'No,' answered René, 'but I have promised to read a few of my verses to some one.'
'To Madame Moraines?' exclaimed his sister.
'You have guessed it,' replied the poet, looking slightly confused. 'Ah! if you only knew!'
And then the pent-up confidence burst forth. Emilie had to listen to an enthusiastic eulogy of Suzanne and all that concerned her. In the same breath René spoke of the lofty nobility of this woman's ideas and of the shape of her shoes, of her marvellous intelligence and of the figured velvet oh her blotting-book. That childish astonishment at these luxurious details should be united to the more poetic fancies in the fabric of love did not surprise Emilie. Had she herself in her love for René not always associated petty desires with boundless ambition? She wished, for instance, with almost equal fervour, that he might have genius and horses, that he might write another 'Childe Harold,' and possess Byron's income of four thousand a year. In this she was as ingenuously plebeian as he himself, confounding—in excusable fashion, after all—real aristocracy of sentiment with that aristocracy expressed by outer and worldly forms. Those who come of a family in which the struggle for bread has lowered the tone of thought easily mistake the second of these aristocracies for a condition inseparable from the first.
Those words, therefore, which might have led an unkind listener to think that René loved Suzanne for her surroundings, and not for herself, charmed Emilie instead of shocking her, and she had so fully entered into her brother's infatuation that on leaving him she said: 'You are not at home to anyone—I'll see that no one comes in. You must show me your verses when you have written them—mind you choose them well.'
The task of making this selection cheated the poet's ardour, and he was able to await the day fixed for his next visit to the paradise in the Rue Murillo without much impatience. The hours of solitude, broken only by his talks with Emilie, passed by in alternate fits of happiness and melancholy. Often a delightful vision of Suzanne would rise up before him. He would then lay down his pen, and all the objects about him would melt away, as if by magic. Instead of the red hangings of his room, it was the little salon of Madame Moraines that he saw; gone were his dear Albert Dürers, his Gustave Moreaus, his Goyas, his small library on whose shelves the 'Imitatio' rubbed shoulders with 'Madame Bovary'—gone were the two leafless trees that stood out black against a light blue sky. But in their place he could see Suzanne, her dainty ways, the poise of her head, the peculiar golden tint of her hair, and the transparent pink of her lovely complexion.
This apparition, which had nothing of a pale or shadowy phantom about it, appealed to René's senses in a way that ought to have made him understand that Madame Moraines' attitudes did but mask the true woman, the voluptuous though refined courtesan. But of this he took no note, and, whilst madly desirous to possess her, he believed that his worship of her was of the most ethereal kind. This mirage of sentiment is a phenomenon frequently observed in men who lead chaste lives, and one which renders them the defenceless prey of the most barefaced hypocrisy. The inability to understand their own feelings makes them still more incapable of analysing the tricks of the women who arouse in them the accumulated passion of a lifetime. The poet, however, became perfectly lucid as soon as Suzanne's image made way for that of Rosalie. On going through his papers he was continually coming across some page headed, in boyish fashion, 'For my flower;' that was the name he had given Rosalie in the heyday of his love, when he had written her a fresh poem almost every morning.
'O Rose of candour and sincerity!' were the terms in which he addressed her at the end of one of these effusions. When his eyes fell upon such lines he was again obliged to lay down his pen, and once more his surroundings would melt away, but this time to make room for a vision of torture. The rooms occupied by the Offarels lay before him, cold and silent. The old woman was busy with her cats. Angélique was turning over the leaves of an English dictionary, and Rosalie was looking at him, René—looking at him through an ocean of space with eyes in which he read no reproach, but only deep distress. He knew as well as if he were there, near her, that she had guessed his secret, and that she was suffering the pangs of jealousy. If such were not the case would he have been so terribly afraid to meet the girl's eyes? Would that he could go to her and say, 'Let us be only friends!' It was his duty to do so. The only means of preserving one's self-esteem is by acting with absolute loyalty in these subsidings of love, which are like fraudulent bankruptcies of the heart. But that loyalty was thrust aside by weakness in which both egoism and pity were equally represented. He took up his pen again, and saying, as on the first day, 'We shall see—later on,' he tried to work. Soon he had to stop once more as his mind reverted to Rosalie's sufferings. He thought of the long nights she would spend in tears, knowing as he did every trifling habit of the simple creature who had given him her heart. She had often told him that the only time she could indulge in her own grief was at night. Then he hid his face in his hands and waited till the vision had passed, meanwhile saying to himself, 'Is it my fault?'
A law in our nature bids our passions grow stronger in proportion to the number of obstacles to be overcome, so that the remorse of his infidelity to poor Rosalie resulted in making René's heart beat faster as the time fixed by Madame Moraines for their next meeting drew near. She, on her side, awaited him with an almost feverish impatience that astonished even herself. She had looked out for the young poet whenever she had been in the street, and again at the Opera when Friday came round. Had she seen his eyes fixed upon her in that simple adoration which is as compromising as a declaration, she would have said, 'How imprudent!' Not to see him, however, gave her a slight fit of doubt, which brought her caprice to its climax. She looked forward to this visit all the more anxiously because she considered it decisive. It was the third time René visited her, and, out of these three times, twice unknown to her husband. Further than that she could not go, on account of the servants. A day or two back Paul, meaning no harm, had said to her at dinner, 'I was talking to Desforges about René Vincy. He doesn't seem to have made a good impression on the Baron. It is decidedly better not to see the authors too closely whose works we admire.'
If the servant who had announced the poet had been in the dining-room at the moment these words were uttered Suzanne would have had to speak. The same thing might happen the next or any other day. She was therefore determined to find a peg in her conversation with René on which to hang an appointment elsewhere. An idea suddenly occurred to her of going somewhere with the poet under pretence of curiosity—a meeting in Notre Dame, for instance, or in some old church sufficiently distant from the fashionable quarter of Paris to be beyond the risk of danger, and she relied upon one or other of René's poems to furnish her with an opportunity of making such an appointment.