“Was I right?” he said with a grin. He shut up the Bulletin and put it back on the counter adding: “You must admit that I deserved better treatment.”
“I will admit nothing till I am sure of it,” I replied, so deeply distressed by this fresh happening that I trembled all over.
“Sure of it?” Molan cried with insolent bitterness. “Sure of it? What do you want? Perhaps you would need to see them in the same bed? Then you would still doubt! But I am not a member of the sect of the pure-minded, I believe that Mademoiselle Favier is the mistress of M. Tournade, and I repeat that in that case the scene which she made this evening is one of the most miserable actions of which I have ever heard tell. I will be revenged. So good-bye.”
He left me after these expressions of hate without any attempt on my part to detain or calm him. I felt crushed by an enormous weight of sorrow. I have never in my sentimental life known that jealousy which most books describe, that agonizing, feverish uneasiness about a perfidy which one suspects without being certain. I have never loved without confidence. It seems to me that women ought to be scrupulous of deceiving men who love them in that fashion. I have discovered that it is not so. Should I commence to, for again I should comfort myself in the same way love the simple reason that a person cannot see with his eyes full of tears. In return, if I have never been jealous in that uneasy and suspicious fashion, I have experienced that other sorrow which consists of having in one’s heart something like a perpetually bleeding open wound, the evidence of having been deceived. I have known what it is to suffer for entire nights at the idea of a woman’s body being given up as a prey to another man’s luxury. This horrible oppression, this interruption of the inmost soul, this deadly shudder in the face of certainty, is, I believe, the worst form of sentimental disorder, and this suffering I have just experienced again with some intensity in reading the name of Tournade in the address book!
Oh, God! how miserable I was when I got back to my residence on the Boulevard des Invalides after walking all the way to quiet my nerves! It was in vain that I told Molan that I was not sure Camille was the mistress of the cad whose impure face had been so repulsive to me in her dressing-room at the Vaudeville, for there was no room in me for doubt on the subject. It was so simple. The unhappy child had lost her head. Excess of anger and sorrow had deranged her, and in a moment of delirium she had executed that scheme of revenge which would degrade her for ever. What am I saying? She had executed the plan! She was doing so even at the moment on that night when I saw the stars shining above my head between the walls of the houses. That hour, these minutes, those seconds, whose length I felt, and whose flight I measured, she also lived and employed. How?
The sensations with which this idea blasted me must be, I should think, those of the man condemned to death and of his friends who love him during the time which separates his awakening on his last morning and his execution. He feels a desire to arrest the passage of time, to even throw the world, and for the earth to open, houses to fall, and a miracle to be accomplished. With what anxiety he then feels that life performs its functions in us with the implacable accuracy of a machine! All our moral and physical agonies, our revolts and surrenders, have no more influence upon nature than the flutterings of an insect in the furnace of a locomotive.
“It is over! She is Tournade’s mistress!”
Those frightful words, which I knew to be true, I pronounced despairingly as I walked along the Rue François I, over the Invalide’s Bridge, and then along the Avenue de la Tour Maubourg. Transcribing them now, even after such a long period, gives me pain; but it is a dull pain, a tender melancholy. With it is mingled a thoughtful pity, like that which I should feel when standing before Camille’s tomb, instead of the bitter nausea of anger and disgust which seized me when I first realized the certainty of the event. Must I have loved her without knowing it, or at least without knowing how much, for thinking of her as I did to be such a penance!
As soon as I reached home, and before going to bed, I wished to looked at the two portraits I had drawn of her: the first of her before she knew Jacques, the one I concealed so carefully; the second of the month previous with an unfinished smile. These two pictures made her so present to me, and made the defilement which sullied her at that moment so real, that I recollect in the solitude of the studio uttering real groans, like those of an animal with a death rattle in its throat.
My grief relieved itself by such outbursts that my servant was awakened. I saw with surprise this good fellow enter the room to ask if I were ill and needed his services. It was a grotesque incident which had at least one advantage, it put an end to this period of semi-madness. I should smile at this childishness after so many months if, alas, I did not find in it one more proof of my personal fatality, a sign of that destiny which has always refused me the power to fashion events after my own heart. Idolizing Camille as I did with such tenderness, ought I not to have told her so before? Should not I have arranged so that her first movement, if she desired to raise an impassable barrier between Jacques and herself, would have been to come to me? Who knows? I should then have realized with her the romance of which she had dreamed and which she had failed to realize with Molan! I should have shown such cleverness, such passionate tact, such caressing adoration in dressing her wound, that perhaps one day she would have loved me! Ah, it is the sorrow of “the might have been”!