Yes, it was an old lady, an old lady whom he did not recognize, and who, while she smiled, seemed ready to weep.
He could not abstain from murmuring:
"It is you, Lise?"
She replied:
"Yes, it is I; it is I, indeed. You would not have known me, isn"t that so? I have had so much sorrow--so much sorrow. Sorrow has consumed my life. Look at me now--or rather don"t look at me! But how handsome you have kept--and young! If I had by chance met you in the street, I would have cried, "Jaquelet!" Now sit down and let us, first of all, have a chat. And then I"ll show you my daughter, my grown-up daughter. You"ll see how she resembles me--or rather how I resemble her--no, it is not quite that: she is just like the "me" of former days--you shall see! But I wanted to be alone with you first. I feared that there would be some emotion on my side, at the first moment. Now it is all over; it is past. Pray be seated, my friend."
He sat down beside her, holding her hand; but he did not know what to say; he did not know this woman--it seemed to him that he had never seen her before. What had he come to do in this house? Of what could he speak? Of the long-ago? What was there in common between him and her? He could no longer recall anything to mind in the presence of this grandmotherly face. He could no longer recall to mind all the nice, tender things so sweet, so bitter, that had a.s.sailed his heart, some time since, when he thought of the other, of little Lise, of the dainty Cinder-Flower. What then had become of her, the former one, the one he had loved? that woman of far-off dreams, the blonde with gray eyes, the young one who used to call him "Jaquelet" so prettily?
They remained side by side, motionless, both constrained, troubled, profoundly ill at ease.
As they only talked in commonplace phrases, broken and slow, she rose up, and pressed the b.u.t.ton of the bell.
"I am going to call Renee," she said.
There was a tap at the door, then the rustle of a dress; next, a young voice exclaimed:
"Here I am, mamma!"
Lormerin remained scared, as if at the sight of an apparition.
He stammered:
"Good-day, Mademoiselle."
Then, turning towards the mother:
"Oh! it is you!..."
In fact, it was she, she whom he had known in bygone days, the Lise who had vanished and come back! In her he found the woman he had won twenty-five years before. This one was even younger still, fresher, more childlike.
He felt a wild desire to open his arms, to clasp her to his heart again, murmuring in her ear:
"Good-day, Lison!"
A man-servant announced:
"Dinner is ready, Madame."
And they proceeded towards the dining-room.
What pa.s.sed at this dinner? What did they say to him, and what could he say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange dreams which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a fixed idea in his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea:
"Which is the real one?"
The mother smiled, repeating over and over again:
"Do you remember?" And it was in the bright eye of the young girl that he found again his memories of the past. Twenty times he opened his mouth to say to her: "Do you remember, Lison?--" forgetting this white-haired lady who was regarding him with looks of tenderness.
And yet there were moments when he no longer felt sure, when he lost his head. He could see that the woman of to-day was not exactly the woman of long ago. The other one, the former one, had in her voice, in her glance, in her entire being, something which he did not find again. And he made prodigious efforts of mind to recall his lady love, to seize again what had escaped from her to him, what this resuscitated one did not possess.
The Baronne said:
"You have lost your old sprightliness, my poor friend."
He murmured:
"There are many other things that I have lost!"
But in his heart touched with emotion, he felt his old love springing to life once more, like an awakened wild beast ready to bite him.
The young girl went on chattering, and every now and then some familiar phrase of her mother which she had borrowed, a certain style of speaking and thinking, that resemblance of mind and manner which people acquire by living together, shook Lormerin from head to foot.
All these things penetrated him, making the reopened wound of his pa.s.sion bleed anew.
He got away early, and took a turn along the boulevard. But the image of this young girl pursued him, haunted him, quickened his heart, inflamed his blood. Apart from the two women, he now saw only one, a young one, the one of former days returned, and he loved her as he had loved her in bygone years. He loved her with greater ardor, after an interval of twenty-five years.
He went home to reflect on this strange and terrible thing, and to think on what he should do.
