A Love Crime

by Paul Bourget

He strove to beguile with physical motion the indefinable and unbearable sadness with which the scene that he had gone through continuously overwhelmed him. He went from tradesman to tradesman, paying bills that were in arrears, leaving cards at houses in which he had not set foot for months, and unceasingly he reverted to this questioning of the recesses of his conscience: Why was he so greatly shaken by a natural event which it was so easy to foresee, and which, when all was said, did not result in any disastrous consequence?

But no; he could not think of Chazel without feeling an inward wound, bleeding and keen. His pride had been stricken to its deepest depths. He, who since their common adolescence had in thought treated Alfred as an inferior creature, he, who had robbed the poor wretch of his wife without the slightest remorse, he now had suddenly been crushed with generosity by this man, had been almost outrageously contemned. There was no means of rebelling against it, of standing out against it. Of the two it was he, Armand, who was playing the unworthy part, and he was pained by it in the baser portions of his being, in that pride in taking the first place, which, from their childhood, had been manifested in the pettiest details. Did they enter a restaurant, or take part in a country excursion? It was Armand who sought to pay, just as he sought to surpass at every game, and to win prizes at the distributions. Vanity had prevented him from choosing a career. Vanity again had inclined him to intrigues with women. Thus he was humiliated to the very soul.

But his painful sensations proceeded at the same time from a more noble cause. The cord of pity had thrilled within him at the sighing forth of the terrible lament to which he had listened for an hour. Aridity of soul was not an essential part of Armand de Querne's nature. It was caused by the fact that with him emotion passed through the brain before it reached the heart. By a rooted deformity to be found in all intellectual lives, he must needs give himself reasons for feeling in such or such a manner. The powerlessness to love of which he was a victim proceeded from this peculiar disposition. He had never been able to believe in the truth of any woman's heart, and as a consequence he had always given himself reasons for not loving any of them unreservedly.

Such a nature is the most miserable of all, for it prompts those who possess it to the worst acts of egotism without securing to them the icy and unconscious serenity of true egotists. Thus it was that the young man was able to become Helen's lover without a scruple, and to tread upon friendship as tranquilly as upon the carpet in the room where they met; and yet Alfred's suffering had just moved him to the inmost fibre. Ah! the reason was that he did not dispute the sincerity of this suffering; he had touched it as though it were an object, and as he believed in it, he felt it.

At the same moment, and for the first time, he perceived the real scope of his conduct. If he had only suspected the depth of Chazel's love for Helen! If he had known with what ardent friendship this man had been attached to himself, Armand! But, people form ideas concerning a person, and proceed to no further verification. They say to themselves: "This man is nothing." They make no more account of his existence than that of a beast or a plant. And then they find themselves face to face with a heart that beats and that has been stricken, with a happiness that was living and that has been slain. What misconceptions lie at the root of our errors! And how many of the latter are merely the misunderstandings—but the irreparable misunderstandings—of others!

Armand de Querne pursued these thoughts the whole day, and at the end of them all, encountering him in a continuous fashion above all the rest, was the image of Helen, and again of Helen. For whom had he betrayed Alfred's confidence? For Helen. To whom had he so lightly sacrificed the memories of his childhood and his youth? To Helen. In whose interest had he just pledged that shameful word of honour? In Helen's. Now the young man had in his feelings towards his mistress reached that moment when the slightest contrariety is so exaggerated as to become almost unbearable; what, then, was to be said of such a humiliation? He had not deceived himself when, on the very eve of the first assignation, he had recognised that he could never love her.

He had at first passed through a sufficiently sweet period of intoxicated pleasure, during which he had abandoned himself to the charm of having a delightful mistress, as endearing as she was pretty, as submissive as she was impassioned. But even at that period he entertained no illusions regarding the nature of the feelings with which she inspired him or regarding their duration. As to the demonstrations of affection to which Helen surrendered herself, he looked upon them as a display of romanticism to be accounted for by long residence in the country among bad books and absurd dreams.

"She is a Madame Bovary," he said to himself, and with this simple phrase he had answered everything.

When once the malady of disbelief has assailed a tormented heart, every fresh detail serves as food for it. Helen's transports and fits of melancholy, her utterances, and her silences, had served for weapons against her. Did she abandon herself to her feelings with the ardour of a deeply affected soul? He thought badly of her; she was a libertine and nothing more. Did she shroud herself in melancholy reserve? He thought badly of her; she wanted to produce an effect, to assume an attitude. Did she question him respecting himself and his wife? What tyranny! Was she silent? What hypocrisy!

For all this, and by a seeming inconsistency such as characterises the facile kindliness of the indifferent when anxious to save themselves useless shocks, Armand had lent himself to the requisitions of Helen's passion. To evade petty contradictions, he had laid aside many of his habits. He declined dinner after dinner, deferred visit after visit, distanced his appearances at the club, in the Rue Royale, where formerly he used to show himself nearly every day. "You are never to be seen now." "I thought you were abroad." "You rascal, what good fortune are you hiding from us?" Such were the phrases with which he was greeted by nearly every one he met at the corner of a footpath, on the threshold of a restaurant, in the lobby of a theatre.