Rene gave her a brotherly kiss on the forehead and said:
"Has not Lucien come yet?"
"Not yet," she replied, in a clear, soft voice; "you know he is almost always rather late."
At that moment the bell rang, and a tall man was shown in. He was dark, with a thick beard, and looked like a modern Hercules. We were introduced to each other; his name was Lucien Delabarre.
Rene and he shook hands in a most friendly manner, and then we went to dinner.
It was a most enjoyable meal, without the least constraint. My old friend spoke with me constantly, in the old familiar cordial manner, just as he used to do. It was: "You know, old fellow!"--"I say, old fellow!"--"Just listen a moment, old fellow!" Suddenly he exclaimed:
"You don"t know how glad I am to see you again; it takes me back to old times."
I looked at his wife and the other man. Their att.i.tude was perfectly correct, though I fancied once or twice that they exchanged a rapid and furtive look.
As soon as dinner was over Rene turned to his wife, and said:
"My dear, I have just met Pierre again, and I am going to carry him off for a walk and a chat along the boulevards to remind us of old times. I am leaving you in very good company."
The young woman smiled, and said to me, as she shook hands with me:
"Don"t keep him too long."
As we went along, arm-in-arm, I could not help saying to him, for I was determined to know how matters stood:
"I say, what has happened? Do tell me!"
He, however, interrupted me roughly, and answered like a man who has been disturbed without any reason.
"Just look here, old fellow leave one alone with your questions."
Then he added, half aloud, as if talking to himself:
"After all, it would have been too stupid to have let oneself go to pot like that."
I did not press him. We walked on quickly and began to talk. All of a sudden he whispered in my ear:
"I say, suppose we go and have a bottle of "fizz" with some girls! Eh?"
I could not prevent myself from laughing heartily.
"Just as you like; come along, let us go."
ALWAYS LOCK THE DOOR!
The four gla.s.ses which were standing in front of the diners were now still nearly half full, which is a sign, as a general rule, that the guests are quite so. They were beginning to speak without waiting for an answer; no one took any notice of anything except what was going on inside him, either in his mind or stomach; voices grew louder, gestures more animated, eyes brighter.
It was a bachelors" dinner of confirmed old bachelors. They had inst.i.tuted this regular banquet twenty years before, christening it "The Celibate," and at the time there were fourteen of them, all fully determined never to marry. Now there were only four of them left; three were dead and the other seven were married.
These four stuck firmly to it, and, as far as lay in their power, they scrupulously observed the rules which had been laid down at the beginning of their curious a.s.sociation. They had sworn, hand-in-hand, to turn aside every woman they could from the right path, and their friends" wives for choice, and more especially those of their most intimate friends. For this reason, as soon as any of them left the society, in order to set up in domestic life for himself, he took care to quarrel definitely with all his former companions.
Besides this, they were pledged at every dinner to relate most minutely their last adventures, which had given rise to this familiar phrase amongst them:
"To lie like an old bachelor."
They professed, moreover, the most profound contempt for woman whom they talked of as an animal made solely for their pleasure. Every moment they quoted Schopenhauer, who was their G.o.d, and his well-known essay "On Women;" they wished that harems and towers might be reintroduced, and had the ancient maxim: "Mulier, perpetuus infans,"[10] woven into their table-linen, and below it, the line of Alfred de Vigny"s:
_La femme, enfant malade et douze fois impure._[11]
So that by dint of despising women they lived only for them, while all their efforts and all their desires were directed towards them.
Those of them who had married called them old fops, made fun of them, and--feared them.
When they began to feel the exhilarating effects of the champagne, this was the moment that their old bachelor experiences began.
On the day in question, these old fellows, for they were old by this time, and the older they got the more extraordinary _good fortune_ in the way of love affairs they had to relate, were quite inexhaustible.
For the last month, to hear them, each of them had played the gallant with at least one woman a day; and what women! the youngest, the n.o.blest, the richest, and the most beautiful!
