Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (74 page)

On the boulevard numerous groups had stationed themselves. From time to time a patrol came and dispersed them; they only gathered together again behind it. They talked freely and in loud tones, insulted and joked about the soldiers, without anything further happening.

“What! are they not going to fight?” said Frédéric to a workman.

“We’re not such fools as to get ourselves killed for the rich! Let them take care of themselves!”

And a gentleman muttered, as he glanced across at the people of the faubourgs:

“Socialist rascals! If it were only possible, this time, to exterminate them!”

Frédéric could not, for the life of him, understand the necessity of so much hatred and stupidity. His feelings of disgust for Paris were intensified, and two days later he set out for Nogent on the first train.

The houses soon became lost to view; the country stretched out before him. Alone in the train car, with his feet on the seat in front of him, he pondered over the events of the last few days, and then on his entire past. The recollection of Louise came back to him.

“She, indeed, loved me truly! I was wrong not to snatch this chance of happiness. So what? let’s forget it.”

Then, five minutes afterwards: “Who knows, after all? Why not, later on?”

His reverie, like his eyes, wandered off towards vague horizons.

“She was naive, a peasant girl, almost a savage; but so good!”

In proportion as he drew nearer to Nogent, her image drew closer to him. As they were passing through the meadows of Sourdun, he saw her once more in his imagination under the poplar-trees, as in the old days, cutting rushes beside the pools. And now they had reached their destination; he stepped out of the train.

Then he leaned with his elbows on the bridge, to gaze again at the isle and the garden where they had walked together one sunny day, and the dizzy sensation caused by travelling and the country air, together with the weakness brought on by his recent emotions, arousing in his chest a sort of exaltation, he said to himself:

“She has gone out, perhaps; suppose I were to go and meet her!”

The bell of Saint-Laurent was ringing, and in the square in front of the church there was a crowd of poor people around an open carriage, the only one in the district—the one which was always hired for weddings. And all of a sudden, under the churchgate, accompanied by a number of well-dressed people in white cravats, a newly-married couple appeared.

He thought he must be hallucinating. But no! It was, indeed, Louise! covered with a white veil which flowed from her red hair down to her heels; and with her was no other than Deslauriers, attired in a blue coat embroidered with silver—the uniform of a prefect.

What was the meaning of all this?

Frédéric concealed himself at the corner of a house to let the procession pass.

Shamefaced, vanquished, crushed, he retraced his steps to the railway-station, and returned to Paris.

The cabman who drove him assured him that the barricades were erected from the Château d’Eau to the Gymnase Theatre, and turned down the Faubourg Saint-Martin. At the corner of the Rue de Provence, Frédéric stepped out in order to reach the boulevards on foot.

It was five o’clock. A thin drizzle was falling. A number of citizens blocked the sidewalk close to the Opera House. The houses opposite were closed. No one at any of the windows. Taking up the whole width of the boulevard, dragoons were galloping at full speed, leaning over their horses; with swords drawn and, the plumes of their helmets, and their large white cloaks, billowing behind them, could be seen under the glare of the gas-lamps, which shook in the wind and mist. The crowd gazed at them mute with fear.
^dd

In the intervals between the cavalry-charges, squads of policemen arrived on the scene to keep back the people in the streets.

But on the steps of Tortoni’s,
^de
a man—Dussardier—who could be distinguished at a distance by his great height, remained standing as still as a statue.

One of the police-officers, marching at the head of his men, with his three-cornered hat drawn over his eyes, threatened him with his sword.

The other thereupon took one step forward, and shouted:

“Long live the Republic!”

The next moment he fell on his back with his arms crossed.

A yell of horror arose from the crowd. The police-officer looked all around him; and Frédéric, stupefied, recognised Sénécal.

H
e travelled. He came to know the melancholy of steamboats, the chill one feels on waking up in tents, the dizzy effect of landscapes and ruins, and the bitterness of ruptured friendships.

He returned home.

He mingled in society, and had other loves. But the constant recollection of his first love made these appear insipid; and besides the vehemence of desire, the very flower of the feeling had vanished. In like manner, his intellectual ambitions had grown weaker. Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

Towards the end of March, 1867, just as it was getting dark, one evening, he was sitting all alone in his study, when a woman suddenly came in.

“Madame Arnoux!”

“Frédéric!”

She took hold of his hands, and drew him gently towards the window, and, as she gazed into his face, she kept repeating:

“Tis he! Yes, indeed—’tis he!”

In the growing shadows of the twilight, he could see only her eyes under the black lace veil that hid her face.

Once she had put down on the edge of the mantelpiece a little wallet of garnet velvet, she seated herself in front of him, and they both remained silent, unable to utter a word, smiling at one another.

At last he asked her a number of questions about herself and her husband.

They had gone to a remote part of Brittany to live cheaply, so as to be able to pay their debts. Arnoux, now almost always ill, had become quite an old man. Her daughter was married and living in Bordeaux, and her son was garrisoned at Mostaganem.
^df

Then she raised her head to look at him again:

“But now I’ve seen you again! I am happy!”

He did not fail to let her know that, as soon as he heard of their misfortune, he had hastened to their house.

“Yes, I know!”

“How?”

She had seen him in the street outside the house, and had hidden herself.

“Why did you do that?”

Then, in a trembling voice, and with long pauses between her words:

“I was afraid! Yes—afraid of you and of myself!”

This disclosure gave him, as it were, a shock of delight. His heart began to throb wildly. She went on:

“Excuse me for not having come sooner.” And, pointing towards the little wallet covered with golden palm-branches:

“I embroidered it specially for you. It contains the amount for which the Belleville property was supposed to be the security.”

