She was very far from attributing these caresses to simple friendship. Friendship, as it is usually understood, does not go so far as that; but, seeing that I went no farther, she was inwardly surprised and did not know what to think; she decided finally that it was too great timidity on my part, due to my extreme youth and lack of practice in amorous intrigue, and that I must be encouraged by all sorts of advances and proofs of good-will.
Consequently she took pains to arrange a multitude of opportunities for tête-à-tête interviews in places well adapted to embolden me by their solitude and seclusion from all noise and all interruption; she took me to walk several times in the forest, to see if the voluptuous musings and amorous desires ordinarily aroused in impressionable hearts by the dense and propitious shade of the woods, could not be turned to her advantage.
One day, after we had wandered a long while through a very picturesque park that lay behind the chateau, and of which I knew only the portions near the buildings, she led me through a narrow path that wound capriciously among elder-bushes and hazels, to a little rustic cabin, a sort of charcoal-kiln, built of round timbers laid transversely, with a thatched roof and a door roughly made of five or six pieces of wood almost unplaned, the interstices being stuffed with moss and wild plants; close beside it, between the green roots of tall ash-trees with silvery bark, marred by black spots here and there, was an abundant spring, which, a few steps away, flowed down over two marble steps into a basin filled with water-cresses greener than the emerald.—In the spots where there were no cresses, you could see at the bottom fine sand as white as snow; the water was as clear as crystal and as cold as ice; coming suddenly from the earth and never receiving the faintest ray of sunlight in that impenetrable shade, it had not time to become warm or disturbed.—Despite its crudity, I love fresh spring water, and seeing how clear that was, I could not resist the impulse to drink some of it; I leaned over and drank several times from the hollow of my hand, having no other vessel at my disposal.
Rosette expressed a desire to drink some of the water, too, to appease her thirst, and asked me to bring her a few drops, being afraid, she said, to lean over far enough to reach it.—I dipped my two hands, joined as closely as possible, into the clear fountain, then put them like a cup to Rosette's lips and held them there until she had exhausted the water they contained, which was not long, for there was very little of it, and much of that little dropped through my fingers, although I held them close together; we made a very pretty group, and it's a pity that a sculptor was not there to make a sketch of it.
When she had almost finished, having my hand so near her lips, she could not refrain from kissing it, but in such a way that I might think she was drawing in her breath to exhaust the last pearl of water collected in my palm; but I was not deceived, and the charming blush that covered her face betrayed her plainly enough.
She took my arm again and we walked on toward the cabin. The fair widow walked as close to me as possible, and leaned toward me as she spoke so that her breast was pressed against my sleeve; an extremely shrewd position and certain to disturb the equanimity of any other than myself; I could feel distinctly the pure, firm contour and the gentle warmth; furthermore I could detect a hurried undulation, which, whether it was genuine or affected, was none the less flattering and seductive.
We arrived thus at the door of the cabin, which I opened by pushing with my foot; I certainly did not expect the spectacle that was presented to my eyes.—I supposed that the hut was carpeted with rushes, with possibly a mat on the ground and a stool or two to sit on. Nothing of the sort.
It was a boudoir furnished with all imaginable luxury.—The spaces above the doors and mirrors represented the most amorous scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses: Salmaces and Hermaphrodite, Venus and Adonis, and Apollo and Daphne, and other mythological loves on plain lilac cameo; the pier-glasses were covered with pompon roses carved with great delicacy, and little marguerites, of which, by a refinement of luxury, only the hearts were gilded, the leaves being silvered. All the furniture was trimmed with silk cord, which was also used to relieve hangings of the most delicate blue imaginable, marvellously well adapted to bring out the whiteness and brilliancy of the skin; the mantel was crowded with a thousand charming and curious things, as were the consoles and étagères, and there was an abundant supply of easy-chairs, reclining-chairs and sofas, which proved conclusively that the retreat was not destined for the most austere avocations, and that mortification of the flesh was not in vogue there.
A lovely clock in rock-work stood on a richly-incrusted bracket opposite a large Venetian mirror, in which it was reflected with strikingly brilliant effect. It had stopped, however, as if it were a superfluous thing to mark the hours in a place where they were destined to be forgotten.
I told Rosette that that refinement of luxury pleased me, that I considered it extremely good taste to conceal the greatest elegance under an appearance of simplicity, and that I strongly approved of a woman wearing embroidered petticoats and chemises trimmed with lace, with an outer garment of simple cloth; it was a delicate attention for the lover that she had or might have, for which he would be grateful beyond words, and that it certainly was better to put a diamond in a walnut than a walnut in a gold box.
Rosette, to prove that she agreed with me, raised her dress slightly and showed me the edge of a petticoat very richly embroidered with great flowers and leaves; it rested entirely with me to be admitted to the secret of greater interior splendors; but I did not ask to see if the magnificence of the chemise equalled that of the petticoat; it is probable that it did not fall short of it.—Rosette dropped the skirt of her dress, sorry not to have shown more.—However, even that exhibition had served to disclose the beginning of a perfectly-turned calf, giving a most favorable idea of what was above.—The leg, which she put forward, the better to show off her petticoat, was in very truth miraculously graceful and shapely in its neat, tight-fitting pearl-gray silk stocking, and the little heeled slipper, terminating in a rosette of ribbon resembled the glass slipper worn by Cinderella. I complimented her most sincerely upon it and told her that I could hardly imagine a prettier leg or tinier foot.—To which she replied with a frankness and ingenuousness altogether charming and very clever, too:—
"That is true."
Then she went to a cupboard in the wall, took out several bottles of liquors and some plates of cakes and sweetmeats, placed them all upon a small table and sat down beside me in a narrow chair, so that I was obliged to put my arm behind her to avoid being too crowded. As both her hands were free, while I could use only my left, she filled my glass with her own hands and placed fruit and sugar-plums on my plate; seeing that I was helping myself rather awkwardly, she said: "Oh! don't try to do it; I'll feed you, you child, as you don't know how to feed yourself." And she put the pieces in my mouth and compelled me to swallow them faster than I wanted to do, pushing them in with her pretty fingers, just as they do to chickens when they are fattening them—which made her laugh heartily.—I could hardly avoid returning upon her fingers the kiss she had just now bestowed upon the palm of my hand, and, as if to prevent me, but really to give me a more solid support for my kiss, she struck my mouth two or three times with the back of her hand.
She had drunk two or three fingers of Crême des Barbades and a glass of Canary, and I almost as much. That assuredly was not a great quantity; but it was enough to enliven two women who were accustomed to drink nothing but water barely colored with wine.—Rosette threw herself back and pressed against my arm very amorously.—She had thrown aside her mantle, and I could see the beginning of her breast, which was distended and thrown forward by that position; the tone of the flesh was ravishingly delicate and transparent; the shape marvellously graceful and solid at the same time. I gazed at her for some time with indefinable emotion and pleasure, and the thought came to my mind that men are more favored than we in their passions, that we give the most priceless treasures into their possession and that they have nothing similar to offer us.—What a delight it must be to run one's lips over that fine, smooth skin, those swelling contours which seem to go out to meet the kiss and provoke it! that satiny flesh, those waving lines which melt into one another, the silky hair that is so soft to the touch; what inexhaustible stores of delicious pleasure that we have not with men!—Our caresses can be only-passive, and yet there is more pleasure in giving than in receiving.
