"Just God! How you must have suffered! But why did you not tell me before? Why did you not confide in me? Did you think that I would love you less? See, I have the courage to hear all."
And she added, in that thirst for the whole truth which we have for the faults of those who are dear to us, as though we looked to find a pardonable excuse in the cruel details:—
"I beg you, tell me all, all. And first, this man? Do I know him?"
"No," replied Madame de Carlsberg, "his name is Olivier du Prat. I met him at Rome two years ago when I was spending the winter there. That was the period of my life when I saw you least, and wrote to you least frequently. It was also the time when I was the most wicked, owing to solitude, inaction, unhappiness, and my disgust with everything, especially with myself. This man was the secretary of one of the two French embassies. He was much lionized because of the passion, he had inspired in two Roman ladies, who almost openly disputed his favors. It is very ignoble, what I am going to tell you, but such was the truth. It amused me to win him from them both. In that kind of an adventure, just as in play, one expects to find the emotions that others have found in it, and then the result is the same as in roulette. One is bored with it, and one throws one's self into the game from wilfulness and vanity, in the excitement of an absurd struggle. I know now," and her voice became graver, "that I never loved Olivier, but that I so persisted in this liaison that he would have the right to say that I wished him to love me, that I wished to be his mistress, and that I did all I could to retain him. He was a singular character, very different from those professional lovers, who are for the most part frightfully vulgar. He was so changeable, so protean, so full of contrasts, so intangible, that to this day I cannot tell whether he loved me or not. You hear me in a dream, and I am speaking as in a dream. I feel that there was something inexplicable in our relations, something unintelligible to a third person. I have never met a being so disconcerting, so irritating, from the endless uncertainty he kept you in, no matter what you did. One day he would be emotional, tremulous, passionate even to frenzy, and on the morrow, sometimes the same day, he would recoil within himself from confidence to suspicion, from tenderness to persiflage, from abandonment to irony, from love to cruelty, without it being possible either to doubt his sincerity or to discover the cause of this incredible alteration. He had these humors not only in his emotions, but even in his ideas. I have seen him moved to tears by a visit to the Catacombs, and on returning as outrageously atheistical as the Archduke. In society I have seen him hold twenty people enraptured by the charm of his brilliant fancy, and then pass weeks without speaking two words. In short, he was from head to foot a living enigma, which I penetrate better at a distance. He had been early left an orphan. His childhood had been unhappy, and his youth precociously disenchanted. He had been wounded and corrupted too soon. Thence came that insatiability of soul, that elusiveness of character which appeared as soon as I became interested in him in a kind of spasmodic force. When I was young at Sallach I loved to mount difficult horses and try to master them. I cannot better describe my relations with Olivier than by comparing them to a duel between a rider and his horse, when each tries to get the better of the other. I repeat it, I am sure I did not love him. I am not certain that I did not hate him."
She spoke with a dryness that showed how deeply these memories were implanted. She paused a moment, and, plucking a rose from a bush near her, she began to bite the petals nervously, while Madame Brion sighed:—
"Need I pity you for that also,—for having sought happiness out of marriage, and for having met this man, this hard and capricious monster of egoism?"
"I do not judge of him," Madame de Carlsberg answered. "If I had been different myself, I should doubtless have changed him. But he had touched me in an irritable spot; I wished to control him, to master him, and I used a terrible weapon. I made him jealous. All that is a bitter story, and I spare you the details. It would be painful to recall it, and it does not matter. You will know enough when I say that after a day of intimacy, when he had been more tender than ever before, Olivier left Rome suddenly, without an explanation, without a word of adieu, without even writing a letter. I have never seen him again. I have never heard of him, except in a chance conversation this winter, when I learned that he was married. Now you will understand the strange emotions I felt when two months ago Chésy asked permission to present a son of a friend of his mother, who had come to Cannes to recover from a bad cold, a young man, rather solitary and very charming; his name was Pierre Hautefeuille. In the countless conversations that Olivier and I had together in the intervals of our quarrelling, this name had often been spoken. Here again I must explain to you a very peculiar thing,—the nature of this man's conversation and the extraordinary attraction it had for me. This self-absorbed and enigmatic being had sudden hours of absolute expansion which I have seen in no one else. It was as though he relived his life aloud for me, and I listened with an unparalleled curiosity. He used at these times a kind of implacable lucidity which almost made you cry out, like a surgical operation, and which at the same time hypnotized you with a potent fascination. It was a brutal yet delicate disrobing of his childhood and his youth, with characterizations of such vividness that certain individuals were presented to me as distinctly as though I had really met them. And he himself? Ah, what a strange soul, incomplete and yet superior, so noble and so degraded, so sensitive and so arid, in whom there seemed to be nothing but lassitude, failure, stain, and disillusionment—excepting one sentiment. This man who despised his family, who never spoke of his country without bitterness, who attributed the worst motive to every action, even his own, who denied the existence of God, of virtue, of love, this moral nihilist, in short, in so many ways like the Archduke, had one faith, one cult, one religion. He believed in friendship, that of man for man, denying that one woman could be the friend of another. He did not know you, dear friend. He pretended—I recall his very words—that between two men who had proved each other, who had lived, and thought, and suffered together, and who esteemed each other while loving each other, there arises a kind of affection so high, so profound, and so strong that nothing can be compared with it. He said that this sentiment was the only one he respected, the only one that time and change could not prevail against. He acknowledged that this friendship was rare; yet he declared that he had met with it several times, and that he himself had experienced one in his life. It was then that he evoked the image of Pierre Hautefeuille. His accent, his look, his whole expression changed while he lingered over the memory of his absent friend. He, the man of all the ironies, recounted with tenderness and respect the naïve details of their first meeting at school, their growing attachment, their boyish vacations. He related with enthusiasm their enlisting together in 1870, and the war, their adventures, their captivity in Germany. He was never tired of praising his friend's purity of soul, his delicacy, his nobility. I have already said that this man was an enigma to me. Such he was above all in his retrospective confidences, to which I listened with astonishment, almost stupor, to behold this anomaly in a heart so lamentably withered, in a land so sterile this flower of delicate sentiment, so young and rare that it made me think—and in spite of Olivier's paradox, it is the highest praise I could give—of our own friendship."
"Thanks," said Madame Brion, "you make me happy. As I listened to you a moment ago I seemed to hear another person speaking whom I did not recognize. But now I have found you again, so loving, gentle, and good."
"No, not good," Madame de Carlsberg replied. "The proof is that no sooner had Chésy pronounced the name of Pierre Hautefeuille than I was possessed by an idea which you will think abominable. I shall pay for it, perhaps, dearly enough. Olivier's departure and then his marriage had stirred in me that hate of which I spoke. I could not hear to think that this man had left me as he did, and was now happy, contented, indifferent—that he had regained his serenity without my being revenged. One acquires these base passions by living as I have so long, unhappy and desperate, surrounded by pleasure and luxury. Too much moral distress is depraving. When I knew that I was to meet the intimate friend of Olivier, a possible vengeance offered itself to me, a refined, atrocious, and certain vengeance. My life was forever separated from that of Du Prat. He had probably forgotten me. I was sure that if I won the affections of his friend, and he knew of it, it would strike the deepest and most sensitive place in his heart; and that is why I permitted Chésy to present Hautefeuille, and why I indulged in those coquetries for which you blamed me. For it is true that I began thus. Dieu! how recent it was, and how long ago it seems!"
"But," interrupted Madame Brion, "does Pierre Hautefeuille know of your relations with Olivier?"