Flaubert, still without meeting Jean’s eyes, seated himself upon the piano stool, and trilled out the latest drawing-room inanities of Parisian music.
Jean hesitated, but in the end said nothing. What can an honest man say to a liar? Nothing that the liar does not already know, and only that which must put an end to all connection between them. Still, he could not breathe in the same room as Flaubert; he took up a list of appointments and passed into a little ante-room where the most insignificant of the pupils were accustomed to wait their turn; it was empty now. The light music followed him with a mocking insistence; it seemed to Jean to be laughing at his fine principles and triumphantly flouting his stubborn honour.
“I don’t know anything,” said Jean to himself doggedly. “After all, what can I do? I don’t know anything!”
The cold, thin music rang its perverse and sickly sentimentality into his brain. It was like bad wine. Jean pushed away the papers in front of him and put his head on his hands. When he lifted it again he looked ten years older. Something had passed away from him never to return.
It was his trust in the integrity of man.
CHAPTER XXII
“JEAN,” said Madame Torialli, one evening late in June. “Are you in a hurry to-night?”
“Not if I can stay with you, Madame?”
Madame Torialli smiled at him; her eyes seemed almost too innocent for maternity, and yet it was maternity that she loved best to express for Jean.
“I sometimes fear that we work you too hard,” she said wistfully. “I am a vampire for my husband, I sacrifice so many to save him and serve him all I can; and in the end I often ask myself what is it that I do for him? Nothing! A woman is very helpless, Monsieur Jean.”