"Have children presentiments?" Helen asked of herself when she was left alone. "One would think he were conscious that something unusual is taking place." And with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting upon her closed hands, she relapsed into the state of fever that had kept her awake the whole night. The nacreous bruise that encircled her eyes too clearly revealed this sleeplessness. On rising, she had looked at herself in the glass, and said to herself:
"I am not pretty—I shall not please him."
What had been preying upon her had been neither prudish reasoning nor moral reflection. It was a sort of ardent languor. She could see Armand in her thought, and as it were a wave of blood, but having greater heat, surged to her heart, her throat choked a little, and her will tottered. It was not only her first intrigue, in the sense in which the world understands the term, but it was her first love. Helen Chazel, while still Mademoiselle de Vaivre, had endured one of the most painful trials that can weigh upon youth. She had been persecuted by a step-mother who hated her, while believing that she was only bringing her up well and correcting her. The De Vaivres lived in a kind of château, four miles from Bourges, and this had been a prison to the young girl. The father, a weak man, who cherished an innocent mania for an archaeological collection, patiently and complacently gathered together, had never suspected the mute drama played between step-mother and step-daughter for twelve years.
Madame de Vaivre loved her husband, and, without herself comprehending as much, was jealous of the dead wife, that first wife whose grace she saw renewed in the features of the child, in her smiles and in her gestures. Nothing is so dangerous as an evil feeling of the existence of which we are not quite aware. To gratify it we discover all kinds of excuses which enable us to feed our hatred without losing our self-esteem. It was thus that Madame de Vaivre, having taken Helen's education in hand, made every lesson and every admonition a means for torture.
This woman, pretty and refined, but unfeeling, very solicitous about propriety in consequence of the lengthened sojournings at Paris with her father, who had been an official deputy under the July monarchy, was withal minutely devout, and instinctively unkind, like all persons who are accustomed never to admit the just sensibilities of others. When Alfred Chazel had come to be intimate with Monsieur de Vaivre, owing to their common taste for excavations and antiquities, she had with joy perceived that he was falling in love with Helen. It afforded her a secret pleasure to marry her step-daughter to a man who had no fortune, and, the dowry being very small, to condemn her for years to a middling existence. Death, which takes as little account of our evil calculations as of our great intentions, had taken in hand to render abortive this woman's hateful anticipation, through which poor Helen had seen no more clearly than Monsieur de Vaivre himself.
All that the young girl understood on the day that Chazel asked her in marriage was that she would be free from her step-mother's tyranny. She had a plain perception of that from which she was escaping. As to marriage and its physical realities, what could she have known of them? Thus, on leaving the church, she found herself in a moral situation that was full of peril. Her childhood, spent, as it had been, beneath continual oppression, had to an excessive degree developed within her a taste for the romantic—a power, that is, of fashioning beforehand an image of life with which the reality is subsequently compared. Through her joy at deliverance, her future marriage showed to her like a paradise of delight.
Misfortune had it that Alfred Chazel should be one of those men who, with all kindness, all delicacy even, at the bottom of their hearts, are for ever ignorant of a woman's nature. The consummation of the marriage was to Helen something as hateful as it had been unexpected—like a tribute paid to clumsy brutality. The result was that she received her husband's endearments with a repugnance that was imperfectly dissembled, and that added to the timidity of a man already timid by nature and awkwardly impassioned, as those who have not slackened the initial ardour of their youth in facile intrigues often are. Alfred was secretly afraid of showing his tenderness to his wife, and he concealed from her the intensity of a love that would perhaps have touched her had she been able to perceive it.
Moral divorce between husband and wife has nearly always physiological divorce for its first and hidden cause. If community in voluptuousness is the most powerful agent for the fusion of temperaments, the torturing possession of a woman by a man remains the certain origin of unconquerable antipathy. It came to pass in the Chazel household, as in all similar households, that this first antipathy was heightened from week to week by reason of the fact that two beings, condemned to live side by side, unceasingly afford each other grounds for more love or greater hatred. Do not all the petty events of life render them every minute more present to each other? The divergence in tastes, ideas, and habits that parted Alfred from Helen, would have provided the latter, had she loved her husband, with pretexts for a loving education. Not loving him, she found in them only reasons for separating from him still more.
Alfred Chazel was in fact a son of the people, and in spite of the intellectual refinement of two generations, his peasant origin showed itself again in him in clumsiness of gesture and attitude. He was not vulgar, and at the same time he was lacking in manner. Helen, on the contrary, came of a noble family, and her step-mother's continual superintendence had developed to an extreme in her a sense of detailed particularity concerning her person and everything about her. Her husband's manner of eating shocked her; his manner of going and coming and sitting down—a certain slowness in grasping all that constituted the material side of life. When it was needful to accomplish a rapid and precise movement, during a walk, or at table, or in a shop, he would pause for a moment, with lips slightly gaping, and with a startled demeanour, like a peasant passing through a terminus in a large town.
Alfred, moreover, was fond of saying that he was an absent man, and that the external world had no existence for him; and it was true, for two influences had contributed to uproot him from the said external world—the sudden transition of his family from one social class into another, and the nature of his mathematical studies. His wife had never been able to ensure that the cord of his eyeglass should not be broken, and then knotted in several places, that the collar of his overcoat should be kept down, his silk hat brushed, and his cravat properly tied. The carelessness characteristic of men of thought was visible in his entire person.