The Confession of a Child of the Century Part 3

I had reason to hate that woman, she was, so to speak, mingled with the blood of my veins; I cursed her but I dreamed of her. What could I do with a dream? By what effort of the will could I drown memory of flesh and blood? Macbeth having killed Duncan saw that the ocean would not wash his hands clean again; it would not have washed away my wounds. I said to Desgenais: "When I sleep, her head is on my pillow."

My life had been wrapped up in that woman; to doubt her was to doubt all; to deny her, to curse all; to lose her, to renounce all. I no longer went out; the world seemed to be peopled with monsters, with horned deer and crocodiles. To all that was said to distract my mind I replied:

"Yes, that is all very well, but you may rest a.s.sured I shall do nothing of the kind."

I sat in my window and said:

"She will come, I am sure of it, she is coming, she is turning the corner at this moment, I can feel her approach. She can no more live without me than I without her. What shall I say? How shall I receive her?"

Then the thought of her perfidy recurred to me.

"Ah! let her come! I will kill her!"

Since my last letter I had heard nothing of her.

"What is she doing?" I asked myself. "She loves another? Then I will love another also. Whom shall I love?"

While casting about I heard a far distant voice crying:

"Thou, love another? Two beings who love, who embrace, and who are not thou and I! Is such a thing possible? Are you a fool?"

"Coward!" said Desgenais, "when will you forget that woman? Is she such a great loss? Take the first comer and console yourself."

"No," I replied, "it is not such a great loss. Have I not done what I ought? Have I not driven her away from here? What have you to say to that? The rest concerns me; the bull wounded in the arena is at liberty to go to sleep in a corner with the sword of the matador in his shoulder, and die in peace. What can I do, tell me? What do you mean by first comer? You will show me a cloudless sky, trees and houses, men who talk, drink, sing, women who dance and horses that gallop. All that is not life, it is the noise of life. Go, go, leave me in peace."

CHAPTER V

WHEN Desgenais saw that my despondency was incurable, that I would neither listen to any advice nor leave my room, he took the matter seriously. I saw him enter one evening with an expression of gravity on his face; he spoke of my mistress and continued in his tone of sadness, saying all manner of evil of women. While he was speaking I was leaning on my elbow, and, rising in my bed, I listened attentively.

It was one of those somber evenings when the sighing of the wind resembles the moans of a dying man; a storm was brewing, and between the splashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All nature suffers in such moments; the trees writhe in pain and twist their heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are deserted. I was suffering from my wound. But a short time before I had a mistress and a friend. The mistress had deceived me and the friend had stretched me on a bed of pain. I could not clearly distinguish what was pa.s.sing in my head; it seemed to me that I was under the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a dream, ridiculous and childish, the falseness of which had just been disclosed.

Desgenais was seated near the lamp at my side; he was firm and serious, although a smile hovered about his lips. He was a man of heart, but as dry as a pumice-stone. An early experience had made him bald before his time; he knew life and had suffered; but his grief was a cuira.s.s; he was a materialist and he waited for death.

"Octave," he said, "after what has happened to you I see that you believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented; in a word, you believe in what is said here below and not in what is done. That is because you do not reason soundly and it may lead you into great misfortune.

"The poets represent love as the sculptors design beauty, as the musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature. There was, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls; Praxiteles designed them all, one after another; then from all these diverse types of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus.

The first man who created a musical instrument and who gave to that art its rules and its laws, had for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds. Thus the poets who understand life, after having known much of love, more or less transitory, after having felt that sublime exaltation which pa.s.sion can for the moment inspire, deducting from human nature all elements which degrade it, created the mysterious names which through the ages are pa.s.sed from lip to lip: Daphne and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.

"To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is the same thing as to seek on the public squares such a woman as Venus or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.

"Perfection does not exist; to comprehend it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it, the most dangerous of follies.

Open your window, Octave; do you not see the infinite? You try to form some idea of a thing that has no limits, you who were born yesterday and who will die to-morrow? This spectacle of immensity in every country in the world, produces the wildest illusions. Religions are born of it; it was to possess the infinite that Cato cut his throat, that the Christians delivered themselves to lions, the Huguenots to the Catholics; all the people of the earth have stretched out their hands to that immensity and have longed to plunge into it. The fool wishes to possess heaven; the sage admires it, kneels before it, but does not desire it.

