"You know Miss Bell has invited me to spend a month with her at Fiesole.
I have accepted; I am going."
Less astonished than discontented, he asked her with whom she was going.
At once she answered:
"With Madame Marmet."
There was no objection to make. Madame Marmet was a proper companion, and it was appropriate for her to visit Italy, where her husband had made some excavations. He asked only:
"Have you invited her? When are you going?"
"Next week."
He had the wisdom not to make any objection, judging that opposition would only make her capriciousness firmer, and fearing to give impetus to that foolish idea. He said:
"Surely, to travel is an agreeable pastime. I thought that we might in the spring visit the Caucasus and Turkestan. There is an interesting country. General Annenkoff will place at our disposal carriages, trains, and everything else on his railway. He is a friend of mine; he is quite charmed with you. He will provide us with an escort of Cossacks."
He persisted in trying to flatter her vanity, unable to realize that her mind was not worldly. She replied, negligently, that it might be a pleasant trip. Then he praised the mountains, the ancient cities, the bazaars, the costumes, the armor.
He added:
"We shall take some friends with us--Princess Seniavine, General Lariviere, perhaps Vence or Le Menil."
She replied, with a little dry laugh, that they had time to select their guests.
He became attentive to her wants.
"You are not eating. You will injure your health."
Without yet believing in this prompt departure, he felt some anxiety about it. Each had regained freedom, but he did not like to be alone. He felt that he was himself only when his wife was there. And then, he had decided to give two or three political dinners during the session. He saw his party growing. This was the moment to a.s.sert himself, to make a dazzling show. He said, mysteriously:
"Something might happen requiring the aid of all our friends. You have not followed the march of events, Therese?"
"No, my dear."
"I am sorry. You have judgment, liberality of mind. If you had followed the march of events you would have been struck by the current that is leading the country back to moderate opinions. The country is tired of exaggerations. It rejects the men compromised by radical politics and religious persecution. Some day or other it will be necessary to make over a Casimir-Perier ministry with other men, and that day--"
He stopped: really she listened too inattentively.
She was thinking, sad and disenchanted. It seemed to her that the pretty woman, who, among the warm shadows of a closed room, placed her bare feet in the fur of the brown bear rug, and to whom her lover gave kisses while she twisted her hair in front of a gla.s.s, was not herself, was not even a woman that she knew well, or that she desired to know, but a person whose affairs were of no interest to her. A pin badly set in her hair, one of the pins from the Bohemian gla.s.s cup, fell on her neck. She shivered.
"Yet we really must give three or four dinners to our good political friends," said M. Martin-Belleme. "We shall invite some of the ancient radicals to meet the people of our circle. It will be well to find some pretty women. We might invite Madame Berard de la Malle; there has been no gossip about her for two years. What do you think of it?"
"But, my dear, since I am to go next week--"
This filled him with consternation.
They went, both silent and moody, into the drawing-room, where Paul Vence was waiting. He often came in the evening.
She extended her hand to him.
"I am very glad to see you. I am going out of town. Paris is cold and bleak. This weather tires and saddens me. I am going to Florence, for six weeks, to visit Miss Bell."
M. Martin-Belleme then lifted his eyes to heaven.
Vence asked whether she had been in Italy often.
"Three times; but I saw nothing. This time I wish to see, to throw myself into things. From Florence I shall take walks into Tuscany, into Umbria. And, finally, I shall go to Venice."
"You will do well. Venice suggests the peace of the Sabbath-day in the grand week of creative and divine Italy."
"Your friend Dechartre talked very prettily to me of Venice, of the atmosphere of Venice, which sows pearls."
"Yes, at Venice the sky is a colorist. Florence inspires the mind. An old author has said: "The sky of Florence is light and subtle, and feeds the beautiful ideas of men." I have lived delicious days in Tuscany. I wish I could live them again."
"Come and see me there."
He sighed.
The newspaper, books, and his daily work prevented him.
M. Martin-Belleme said everyone should bow before such reasons, and that one was too happy to read the articles and the fine books written by M.
Paul Vence to have any wish to take him from his work.
"Oh, my books! One never says in a book what one wishes to say. It is impossible to express one"s self. I know how to talk with my pen as well as any other person; but, after all, to talk or to write, what futile occupations! How wretchedly inadequate are the little signs which form syllables, words, and phrases. What becomes of the idea, the beautiful idea, which these miserable hieroglyphics hide? What does the reader make of my writing? A series of false sense, of counter sense, and of nonsense. To read, to hear, is to translate. There are beautiful translations, perhaps. There are no faithful translations. Why should I care for the admiration which they give to my books, since it is what they themselves see in them that they admire? Every reader subst.i.tutes his visions in the place of ours. We furnish him with the means to quicken his imagination. It is a horrible thing to be a cause of such exercises. It is an infamous profession."
"You are jesting," said M. Martin-Belleme.
"I do not think so," said Therese. "He recognizes that one mind is impenetrable to another mind, and he suffers from this. He feels that he is alone when he is thinking, alone when he is writing. Whatever one may do, one is always alone in the world. That is what he wishes to say. He is right. You may always explain: you never are understood."
"There are signs--" said Paul Vence.
"Don"t you think, Monsieur Vence, that signs also are a form of hieroglyphics? Give me news of Monsieur Choulette. I do not see him any more."
Vence replied that Choulette was very busy in forming the Third Order of Saint Francis.
"The idea, Madame, came to him in a marvellous fashion one day when he had gone to call on his Maria in the street where she lives, behind the public hospital--a street always damp, the houses on which are tottering. You must know that he considers Maria the saint and martyr who is responsible for the sins of the people.
"He pulled the bell-rope, made greasy by two centuries of visitors.
Either because the martyr was at the wine-shop, where she is familiarly known, or because she was busy in her room, she did not open the door.
Choulette rang for a long time, and so violently that the bellrope remained in his hand. Skilful at understanding symbols and the hidden meaning of things, he understood at once that this rope had not been detached without the permission of spiritual powers. He made of it a belt, and realized that he had been chosen to lead back into its primitive purity the Third Order of Saint Francis. He renounced the beauty of women, the delights of poetry, the brightness of glory, and studied the life and the doctrine of Saint Francis. However, he has sold to his editor a book ent.i.tled "Les Blandices", which contains, he says, the description of all sorts of loves. He flatters himself that in it he has shown himself a criminal with some elegance. But far from harming his mystic undertakings, this book favors them in this sense, that, corrected by his later work, he will become honest and exemplary; and the gold that he has received in payment, which would not have been paid to him for a more chaste volume, will serve for a pilgrimage to a.s.sisi."
Madame Martin asked how much of this story was really true. Vence replied that she must not try to learn.
He confessed that he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal and Judaic sense.
He affirmed that at least Choulette was publishing Les Blandices, and desired to visit the cell and the grave of St. Francis.