Frédéric thanked her for letting him have the money, while chiding her at the same time for having given herself any trouble over it.

“No! ’tis not for this I came! I was determined to pay you this visit—then I will return ... there.”

And she spoke about the place where they lived.

It was a low-built house of only one story; and there was a garden full of huge box-trees, and a double avenue of chestnut-trees, reaching up to the top of the hill, from which there was a view of the sea.

“I go there and sit down on a bench, which I have called ‘Frédéric’s bench.’ ”

Then she proceeded to fix her gaze on the furniture, the ornaments, the pictures, greedily, so that she might be able to carry away the impressions of them in her memory. The Maréchale’s portrait was half-hidden behind a curtain. But the golds and the whites, which showed their outlines through the midst of the surrounding darkness, attracted her attention.

“It seems to me I knew that woman?”

“Impossible!” said Frédéric. “It is an old Italian painting.”

She confessed that she would like to take a walk through the streets on his arm.

They went out.

The light from the shop-windows fell, every now and then, on her pale profile; then once more she was wrapped in shadow, and in the midst of the carriages, the crowd, and the din, they walked on without paying any heed to what was happening around them, without hearing anything, like those who walk together in the countryside over beds of dead leaves.

They talked about the days which they had formerly spent in each other’s company, the dinners at the time when
L’Art Industriel
flourished, Arnoux’s various fads, his habit of tugging at the points of his collar and of smearing pomade over his moustache, and other matters of a more intimate and serious nature. What delight he experienced on the first occasion when he heard her singing! How lovely she looked on her feast-day at Saint-Cloud! He reminded her of the little garden at Auteuil, evenings at the theatre, a chance meeting on the boulevard, and some of her old servants, including her negress.

She was astonished at his vivid recollection of these things.

“Sometimes your words come back to me like a distant echo, like the sound of a bell carried on by the wind, and when I read love passages in books, it is as if you were here before me.”

“All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction you have made me feel,” said Frédéric. “I can understand Werther,
^dg
who felt no disgust at his Charlotte for serving bread and butter.”

“Poor, dear friend!”

She heaved a sigh; and, after a prolonged silence:

“No matter; we will have loved each other so much!”

“And still without having ever belonged to each other!”

“This perhaps is all the better,” she replied.

“No, no! What happiness we might have enjoyed!”

“Oh, I am sure of it with a love like yours!”

And it must have been very strong to endure after such a long separation.

Frédéric wished to know from her how she first discovered that he loved her.

“It was when you kissed my wrist one evening between the glove and the cuff. I said to myself, ‘Ah! yes, he loves me—he loves me;’ nevertheless, I was afraid of finding out if it was true. So charming was your discretion, that I delighted in it as an unconscious and continuous homage.”

He regretted nothing now. He was compensated for all he had suffered in the past.

When they came back to the house, Madame Arnoux took off her bonnet. The lamp, placed on a console table threw its light on her white hair. Frédéric felt as if some one had given him a blow in the middle of the chest.

In order to conceal from her his sense of disillusion, he flung himself on the floor at her feet, and seizing her hands, began to whisper in her ear words of tenderness:

“Your person, your slightest movements, seemed to me to have a superhuman importance in the world. My heart was stirred like dust under your feet. You affected me like moonlight on a summer’s night, when around us we find nothing but perfume, soft shadows, pale light infinity; and all the delights of the flesh and of the spirit were for me embodied in your name, which I kept repeating to myself while I tried to kiss it with my lips. I thought of nothing beyond that. It was Madame Arnoux such as you were with your two children, tender, serious, dazzlingly beautiful, and yet so good! This image erased every other. Did I not think of it alone? for I had always in the very depths of my soul the music of your voice and the brightness of your eyes!”

She accepted rapturously these tributes of adoration to the woman whom she could no longer claim to be. Frédéric, becoming intoxicated with his own words, came to believe what he was saying. Madame Arnoux, with her back turned to the light of the lamp, stooped towards him. He felt the caress of her breath on his forehead, and the undefined touch of her entire body through the garments that kept them apart. Their hands were clasped; the tip of her bootee peeped out from beneath her gown, and feeling faint he said to her:

“The sight of your foot is disturbing me.”

An impulse of modesty made her rise. Then, without any further movement, she said, with the strange intonation of a sleepwalker:

“At my age!—he—Frederic! Ah! no woman has ever been loved as I have been. No! what is the use of being young? What do I care about that? I despise them—all those women who come here!”

“Oh! very few women come to this place,” he returned, kindly.

Her face brightened up, and then she asked him whether he would marry.

He swore that he never would.

“Are you perfectly sure? Why should you not?”

“ ’Tis on your account!” said Frédéric, clasping her in his arms.

She remained thus pressed to his heart, with her head thrown back, her lips parted, and her eyes raised. Suddenly she pushed him away from her with a look of despair, and when he implored her to say something to him in reply, she bent forward and whispered:

“I would have liked to make you happy!”

Frédéric had a suspicion that Madame Arnoux had come to offer herself to him, and once more he was seized with a desire to possess her—stronger, fiercer, more desperate than he had ever experienced before. And yet he felt, the next moment, an unaccountable repugnance to the thought of such a thing, like the guilt of committing incest. Another fear, too stopped him, the fear of being disgusted later. Besides, what an inconvenience it would be!—and, abandoning the idea, partly through prudence, and partly through a resolve not to degrade his ideal, he turned on his heel and proceeded to roll a cigarette between his fingers.

She watched him with admiration.

“How considerate you are! There is no one like you! There is no one like you!”

The clock struck eleven.