'Monsieur Offarel is engaged this evening,' she said, 'so Monsieur Passart was kind enough to bring us. Give Monsieur Jacques that seat near you, Rosalie.'
Poor Rosalie had not seen René since receiving his cruel message through Emilie. In passing from the Rue Bagneux to the Rue Coëtlogon—in reality a short, but to her an interminable distance—she had suffered agonies, and her heart beat fast as she entered the room. She had, however, the courage to steal a glance at her old lover, as a kind of protest that she was not responsible for her mother's mean calculations, and the courage also to reply coldly, as she took a seat in a corner and placed a chair before her, 'I want this chair to put my wool on. I'm sure Monsieur Passart won't deprive me of it.'
'There's room here,' said Emilie, coming to the poor girl's aid, and giving the young man a seat next to herself. Rosalie firmly refused to play the rôle marked out for her, although she well knew what a terrible scene awaited her at home. And yet it would have been so natural if spite had inspired her with that petty mode of revenge. But women with truly delicate feeling, who know what real love is, are strangers to such mean spite. To inspire a fickle lover with jealousy would horrify them simply because it would mean flirting with another, and such a proceeding is beneath them. Such scrupulous loyalty in spite of all is a touching proof of love, and one which ensures a woman a place in a man's regrets for ever.
For ever! But as far as regards the present hour and the immediate result, these loyal hearts get left far behind, and the flirts win. When the years have fled, and the lover, grown old, shall institute comparisons, he will understand the unique position held by her who would not cause him pain—even to win him back. Meanwhile he runs after the jades who make him drink the bitter cup of that degrading but intoxicating passion, jealousy. It is only fair to René to say that, in sacrificing Rosalie for Suzanne, he believed that he was acting in the interests of true love. When, next morning, his sister praised the girl's noble behaviour, he was quite sincere too in his reply, smacking as it did, though, of naïve self-conceit.
'What a pity that such fine feeling should be wasted!'
'Yes,' repeated Emilie with a sigh, 'what a pity!'
Had René had a thought for aught else than his love, the tone in which his sister had uttered these words would no doubt have revealed to him the change that her opinions had undergone with regard to Madame Moraines. His love, however, entirely absorbed him. His days were now parcelled out into two kinds—those on which he was to meet Suzanne and those which he was to spend without seeing her. The latter, which were by far the more numerous, were passed in the following manner. A great part of the morning he spent in bed, dreaming, for he was already beginning to feel a diminution of vital energy. Then he bestowed much time upon his toilet, lavishing such attention on details as would convince a woman of experience that a young man was beloved. His toilet finished, he wrote to his Madonna. She had imposed upon him the sweet task of sending her an account of all his thoughts day by day. As for herself, he had not a line of her writing. She had said, 'I am so watched, and never alone!' And he pitied her as he devoted himself to compiling the detailed diary that she had demanded.
This pose of a sentimental Narcissus gazing incessantly upon himself and his love was well in keeping with that deep-rooted vanity which he possessed in common with nearly all writers. Suzanne had not sufficiently reflected upon the anomalous nature of a man of letters to have taken vanity into account. It pleased her to read René's words when he was not there simply as a burning reminder of the kisses they had exchanged. When the poet had paid his morning devotions to his divinity in this fashion it was time for lunch. Immediately after that he would go to the Bibliothèque in the Rue de Richelieu and work unremittingly at the notes for his 'Savonarola,' which he had again taken up, during the whole of the afternoon, and sometimes right on into the evening. He worked now without ever having, as in writing the 'Sigisbée,' those flashes of talent which pass from the brain to the pen, charging the memory with a flow of words and drawing the images with such precision and life-like resemblance that the effort of production becomes a strong but delightful intoxication that ends in a state of agreeable exhaustion.
To build up the scenes of the drama he was now writing, René had to keep his mind in a painful state of tension, and at a worse tension still to turn his prose sketches into verse. His brain no longer served him in making happy finds. For this there were several important and distinct reasons. The first—a physical one—was the waste of vital energy inseparable from all reciprocated passions; the second—a moral one—the constant hold that Suzanne had upon his mind and the inability to entirely forget her; the last—an intellectual and secret one, though most powerful—was the deadening influence which success exercises upon the greatest genius.
Whilst conceiving and writing he was beginning to think of the public. He saw before him the house on the first night, the critics in their stalls, the fashionable people scattered here and there, and, seated in a box, Madame Moraines. He already heard the shouts of applause, as demoralising for a dramatic author as the number of editions is for a novelist. The desire to produce a certain effect took the place of that disinterested, natural, and irresistible impulse which is a necessary condition in true art. Still too young to possess the skill with which literary veterans can write impassioned phrases in cold blood, and even well enough to deceive the best critics, René sought in himself that source of ideas which he no longer found. His play would not take shape in his mind in a natural and easy way. The goat-like features of the Florentine monk and the tragic figures of the terrible pontiff Alexander VI., the violent Michael Angelo, the sour Machiavelli, and the formidable Cæsar Borgia would not clothe themselves in flesh and blood before his eyes, in spite of the heaps of notes and documents he had collected and the pages erased again and again. Frequently he would lay down his pen and gaze up at the blue sky through the lace curtains of his window; he would listen to the noises in the house—the closing of a door, Constant playing, Françoise grumbling, Emilie passing quietly, Fresneau walking heavily—and then find himself counting how many hours he had still to wait before seeing Suzanne.