The Human Comedy (53 page)

Put any feminine creature under the feet of a furious horse or another terrible beast, and she will naturally fall to her knees and await death. But if the beast is forgiving and does not kill her altogether, she will love the horse, the lion, the bull, she will speak of it at her ease. The duchess felt she was under the lion’s feet: She trembled, but she did not hate him. These two people, so singularly posed face-to-face, met in society three times that week. Every time, in response to coquettish questions, the duchess received Armand’s respectful bow and smiles tinged with such cruel irony that they confirmed all the apprehensions inspired that morning by his visiting card. Life is only what we make of it with our feelings; their feelings had hollowed out an abyss between them.

The Comtesse de Sérizy, sister of the Marquis de Ronquerolles, gave a great ball at the beginning of the week to which Madame de Langeais had promised to come. The first figure the duchess saw upon entering was that of Armand—this time Armand was waiting for her, at least she thought so. The two of them exchanged a look, and a cold sweat suddenly broke from all her pores. She had believed Montriveau capable of some unimaginable vengeance in proportion to their positions; this vengeance had been discovered, it was ready, it was boiling hot. The betrayed lover shot lightning bolts at her, his face radiant with exultant hatred. And the duchess had a doleful look, in spite of her determination to be cold and impertinent. She went to stand next to the Comtesse de Sérizy, who could not prevent herself from saying to her, “What is the matter, my dear Antointette? You look frightful.”

“I will revive after a quadrille,” she answered, giving her hand to a young man who had just appeared.

Madame de Langeais began to waltz with a kind of frenzy and abandon that made Montriveau scrutinize her even more intensely. He remained standing in front of the onlookers, who amused themselves watching the dancing couples. Each time his mistress passed him, his eyes plunged onto her turning head, like those of a tiger on his prey. Once the waltz was done, the duchess came to sit beside the countess, and the marquis never stopped watching her as he spoke with a stranger.

“Monsieur,” he was saying to him, “one of the things that has struck me most on this journey . . .”

The duchess was all ears.

“ . . . is the remark the guard at Westminster makes while showing you the ax used by a masked executioner, they say, to cut off the head of Charles I. The king apparently said these words to an inquisitive person and they are repeated in his memory.”

“What did he say?” asked Madame de Sérizy.

“
Do not touch the ax
,” answered Montriveau in a threatening tone of voice.

“In truth, monsieur le marquis,” said the Duchesse de Langeais, “you are looking at my neck in such a melodramatic way as you repeat this old story, known to everyone who goes to London, that I seem to see an ax in your hand.”

These last words were pronounced in laughter, although the duchess had broken out in a cold sweat.

“But circumstances have made this story quite new,” he answered.

“How so? I beg you, for pity’s sake, in what way?”

“In this way, madame: You have touched the ax,” Montriveau said to her in a low voice.

“What a ravishing prophecy!” she replied smiling with affected grace. “And when is my head to fall?”

“I have no wish to see your pretty head fall, madame. I fear for you only some great misfortune. If you were shorn, would you feel no regrets for the charming golden hair you turn to such good effect—”

“There are men to whom women love to make these sacrifices, and often even to men who do not know how to make allowances for an outbreak of temper.”

“Very well. And if some wag suddenly spoiled your beauty by some chemical process and made you look a hundred years old when we know you are only eighteen—”

“But, monsieur,” she said, interrupting him, “the smallpox is our Waterloo. Afterward, we know who truly loves us.”

“You would not regret this lovely face that—”

“Oh yes, very much, but less for my sake than for him who might have taken joy in it. However, if I were loved sincerely, well, what would beauty matter to me? What do you say, Clara?”

“This is a dangerous sort of speculation,” replied Madame de Sérizy.

“Might one ask His Majesty the King of Sorcerers,” Madame de Langeais went on, “when I committed the sin of touching the ax, since I have never gone to London?”

“
Non so
,” he answered in Italian, with a burst of ironic laughter.

“And when will the punishment begin?”

Here Montriveau coldly pulled out his watch and checked the time with a truly terrifying conviction.