"Perfection, my friend, is no more made for us than infinity. We must seek for nothing in it, demand nothing of it, neither love nor beauty, happiness nor virtue; but we must love it if we would be virtuous, if we would attain the greatest happiness of which man is capable.

"Let us suppose you have in your study a picture by Raphael that you consider perfect; let us suppose that upon a close examination you discover in one of the figures a gross defect of design, a limb distorted, or a muscle that belies nature, such as has been discovered, they say, in one of the arms of an antique gladiator; you would experience a feeling of displeasure, but you would not throw that picture in the fire; you would merely say that it is not perfect but that it has qualities that are worthy of admiration.

"There are women whose natural singleness of heart and sincerity are such that they could not have two lovers at the same time. You believed your mistress such a one; that is best, I admit. You have discovered that she has deceived you; does that oblige you to despise and to abuse her, to believe her deserving of your hatred?

"Even if your mistress had never deceived you, even if at this moment she loved none other than you, think, Octave, how far her love would still be from perfection, how human it would be, how small, how restrained by the hypocrisies and conventionalities of the world; remember that another man possessed her before you, that many others will possess her after you.

"Reflect: what drives you at this moment to despair is the idea of perfection in your mistress, the idea that has been shattered. But when you understand that the first idea itself was human, small and restricted, you will see that it is little more than a round in the rotten ladder of human imperfection.

"I think you will readily admit that your mistress has had other admirers and that she will have still others in the future; you will doubtless reply that it matters little, so long as she loved you. But I ask you, since she has had others, what difference does it make whether it was yesterday or two years ago? Since she loves but one at a time what does it matter whether it is during an interval of two years or the course of a single night? Are you a man, Octave? Do you see the leaves falling from the trees, the sun rising and setting? Do you hear the ticking of the clock of time with each pulsation of your heart? Is there, then, such a difference between the love of a year and the love of an hour? I challenge you to answer that, you fool, as you sit there looking out at the infinite through a window not larger than your hand.

"You consider that woman faithful who loves you two years; you must have an almanac that will indicate just how long it takes for an honest man's kisses to dry on a woman's lips. You make a distinction between the woman who sells herself for money and the one who gives herself for pleasure, between the one who gives herself through pride and the one who gives herself through devotion. Among women who are for sale, some cost more than others; among those who are sought for pleasure some inspire more confidence than others; and among those who are worthy of devotion there are some who receive a third of a man's heart, others a quarter, others a half, depending upon her education, her manner, her name, her birth, her beauty, her temperament, according to the occasion, according to what is said, according to the time, according to what you have had to drink for dinner.

"You love women, Octave, because you are young, ardent, because your features are regular and your hair dark and glossy, but you do not, for all that, understand woman.

"Nature, having all, desires the reproduction of beings; everywhere, from the summit of the mountain to the bottom of the sea, life is opposed to death. G.o.d, to conserve the work of his hands, has established this law that the greatest pleasure of all loving beings shall be the act of generation.

"Oh! my friend, when you feel bursting on your lips the vow of eternal love, do not be afraid to yield, but do not confound wine with intoxication; do not think the cup divine because the draft is of celestial flavor; do not be astonished to find it broken and empty in the evening. It is but woman, it is a fragile vase, made of earth by a potter.

"Thank G.o.d for giving you a glimpse of heaven, but do not imagine yourself a bird because you can flap your wings. The birds themselves can not escape the clouds; there is a sphere where air fails them and the lark rising with its song into the morning fog, sometimes falls back dead in the field.

"Take love as a sober man takes wine; do not become a drunkard. If your mistress is sincere and faithful, love her for that; but if she is not, if she is merely young and beautiful, love her for that; if she is agreeable and spirituelle, love her for that; if she is none of these things but merely loves you, love her for that. Love does not come to us every day.

"Do not tear your hair and stab yourself because you have a rival. You say that your mistress deceives you for another; it is your pride that suffers; but change the words, say that it is for you that she deceives him, and behold you are happy.

"Do not make a rule of conduct and do not say that you wish to be loved exclusively, for in saying that, as you are a man and inconstant yourself, you are forced to add tacitly: 'As far as possible.'

"Take time as it comes, the wind as it blows, woman as she is. The Spaniards first, among women, love faithfully; their heart is sincere and violent, but they wear a dagger just above it. Italian women are lascivious. The English are exalted and melancholy, cold and unnatural.