But, as he was pa.s.sing, with a wax candle in his hand, before the gla.s.s, the large gla.s.s in which he had contemplated himself and admired himself before he started, he saw reflected there an elderly, gray-haired man; and suddenly he recollected what he had been in olden days, in the days of little Lise. He saw himself charming and handsome, as he had been when he was loved! Then, drawing the light nearer, he looked at himself more closely, as one inspects a strange thing with a magnifying gla.s.s, tracing the wrinkles, discovering those frightful ravages, which he had not perceived till now.
And he sat down, crushed at the sight of himself, at the sight of his lamentable image, murmuring:
"All over, Lormerin!"
LETTER FOUND ON A DROWNED MAN
You ask me, madame, whether I am laughing at you? You cannot believe that a man has never been smitten with love. Well, no, I have never loved, never!
What is the cause of this? I really cannot tell. Never have I been under the influence of that sort of intoxication of the heart which we call love! Never have I lived in that dream, in that exaltation, in that state of madness into which the image of a woman casts us. I have never been pursued, haunted, roused to fever-heat, lifted up to Paradise by the thought of meeting, or by the possession of, a being who had suddenly become for me more desirable than any good fortune, more beautiful than any other creature, more important than the whole world! I have never wept, I have never suffered, on account of any of you. I have not pa.s.sed my nights thinking of one woman without closing my eyes. I have no experience of waking up with the thought and the memory of her shedding their illumination on me. I have never known the wild desperation of hope when she was about to come, or the divine sadness of regret when she parted with me, leaving behind her in the room a delicate odor of violet powder and flesh.
I have never been in love.
I, too, have often asked myself why is this. And truly I can scarcely tell. Nevertheless, I have found some reasons for it; but they are of a metaphysical character, and perhaps you will not be able to appreciate them.
I suppose I sit too much in judgment on women to submit much to their fascination. I ask you to forgive me for this remark. I am going to explain what I mean. In every creature there is a moral being and a physical being. In order to love, it would be necessary for me to find a harmony between these two beings which I have never found. One has always too great a predominance over the other, sometimes the moral, sometimes the physical.
The intellect which we have a right to require in a woman, in order to love her, is not the same as virile intellect. It is more and it is less. A woman must have a mind open, delicate, sensitive, refined, impressionable. She has no need of either power or initiative in thought, but she must have kindness, elegance, tenderness, coquetry, and that faculty of a.s.similation which, in a little while, raises her to an equality with him who shared her life. Her greatest quality must be tact, that subtle sense which is to the mind what touch is to the body. It reveals to her a thousand little things, contours, angles, and forms in the intellectual order.
Very frequently pretty women have not intellect to correspond with their personal charms. Now the slightest lack of harmony strikes me and pains me at the first glance. In friendship, this is not of importance. Friendship is a compact in which one fairly divides defects and merits. We may judge of friends, whether man or woman, take into account the good they possess, neglect the evil that is in them, and appreciate their value exactly, while giving ourselves up to an intimate sympathy of a deep and fascinating character.
In order to love, one must be blind, surrender oneself absolutely, see nothing, reason on nothing, understand nothing. One must adorn the weakness as well as the beauty of the beloved object, renounce all judgment, all reflection, all perspicacity.
I am incapable of such blindness, and rebel against a seductiveness not founded on reason. This is not all. I have such a high and subtle idea of harmony, that nothing can ever realize my ideal. But you will call me a madman. Listen to me. A woman, in my opinion, may have an exquisite soul and a charming body, without that body and that soul being in perfect accord with one another. I mean that persons who have noses made in a certain shape are not to be expected to think in a certain fashion. The fat have no right to make use of the same words and phrases as the thin. You, who have blue eyes, madame, cannot look at life, and judge of things and events as if you had black eyes. The shades of your eyes should correspond, by a sort of fatality, with the shades of your thought. In perceiving these things I have the scent of a bloodhound. Laugh if you like, but it is so.