George was spending more nights at home: he showed himself more courteous and took her frequently to dances and plays. On her last birthday he had hired a carriage by the month for her. His affairs were at last taking a better turn. He was gradually paying off his bills and the interest due on the mortgage. Zozé had a vague idea that he was consulting engineer to a large mining company owning mines in Bosnia.
A sort of Indian summer of affection brought her suddenly nearer to her husband. She boasted of it to her friends and declared that the age of folly had passed for her. In order to fill the vacancy left by her lovers, she threw herself with ardor into the pleasures of the mind.
Mercilessly, without choice or respite, she read every new book her bookseller offered her. Memoirs, fiction, poetry and travel books merely whetted her appetite. “I am devouring them!” she would say. And in point of fact, that was precisely what she did; she swallowed and engulfed her readings; she digested nothing, retained nothing.
She became a subscriber to lectures, delighted in old songs and waxed enthusiastic over new ones. She went to concerts on Sundays and dreamt in music of her past liaisons. The only branch of intellectual pleasure she neglected was painting; she never went to the Salon, out of spite for the painters. However, no light of understanding pierced through this chaos of contrary studies. Mme. Chambannes was surprised that, having learned so much, she had not acquired more assurance. Her opinions ran away from her call, like so many flies. She stammered whenever she had to express a personal view. And, in the end, the joys of the intellect bored her....
Her memories of the next two years were misty....
What had she been doing during those two years? She remembered that George had received the Légion onneur on the 14th of July. But the rest, her furious hunt for the perfect lover whom her heart and her senses called for in spite of herself—what was there left of it? Was it not withered, pressed tight at the back of her brain by weightier and more urgent affairs? Two anemic shadows re-appeared at her conjuring, standing in a dim, gray light: herself invariably one of them; while the other was this one or that one, names and features forgotten, or confusedly mixed up under the stamp of time. There had been flirtations at dances, some mild drives in closed carriages, unfinished kisses, mere sketches of self-giving, several vain attempts to reach the ideal and many false hopes and shattered illusions. How could she have felt any affection for those men, those German bank clerks, those exotic, dumpy fellows, more elaborately dressed than gentlemen should be and more caddish than the worst bounders could be! Had she given herself to them? Perhaps she had. To one or two of them, or to none at all? In sooth, she was not at all positive about it. Later, when she gravely swore to Gerald that she had never had but one lover, her conscious fib put that bungling little Mouzarkhi girl only two out of reckoning!
Her search was not guided solely by mere animality.
She longed secretly for an ideal lover. Her day dreams accentuated one feature after the other of his exquisite portrait. But the imagination of many women acts as their body does. It can reproduce but not create. That of Mme. Chambannes, impregnated by the reading of fashionable novels, was acting on a given formula.
She imagined the expected hero with a large blonde beard, melancholy eyes wherein passed at times the moist shadow of an old sorrow; he would also have an income of 30,000 or 40,000 francs and a name which, if not a noble one, belonged at least to the smart and wealthy bourgeoisie.
He would have bitterly suffered at the hands of women, of one especially, a treacherous actress, in love with deceit, notoriety and money. Unwittingly, Mme. Chambannes allowed her mind to dwell on this last point.... The disillusioned lover to come would lift his upper lip in a contraction that showed what bitter experiences he had undergone. From his lips would surge blasphemies against the perfidious sex, ma enemy. Thereupon Mme. Chambannes would tenderly stop the anathemas with her kisses; she would lay that sorrowful head upon her breast and bring smiles back to those defiant lips. If necessary, and he wished it, she would go away with him. They would then become exiles on a small English island, far from the wicked world, and stay for hours together sitting alone on the sands of the seashore, hand in hand, indefinitely contemplating the changing play of the waves or the ships returning home.