Like Death Page 5

  While painting slowly, he reasoned by small, precise arguments that were both clear and sure, feeling himself to be lucid and strong, the present master of events. He had only to be prudent, only to be patient, only to be devoted, and one day or another she would again be his.

  He knew how to wait. In order to reassure her and to regain her trust he had wiles in his turn: tenderness feigned under seeming remorse, hesitant attentions and seemingly indifferent attitudes. Tranquil in the certainty of eventual happiness, sooner or later mattered little to him. He even experienced a curious and refined pleasure in never insisting on haste, in watching her and thinking “She’s afraid” when seeing her always accompanied by her child.

  He realized that between them a slow process of reconciliation was occurring, and that in the countess’s glances something strange was seeking expression, something reluctant and painfully sweet, the appeal of a struggling soul, of a failing will that seemed to be saying, “But go on, force me then!”

  After some time, she again returned alone, reassured by his reserve. He was treating her like a friend now, a comrade actually, discussing his life, his plans, his art, as if with a brother.

  Seduced by this apparent self-abandon, she delighted in resuming her role as his adviser, flattered to be distinguished from other women and convinced that his talent would gain a certain delicacy from this intellectual intimacy of theirs. But by means of such deference in seeking her advice he made it quite easy for her to shift from an adviser’s functions to the sacred offices of an inspiration. Madame de Guilleroy found it quite charming to accept her influence over the great man, and more or less consented to acknowledge his love for her as an artist whose inspiration she had become.

  It was one evening, after a long discussion of the mistresses of illustrious painters, that she let herself slip into his arms. She remained there this time, without attempting to flee, and returned his kisses.

  Henceforth she felt no remorse, merely the vague sense of a certain forfeiture, and to answer the reproaches of her reason, she now credited a certain fatality. Drawn to him by her virgin heart and her void soul, her flesh vanquished by the slow dominion of caresses, she gradually became attached, as tender women do who love for the first time.

  In his case, it was a crisis of acute love, sensual and poetic. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had taken flight with open hands, and that he had been permitted to embrace with open arms the winged and wonderful dream ever hovering over all men’s hopes.

  He had completed the countess’s portrait, certainly the finest he had ever painted, for in it he had been able to see and to reproduce that inexpressible element which a painter so rarely reveals, that reflection, that mystery—call it the soul’s physiognomy which passes so elusively across the human face.

  Months passed, then years, which scarcely loosened the bond uniting the Countess de Guilleroy and the painter Olivier Bertin. For him, this period was no longer the exaltation of the early days but a calmer, deeper affection, a sort of amitié amoureuse to which he had become easily and entirely accustomed.

  In her case, on the contrary, evolved the obstinate affection of certain women who give themselves to a man for everything and forever. As honest and straightforward in adultery as they would have been in marriage, they surrender themselves to a unique tenderness from which nothing can deter them. Not only do they love their lover but they will themselves to love him, and with eyes for him alone their heart is so full of his image that nothing alien can distract them. Their own life is resolutely bound, as the hands of a man determined to die are bound when he leaps from a high bridge into the sea.

  But from the instant the countess had yielded in this fashion, she found herself assailed by fears for Olivier Bertin’s constancy. What was there to hold him but his man’s will, a caprice, a passing taste for some woman encountered one day or another, as he has already encountered so many others! She knew how free he was, and how readily tempted—a man who lived without duties, without habits, and without scruples, like all men! He was a good-looking boy, famous, popular, having within reach of his easily stirred desires women of fashion whose modesty is so fragile, shameless women, actresses prodigal of their favors to men like him. One of these women, some evening after dinner, might follow him, please him, take him—and keep him!

  She lived, therefore, in terror of losing him, scrutinizing his manner, his attitudes, agonized by a word, gorged with misery the moment he admired another woman, praised the charm of a face, the grace of a figure. Whatever she didn’t know about his life made her tremble, and whatever she knew terrified her. At each of their meetings she grew cleverer at asking questions without his being aware that he was revealing opinions about people he had met, houses where he had dined, impressions of his professional contacts.

  The instant she felt she had discovered someone’s possible influence, she opposed it with amazing ingenuity. Often enough she divined these brief intrigues, lasting only a few days but occasionally to be encountered in the life of every celebrated artist. She had, as it were, the intuition of danger, even before being warned of the awakening of Olivier’s new desire by the expression a man’s face and eyes assume when overexcited by a gallant fancy.

  That was when her suffering would begin, her sleep troubled by the torments of doubt. To effect a surprise, she would arrive at his rooms without warning, asking apparently naive questions, testing his heart, listening to his thoughts as one detects an illness the naive body attempts to conceal.

  And she would burst into tears the first moment she was alone, convinced that this time he had been taken from her forever, this love to which she clung so desperately because she had staked so much upon it—all her power of affection, all her hopes, all her dreams.

  And then, after these brief estrangements, when she realized he was coming back to her, she felt as she held him close and took possession of him like something lost and found again, a mute and profound happiness that sometimes, as she passed a church, obliged her to go inside and thank God.

