“You would have preferred a public carriage, would you not?” he asked me. “I do not, for let me tell you that carriage rides are very fashionable. There are innocent and guilty ones. You can imagine us, then, in this small carriage filled with the perfume of woman, one of those vague and penetrating aromas in which a hundred scents are mingled. Queen Anne and I were in this soft, warm atmosphere. The fog enveloped the carriage. I took her hand, which she did not withdraw. I pressed the little hand, and it returned my pressure. I put my arm around her waist. Her loins bent as if to avoid me, in reality to make me feel their suppleness. She turned to me as if to become indignant, but in reality to envelop me with her staring eyes and madden me. My lips sought her lips. She struggled, and suddenly instead of insisting, I repulsed her. It was I who said: 'No, no, no. It would be too wicked.’ I could not do that to her, and made use of the expressions usual to her sex at such times. I it was who stopped the carriage and fled! With a mistress on the other side of Paris, who loves and pleases you, to whom to bring the desire awakened by her rival, this is truly the most delightful of sports. It is very natural that Queen Anne will allow herself to be taken. The feeling that she is passionately desired and at the same time shunned is likely to provoke the worst follies in a woman, who is a little corrupt and a little cold, a little vain and a little curious.”
“Then if I have understood you, my part at to-morrow’s dinner would consist of lying to the same effect as yourself when Madam de Bonnivet speaks to me of Camille? In that case it would be useless for me to accept the invitation. I will not commit that villainy.”
“Villainy is a hard word. Why not?” asked Jacques with a laugh.
“Because I should feel remorse at contributing to the success of this dirty intrigue,” I replied, getting quite angry at his laughter. “Whether Madam de Bonnivet does or does not deceive her husband is no business of mine, nor would it concern me if either of you injured yourself through the villainous game you are playing. But when I meet real sentiment, I take my hat off to it, and I do not trample on it. It is real sentiment which Camille Favier feels for you. I heard her speak of her love, the evening I saw her, while you were at supper with your coquette. I saw her, too, the next day when she received your cruel reply. This girl is true as gold. She loves you with all her heart. No, no, I will not help you to betray her, all the more so as the crisis is graver than you think.”
I was wound up. I went on telling him with all the eloquence at my command the discoveries I had made and omitted to tell him a week before: the troubles of the pretty actress, what he had been, what he was to her, the ideal of passion and art she believed she was realizing in their liaison, the temptations of luxury which surrounded her, and the crime it is to provoke the first great deception in a human being. At last I was expending, in defending the little Blue Duchess to her lover, the warmth of the unfortunate love I myself felt for her. And I was so jealous of it! It was a grievous sentimental anomaly which Jacques did not discern in spite of his keenness. He could only see in my protests the deplorable naïveté with which he always believed me to be contaminated, and he replied with a smile more indulgent than ironical—
“Did she tell you this in the two or three hours you were together? It is not a boat she has manned, it is a squadron, a flotilla, an armada! But, my friend, do you think I have not noticed the feelings of our little Blue Duchess? It is perfectly true that she was chaste before meeting me. But as she first threw herself at my head and knew perfectly well what she was doing, however modest she may have been, you will permit me to have no remorse, and all the more so since I have never concealed from her that I only offered her a fantasy and that I did not love her with real love. Even I have my own code of loyalty to women, although you don’t think so. Only I place it so as not to deceive them upon the quality of the little combination to which I invite them in courting them. It is for them to accept and take the consequences. If to-day Camille experiences the temptation for luxury, which, by the way, I think very natural, this temptation has nothing to do with her broken ideal. She makes that pretty excuse to herself, and that, I think, is very natural too. She is almost as sincere as the young girls who make a wealthy marriage and excuse themselves for a first love betrayed. Let her take her rich lover—you can give her my permission; let him pay for dresses for her by Worth, horses, carriages, a house and jewels! Let her take him this afternoon, to-morrow, and I swear to you I shall have no more remorse than I have in lighting this cigarette. It will even amuse me when she does so. In the meantime, accept Madam Bonnivet’s invitation. You will have a good dinner, a thing never to be disdained, and then you can thwart my dirty intrigue, as you call it, as much as you please. In love it is just as at chess. Nothing is so interesting as playing in difficulties. Besides, I am foolish to suppose even for a moment that you would not go. You will go, I can see it in your eyes.”
“How?” I asked him, somewhat confused at his perspicacity. It was true that I felt my resolution to refuse destroyed by his presence alone.
“How? By your look while you are listening to me. Would you pay such attention if the story did not passionately interest you? It means that you would imagine us all three, Camille, Madame Bonnivet and myself, rather than pass from knowing us. I told you the other day, you are a born looker-on and confidant. You have been mine. You suddenly became Camille’s, and now you must become Madam de Bonnivet’s. You will receive the confidences of this woman of the world; you will receive them and believe them!” he insisted, accentuating each syllable, and he concluded: “That will be the punishment for your blasphemies. But it has just occurred to me, when do you begin the portrait of the Blue Duchess?”
It must be admitted that this devil of a man was not wrong; as a matter of fact, his adventure hypnotized me with irresistible magnetism. After all, I did not leave his study till I had written with his pen on his paper a letter of acceptance to Madam Bonnivet. Besides that, I had done worse. In spite of the spasm of unreasonable and morbid jealousy which clutched my heart each time I thought of the intercourse between Jacques and his mistress, I made an appointment to begin the promised portrait, not that of the ideal dream Camille, but of the real one, who belonged to this man, who gave him her mouth, and her throat, and who surrendered herself entirely to him, and we arranged the first sitting for the day after Madam de Bonnivet’s dinner, in my studio!
I repented of these two weaknesses before I was down the staircase of the house in the Place Delaborde, but not enough, alas, to return and take back my note, which Jacques had promised to deliver. My remorse increased as directly I entered my studio I saw Camille’s head upon my easel. Delicious in her phantom and unfinished life, she smiled at me from her frameless canvas. “No, you will never finish me,” she seemed to say to me with her sad eyes, her fine oval face, and her mouth framed in a melancholy smile. It is certain that neither that evening nor during the hours which followed had I the courage to touch that poor head, nor have I done so since. The enchantment was broken. I passed the ensuing hours in a state of singular agitation. I was seized again by the fever of my new-born passion, and this time I had neither the hope nor the will to struggle. I felt that this week of renunciation and seclusion with the ideal Camille had given me the only joy that this passion, which was so false and also condemned in advance, would ever give me. These joys I renounced were symbolized to me by this chimerical portrait.