A Cruel Enigma

by Paul Bourget

He threw himself upon the couch and lost himself in the gulf of his reflection. Yes, Theresa had loved him, and Theresa loved him still. There are tears, embraces, and a warmth of soul which do not lie. She loved him and she had betrayed him! With his own name in her heart she had given herself to another, less than six weeks after leaving him! But why? why? Driven by what force? Led away by what dizziness? Overwhelmed by what intoxication? What was the nature—not of women of that sort now, for he had no longer any such fierceness of thought—but of woman, that so monstrous an action should be barely possible to her? Of what flesh was she formed, this deceiving creature, that with all the appearances and all the realities of love, it was not possible to place more reliance upon her than upon water.

How soft they were, those woman's hands, and how loyal they seemed! but to entrust one's heart to them, believing in a mutual affection, was the most foolish of follies! She smiles upon you, and weeps for you, and already she has noticed a passer-by, to whom, if he amuse her for an hour, she will sacrifice all your tenderness, with flame in her eyes and grace on her lips! Ah! why? why? Yet what truth can there be in the world if even love is not true? And what love? Hubert was now thoroughly investigating his past; he conscientiously examined his attachment to Theresa, and he did himself the justice to acknowledge that for months past he had not had a thought that was not for her. He had certainly made mistakes, but they had always been for her, and even at this hour he could not repent them.

He would have found relief for all his pain in kneeling before the priest who had trained him, and saying: "Father, I have sinned." But no; it was beyond his power to regret the actions in which Theresa, his Theresa, had been involved. Yes, he had idolised her with unswerving fervour, and it was his first love, and it would be the last, or at least he thought so, and he had shown her his confidence in the continuance of their feelings with incalculable ingenuousness. Nothing of all this had had sufficient influence over her to arrest her at the moment when she committed her infamy,—with the same body.

He could suddenly breathe its aroma, and again feel its impression over his whole being; then there was a resurrection of jealousy, painful even to torture, and continually he harped on the "why? why?"—in despair, and pitiful, like so many before him, from clashing against the unanswerable riddle of a woman's soul, guilty once, guilty again, guilty even to her grey hairs and to her death itself.

This new form of grief lasted for days and days afterwards. The young man was giving free rein within himself to a new feeling of which he had never had a suspicion hitherto, and which he was henceforward to endure continually—mistrust. From his earliest years he had lived with a complete faith in the appearances which surrounded him. He had believed in his mother. He had believed in God. He had believed in the sincerity of every word and caress. Above all, he had believed in Theresa de Sauve. He had assimilated her in thought with the rest of his life. All was truth around him; thus Theresa's love had appealed to him as a supreme truth, and now, by a mental revolution which betrayed the primitive flaw in his education, he was assimilating all the rest of his life with this woman of falsehood.

His mother had accustomed him to have nothing to say to scepticism. This is probably the surest method of causing the first deception to transform the too implicit believer into an absolute negator. It is never well to expect much from men or from nature, for the former are wild animals scantily masked with decorum; while, as for the latter, her apparent harmony is the result of an injustice which knows no remission. To preserve the ideal within us until death at last releases us from the dangerous slavery to others and to ourselves, we must early habituate ourselves to regard the universe of moral beauty as the opium-smoker regards the dreams of his intoxication. Their charm consists in the fact that they are dreams, and consequently correspond to nothing that is real.

Hubert, quite on the contrary, was so accustomed to move his intellect in one piece that he was unable to doubt or to believe by halves. If Theresa had lied to him why should not everyone do the same? This idea did not frame itself in an abstract form, nor did he arrive at it by the aid of reasoning: it was the substitution of one mode of feeling for another. During this cruel period he found himself suspecting Theresa in their common past.

He asked himself whether her betrayal at Trouville had been the first, whether she had not had another lover than himself at the time of their most infatuated passion. This woman's perfidy was corrupting his very recollections. It was doing worse. Under this misanthropical influence he committed the greatest of moral crimes: he doubted his mother's tenderness. Yes, in Madame Liauran's passionate affection the unhappy fellow could see nothing but jealous egotism.

"If she really loved me," he said to himself, "she would not have told me what she did."

Thus, he found himself in that state of feeling to which popular language has given the expressive name of disenchantment. He had seen the last of the beauty of the human soul, and he was beginning to prove its misery, and always he fell back upon this question as upon the point of a sword: