A Living Lie

by Paul Bourget

'But it's out of your own savings,' remarked Paul. 'What fine stones! Do you want me not to scold you? Then let me put them in.'

'You'll never be able to manage it,' she replied, holding up one of her dainty ears adorned with a plain pink pearl, which Paul slipped out deftly. Then came the turn of the other ear and the other pearl. He showed the same dexterity in putting in the diamonds, touching his beloved as gently with his strong man's hands as any girl could have done. To look at herself, Suzanne took up a small mirror set in a frame of antique silver, another present of the Baron's, and smiled. She looked so pretty at that moment that Paul drew her towards him, and, holding her in his arms, tried to obtain a kiss from her lips. As a rule, she never refused him this. Possibly, from some complication in her nature, she had managed to preserve, in spite of all, a kind of physical liking for this honest, manly fellow, whom she deceived in such a cruel fashion. What, then, had suddenly come over her, and made the usual kiss unbearable? She pushed her husband away almost roughly, saying, 'Oh! let me alone'—then, as if to mitigate the harshness of her tone, she added, 'It's ridiculous in an old married couple. Good-bye, I have hardly time to dress.'

With these words she passed into her bedroom, and so into her dressing-room. Of all the apartments in her home, this was the one in which the profound materialism that formed the basis of this woman's nature was most revealed. Her maid, Céline, a tall, dark girl with impenetrable eyes, commenced to undress her in this shrine of beauty, as gorgeously upholstered as that of any royal courtesan, and anyone who had seen Suzanne at that moment would have understood that she was ready to do anything for the luxury of living in this atmosphere of supreme refinement.

This woman, so delicately fashioned that she seemed almost fragile, was one of those creatures who combine full hips with a slender waist, neat ankles with a well-turned leg, dainty wrists with rounded arms, small features with a full figure, and whose dresses, by hiding all such material charms, clothe them, as it were, with spirituality. She cast a glance at the long mirror set in the centre of her wardrobe, where, packed away in sweet-smelling sachets, lay piles of embroidered linen; seeing how well she looked she smiled as there once more flashed across her brain the same idea that but a few moments ago had dragged her from her husband's arms. This idea was evidently not one of those which it pleased her to entertain, for she shook her head, and a few minutes later, having thrown over her bare neck and shoulders a dressing-jacket of pale blue foulard silk and put her naked feet into a pair of soft swans-down slippers, she gave herself up to the hands of her maid, who began to dress the long, shining hair. The cool water in which she had bathed her face had completely restored her self-possession, and in the mirror before her she saw all the details of this apartment that she had turned into the chapel of her one religion—her beauty.

All was reflected there—the soft-toned carpet, the bath of English porcelain, the wide marble washhand-stand with its silver fittings and its host of small toilet necessaries. Did the sight of all these things remind her of the divers conditions that secured her this happy existence? In any case, it was of her husband she was thinking when she exclaimed, 'The dear, good fellow!' The sparkling diamonds that she had kept in her ears recalled thoughts of Desforges, and following close upon the other came the mental exclamation, 'Dear, kind friend!' These two contradictory impressions became as easily reconciled in the head adorned with those long silken tresses as the two facts were reconciled in life. Women excel in these moral mosaics, which appear less monstrous when the process of their construction has been carefully watched. This fair Parisian of thirty was certainly as thoroughly corrupted as it is possible to be; but, to do her justice, it must be said at once that she was unaware of it, so passive had she been with regard to the circumstances that had gradually reduced her to this state of unconscious immorality.

When Suzanne had allowed herself to be married to Paul Moraines two years before the war of 1870 she had felt neither repugnance nor enthusiasm. The matter had been arranged by the two families; old Moraines, a senator ever since the establishment of the Second Empire, belonged to the same set as old Bois-Dauffin, and Paul, who was then an officer of the Council of State, a good dancer and a charming ladies' man, seemed made for her, as she did for him. For the first two years they formed what is called in women's parlance 'a sweet couple;' it was one round of balls, suppers, and theatre parties, with rural festivities in summer and hunting parties in autumn, all of which both of them enjoyed to the full. Paul himself well defined the kind of relations that bound him to his wife amidst these continual pleasures. 'You are as bewitching as a mistress,' he would say to her as he kissed her in the brougham that took them home at one in the morning.

