in her drawing room, when the young girl was being compared to her own portrait. In spite of herself she was watching for those glances of which Annette was the attraction; she felt them coming from afar, glance off her face without stopping, suddenly arrested by the fair face at her side. She guessed, she saw in the eyes the rapid and silent homage to this blooming youth, to the attractive charm of that freshness, and she thought, “I looked as well as she, if not better.” Suddenly the thought of Olivier shot through her brain, and she was seized, as she had been at Roncières, with an irresistible desire to run away.
A stranger! He himself! Olivier! He spoke to her as formerly, with the same words, the same voice, the same tones. And yet there was something new between them now, something inexplicable, intangible, invincible, almost nothing, that “almost nothing” which causes a sail to drift away when the wind changes.
He was actually drifting away, drifting away from her a little more every day with all the glances he bestowed on Annette. He himself made no effort to see clearly into his heart. He felt quite plainly that fermentation of love, that irresistible attraction, but he refused to understand; he trusted to events, to the unforeseen hazards of life.
These thoughts haunted her, spoiled everything she might have relished, turned into grief everything that would have given her joy, left her no pleasure, no contentment, no gaiety intact. She was forever trembling with an exasperated need to shake off the burden of misery that crushed her, for without this distressing importunity she would yet have been happy, alert, and healthy. She felt that her soul was spirited and fresh, her heart ever young, the ardor of a being that is beginning to live, an insatiable appetite for happiness, more ravenous even than heretofore, and a devouring desire to love.
And lo! All good things, all sweet, delicious, poetic things that embellish life and render it enjoyable, were withdrawing from her because she was growing old. It was over. Yet she still found within herself the sensibility of a young girl and the passionate impulse of a young woman. Nothing had grown old but her body, her miserable skin, that bag of bones, faded little by little, moth-eaten like the slip-cover of a piece of furniture. The obsession with this decay had fastened itself upon her and become the curse of a physical suffering.
Time was, like everyone else, when she had some notion of the passing years and of the changes they bring. Like everyone else she had said, she had told herself, every winter, every spring, and every summer, “I’ve changed so much since last year.” But ever beautiful, with a somewhat varying beauty, she paid no attention to it. Today, suddenly, she did pay attention to it. Today, all at once, instead of once more peaceably realizing the seasons’ slow changes, she had just discovered and understood the minutes’ formidable flight. She had had a sudden revelation of that vanishing of the hour, of that imperceptible race, maddening when one thinks of it, of that infinite procession of little hurried seconds which nibble at the body and the life of man.
Every morning now, as soon as she had risen, she felt impelled by a powerful desire to pray to God and obtain from Him a little relief and consolation.
Then she knelt before a tall oak crucifix, Olivier’s gift, a rare gift discovered by him, and with closed lips, imploring with the voice of the soul, the voice with which we speak to ourselves, she offered up a sorrowful supplication to the divine martyr. Distracted by the want of being heard and succored, simple in her distress like all the faithful on their knees, she could not doubt that He was listening to her, that He was attentive to her request and perhaps touched by her sorrow. She didn’t ask for Him to do for her what He never did for anyone—to leave her charm, her freshness, and her grace until her death; she only asked for a little respite and repose. Of course, she must grow old, as she must die. But why so soon? Some women remain beautiful to such an advanced age. Could He not grant that she be one of those? How good He would be, He who had also suffered so much, if He only gave her for two or three years more the remnant of charm she needed in order to please.