XXIV.
EDGAR DE MEILHAN
to
MADAME GUERIN,
Pont de l'Arche (Eure).
RICHEPORT, July 10th 18—.
Three times have I been to the post-office since you left the château in such an abrupt and inexplicable manner. I am lost in conjecture about your sudden departure, which was both unnecessary and unprepared. It is doubtless because you do not wish to tell me the reason that you refuse to see me. I know that you are still at Pont de l'Arche, and that you have never left Madame Taverneau's house. So that when she tells me in a measured and mysterious tone that you have been absent for some time; looking at the closed door of your room, behind which I divine your presence, I am seized with an insane desire to kick down the narrow plank which separates me from you. Fits of gloomy passion possess me which illogical obstacles and unjust resistance always excite.
What have I done? What can you have against me? Let me at least know the crime for which I am punished. On the scaffold they always read the victim his sentence, equitable or otherwise. Will you be more cruel than a hangman? Read me my sentence. Nothing is more frightful than to be executed in a dungeon without knowing for what offence.
For three days—three eternities—I have taxed my memory to an alarming extent. I have recalled everything that I have said for the last two weeks, word by word, syllable for syllable, endeavoring to give to each expression its intonation, its inflection, its sharps and flats. Every different signification that the music of the voice could give to a thought, I have analyzed, debated, commented upon twenty times a day. Not a word, accent nor gesture has enlightened me. I defy the most embittered and envious spirit to find anything that could offend the most susceptible pride, the haughtiest majesty. Nothing has occurred in my familiar intercourse with you that would alarm a sensitive plant or a mimosa. Therefore, such cannot be the motive for your panic-stricken flight. I am young, ardent, impetuous; I attach no importance to certain social conventionalities, but I feel confident that I have never failed in a religious respect for the holiness of love and modesty. I love you—I could never, wilfully, have offended you. How could my eyes and lips have expressed what was neither in my head nor in my heart? If there is no fire without smoke, as a natural consequence there can be no smoke without fire!
It is not that—Is it caprice or coquetry? Your mind is too serious and your soul too honest for such an act; and besides, what would be your object? Such feline cruelties may suit blasé women of the world who are roused by the sight of moral torture; who give, in the invisible sphere of the passions, feasts of the Roman empresses, where beating hearts are torn by the claws of the wild beasts of the soul, unbridled desires, insatiate hate and maddened jealousy, all the hideous pack of bad passions. Louise, you have not wished to play such a game with me. It would be unavailing and dangerous.
Although I have been brought up in what is called the world, I am still a savage at heart. I can talk as others do of politics, railroads, social economy, literature. I can imitate civilized gesture tolerably well; but under this white-glove polish I have preserved the vehemence and simplicity of barbarism. Unless you have some serious, paramount reason, not one of those trivial excuses with which ordinary women revenge themselves upon the lukewarmness of their lovers—do not prolong my punishment a day, an hour, a minute—speak not to me of reputation, virtue or duty. You have given me the right to love you—by the light of the stars, under the sweet-scented acacias, in the sunlight at the window of Richard's donjon which opens over an abyss. You have conferred upon me that august priesthood. Your hand has trembled in mine. A celestial light, kindled by my glance, has shone in your eyes. If only for a moment, your soul was mine—the electric spark united us.
It may be that this signifies nothing to you. I refuse to acknowledge any such subtle distinctions—that moment united us for ever. For one instant you wished to love me; I cannot divide my mind, soul and body into three distinct parts; all my being worships you and longs to obtain you. I cannot graduate my love according to its object. I do not know who you are. You might be a queen of earth or the queen of heaven; I could not love you otherwise.
Receive me. You need explain nothing if you do not wish; but receive me; I cannot live without you. What difference does it make to you if I see you?
Ah! how I suffered, even when you were at the château! What evil influence stood between us? I had a vague feeling that something important and fatal had happened. It was a sort of presentiment of the fulfilment of a destiny. Was your fate or mine decided in that hour, or both? What decisive sentence had the recording angel written upon the ineffaceable register of the future? Who was condemned and who absolved in that solemn hour?
