As I pressed my lips upon her cheek I felt through her veil that it was moist with tears. Not another word was spoken between us. I could not find a question to ask her. She did not think of a plaint to make. Even at the deathbeds of those I loved most I have never said a good-bye which has cost me more.
CHAPTER XI
Yes, it was a sad and rending farewell! I must, too, have been plunged into the depths of melancholy in my heart, for as I wrote the account of it I sprinkled the paper with my tears; and now I feel that I have hardly the strength to take up my pen again to add to this real romance the sinister epilogue, the suggestive irony of which alone decided me to write these pages. Twenty-five months and an absence of that length have not healed my secret wound. It is still open and bleeding at the recollection simply of Camille’s cheek moist with those vain tears beneath my farewell kiss, the first and last I ever placed on that charming face which was now profaned for ever. Yet if absence and silence are the two great remedies for those passions without hope and desire, one of which my strange sentiment for this poor girl was, I can do myself the justice to say that I sincerely practised them. Those twenty-five months appeared to me so short, so short when compared with those few weeks spent in following hour by hour the fatal march of the deceived mistress towards despair, and the rest without trying to prevent it.
But let us run through those two years from memory, and also to prove that I have not much to regret in their employment. First of all, that same evening came my hurried flight to Marseilles, then the following day I sailed for Tuscany by one of the boats which call at Bastia eighteen hours later and then at Leghorn. I have always preferred this way of entering dear Italy without halts by the way, besides which this journey did away with the possibility of telegrams or letters for at least half a week, from Sunday to Thursday. Would Camille Favier leave Tournade and resume her position as Jacques’ mistress or not? Would the latter follow up his absurd project of a duel with his new rival? Would he not extend the folly of his humiliated self-conceit to the length of having an affair with Pierre de Bonnivet as well? So weary was I that I no longer wished to set myself these problems. O God, how weary I was! In parenthesis, I was very wrong in setting myself these problems, for to talk like my friend Claude, who used to quote with such delight a phrase from Beyle upon the execution of one of his heroes: “Everything went off simply and decently.”
I found out that detail afterwards, but much later. At the time I remained in an uncertainty which I had the wisdom to prolong. But four months later, opening by chance a French paper in a hotel in Perugia, I saw that Mademoiselle Camille Favier was to replace Mademoiselle Berthe Vigneau in the chief part of a comedy by Dorsenné; that Molan was publishing a collection of his own plays; that a horse of M. Tournade’s, Butterfly, had won some big race; that at a very select gathering at M. de Senneterre’s Madam X——, Madam Y——, Madam Z——, and Madam de Bonnivet were noticed. All this news was packed into this one issue of the paper like raisins in a pudding. It sufficed to prove to me that this corner of the world, like all corners of the world, was still itself, and that there was a reassuring lack of important events. But on my part, was I not imitating myself by copying first a part of the fresco of Spinello Aretino on Saint Ephése, then the Salomé of Fra Filippo Lippo at Prato, and going on with a study after the Piero della Francesca by Arezzo? Then I was preparing to go to Ancona; afterwards to Brindisi; to visit Athens and Olympia, to feast with new visions the most sterile and insatiable of dilettantisms. When I think of that furious work of vain culture, I repeat to myself another phrase which Dorsenné was always quoting, the exclamation of the dying Bolivar so poignant with lassitude: “Those who have served the Revolution have ploughed the sea!” Have those who have served art as I have served it accomplished more useful work? Then what is it?
Then what? I think that Bonaparte, Talleyrand, Bernadotte and many others would have smiled a smile of the most profound contempt for the dying revolutionary who had caught no treasure in the great troubled sea of politics, and I have only to think of the two little scenes which fixed the bitter crisis in my memory to smile a no less contemptuous smile at myself. However, after my tour in Greece, I returned to prepare for a longer stay in the Orient, and a visit to Egypt and Asia Minor in the month of October, to begin there that series of pictures upon our Lord, conceived in their natural environment, which would have been the definitive work of my maturity if another had not anticipated me.
Chance had prevented me meeting Jacques and Camille between these two trips. I only know that the latter was more celebrated than ever and the former had married. He had decided at last to pluck the ripe pear, and he had done so under the wisest conditions. He had married a widow of about his own age who was very rich and without children, with sufficient to provide him in his maturity with a luxurious home without the aid of his copy. But as he had not deigned to add a friendly word to the wedding card he sent me I had not written to him. That absolute suppression of intercourse between us hardly allowed me to expect to see him enter, as he did the other day, my studio, looking a little older, but with as clear an eye, as satirical a mouth, and as well-dressed and smart a person as ever. Had we met on the previous evening he could not have shaken hands with gayer cordiality, and at once without waiting to hear my news began—
“You don’t know the pleasure I feel in seeing you again. When will you come and dine and be presented to Madam Molan? You shall see that I have been lucky in the marriage lottery. I am sure you will be very pleased with her. She knows, too, how I like you. Yes, we have not met lately, but that is no reason for forgetting. What have you been doing since we had our last chat? It is two years ago; how time passes! I knew that you had gone to the Orient. I heard of you through Laurens, the Consul at Cairo. You see, I followed your movements from afar. But tell me,” he went on, after I had replied to him in some embarrassment. These subtle cordialities after such indifference still disconcerted me a little. “Yes, tell me. Have you seen Camille Favier?”
“Me?” I cried, and I felt that I was blushing under his indulgent, ironical look, “never. Why do you ask that?”