A Love Crime

by Paul Bourget

Chazel understood only too well what this reply meant. He remained silent in a corner of the carriage. Helen also refrained from speaking. But a plan had already ripened in her head. The very next day, brought by Alfred himself, she would visit their physician, whose consulting day it was. She would enter the doctor's room alone, and relate to him some symptoms or other; then she would say that the physician forbade all intimate relations with her husband until further notice. She was too well acquainted with the species of timid modesty which ruled Alfred not to know that he would pity her without seeking to divine the mystery of suffering with which she would shroud herself. Supported by this plan—which would have been very repugnant to her had it not been calculated to assure the security of her happiness—with what delight did she suffer herself to be overpowered by sleep, by such a sleep as that wherein we appear to sleep with clearness in our dreams! We sleep, and something wakes within us—a happy portion of our spirit—which ceases not to be sensible of the happiness that we shall find again to-morrow on our pillow. Do we not know that we shall learn this happiness anew by merely opening our eyes?

But neither on that following morning, nor on the mornings which came after it during those few weeks of first intoxication through which she passed, did Helen open her eyes immediately upon awaking. For several minutes she kept her eyelids closed, that Armand's image might return to her perfectly clear and complete before any other impression. If the day about to be spent was an ordinary one, that is to say, without an appointed visit to the Rue de Stockholm, she rose indolently. The thought of her appointment was not present to make her feverish, and she could think about her lover without anxiety.

On the previous evening, before going to bed, she had begun a letter to him, which she concluded as soon as she had risen, so that "good-night" and "good morning" might meet upon the same scrap of paper—a visible symbol of the continuity of her love. Sometimes she found means to send this letter, sometimes she kept it about her, folded in two in her bosom, in order to deliver it herself. From Armand she expected no reply. He had explained to her the prudential reasons on account of which he did not write, and in this prudence she had not perceived the lack of impulse and politic calculation of a man of gallantry, who foresees approaching ruptures, and does not wish to leave any weapon in the hands of his future enemy.

She used to close her letter with a seal, on which she had had engraved a serpent in the shape of the letter S, because with an S began the name of the street which had been the asylum of her happiest moments. The laughter with which Armand had greeted this childishness, had indeed pained her somewhat, but she had said to herself: "Men have not the same way of loving as we have." Then, her dear task concluded, she addressed herself to all the cares of her household, cheerful, and finding no duty irksome. She was accompanied throughout her work by a phrase which she used to repeat in a whisper: "He loves me, he loves me." Especially did she occupy herself with her son, whom she now could kiss without remorse. "No, dear child, I have taken nothing from you," she said to him in her heart, and thanks to that power of sophistry characteristic of happy love, she came to think in like manner respecting her husband.

She had never done anything but esteem him, and she continued to esteem him as before. Since the pretence of the doctor's order had freed her from all hateful advances on Alfred's part, she ingenuously extended to him the joy with which her heart was filled. She no longer made him any of those bitter replies which, in connection with the pettiest details, betray the unconscious animosity of a woman against the man to whom she belongs, and who has not been able to win her love. Did he at table utter, as he used to do, an idea that was not her own; did he allow an awkward gesture or a clumsy question to escape him, she had no capacity within her for becoming angry, all her faculties being employed in calculating the hour at which Armand would be with her, and in depicting to herself the happiness that his presence would bring her. The hour struck, and Armand was there. She felt so fully satisfied that she no longer thought of watching him. He told her that he loved her; he proved it to her by sacrificing his life in society, the theatres, his club, and spending as many as two or three evenings in the week with her. What interest would he have in deceiving her, and how could she do otherwise than surrender herself to this divine felicity?

When the morning of a day selected for one of their secret meetings arrived, she had not the strength to superintend her household. The expectation of happiness was so keen that it bordered upon pain. On these mornings, as on the first of them, she was absorbed, feverish and prostrate by the fireside, in prolonged reflection, and in her excess of feeling experienced an anguish that relaxed to delight when she had reached the little suite of rooms in the Rue de Stockholm. These were still the same; for having been obliged at their third meeting to take other rooms in the same house, she had entreated Armand to return to the former ones, to those which had witnessed her first intoxication.

To do this it had been necessary to take the lodgings no longer by the day, but by the month. Armand had at first declined to do this, affirming that he had good reasons, but in reality because he knew by experience how greatly a movable place of meeting that is changed on each occasion facilitates ruptures, and then—although he was generous and rich he felt, without fully acknowledging it to himself, that there was rather too great a difference between the twenty-five francs that Madame Palmyre demanded for an afternoon, and the four hundred represented by a monthly hiring. He had yielded nevertheless, just because a small money question was involved, and because he thought himself shabby for having so much as thought about it.

"It will only last six months after all," he had said to himself.

But how delighted the confiding Helen had been by this concession! What quick work it had been with her to transform the commonplace rooms into a personal domain to which she brought all kinds of dainty feminine objects, slippers into which to slip her naked feet, a lace shawl to throw over her quivering shoulders, a few pieces of material for draping the table and the backs of the easy chairs, a frame in which to place a photograph of Armand. She had not suspected that each of these little attentions had had the double effect of disquieting De Querne with respect to the difficulty of future separations, and of proving to him that he had to deal with a lady of experience. Like all romantic women, Helen was occupied with the subtleties of the voluptuousness common to herself and to her lover, as though with an anxiety suggested by sentiment. What renders a woman of this kind perfectly unintelligible to a libertine is that he, on his part, has accustomed himself to separate the things of pleasure from the things of the heart, and to taste this pleasure amid degrading conditions; whereas a woman who is romantic and in love, having known pleasure only as associated with the noblest exaltation, transfers to her enjoyments the reverence which she has for her moral emotions.

Helen approached with amorous piety, almost with mystic idolatry, the world of mad caresses and embracings. This piety was centred upon the man who had taught her to love, as upon a being above the range of all discussion. It went for nothing that Armand, after the first days of a self-abandonment produced by the novelty of physical possession, multiplied the tokens of his egotism; his mistress found the means of loving him the more for them. If he came late to their interview in the Rue de Stockholm, she was so proud of having worsted him in the intimate joust of love that she was almost grateful to him for doing so. If at the last moment, and merely to suit his own convenience, he altered the hour of their meeting, the gentle woman experienced a further pleasure in feeling herself treated by her worshipped master as a slave, as a thing which belonged to him, and which he disposed of according to his fancy.