These remarks I certainly should not have made last year, and I could have looked at all the bosoms and shoulders in the world without worrying as to whether they were well or ill shaped; but since I have laid aside the garments of my sex and have lived among young men, a sentiment has developed in me that was entirely unfamiliar to me before:—the sentiment of beauty. Women are usually devoid of that sentiment, I don't quite see why, for they would seem at first glance better fitted to judge beauty than men;—but as they are the ones who possess beauty, and as knowledge of one's self is the most difficult knowledge to acquire, it is not surprising that they know nothing about it.—Ordinarily, if one woman considers another woman pretty, you can be sure that the latter is hideously ugly, and that no man would look twice at her.—On the other hand, all the women whose beauty and grace are vaunted by men, are unanimously voted unsightly and affected by the whole petticoated swarm; there is no end to the outcries and clamor. If I were what I seem to be, I would take no other guide in making my selection, and the disapprobation of the women would be a sufficient certificate of beauty.
Now I know beauty and love it; the clothes I wear separate me from my sex and take away anything like rivalry; I am in a better position to judge than anybody else.—I am no longer a woman, but I am not yet a man, and passion will not blind me so far as to take manikins for idols; I look on coolly, without prejudice for or against, and my position is as completely disinterested as possible.
The length and fineness of the eyelashes, the transparency of the temples, the limpidity of the crystalline lens, the curves of the ear, the color and quality of the hair, the aristocratic shape of the feet and hands, the slenderness of the ankle and wrist, a thousand and one things which I used not to notice and which constitute real beauty and prove purity of breeding, guide me now in my judgments, and make it almost impossible for me to go astray.—I think that one could accept with eyes closed a woman of whom I had said: "Really, she is not bad."
By a natural consequence I am a much better judge of pictures than formerly, and, although I have only a very superficial knowledge of the masters, it would be difficult to pass off a poor work on me for a good one; I find that this study possesses a strange and profound fascination; for, like everything in the world, beauty, moral or physical, requires to be studied and cannot be understood at once.
But let us return to Rosette; the transition from this subject to her is not a difficult one; they are two ideas that attract each other.
As I said, the fair widow had thrown herself back against my arm and her head rested against my shoulder; emotion tinged her cheeks with a delicate pink flush, admirably heightened by a coquettish little black patch; her teeth glistened through her smile like rain-drops in the heart of a poppy, and her lashes, half-lowered, enhanced the moist brilliancy of her great eyes;—a sunbeam caused a thousand metallic gleams to play upon her silken, glossy hair, a few locks of which had escaped from the comb and fell in natural curls along her plump, round neck, showing off the warm whiteness of the skin; some tiny stray hairs, more rebellious than the others, held aloof from the mass and flew hither and thither in capricious spirals, gleaming like gold, and taking on all the shades of the prism as the light passed through them:—you would have said they were some of the golden threads that surround the heads of virgins in the old pictures.—Neither of us spoke and I amused myself by following the little sky-blue veins under the transparent pearly skin of her temples, and the gradual, insensible disappearance of the down at the extremity of her eyebrows.
She seemed to be absorbed in thought and to be cradled in dreams of infinite pleasure; her arms hung beside her body, as soft and flexible as loosened scarfs; her head fell back farther and farther, as if the muscles that held it had been cut or were too weak to hold it longer. She had drawn her little feet under her skirt, and had succeeded in forcing herself well into my corner of the chair, so that, although it was a very narrow affair, there was a considerable vacant space on the other side.
Her supple, yielding body shaped itself to mine like wax and took its whole exterior outline as exactly as possible:—water would not have found its way more scrupulously into every irregularity in the line.—Thus glued to my side, she produced the effect of the double stroke that painters give to the shadow side of their picture in laying on their color.—Only an amorous woman can manage such undulations and entwining.—The ivies and willows are nowhere.
The gentle warmth of her body penetrated through her clothes and mine; a thousand magnetic currents played about her; her whole life seemed to have passed into me and to have abandoned her completely. From moment to moment she languished and sank and yielded more and more: a slight perspiration stood on her lustrous brow: her eyes were swimming in moisture and two or three times she made a movement as if to put up her hands to hide them; but her wearied arms stopped half-way and fell back upon her knees, and she could not do it;—a great tear overflowed and rolled down her burning cheek where it was soon dried.
My situation was becoming very embarrassing and decidedly ridiculous;—I felt that I must seem tremendously stupid and that feeling annoyed me to the last degree, although it was not in my power to change my behavior.—Enterprising conduct on my part was out of the question, and it was the only sort that would have been suited to the occasion. I was too sure of meeting with no resistance, to take the risk, and in truth I did not know which way to turn. To pay compliments and make gallant speeches would have been very well in the beginning, but nothing would have seemed more insipid at the point at which we had arrived;—to rise and go out would have been unspeakably rude; and, indeed, I am not sure that Rosette wouldn't have played the part of Potiphar and held me by the corner of my cloak.—I should have had no virtuous reason to give her for my resistance; and then, I confess it to my shame, this scene, equivocal as it was in respect to myself, did not lack a certain fascination to which I yielded more than I should have done; that ardent passion warmed me with its flame and I was really grieved at my inability to satisfy it; I even longed to be a man, as I seemed to be, in order to crown Rosette's love, and I deeply regretted her mistake. My respiration quickened, I felt a flush rising to my cheeks, and I was hardly less agitated than my poor lovelorn companion.—The idea of the identity of sex gradually faded away, leaving behind only a vague idea of pleasure; a mist came before my eyes, my lips trembled, and if Rosette had been a young man instead of what she was, she would have gained an easy victory over me beyond question.
At last, unable to endure it, she sprang suddenly to her feet with a sort of spasmodic movement and began to walk hurriedly up and down the room; then she stopped before the mirror and adjusted a few locks of hair that were out of place. During that walk of hers I cut but a sorry figure and I hardly knew what face to put upon the matter.
She paused in front of me and seemed to reflect.
She believed that inordinate bashfulness alone held me back, that I was more of a school-boy than she had at first supposed.—Being quite beside herself and stirred to the highest pitch of amorous excitement, she determined to make a supreme effort and to stake all to win all, at the risk of losing the game.
She came to me, seated herself on my knees with lightning-like rapidity, threw her arms around my neck, clasped her hands behind my head, and her mouth clung to mine in a fierce embrace; I felt her breast, half-uncovered, throbbing against mine, and her interlaced fingers moving convulsively in my hair. A shudder ran all over my body and the nipples of my bosom stood erect.
Rosette's mouth did not leave mine; her lips enveloped my lips, her teeth touched my teeth, our breaths mingled.—I recoiled for an instant, and I turned my head away two or three times to avoid the kiss; but an invincible attraction drew me forward again, and I returned it almost as ardently as she had given it to me. I have no very clear idea what would have been the end of it all, had it not been for a tremendous barking out of doors followed by a sound as of feet scratching. The door yielded and a beautiful white greyhound came yelping and bounding into the cabin.
Chapter XII — She came to me, seated herself on my knees with lightning-like rapidity, threw her arms around my neck, clasped her hands behind my head, and her mouth clung to mine in a fierce embrace; I felt her breast, half-uncovered, throbbing against mine, and her interlaced fingers moving convulsively in my hair.
Rosette rose abruptly and rushed to the further end of the room: the beautiful white hound leaped joyously around her and tried to reach her hands to lick them; she was so confused that she could hardly arrange her mantle over her shoulders.
The greyhound was her brother Alcibiades's favorite dog; he never left him, and when you saw him you could be sure that his master was not far away;—that was what caused poor Rosette's alarm.
