In society I renewed my acquaintance with Mme. de H—, whom I had met at the Waldhaus, dressed in black, mourning for the shade of Nietzsche. Her husband had died a few months before of a mysterious and rapid illness. A court surrounded her, praising “The Open Garden” and newer poems on the horror of death. Her charm in my eyes withered in one evening like a full blown rose, and I can hardly to-day analyse it or explain my servitude. I must, however, try to do so if I am to make myself understood.
The first time I met her was at Mme. de Saunois’ reception, when she had appeared in the salon after we had listened to a song by Henry Duparc called “An Invitation to a Journey.” The music added to Baudelaire’s words a neurasthenic morbidness. That nonchalance, that nervous fatigue, was as if embodied in her. One felt that she was ready for audacious departures. She was in a word the Invitation. Like vessels anchored in a port, she gave promise of new sensations in other countries whose fruits were more savoury or more sour. Their battered sides, hung with the barnacles and weeds of previous journeys, give evidence of adventure. And as the almost imperceptible movement of the ship in quiet waters suggests its tossing in the open sea, so too when Mme. de H— crossed a salon she set in motion a wave of sensual appeal. Her affectation, her make-up, her poems, all were marks of a dark and stormy past. One conjectured healed wounds and suspected venturesome risks. She had lived through many a perilous moment and had not remained unscathed. Beauty which is no longer unblemished, and dead youth which adorns itself as if it sought in advance to defy time by substituting artificial for natural attractions, are like the witchcraft of ancient sorcery, whose philtres were like perfumes, stronger than the fading flowers of which they were made—stronger because they were beginning to become tainted....
I had been guilty of infidelities before, but this last summed up for me all the contaminated seduction of primitive passion, passion to which our civilisation had added one thing more—a taste for flesh that is “high.”—
* * *
I had forgotten that Raymonde spent part of almost every day in the Bois with Dilette, among the pine trees around the little pond of St. James, near the Bagatelle. It is an open playground where the mothers and nurses bring their little charges, whom they can watch from a distance during their games of hide and seek.
The Autumn sun was so inviting that Mme. de H— suggested a walk in the Bois before returning to the automobile waiting at the side of one of the roads for us. We were sauntering along when suddenly we came upon my wife and Dilette.
The fact of my being seen publicly with a lady of her calibre in a frequented place need not of necessity have aroused suspicion. Was it that the mere presence of one perfectly right and loyal creature threw out falsehood and irregularity? We were often seen together—why should we now appear so at fault? Until now Raymonde had no inkling of anything between us Now the trembling of her lips a moment alarmed me. In the Sleeping Woods how could she have learned that one must control one’s self in public? I feared everything from her provincial education, lest it cause her to indulge ill-founded jealousy. Yet was not our sudden instinctive halt at sight of her unmistakable admission?
I was soon reassured. Everything happened in the best possible manner. I asked her, I dared to invite her, to join us in the automobile, impudently; but was it not necessary to set her doubts at rest?
“No,” she said, “I shall stay with Dilette.”
“Are you not afraid it is too cold?”