Читать книгу The Complete Works of Emile Zola - Emile Zola - Страница 155

Madeleine Férat was the daughter of a machine-maker. Her father, who was born in a little village in the mountains of Auvergne, came barefooted and with empty pockets, to seek his fortune in Paris. He was one of those thickset broad-shouldered Auvergnians, with a dogged obstinacy for work. He put himself apprentice to a machine-maker, and there, for nearly ten years, he filed and hammered with all the might his hard hands were capable of. Sou by sou he amassed a few thousand francs. From the first stroke he had made with his hammer, he had said to himself that he would only stop when he had saved enough money to commence business on his own account.

When he thought himself well enough off, he rented a sort of shed in the neighbourhood of Montronge, and set up as a boiler-maker. It was the first step on the road to fortune; the first stone in those vast workshops which he dreamed of being at the head of later on. For ten more years, he lived in his shed, filing and hammering with renewed ardour, never indulging in a single amusement, never taking a day’s holiday. Little by little, he enlarged the shed, one by one he increased the number of his workmen; at last he was able to buy the ground and build immense workshops, on the very spot where his little wood erection had formerly stood. The goods that he made had increased in size too; kitchen-boilers had become factory-boilers. The railways with which France was then being covered, furnished him with abundance of work, and put enormous profits into his hands. His dream was being realised; he was rich.

Up to this time, he had stuck to his anvil, resolved to make as much money as possible, without ever asking himself what he would do with this money. Forty sous a-day were more than enough for him to live on. His industrious habits, his ignorance of the pleasures, and of even the commodities of life, made a fortune useless to him. He had made himself rich more out of blind obstinacy than from any wish to derive any comfort from his wealth.

He had vowed to become a master in his turn, and his whole existence had been spent in making his vow good. When he had amassed nearly a million francs, he asked himself what he could possibly do with it. He was moreover by no means a miser.

First he built, close to his workshops, a little plain house which he decorated and furnished with a certain amount of comfort. But he could not feel at ease on the carpets of. his rooms, he preferred to pass his days with his workmen, among his grimy furnaces. He might perhaps have decided to let his house and go back to the apartments he occupied before above his office, had not an important event transpired which modified his whole existence and changed his whole being.

— Beneath the gruffness of his voice and the austerity of his manners, Férat was as gentle as a child. He would not have crushed a fly. All the tenderness of his nature was lying dormant, stifled by his life of toil, when he met an orphan, a poor girl who was living with an aged relative. Marguerite was so pale, so delicate that she would not have been taken for a girl of more than sixteen; she had one of those sweet submissive faces which move strongmen. Férat was attracted and touched by this child who smiled with a timid air, with the humility of a devoted servant. He had always lived among coarse workmen, he knew nothing of the charms of weakness, and immediately fell in love with Marguerite’s delicate hands and childish face. He married her almost at once, and carried her off to his house like a little girl, in his arms. Once his wife, he loved her with a devotion bordering on worship. He doted on her paleness, her unhealthy appearance, all her frailties as a suffering woman whom he did not dare touch with his horny hands. He had never been in love before; on going over his past life, the only tender feeling that he could remember was one of a sacred nature, which his mother had inspired him with for a white image of the Holy Virgin, who seemed to smile mysteriously under her veil, in one of the shrines of his native village. In Marguerite he seemed to find again this Holy Virgin; there was the same maidenly smile, the same saintly serenity, the same affectionate kindness. From the very first, he had made his wife, an idol and a queen; she was supreme in the house, filling it with a perfume of elegance and comfort; she transformed the cold home, which the former workman had built, into a fragrant retreat, all warm with love. For nearly a year, Férat hardly gave a thought to his workshops; he was absorbed in that exquisite and, to him, new delight of having a frail being to love. What charmed him and at times moved him to tears, was the gratitude which Marguerite showed him. Each look of hers would thank him for the happiness and wealth he had given her. She remained humble in her sovereignty; she adored her husband as a master, as a benefactor, like a woman who can find no affection deep enough to pay her debt of felicity. She had married Férat without looking at his swarthy face, without thinking of his forty years, moved simply by an almost filial affection. She had divined that he was kind. “I love you,” she would often say to her husband, “because you are strong and do not disdain my weakness; I love you because I was nothing and you have made me your wife.” And Férat, as he heard these words murmured in a meek endearing voice, would press her to his bosom, his heart full of unutterable love.

After they had been married a year, Marguerite became enceinte. Her pregnancy was a painful one. A few days before the crisis, the doctor took Férat aside and told him that he was not without apprehensions. The young wife’s constitution seemed to him so delicate, that the sharp pangs of childbirth made him feel afraid for her. Férat was almost out of his senses for a week; he would smile on his wife, as she lay on a long chair, and then go and sob in the street; he would pass whole nights in his deserted workshops, and come every hour to ask for news; at times, when his anguish seemed to choke him, he would take a hammer and then strike furiously at the anvils, as if to soothe his anger. The terrible moment came at last, the fears of the doctor were realised. Marguerite died in giving birth to a daughter.

