Paul Bourget - A LOVE CRIME

influenced his mode of dress.

Just as Chazel seemed to have remained quite young at heart, in spite of

the failure of constitution, so the other, if only in the expression of

his eyes, which were very dark ones, appeared to have undergone a

premature aging of soul and intellect, in spite of the energy maintained

by his physical machine. The face was somewhat long and somewhat

browned, like that of one in whom bile would prevail some day, the

forehead without a wrinkle, the nose very refined; a slight dimple was

impressed upon the square chin. It would have been impossible to assign

any profession or even occupation to this man, and yet there was

something superior in his nature which seemed irreconcilable with the

emptiness of an absolutely idle life, as well, too, as lines of

melancholy about the mouth which banished the idea of a life of nothing

but pleasure.

Meanwhile he continued to smoke with perfect calmness, showing every

time that he rejected the smoke small, close teeth, the lower ones being

set in an irregular fashion, which is, people say, a probable indication

of fierceness. He watched Chazel kiss his wife on the temple, while

_she_ lowered her eyelids without venturing to look at Armand; and yet,

had the dark eyes of the young man been encountered by her own, she

would not have surprised any trace of sorrow, but an indefinable

blending of irony and curiosity.

"Yes," said Alfred, replying thus to the mute reproach which Helen's

countenance seemed to make to him, "it is bad form to love one's wife in

public, but Armand will forgive me. Well, goodbye," he went on, holding

out his hand to his friend, "I shall not be away for more than an hour.

I shall find you here again, shall I not?"

The young Baron and Madame Chazel thus remained alone. They were silent

for a few minutes, both keeping the positions in which Alfred had left

them, she standing, but this time with her eyes raised towards Armand,

and the latter answering her look with a smile while he continued to

wrap himself in a cloud of smoke. She breathed in the slight acridity of

the smoke, half opening her fresh lips. The sound of carriage wheels

became audible beneath the windows. It was the rolling of the cab that

was taking Chazel away.

Helen slowly advanced to the easy chair in which Armand was sitting;

with a pretty gesture she took the cigarette and threw it into the fire,

then knelt before the young man, encircled his head with her arms, and,

seeking his lips, kissed him; it looked as though she wished to destroy

immediately the painful impression which her husband's attitude might

have left on the man she loved, and in a clear tone of voice, the

liveliness of which discovered a free expansiveness after a lengthened

constraint, she said:

"How do you do, Armand. Are you in love with me to-day?"

"And yourself," he questioned, "are you in love with me?"

He was caressing the hand of the young woman who had thrown herself upon

the ground, and with her head resting on her lover's knees, was looking

at him in a fever of ecstasy.

"Ah! you flirt," she returned, "I have no need to tell you so to have

you believe it."

"No," he replied, "I know that you love me--much--though not enough to

go all lengths with the feeling."

The tone in which he uttered this sentence was marked with an irony

which made it palpably an epigram. It was an allusion to oft-stated

complaints. Helen, however, received the derisive utterance with the

smile of a woman who has her answer ready.

"So you will always have the same distrust," she said, and although she

was very happy, as her eyes sufficiently testified, a shadow of

melancholy passed into those soft eyes when she added: "So you cannot

believe in my feelings without this last proof?"

"Proof," said Armand, "you call that a proof! Why the unqualified gift

of the person is not a proof of love, it is love itself. It is true," he

went on with a more gloomy air, "so long as you refuse to be entirely

mine I shall suspect--not your sincerity, for I think that you think you

love me, but the truth of this love. Too often people imagine that they

have feelings which they have not. Ah! if you loved me, as you say, and

as you think, would you deny me yourself as you do? Would you refuse me

the meeting that I have asked of you more than twenty times? Why you

would grant it as much for your own sake as for mine."

"Armand--" she began thus, then stopped, blushing.

She had risen and was walking about the room without looking at her

lover, her arms apart from her body with the backs of her hands laid on

her hips, as was usual with her at moments of intense thought. Since she

had begun to love, and had acknowledged her feelings to Monsieur de

Querne she was quite aware that she must some day give up her beautiful

dream of an attachment which, though forbidden, should remain pure. Yes,

she knew that she must give her entire self after giving her heart, and

become the mistress of the man whom she had suffered to say to her: "I

love you." She knew it, and she had found strength for the prolonging of

her resistance to that day, not in coquetry--no woman was less capable

of speculating with a man's ungratified desire in order to kindle his

passion--but in the persistence of the duty-sense within her.

Where is the married woman who has not fondled this chimera of a

reconciliation between the infidelity of heart and the faith sworn to her

husband? The renunciation of the delights of complete love seems at

first to her a sufficient expiation. She engages in adultery believing

that she will not pass beyond a certain limit, and she does in fact keep

within it a longer or a shorter time according to the disposition of the

man she loves. But the inflexible logic that governs life resumes its

rights. Soul and body do not separate, and love admits of no other law

than itself.

Yes, the fatal hour had struck for Helen, and she felt it. How many

times during the last fortnight had she had this horrible discussion

with Armand, who always ended by requiring from her this last token of

love? She was sensible that after each of these scenes she had been

lessened in the eyes of this man. A few more, and he would lose

completely his faith in the feeling which she entertained towards him, a

feeling that was absolute and unreasoned; for she loved him, as women

alone are capable of loving, with such a love as is almost in the nature

of a bewitchment, and is the outcome of an irresistible longing to

afford happiness to the person who is thus loved. She loved him and she

loved to love him. Pain in those beloved eyes was physically intolerable

to her, and intolerable also mistrust, which betokened the shrinking

back of his soul.

She had taken account of all this, she had looked the necessity for her

guilt in the face, and she had resolved to offer herself to her

"beloved," as in her letters she always called him, because "friend" was

too cold, and the word "lover" purpled her heart with shame,--yes, to

offer him the supreme proof of tenderness that he asked for, and now,

when on the point of consenting, she was impotent. Her will was failing

at the last moment. Was she going again to begin what she used to call,

when she thought about it, a hateful contract? Ah! why was she not

free--free, that is, from duties towards her child, the only being whom