He fell on his knees as if struck by lightning, and dragged himself to my bed with an imploring air.
"Go to bed to your wife," I said, repeating the marquis's words in a sort of delirium; "but change your shirt, for you have Henryet's blood on your frill!"
Leoni fell face downward on the floor, uttering inarticulate cries. I lost my reason altogether, and it seemed to me that I repeated his cries, imitating with dazed servility the tone of his voice and the contortions of his body. He thought that I was mad, and, springing to his feet in terror, came to my side. I thought that he was going to kill me; I threw myself out of bed, crying: "Mercy! mercy! I won't tell!" and I fainted just as he seized me, to lift me up and assist me.
[XIX]
I awoke, still in his arms, and he had never put forth so much eloquence, so much affection, so many tears, to implore his pardon. He confessed that he was the lowest of men; but, he said, there was one thing, and only one, that raised him somewhat in his eyes, and that was the love he had always had for me, and which none of his vices, none of his crimes had had the power to stifle. Hitherto he had fought against the appearances which accused him on all sides. He had struggled against overwhelming evidence in order to retain my esteem. Thenceforth, being no longer able to justify himself by falsehood, he took a different course and assumed a new rôle, in order to move me and conquer me. He laid aside all artifice—perhaps I should say all sense of shame—and confessed all the villainy of his life. But amid all that filth he forced me to distinguish and to understand what there was in his character that was truly noble, the faculty of loving, the everlasting vigor of a heart in which the most exhausting weariness, the most dangerous trials, did not extinguish the sacred flame.
"My conduct is base," he said to me, "but my heart is still noble. It still bleeds for its crimes; it has retained, in all the vigor of its first youth, the sentiment of justice and injustice, horror of the evil it does, enthusiastic admiration of the good it beholds. Your patience, your virtues, your angelic kindliness, your pity, as inexhaustible as God's, can never be displayed in favor of a being who appreciates them better or admires them more. A man of regular morals and sensitive conscience would consider them more natural and would appreciate them less. With such a man you would be simply a virtuous woman; while with a man like me you are a sublime woman, and the debt of gratitude which is piling up in my heart is as great as your sacrifices and your sufferings. Ah! it is something to be loved and to be entitled to a boundless passion, and from what other man have you so good a right to claim such a passion as from me? For whom would you subject yourself again to the tortures and the despair you have undergone? Do you think there is anything else in life but love? For my part, I do not. And do you think that it is a simple matter to inspire it and to feel it? Thousands of men die incomplete, having never known any other love than that of the beasts. Often a heart capable of loving seeks in vain where to bestow its love, and comes forth pure of all earthly passions, perhaps to find a place in heaven. Ah! when God vouchsafes to us on earth that profound, passionate, ineffable sentiment, we must no longer desire or hope for paradise, Juliette; for paradise is the blending of two hearts in a kiss of love. And when we have found it here on earth, what matters it whether it be in the arms of a saint or of one of the damned? What matters it whether the man you love be accursed or adored among men, so long as he returns your love? Is it I whom you love, or is it this noise that is going on about me? What did you love in me at the outset? Was it the splendor that encompassed me? If you hate me to-day, I must needs doubt your past love; I must needs see in you, instead of that angel, that devoted victim whose blood, shed for me, falls ceaselessly drop by drop upon my lips, only a poor, weak, credulous girl, who loved me from vanity and deserted me from selfishness. Juliette, Juliette, think of what you will do if you leave me! You will ruin the only friend who knows you, appreciates and respects you, for a society which despises you now and whose esteem you will never recover. You have nothing left but me in the whole world, my poor child. You must either cling to the adventurer's fortunes or die forgotten in a convent. If you leave me, you are no less insane than cruel; you will have had all your misery, all your sufferings, and you will not reap their fruit; for now, if, notwithstanding all that you know, you can still love me and stay with me, be sure that I will love you with a love of which you have no conception, and which I never should have dreamed of as possible if I had married you honestly and lived with you peacefully in the bosom of your family. Hitherto, despite all you have sacrificed, all you have suffered, I have not loved you as I feel that I am capable of loving. You have never yet loved me as I am; you have cherished an attachment for a false Leoni, in whom you still saw some grandeur and some fascination. You hoped that he would become some day the man you loved in the beginning; you did not believe that you had held in your arms a man who was irrevocably lost. And I said to myself: 'She loves me conditionally; it is not I whom she loves as yet, but the character I am acting. When she sees my features under my mask, she will cover her eyes and fly; she will look with horror on the lover whom now she presses to her bosom. No, she is not the wife and mistress I had dreamed of, and for whom my ardent heart is calling with all its strength. Juliette is still a part of that society whose foe I am; she will be my foe when she knows me. I cannot confide in her; I cannot pour out upon the bosom of any living being the most execrable of my sufferings, my shame for what I am doing every day. I suffer, I am heaping up remorse in my soul. If only there were a woman capable of loving me without asking me to change—if I could have a friend who would not be an accuser and a judge!'—That is what I thought, Juliette. I prayed to heaven for that friend, but I prayed that it might be you and no other; for you were already what I loved best on earth before. I realized all that there still remained for us both to do before loving each other really."
What could I reply to such speeches? I looked at him with a stupefied air. I was amazed that I still considered him handsome and lovable; that I still felt in his presence the same emotion, the same desire for his caresses, the same gratitude for his love. His degradation left no trace on his noble brow; and when his great black eyes flashed their flame upon mine, I was dazzled, intoxicated as always; all his blemishes disappeared, everything was blotted out, even the stains of Henryet's blood. I forgot everything else to bind myself to him by blind vows, by oaths and insane embraces. Then in very truth his love was rekindled or rather renewed, as he had prophesied. He gradually abandoned the Princess Zagarolo and passed all the time of my convalescence at my feet, with the same loving attentions and the delicate tokens of affection which had made me so happy in Switzerland; I can say, indeed, that these proofs of affection were even more ardent and caused me more pride, that was the happiest period of my whole life, and that Leoni was never dearer to me. I was convinced of the truth of all that he had told me; nor could I fear that he clung to me from self-interest, as I had nothing more in the world to give him, and was thenceforth a burden to him and dependent upon the hazards of his fortunes. However I felt a sort of pride in not falling short of what he expected from my generosity, and his gratitude seemed to me greater than my sacrifices.
One evening he came home in a state of great excitement, and said, pressing me to his heart again and again:
"My Juliette, my sister, my wife, my angel, you must be as kind and indulgent as God himself, you must give me a fresh proof of your adorable sweetness and your heroism; you must come and live with me at the Princess Zagarolo's."
I recoiled, surprised beyond words; and, as I realized that it was no longer in my power to deny him anything, I turned pale and began to tremble like a condemned man at the gallows' foot.