"Stop," broke in Hautefeuille, hurriedly, "don't sully your souvenirs in that way. I don't know them, but they must be sacred. If I have never questioned you about the secrets of your sentiments, my dear Olivier, it is through respect for them and not through any respect for our friendship.—Our affection would not have been limited by association with a true, deep love. Do not calumniate yourself. Do not tell me that you have never loved truly and deeply, and do not blaspheme."
"True love!" interrupted Olivier, with singular irony. "I don't even know what the two words taken together mean. I have had more than one mistress. And, when I think of them, they all represent wild desire, followed by deeper disgust; bitter sensuality, saturated with jealousy, much falsehood understood, much falsehood uttered, and not an emotion, not one, do you understand? Not one that I would wish to recall, not a happiness, not a noble action, not a satisfaction! Whose fault is it? Is it due to the women I have met or to myself, to their vileness or to my poverty of heart?—I cannot say."
"The heart is not poor," interrupted Hautefeuille, with just as much earnestness, "in him who has been the friend that you have been to me."
"I have been that friend to you because you are yourself, my dear Pierre," replied Olivier, in a tone of absolute sincerity. "Besides, the senses have no place in friendship. They have a big one in love, and my senses are cruel. I have always suffered from evil desires, from wicked voluptuousness. And I cannot tell you what leaven of ferocity has worked in the deepest depths of my soul every time that my desires have been strongly aroused.—I do not justify myself. I do not explain the mystery. It exists, that is all. And all my liaisons, from the first to the last, have been poisoned by this strange, fermenting mixture of hatred."
"Yes," he went on, "from the first to the last.—Above all, the last!—It was at Rome, two years ago. If ever I thought I could love it was at that time. In that unique city I met a woman, herself unique, different from the others, with so much unflinching courage in her mind, so much charm in her heart, without any meanness, without any smallness, and beautiful!—Ah! so beautiful!—And then our pride clashed and wounded us both. She had had lovers before me.—One at least, whom I was sure about.—He was a Russian, and had been killed at Plevna. I knew she had loved him. And although he was no more, that unreasoning jealousy, the unjust, inexpressible jealousy of the dead, made me cruel toward the unhappy woman, even before our first rendezvous, from our first kisses!—I treated her brutally.—She was proud and coquettish. She avenged herself for my cruelty. She accepted another lover without dismissing me—or I thought she did, which amounts to the same thing.—In any case she made me suffer so horribly that I left her, the first. I left her abruptly one day without even saying farewell, swearing that never again would I seek satisfaction in that way.
"I was at the middle of my life. From the passionate experiences I had tasted, all that remained to me was such a poverty of sentiment, such a singular interior distortion, if I may so explain myself, such a terrible weariness of my mode of life, that I made a sudden resolution to change it, certain that nothing would be, nothing could be, worse.—There are marriages of calculation, of sentiment, of convenience, of reason. I made a marriage of weariness.—I don't think that such cases are rare. But it is much more rare for one to admit having made such a marriage. I admit it.—I never had but one originality. I was never hypocritical with myself. I hope to die without having lost the quality.—There you have my story."
"And yet you seemed to love your fiancée," said Pierre. "If you had not loved her, or if you had not thought you loved her, you, the honorable friend, whom I know so well, would never have linked your life with hers."
"I did not love her," replied Olivier. "I never thought I loved her. I hoped to love her. I told myself that I should feel what I had never felt at the contact of this soul so different, so new, so fresh, and in a life that resembled my past so little. Yes, once again I hoped and tried to feel." He accentuated the words with singular energy. "The real evil of this twilight of the century is the obstinate headstrong research of emotion. That malady I have.—I said to myself, to soothe my conscience: 'If I do not marry this girl, another will. She will be swept off by one of those countless rascals that flourish upon the Paris boulevards and one who is only hungry for her dowry. I shall not be a worse husband than such a one.'—And then I hoped for children, for a son.—Even that would not stir my heart now, I believe. The experiment has been made. Six months have been enough. My wife does not love me. I do not love, I never shall love, my wife.—There is the whole account.—But you are right. Honor still remains, and I will keep my word to the best of my ability."
He passed his hand before his eyes and across his brow, as though to drive away the hideous ideas that he had just evoked with such brutal frankness, and went on more calmly:—
"I don't know why I should sadden you with my nervousness in the first moments of our meeting.—Yes, I do know.—It is the fault of this forest, of the color of the sky, of the souvenir of sixteen years ago, a souvenir so exact that it is a veritable obsession. However, it is finished. Don't speak; don't console me. The bitter pill has to be swallowed without a word."