“I am curious,” he said to me, “to know what she has prepared for her audience of swells. She has promised the great scene from La Duchesse Blue with Bressoré, and then a few monologues and imitations. You don’t know her in that light, do you? She has like every actor or actress her monkey side.”
“Imitations!” I repeated. “Fashionable people are admirable. They no sooner have in their hands an artist of talent than they become possessed of a single idea, to degrade that talent by forcing the possessor to become a plaything for them. If it is a painter like Miraut, they order from him portraits with a disgusting want of expression to put upon bon-bon boxes! If he is a man of letters like you, they make him write bad prose and verse at a moment’s notice! If he is a musician, he has to produce a piece for the piano at once! In the case of an actress like Camille, with ardour, temperament, and passion, they make a parade of her. Good God, what foolishness it is! What is going to happen to-night?”
“Would you prefer,” sneered the dramatic author, “to hear the plaints of Iphigenia or of Esther proclaimed ten paces away from a buffet laden with foie gras sandwiches, punch, orangeade, chocolate and iced champagne? On my word of honour you seem to me admirable! But if you had the lightest tint of that transcendental irony, without which life does not present the slightest savour, you would find it exquisite that my pretty Blue Duchess has saved the honour, and perhaps the life, of my adorable Queen Anne, and that they met face to face—one playing her part as a fashionable Parisian hostess, respected and worshipped; the other giving her performance before an audience of the idle; while I myself am the third person. My only regret for the beauty of the situation is that I did not have an appointment with both during the day. Would you believe it? Since these happenings I desire Camille again, and I would retake her if I did not fear to spoil her masterpiece. Yes, the masterpiece of her rupture. For she has discovered it; there is no denying it. If André Mareuil had not laid down his humorous pen to become a Commissioner of Police, if he were still writing his Art de rompre instead of drawing up regulations, I should submit the case to him. Have you ever thought of a more divine method of a mistress ridding herself of her lover and leaving in his mind an exquisite memory? That is the ideal end of love.”
“Try at least to be ashamed of your egoism,” I interrupted. I realized that he was amusing himself by making my naïveté display itself, and that he was joking. But actually the fact that he was unable to jest on such an occasion angered me, and I continued, touching his breast as I did so: “Have you, then, absolutely nothing there but a ream of paper and a bottle of ink, for the idea of this love, devotion and sorrow, only to inspire you with one more paradox instead of bringing tears from your eyes?”
“One must never judge what is visible,” he replied with sudden seriousness which contrasted strangely with his former flippancy. Did he conceal in an inner fold of his heart, poisoned though it was with social vanity, commercial calculations and literary ambitions, a tender corner, too small to be ever exalted into complete passion, but sufficiently alive to sometimes bleed, and had I touched the secret wound? Or was his one of those complicated natures which keep just enough sensibility to suffer because they have no more? These two latter hypothesis are not irreconcilable in such a complex nature. They would at least explain the anomaly of a talent for accurate human observation, being associated with such implacable hardness of heart and a systematic and utilitarian depravity of mind. Never had the astounding contrast between Jacques’ person and his work struck me as it did in that rapidly moving carriage. He was the first to break a silence which had lasted for a few minutes by saying—he was without doubt replying to a thought my reproaches had suggested to him—
“Besides, if it were to begin again, I should have prevented that party. It is useless. I don’t know what fresh information Bonnivet has received, but he is charming to me and his wife. I found both of them the other day examining two ornaments their jeweller had just brought. In parenthesis, what do you think of this conjugal scene? She was clasping around her neck a necklace of pearls and looking at herself in the glass, while her husband said to me—to me!—as she showed me another one: 'Which one do you prefer?’ She experienced a keen pleasure at this high comedy scene. I saw that her eyes were shining like the pearls in the necklace. At what price had she purchased this renewal of confidence?”
“But,” I said, “did not a scene like this, and the conclusion you drew from it, make you take your hat and stick and go away, never to return?”
“You are not, and never will be, intellectual, my dear boy,” he replied. “Understand that there is a sort of bitter and ferocious joy in despising what one desires, just as there is in enjoying what one hates. That is how Queen Anne holds me fast, perhaps for a long time, just as I hold her fast by the attraction of the danger involved. We have already, since the affair, revisited the rooms in the Rue Nouvelle; would you believe it? Decidedly there is no tincture of cantharides like fear?”
“That is folly,” I cried, “to tempt fate like that!”
“Quite right,” he said with a shrug of the shoulders, “but one must live to write. There is a play in this story, and I will not miss it.”