Alcibiades did, in fact, appear a moment later, all booted and spurred, with his whip in his hand:—"Ah! here you are," he said; "I have been looking for you for an hour and I certainly shouldn't have found you if my good old Snug hadn't driven you to earth in your hiding-place."
And he glanced at his sister with a half-serious, half-playful expression that made her blush to the whites of her eyes.
"You apparently had some very knotty subjects to discuss to induce you to seek this profound solitude?—you were talking about theology, I suppose, and the twofold nature of the soul?"
"Oh! Mon Dieu, no; our minds were engrossed by subjects much less sublime; we were eating cake and talking fashions—that's all."
"I don't believe a word of it; you looked to me as if you were buried deep in some sentimental discussion;—but, to divert your minds from your vaporish conversation, I think it would be a good idea for you to take a turn on horseback with me.—I have a new mare I want to try.—You shall ride her too, Théodore, and we'll see what we can make of her."
We went out together, I on his arm and Rosette on mine; the expressions on our faces were curiously different.—Alcibiades was pensive, I was altogether content, and Rosette excessively annoyed.
Alcibiades had arrived most opportunely for me, most inopportunely for Rosette, who thus lost, or thought that she lost, all the fruit of her shrewd attacks and her ingenious tactics.—She had it all to do over again;—a quarter of an hour later, deuce take me if I know what might have been the conclusion of that incident—I can imagine no possible outcome.—Perhaps it would have been better that Alcibiades should not intervene just at the decisive moment like a deux ex machina;—then the thing would have had to come to a climax in one way or another.—Two or three times during that scene I was on the point of telling Rosette who I was; but the fear of being taken for an adventuress and of having my secret revealed retained upon my lips the words that were already to take flight.
Such a condition of things could not last.—My departure was the only method of cutting short that issue-less intrigue; and so, at dinner, I formally announced that I must take my leave the very next day.—Rosette, who was sitting beside me, almost fainted at the news, and dropped her glass. A sudden pallor overspread her lovely face; she bestowed upon me a grieved, reproachful glance which made my emotion and trouble almost as great as her own.
The aunt raised her old wrinkled hands with a gesture of painful surprise, and in her shrill, trembling voice, which wavered even more than usual, she said: "Oh! my dear Monsieur Théodore, are you going to leave us like this? That's not right; yesterday you did not show the slightest disposition to go.—The postman has not arrived, so you have received no letters and you have no reason to go. You gave us another fortnight and now you take it back; really you have no right to do it: a thing given cannot be taken back.—You see how Rosette looks at you, and how displeased she is; I warn you that I shall be as displeased as she, and that I will glare at you as fiercely, and the glare of sixty-eight years is a little more terrible than the glare of twenty-three. See to what you voluntarily expose yourself; to the wrath of the aunt and the niece, and all this on account of some whim that has suddenly taken possession of you between the fruit and the cheese."
Alcibiades, bringing his fist down on the table, swore that he would barricade the doors of the chateau and hamstring my horse rather than let me go.
Rosette gave me another glance, so sad and so supplicating, that one must have been as ferocious as a tiger who has eaten nothing for eight days not to have been touched by it.—I did not resist, and although I was exceedingly loth to do it, I made a solemn promise to remain.—Dear Rosette would gladly have leaped on my neck and kissed my mouth for my complaisance; Alcibiades took my hand in his great hand and shook my arm so violently that he almost tore it out at the shoulder, changed the shape of my rings from round to oval and drove them deep into three of my fingers.
The old lady in her joy took an immense pinch of snuff.
Rosette, however, did not completely recover her cheerfulness;—the idea that I might go and that I was inclined to do so, an idea that had not before presented itself clearly to her mind, threw her into a profound reverie. The color that my announcement of my departure had driven from her cheeks did not return with the same brilliancy as before;—there was still some trace of pallor on her cheeks, and of anxiety deep in her heart.—My conduct toward her surprised her more and more.—After the marked advances she had made, she could not understand my motives for showing so much restraint in my relations with her: what she wanted was to bring me to a decisive engagement before my departure, having no doubt that after that it would be extremely easy to keep me as long as she chose.
Therein she was right, and, if I had not been a woman, her reckoning would have been accurate; for, however satiated one may be with pleasure and filled with the disgust that ordinarily follows possession, every man who has a heart situated at all as it should be and who is not wretchedly blasé and beyond redemption, feels his love increase with his good-fortune, and very often the best way to retain a lover who is ready to take flight is to give one's self up to him with entire abandon.
Rosette designed to bring me to something decisive before my departure. Knowing how difficult it is to take up a liaison later at the point at which you left it, and, furthermore, being in no wise sure of ever being thrown with me again under such favorable auspices, she would neglect none of the opportunities that might present themselves to place me in a position where I must declare myself in precise terms and abandon the evasive manœuvres behind which I was in the habit of entrenching myself. As I, for my part, had a very decided purpose to avoid any such meeting as that in the rustic pavilion, and as I could not, without making myself ridiculous, treat Rosette too coldly and import a childish prudery into our relations, I did not know just how to behave, and I tried to arrange it so that there would always be a third person with us.—Rosette, on the contrary, did her utmost to be left alone with me, and she succeeded very often, the chateau being at some distance from the town and little frequented by the neighboring nobility.—This sullen resistance saddened and surprised her;—at times she was assailed by doubts and hesitation as to the power of her charms, and, seeing that she made so little impression upon me, she was sometimes not far from believing that she was ugly.—Thereupon she redoubled her attentions and her coquetry, and although her mourning did not permit her to resort to all the devices of the toilet, she knew how to embellish it and vary it in such a way as to be every day two or three times more charming than the day before—which is no small thing to say.—She tried everything: she was playful, melancholy, tender, passionate, gracious, coquettish, even affected; one after another she put on all the fascinating masks that sit so well upon women that we cannot say whether they are real masks or their real faces;—she assumed successively eight or ten different, strongly-contrasted individualities, to see which pleased me best and settle upon that. She constituted a whole seraglio in herself alone, and I had only to throw down the handkerchief; but, of course, nothing succeeded.
The failure of all these stratagems caused her to fall into a state of profound stupefaction.—Indeed, she would have made old Nestor's brain whirl and melted the ice in chaste Hippolytus himself,—and I resembled no one less than Hippolytus or Nestor: I am young and I had a haughty, resolute mien, was bold in speech and, everywhere except in a tête-à-tête, very self-possessed.
She might well have thought that all the witches of Thrace and Thessaly had cast their charms upon my body, or that, at all events, I had some physical impediment, and so have formed a very contemptuous opinion of my virility, which does not amount to much in truth. However, it seems that that idea did not occur to her and that she attributed my strange reserve solely to my lack of love for her.
The days passed and her affairs made no progress.—She was visibly affected by that fact: an expression of anxious melancholy replaced the bright smile that always played about her lips; the corners of her mouth, once so joyously arched, drooped sensibly and formed a straight, serious line; the small veins in her eyelids stood out more clearly; her cheeks, formerly so like the peach, had retained nothing of that appearance except the imperceptible velvety down. Often I saw her from my window in the morning walking in the flower-garden in her peignoir; she hardly lifted her feet, as if she were gliding rather than walking, her arms folded across her breast, her head bent forward, doubled over like a willow branch dragging in the water, and with a swaying, uncertain motion like a drapery that is too long and touches the floor.—At such moments she resembled one of the amorous maidens of old, victims of the anger of Venus, upon whom the pitiless goddess empties all the vials of her wrath:—thus I imagine Psyche must have appeared when she lost Cupid.
