Artist and Model Part 4

Then, moving toward the group of hunters, who had not dismounted, she left the painter standing there, and asking himself uneasily if he had not a second time displeased the woman whom he was growing more infatuated about hour by hour.

A few minutes later the blasts on the horns were again heard, the hunters went off on their way toward the Wandau, and the princess, having remounted with the aid of one of the servants, gave the signal for a start to be made. She wished to be back at the chateau by breakfast-time.

Paul was the only male guest of the prince who had not joined the hunt, and he reckoned on the fact to afford the chance of an explanation between himself and Lise; but in the course of the hour that was spent on the return journey to Pampeln he could not get a moment alone with the princess. She never was away from the side of the carriages in which her mother and friends were.

Vexed and desperate, wondering whether it was that Lise Olsdorf dreaded him or that she was merely a coquette and laughing at him, Paul Meyrin determined to force her hand. Fortune was about to give him a chance of doing so sooner than he had dared to hope--that very day indeed.

In the evening, about six o'clock, when the few guests remaining at the chateau were going to their rooms to dress for dinner, the artist saw the princess crossing the lawn and going toward one of the alleys of the park.

Within five minutes, having gone a roundabout way, Paul, as if he had come from the outskirts of the park, met the young woman face to face.

Lise was walking with lowered head, pushing aside idly with the end of her parasol the dead leaves blown from the oaks and cedars, whose great branches met overhead in a thick arch, which made the spot dim and mysterious.

At the sound of the painter's footsteps she raised her eyes.

"You?" she exclaimed, in an ironical voice. "So you are as good a runner as you are a horseman."

"I don't understand you," said Paul, bowing.

"Because you don't want to. A few moments ago, as I was coming down the steps from the house, I saw you at one of the windows of the fencing-room. You must have been very fleet, then, to be here as soon as I am, coming direct from the chateau, while you seem to be coming from the other side of the park."

Finding his stratagem exposed, Paul Meyrin could not but blush slightly.

He quickly recovered his composure, and said frankly:

"Well then, yes, you are right, madame. Chance is not to be thanked for this meeting. For some days now I have been trying in vain to speak to you. You seemed to avoid me; and I have dared, therefore, to join you here and now."

After hesitating a moment or two, and seeming about to turn and retrace her steps, the daughter of the Countess Barineff, with an odd, resolute gesture, walked onward.

Paul walked beside her.

The last rays of the sun scarcely pierced the thick wall of verdure formed by the great trees of the avenue; the air was warm, charged with electricity, and heavy with the balsamic odors of the Norwegian pine-trees. From the woods could only be heard the rustle of a breeze, and the first timid notes, at long intervals, of the song-birds of the evening. Under these shades, in the perfumed air, a mysterious harmony reigned, a thrilling calm, of which nature alone has the secret.

"What have you to say to me that is so interesting?" said the princess, after a momentary silence.

"I have a favor to ask of you."

"A favor? What?"

"That you will sit to me for a few hours."

Whether or not this was the proposal she had expected, the mistress of Pampeln trembled slightly.

As the princess did not reply, the painter added:

"You would not have me paint a masterpiece, then?"

The artist had spoken the words in so fervid and exalted a tone, that the princess, halting abruptly, and plunging as it were her eyes into Paul's, said, in a firm, vibrating voice:

"You love me, Monsieur Meyrin. That is what your request poorly hides."

"Madame."

"Let me speak. Neither of us is timid or fearful of calling things by their real name; neither of us is a coward, ready to fly before danger.

You love me, or think you do; and you fancy that in the sittings you ask of me the chance would surely offer to speak to me of your love. But what if I do not love you?--if I look upon your protestations and declarations as outrages, and have you expelled from the house by my servants, what will you do, what will you say, what will become of you?

Do you still hold by this masterpiece, which I say is a mere pretext?"

Lise Olsdorf, speaking thus, was superb in her energy. Paul looked at her with admiration. She had never seemed more beautiful or more desirable.

"You do not answer," she went on. "So, then, I am not wrong."

"You are wrong, madame--wholly wrong. It is true that I love you madly, but my love is one of the feverish pa.s.sions that have their birth in the hearts alone of artists who are adorers of the beautiful. I feel within me a medley of pa.s.sions. You are not for the man who loves merely the woman desired; you are also for the painter, the model he has dreamed of--the marvel of grace and beauty that will inspire him. You are not simply the woman who says 'Love;' you are the ideal as well that says 'Glory.' If it were otherwise, should I have had the courage to follow you, should I dare to speak as I am speaking, to take your hand and tell you that with my soul, with my senses, with my imagination--I love you--I love you?"

