CHAPTER VIII
FRIEND AND MISTRESS
Olivier du Prat thought he knew himself. It was a pretension he had often justified. He was really, as he had said to Hautefeuille, a child of the declining century in his tastes, in his passion, almost mania, for self-analysis, in his thirst for emotions, in his powerlessness to remain faithful to any one of his sensations, in his useless lucidity, as regarded himself, and in his indulgence of the morbid, unsatisfied, unquiet longings of his nature. He felt his case was irremediable, the gloomy sign that characterizes the tragically disturbed age we live in, and one of the infallible marks of decadence in a race. Healthy life does not entirely rest upon a freedom from wounds. For the body as for the soul, for a nation as for an individual, vigorous life is indicated by the power to heal those that are made. Olivier was entirely without this capacity. Even the most distant troubles of his childhood became so real as to be agonizing when he thought of them after all the years that had passed. In recalling their walk among the mountains of Auvergne, as he had done the night before to Pierre, he had simply been thinking aloud as he always thought to himself. His imagination was incessantly occupied in turning and returning with an unhealthy activity of mental retrospection, to the hours, the minutes, that had forever vanished. In his mind he reanimated, revived, the past and lived it over again. And by this self-abandonment to a past sensitiveness he continually destroyed all present sensitiveness. He never allowed the wounds that had once been made to heal over, and his oldest injury was always ready to bleed afresh.
This unfortunate singularity of his nature would, under any circumstances, have made a meeting with Madame de Carlsberg very painful, even though the dearest friend of his youth had not been concerned in it. And he would never have heard that his friend loved without being deeply moved. He knew he was so tender-hearted, so defenceless, so vulnerable! Here, again, he was the victim of a retrospective sensitiveness. Friendship carried to the extreme point that his feeling for Hautefeuille occupied is a sentiment of the eighteenth rather than of the thirty-second year. In the first flush of youth, when the soul is all innocence, freshness, and purity, these fervent companionships, these enthusiasms of voluntary fraternity, these passionate, susceptible, absolute friendships, often appear to quickly fade away. Later in life self-interest and experience individualize one and isolation is unavoidable. Complete communion of soul with soul becomes possible only by the sorcery of love, and friendship ceases to suffice. It is relegated to the background with those family affections that once also occupied a unique place in the child and in the youth. Certain men there are, however, and Olivier was one of the number, upon whom the impression made by friendships about their eighteenth year has been too deep, too ineffaceable, and, above all, too delicate, to be ever forgotten, and even to be ever equalled. It remains an incomparable sentiment. These men, like Olivier, may pass through burning passions, suffer all the feverish shocks of love, be bruised in the most daring intrigues, but the true romance of their sensitive natures is not to be found in these passions. It is to be found in those hours of life when, in thought, they project themselves into the future with an ideal companion, with a brother that they have chosen, in whose society they realize for an instant La Fontaine's sublime fable, the complete union of mind, tastes, hopes:—
"And one possess'd nothing that the other did not share."
In the case of Olivier and Pierre this ideal comradeship had been sacredly cemented. Not only had they been brothers in their dreams, they had been brothers in arms. They were nineteen years of age in 1870. At the first news of the immense national shipwreck both had enlisted. Both had gone through the entire war. The first snowfall of the winter that saw the terrible campaign found them bivouacking upon the banks of the Loire. It was as though this friendship of the two students, now become soldiers in the same battalion, had been heroically baptized. And they had learned to esteem as much as they loved each other as they simply, bravely, obscurely risked their lives side by side. These souvenirs of their youth had remained intact and living in both, but particularly in Olivier. For him they were the only recollections unmixed with bitterness, unsullied by remorse. Before these memories his life had been full of sadness, completely orphaned as he had been early in life and turned over to the guardianship of a horribly selfish uncle. Sensual and jealous, suspicious and despotic as he was, he had only known the bitterness and the pains of love apart from his souvenirs of Pierre. Nothing more is necessary to explain to what a degree this illogical and passionate, this troubled and disillusioned being was moved by the mere idea that a woman had come between his friend and him—and what a woman, if she were Madame de Carlsberg, so hated, despised, condemned by him formerly!