On the days when she did not exert herself to overcome my coldness and my hesitation her love appeared in a simple, primitive guise that would have fascinated me; there was a silent, confiding unconstraint, a chaste prodigality of caresses, an inexhaustible abundance and plenitude of affection, all the treasures of a lovely nature displayed without reserve. She had none of the petty meannesses that we see in almost all women, even the most generously endowed; she sought no disguise, but calmly allowed me to see the full extent of her passion. Her self-esteem did not rebel for an instant at my failure to respond to such persistent advances, for pride leaves the heart on the day that love enters; and if ever any one was truly loved, I have been and by Rosette.—She suffered, but without complaint and without bitterness, and she attributed the ill-success of her endeavors to herself alone.—Meanwhile her pallor was increasing every day, and the lilies and roses had fought a pitched battle on the battlefield of her cheeks, resulting in the definitive rout of the latter; that grieved me deeply, but in all conscience I could do less to remedy it than any one.—The more gently and affectionately I spoke to her, the more caressing my manner was to her, the deeper in her heart I buried the barbed arrow of impossible love.—To console her to-day, I exposed her to much greater sorrow in the future; my remedies poisoned her wound while seeming to allay the pain.—I was sorry in a certain sense for all the pleasant things I had succeeded in saying to her, and I would have been glad, on account of my very warm friendship for her, to find a way to make her hate me. Unselfishness can go no farther than that, for I most certainly should have been sorry;—but it would have been better so.
I tried two or three times to say something harsh to her, but I very soon returned to incense, for I dread her smile less than her tears.—On such occasions, although the purity of my purpose absolves me fully in my conscience, I am more touched than I ought to be, and I feel something which is not far from being remorse.—A tear can hardly be dried except by a kiss, and one cannot decently leave that duty to a handkerchief, though it be of the finest lawn imaginable;—I simply undo what I have done, the tear is very soon forgotten, much sooner than the kiss, and the result so far as I am concerned is always increased embarrassment.
Rosette, who sees that I am going to escape her, clings obstinately and wretchedly to the remains of her hope, and my position becomes more and more complicated.—The strange sensation that I felt in the little hermitage, and the inconceivable excitement into which I was thrown by the ardor of my beautiful lover, have been repeated several times, although in a less violent form; and often, as I sit beside Rosette, with her hand in mine, listening to her as she talks to me in her soft, cooing voice, I imagine that I am a man as she believes, and that my failure to respond to her love is pure cruelty on my part.
One evening by some chance I found myself alone with the old lady in the green room;—she had in her hand a piece of embroidery, for, notwithstanding her sixty-eight years, she was never idle, being desirous, as she said, to finish before her death a piece of furniture on which she had been at work for a very long time. Feeling a little tired she put aside her work and leaned back in her great easy-chair; she looked at me very attentively and her gray eyes gleamed through her spectacles with strange vivacity; two or three times she passed her thin hand across her wrinkled forehead and seemed to be in deep thought.—The memory of a time that was no more and which she regretted gave to her face an expression of melancholy emotion.—I said nothing for fear of disturbing her thoughts, and the silence lasted some minutes; at last she broke it.
"They are Henri's eyes,—my dear Henri's,—the same bright, melting glance, the same way of carrying the head, the same sweet, proud face;—one would say it was he.—You cannot imagine how striking the resemblance is, Monsieur Théodore;—when I see you, I can no longer believe that Henri is dead; I think that he has been on a long journey from which he has at last returned.—You have given me much pleasure and much pain, Théodore!—pleasure by reminding me of my poor Henri, pain by showing me how great a loss I have suffered; sometimes I have taken you for his phantom.—I cannot get used to the idea that you are going to leave us; it seems to me that I am losing my Henri once more."
I told her that if it were possible for me to remain longer I would do it with pleasure, but that my stay had already been prolonged far beyond what it should have been; that I looked forward to returning, however, and that my memories of the chateau would be too pleasant to allow me to forget it so quickly.
"Sorry as I am to have you leave us, Monsieur Théodore," she continued, pursuing her thought, "there is some one here who will be more so than I.—You understand whom I refer to, without my telling you. I don't know what we shall do with Rosette when you have gone; but the old chateau is a very dull place. Alcibiades is always hunting, and for a young woman like her the society of a poor helpless old creature like myself is not very entertaining."
"If any one should feel regret, madame, it is neither you nor Rosette, but myself; you lose little, I lose much; you will readily find society more agreeable than mine, but it is more than doubtful if I can ever find any to replace yours and Rosette's."
"I have no wish to quarrel with your modesty, my dear monsieur, but I know what I am saying, and I say what is true: it is probable that we shall not see Madame Rosette in good humor for a long while, for you are the one who makes rain or fair weather on her cheeks now. Her period of mourning is drawing to an end and it would be truly a deplorable thing that she should lay aside her cheerfulness with her last black dress; that would be a very bad example and altogether opposed to ordinary laws. It is something that you can prevent without much trouble, and that you will prevent, I have no doubt," said the old lady, dwelling on the last words.
"Most assuredly I will do my utmost to have your dear niece preserve her cheerfulness, as you credit me with so much influence over her. But I can hardly see how I am to set about it."
"Oh! really, you can hardly see! What are your bright eyes good for?—I didn't know that you were so near-sighted. Rosette is free; she has eighty thousand francs a year absolutely at her own disposal, and some women twice as ugly as she are considered very pretty. You are young, well-favored, and, so far as I know, unmarried; it seems to me the simplest thing in the world, unless you have an insurmountable horror for Rosette, which is difficult to believe."—
"And which is not and cannot be the fact; for her mind is as attractive as her body, and she is one of those who might be ugly without any one noticing it or wishing her otherwise."—
"She might be ugly with impunity and she is charming.—That is what I call being right twice over; I do not doubt what you say, but she has taken the wisest course.—So far as she is concerned, I can readily assure you that there are a thousand people whom she hates worse than you, and that, if she were to be asked the question several times, she would finally confess perhaps that you are not exactly indifferent to her. You have on your finger a ring that would fit her perfectly, for your hand is almost as small as hers, and I am almost sure that she would accept it with pleasure."
The good lady paused for a few seconds to see what effect her words produced on me, and I cannot say whether she was likely to be satisfied with the expression of my face.—I was cruelly embarrassed, and I didn't know what to reply. From the beginning of the interview I had seen whither all her hints were tending; and although I almost expected what she had just said, I was surprised and dumfounded; I had no choice but to refuse; but what plausible reasons could I give for such a refusal? I had none except that I was a woman; that was an excellent reason, I agree, but it was precisely the one that I did not choose to give.
I could hardly throw the blame upon intractable, ridiculous relations; all the relations in the world would have welcomed such a match with delirious joy. Even if Rosette had not been what she was, sweet and lovely, and of gentle birth, the eighty thousand francs a year would have removed every obstacle.—To say that I did not love her would have been neither true nor honorable, for I really loved her dearly, more dearly than one woman loves another.
I was too young to pretend to be engaged to somebody else: the best expedient I could invent was to give her to understand that, as I was a younger son, family interests required that I should enter the Order of Malta, and thus made it impossible for me to think of marriage: which fact caused me the greatest sorrow imaginable since I had seen Rosette.
That answer was not worth the breath required to put it into words and I was perfectly conscious of it. The old lady was not deceived by it and did not look upon it as definitive; she thought that I had spoken thus in order to have time to reflect and consult my relations.—In truth, such a marriage was so advantageous and so far beyond my hopes that it was not possible that I should refuse it, even if I had loved Rosette only a little or none at all; it was an opportunity not to be neglected.
