Ah! Thérèse had not been wrong about the shallowness of this Mme. Chambannes, her depravity and her mediocrity. In one meeting, she had appreciated her better, fathomed her and sentenced her more accurately than he had done in a hundred meetings. For she, Thérèse, did not love her, while he, alas did!
“Yes! I loved her; I love her still!” he murmured fervently, as if to deny in that remorseful admission all the puny disguises, all the artifices of prudery which had sheltered a passion that was without courage.
The sound of shutters being closed and footsteps coming up interrupted his meditations. He hoped that Mme. Chambannes would come in to ask him how he was. What should he say in reply? Should he fall at her knees, pitifully stammering words of love? Or should he repulse her with a scornful reply?
He did not have to choose, because Zozé did not come to him. Instead of her coming, the echoes of the park took up once more in the mind of the master their vile, diabolical concert, the duet of their ravished accents.
Oh! what atrocious, what repugnant words! M. Raindal compared them with the Latin footnotes of his book. At a distance of twenty centuries, they were almost the same words, the same follies as those which Cleopatra, in her worst ecstasies had stimulated in her lover, Antony the rough soldier! By means of what miracle of universal and immutable perversity had this infamous vocabulary been shamefully transmitted from the Queen of Egypt to the maste little friend? How many amorous couples must have repeated and preserved it, from generation to generation!
Then, suddenly, a clear intuition rose through the discard of those historical parallels. M. Raindal understood; he explained to himself at last the work of his little pupil ... his professor rather, his little teacher who had, from the first day, little by little, taught him the meaning of a refined existence, material enjoyment, the tangible reality of all those terms which he had in the past carelessly used in the written sentences of his books, as the symbolical pieces of a lifeless chessboard!... Pleasure, love, luxury, elegance, ardor of the senses, beauty, grace, passion, tenderness—these had been to him as so many inert syllables, until Mme. Chambannes brought them to life for him.
And the last lesson, the end of this apprenticeship—had it not been completed just now, out there among the high trees where, perhaps, she might still be, enraptured, and forgetting him in the arms of another man!...
The hitherto unknown torture with which this vision inflicted him brought an exclamation of horror to his lips. He rose from his bed, blinking. He beat the air with his fists in a sudden threat. For a few minutes, he lost the thread of his meditations.
He crumbled down, quite exhausted, in a cretonne armchair; in his mind he was living again his whole career, the succession of those virtuous years whose righteousness had once exalted his pride. How dull and trivial that narrow little path which he had walked at the cost of so much hardship and so many efforts seemed now! It reminded him of one of those out of the way side-paths which one walked, on holidays, to avoid the joy of others.... Near that vision, he dimly perceived, as in an ancient print, the noisy kermesse of Life, singing groups, bouquets, drunken orgies, women with men, the furious exuberance of the mob of revelry.... Meanwhile he was pursuing, apart, his own road and that step by step, seeing only the next da march when one was completed, applying his efforts merely not to deviate from this path, his zeal not to be diverted.... What cared he whether they enjoyed themselves and lived on the other side? Was he not aware with scientific certainty how vain and vulgar were the pleasures which satisfy the mob? Did he not know that they left nothing but disgust behind them, to what sottishness they brought one down, and finally what a very small thing was Woman (mulier) in comparison with a superior mind?...
Woman—he had really known but one, his own. Apart from a few indiscretions during his life as a student, indiscretions that were forgotten as soon as committed, he remembered his life as a young man, his four years spent in the desert under Mariette Bey, his imperturbable chastity, that precocious contempt for love which caused even the “Great Bey” to tease him. When his comrades left the cantonment and went to the nearest town to see the dancing Bayaderes or spend a nigh leave with some native girl, M. Raindal had, as a rule, discovered some pretext not to join them, some special work to be finished, a papyrus to be deciphered or a sudden indisposition. “Sapristi! Raindal, you must rub the rust off yourself, my dear fellow!” the Great Bey declared, in that sarcastic voice of his. “You will end by making us believe that you have a liaison with a mummy!” The young savant would laugh, promise to follow his companions, but recant at the last minute. The Bayaderes bored him. Since then, apart from his wife, no one! Not one adventure, not one memory, no graceful image, none of those dear phantoms whose one particular beauty—her hands, her smile, her finesse in love-making or the sweetness of her eyes—flatters one, with its secret companionship, till death.