Olivier's imagination could only attach itself to two precise facts during the night that followed the arousing of his first suspicions,—a night that was given up to the consideration, one by one, of the possibilities of a love-affair between Ely and Hautefeuille. These were the character of his friend and that of his former mistress. The character of his friend made him fear for him; the character of his former mistress made him fear for her. Upon this latter point also his feelings were very complex. He was convinced that Ely de Carlsberg had had a lover before him, and the idea had tortured him. He was convinced that she had had a lover at the same time with him, and he had left her on account of this idea. He was mistaken, but he was sincere, and had only yielded to proofs of coquetry that appeared sufficiently damaging to convince his jealous nature. This double conviction had left in him a scornful resentment against Ely; had left that inexpiable bitterness which compels us to continually vilify in our mind an image that we despairingly realize can never become entirely indifferent to us. He would have considered a liaison with such a creature a frightful misfortune for any man. What, then, were his feelings when he saw that she had made herself beloved by his friend or that she might make herself beloved?—Having such a prejudiced, violent contempt for this sort of woman, Olivier divined what was really the truth, although it had remained so for so short a time. Ely had been angered by his departure. She had felt the same resentment with him that he had felt with her. Chance had brought her face to face with his dearest friend, with Pierre Hautefeuille, of whom he had so often spoken in exalted terms. She must have decided upon revenge, upon a vengeance that resembled her—criminal, refined, and so profoundly, so cruelly, intelligent!—In this way Du Prat reasoned. And, although his reasoning was only hypothetical, he felt, as he fed his mind with such thoughts, a suffering mingled with a sort of unhealthy and irresistible satisfaction that would have terrified him had he considered it calmly. To suppose that Madame de Carlsberg had avenged herself upon him with such calculation was to suppose that she had not forgotten him. The windings in the human heart are so strange! In spite of the fact that he had insulted his former mistress all the time they had been together, that he had left her first, without a farewell, that he had married after due reflection, and had resolved to keep his vows honorably—in spite of all this, the idea that she still remembered him secretly stirred him strangely. It must be remembered that he was just passing through one of the most dangerous moments of conjugal existence. Every moral crisis is complicated with a multitude of contradictory elements in souls such as his,—souls without fixed principles, that are turned aside at every moment by the influence of their faintest impression. Marriages contracted through sheer lassitude, such as the one he admitted having contracted, bring down their own punishment upon the abominable egoism that prompts them. They have to pay a penalty worse than the most redoubtable catastrophe. They are followed immediately by profound, incurable weariness. The man, thirty years of age, who, thinking he is disgusted forever with sensual passions, and who, mistaking this disgust for wisdom, settles down, as the saying is, quickly finds that those very passions that sickened him are as necessary to him as morphine is to the morphine maniac who has been deprived of his Pravaz syringe, as necessary as alcohol is to the inebriate put upon a régime of pure water. He suffers from a species of nostalgia, of longing for those unhealthy emotions whose fruitlessness he has himself recognized and condemned. If a brutal but very exact comparison can be borrowed from modern pathology, he becomes a favorable medium for the cultivation of all the morbid germs floating in his atmosphere. And at the very moment when everything seems to point to the pacific arrangement of their destiny, some revolution takes place, as it was doing in Olivier,—a revolution so rapid, so terrible, that the witness and victims of these sudden wild outbursts are left almost more disconcerted than despairing.
He had therefore passed the night meditating upon all the details, significant and unimportant, that he had observed in the afternoon and evening, from the moment he had remarked the unexpected intimacy of Pierre with Corancez until the instant he had entered his friend's chamber hoping for an explanation, and had found it empty.
Toward five o'clock he fell asleep, slumbering brokenly and heavily as one does in a railway train in the morning. He dreamed upon the lines of thought that had kept him awake, as was to be expected. But it heightened his uneasiness by an appearance of presentiment. He thought he was again in the little salon of the palace at Rome, where Ely de Carlsberg used to receive him. Suddenly his wife arrived, leading Pierre Hautefeuille by the hand. Pierre stopped, as though smitten with terror, and tried to scream. Suddenly paralysis struck him down, turning his leg rigid, forcing out his left eye, drawing down the corner of his mouth, whence not a sound issued! The suffering caused by this nightmare was so intense that Olivier felt its influence even after he was awake.
He felt so ill that he could not even wait to see his wife before going out. He scribbled a line telling her that he was suffering from a slight headache, and that he had gone out to try and seek relief. He added that he had not liked to disturb her so early in the morning, and that he would be back about nine o'clock. He told her, however, that she was not to await his return should he happen to be late.
He felt that he must steady his nerves by means of a long walk so as to be prepared to cope with the events of the day, which he was convinced would be decisive. Prolonged walks were his invariable remedy in his nervous crises, and he might have been successful this time if, after having walked straight before him for some time, he had not come, about ten o'clock, to the corner of the Rue d'Antibes, the most animated and interesting part of Cannes.