I am unable to say whether the aunt opened the subject to me at her niece's instigation, but I am inclined to think that Rosette was not a party to it; she loved me too simple-mindedly and ardently to think of anything else than immediate possession of me, and marriage would certainly have been the last method she would have employed.—The dowager, who had not failed to notice our intimacy, which she probably believed to be much greater than it was, had arranged this plan in her head, in order to keep me with her, and to replace, as far as possible, her dear son Henri, killed in the army, to whom she discovered such a striking resemblance in me. She had taken great pleasure in the idea and had taken advantage of that brief tête-à-tête to come to an understanding with me. I saw by her manner that she did not consider herself defeated, and that she proposed to return soon to the charge, which vexed me to the last degree.
Rosette, for her part, in the evening of that same day, took a step which had such serious results, that I must tell you the story by itself and not in this letter, which has already exceeded all bounds.—You will see to what extraordinary adventures I am predestined, and that Heaven plainly cut me out for a hero of romance; upon my word, I don't know just what moral can be drawn from all this,—but lives are not like fables, each chapter hasn't a rhymed sentence for a tailpiece.—Very often the meaning of life is that it is not death. Nothing more. Adieu, my dear, I kiss your lovely eyes. You will soon receive the sequel of my triumphant biography.
Théodore—Rosalind—for I know not by what name to call you—I saw you a moment ago and now I am writing to you.—How I wish I might know your woman's name! it must be as sweet as honey and float about the lips softer and more melodious than poetry! I should never have dared to tell you that, and yet I should die not to tell you.—No one knows what I have suffered, no one can know, I myself could give only a faint idea of it; words do not express such agony; I should seem to have twisted my phrases at will, to have made mighty efforts to say strange and novel things and to indulge in the most extravagant exaggeration even if I should describe my feelings in far from adequate terms.
O Rosalind, I love you, I adore you, would that there were a word stronger than that! I have never loved, I have never adored any woman but you;—I prostrate myself, I annihilate myself before you, and I would like to compel all creation to bend the knee before my idol; to me you are more than all nature, more than myself, more than God;—indeed, it seems strange to me that God does not come down from heaven to be your slave. Where you are not, everything is a desert, everything is dead, everything is black; you alone people the world for me; you are my life, my sun;—you are everything.—Your smile makes the day, your sadness makes the night; the spheres follow the movements of your body and the celestial harmonies govern themselves by you, O my beloved queen! O my beautiful real dream! You are arrayed in splendor and you swim always in a flood of radiant beams.
It is hardly three months that I have known you, but I have loved you a long, long time.—Before I ever saw you, I was languishing with love of you; I called you, I sought you, and I was in despair at not meeting you on my road, for I knew that I could never love another woman.—How many times you have appeared to me—at the window of the mysterious chateau, leaning in melancholy mood on the balcony and throwing to the wind the petals of some flower, or galloping through the dark paths of the forest, an impetuous Amazon, on your Turkish horse, whiter than the snow!—There were your proud yet gentle eyes, your transparent hands, your lovely, waving hair and your adorably disdainful half-smile.—But you were less beautiful, for the most ardent, unbridled imagination, the imagination of painter or poet, could not attain the sublime poesy of the original. There is within you an inexhaustible spring of charms, an ever-gushing fountain of irresistible seductions; you are a casket, always open, of the most precious pearls, and in your slightest movements, in your most careless gestures, in your most unstudied poses, you scatter to right and left inestimable treasures of beauty, with royal profusion. If the graceful undulations of a contour, the fleeting outlines of an attitude, could be fixed and preserved in a mirror, the mirrors before which you pass would cause the divinest canvases of Raphael to be despised and looked upon as tavern signs.
Chapter XIII — How many times you have appeared to me—at the window of the mysterious chateau, leaning in melancholy mood on the balcony and throwing to the wind the petals of some flower. * * * There were your proud yet gentle eyes, your transparent hands, your lovely, waving hair and your adorably disdainful half smile.
Every gesture, every motion of the head, every different aspect of your beauty, was engraved on the mirror of my mind with a diamond-point, and nothing in the world could efface its deep impression; I know where the shadow was and where the light, the flat surface illumined by the sunbeam, and the spot where the wandering reflection blended with the softer tints of the neck and cheek.—I could draw you absent; your image is always posing before me.
When I was a child, I stood for whole hours before the pictures of the old masters and gazed eagerly into their dark depths.—I scanned the lovely faces of saints and goddesses whose flesh, of the whiteness of ivory or wax, stood out so marvellously against the dark backgrounds, blackened by the decomposition of the colors; I admired the simplicity and magnificence of their carriage, the strange grace of their hands and feet, the nobility and beauty of their features, at once so delicate and so strong; the magnificence of the draperies which enveloped their divine forms, and whose purple folds seemed to thrust themselves forward like lips to kiss those lovely bodies.—By dint of persistently plunging my eyes beneath the veil of haze thickened by centuries, my sight would become confused, the outlines of objects would lose their precision, and a sort of motionless, inanimate life would seem to inspire all those pale phantoms of vanished beauties; I always ended by discovering that the faces bore a vague resemblance to the fair stranger whom I adored with all my heart; I sighed as I thought that she whom I was destined to love was perhaps one of them and had been dead three hundred years. That thought often affected me so deeply as to make me shed tears, and I would fly into a fierce passion against myself for not having been born in the sixteenth century, when all those beauties lived. I considered that it was unpardonable stupidity and folly on my part.
When I grew older, the pleasing phantom possessed me even more completely. I saw it always between me and the women I had for mistresses, smiling ironically and mocking at their human beauty with all the perfection of its divine beauty. It made women who were really charming seem ugly to me—women well adapted to make any man happy who was not in love with the adorable shadow, whose body I did not believe to be in existence, but which was only the premonition of your beauty. O Rosalind! how wretched I have been because of you before I knew you! O Théodore! what wretchedness I have endured because of you since I have known you!—If you wish, you can throw open to me the paradise of my dreams. You are standing on the threshold, like a guardian angel enveloped in her wings, and you hold the golden key in your fair hands.—Tell me, Rosalind, tell me, will you do it?
I await only a word from you to live or die;—will you say it?
Are you Apollo driven forth from heaven, or the fair Aphrodite coming from the bosom of the sea? Where did you leave your chariot of precious stones drawn by four fiery steeds? what have you done with your shell of mother-of-pearl, and your dolphins with the sky-blue tails?—what amorous nymph has blended her body with yours in the midst of a kiss, O thou comely youth, more charming than Cyparissus or Adonis, more adorable than all women in the world?
But you are a woman; we are no longer living in the days of the Metamorphoses;—Adonis and Hermaphroditus are dead,—and such a degree of beauty cannot now be attained by a man;—for, since heroes and gods are no more, women alone retain in their marble bodies, as in a Grecian temple, the priceless gift of shape anathematized by Christ, and prove that earth has no reason to envy heaven; you worthily represent the first divinity in the world, the purest symbol of the eternal essence—beauty.
