A Cruel Enigma

by Paul Bourget

"Silence . . ." he resumed. "Do we speak to one that is dead? Well, Theresa is dead to me."

Thus expressing himself in the solitude of his study, where he now spent nearly all his days, Hubert had no ill-will remaining against his mistress. As no new fact came to rouse fresh feelings within him, the old ones, which had existed before the betrayal, reappeared. The images of his remembrances abounded within him, nor did he drive them away, and under their influence his anger little by little became something abstract, rational, and, so to speak, expedient in his eyes; but in reality he had never loved this woman so much as he did now when he believed himself sure of never seeing her again.

He loved her, in fact, as though she were dead; but who does not know that is the most indestructible and frantic tenderness? When irrevocable separation has not primarily resulted in the killing of love, it exalts it on the contrary in a strange fashion. Impossible to embrace, so present and so far away, the dim shape of the wished-for phantom hovers before our gaze with the beauty that life will never wither more, and our whole soul goes out sadly and passionately to meet it. The duration of days is annihilated. The sweetness of the past flows back in its fulness within us, and then begins a singular and retrospective kind of enchantment which is like hallucination in the heart.

Theresa de Sauve might have been a woman buried, sewn up in a shroud, laid in the coldness of the funeral vault for ever, and Hubert would not have abandoned himself more to the gnawings of his memory, to the mad ardour of love which lacks both hope and desire, and is wholly made up of ecstacy of what once has been,—and can never be again. By means of her notes, which he had kept, and which he re-read until he knew every word by heart, he reconstructed, hour by hour, the delicious months of his past intoxication. Theresa was in the habit of never dating her letters, but of simply writing the name of the day at the head of them, "Thursday," "Wednesday," "Saturday." Hubert found the day of the month from the post-mark, thanks to the pious care with which he had preserved all the envelopes, for the childish reason that he could not have destroyed a line of that handwriting without pain.

Even after so many weeks, he had failed to become insensible to the emotion caused him by the sight of the letters of his name traced by Theresa's hand. Yes; hour by hour he revived the life already lived. The charm of the bygone moments reappeared so complete, so rapturous, so heart-breaking! It had passed away as everything does, and the young man had come to rebel no longer against the enigma of which he was the victim. The Christian notion of responsibility was succeeded within him by an obscure fatalism. The termination of his happiness was now explained in his eyes by the inevitable misery of mankind. He almost acquitted his phantom of a fault which seemed to him to be bound up with natural fatalities; and then he began to think that this phantom was not that of a dead woman with closed eyes, motionless bosom, and shut lips, but of a living creature with beating eyelids, throbbing heart, and parted lips that were fresh and warm; and, tormented in spite of himself by some vague, dim desire, he again began to murmur:

"What is she doing?"

What then was Theresa doing, and how was it that she had essayed no effort to see again the man she loved? What thoughts and what feelings had she experienced since the terrible scene which had separated her from Hubert? With her, too, days had succeeded to days, but while the young man, a prey to a metamorphosis of soul provoked by the most unlooked-for and tragic of deceptions, suffered these rapid burning days to slip away as he passed from one extremity of the universe of feeling to the other, she, the guilty one, the vanquished one, was absorbed in a single thought. Herein like all women who love, she would have given her blood-drops, one after another, to cure the sorrow that she had caused to her lover. It was not that the visible details of her life were modified. Except for the first week, during which she had been overthrown, so to speak, by a continuous and shooting headache, she had, as the result of a reaction from the experience of so many emotions, resumed her vocation as a woman of fashion, her accustomed course of drives and visits, great dinners and receptions, theatre-goings or evening parties.

But this completely external movement has never been able to hinder dreams any more than the employment of the needle does in fancy work. Though a strange fact at first sight, the explanation in the Avenue Friedland had been followed by a half-soothed relaxation in her soul, simply because voluntary confession had lessened remorse, as it always does. It is, too, on this unexplained law of our consciousness that the subtle psychology of the Catholic Church has based the principle of confession. If Theresa did not altogether forgive herself for her fault, she was, at least, no longer compelled by her thoughts of it to endure the contemplation of absolute baseness. The notion of a certain moral loftiness was now associated with it, ennobling it in her own eyes. This sleep of remorse left her free to absorb herself in the remembrance of Hubert.

She now lived in a condition of deadly anxiety concerning him, and was dominated by a steady longing to see him again, not that she hoped to obtain her forgiveness from him, but she knew that he was unhappy, and she felt within her such a love for the youth whom she had wounded, that she would willingly have found means to dress and close the sore. How? She could not have told that; but it was not possible that such great, deeply-repentant tenderness could be inefficacious. In any case she must, at least, show Hubert the scope of the passion which she felt for him. Could this fail to touch him, to move him, to rescue him from despair? Now that she was no longer beneath the immediate burden of her infidelity, she did not judge of it from the essentially masculine standpoint, that is, as being something absolute and irreparable.

In woman, who is a creature much more instinctive than we men, and much closer to nature, the energies of renewing spring-time are much more unimpaired. A woman who is deceived forgives, provided that she knows herself to be loved, and a woman who has deceived can scarcely understand non-forgiveness provided that she loves. The fault committed is an idea, a shadow, a chimera. The love felt is a fact, a reality. Thus Theresa had entirely emerged from the period of moral depression, the extreme limit of which had been marked by her confession. Certainly, she did not regret the latter, as so many other women would have done in like circumstances; but it was her longing, her hope, her wish that it should not have marked the end of her happiness, for, after all, she loved and was loved.