Towards the latter he entertained a feeling of friendship all the more intense that there was blended with it an element of admiration. When they were studying on the same form at school, he used to look at him, and the refinement of Armand's manners, his beauty, his intellect, his halo of social superiority, inspired him with a sort of fetichism. Himself so modest, so hard-working, so akin to the people, he had vaguely considered his friend as a being of a somewhat different species; and when a very clear vision of a difference of this kind produces neither hatred nor envy, it gives birth to an almost blind enthusiasm. Never had Chazel judged De Querne. He had become so habituated to taking him as he was, that he did not even ask himself what manner of friendship Armand was giving him in return for his own. When they had separated, and the young baron used to send about two hastily scribbled pages in reply to the interminable letters from his old companion, the latter would say to himself:
"Armand is very fond of me, but it is wearisome to him to write. It is only natural. He is such an agreeable fellow, and so much sought after;" and this was all the complaint of an excellent heart that was ever deceived by a trifling exhibition of sympathy.
At every visit that he paid to Paris he met with the same reception from Armand—a clasp of the hand, an invitation to luncheon, to dinner, to the theatre. These tokens of comradeship, at once indifferent and cordial, appeared to him proofs of loyal affection. Not having observed Armand any more than, once married, he was to observe his wife, he could not measure the depth of the abyss which from year to year yawned still wider between his old classmate and himself. He knew not how to recognise the visible signs of radical indifference: the absolute dumbness of the young baron respecting himself, his looks of inattention during their conversations.
While Alfred, for example, was detailing to him the beginnings of his love for Mademoiselle de Vaivre, the innocent privacies of his furtive wooing and his hopes, Armand would smoke a cigar, and think of the loves which had crossed his own life, amid all the studied elegance and corruption which at Paris make a woman of pleasure so complex a thing, an extreme attained in the art of refining upon voluptuousness. He could by anticipation see in the young girl loved by his friend an awkward and undesirable creature, with red hands, badly-made dresses, and white stockings.
Like all men in whom the source of sensibility is not flowing and rich, he discovered pretexts for disgust in the trifles of petty external fact, and he involuntarily despised Chazel for not being disgusted like himself. This contempt was even so continuous, that it prevented him from looking seriously on the life of this worthy student, this prize of social excellence, as he used to call him in his absence. The astonishment caused him by Helen's distinguished appearance, had merely prompted him to say to himself below his breath:
"It's only ninnies like him that ever get hold of such a woman as that."
Alfred had trembled to know the judgment passed by his friend upon his wife, and had been enraptured to find that she pleased him. Armand's constant presence in their home, after they had settled at Paris, caused him intense joy. He became still more attached to his friend, because he appreciated the woman he himself loved so dearly, and to the latter because she appreciated his friend.
"I knew he would please you," he used to say ingenuously to his wife. "He is such an affectionate fellow, for all his sceptical ways."
And he would tell her how, in the days of their early youth, the elder Chazel had been in want of ten thousand francs to pay a brother's debts, and how Armand had immediately lent them.
For the first few months Helen listened to these praises with brilliant eyes, and a happy soul; she found in them reason for loving still more the man she loved. Since she had been the young man's mistress, these same praises darkened her countenance as they wounded her love. Did not the husband's trust degrade the lover? If Alfred's ingenuous sensibility discovered in this sign, as well as in many others, a metamorphosis in his wife's character, he was incapable of discerning its secret cause. It was just this too delicate sensibility which rendered it intolerable to him to think continuously of evil instincts, disgraceful actions, treacheries. There is hardness of heart in all distrust. The admission of evil tortured Chazel, and he forced himself not to think about it.