CHAPTER XV
COLETTE'S SPITE
This delightful existence had been going on for about two months with nothing to break its sweet monotony but the pain of parting and the joy of meeting when, one morning, just as René was about to proceed to the Rue des Dames, Françoise handed him a letter that made him start, for on it he recognised Claude Larcher's handwriting. By calling at Larcher's rooms René had learnt from Ferdinand that the writer had stopped at Florence and then at Pisa. He had even sent him a letter to each of these towns addressed poste restante, but had received no reply. He saw by the postmark that Claude was now in Venice, and with feelings of intense curiosity he tore open the envelope, reading the contents as he strolled down to the river through the quiet suburban streets on this fair spring morn that was as fresh and bright as his own love.
'Venice, Palais Dario: April, 1879.
'My DEAR RENÉ,—I am writing you these lines from your Venice—from that Venice whence you evoked the cruel features of your Cœlia and the sweet face of your Beatrice; and as this fairy-like city is, as it always was, the land of improbabilities, the city of the Undines, which on these Eastern shores are called sirens, I have, like Byron, discovered a small furnished suite in a most delightful little palace on the Grand Canal, a palazzino with marble medallions on its façade, all ornamented, carved, and engraved, and leaning as badly as I do on my bad days. As I scribble this letter I have the blue waters of the Canal Grande under my window and around me the peace of this great city—the Cora Pearl of the Adriatic, a wretched play-writer would say—like the silence of a dream. My dear fellow, why have I brought my battered old heart here of all places—here, where I feel it beat louder and stronger in the sweet stillness? I must tell you that it is two o'clock, that I have just breakfasted at Florian's under the arcades after having been to San Giorgio in Bragora to look at a divine Cima, that I am to dine to-night with two ladies directly descended from the Doges—fair as the creations of Veronese—and some Russians as amusing as our friend Beyle's Korazoff, and that, instead of feeling elated, I have come home to look at Her Portrait—with a capital H and a capital P—the portrait of Colette! René, René, why am I not seated in my stall at the Théâtre Français, gazing at her as Camille in "On ne badine pas avec l'amour"—a divine play, as bitter as "Adolphe," yet as sweet as the music of Mozart? Do you remember her smile as she holds her pretty head on one side and says, "Are you sure that a woman lies with all her soul when her tongue lies?" Do you remember Perdican and these words: "Pride, thou most fatal of human counsellors, why art thou come between this maid and me?" All my story—all our story lies in those few words. Only it happens that I am the real Perdican of the play, having in my soul that source of idealism and love, ever flowing in spite of experience, ever pure in spite of so many sins! And she, my Camille, has been stained by so much shame that nought can wash her clean! Alas! how sadly the world treated my flower—when I wished to inhale its fragrance I found instead a smell as of the grave.
'Come, come, it was not to write you such stuff that I sat down before my balcony, through the carving of which I can see the gondolas pass. They glide and slant and turn about, looking so pretty with their slim, funereal shapes. If each of these floating biers carried away one of my dead dreams, what an interminable procession there would be on the dreary waters! Would that I were an etcher! I know what Dance of Death I would engrave—a flight of these black barques in the twilight, with white skeletons as gondoliers at the prow and poop, and a row of ruined palaces for a background. Under it I should write: "Such is my heart!" After a youth more down-trodden than the grapes in the wine-tubs, and when I had just emerged from the miserable drudgery of my profession, it was this horrible slavery of love that stared me in the face—this love with its basis of hatred and contempt! Why, just Heaven!