“Before this day is done, a horrible misfortune will befall you.”

“I am not a child who is so easily frightened, or rather I am a child who does not know danger,” said the duchess, “and goes on dancing fearlessly at the edge of the abyss.”

“I am delighted, madame, to know you have such character,” he replied, seeing her go to take her place in a quadrille.

In spite of her apparent disdain for Armand’s dark predictions, the duchess was in the grip of very real terror. Her lover’s presence filled her morally and almost physically with a sense of oppression that scarcely ceased when he left the ball. Nonetheless, after enjoying a moment’s pleasure breathing more easily, she was surprised to feel regret for the emotions of fear, so avid is female nature for extreme sensations. This regret was not love, but it surely belonged to the feelings that precede it. Then, as if the duchess again felt the effect of Montriveau’s presence, she remembered the air of conviction with which he had just looked at the clock and, suddenly gripped by a spasm of dread, she took her leave.

It was by then around midnight. One of her servants wrapped her pelisse around her and went ahead to call her carriage. Then, when she was seated inside, she fell into a rather natural daydream, provoked by Monsieur de Montriveau’s prediction. Having arrived in her courtyard, she entered a vestibule almost identical to the one in her residence, but all of a sudden she did not recognize her staircase. The moment she turned around to call her people, several men quickly assailed her and threw a handkerchief over her mouth, tied her hands and feet, and carried her off. She cried for help.

“Madame, we have orders to kill you if you cry out,” someone spoke in her ear.

The duchess’s fear was so great that she could never explain to herself how or where she was transported. When she came to her senses, she found herself bound hand and foot with silken ropes, lying on the couch of a bachelor’s quarters. She could not restrain a cry when she met the eyes of Armand de Montriveau, wrapped in his dressing gown as he sat calmly in an armchair smoking a cigar.

“Do not cry out, duchess,” he said coldly, removing his cigar from his mouth. “I have a migraine. Besides, I am going to untie you. But listen carefully to what I have the honor to tell you.” He delicately untied the knots that bound the duchess’s feet. “What good would your cries do? No one can hear you. You are too well bred to make futile grimaces. If you should not keep quiet, if you should wish to fight me, I will bind you again, hand and foot. I think that, all things considered, you have enough self-respect to stay on that couch as if you were at home on yours, cold as ever, if you like . . . You have made me shed many tears on this couch, tears that I hid from all eyes.”

While Montriveau was speaking to her, the duchess cast around her a woman’s furtive glance, a glance that can take everything in while appearing distracted. She liked this room that seemed so much like a monk’s cell. The man’s mind and soul hovered there. No decoration could change the gray paint on the blank walls. On the floor was a green rug. A black couch, a table covered with papers, two large armchairs, a dresser with an alarm clock as ornament, a very low bed with a red coverlet bordered in a black key design flung over it—the texture of these furnishings displayed the habits of a life reduced to its simplest expression. An Egyptian-style triple sconce on the mantel recalled the vastness of the deserts where this man had wandered so long. Beside the bed, its foot shaped like an enormous sphinx paw jutting from folds of cloth, was a door near the corner of the room, hidden by a green curtain with red-and-black fringes hanging from large rings circling a spear handle. The door through which the strangers had entered was similarly concealed, but its curtain was tied back from an ordinary rod. The duchess took a last look at the two curtains to compare them, and she perceived that the door next to the bed was open, and that a reddish light illuminating the other room flickered beneath the fringed borders. Naturally her curiosity was aroused by this somber light, which scarcely allowed her to distinguish the strange shapes that played there among the shadows. But at this moment she did not imagine that any danger to herself could come from that quarter and wanted to satisfy an increasingly ardent curiosity.

“Monsieur, is it indiscreet to ask what you mean to do with me?” she said, with impertinence and stinging mockery.

The duchess imagined an excessive love in Montriveau’s words. Furthermore, surely a woman must be the object of a man’s adoration for him to abduct her!

