A Love Crime

by Paul Bourget

"Am I really in love with Helen?"

He gathered and heaped together the whole of his inmost sensibility, like a physician seeking with his fingers for the painful spot of a diseased limb. But the spot of love, which it would have given him such sweet pain to meet with, Armand could not discover.

"No," he answered himself with terrible sadness, yet courageously—for, with all his failings, he had energy enough to venture upon self-knowledge—"no, I am not in love with Helen. I desire her because she is beautiful; I have paid my addresses to her because I feel bored; I have grown obstinate about it because she denied me. Pride, sensuality, and romantic twaddle—that's the top and bottom of the whole affair. Then what is the good of it? What is the good? Why renew such an intrigue as that with Madame de Rugle?"

And all the amours into which his depraved liking for seduction—the fatal vice of his youth—had impelled him, came back into his memory, with the monotony of their pleasures, the bitterness of their ruptures, the sickening void of their duration. What was the good of this one or of that? What was the good a year or two ago of amusing himself by winning the love of Juliet, governess to the children of a house at which he was received? What was the good of that comedy played to little Maud, the pretty Englishwoman whom he had met at a watering-place?

"I dreamed of being a man of gallantry—a Don Juan. It looks as though fate punishes us for the evil dreams of our youth by bringing them to pass. I have had intrigues that might flatter my foolish vanity—and what wretchedness!"

Among all the women whose faces and kisses he distinguished in his thought, there was not one who had made him happy, even for a single day, and—strange anomaly of a distempered heart—there was not one who had not in some sort made him suffer. Through what moral disorder did it come to pass that he was devoted to this continual inward calamity—to the endurance of all the tortures of love: the jealousy of the present, the intolerable loathing for the past, the bitter vision of the treacheries of the future, and never, never, aught but physical intoxication, without that ecstacy of soul which, notwithstanding, existed, for he had seen with envy the heavenly expression due to it on the countenances of a few of his mistresses?

One especially came before him—one whose conquest had not been effected for the flattering of his fatuity, for she was but a girl was Aline, who had died of consumption in the autumn of 1880. He could again see her with her hollow eyes, her delicate cheek, and the blending of native purity and corruption that was in her. He could see her nursing a little sister whom she had taken to be with her, a child four years of age. What affecting kindliness in vice, and what innocence in infamy! Yes, Aline loved him, although she had three or four other lovers at the same time as himself. His chief pleasure used to consist in taking this pretty, ruined creature into the country to enjoy the childish outbreaks of rusticity that prompted her to pick flowers, to listen to the birds, to lean upon his arm, as though she had never exercised her hideous profession.

What a mysterious thing is memory! He was on the eve of his first assignation with Helen, and here he was growing tender over poor Aline, evoking her as she was when he had so often sought her in her rooms in the Rue de Moscow; as she was at certain moments when he had loved or nearly loved her—on a summer evening, for instance, when she was seated in the stern of a boat rowed on the Seine by four oarsmen of their acquaintance. Yes, she was seated in a bright dress, looking at him over the heads of the youths as they alternately stooped and rose. A stillness was falling upon the river. A fine of orange was trailing along the margin of the sky. What unspeakable emotion had bathed his soul as he was sensible of the passing hour, the quivering water, the living creature, and the dying light!

He ascended his staircase with these thoughts. Why this fatal incompleteness in all his passions? Why was he incapable of attaining to that absolute of tenderness which he conceived, of which he had glimpses, towards which he sprang at every new intrigue? And then—nothing! And yet how many chances had been combined for him; and while his servant was relieving him of his overcoat, and he was passing into the drawing-room, in which he often read at night before going to bed, he mentally enumerated these chances: a fortune which enabled him to pursue his fancies without much need of calculation; a genuine and ancient title; ability to maintain a position in society that pleased him; a robustness of health that could not recall a week of sickness; a taste for intellectual things just sufficient to occupy his attention without annoyance, for, absolutely free from personal ambition, he had never ceased to be interested as an amateur by the attractions of literature and art.

Added to all this, he had an appointment for the following day with a charming woman whom he desired, and the fire of sense had not been slackened within him by the excesses of his life. Why, then, was it inevitable that the perception of an indefinable insufficiency in his life should make him so melancholy just at this moment? He put on a lounging jacket, dismissed his servant, and settled himself beside the fire in his drawing-room. He again evoked Helen with an exactitude of recollection which made her present to him from her mauve stockings to that little mark which she had there at the right corner of her mouth. Well! he did not love her, and he would never love her. If he had hoped to experience at last, through her, that supreme surprise of the heart which continually eluded him, he might tell himself that this hope was abortive like the rest.