As soon as I saw you, something was torn away within me, a veil fell, a door opened, I felt that I was flooded inwardly with waves of light; I realized that my life was before me, and that I had finally reached the decisive crossroads.—The obscure, lost portions of the half-radiant face I was seeking to distinguish in the shadow were suddenly illuminated; the dark tints in which the background of the picture was enveloped were flooded with a soft light; a delicate rosy flush stole over the ultramarine, slightly tinged with green, of the middle distances; the trees, which formed only confused silhouettes, began to stand out more clearly; the dew-laden flowers made bright spots on the dull green of the turf. I saw the scarlet-breasted bullfinch at the end of an elder branch; the little white rabbit, pink-eyed and with ears erect, putting out his head between two wisps of wild thyme and passing his paw over his nose, and the timid stag coming to drink at the spring and gaze at his branching antlers in the water.—On the morning when the sun of love rose upon my life, everything was changed; where shapes barely outlined and rendered terrible or unnatural by their uncertainty, once vacillated before my eyes, were now graceful groups of trees in blossom, hillsides forming charming amphitheatres, silver palaces, with their terraces covered with urns and statues, bathing their feet in the azure lakes and apparently swimming between two skies; the shape that I took in the obscurity for a gigantic dragon with wings armed with talons, crawling on the darkness with his scaly paws, was simply a felucca with silken sails and oars painted and gilded, filled with women and musicians; and the horrible crab which I fancied that I saw waving his claws and nippers over my head was only a fan-shaped palm whose long, narrow leaves moved gently in the night wind.—My chimeras and my errors have vanished:—I love.
Despairing of ever finding you, I accused my dream of falsehood, and reviled fate bitterly;—I said to myself that I was very foolish to seek such a type, or that nature was very unfruitful and the Creator very unskilful, not to be able to realize the simple thought of my heart.—Prometheus had the noble aspiration to make a man and enter into rivalry with God; I had created a woman, and I believed that, to punish me for my audacity, a longing always unsatisfied would gnaw at my liver like another vulture; I expected to be bound with diamond chains upon a hoary rock on the shore of the wild ocean,—but the lovely sea-nymphs with long green hair, lifting their snow-white, swelling breasts above the waves and showing the sun their mother-of-pearl bodies all dripping with the tears of the sea, would not have come and reclined upon the bank to converse with me and comfort me in my agony, as they do in old Æschylus's play.
It did not turn out so.
You came and I was fain to reproach my imagination with its impotence.—I have not suffered the torture that I dreaded, of being chained forever upon a sterile rock, the victim of an idea; but I have suffered none the less. I had seen that you did, in fact, exist; that my presentiments had not lied to me in that respect; but you appeared to me with the ambiguous, and terrifying beauty of the sphinx. Like Isis, the mysterious goddess, you were enveloped in a veil which I dared not raise for fear of falling dead.
If you knew with what panting, anxious scrutiny, under my apparent indifference, I watched you and followed your slightest movements! Nothing escaped me; how earnestly I gazed at the little flesh that appeared at your neck or your wrists, trying to determine your sex! Your hands were the subject of profound study on my part, and I can fairly say that I know every detail of their shape, every imperceptible vein, and the tiniest dimple; you might be enveloped from head to foot in the most impenetrable domino, and I would recognize you simply by looking at one of your fingers. I analyzed the undulations of your gait, the way in which you put your foot to the ground, your manner of pushing back your hair; I tried to surprise your secret in the management of your body.—I watched you particularly in your hours of relaxation when the bones seem to be removed from the body, and when the limbs relax and bend as if they were unstrung, to see if the feminine lines would declare themselves more boldly in that careless, forgetful attitude. No one was ever the object of such ardent scrutiny as you.
I forgot myself in contemplating you for hours at a time. Withdrawing to some corner of the salon, with a book that I did not read in my hand, or crouching behind the curtains in my bedroom, when you were in yours and the blinds at your window were raised,—at such times, deeply penetrated by the marvellous beauty that emanates from you and creates a luminous atmosphere about you, I said to myself: "Surely it is a woman;"—then suddenly an abrupt, decided gesture, a virile tone, or some cavalierish action would destroy in a moment my frail edifice of probabilities, and throw me back into my former irresolution.
I would be sailing before the wind over the boundless ocean of amorous reverie, and you would come to ask me to fence or to play tennis with you; the young woman, transformed into a young gallant, would deal me terrific truncheon-like blows and send the foil flying out of my hands as deftly and quickly as the most expert bravo in the trade; every minute in the day I had some such disappointment.
I would be on the point of approaching you, to say: "My dear lady, I adore you," and I would see you lean over and whisper tenderly to some fair dame, and blow madrigals and compliments through her hair in puffs.—Judge of my position.—Or else some woman, whom, in my mad jealousy, I would have flayed alive with the greatest pleasure on earth, would hang upon your arm, would lead you aside to confide her paltry secrets to you, and detain you for whole hours in a window recess.
It made me furious to see women speak to you, for that forced me to believe that you were a man, and, even if you had been, I could not have endured it without intense suffering.—When the men approached you and addressed you freely and familiarly, I was even more jealous, because I thought this—that you were a woman, and perhaps they suspected it as I did; I was tortured by the most contrary passions, and I did not know what to believe.
I became angry with myself, I reproached myself most bitterly for being so tormented by such a love, and for not having the strength to tear from my heart the noxious plant that had sprung up there in one night like a poisonous mushroom; I cursed you, I called you my evil genius; I believed for an instant that you were Beelzebub in person, for I could not explain the sensation to which I was a prey when in your presence.
When I was thoroughly convinced that you were in reality nothing else than a woman in disguise, the improbability of the motives with which I sought to justify such a whim plunged me into my uncertainty once more, and I began anew to deplore that the figure I had dreamed of for the love of my soul, should prove to belong to a person of the same sex as myself;—I blamed the chance that had arrayed a man in such a charming exterior, and, to my everlasting misery, had thrown him in my way when I had ceased to hope for the realization of the ideal of pure beauty which I cherished so long in my heart.
But now, Rosalind, I am profoundly certain that you are the loveliest of women; I have seen you in the costume of your sex, I have seen your pure, perfectly-rounded shoulders and arms. The upper part of your breast, which your neckerchief disclosed, can belong only to a young woman; neither Meleager, the beautiful huntsman, nor the effeminate Bacchus, with their uncertain figures, had such purity of outline or such fineness of skin, although they were both made of Parian marble and polished by the amorous kisses of twenty centuries.—I am no longer worried in that direction—But that is not all: you are a woman, and my love is no longer reprehensible; I can give myself up to it without remorse, and abandon myself to the current that draws me toward you; however ardent and unruly my passion, it is legitimate and I can avow it; but you, Rosalind, for whom I have burned in silence and who knew nothing of the immensity of my love, you in whom this tardy disclosure will perhaps arouse no sentiment but surprise—do you hate me, do you love me, can you love me? I do not know—and I tremble and am unhappier than before.
At times it seems to me that you do not hate me;—when we played As You Like It, you gave to certain passages in your part a special intonation that emphasized their meaning, and urged me, in some sense, to declare myself.—I fancied that I could see in your eyes and your smile gracious promises of indulgent treatment, and could feel your hand respond to the pressure of mine.—If I am mistaken—O God! that is a contingency on which I dare not reflect.—Encouraged by all that, and impelled by my love, I have written to you, for the garb you wear is not propitious to such avowals in words, and a thousand times my voice has died upon my lips; although I believe, yes, was firmly convinced that I was speaking to a woman, that masculine costume frightened away all my tender, amorous thoughts, and prevented them from winging their way to you.
