Paul Bourget - A LOVE CRIME

which had made them laugh like mad creatures:

"Alfred, my pale Alfred, my love, my sweet."

"Ah! what a horrible, horrible, place!" thought the young man, as he

recalled this blending of turpitude and puerility.

Alfred and he had belonged to the small number of those who had remained

untouched by the infection. But to him at least, all the advantage due

to this disgust was that it had led him when quite young to the pursuit

of women, and his initiation into natural pleasure had been effected in

the most degraded prostitution.

"And these are the youthful recollections that I should respect," said

Armand to himself. "What duty do I owe him because we were galley slaves

together?"

No, a hundred times no, it was not on Alfred's account that he felt so

melancholy as he hastened his steps and, this time with semi-brutality,

repulsed the love-beggars who accosted him with their unvarying phrases.

Ah! he knew this unconquerable melancholy only too well. Only too often

had it visited him, gnawing him in the diseased portion of his heart,

from the time that the income of thirty thousand francs coming to him at

his majority had permitted him to live according to his fancy; and this

fancy had immediately taken the direction of sentimental experiences.

Such melancholy, sharp and severe, he had experienced, even when quite a

youth, every time that he had found himself on the eve of a first

love-meeting with a new mistress, even though she had been the most

coveted. It was like an anguish-stricken apprehension--a dull, dim agony

of soul.

At first he had attributed this strange phenomenon alternately to

physical timidity, to remorse at his own unworthiness of the feelings

that he might inspire, and to hankerings after purity. Now he knew the

true explanation of these momentary sorrows, these keener crises of the

great sorrow which formed the gloomy background of his life. It was,

alas! the more present and palpable certainty of his impotence to love.

At this very moment he was asking himself:

"Am I really in love with Helen?"

He gathered and heaped together the whole of his inmost sensibility,

like a physician seeking with his fingers for the painful spot of a

diseased limb. But the spot of love, which it would have given him such

sweet pain to meet with, Armand could not discover.

"No," he answered himself with terrible sadness, yet courageously--for,

with all his failings, he had energy enough to venture upon

self-knowledge--"no, I am not in love with Helen. I desire her because

she is beautiful; I have paid my addresses to her because I feel bored;

I have grown obstinate about it because she denied me. Pride,

sensuality, and romantic twaddle--that's the top and bottom of the whole

affair. Then what is the good of it? What is the good? Why renew such an

intrigue as that with Madame de Rugle?"

And all the amours into which his depraved liking for seduction--the

fatal vice of his youth--had impelled him, came back into his memory,

with the monotony of their pleasures, the bitterness of their ruptures,

the sickening void of their duration. What was the good of this one or

of that? What was the good a year or two ago of amusing himself by

winning the love of Juliet, governess to the children of a house at

which he was received? What was the good of that comedy played to little

Maud, the pretty Englishwoman whom he had met at a watering-place?

"I dreamed of being a man of gallantry--a Don Juan. It looks as though

fate punishes us for the evil dreams of our youth by bringing them to

pass. I have had intrigues that might flatter my foolish vanity--and

what wretchedness!"

Among all the women whose faces and kisses he distinguished in his

thought, there was not one who had made him happy, even for a single

day, and--strange anomaly of a distempered heart--there was not one who

had not in some sort made him suffer. Through what moral disorder did it

come to pass that he was devoted to this continual inward calamity--to

the endurance of all the tortures of love: the jealousy of the present,

the intolerable loathing for the past, the bitter vision of the

treacheries of the future, and never, never, aught but physical

intoxication, without that ecstacy of soul which, notwithstanding,

existed, for he had seen with envy the heavenly expression due to it on

the countenances of a few of his mistresses?

One especially came before him--one whose conquest had not been effected

for the flattering of his fatuity, for she was but a girl was Aline, who

had died of consumption in the autumn of 1880. He could again see her

with her hollow eyes, her delicate cheek, and the blending of native

purity and corruption that was in her. He could see her nursing a little

sister whom she had taken to be with her, a child four years of age.

What affecting kindliness in vice, and what innocence in infamy! Yes,

Aline loved him, although she had three or four other lovers at the same

time as himself. His chief pleasure used to consist in taking this

pretty, ruined creature into the country to enjoy the childish outbreaks

of rusticity that prompted her to pick flowers, to listen to the birds,

to lean upon his arm, as though she had never exercised her hideous

profession.

What a mysterious thing is memory! He was on the eve of his first

assignation with Helen, and here he was growing tender over poor Aline,

evoking her as she was when he had so often sought her in her rooms in

the Rue de Moscow; as she was at certain moments when he had loved or

nearly loved her--on a summer evening, for instance, when she was seated

in the stern of a boat rowed on the Seine by four oarsmen of their

acquaintance. Yes, she was seated in a bright dress, looking at him over

the heads of the youths as they alternately stooped and rose. A

stillness was falling upon the river. A fine of orange was trailing

along the margin of the sky. What unspeakable emotion had bathed his

soul as he was sensible of the passing hour, the quivering water, the

living creature, and the dying light!

He ascended his staircase with these thoughts. Why this fatal

incompleteness in all his passions? Why was he incapable of attaining to

that absolute of tenderness which he conceived, of which he had

glimpses, towards which he sprang at every new intrigue? And

then--nothing! And yet how many chances had been combined for him; and

while his servant was relieving him of his overcoat, and he was passing

into the drawing-room, in which he often read at night before going to

bed, he mentally enumerated these chances: a fortune which enabled him

to pursue his fancies without much need of calculation; a genuine and

ancient title; ability to maintain a position in society that pleased

him; a robustness of health that could not recall a week of sickness; a

taste for intellectual things just sufficient to occupy his attention

without annoyance, for, absolutely free from personal ambition, he had

never ceased to be interested as an amateur by the attractions of

literature and art.

Added to all this, he had an appointment for the following day with a

charming woman whom he desired, and the fire of sense had not been

slackened within him by the excesses of his life. Why, then, was it

inevitable that the perception of an indefinable insufficiency in his

life should make him so melancholy just at this moment? He put on a