Paul had seized her hands and was covering them with kisses.

Then there happened a strange and fatal thing between the two beings drawn one to the other by every pa.s.sion. After tearing away her hands from his grasp, Lise Olsdorf, falling back a pace, grew deathly pale and staggered. Her eyes gleamed, her lips were parted, a guttural cry, pa.s.sionate and almost savage, broke from them, and she fell into the arms of Paul, who had sprung forward to support her.

With a savage movement he crushed her in his arms, gluing his lips to hers.

Under the gloomy shades of the great alleys of Pampeln was no longer an irreproachable wife, or a Princess Olsdorf proud of her name. There was only a yielding woman conquered by desires until then unsatiated.

The other was the conqueror. The beast killed the soul.

CHAPTER IV.

GENERAL PODOI.

If I were a writer of the naturalistic school--that is, if I were without care for modesty or the choice of words--I should need here to summon physiology to my aid to paint in all its brutality the love that the Princess Olsdorf and Paul Meyrin felt for each other; and the lines that I should devote to this study, and the scenes that it would involve, would give their distinctive note to the book. They would probably make it successful, thanks to the unhealthy curiosity by which even the freshest readers are tainted nowadays, for we live in a strange age, when cynicism reigns alike in letters, art, business, and politics.

Cynicism is indeed the only sovereign that our pseudo-republic is willing to accept.

In truth, license has never been so unbridled; never has mediocrity gone so far, impudence mounted so high, or indifferent work, dramatic and literary, had so much success, if cleverly launched. Our country, formerly known for its gallantry and good taste, has become the kingdom of what is common and vulgar.

This new state of things is due to many causes--the _abandon_ of religion, the scandalous rapidity with which fortunes have been won, the eager desire to enjoy everything, and also--it is needful that one should dare to say it--the invasion of those numberless Southerners who have carried everything with a high hand, and brought with them into the society they have gained a footing in, the vanity, the extravagance, and the boastfulness inherent in their natures. A Gascon or a Provencal may, of course, be an upright, worthy, and intelligent man, a devoted friend--I have known many with these qualities, but too often they are lacking. One might suppose they were incompatible with the terrible accent of these men, their epileptic gestures, their rage for loud talking, for calling people by their names, and for talking of their own affairs to everybody. And if the Southerner is a Jew, too, the case is worse than ever, for then no place or reward is safe from his greed.

To put against the few men of wit, the occasional writers of the first order, the two or three poets that the South has given us, what noisy, insolent, troublesome _parvenus_ Paris owes to it! It would seem that everything is these people's, of right. They slip in everywhere, shamelessly, jostling one another, greedy of place and honor rather than avaricious. Such of them as are not poets or musicians are hair-dressers, or croupiers at gambling-tables, or statesmen.

This calamitous invasion has come upon us chiefly from the right bank of the Garonne, and the sea-coast; for further inland, toward the mountainous country, these Southerners are of another kind--almost a different race. First they have a less marked accent, and, second, some indisputable qualities are theirs.

One cla.s.s of these new-comers are of no particular country. They come from everywhere--from South America as well as from the banks of the Nile; from the Gulf of Mexico as well as from the far East; and the sore that eats into our very marrow is owing to the enthusiastic welcome Paris gives to their high-sounding names and suspicious fortunes.

Lacking all the good points of the Southerners, whose faults usually spring from exuberant vigor and fancifulness, these foreigners take Paris for a kind of modern Capua. They are the dealers in commonplace, the readers of obscene works, the originators of every debauchery.

The result is seen in voice and gesture, in a freedom of bearing and a frivolity which, in great part, are the cause of our social fall, and, as a consequence, of the success achieved by erotic books, written in a language scarcely intelligible, and by unhealthy volumes which, stinking at one and the same time of the sewer and of opoponax, might have been printed at Lesbos.

Now, as I have no ambition to write one of these books, I will only say what is needful to make myself understood of the pa.s.sion which had brought Lise Olsdorf and Paul Meyrin together. What I wish to sketch is the moral depths into which a woman quickly sinks when, yielding to her animal desires alone, she throws herself blindly and recklessly into the arms of a man who is of neither her world, race, nor education.

Love, in the pure acceptation of the word, even when it is not legitimate, must occasion an exchange of lofty sentiments, sacrifices, and devotion between those who feel it for one another. It outlives all trials; in the pride of its abnegation it will provoke them on occasion.