The revolution of the Fourth of September put an end to this fairy-like existence. The families on both sides had lived on large salaries that were suddenly stopped, but this stoppage had no immediate effect upon the gratification of their expensive tastes. Until his death, which occurred in 1873, Bois-Dauffin was convinced of the speedy restoration of a régime that had been so strong, so well supported, and so popular. The ex-senator, who survived his friend only a few months, shared his sanguine dreams. Paul had, of course, lost his place at the Council of State. He possessed, to an even greater extent than his father and his father-in-law, that blind faith in the success of the cause which will always remain an original trait of the Imperialist party. Suzanne, who had no faith of any kind, commenced to be troubled in 1873 by a very clear vision of the ruin towards which she and her husband were steering by living, as they did, on their capital. This was precisely the moment when Frédéric Desforges commenced to pay her court.

This man, who was then not yet fifty, had remained the most brilliant representative of the generation that had come in with the Second Empire, and which had for its chief the clear-sighted and seductive Duc de Morny. In Suzanne's eyes the Baron's highest recommendation lay in the romantic tales of gallantry that were told of him in the drawing-room, and soon this prestige was supplemented by his indisputable superiority in the knowledge and management of Parisian Society. Having been left a childless widower after a brief union, with almost nothing to do, for his parliamentary duties did not trouble him much, and with an income of four hundred thousand francs a year, exclusive of his mansion in the Cours-la-Reine, his estate in Anjou and his chalet at Deauville, the former favourite of the famous Duke had the rare courage to allow himself to grow old—just as his leader had had the courage to die. He wished to form one last attachment that would bear cultivating until his sixtieth year, and procure him not only an agreeable and accommodating mistress, but a pleasant circle in which to spend his evenings. He had taken in the position of Madame Moraines at a glance, and decided that this was exactly the kind of woman he wanted—extremely pretty and graceful, guaranteed against all probability of maternity by six years of childless married life, and possessing a presentable husband, who would never become a blackmailer. The crafty Baron summed up all these advantages, and by gradually worming his way into Suzanne's confidence, by proving his devotion in getting Moraines his secretaryship, by making her accept presents upon presents, and by showing that exquisite tact of a man who only asks to be tolerated, he at last got her to consent to his wishes. All this, too, was done so slowly and so imperceptibly, and the liaison, when once established, became so simple and so closely bound up with her daily life, that the criminality of her relations with Desforges scarcely ever seemed to strike Suzanne.

What wrong was she doing Moraines, after all? Was she not his wife, and really attached to him? As for the Baron, it is true that he provided a very fair share of the luxuries in which she indulged. But what of that? May not a woman receive presents? If he paid a bill here, and a bill there, did that hurt anyone? She was his mistress, but their relationship was clothed in an air of respectability that made it seem almost like a legitimate union. She had become so accustomed to this compromise with her conscience that she considered herself, if not quite an honest woman, at least vastly superior in virtue to a number of her friends with whose various intrigues she was acquainted. If her conscience reproached her at all, it was for having deceived Desforges, two years after the beginning of their intimacy, with a swell clubman, whom she had carried off from one of her friends during the racing season at Deauville. This individual had, however, almost compromised her so fatally, and she had been so quick to detect in him the self-conceit of a mere flirt, that she had been only too glad to sever the connection at once. Thereupon she had sworn to restrict herself to the peaceful delights of her three-cornered arrangement—to Paul's gentlemanly ways and the Baron's Epicurean gallantry. And so carefully had she kept her resolve, and with such attention to outward appearance, that her good name was as safe as it could be in the enviable position to which her beauty raised her. She had rivals who were too well accustomed to drawing up accounts not to know that the Moraines were living at the rate of eighty thousand francs a year; 'and we knew them when they were almost beggars,' added these kind people. 'Scandal!' cried all the Baron's friends in chorus, and he had a way of making friends everywhere. 'Scandal!' cried the simple-minded people who are shocked by the tales of infamy that go the round of the drawing-rooms every night. 'Scandal!' added the wiseacres, who know that the best thing to do in Paris is to pretend to believe nothing, and to take people at their own value.

Recollections of the innumerable services that Desforges had rendered her were no doubt running through Suzanne's mind as, seated before her toilet table, she exclaimed, 'The dear, kind friend!' Why, then, did the Baron's face, intelligent but worn, suddenly make way for another and a younger face, adorned with an ideal beard and lit up by a pair of dark blue eyes that reflected all the ardour of a virgin and enthusiastic soul? Why, whilst Céline's nimble fingers were busy with laces and hooks, would an inner voice continually murmur the sweet music of these four syllables—René Vincy? What secret temptation was she resisting when she whispered again and again the word, 'Impossible!'