  This constant preoccupation to please him more than any other woman could, to retain him against all rivals, had made her life a constant combat of coquetry. She fought for him incessantly in his presence with the weapons of grace, of beauty, of elegance. She wanted to feel that wherever he heard her spoken of, it was in praise of her charm, her taste, her wit, and her wonderful clothes. She tried to please others for him, to seduce them so that he would be proud and jealous of her. And each time she recognized his jealousy, after momentarily making him suffer, she permitted him a triumph that revived his love by arousing his vanity.

  Then, realizing that a man can always encounter, somewhere in the world, a woman whose physical seduction would be more potent than hers, if only for being newer, she resorted to other means: she flattered and spoiled him.

  In a discreet and continuous fashion, she spread a blanket of praise over him; she lulled him with compliments and dazzled him with admiration so that everywhere else he experienced friendship and even affection as rather chilly and incomplete, with the consequence that if others loved him too, he ultimately perceived that she and she alone really understood him.

  She made of her house—those two salons he visited so often—a place where his artist’s pride was as well rewarded as his man’s heart, the one place in Paris he liked best to be, where all the cravings of his nature found satisfaction.

  Not only did she learn to discover all his tastes, so that while satisfying them in her own home she could give him a sense of irreplaceable well-being, but she managed to bring new ones into his life, creating appetites of all kinds, material and sentimental, an habitual atmosphere of small services, of adoration, of flattery. She strove to seduce his eyes by elegance, his sense of smell by perfumes, his ears by compliments, and his palate by fine cooking.

  But when she had beguiled his soul and his bachelor’s pampered senses with a multitude of tyrannical minor needs, when she was quite sure that no mistress
could exercise her care in supervising and maintaining them in order to bind him by all of life’s little pleasures, she was suddenly terrorized by imagining him disgusted with his own lodging, constantly complaining of his lonely life, unable to come to her except with all the restraints imposed by society, seeking elsewhere for some means to temper his isolation—that was when she feared he would think of marriage.

  On certain days she suffered so terribly from these anxieties that she longed for old age to put an end to this anguish, to find rest in a cooler, calmer affection.

  Yet the years passed without uncoupling them. The chain she had attached was a solid one, and she recast the links as fast as they were worn away. But ever anxious, she kept a sharp eye on the artist’s heart, like a parent watching her child cross a busy street, and still, from day to day, she dreaded the unforeseen event, whose constant threat menaced her.

  Count de Guilleroy, without suspicions and without jealousy, regarded as quite natural his wife’s intimacy with a famous artist eagerly invited everywhere. Meeting so frequently, the two men, growing used to each other, ultimately settled into a mutual affection.

  2

  ON FRIDAY evening, when Bertin reached his beloved’s residence where he was to dine in celebration of Annette de Guilleroy’s return, he found in the little Louis XV salon only Monsieur de Musadieu, who had also just arrived.

  This was a clever old man who might have become a famous one, and who remained inconsolable for what he had not achieved. As a former commissioner of the imperial museums, he had found means to get himself renamed the inspector of fine arts under the Republic, an office that never hindered him from being, above all, the friend of princes—of all the princes, princesses, and duchesses of European aristocracy—as well as the sworn protector of artists of every description. Endowed with a quick intelligence and a great readiness of speech that enabled him to transform any commonplace—his own, and even a colleague’s—into a memorable formulation, as well as with a mental flexibility that put him at ease in all circles, and with a diplomat’s flair for judging newcomers at first glance, Musadieu flaunted from salon to salon, by day as by night, his well-informed, fastidious, and futile activity.

  Universally adept, or so it seemed, he managed to discuss everything with what appeared to be an engaging competence and a popularizer’s clarity that won him the enthusiastic appreciation of fashionable ladies for whom he served as a peripatetic bazaar of erudition. He knew, indeed, many things without ever having read anything but certain indispensable books; yet he was on the best of terms with all five academies, with all scholars and savants to whom he listened with discrimination, and to the information thus gleaned he lent an easy, clear, and good-natured turn that made everything as easy of comprehension as scientific fabliaux. He gave and relished the impression of a treasury of ideas, one of those vast warehouses where one never encounters rare articles but where ordinary productions of every kind and source abound, from household utensils to the popular apparatus of parlor physics or schoolboy chemistry.

  Painters, with whom his duties brought him into constant contact, teased and feared him. Yet he did them favors, helping them sell their pictures and launch their careers, apparently devoting himself to a mysterious fusion of the fashionable and the artistic worlds, boasting of his intimate acquaintance with the one and his familiar reception by the other, a luncheon with the Prince of Wales on his way through Paris and a dinner the same evening with Paul Adelmans, Olivier Bertin, and Amaury Maldant.

  Bertin, who rather liked the old man, finding him droll, used to say about him, “It’s the encyclopedia of Jules Verne bound in the skin of an ass.”

  The two men shook hands and began to talk politics: rumors of war Musadieu found alarming for obvious reasons, which he explained very clearly: Germany having every interest in crushing us and arriving at the moment Bismarck had been waiting for these eighteen years, while Olivier proved by irrefutable arguments that such fears were quite chimerical since Germany couldn’t be foolish enough to hazard her conquest in an always doubtful adventure, nor the chancellor imprudent enough to risk, at the end of his life, the work he had accomplished and the glory he had won at one blow.

