“If Madame has a character as strong as her genius, her name will one day be on the lips of all the world.” He looked at her searchingly.
“I knew it!” exclaimed M. Thillard. “Madame, je vous félicite.”
“Ah!” cried Jouffroy, with a shake of his black shaggy head, “this is not a fate to be envied. C’est dur!”
“I am bewildered!” cried Hadria at last, in a voice that seemed to her to come from somewhere a long way off. The whole scene had acquired the character of a dream. The figures moved through miles of clear distance. Her impressions were chaotic. While a strange, deep confirmation of the musician’s words, seemed to stir within her as if they had long been familiar, her mind entirely refused credence.
He had gone too far. Had he said a remarkable talent, but——
Yet was it not, after all, possible? Nature scattered her gifts wildly and cruelly: cruelly, because she cared not into what cramped nooks and crannies she poured her maddening explosive: cruelly, because she hurled this fire from heaven with indiscriminate hand, to set alight one dared not guess how many chained martyrs at their stakes. Nature did not pick and choose the subjects of her wilful ministrations. She seemed to scatter at random, out of sheer gaieté de coeur, as Jouffroy had said, and if some golden grain chanced to be gleaming in this soul or that, what cause for astonishment? The rest might be the worst of dross. As well might the chance occur to one of Nature’s children as to another. She did not bestow even one golden grain for nothing, bien sûr; she meant to be paid back with interest. Just one bright bead of the whole vast circlet of the truth: perhaps it was hers, but more likely that these kind friends had been misled by their sympathy.
M. Jouffroy came next day to have a long talk with Hadria about her work and her methods. He was absolutely confident of what he had said, but he was emphatic regarding the necessity for work; steady, uninterrupted work. Everything must be subservient to the one aim. If she contemplated anything short of complete dedication to her art—well (he shrugged his shoulders), it would be better to amuse herself. There could be no half-measures with art. True, there were thousands of people who practised a little of this and a little of that, but Art would endure no such disrespect. It was the affair of a lifetime. He had known many women with great talent, but, alas! they had not persistence. Only last year a charming, beautiful young woman, with—mon Dieu!—a talent that might have placed her on the topmost rank of singers, had married against the fervent entreaties of Jouffroy, and now—he shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of pitying contempt—“elle est mère tout simplement.” Her force had gone from herself into the plump infant, whose “cris dechirants” were all that now remained to the world of his mother’s once magnificent voice. Hélas! how many brilliant careers had he not seen ruined by this fatal instinct! Jouffroy’s passion for his art had overcome the usual sentiment of the Frenchman, and even the strain of Jewish blood. He did not think a woman of genius well lost for a child. He grudged her to the fetish la famille. He went so far as to say that, even without the claims of genius, a woman ought to be permitted to please herself in the matter. When he heard that Madame had two children, and yet had not abandoned her ambition, he nodded gravely and significantly.
“But Madame has courage,” he commented. “She must have braved much censure.”
It was the first case of the kind that had come under his notice. He hoped much from it. His opinion of the sex would depend on Hadria’s power of persistence. In consequence of numberless pupils who had shewn great promise, and then had satisfied themselves with “a stupid maternity,” Jouffroy was inclined to regard women with contempt, not as regards their talent, which he declared was often astonishing, but as regards their persistency of character and purpose.
One could not rely on them. They had enthusiasm—Oh, but enthusiasm à faire peur, but presently “un monsieur avec des moustaches seduisantes” approaches, and then “Phui, c’est tout fini!” There was something of fatality in the affair. The instinct was terrible; a demoniacal possession. It was for women a veritable curse, a disease. M. Jouffroy had pronounced views on the subject. He regarded the maternal instinct as the scourge of genius. It was, for women, the devil’s truncheon, his rod of empire. This “reproductive rage” held them—in spite of all their fine intuitions and astonishing ability—after all on the animal plane; cut them off from the little band of those who could break up new ground in human knowledge, and explore new heights of Art and Nature.