And yet no appreciable event happened, nothing appeared changed in our life. Why this fearful uneasiness, this deep dejection, this presentiment of a great but unknown danger? I have had that same instinctive perception of evil, that magnetic terror which slumbering misers experience when a thief prowls around their hidden treasure; it seemed as if some one wished to rob me of my happiness.
We were embarrassed in each other's presence; some one acted as a restraint upon us. Who was it? No one was there but Raymond, one of my best friends, who had arrived the evening before and was soon to depart in order to marry his cousin, young, pretty and rich! It is singular that he, so gentle, so confiding, so unreserved, so chivalrous, should have appeared to me sharp, taciturn, rough, almost dull,—and my feelings towards him were full of bitterness and spite. Can friendship be but lukewarm hate? I fear so, for I often felt a savage desire to quarrel with Raymond and seize him by the throat. He talked of a blade of grass, a fly, of the most indifferent object, and I felt wounded as if by a personality. Everything he did offended me; if he stood up I was indignant, if he sat down I became furious; every movement of his seemed a provocation; why did I not perceive this sooner? How does it happen that the man for whom I entertain such a strong natural aversion should have been my friend for ten years? How strange that I should not have been aware of this antipathy sooner!
And you, ordinarily so natural, so easy in your manners, became constrained; you scarcely answered me when he was present. The simplest expression agitated you; it seemed as if you had to give an account to some one of every word, and that you were afraid of a scolding, like a young girl who is brought by her mother into the drawing-room for the first time.
One evening, I was sitting by you on the sofa, reading to you that sublime elegy of the great poet, La Tristesse d'Olympio; Raymond entered. You rose abruptly, like a guilty child, assumed an humble and repentant attitude, asking forgiveness with your eyes. In what secret compact, what hidden covenant, had you failed?
The look with which Raymond answered yours doubtless contained your pardon, for you resumed your seat, but moved away from me so as not to abuse the accorded grace; I continued to read, but you no longer listened—you were absorbed in a delicious revery through which floated vaguely the lines of the poet. I was at your feet, and never have I felt so far away from you. The space between us, too narrow for another to occupy, was an abyss.
What invisible hand dashed me down from my heaven? Who drove me, in my unconsciousness, as far from you as the equator from the pole? Yesterday your eyes, bathed in light and life, turned softly towards me; your hand rested willingly in mine. You accepted my love, unavowed but understood; for I hate those declarations which remind one of a challenge. If one has need to say that he loves, he is not worth loving; speech is intended for indifferent beings; talking is a means of keeping silent; you must have seen, in my glance, by the trembling of my voice, in my sudden changes of color, by the impalpable caress of my manner, that I love you madly.
It was when Raymond looked at you that I began to appreciate the depth of my passion. I felt as if some one had thrust a red-hot iron into my heart. Ah! what a wretched country France is! If I were in Turkey, I would bear you off on my Arab steed, shut you up in a harem, with walls bristling with cimetars, surrounded by a deep moat; black eunuchs should sleep before the threshold of your chamber, and at night, instead of dogs, lions should guard the precincts!
Do not laugh at my violence, it is sincere; no one will ever love you like me. Raymond cannot—a sentimental Don Quixote, in search of adventures and chivalrous deeds. In order to love a woman, he must have fished her out of the spray of Niagara; or dislocated his shoulder in stopping her carriage on the brink of a precipice; or snatched her out of the hands of picturesque bandits, costumed like Fra Diavolo; he is only fit for the hero of a ten-volume English novel, with a long-tailed coat, tight gray pantaloons and top-boots. You are too sensible to admire the philanthropic freaks of this modern paladin, who would be ridiculous were he not brave, rich and handsome; this moral Don Juan, who seduces by his virtue, cannot suit you.
When shall I see you? Our moments of happiness in this life are so short; I have lost three days of Paradise by your persistence in concealing yourself. What god can ever restore them to me?
Louise, I have only loved, till now, marble shadows, phantoms of beauty; but what is this love of sculpture and painting compared with the passion that consumes me? Ah! how bittersweet it is to be deprived at once of will, strength and reason, and trembling, kneeling, vanquished, to surrender the key of one's heart into the hands of the beautiful victor! Do not, like Elfrida, throw it into the torrent!
EDGAR DE MEILHAN.