I implore you, Rosalind, if you do not love me yet, try to love me, who have loved you in spite of everything, beneath the veil in which you enveloped yourself, through pity for us, I doubt not; do not condemn me for the rest of my life to the most frightful despair and hopeless discouragement; consider that I have adored you since the first ray of thought shone in upon my brain, that you were revealed to me before I saw you, and that, when I was a little fellow, you appeared to me in a dream with a crown of dew-drops, two rain-bow-like wings, and the tiny blue flower in your hand; that you are the end, the means and the meaning of my life; that, without you, I am nothing but a vain shadow, and that, if you breathe upon the flame you have kindled, naught will remain of me but a pinch of dust, finer and more impalpable than that which is sprinkled upon the wings of Death itself.—Rosalind, do you, who have so many receipts for the cure of love, cure me, for I am very sick; play your part to the end, lay aside the garb of the fair page Ganymede, and extend your white hand to the youngest son of the gallant knight, Sir Rowland des Bois.
I was at my window busily watching the stars that bloomed joyously in the garden of the sky, and inhaling the sweet perfume of the mirabilis wafted to my nostrils by a dying breeze.—The wind blowing through the open window had extinguished my lamp, the last that remained lighted in the chateau. My thoughts degenerated into vague musing, and a sort of drowsiness began to steal over me; I remained, however, with my elbows resting on the stone balustrade, either because I was fascinated by the charm of the night, or through indifference and forgetfulness.—Rosette, seeing that my lamp was out, and being unable to distinguish my form because of a great wedge of shadow that fell exactly upon the window, had concluded, I presume, that I had gone to bed, and that was what she was waiting for, to risk one last, desperate attempt.—She opened the door so softly that I did not hear her come in, and she was within two steps of me before I discovered her. She was tremendously surprised to find me still up; but she soon recovered from her astonishment, came to me and grasped my arm, calling me twice by my name:—"Théodore, Théodore!"
"What! you, Rosette, here, at this hour, all alone, without a light, in such complete déshabillé!"
I must tell you that she had nothing on but a peignoir of the finest linen, and the glorious lace-trimmed chemise which I did not choose to see on the day of the famous scene in the little kiosk in the park. Her arms, as cold and smooth as marble, were entirely bare, and the garment that covered her body was so clinging and transparent that you could see her nipples through it, as in the statues of bathers covered with damp drapery.
"Do you mean that for a reproach, Théodore? or is it simply an exclamation? Yes, I, Rosette, la belle dame, here in your bedroom, not in my own where I should be, at eleven o'clock at night, perhaps midnight, without duenna or chaperone or maid, almost naked, in a simple night peignoir;—that is very surprising, is it not?—I am as surprised as you, and I hardly know what explanation to give you."
As she spoke, she put one arm around my body and sank down on the foot of my bed in such a way as to drag me with her.
"Rosette," I said to her, struggling to release myself, "I will try to light the lamp; nothing is so depressing as a dark room; and then, it is downright murder not to be able to see when you are here, and so be deprived of the sight of your charms.—Allow me, with the help of a bit of tinder and a match, to make a little portable sun which will put in relief all that the jealous darkness blots out beneath its shadow."
"It isn't worthwhile; I prefer that you should not see my blushes; I feel that my cheeks are burning hot, for it is quite enough to make me die of shame."
She put her face against my breast and remained some moments so, as if suffocated by her emotion.
Meanwhile, I was mechanically running my fingers through the long floating curls of her hair; I was cudgelling my brain in search of some honorable means of extricating myself from the scrape, but I could find none, for I was driven into my last entrenchments, and Rosette seemed firmly resolved not to leave the room as she had entered it.—There was a formidable negligence about her dress which promised nothing good. I had on an open robe-de-chambre myself, which would have defended my incognito but feebly, so that I was disturbed beyond measure concerning the result of the battle.
"Listen to me, Théodore," said Rosette, standing up and throwing the hair back from both sides of her face, as well as I could judge by the feeble light which the stars and a very slender crescent moon, just appearing above the horizon, cast into the room, the window being still open;—"this is a strange step I have taken; everybody would blame me for it.—But you are going away soon, and I love you! I cannot let you go thus without having an explanation with you.—Perhaps you will never come back; perhaps this is the first and last time that I am to see you.—Who knows where you will go? But wherever you go you will carry my heart and my life with you.—If you had remained, I should not have resorted to this extreme measure. The happiness I felt on seeing you, of listening to your voice, of living beside you, would have been enough for me; I would have asked for nothing more. I would have confined my love in my heart; you would have thought that you had simply a kind and affectionate friend in me; but that cannot be. You say that you absolutely must go.—It bores you, Théodore, to see me clinging to your footsteps like an amorous shadow which can only follow you, but would like to be blended with your body; it must annoy you always to find behind you imploring eyes and hands stretched out to grasp the hem of your cloak.—I know it, but I cannot refrain from doing it.—You cannot complain, however; it is your fault.—I was calm, peaceful, almost happy before I knew you.—You appeared, handsome, young, and smiling, like Phœbus, the charming god.—You paid me most marked, most gallant attention; never was cavalier more courteous and clever. Rubies and roses fell from your lips every moment; everything became for you an opportunity to turn a compliment, and you knew how to transform the most insignificant words into charming flattery.—A woman who had hated you mortally at first, would have ended by loving you, and for my part, I loved you the moment I saw you. Why, having made yourself so agreeable, do you seem surprised to be so loved? Isn't it a perfectly natural consequence? I am neither mad nor empty-headed, nor a romantic child who falls in love with the first sword she sees. I have seen society, and I know what life is. Any woman, even the most virtuous or the most prudish, would have done as much as I am doing.—What was your idea or your purpose? to please me, I imagine, for I cannot attribute any other to you. How does it happen, then, that you seem in some measure sorry because you have succeeded so well? Have I unintentionally done anything to displease you?—I ask your pardon.—Do you no longer think me beautiful, or have you discovered in me some defect that repels you?—You have the right to be exacting in the matter of beauty, but either you have lied outrageously, or I am beautiful!—I am young like yourself and I love you; why do you disdain me now? You used to be so attentive to me, you held my arm with such unfailing solicitude, you pressed so tenderly the hand I abandoned to you, your eyes were so languorous when you raised them to mine: if you did not love me, why all that manœuvring? Can it be that you are cruel enough to kindle love in a heart in order to laugh at it afterward? Ah! that would be a ghastly joke, impious and sacrilegious! only a wicked soul could be amused by it, and I cannot believe it of you, however inexplicable your conduct toward me. What is the cause, then, of this sudden change? As for me, I can imagine none.—What mystery is hidden by such coldness?—I cannot believe that you feel repugnance for me; what you have done proves that you do not, for a man does not pay court so earnestly to a woman for whom he has a feeling of disgust, though he were the greatest scoundrel on earth. O Théodore, what have you against me? what has changed you so? what have I done to you?—If the love you seemed to have for me has vanished, mine, alas! has remained, and I cannot tear it from my heart.—Have pity on me, Théodore, for I am very unhappy.—At least pretend to love me a little, and say a few kind words to me; they will not cost you much, unless you have an insurmountable horror of me."
At that pathetic point in her discourse, sobs completely choked her voice; she clasped her hands on my shoulder and rested her forehead upon them in an attitude of utter despair. All that she said was absolutely true, and I had nothing to say in reply.—I could not treat the matter as a jest. That would not have been decent.—Rosette was not one of the creatures one can treat so lightly; besides, I was too deeply touched to be able to do it. I felt guilty for having thus made a plaything of a charming woman's heart, and I was seized with the deepest and most sincere remorse.
Seeing that I made no reply, the dear child drew a long breath and made a movement as if to rise, but she fell back, crushed by her emotion; then she threw her arms about me—I could feel their cool touch through my doublet—laid her face against mine and began to weep silently.
It produced a strange effect upon me to feel that exhaustless current of tears that did not flow from my own eyes, rolling down my cheeks.—Mine were soon mingling with them, and there was a veritable rain of bitter tears, violent enough to cause another deluge, if it had lasted forty days.
