Paul Bourget - A LOVE CRIME

pretty patent leather shoes and mauve stockings, the latter being of the

same colour as her dress. "If I had not my neuralgia!" she added,

putting her fingers to her temple. "You will make all my excuses to

them. Come, my poor Alfred, courage!"

She rose and held out her hand to her husband, who drew her to him in

order to give her a kiss. Visible pain was depicted on Helen's handsome

face for a minute, during which she was constrained to submit to this

caress. Standing thus, in her mauve-coloured, lace-trimmed dress, the

contrast between the elegance of her entire person and the clumsiness of

the man whose name she bore was still more striking.

She was tall, slender, and supple. The delicacy with which her hand

joined the arm which the sleeve of her dress left half uncovered, the

fulness of this arm, on which shone the gold of a bracelet, the

roundness of her dainty waist, the grace of her youthful figure,--all

revealed in her the blooming of a bodily beauty in harmony with the

beauty of her head. Her bright chestnut hair, parted simply in the

centre, half concealed a forehead that was almost too high--a probable

sign that with her feeling predominated over judgment. She had brown

eyes, in a fair complexion, such eyes as become hazel or black according

as the pupil contracts or dilates; and everything in the face declared

passion, energy, and pride, from the rather too pronounced line of the

oval, indicating the firm structure of the lower part of the head, to

the mouth, which was strongly outlined, and from the chin, which was

worthy of an ancient medal, to the nose, which was nearly straight, and

was united to the forehead by a noble attachment.

The pure and living quality of her beauty fully justified the fervour

depicted on the face of her husband while he was kissing his wife, just

as the evident aversion of the young woman was explained by the

unpleasing aspect of her lord and master. They were not creatures of the

same breed. Alfred Chazel presented the regular type of a middle-class

Frenchman, who has had to work too diligently, to prepare for too many

examinations, to spend too many hours over papers or before a desk, at

an age when the body is developing.

Although he was scarcely thirty-two, the first tokens of physical wear

and tear were abundant with him. His hair was thin, his complexion

looked impoverished, his shoulders were both broad and bony, and there

was an angularity in his gestures as well as an awkwardness about his

entire person. His tall figure, his big bones, and his large hand

suggested a disparity between the initial constitution, which must have

been robust, and the education, which must have been reducing. Chazel

carried an eye-glass, which he was always letting fall, for he was

clumsy with his long, thin hands, as was attested by the tying of the

white evening cravat, so badly adjusted round his already crumpled

collar. But when the eye-glass fell, the blue colour of his eyes was the

better seen--a blue so open, so fresh, so childlike, that the most

ill-disposed persons would have found it hard to attribute this man's

weariness to any excess save that of thought.

His still very youthful smile, displaying white teeth beneath a fair

beard, which Alfred wore in its entirety, harmonised with this childlike

frankness of look. And, in fact, Chazel's life had been passed in

continuous, absorbing work, and in an absolute inexperience of what was

not "his business," as he used to say. Son of a modest professor of

chemistry, and grandson of a peasant, Alfred, having inherited aptitude

for the sciences from his father, and tenacity of purpose from his

grandfather, had, by dint of energy, and with but moderate abilities,

been one of the first at the entrance to that École Polytechnique

which, in the estimation of many excellent intellects, exercises, by its

overloaded and precocious examinations, a murderous influence upon the

development of the middle-class youth of our country.

At twenty-two, Chazel passed out twelfth, and three years later first

from the School of Roads and Bridges. Sent to Bourges, he fell in love

with Mademoiselle de Vaivre, whose father, having married a second time,

could give her only a very slender dowry. The unexpected death, first of

Monsieur de Vaivre, then of his second wife and of their child, suddenly

enriched the young household. Appointed the preceding year to a

municipal post at Paris, the engineer found that he had realised a

hundredfold the most ambitious hopes of his youth. His wife's fortune

amounted to about nine hundred thousand francs, to the returns from

which were added the ten thousand francs of his own salary and the small

income which had been left by his father. But this competency, instead

of blunting the young man's activity, stimulated it to the ambition of

compensating in honour for the inequality of position between himself

and his wife. He had, accordingly, gone back to mathematical labours

with fresh ardour. Admission to the Institute shone on the horizon of

his dreams, like a sort of final apotheosis to a destiny, the happiness

of which he modestly referred to his father's wise maxim: "To keep to

the high road."

Add to this that a son had been born to him, in whom he already

discerned a reflection of his own disposition, and it cannot fail to be

understood how this man would congratulate himself daily for having

taken life, as he had done, with complete submission to all the average

conditions of the social class in which he had been born.

Did these various reflections pass through the mind of the third

individual--the man whom Alfred Chazel had called Armand, as he

contemplated the conjugal tableau through the smoke from a Russian

cigarette which he had just lighted--a liberty which revealed the extent

of his intimacy with the family? The same contrast which separated

Alfred from Helen separated him also from Armand. The latter looked at

first younger than his age, though he too had passed his thirty-second

year. If Alfred's carelessly-worn coat revealed rather the leanness and

disproportion of his body, the frock of the Baron de Querne--such was

Armand's family-name--fitted close to the shoulders and bust of a man,

small but robust, and evidently devoted to fencing, riding, tennis, and

all the sporting habits which the youths of the richer classes have

contracted in imitation of the English, now that political

careers--diplomacy, the Council of State, and the Audit Office--are

denied them by their real or assumed opinions.

The quiet jewellery with which the young baron was adorned, the delicacy

of his hands and feet, and everything in his appearance, from his cravat

and his collar to the curls in his dark hair, and to the turn of his

moustache, drawn out over a somewhat contemptuous lip, disclosed that

deep attention to the toilet which assumes the lengthened leisure of an

idle life. But what preserved De Querne from the commonplaceness usual

to men who are visibly occupied with the trifles of masculine fashion

was a look, in a generally immovable face, of peculiar keenness and

unrest. This look, which was not at all like that of a young man,

contradicted the remainder of his person to the extent of imparting an

appearance of strangeness to one who looked in this way, although a

desire to evade remark, and to be above all things correct, evidently