  Monsieur de Musadieu, however, seemed to be acquainted with facts that he was not at liberty to reveal. Besides, he had seen a minister this very day and met the Grand Duke Vladimir on his return from Cannes the previous evening.

  The artist resisted, and with tranquil irony contested the competence of so-called well-informed people. Such rumors constituted a large part of the manipulations of the Bourse! Only Chancellor Bismarck might have a valid opinion on such matters—perhaps.

  At which point Monsieur de Guilleroy came in, shook hands cordially, apologizing unctuously for having left his guests alone.

  “And you, my dear deputy,” asked the painter, “what do you make of these war clouds?”

  Monsieur de Guilleroy launched into a speech. As a member of the chamber he knew more than anyone, though he differed from the majority of his colleagues. No, he did not believe in the likelihood of an imminent conflict, unless it was provoked by French turbulence and the braggadocio of so-called patriots of the league. And then he drew a portrait of the chancellor in bold strokes—a portrait à la Saint-Simon. “One refuses to understand such a man because one always attributes to others one’s own way of thinking and assumes the likelihood of behavior similar to one’s own in a similar situation. Bismarck was not a false and lying diplomat but a frank and brutal fellow who always shouted the truth at the top of his lungs and always declared his intentions. ‘I want peace,’ he said, and that was the truth, he wanted peace and nothing but peace, and everything has proved as much in the last eighteen years—everything, including his armaments and his alliances, that group of peoples united against our impetuosity.” Monsieur de Guilleroy concluded in a deep, convincing tone: “He really is a great man, a very great man who wants peace but who believes only in threats and violent means in order to achieve it. In a word, gentlemen, a great barbarian.”

  “Who seeks the end cannot avoid the means,” replied Monsieur de Musadieu. “I grant you he adores peace if you’ll concede he always insists on war in order to obtain it. There you have, however, an indisputable and phenomenal truth: in such a world, war is waged only in order to obtain peace!”

  A servant announced, “Madame the Duchess de Mortemain.”

  In the open doorway appeared a tall, massive woman who entered with authority.

  Guilleroy hurried to her, kissed her fingertips, and said, “Ah, how do you do, duchess?”

  The other two men greeted her with a certain careful familiarity, for the duchess had manners that were at once cordial and brusque. The widow of a general, the Duke de Mortemain, the mother of an only daughter married to the Prince de Salia, and herself the daughter of the Marquis de Farandal, of noble descent and royally rich, she received at her residence on the rue de Varenne notable characters from all over the world who met and exchanged compliments upon being there. No Highness passed through Paris without dining at her table, and no man could arouse public attention without creating in the duchess an immediate desire to know him: She had to see him, to hear him speak, to judge him. All of which amused her greatly, stirred her expectations, and fed the flame of an imperious and benign curiosity that burned within her.

  Hence she was scarcely seated when the servant again announced, “Monsieur the Baron and Madame the Baroness de Corbelle.”

  They were young, the baron bald and portly, the baroness slender, elegant, and very dark. This couple occupied a unique position in the French aristocracy, entirely due to a scrupulous choice of connections. Belonging to untitled gentry, having no value and no cleverness, ruled in all circumstances by an immoderate love of what is select and comme il faut, their behavior determined by an excessive adoration of what is upper class, frequenting only the most princely residences, exhibiting their royalist feelings, pious and correct to a supreme degree, r
especting all that was to be respected and despising all that was to be despised, never mistaken upon a point of worldly dogma, never hesitating upon a detail of etiquette, they had succeeded in passing, in the eyes of many, for the very essence of high life. Their opinion formed a sort of code of propriety, and their presence in a household established a true title of honorability.

  The Corbelles were related to the Count de Guilleroy.

  “Well then,” exclaimed the duchess in astonishment, “where’s your wife?”

  “In a moment,” the count insisted. “There’s to be a surprise. She’ll be here right away.”

  When the Countess de Guilleroy, a month after her marriage, had made her debut in society, she was presented to the Duchess de Mortemain who immediately fell in love with her, adopted her, promoted her. For twenty years this friendship had never wavered, and when the duchess pronounced the words “ma petite” one still heard in her voice the chime of that sudden and persistent affection. It had been at her house that the countess had happened to meet Bertin.

  Musadieu came up to her and asked, “Has the duchess been to see the Intempérants’ exhibit?”

  “No, what’s that?”

  “A group of new artists, every one of them impressionists in a state of intoxication—two of them first rate.”

  The great lady murmured disdainfully, “I don’t enjoy those gentlemen’s jokes.”

  Peremptory, blunt, intolerant of any opinion but her own, founded entirely on the consciousness of her social position, considering—without any real awareness—artists and learned men to be intelligent mercenaries appointed by God to amuse society or to render it service, she based her judgments entirely on the degree of astonishment and unreasoning pleasure that the sight of a thing, the reading of a book, or the announcement of a discovery happened to afford her.