“Nothing at all, madame,” he replied, gracefully puffing the last of his cigar. “You are here for a short while. First of all, I want to explain to you what you are, and what I am. I cannot put my thoughts into words when you are twisting on your divan in your boudoir. And when you are at home, you ring for your servant at the slightest thought that displeases you, you shout out loud and show your lover the door, as if he were the lowest of the low. Here my mind is free. Here no one can throw me out the door. Here you will be my victim for a few moments, and you will have the extreme goodwill to hear me out. Do not be afraid. I have not abducted you in order to insult you, to wrench from you by violence what I have not been able to merit, what you have not wished to grant me of your own free will. That would be beneath me. Perhaps you imagine rape; I, on the other hand, have no such idea.”

Abruptly, he tossed his cigar into the fire.

“Madame, the smoke is no doubt unpleasant to you?”

Rising at once, he took a hot chafing dish from the hearth, burned perfumes and purified the air. The duchess’s astonishment was equal only to her humiliation. She was in this man’s power, and he did not wish to abuse his power. She saw those eyes, formerly blazing with love, now calm and steady as stars. She trembled. Then her dread of Armand was increased by one of those transfixing sensations like the agitations you feel in a nightmare, unable to move. Fear nailed her in place as she thought she saw the glow from behind the curtain intensify as from the work of a bellows. Suddenly the reflections, growing more vivid, illuminated three masked figures. This ghastly aspect vanished so suddenly that she took it for an optical illusion.

“Madame,” Armand went on, regarding her with cold contempt, “a minute, a single minute is enough for me to reach you in every moment of your life, the only eternity I can touch. I am not God. Listen to me carefully,” he said, pausing to give due weight to his words. “Love will always come at your bidding; you have a limitless power over men. But remember that one day you bade love come and it came pure and candid, as much as it can be on this earth; as respectful as it was violent; caressing as the love of a woman, or as that of a mother for her child; finally, so great that it was a kind of madness. You played with this love, and thus you have committed a crime. It is any woman’s right to refuse a love she feels she cannot share. The man who loves without making himself loved cannot complain, nor has he any right to complain. But, madame la duchesse, to attract a poor man deprived of all affection by feigning love, giving him a glimpse of happiness at its fullest only to steal it from him, to snatch away his future felicity, to kill it not only today but for as long as his life lasts, poisoning all his hours and his thoughts—this is what I call a dreadful crime!”

“Monsieur—”

“I cannot yet allow you to answer me. Listen to me, then. Besides, I have rights over you, but I want only the rights of the judge over the criminal so as to awaken your conscience. If you had no more conscience, I would not blame you at all; but you are so young! I like to think that you must feel some life in your heart. While I believe you are depraved enough to commit a crime unpunished by law, I think you are not so degraded that you cannot comprehend the full meaning of my words. I continue.”

At this moment, the duchess heard the hollow sound of a bellows; the strangers whom she had just glimpsed were no doubt using it to fan the fire clearly reflected on the curtain. But Montriveau’s burning look forced her to stay still, her heart beating, her eyes staring in front of her. Whatever her curiosity, the fire of Montriveau’s words interested her even more than the sound of this mysterious fire.

“Madame,” he said, after a pause, “in Paris, when the executioner must lay hands on a poor murderer and place him on the block, where a murderer by law loses his head . . . You know, the newspapers forewarn rich and poor alike, telling the rich to remain calm and the poor to be watchful for their lives. Well, you who are religious, and even something of a bigot, go to say Mass for this man: You are part of the family, but you are of the elder branch. That branch can rest in peace, happy and carefree. Pushed by poverty or by anger, your brother the convict has only killed a man. And you! You have killed a man’s happiness, the best part of his life, his most dearly held beliefs. Driven by misery or anger, your convict brother has quite naïvely lain in wait for his victim; he has killed him in spite of himself and in fear of the scaffold. But you . . . you have heaped up all the sins of weakness against an innocent strength; you have tamed the heart of your patient the better to devour it! You have lured him with caresses, you have left nothing undone that could lead him to imagine, dream, desire the delights of love. You have asked of him a thousand sacrifices in order to reject them all. Indeed, you have made him see the light before putting out his eyes.