LIV.
MATER SAEVA CUPIDINUM.
"Well, you have found it, this ephemeral happiness."
BABILLOT (La Mascarade humaine).
Sadness succeeds to joy, deception to illusion, the awakening to the dream, the head-ache to the debauch.
When the crime is perpetrated, remorse, the avenging lash of virtue, comes and scourges the conscience. "Come, up, vile thing! thou hast slept over long."
And it exposes to the wretch the emptiness of pleasures, purchased at the price of honour.
The dawn found the Curé of Althausen groaning secretly to himself on his couch.
He had made himself guilty of an abominable wickedness, he had just committed an inexcusable crime, he had succumbed cowardly, ignominiously; he had betrayed his faith, abjured his priestly oaths, forgotten his duties, prostituted his dignity on the withered breast of an old corrupted maid-servant.
Suzanne, the adorable young girl, who in the first place had insensibly and involuntarily drawn him on the road of perjury, for whom he would have sacrificed honour, reputation, the universe and his God, he had abjured her also in the arms of this drab.
And that was the wound which consumed his heart the most.
For as soon as we have yielded to the infernal temptation, the lying prism vanishes, the halo disappears, and there only remains vice in all its hideousness and repulsive nudity. It is then that we hear a threatening voice mutter secretly in the depths of our being.
Happy is he who, already slipping on the fatal descent, listens to that voice: "Stop, stop; there is still time, raise thyself up."
But most frequently we remain deaf to that importunate cry. And, weary of crying in vain, conscience is silent. It no more casts its solemn serious note into the intoxicating music of facile love.
And the wretch, devoured by insatiable desire, pursues his coarse and looks not back. He goes on, he ever goes on, leaving right and left, like the trees on the way-side, his vigour and his youth which he scatters behind him. He set forth young, robust and strong, and he arrives at the halting-place, worn-out, soiled and blemished. There is the ditch, and he tumbles headlong into it. He falls into the common grave of cowardice and infamy. The lowest depths receive him and restore him not again.
Seek no more, for there is no more; the worms which consume him to his gums have already consumed his brain, and his heart is but gangrened. Disturb not this corpse, it is only putrefaction.
The poet has said:
"Evil to him who has permitted lewdness
Beneath his breast its foremost nail to delve!
The pure man's heart is like a goblet deep:
Whe the first water poured therin is foul,
The sea itself could not wash out the spot,
So deep the chasm where the stain doth lie."
Marcel had not reached that point, but he felt that he was on a rapid descent, and made these tardy reflections to himself:
"Shall I ever be able to see the light of day? Shall I ever dare to raise my eyes after this filthy crime? Oh Heaven, Heaven, overwhelm me. Avenging thunderbolt of omnipotent God, reduce me to ashes, restore me again to the nothingness, from which I ought never to have come forth."
But Heaven did not overwhelm him that day, nor was there the slightest rumbling of thunder. Nature continued her work peacefully, just as if no minister of God had sinned. The sun, a glorious sun of Spring, came and danced on his window, and he heard as usual the happy cries of the pillaging sparrows as they fluttered in his garden.
There was a movement by his side, and he felt, close to his flesh, the burning flesh of Veronica; she was awake and looking at him with a smile. She felt no remorse; she was proud and happy, and her eyes burning with pleasure and want of sleep were fixed on her new lover with restless curiosity.
[PLATE IV: MATER SAEVA CUPIDINUM. …he sprang out of bed, surfeited with disgust…. And she rose also, and ran off to her room, laughing like a madcap, and carrying her dress and petticoats under her arm.]
[Illustration]
Doubtless she was saying to herself: "Is it really possible? Am I then in bed with this handsome priest? Is my dream then realised?"
And to assure herself that she was not dreaming, that she was really in the
Curé of Althausen's bed, she spoke to him in mincing tones:
—You say nothing, my handsome master. You seem to be dejected. What! you are not tired out already?
And she put out her hand to give him a caress. But he sprang out of bed, surfeited with disgust.
—Ah, true, she said, happiness makes us forgetful. I was forgetting your
Mass.
And she rose also, and ran off to her room, laughing like a madcap, and carrying her dress and petticoats under her arm.