After they had finished their tales, one of them, he who having spoken first had been obliged to listen to all the others, rose and said:
"Now that we have finished drawing the long-bow, I should like to tell you, not my last, but my first adventure,--I mean the first adventure of my life, my first fall,--for it is a moral fall after all, in the arms of Venus. Oh! I am not going to tell you my first--what shall I call it?--my first appearance; certainly not. The leap over the first hedge (I am speaking figuratively) has nothing interesting about it. It is generally rather a disagreeable one, and one picks oneself up rather abashed, with one charming illusion the less, with a vague feeling of disappointment and sadness. That _realization_ of love the first time one experiences it is rather repugnant; we had dreamt of it as being so different, so delicate, so refined. It leaves a physical and moral sense of disgust behind it, just like as when one has happened to have put one"s hand into some clammy matter and feels in a hurry to _wash_ it off. You may _rub_ it as hard as you like, but the moral feeling remains.
"Yes! but one very soon gets quite used to it; there is no doubt about that. For my part, however, I am very sorry it was not in my power to give the Creator the benefit of my advice when He was arranging these little matters. I wonder what _I_ should have done? I am not quite sure, but I think with the English savant, John Stuart Mill, I should have managed differently; I should have found some more convenient and more poetical combination; yes--more poetical.
"I really think that the Creator showed Himself to be too much of a naturalist ... too ... what shall I say? His invention lacks poetry.
"However, what I am going to tell you is about my first woman of the world, the first woman in society I ever made love to;--I beg your pardon, I ought to say the first woman of the world that ever triumphed over me. For at first it is _we_ who allow ourselves to be taken, while, later on--well, then it is quite another matter.
"She was a friend of my mother"s, a charming woman in every way. When such women are chaste, it is generally from sheer stupidity, and when they are in love they are furiously so. And then--_we_ are accused of corrupting _them_! Yes, yes, of course! With them it is always the rabbit that begins and never the sportsman. I know all about it; they don"t seem to put their fingers near us, but they do it all the same, and do what they like with us, without it being noticed, and then they actually accuse us of having ruined them, dishonored them, humiliated them, and all the rest of it.
"The woman in question certainly had a great desire to be humiliated by me. She may have been about thirty-five, while I was scarcely two-and-twenty. I no more thought of dishonoring her than I did of turning Trappist. Well, one day when I was calling on her, and while I was looking at her dress with considerable astonishment, for she had on a morning wrapper which was open as wide as a church-door when the bells are ringing for service, she took my hand and squeezed it--squeezed it, you know, like they will do at such moments--and said, with a deep sigh, one of those sighs, you know, which come from right down the bottom of the chest: "Oh! don"t look at me like that, child!" I got as red as a tomato, and felt more nervous than usual, naturally. I was very much inclined to bolt, but she held my hand tightly, and putting it onto her well-developed bust, she said: "Just feel how my heart beats!" Of course it was beating, and I began to understand what was the matter, but I did not know what to do. I have changed considerably since then.
"As I remained standing there, with one hand on the soft covering of her heart, while I held my hat in the other, and continuing to look at her with a confused, silly smile--a timid, frightened smile--she suddenly drew back, and said in an irritated voice:
""Young man, what are you doing? You are indecent and badly brought up."
"You may be sure I took my hand away quickly, stopped smiling, and stammering out some excuse, I got up and took my leave as if I had lost my head.
"But I was caught, and dreamt of her. I thought her charming, adorable; I fancied that I loved her, that I had always loved her, and I determined to see her again.
"When I saw her again she gave me a little smile like an actress might behind the scenes. Oh, how that little smile upset me! And she shook hands with a long, significant pressure.
"From that day it seems that I made love to her; at least, she declared afterwards that I had ruined her, captured her, dishonored her, with rare Machiavelism, with consummate cleverness, with the perseverance of a mathematician, and the cunning of an Apache Indian.
"But one thing troubled me strangely; where was my triumph to be accomplished? I lived with my family, and on this point my family was most particular. I was not bold enough to venture to go to an hotel in broad daylight with a woman on my arm, and I did not know whom to ask for advice.