“That is precisely it,” he replied nodding his head; “it is her life and her personality. She is the only one who can play the part, and I do not know how to negotiate with her. She is a strange creature. She never forgets. Would you believe that three weeks ago she spoke bitterly of me to one of our mutual friends! If I write to her she is quite capable of leaving my letter unopened. Some one must go and suggest the part to her, some one before whom she has no self-conceit. I thought of Fomberteau. But we have not been very friendly since my marriage. He reproached me with selling myself. What foolishness! Camille and he have quarrelled, too, over some article. Oh, she has become a great actress now. That is the reason I have come to you to ask for your assistance.”
“Me!” I cried. “You want me to go with your manuscript and beg that poor girl not only to forgive you for writing the play, but also on your behalf to take the part herself! Come, let me look you straight in the face! But you are not a fool. You are a man like another. Yet you do not realize what a monstrous thing you are proposing to me!”
“Ah, well!” he replied with his usual smile, which he had already employed to laugh at my naïveté, “will you undertake simply to convey our conversation to her as far as your indignant exit just now? I authorize you to do so. That does not make you into the accomplice of any infamy. You are going to see an old friend you have somewhat neglected. Nothing can be more natural, can it? You talk of the rain and the fine weather. My name is mentioned and you repeat our conversation exactly, beginning like this: What do you think Jacques dared to ask me? You will then see what answer she will give.”
Was it the continuation of the habitual empire his vitality had exercised from our college days over my doubts? Was there concealed within me a secret desire to see Camille again, a curiosity to know what the Blue Duchess of two years ago had become? Did I also feel curious to know her reply to Jacques’ outrageous proposal? But whatever the reason, I accepted this mission which I considered and still consider monstrous. I called upon Camille, everybody’s Camille, to take her the horrible words of her old lover. I saw once more the face I loved so well, but now it was framed in ignoble luxury which contrasted so cruelly to my mind with the proud and humble simplicity of the Rue de la Barouillére! Not one of those pieces of furniture in those former apartments in that old street but told of a noble act of her who did not wish to sell her beauty, or of her mother who had saved the honour of their name by the heroic sacrifice of her fortune. There was not a room in the sumptuous house, that home of infamy where she lived now in the Avenue de Villiers, like my fashionable colleagues, which did not tell of one of her prostitutions.
Was it indeed the woman who, when I last saw her, had not dared to raise her veil, as if she were afraid I should see the traces on her pale cheeks of Tournade’s caresses? Yes, it was the same woman who now received me laughing in insolent bravado with not a trace of embarrassment; and she was still beautiful, adorably beautiful, with her fine and delicate beauty, which I believe would never have deserted her whatever her surroundings; but she was now so provoking, so shameless!
Not a word, not a blush, not a falter betrayed that she felt any emotion at seeing in me the witness of what must remain to her a perpetual memory. She lit, while she listened to me, an Egyptian cigarette of tobacco the colour of her hair, and smoked it, exhaling the bluish smoke through her delicate nostrils, with wide open eyes between her eyelashes which had been slightly eaten away by the crayon she used. Her mouth looked too red from the rouge of the night before; her cheeks were fuller and her throat was larger; and her more opulent lips were defined by a dressing-gown which was a costume of blue stuff worked and embroidered with silver. I began as a matter of politeness by giving her a brief account of my travels, my work and my return; then I broached the real object of my visit, and I conveyed to her brutally, without evasion, Molan’s proposal.
“Is he cad enough!” she said shrugging her supple shoulders. “Is he cad enough!” For a moment I hoped that a nausea of disgust would prove to me that the old Camille was not dead. But no, she went on after a brief silence: “If there is really a fine part for me, tell him to send or bring me the play. He is so very clever when he is clever! Have you read the play? Is he satisfied with it? You know I am really in need of a fine part. So is he, for since he has become wealthy, he is allowing himself to be forgotten. Between the two of us I will answer for its success: his prose is so tender and I interpret it so well!”
Not a vestige of indignation did she feel, that indignation I had felt at knowing that the sorrowful romance of her irreparable downfall was profaned! Hardly a vestige of malice did she show against Jacques, that malice he himself expected! From her clear eyes which retained the colour, the transparent purity, of the days of her innocence, I now saw her smile at the fine part, as I had seen Jacques smile on the subject of the play. Then it was I really understood the reason I should never be a great artist. For them—for him as I have always known him, for her as she has become after her first experience, their entire life, hearts included, is only an opportunity for producing the special act they have to produce, the precious secretion which they make, as the bee does honey, as the spider does its web, by an instinct blind and ferocious as all instincts are.
Love, hate, joy and sorrow is the soil to make the flower of their talent grow, this flower of delicacy and of passion, for which they do not hesitate a moment to kill in themselves all real delicacy and living passion. For a word to speak on the stage, for a phrase to write in a book, this woman and this man would sell their father and their mother—Camille had not even mentioned hers; they would sell their friend, their child, and their sweetest memory. I, who have spent my life in feeling what they express so well, he in black and white, she by gestures and in moving accents, only succeed in paralysing myself with that which exalts these expressive natures; in exhausting myself with that which nourishes these souls of prey. Does destiny then will it that artists, little or great, be of necessity distributed between the two classes, those who transcribe marvellously without feeling the passions which the other class feels without power to transcribe? Was Jacques right in saying that his cruelty to Camille by giving her memories would also give her talent? A fine part! A good play! Really we do not complain at remaining obscure and mediocre, if this obscurity and mediocrity are the condition for real feeling. Besides we have no choice.
THE END.