A long month has passed since my return to Paris. Twice Rose has written to announce her arrival: I waited for her at the station and she did not come. Poor child! We all know how difficult it is to break one's bonds, even the most detested. A thousand invisible ties keep us in the place where chance has set us; and, when we are about to rend them, they become so many unsuspected pangs. Instinct blindly resists all change, as though it were unable to distinguish what reason dimly descries beyond the trials and dangers of the moment. Rose is leaving nothing but wretchedness; in front of her is a fair and pleasant prospect. Nevertheless, she hesitates and she is unhappy.
In my present restless state, I no longer know what I wish. If she came to-morrow, should I be glad or not? I cannot tell. I can no longer tell. Those who do not suffer from this absurd mania for action escape those painful moments when we are at the mercy of a distracted will that no longer knows exactly what it ought to want. In absence, our feelings pass through so many contradictory phases! When the hour of return comes, finding it impossible to collect so many conflicting sentiments or to bring back to one point so many different desires, we surrender ourselves to the impression of the moment; and this impression often has nothing in common with what we had previously felt and hoped.
I have done my utmost to make her come. Lately, I have been sending her urgent and encouraging letters daily. Now, the hour is approaching; and my only feeling is one of anguish.
I have told her twenty times that the talk about responsibility which I hear all around me brings a smile to my lips. I have told her how, by making my conduct depend on hers, I relieved myself of all personal anxiety. And to-day my task appears to me so heavy that I can only laugh at my presumption.
2
It was foolish of me to write to her:
"What are your faults? Teach me to know you. Tell me what you are."
In reality, our faults arise from our circumstances. Events alone set us the questions to which our actions give a definite answer. Up to the present, Rose has not lived; she has been accumulating forces that are now about to come into being. What will they be? Whither will they tend? We can assume nothing in a life that is but beginning; and is it not just this that encourages us to seek and to help? Each of us has only to look back in order to know that, in the shifting soil of characters, we can fix or establish nothing. I found her acquiescing in a shameful servitude; and yet I have faith in the nobility of her soul. She was untruthful; there was no relation between her wishes and her actions, her thoughts and her words. Nevertheless, I do not doubt her essential honesty.
The atmosphere that surrounds us is so often treacherous to our pliant natures! We women are obliged to lie. So long as we have not found our "love," we look in vain for a little confidence. No one believes us, no one receives the best part of our soul. One would think that, for those who listen to us, our sincerest words are poisoned as they pass through our fairest smiles. And, when nature has made us beautiful and gifted, people take pleasure in judging us severely, as they might look at the summer days through dark-tinted window-panes.
We are always refused recognition. The first feeling which any work that we perform arouses is one of doubt. Its merit is disputed. And yet we have devoted a part of our youth to it; we have left with it a little of our freshness and our bloom. Very often, it is the ransom of our sorrow. Our love is written upon it; and it bears the imprint alike of our smiles and of our tears. Do we not know that woman, for all her culture, remains closer than man to her instinct and her "soil?" She is less purely intellectual but more sensitive than man; and, while he can create everything in the silence of his imagination, she has to live and suffer everything that she brings into the world. She conceives and realises with her flesh and with her blood.