A Love Crime

by Paul Bourget

"Then you think that there is no woman in existence who has had only one love?"

"Few," said Armand. "But what does it matter?" he added gaily; "at each fresh intrigue they fancy that they have never loved before, and it is half true, like all truths—they have not loved altogether in the same manner."

A question rose to Helen's lips. She wished to ask: "And I? What do you think me? Do you believe that I have loved before you? Do you believe that I shall love after you?" She dared not. Once more she was cruelly impressed by the unknown element in her lover's character. No, it was not she whom he doubted—not she, more than another. The man did not believe in any woman. But how is love possible without belief? Is there any sort of tenderness possible without trust? She did not answer herself on these too painful topics, but she prolonged an involuntary analysis of her relations with Armand, and suddenly light was thrown within her upon many of the details which she had not interpreted.

Reflecting upon the distrustful characteristics which alarmed her in this man, she in a retrospective fashion understood the silence with which on certain occasions he had greeted her outpourings. She remembered him listening to her while she spoke of her country life, and of her moral solitude. "I was keeping myself for you beforehand, without knowing you," she had said. He had made no reply. He had not believed her. Another time she had talked to him of the future, and of the joy that she felt in thinking that they were both young and so had many years in which to love each other. He had made no reply. He had not believed her. When she told him that, but for her son, she would have gone far, very far away, that she might consecrate her entire life to him alone, he kept silence; he had not believed her. Ah! his incredulity, his horrible incredulity! She encountered it now even in a quite recent past, but where she had not suspected it! Or no, was she deceiving herself? Was it that Armand had believed in her so long as he loved her, and was beginning to believe in her no longer now that he loved her less?

Did he love her less? She did not admit for a moment that he had not loved her at the beginning of their connection. He was an honourable man, not a love criminal. He would not have asked her to be his had he not been drawn to do so by all the forces of passion. Then, to explain Armand's incredulity, she reverted to the young man's past, to the mysterious deceptions of which her husband had formerly spoken to her.

"A woman has spoiled his heart," she said to herself.

At the thought of this she was pained by a different pain. She pitied Armand more, and she was jealous with a dim, vague jealousy. Then she asked herself:

"Will my love ever have power to restore to him the faith that he has lost?"

Absorbed as she was in these thoughts, nothing of which she expressed to the man who was their object, she no longer studied the impression which she herself produced upon her lover. When Armand came to dine in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, and all three of them—he, Alfred, and herself—remained to spend the evening in the little drawing-room, she lapsed into abysmal silence. Alfred delighted, as a mathematician, in abstract discussions, and set forth social, political, and economic theories to the young baron, who listened to him with visible weariness depicted upon his features. Then a moment would come when Helen, emerging from her reflections, looked at him. She saw this expression of weariness, and failed to comprehend its immediate and trifling cause. "He is not happy with me," she would say to herself, and immediately afterwards, with even greater simplicity, "He is not happy." So she reflected, she who had given herself to him to obliterate a wrinkle of melancholy upon his brow, she whose thoughts and feelings had but a single aim: his happiness!

At other times, Armand would come, and at the first glance she discerned that while away from herself he had passed through periods of sadness. Then she felt quite paralysed. She trembled to speak to him, to utter a word that, coming from her lips, would displease him. An indefinable uneasiness took possession of her, a fear of showing her soul to the man she loved, that was all the more painful, for the fact that she had at first surrendered herself with such deep delight to the charm of feeling aloud in his presence, and this uneasiness with her now went even to their interviews in the Rue de Stockholm.