“Is that true?” she asked in an almost raucous voice; and she supplicatingly said: “Tell me that it is true and I will believe you. But don’t lie to me. From you it would be too horrible.” She seized my hand in hers as she said: “Do not be offended. I know that you would not lend yourself to deceive me and that you are my friend. I will explain it to you now how I heard that Bonnivet, you know, the husband of that horrible woman, was away. Then I got the idea into my head that they would take advantage of his absence, Jacques and her, to spend the evening together; I freed myself by lying to my mother, the first time I have done so, and I wrote a note to him asking him to dine with me. I was well punished for my two lies. He did not reply. Repeat to me that I was foolish, that he was with you last evening, not with her. O God! let me weep. It does me so much good. Oh, thank God he was not with her, not with her!”
As she talked to me like this every word entered my conscience like the most cruel reproach. She then burst into tears, and the tears which flowed down her thin cheeks were long, abundant tears which she wiped with her poor little handkerchief on which the edges of her teeth had left traces of her nervousness and anguish. I experienced, as I watched her genuine tears flow, poignant remorse for my falseness. It was no longer possible for me to go back on what I had said, and ninety-nine men out of a hundred in acting as I had done would have believed that they were doing right. I myself had enough evidence to realize that this passage from pity to lies, which had been so natural to me, constituted a real crime in the presence of such profound passion. The heart which loves and suffers has a right to know the entire truth whatever it may be. The thankful smiles which Camille gave me through her tears were almost physically intolerable to me. Besides, one does not deceive for long the lucidity of justified jealousy. Can it be blinded even for a minute? It is soothed by being misled as regards the facts. What are facts? When a woman feels herself to be loved even the most convincing count for nothing. When a woman feels, as Camille did, treachery hovering around her in the atmosphere, illusion is no sooner produced on one point than lucidity awakens on another. The person goes on searching in the dark for a proof which is always forthcoming, very often by a chance which is all the more grievous as it is not considered. No. If it were to begin over again at the risk of playing in my own eyes the obvious part of the cruel wretch, I would not lend myself to that cowardly lying charity to which I leant myself that morning. The only result of it was to render more painful the scene, to the recital of which I have now come, the scene which marks the definite entrance into the third period, that of furious certainty and exasperated despair.
CHAPTER VII
Three more weeks had passed, and the never-ending picture had undergone so many touches that it was a little less advanced than before. It is the certain sign that an artistic creation will not result: work destroys it instead of improving it, and it is a proof, too, that we do not accomplish works worthy of the name, they are made in us, without effort, without will, almost unknown to us. The sittings, too, became more and more irregular. Camille began to rehearse the piece to follow La Duchesse Blue, and sometimes from one excuse, sometimes another, one day because she was fatigued, another because she was studying her part, she found a way of putting off half her visits to the studio. When she did sit it was under very different conditions to the first sittings. Her tête-à-tête with me had been a necessity to her at the time of her sweet confidences and even at the time of her tender uneasy complaints. A fear came to her now that her jealousy of her rival would endow her with an acute character of suspicious inquiry.
Not once during the three weeks, the anxious expectancy of which I am summarizing here, did she come alone to the studio. Sometimes her mother, sometimes her cousin, sometimes a companion accompanied her. I should have known nothing of her but for guessing at her troubles from the very pronounced alteration in her face and her increasing nervousness on the one hand, and for having, on the other hand, three conversations with Jacques which were very brief but well calculated to edify me as to the cause of the poor Blue Duchess’ terrible trouble.
“Don’t talk to me of her,” he said on the first occasion with angry harshness; “I should be unjust, for she loves me after all. But what a character she has! what a character!”
“Ah! so she still continues to play to you her comedy of the beautiful soul unappreciated,” he jeered on the second occasion. “Come, don’t let us talk about her any more.”
On the last occasion he said violently: “As you are so interested in her, I am going to give you a commission. If she wants to reach the stage when I shall not recognize her if I meet her, you can tell her she is well on the way to it. If I did not need her for my new comedy I should not do so now.”
On neither of these three occasions had I insisted on knowing more. His harshness, irony and violence made me a prey to a very strange fear. I apprehended with real anguish the moment when he would say in his own way. “It is all over. Madam de Bonnivet is my mistress.” Under any circumstances it is saddening to receive such confidences. At least I have always felt it so. It is so repugnant to me as to almost become painful. Is it a result of the prudery with which Jacques reproached me? Is it a persistent prejudice, the remains of a conventional imposition before the woman’s modesty, as he also pretended?