Paul Bourget - A LOVE CRIME

lounging jacket, dismissed his servant, and settled himself beside the

fire in his drawing-room. He again evoked Helen with an exactitude of

recollection which made her present to him from her mauve stockings to

that little mark which she had there at the right corner of her mouth.

Well! he did not love her, and he would never love her. If he had hoped

to experience at last, through her, that supreme surprise of the heart

which continually eluded him, he might tell himself that this hope was

abortive like the rest.

Like the rest! He felt a desire to convince himself that it had always

been so with him. He went and opened a box, in which were piled six or

seven note-books of different sizes. Some were made of sheets of school

paper. There were two of Japanese paper. These note-books were journals

of his life taken up repeatedly at unequal periods. In them he came upon

pages scrawled on the desk of the study-room at school, pages blackened

on the sides of boats, in hotel rooms, in this very drawing-room. He

took up these note-books, and began to turn over the leaves, finding in

them a former ego perfectly similar to the present ego in premature

misanthropy, sudden and fleeting ardours of sensuality, murderous

analysis, impotent hankering after unattainable delight, indolent

languor and incapacity ever fully to feel anything, whether real or

ideal.

The whole had combined to make of him a sort of child of the century, of

the year 1883, but without elegy, a Nihilist of gallantry and without

declamation.

The following is one of the pieces which his eyes, now gloomy and dull,

dwelt upon, and which would have broken Helen's heart if, gifted with

the magic faculty of second sight, she had discovered the melancholy

torpor which even the gift of her person, following upon the gift of her

entire soul, was inadequate to disturb.

"PARIS, _May_ 1871.

"Terrible days. Vanaboste comes and tells us yesterday, at one o'clock,

that we must get ready to leave, and that the pupils at Sainte Barbe

have gone already with their head. The Panthéon is full of powder, and

will soon blow up. Since morning the firing had been slowly, slowly

drawing nearer--a strange noise! It was as though some one had shaken

millions of nuts over the town in a gigantic cloth. Alfred and I spent

the morning in the attic watching the flames of the conflagrations

writhing against the sky. He was quite depressed, and I fiercely gay,

with a nervous gaiety that forced me to the utterance of outrageous

paradoxes--but were they paradoxes?--concerning the fine theories of our

professor of philosophy last week. O vision of fate! His last lesson

turned upon progress!

"We are packing up hastily in order to leave, when one of the masters

comes in a state of terror through the little door opening upon the

Rue Tournefort, which he bolts behind him. He tells us that the

federates would not allow anyone to pass their barricades. It was with

great difficulty that he himself has been able to return. We were a long

way from the good-natured National Guardsman who said to us on Monday,

at the doors of the Lycée: Shout "Long live the Commune!" boys, and you

are free." Vanaboste was as white as my paper when he heard this news.

The usher hit on the plan of having mattresses spread over the middle of

the courtyard, so that if the Panthéon blew up we should fall with less

violence. We remained for about two hours in this distress, we pupils

fourteen in number, the two assistant masters, and the head master.

Alfred and I, who, by an odd contradiction, were almost calm, talking

together in a corner.

"In spite of the firing, which was constantly drawing nearer, and the

bullets cracking against the walls, perhaps a hundred paces off, we had

neither of us a perception of reality; the danger appeared to us to be

something distant, dim, almost abstract. And we were talking--of what?

Of our childhood. 'It has been a happy one,' he said to me, 'even here.'

For once I emptied my heart to him, and let him see what I thought of

the scholastic lupanar in which, owing to my guardian's selfishness, I

have been obliged to grow up. After all, I prefer even this bagnio to

his house.

"Through this useless talking the firing can be heard coming nearer. The

Panthéon does not blow up. Suddenly a loud shout comes down from one of

ourselves in the upper story, where, at the risk of receiving a bullet,

he had stationed himself at the window. 'The Chasseurs are at the end of

the street.' That was the most trying moment. My heart beat as though it

would burst, my throat was choking in the expectation of what was going

to happen. Undefined danger had left me calm. Exact, brutal, and present

fact affected me unpleasantly. Some shots are fired quite close, then

furious summonses with the butt-ends of guns shake the gate. The same

usher who had shown his coolness in conceiving the precautionary measure

of the mattresses, rushes forward in time to strike up the levelled guns

of two chasseurs, who, blackened with powder, and with eyes gleaming in

frenzy, would have fired at random into the crowd of us if the other had

not been there. A lieutenant comes up, a little man in yellow boots,

with strap on chin and pistol in fist. Vanaboste speaks to him, and we

are saved.

"All this was yesterday. To-day we are again at our studies, a symbol of

our childish life in the midst of this tumult of action. I turn over the

leaves of an old book of spiritual philosophy with the pleasure of

contempt, and after reading official phrases about God, the immortal

soul, refinement of manners, moral liberty and innate reason, I close my

eyes and see the Square of the Panthéon as it was last night: the dead

lying with naked feet, because their shoes have been stolen; and with

battered skulls, because their deaths have just been made sure, of by

blows from butt-ends of guns; the splashes of blood, that feel sticky

beneath the soles of our boots; the flames of the conflagrations in the

distant sky; and on the footpath, lying on the same straw, and sleeping

like wearied brutes, the little chasseurs who have taken the quarter.

_Homo homini lupior lupis._"

"DIEPPE, _July_ 1874.

"The daughter resembles the mother. She is only twelve years old, and

already I can catch the coquetry, the glances, the premonition of the

woman in the presence of the man; and it will end as it did with her

mother, in a marriage of convenience, first acts of thoughtlessness, a

first lover, then a series of lovers down to some young Baron de Querne,

whom there will be an attempt to persuade that none was ever loved but

he; and, more foolish or more intelligent than myself, he will perhaps

believe it.

"Yes, more intelligent; for in love the great thing is to have as much

emotion as possible; and the real deception is to paralyse one's heart

by clear-sightedness. Whether was it Valmont in the 'Liaisons'--dear

Valmont--or the President's wife that was deceived? She who felt or he

who calculated? Whether was it Elvire or Don Juan, who does not

understand that Elvire, seeing that she has been able to intoxicate

herself with love, is alone to be envied, while he himself is not? I

know all this, but the inward demon is the stronger, and as soon as I

begin to pay my addresses to a woman I am at pains to procure all such

information concerning her as can render me incapable of loving her.