At that instant the moon shone fairly on the window; a pale beam shot into the room and cast a bluish gleam upon our silent group.
With her white peignoir, her bare arms, her uncovered throat and breast, of almost the same color as the linen, her dishevelled hair and her sorrowful expression, Rosette had the aspect of an alabaster figure of Melancholy sitting on a tomb. As for myself, I have no very clear idea what I may have looked like, as I could not see myself and there was no mirror to reflect my image, but I fancy that I might very well have posed for a statue of Uncertainty personified.
I was moved, and I bestowed upon Rosette a caress or two rather more affectionate than usual; from her hair my hand descended to her velvety neck and thence to her round, smooth shoulder which I patted softly as I followed its shivering contour. The child quivered under my touch like a harpsichord under a musician's fingers; her flesh shuddered and leaped, and amorous thrills ran all over her body.
I myself was conscious of a sort of vague, confused desire, the object of which I could not make out, and I took a keen delight in running my hand over those pure, delicate lines.—I left her shoulder, and, taking advantage of an opening in the folds of her peignoir, I suddenly closed my hand upon her little, frightened breast, which palpitated madly like a turtle-dove surprised in its nest;—from the extreme edge of her cheek, upon which I breathed a hardly perceptible kiss, I arrived at her half-open mouth: we remained in that position for some time.—Upon my word, I have no idea whether it was two minutes or a quarter of an hour or an hour; for I had lost all idea of time, and I did not know whether I was in heaven or on earth, here or elsewhere, dead or alive. The heady wine of lust had so intoxicated me at the first mouthful I swallowed, that all the reason I possessed had fled.—Rosette wound her arms more and more tightly about me and enveloped me with her body; she leaned convulsively toward me and pressed me against her bare, palpitating breast; at every kiss all her life seemed to rush to the spot kissed and to abandon the rest of her person.—Strange ideas passed through my head; if I had not feared to betray my incognito, I would have given full scope to Rosette's passionate impulses, and perhaps I should have made some vain, mad attempt to impart a semblance of reality to the shadow of pleasure which my beautiful lover embraced so ardently; I had not yet had a lover; and those fierce attacks, those reiterated caresses, the touch of that lovely body, those sweet names drowned in kisses, excited me to the last degree—although they proceeded from a woman;—and then that nocturnal visit, that romantic passion, the moonlight, all had for me the refreshing charm of novelty, and made me forget that, after all, I was not a man.
However, making a great effort to control myself, I told Rosette that she was compromising herself terribly by coming to my room at such an hour and remaining there so long, that her women might notice her absence and see that she had not passed the night in her own room.
I said this in such a mild tone that Rosette's only reply was to let her peignoir and slippers fall to the floor and glide into my bed like a snake into a bowl of milk; for she fancied that my clothes alone prevented me from coming to more definite demonstrations, and that they were the only obstacle that held me back.
She believed, poor child, that the happy hour, so laboriously led up to, was about to strike for her; but the clock struck two instead.—I was in a most critical position, when suddenly the door turned on its hinges and gave passage to the Chevalier Alcibiades in person; he held a candlestick in one hand and his sword in the other.
He went straight to the bed and threw back the clothes, and, putting the light under poor, speechless Rosette's nose, said to her in a bantering tone:—"Good-morning, sister." Little Rosette had not the strength to say a word in reply.
"So it seems, my very dear and most virtuous sister, that, having considered in your wisdom that Seigneur Théodore's bed was more downy than your own, you came here to sleep in it? or perhaps there are ghosts in your room and you thought that you would be safer here, under the protection of the aforesaid seigneur?—It is very well thought of.—Aha! Monsieur le Chevalier de Sérannes, you have made soft eyes at Madame our sister, and you think that will be the end of it.—In my opinion, it would not be unhealthy for us to slash at each other a little, and if you would oblige me to that extent I should be infinitely grateful to you.—Théodore, you have abused my friendship for you, and you make me repent the good opinion I formed at first of the loyalty of your character; this is bad, very bad."
I could not defend myself in any valid way; appearances were against me. Who would have believed me if I had said, as the fact was, that Rosette had come to my room against my will, and that, far from trying to attract her, I was doing all I possibly could to turn her away from me.—There was but one thing for me to say, and I said it:—"Seigneur Alcibiades, we will slash at each other all you wish."
During this colloquy, Rosette had not failed to faint according to the most approved rules of the pathetic;—I went to a goblet filled with water which contained a great white rose, half withered, and I threw a few drops on her face, which restored her to consciousness at once.
Not knowing just what to do, she vanished in the passage beside the bed and buried her pretty head in the bedclothes, like a bird preparing to sleep.—She had piled cushions and clothes about her so that it would have been very hard to discover what was under the heap; a musical sigh that issued therefrom, now and then, was the only thing that denoted that it was naught but a repentant young sinner, or rather one who was excessively annoyed to be a sinner in intention only, not in fact: which was the unfortunate Rosette's plight.
Monsieur the brother, having no further anxiety concerning his sister, resumed the dialogue, and said to me in the sweetest of tones:—"It is not absolutely indispensable for us to cut each other's throats on the spot; that is an extreme method to which there is always time to resort.—Listen:—The game is not equal between us. You are very young and much less strong than I; if we should fight, I should kill you or maim you at the very least—and I am not anxious either to kill or disfigure you—it would be a great pity; Rosette, who is down there under the clothes and hasn't a word to say, would bear me a grudge for it all her life; for she is as unforgiving and wicked as a tigress when she puts her mind to it, the dear little dove. You, who are her Prince Galaor and receive only sweet words from her, know nothing about that; but it isn't pleasant. Rosette is free, so are you; it seems that you are not irreconcilable enemies; her widowhood is at an end and the thing turns out as well as possible. Marry her; she will not need to go back to her own room to sleep, and in that way, you see, I shall be relieved of the necessity of taking you for a sheath for my sword, which would be agreeable to neither of us;—what do you say?"
I must have made a horrible grimace, for what he proposed was of all things in the world the most impossible of execution by me; I would rather have crawled on all fours on the ceiling like the flies, or have unhooked the sun from the sky without taking anything to stand on, than do what he asked me, and yet the last proposition was incontestably more agreeable than the first.
He seemed surprised that I did not accept with transports of delight, and he repeated what he had said, as if to give me time to reply.
"An alliance with you would be most honorable for me, and I should never have dared to aspire to it; I know that it is an unheard-of good fortune for a young man who has as yet no position or footing in society, and that the most illustrious men would esteem themselves very fortunate;—but I can only persist in my refusal, and as I am free to choose between marriage and a duel, I prefer the duel.—It is a strange choice, and one which few people would make—but it is mine."
At that point Rosette uttered the most heart-broken sigh you can imagine, put her head out from behind the pillow, and instantly drew it back again, like a snail when you strike its horns, when she saw my impassive and determined countenance.
"It is not that I do not love Madame Rosette, I love her very dearly; but I have reasons for not marrying, reasons which you would consider satisfactory if it were possible for me to tell you what they are.—By the way, matters have not gone as far as you might judge from appearances; beyond a kiss or two which a very warm friendship is sufficient to explain and justify, there is nothing between us to which exception can be taken, and your sister's virtue is as pure and unsullied as virtue can be.—I owe her that testimony.—Now, when shall we fight, Monsieur Alcibiades, and where?"
"Here, and instantly!" cried Alcibiades, drunk with rage.
"Can you think of such a thing? before Rosette!"