A Cruel Enigma

by Paul Bourget

Hubert had told the truth, in that he was not Madame de Sauve's lover in that sense of entire and physical possession in which the term is understood in our language. She had never belonged to him, and it was the first time that he was going to be really alone with her, in that solitude of a foreign land which is the secret dream of everyone who loves.

While the train was steaming at full speed through plains alternately ribbed with hills, intersected with watercourses, and bristling with bare trees, the young man was absorbed in telling the rosary of his recollections. The charm of the hours that were gone was rendered still dearer to him by the expectation of some immense and undefined happiness.

Although Madame Liauran's son was twenty-two years of age, the manner of his education had kept him in that state of purity so rare among the young men of Paris, who, for the most part, have exhausted pleasure before they have had so much as a suspicion of love. But a fact of which the young fellow was not aware was that it had been this very purity which had acted more powerfully than the most accomplished libertinism could have done upon the romantic imagination of the woman whose profile was passing to and fro before his gaze with the motion of the carriage, and showing itself alternately against woods, hills and dunes. How many images does a passing train thus bear along, and with them how many destinies rushing towards weal or woe in the distant and the unknown!

It was at the beginning of the month of October, in the preceding year, that Hubert had seen Madame de Sauve for the first time. On account of Madame Liauran's health, which rendered the shortest journey dangerous to her, the two women never left Paris; but the young man sometimes went during the summer or autumn to spend three or four days in some country house. He was coming back from one of these visits in company with his cousin George, when, getting into a carriage at a station on the same northern line along which he was now travelling, he had met the young lady with her husband. The De Sauves were acquainted with George, and thus it was that Alexander Hubert had been introduced.

Monsieur de Sauve was a man of about forty-five years of age, very tall and strong, with a face that was already too red, and with traces of wear and tear which were discernible through his vigour, and the explanation of which might be found, merely by listening to his conversation, in his mode of regarding life. Existence to him was self-lavishment, and he carried out this programme in all directions. Head of a ministerial cabinet in 1869, thrown after the war into the campaign of Bonapartist propaganda, a deputy since then, and always re-elected, but an active deputy, and one who bribed his electors, he had at the same time launched forth more and more freely into society. He had a salon, gave dinners, occupied himself with sport, and still found sufficient leisure to interest himself competently and successfully in financial enterprises. Add to this that before his marriage he had had much experience of ballet dancers, green-rooms of small theatres, and private supper-rooms.

There are temperaments of this kind which nature makes into machines at a great outlay, and consequently with great returns. Everything in André de Sauve revealed a taste for what is ample and powerful, from the construction of his great body to his style of dress, or to the gesture with which he would take a long black cigar from his case to smoke it. Hubert well remembered how this man, with his hairy hands and ears, his large feet and his dragon's mien, had inspired him with that description of physical repulsion which we all endure on meeting with a physiology precisely contrary to our own.

Are there not respirations, circulations of blood, plays of muscle which are hostile to us, thanks, probably, to that indefinable instinct of life which impels two animals of different species to rend each other as soon as they come face to face? Truth to tell, the antipathy of the delicate Hubert was capable of being more simply explained on the ground of an unconscious and sudden jealousy of Madame de Sauve's husband; for Theresa, as her husband familiarly called her, had immediately exercised a sort of irresistible attraction upon the young man. In his childhood he had often turned over a portfolio of engravings brought back from Italy by his illustrious grandfather, who had served under Bonaparte, and at the first glance that fell upon this woman, he could not help recalling the heads drawn by the masters of the Lombardic school, so striking was the resemblance between her face and those of the familiar Herodiases and Madonnas of Luini and his pupils.

There was the same full, broad forehead, the same large eyes charged with somewhat heavy eyelids, the same delicious oval at the lower part of the cheek terminating in an almost square chin, the same sinuosity of lips, the same delightful union of eyebrow to the rising of the nose, and over all these charming features, a suffusion, as it were, of gentleness, grace, and mystery. Madame de Sauve had further, the vigorous neck and broad shoulders of the women of the Lombardic school, as well as all the other tokens of a race at once refined and strong, with a slender waist and the hands and feet of a child. What marked her out from this traditional type was the colour of her hair, which was not red and gold but very black, and of her eyes, the mingled grey of which bordered upon green. The amber paleness of her complexion, as well as the languishing listlessness of all her movements, completed the singular character of her beauty.

In the presence of this creature, it was impossible not to think of some portrait of past times, although she breathed youth with the purple of her mouth and the living fluid of her eyes, and although she was dressed in the fashion of the day, and wore a jacket fitting close to her figure. The skirt of her dress, made of an English material of a grey shade, her feet cased in laced boots, her little man's collar, her straight cravat, fastened with a diamond horseshoe pin, her Swede gloves, and her round hat, scarcely suggested the toilet of princesses of the sixteenth century; and yet she presented to the eye a finished model of Milanese beauty, even in this costume of Parisian elegance. By what mystery?

She was the daughter of Madame Lussac, née Bressuire, whose relations had not left the Rue Saint-Honoré for three generations, and of Adolphus Lussac, Prefect under the Empire, who had come from Auvergne in Monsieur Rouher's train. The chronicle of the drawing-rooms would have answered the question by recalling the Parisian career of the handsome Count Branciforte, somewhere about the year 1858, his greenish-grey eyes, his dead-white complexion, his attentions to Madame Lussac, and his sudden disappearance from surroundings in which for months and months he had always lived. But Hubert was never to have these particulars. By education and by nature he belonged to the race of those who accept life's official gifts and ignore their deep-lying causes, their thorough animality, and their tragic lining—a happy race, for to them belongs the enjoyment of the flower of things, but a race devoted beforehand to catastrophes, for only a clear view of the real will admit of any manipulation of it.