—why? Who could have guessed on that July evening when this madness began that I was entering upon one of the most solemn periods of my life? I had been dining alone after a hard day's work, and, in order to get a little fresh air and pass the time until ten o'clock, I was just strolling wherever my fancy took me, gazing idly at the passers-by. What invisible demon led my steps to the Comédie Française? Why did I go up into the green-room, where I had not been for months, to shake hands with old Farguet, about whom I did not care a rap? Why had I such a ready flow of wit and such brilliant repartee at my command at that very moment—I who, at fashionable dinners, had frequently found myself as dumb as the carp à la Chambord on the dish? Why was Colette there in that adorable costume that belongs to the old répertoire? She was playing Rosine in the "Barber of Seville," and I went to the front to hear her sing the air, "When Love brings us spring again." Why did she look at me as she sang it, and show such real emotion that I dared scarcely believe it was meant for me? Why had she those lips, those eyes, that face on which might be read the sufferings of a conquered Psyche, a prey to love? How passionately we loved each other from that very first evening! And it was only the second time we had met. Can you understand how I was mad enough to expect fidelity from a girl who had thrown herself at me in that fashion? As soon as I got back behind the scenes she invited me into her dressing-room, and before we had been there a quarter of an hour her lips were pressed to mine in most painful ecstasy. Fool that I was! I ought to have taken her for what she was—a charming courtesan—and remembered that women are just the same to others as they are to us. Instead of which—
'Let us leave this road, my dear René, for I perceive a finger-post on which is written "To despair," like the posts in that forest of Fontainebleau where I took her one summer morning in a dog-cart drawn by a black horse named Cerberus. I can see the horse now, with a fox-tail hanging down over his forehead, and my Colette beside me, looking pale, but so beautiful. When was she not beautiful to me? But let us leave, I say, this fatal road, and come to the present, of which I owe you an account, since you have been good enough to write me several such nice letters. When I left you in the Rue Coëtlogon and hied me off to Italy—it sounds like a song!—I wanted to see whether I could do without her. Well, the experiment has been made—and has failed. I cannot. I have argued with myself, and I have struggled long and hard. Since my departure I have got up not ten—but twenty, thirty times, and sworn not to think of her during the whole of that day. It's all right for a quarter of an hour, for half an hour even. But at the end of that time I see her again. I see her eyes and her mouth, I see those gestures I have seen in none other—the pretty way she had, for instance, of laying her head on my shoulder when I held her in my arms, and then, wherever I may be, I am obliged to stop and lean against a wall, so sharp is the pain that pierces my heart. Would you believe that I had to leave Florence because I spent my time in the "Uffizi" before Botticelli's "Madonna Incoronata," a photo of which you have seen in my rooms? I have sometimes taken a cab from the other end of the town in order to reach the gallery before closing time, so that I might gaze upon the canvas once more. The angel on the right, the one that lifts the curtain, is the very image of her, and wears that look which has so often made me pity Colette and bewail her misfortune when I ought to have killed her.
'So I left Florence and came to Pisa, the dead city whose sweet silence had enchanted me in days gone by. I had taken an immense fancy to the square in which stand the Dome, the Baptistery, and the Belfry, with a cemetery wall and the remains of a battlemented rampart to enclose it. Then there was the shore of the Gombo two hours distant—a sandy desert among the pines—and the yellow Arno flowing sluggishly by! My room looked out upon the dreary river, but it was full of sunshine, warm and clear, and I had come there filled with a glorious plan. An old maxim of Goethe had come into my mind, "Poetry is deliverance!" "I will try it," I said to myself, and I swore not to leave Pisa before I had turned my grief into literature. Perhaps, in making bubbles out of the tears I had already shed, I might forget to shed fresh ones. These bubbles grew into a story which I called Analysis. You have no doubt read it in the Revue parisienne. Don't you think it as good as anything I have done? As you see, it is the whole story of my sad love; every detail is absolutely correct, from the episode of the letter to my jealousy of the Sapphos. What do you think of Colette—isn't she well drawn? And of me? Alas! my dear fellow, would that I had obtained peace of mind by besmirching the image of her I have so loved, by dragging in the dirt the idol once adorned with freshest roses, by dishonouring the dear past with all the strength at my command! Hear the result of this noble effort—I had no sooner posted the manuscript of this story than I went home and wrote to Colette asking her to forgive me. An excellent joke, this maxim of Goethe—a sublime Philistine and a Jupiter, as they used to style him! I have plunged a pen into my wound to use my blood for ink, and I have only poisoned myself afresh. If I am to be cured at all, time is the only thing that will cure me. But, after all, why be cured?
