She and he; Lavinia; Memoir

by George Sand

Two or three other incidents of this nature having put her on her guard, she began to wonder whether the unexciting, regular life which she sought to give her friend was the regimen best adapted to that exceptional nature. She had said to him:

"Perhaps you will be bored sometimes; but ennui is a welcome rest from vertigo, and when your mental health has fully returned, you will be amused by trifles and will know what real cheerfulness is."

But matters turned out differently. Laurent did not admit his ennui, but it was impossible for him to endure it, and he vented it in strange and bitter caprices. He lived a life of constant ups and downs. Abrupt transitions from reverie to wild excitement, and from absolute indifference to noisy extravagance, became with him a normal condition, and he could not live without them. The happiness that he had found so delicious for a few days, began to irritate him like the sight of the sea during a flat calm.

"You are lucky," he said to Thérèse, "to wake every morning with your heart in the same place. You see, I lose mine while I am asleep. It is like the night-cap my nurse used to put on my head when I was a baby; sometimes she found it at my feet and sometimes on the floor."

Thérèse said to herself that it was impossible that serenity could come to that troubled soul all at once, and that it must become accustomed to it by degrees. To that end, he must not be prevented from returning sometimes to active life; but how could she arrange it so that activity would not be a blemish, a deadly blow dealt at their ideal? Thérèse could not be jealous of the mistresses Laurent had had previously; but she could not understand how she could kiss his brow on the morrow of a debauch. She must, therefore, since the work, which he had resumed with great ardor, excited him instead of calming him, seek with him a vent for that surplus energy. The natural vent would have been the enthusiasm of love; but that was an additional source of excitement, after which Laurent would fain have scaled the third heaven; lacking the strength for that, he turned his eyes in the direction of hell, and his brain, sometimes his very face, received a diabolical reflection therefrom.

Thérèse studied his tastes and his caprices, and was surprised to find them easy to satisfy. Laurent was greedy of diversion and of surprises; it was not necessary to take him among scenes of enchantment that could never exist in real life; it was enough to take him no matter where, and provide some amusement for him which he did not expect. If, instead of giving him a dinner at home, Thérèse informed him, putting on her hat the while, that they were to dine together at a restaurant, and if she suddenly asked him to take her to an entirely different sort of play from the one to which she had previously asked him to take her, he was overjoyed by that unexpected diversion and took the keenest pleasure in it; whereas, if they simply carried out a plan marked out beforehand, he was certain to feel an insurmountable distaste for it and a disposition to sneer at everything. So Thérèse treated him as a convalescent child, to whom one refuses nothing, and she chose to pay no heed to the resultant inconveniences to which she was subjected.

The first and most serious was the danger of compromising her reputation. She was commonly said to be, and known to be, virtuous. Everybody was not convinced that she had never had any other lover than Laurent; indeed, some person having reported that she had been seen in Italy years before with the Comte de ——, who had a wife in America, she was supposed to have been kept by the man whom she had actually married, and we have seen that Thérèse preferred to endure that blot upon her fame rather than engage in a scandalous contest with the miserable wretch whom she had loved; but every one was agreed in considering her a prudent and sensible woman.

"She keeps up appearances," people said; "there is never any rivalry or scandal about her; all her friends respect her and speak well of her. She is a clever woman, and seeks nothing more than to pass unnoticed; which fact adds to her merit."

When she was seen away from home, on Laurent's arm, people began to be surprised, and the blame was all the more severe because she had kept clear of it so long. Laurent's talent was highly esteemed by artists generally, but he had very few real friends among them. They took it ill of him that he played the gentleman with fashionable young men of another class, and, on the other hand, his friends in that other class could not understand his conversion and did not believe in it. So that Thérèse's fond and devoted love was regarded as a frenzied caprice. Would a chaste woman have chosen for her lover, in preference to all the serious men of her acquaintance, the only one who had led a dissolute life with all the vilest harlots in Paris? And, in the eyes of those who did not choose to condemn Thérèse, Laurent's violent passion seemed to be simply a successful piece of lechery, of which he was shrewd enough to shake himself clear when he was weary of it.

Thus on all sides Mademoiselle Jacques lost caste on account of the choice which she had made and which she seemed desirous to advertise.