  Mme. Bourjot had married in order that two important business houses should be united; for the sake of amalgamating various interests she had been wedded to a man whom she did not know, and at the end of a week of married life she had felt all the contempt that a wife can possibly feel for a husband. It was not that she had expected anything very ideal, nor that she had looked on marriage as a romantic and imaginative girl so often does. She was remarkably intelligent herself, and seriously inclined, her mind had been formed and nurtured by reading, study, and acquirements which were almost more suitable for a man. All that she asked from the companion of her life was that he should be intellectual and intelligent, a being in whom she could place all her ambitions and her pride as a married woman, a man with a brilliant future before him, capable of winning for himself one of those immense fortunes to which money nowadays leads, and who should prove himself able to leap over the gaps of modern society to a high place in the Ministry, the Public Works, or the Exchequer. All her castles in the air crumbled away with this husband, whom she found day by day more and more hopelessly shallow, more and more incapable, devoid of all that should have been in him, and which was in her instead, more narrow-minded, more mean and petty as time went on, and all this mingled with and contradicted by all the violences and weaknesses of a childish disposition. It was her pride that had preserved Mme. Bourjot from adultery, a pride which, it may be said, was aided by circumstances. When she was young, Mme. Bourjot, who was of a spare build and southern type, had features which were too pronounced to be pleasing or beautiful. When she was about thirty-four she began to get rather more plump, and it seemed then that another woman had evolved from the one she had been. Her features, though still strongly pronounced, became softer and more pleasing; the hardness of her expression appeared to have melted away, and her whole face smiled. It was one of those autumn beauties such as age brings to certain women, making one wish to have seen them as they were at twenty; a beauty which makes one imagine for them a youthfulness they never had. As a matter of fact, then, so far Mme. Bourjot had not run any great danger, nor had she known any very great temptations. The society, which on account of her tastes she had chosen, her surroundings, the men who frequented her salon and whom she met elsewhere, had scarcely made it necessary for her to stand seriously on the defensive. They were, for the most part, academicians, savants, elderly literary men, and politicians, all of them unassuming and calm, men who seemed old, some of them from stirring up the past and the others the present. Satisfied with very little, they were happy with a mere nothing—the presence of a woman, a flattering speech, or the expression of eyes that were drinking in their words. Accustomed to their academic adoration, Mme. Bourjot had, without much risk, allowed it free scope and had treated it with jests like an Egeria: it had been a flame which did not scorch, and with which she had been able to play. But the time of maturity arrived for Mme. Bourjot. A great transformation in her face and figure took place. Tormented, as it were, by health which was too robust and an excess of vitality, she seemed to lose the strength morally which she was gaining physically. She had a great admiration for her past, and she felt now that she was less strong-minded, and that there was less assurance in her pride than formerly. It was just at this time that Henri Mauperin had made his appearance in her drawing-room. He seemed to her young, intelligent, serious, and thorough, equipped for the victories of life with all those dispassionate and unwavering qualities that she had dreamed before her marriage of finding in a husband. Henri had seized the situation at a glance, and, divining his own chances, he made his plans and swooped down on this woman as his prey. He began to make love to her, and this woman, who had a husband and daughter, who had been a faithful wife for twenty years, and who held a high position in Parisian society, scarcely waited for him to tempt her. She yielded to him at their first interview, conducting herself like a mere cocotte. Her love became a mad passion with her, as it so frequently does with women of her age, and Henri proved himself a genius in the art of attaching her to himself and of chaining her, as it were, to her sin. He never betrayed himself, and never for an instant allowed her to see a sign of the weariness, the indifference, or the contempt that a man feels after a too easy conquest, or of that sort of disgust with which certain situations of a woman in love inspire him. He was always affectionate, and always appeared to be deeply moved. He had for Mme. Bourjot those transports of love and jealousy, all those scruples, little attentions, and thoughtfulness which a woman, after a certain age, no longer expects from her lover. He treated her as if she were a young girl, and begged her to give him a ring which she always wore, and which had been one of her confirmation presents. He put up with all the childishness and coquetry which was so ridiculous in the passion of this mother of a family, and he encouraged it all without a sign of impatience on his face or a shade of mockery in his voice. At the same time he made himself entirely master of her, accustoming her to be docile and obedient to him, revealing to her such passionate love that Mme. Bourjot was both grateful to him and proud of her victory over this apparently cold and reserved young man. When he was thus completely master of her, Henri worked her up still more by impressing her with the danger of their meetings and the risks there were in their liaison, while by all the emotions of a criminal passion he excited her imagination to such a pitch of fear that her love increased with the very thought of all she had to lose. She finally reached that stage when she only lived through him and for him, by his presence, his thoughts, his future, his portrait, all that remained to her of him after she had seen him. Before leaving him she would stroke his hair with her hands and then put her gloves on quickly. And all day afterward, when she was at home again with her husband and her daughter, she would put the palms of her hands, which she had not washed since, to her face and inhale the perfume of her lover's hair. This soirÉe, and this treason and rupture at the end of a year, completely crushed Mme. Bourjot. She felt at first as if she had received a blow, and her life seemed to be ebbing away through the wound. She fancied she was really dying, and there was a certain sweetness in this thought. The following day she hoped Henri would come. She was vanquished and quite prepared to beg his pardon, to tell him that she had been in the wrong, to beg him to forgive her, to entreat him to be kind to her, and to allow her to gather up the crumbs of his love. She waited a week, but Henri did not come. She asked him for an interview that he might return her letters, and he sent them to her. She wrote and begged to see him for the last time that she might bid him farewell. Henri did not answer her letter, but, through his friends and through the newspaper and society gossip, he contrived to let Mme. Bourjot hear the rumour of an action that had been taken against him for one of his articles on the misery of the poor. For a whole week he managed to keep her mind occupied with the ideas of police and police courts, prison, and all that the dramatic imagination of a woman pictures to itself as the consequence of a lawsuit. When the Attorney-General assured Mme. Bourjot that the action would not be taken, she felt quite a coward after all the terror she had gone through, and weak and helpless from emotion, she could not endure any more, and so wrote in desperation to Henri: "To-morrow at two o'clock. If you are not there I shall wait on the staircase. I shall sit down on one of the stairs till you come." |
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