The page showed me this time into the great man’s study. Molan was sitting at his writing-table which was of massive oak with numerous drawers in it. Bookcases were all round this little room, and in appearance the volumes were works of reference often used but always put back in their places. There was no dust on them, nor was there any trace of the disorder to be found with the writer-born, whose fancy ceaselessly interrupts his work. A high desk held out an invitation for standing composition. Another bookcase, lofty and revolving, full of dictionaries, atlas, books of reference, and maps stood at the corner of the writing-table; and the order of the latter piece of furniture, with its sheets of paper carefully cut, its stock of useful articles, its place for answered letters and for letters to be answered, demonstrated the methodical habits of work daily allotted and executed. These details of practical installation were too like their owner for a single one to escape me. There was not a work of art to be seen, not even on the mantelpiece, where stood the usual library clock. This timepiece which marked the hours of work was a good, accurate instrument, metallic and clear in its glass and copper case.
What other portrait could one paint of this writer, who was an absolute stranger to anything not his own business, as methodical as if he were not a man of the world, as regular as if he were not, by his art itself, the painter of all the troubles and all the disorders of the human soul, than sitting at his table with his cold and reflective face, and his way of using his pen with a free, measured and regular gesture. To make his portrait really typical it was necessary to paint Molan as I surprised him, engaged in reading the four pages he had written since his awakening that morning—four little sheets covered with lines of equal length in a handwriting every letter of which was properly made, every T crossed and every I dotted. Was I envious as I noted these details with an irritation not justified in appearance? He had the right after all, this fellow, to administer his literary fortune as if it were a house of business. But is there not something in us, almost a sense which this indefinable deception offends: this working of a fine talent, with so much egoism, so much calculation at its base, and so little moral unity between the written thought and the thought lived?
Another mannerism of Jacques’ irritated my nerves. He stretched out his hand to me with an indifferent cordiality quite his own. He had been for months without seeing me till we met at the club, and he spoke to me then in as friendly a way as if we had met on the previous day. He had told me about the two adventures he had on hand as if I were his best and surest friend. Directly I turned on my heel I saw or heard no more of him. I had ceased to exist as far as he was concerned. When I saw him again he greeted me with just the same handshake. How much I prefer, to these smiling and facile friends, the suspicious, the susceptible, and the irritable ones with whom you quarrel, who either want you or do not do so, who often get angry with you, sometimes wrongly and by the most involuntary negligence, but for whom you exist and are real with human living reality! To the real egoists, on the other hand, you are an object, a thing the equal in their eyes of the couch they offer you to sit down upon with their most amiable and empty smile. Your only reality to them is your presence, and the pleasure or the reverse they feel at it. To be entirely frank, perhaps I should have wished Camille’s lover to receive me in the way he always had done, with his impersonal graciousness, if I had not found him looking a little pale and heavy-eyed; and I was obliged to attribute this slight fatigue to his love of the charming girl, whose maidenly grace of the past I had just spent a week in evoking, sustained by the most passionate of retrospective hypnotism. This impression was as painful to me as if I had over Camille other rights than those of dream and sympathy. I had really come to talk about her, and I would have liked to depart without even her name being mentioned. This silence was the more impossible as after our greeting I held out to Jacques Madam de Bonnivet’s invitation.
“Were you the cause of this being sent to me?” I asked him. “Who will be present at this dinner? What answer shall I give?”
“I?” he said, after reading the letter, unable to conceal his astonishment. “No. I had nothing to do with it. You must accept for two reasons: first because it will amuse you, and then you, by doing so, will be rendering me a real service.”
“You a service?”
“Yes. It is very simple,” he replied, a little impatient at my stupidity. “You don’t understand that Madam de Bonnivet has invited you because she hopes to find out from you my actual relations with Camille Favier? It is a little ruse. As a matter of fact, you have deserted me again and are not up-to-date. But you know me well enough to be sure that I have not let the week pass without manœuvring skilfully in the little war which Queen Anne and myself are waging! I say skilfully, but it is merely working a scheme, the foundation of which never varies. Mine has progressed in the way I told you, by persuading the lady more and more that I have a profound passion for little Camille. There is no need for me to tell you my various stratagems, the simplest of which has been to behave with Camille as if I really loved her. But Queen Anne is clever, and is studying my play. I have only to make one slip and my plan will fail.”
“Come. I don’t understand you. One fact is that you are courting Madam de Bonnivet. You talk to her about your passion for little Favier; that is another fact. How do you manage that? For to pay court to one is not to have a passion for the other?”
“But, my dear fellow,” he interrupted, “you forget the remorse and the temptation. I am not paying court to Queen Anne, I am arranging to do so. Have you ever kept a dog? Yes. Then you have seen it, when you were at table enjoying a cutlet, look at you and the bone with eyes in which the honest sentiments of duty and the gluttonous appetite of the carnivorous animal were striving for mastery? Ah, well, I have those eyes for Queen Anne at each new ruse she employs to arouse my desire for her beauty. The man being superior to the dog in virtue, sir, and in self-control, duty carries him away. I leave her quickly like some one who does not wish to succumb to temptation. Stop, shall I give you an illustration? Take, for example, yesterday; we were in a carriage in the fog; it was what I call a nice little adultery fog. Madam de Bonnivet and I had met in a curiosity shop, where she had gone to buy tapestry, and so had I. What luck! She offered me a lift.”
“In her own carriage?” I asked.