[XL]
When Annette returned to her apartment again, with lowered head, heavy with thought, she went to bed without speaking. She tried to make her mind a blank, but she could not sleep. She had to struggle to escape from a certain mental picture, for the moment she became drowsy the picture appeared at the door of her imagination. To forget it she tried to fix her mind on her everyday affairs: they did not interest her. Then she appealed against the threatening invasion to an ally whom she usually feared to invoke, because by doing so she ran the ride of stirring up too many past troubles: Julien and the world of thoughts, more fictitious than real, which her regrets and dreams had grouped about the beloved name. They returned for a moment and fell back again, frozen. She persisted in trying to grasp them by force. She held in her arms only withered sheaves. A hot sun had dried up their sap. In her desire to revive them Annette, with her feverish hands, only burned them up. She was agitated, turning and turning her pillow. But she had to sleep for the sake of to-morrow's work. She took a sleeping-powder and fell into oblivion. But when she awoke after three or four hours, her anxiety was still there. It seemed to her that even during her sleep it had not left her.
During the next day and the days that followed, her anxiety persisted. She came and went, gave her lessons, talked, laughed as usual. The well-equipped machine went on of itself. But her soul was troubled.
One grey day, as she was crossing Paris, everything suddenly became bright. On the other side of the street Philippe Villard was passing. She went home filled with joy.
When she made up her mind to get to the bottom of this joy she was thunderstruck. It was as if she had discovered a cancer in herself. . . . So once more she had been caught in the trap. Love? Love for a man who could only be for her another cause for useless suffering, a man whom she was sure was dangerous, heartless, a man who could not belong to her, who belonged to someone else, a man she could not love because she loved someone else. Someone else? Yes, yes, she still loved Julien. Well, if she loved him, how was it possible for her to love another man? She did love him. . . . But how, how could her heart give itself to two persons at once? Give itself wholly to each without dividing itself? For when she gave her heart Annette gave it completely. . . . She had a feeling that she was prostituting herself. To be sure, to surrender her body would have seemed to her less shameful than to surrender her heart to two loves at once. Wasn't she sincere, loyal to herself? . . . Of course she was. She did not know that she had more than one heart, that she was more than one being. In the forest of a soul there co-exist thickets of thoughts, jungles of desire, twenty different essences. Ordinarily one does not distinguish them: they are asleep. But when the wind passes over them their branches dash against one another. . . . The clash of passions had long since stirred this multiplicity to life in Annette. She was at once a dutiful and a passionately proud woman, a passionate mother, a passionate mistress. Mistress? Mistresses? The forest in the wind with its branches flung out toward all the points of heaven. . . . Annette, humiliated by the oppression of the force that was disposing of her without her consent, thought: "What is the use of willing and struggling for years if one moment is enough to ruin everything? Where does this force come from?"
For she repudiated it, furiously, as something alien. Didn't she recognize it as of her own substance? Ah, that was even more overwhelming. How escape from herself?
She was not the sort of woman who yields passively to an inner fatality that she despised. She determined to stifle a feeling that mortified her. And with the help of her work she would have succeeded had it not been for Noémi.
She received a letter in the large handwriting of this little person who, although she had made a study of worldly elegance, was unable to disguise the cold resolution that lay behind it. A few friendly lines inviting her to dinner. Annette excused herself because of her work. Noémi repeated the invitation, expressing this time the warm desire she felt to see her again and leaving her to choose the evening. Annette, determined not to risk a danger of which she had become aware, declined the invitation again, pleading her extreme fatigue at the end of her days. She thought the matter was settled, but the little Pandarus, who, when he is bored and malicious, is one of the thousand forms of love, left Noémi no peace until she had introduced Annette into her sheepfold. And one evening when Annette, returned from her lessons, was preparing dinner—the hour that idle people always choose to make their calls—who should appear but Noémi, chirping, assuring her of her eternal friendship. While Annette, embarrassed at appearing at such a disadvantage, was beguiled by the affectionate manner of this woman in whom she unconsciously loved the reflection of "the other one," she held her ground, in spite of Noémi's entreaties, and absolutely refused to dine with her. But she could not do less than promise to return her call, carefully making sure of the hours when she would be certain to find Noémi alone. Noémi perceived how anxious Annette was to avoid Philippe; she put it down to timidity and a lack of sympathy with him. Her own sympathy increased. When she was at home again she indiscreetly poured out to Philippe an account of her call, dwelling, with the charming perfidy of the best of friends, upon everything which, to her mind, might tend to depreciate a woman in Philippe's eyes: the poverty, the disorder, the odor of ink and cooking—in a word, Annette in the kitchen. Philippe, who knew all about Annette's gallant history and who knew still better the odor of poverty, made other reflections than those he was expected to make, but he kept them to himself.
It was not altogether by chance that Annette, a few days later, as she was coming out of Noémi's house, met Philippe in the street on his way home. As she had not expected to meet him, she felt she had a right not to combat the secret joy that ran through her. They exchanged a few words. While they stopped to talk, a young woman passed to whom Philippe bowed. Annette recognized her. She was the intelligent actress who was playing Maslova just then. Annette was attracted to her, and this attraction was evident in her look. Philippe asked: "Do you know her?"
"I have seen her," she said, "in Resurrection."