“I have addressed myself to his family, but without effect. They refuse to recognise me. Everybody here, of course, figures to himself that I am his mistress. He has two brothers, one of the army, one an advocate. I have besieged them in vain. They say, ’We have done for him all that is possible. We can do no more. He has exhausted our patience. Now that he has gone a step farther, and, in his age, disgraced himself by living with a mistress, as well as besotting himself with opium, we wash our hands of him for good.’ And yet, I cannot leave him, because I know, without me, he would kill himself within the month, by his excesses. To his sisters, both of whom are married and ladies of the world, I have appealed with equal results. They refuse to regard me otherwise than as his mistress. But I cannot bear to see that great man, with that mind, that talent, doing himself to death. And when he is not under the influence of his drug, who is so great? Who has the wit, the wisdom, the heart, the charm, of Monsieur Edouard? Who can paint like him?
“My dear, as a last resource, I take up my pen to ask you for assistance. If you could see him your heart would be moved. He is so thin, so thin, and his face has become blue, yes, blue, like the face of a dead man. Help me to save him from himself. If you can send me a note of five hundred francs, I can pay off our indebtedness here, and bring him back to France, where, in a sane country, far from a town, again I can reduce him to a few drops of laudanum a day, and again see him in health and at work. That which it costs me to make this request of you, I have not the words to tell you. But, at the end ot my forces, having no other means, no other support, I confide myself to your well-tried amity.
“I give you a good kiss. Jeanne.”
If the reading of this letter brought a lump into my throat and something like tears into my eyes—if I hastened to a banker’s, and sent P’tit-Bleu the money she asked for, by telegraph—if I reproached her bitterly and sincerely for not having applied to me long before,—I hope you will believe that it wasn’t for the sake of Monsieur Edouard.
They established themselves at St. Etienne, a hamlet on the coast of Normandy, to be farther from Paris. Dieppe was their nearest town. They lived at St.-Etienne for nearly three years. But, periodically, when she had got her house of cards nicely built up—piff!—he would walk into Dieppe.
He walked into Dieppe one day in the autumn of 1885, and it took her a week to find him. He was always ill, after one of his grand debauches. This time he was worse than he had ever been before. I can imagine the care with which she nursed him, her anxious watching by his bedside, her prayers, her hopes, the blankness when he died.
She came back to Paris, and called three times at my lodgings. But I was in England, and didn’t receive the notes she left till nearly six months afterwards. I have never seen her since, never heard from her.
What has become of her? It is not pleasant to conjecture. Of course, after his death, she ought to have died too. But the Angel of this Life,
“Whose care is lest men see too much at once,”
couldn’t permit any such satisfying termination. So she has simply disappeared, and, in the flesh, may have come to... one would rather not conjecture. All the same, I can’t believe that in the spirit she will have made utter shipwreck. I can’t believe that nothing permanent was won by those long years of love and pain. Her house of cards was toppled over, as often as she built it up; but perhaps she was all the while building another house, a house not made with hands, a house, a temple, indestructible.