The German women are tender and sweet, but colorless and monotonous. The French are spirituelle, elegant, and voluptuous, but they lie like demons.

"Above all, do not accuse women of being what they are; we have made them thus, undoing the work of nature.

"Nature, who thinks of everything, made the virgin for love; but with her first child her bosom loses its form, her beauty its freshness. Woman is made for motherhood. Man would perhaps abandon her, disgusted by the loss of beauty; but his child clings to him and weeps. Behold the family, the human law; everything that departs from this law is monstrous.

"Civilization thwarts the ends of nature. In our cities, according to our customs, the virgin destined by nature for the open air, made to bask in the sunlight, to admire the nude wrestlers, as in Lacedemonia, to choose, and to love, is shut up in close confinement and bolted in; yet she hides romance under her cross; pale and idle she fades away and loses in the silence of the nights that beauty that stifles her and which has need of the open air. Then she is suddenly taken from this solitude, knowing nothing, loving nothing, desiring everything; an old woman instructs her, a mysterious word is whispered in her ear, and she is thrown into the arms of a stranger. There you have marriage--that is to say, the civilized family. A child is born. This poor creature has lost her beauty and she has never loved. The child is brought to her with the words: 'You are a mother.' She replies: 'I am not a mother; take that child to some woman who can nurse it. I can not.' Her husband tells her that she is right, that her child would be disgusted with her. She receives careful attention and is soon cured of the disease of maternity. A month later she may be seen at the Tuileries, at the ball, at the opera: her child is at Chaillot, at Auxerre; her husband with another woman. Then young men speak to her of love, of devotion, of sympathy, of all that is in the heart. She takes one, draws him to her bosom; he dishonors her and returns to the Bourse. She cries all night, but discovers that tears make her eyes red. She takes a consoler, for the loss of whom another consoles her; thus up to the age of thirty or more. Then, blase and corrupted, with no human sentiment, not even disgust, she meets a fine youth with raven locks, ardent eye and hopeful heart; she recalls her own youth, she remembers what she has suffered, and telling him the story of her life, she teaches him to shun love.

"That is woman as we have made her; such are your mistresses. But you say they are women and there is something good in them!

"But if your character is formed, if you are truly a man, sure of yourself and confident of your strength, you may taste of life without fear and without reserve; you may be sad or joyous, deceived or respected; but be sure you are loved, for what matters the rest?

"If you are mediocre and ordinary, I advise you to consider your course very carefully before deciding, but do not expect too much of your mistress.

"If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant, and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers. The sap of your life will dissipate into the formation of a useless bark; all your actions will be as colorless as the leaves of the willow; you will have no tears to water you, but those from your own eyes, to nourish you, no heart but your own.

"But if you are of exalted nature, believing in dreams and wishing to realize them, I say to you plainly. Love does not exist.

"For to love is to give body and soul, or, better, it is to make a single being of two; it is to walk in the sunlight, in the open air through the boundless prairies with a body having four arms, two heads and two hearts. Love is faith, it is the religion of earthly happiness, it is a luminous triangle suspended in the temple of the world. To love is to walk freely through that temple and to have at your side a being capable of understanding why a thought, a word, a flower makes you pause and raise your eyes to that celestial triangle. To exercise the n.o.ble faculties of man is a great good, and that is why genius is glorious; but to double those faculties, to place a heart and an intelligence upon a heart and an intelligence--that is supreme happiness. G.o.d has nothing better for man; that is why love is better than genius. But tell me, is that the love of our women? No, no, it must be admitted. Love, for them, is another thing; it is to go out veiled, to write in secret, to make trembling advances, to heave chaste sighs under a starched and unnatural robe, then to draw bolts and throw it aside, to humiliate a rival, to deceive a husband, to render a lover desolate; to love, for our women, is to play at lying, as children play at hide and seek, the hideous debauchee of a heart, worse than all the lubricity of the Romans, or the Saturnalia of Priapus; b.a.s.t.a.r.d parody of vice itself as well as of virtue; loathsome comedy where all is whispering and oblique glances, where all is small, elegant and deformed like the porcelain monsters brought from China; lamentable derision of all that is beautiful and ugly, divine and infernal; a shadow without a body, a skeleton of all that G.o.d has made."

Thus spoke Desgenais; and the shadows of night began to fall.

CHAPTER VI