A Love Crime

by Paul Bourget

"What was the use of having loved like that? What was the use? Ah! the lying, lying, lying!—"

What served to complete her provocation in the mortal crisis through which she was passing was the tender and untimely solicitude of her husband. As he had no suspicion of the drama that was being enacted in this distempered soul, he would chance to say to her, in the belief that he was holding out an agreeable prospect: "We will make a trip as soon as I am free. Perhaps Armand will come with us." Or perhaps: "I am surprised at not having heard from Armand. Has he not written to you?"

"No," she would reply.

Alfred now reproached himself for the explanation that he had had with his friend, feeling persuaded that the latter had gone to travel only in order to spare his jealousy. He thought about his wife's melancholy, he found it ever more inexplicable, and he told himself that he had deprived her of one of her few relaxations. She, on the other hand, was profoundly sensible of angered pride on thus encountering her husband's trust, which contrasted too sharply with the distrust of her lover. And then these plans of travelling together, which Alfred called up, were they not the very ones that she had herself formerly cherished? They showed her with only too great precision what might have been—those summer months whose intimate holiday-making she had imagined beforehand. They would have lived together by the seashore in one of the villages of Normandy, where the trees grow green to the very margin of the blue waves. Perhaps they would have seen together one of those Italian towns whose mere names seem to shroud a promise of happiness with light. And then there came nothing but freezing solitude, nothing but desertion! He had not written her a note since their rupture, not a line of pity. But why should he have pitied her? Doubtless he believed her already comforted, perhaps in the arms of another. Why not? He had deemed her capable of having Varades before himself. Two lovers, three, ten, what matters the total if there be more than one?

From day to day the keen pain of this injustice became more keen within her, and the pain resulted in a mad and morbid thought, yet the only one that could satisfy somewhat the despair that raged in her heart. Yes, in those hours of anguish she conceived the criminal thought of indeed committing frightful actions, since she had been deemed capable of them, of being like the image that Armand had formed of her, like that fast and facile woman whom he had believed himself to possess.

Moral life, like physical life, has its suicidal fevers, its damning frenzies. There are moments when we are driven at all costs to renounce our inner personality, to assassinate it, to become another being. It is especially injustice that produces these crises, mysterious yet so necessary, and so natural that even children, like animals, are subject to them. Are not the best rendered the worst by being beaten without having deserved it? The more Helen was sensible of having been irredeemably misunderstood, the more a frightful attraction impelled her to become just the opposite of what she had formerly been. A vertigo seized her, and, as it were, a delirious longing for degradation. "'Tis too foolish," she said to herself, "to have any heart."

This appetite for destruction which works in all creatures simultaneously with the sense of love, recoiled upon herself. She set herself to attack her own inner nature systematically, as some men intoxicate themselves, in analogous circumstances, glass by glass, in spite of disgust and, so to speak, from a sense of duty. She began to exhibit strange phenomena of nervous gaiety in the ordinary affairs of life. She, who hitherto had detested light conversation, affected to fill her talk with the most direct allusions to the things of love. She sent for those works which, during the last few years, she had heard spoken of as being the most audacious, in order to have them upon her table. She was seized with a sort of frenzy for pleasure, and every evening there would be a party at the theatre to which she brought Alfred, and she would speak of her intentions of going again into society, and interest herself with surprising activity in the disguise that she was to wear at a fancy ball given by the Malhoures, a ball for which Armand was to have chosen her costume. Her voice seemed to be of a higher pitch. She laughed a more sonorous laugh, and at all the demonstrations of this painful merriment Alfred, in spite of himself, felt affected by an indefinable anxiety, so completely were her eyes characterised by that extraordinary brightness, her gestures by those nervous jerkings, and her words by that abruptness which occasion a dread lest a woman capable of looking, gesticulating, and talking in this way should suddenly be seized by a fit of insanity, and should commit some extravagant and irretrievable action.

She was stranger still on the morning of the day on which she was to go to the Malhoures' ball. It was the first time since her quarrel with Armand that she was going out for the evening. She did not come down to breakfast. Alfred, seated at the square table with his wife's cover laid opposite to him, and with his son on his right, ate without speaking, a prey to the increasing distress inflicted upon him by the mournful oddness of Helen's behaviour. She no longer seemed to be aware of the little boy's existence. "Good morning, dear," "Good night, dear," and that was nearly all. She, a mother usually so loving, seemed to have the maternal instinct paralysed within her, and for the moment such was indeed the case.

A settled idea produces upon the heart the same effect as is produced by a bright and motionless point upon our eyes; it hypnotises the being which it sways, and limits its susceptibility to a tiny circle of sensations. It was impossible for the unhappy woman to have any feeling whatever in respect of her son, because in her condition of lucid aberration it was impossible for her to be sensible of his existence.

The little boy was raised on a high chair, and had that morning on his face the sad, and at the same time perplexed expression of a child that grieves without knowing why. A depth of undefined sorrow was in his eyes; his father was aware, merely by observing the way in which he ate with the tips of his teeth, that a hidden trouble was tormenting this curly head.