'Yes, why? I have been proud—I am proud no longer. I have struggled against the passion that abased me—I will struggle no more. If I had the cancer in my cheek, should I be ashamed of it? Well, I have a cancer in my soul, and make no attempt to check its growth. Listen to the end of my story. Colette did not answer my letter. Could I expect her to be kind to me after my behaviour? I had already begun to humble myself by writing to her. I went on doing so. Then I commenced to feel such delight as I had never felt before—that of degrading myself before her, of letting her trample upon my manly dignity. I wrote to her a second, a third, a fourth time.
'My novel appeared, and I wrote to her again—letters in which I delighted in humbling myself, letters that she might show about and say: "He has left me, he insults me, and yet see how he loves me!" Should not those very insults have proved to her how much I loved her? You don't know her, René; you don't know how proud she is, in spite of all her faults. What pain that wretched novel must have caused her I scarcely dare to think, and that, too, is why I dare not come back. In my present state of mind I could not possibly face a scene such as we used to have, and to live longer without her is equally beyond me. I have therefore decided, my dear René, to ask you to go and speak to her. I know that she has always liked you, and that she is really grateful to you for the pretty rôle you wrote her. I know that she will believe you when you say to her, "Claude can stand it no longer—have pity on him." Tell her, too, René, that she need have no fear of my horrible temper. The rebellious Larcher she could not bear exists no longer. To be near her, to live in her shadow, to have her near me, I will tolerate all, all—you understand. Our last months together were not all honey, it is true, but what a paradise they were compared with this Inferno of absence! And we had our happy hours, too—those afternoons we spent together in her rooms in the Rue de Rivoli, overlooking the gardens of the Tuileries. The bustle of the great city went on around us as I held my darling pressed to my heart. See how my hand trembles only to think of it! If I have ever done you a service in the past, as you say I have, be my friend now and call on her, show her this letter, speak to her, appeal to her heart. Ask her to say that she forgives me and that I may come back to her. Good-bye. I await your reply in agony, and you know what torture that machine is capable of suffering which calls itself your old friend.
'C. L.
'P.S.—Go to the Revue office and ask for five copies of my story; I can get rid of them here.'
'How like him!' said René, after having read this strange epistle, which was nothing but a bundle of the different elements that made up Claude's composite personality. Childish sincerity wedded to a taste for dramatic display; a love of posing even when suffering bitter anguish; most susceptible professional vanity and an absolute lack of all pretensions; profound self-knowledge and total inability to govern himself—all this was there. 'I shall go to the theatre to-night if Colette is playing,' said René to himself. He bought a paper and saw her name in the list for that evening. 'But,' he thought, 'how will she receive me?'
He was so interested in what would happen and so moved by his dear friend's grief that he could not help telling Suzanne all about it as soon as he reached the trysting-place. He even gave her the letter to read, and as she handed it back to him she said: 'Poor fellow!' adding, in an indifferent tone, 'Haven't you really ever mentioned me when talking together?'
'Yes, once, quite casually,' replied René, with some hesitation. Since he had become Suzanne's lover he had never forgiven himself for the question he had put to Claude about her—the unfortunate question which had drawn down upon him the sarcasm of his friend.
Suzanne mistook the cause of his hesitation and returned to the charge. 'I am sure that he said something nasty about me?'
'Indeed, he didn't,' replied René, in a tone of assurance. He was too well acquainted with the play of Suzanne's face not to have remarked the look of anxiety in her eyes as she put her second question, and he, in his turn, now asked: 'How you distrust him! Why?'
'Why?' she repeated with a smile; 'because I love you so dearly, René, and men are so bad.' Then, wishing to entirely destroy the effect that her excessive distrust might have produced in the poet, she added, 'You must go and see Mademoiselle Rigaud.'