Férat’s grief was fearful. His tears were dried up. When the poor woman was buried, he shut himself up in the house, and stayed there in a fit of gloomy dejection. At times, he would be seized with crises of blind frenzy. He invariably spent the night in his dark silent workshops; till morning came, he would walk up and down among the motionless machinery, the tools, the bits of iron-ore that lay about. Gradually, the sight of these instruments of his fortune would send him into a paroxysm of rage. He had conquered misery and had not been able to conquer death. For twenty years, his powerful hands had made the bending of iron a plaything, and yet they had been powerless to save the object of his love. And ho would exclaim:

“I am a coward then, and as weak as a child; had I been strong I should not have been robbed.”

For a month, no one dared to disturb this man’s grief. Then, one day, the nurse, who was suckling little Madeleine put the child into his arms. Férat had forgotten that he had a daughter. The tears came at last as he saw this poor little creature, hot scalding tears which eased both his head and his heart. He looked at Madeleine for a long time.

“She is feeble and delicate like her mother,” he muttered, “she will die just as she did.”

From that time, his despair melted away. He got into the way of thinking that Marguerite was not altogether dead. He had loved his wife like a father; he was able, by loving his daughter, to deceive himself, to persuade himself that his heart had lost nothing. The child was very frail; she seemed to get her little pale face from her poor dead mother. Férat was delighted at first not to find his own strong nature reproduced in Madeleine; he could thus picture to himself that it was to her solely that she owed her birth. When he danced her on his knees, the strange fancy would come over him that his wife had died in order to become a child again, and that he might love her with fresh affection. Up to two years of age, Madeleine was a puny child. She was always hovering between life and death. The offspring of a dying mother, she had in her eyes a shadowy vagueness which her smile was seldom able to dispel. Her father loved her the more for her sufferings. It was her very weakness which saved her; illness could get no hold on this poor little body. The doctors gave her up, and she went on living; she was like the flame of one of those pale night-lamps which flickers yet never goes out. Then, at two years old, health suddenly burst on her; in a few months the shadow of death was dispelled from her eyes, the blood mounted to her lips and cheeks. It was a resurrection.

Hitherto she had resembled a pale speechless corpse; she could neither laugh nor play. When her legs became strong and she could stand, she filled the house with her prattle and the patter of her toddling limbs. Her father would call her, with his arms stretched out towards her, and then she would rush to him with that hesitating step which is one of the charms of children. Férat would play with his daughter for hours; he would carry her into the workshops among the frightful din of the machinery, saying that he wanted to make her as courageous as a boy. And to make her laugh, he found out little childish tricks that a mother would not have invented.

One curious circumstance redoubled the good fellow’s worship of his child. As Madeleine grew, she became more and more like him. During her earlier days, when she lay in her cradle, trembling all over with fever, she had had her mother’s gentle mournful face. Now, vibrating with life, broad-set and full of vigour, she looked like a boy; she had Férat’s grey eyes and stern brow, and, like him, she was violent and obstinate. But, as the effect of the drama of her birth, there always remained with her a sort of nervous shudder, an innate weakness which would subdue her in the height of her violent childish anger. Then she would weep bitterly, and become submissive. If the upper part of her features had borrowed the sternness of the old workman’s face, she always bore a strong likeness to her mother in the weakness of her mouth and the loving meekness of her smiles.

She grew, and Férat dreamed of a prince for her husband. He had assumed again the superintendence of his workshops, for he knew now what he would do with his millions. He would have liked to heap up treasures at the feet of his dear little idol. He launched out into important speculations, no longer content with the profits of his trade, and risking his fortune in order to double it. All of a sudden came a fall in the price of iron which ruined him.

Madeleine was then six years old. Férat displayed incredible energy. He hardly staggered under the mortal blow which had struck him. With the accurate and rapid perception of men of action, he calculated that his daughter was young and that he had still time to earn her a dowry; but he could not start his giant’s task in France: he must have, as his field of operation, a country where fortunes are made rapidly. His resolution was formed in a few hours. He decided on going to America. Madeleine should await his return in a Paris boarding-school.

He disputed, sou by sou, the remains of his fortune, and succeeded in saving an income of two thousand francs, which he placed in Madeleine’s name. He thought that the child would then always have bread if any misfortune happened to him. As for himself, he set out with a hundred francs in his pocket. The day before he went away, he carried Madeleine to the house of a fellow-countryman of his and asked him to look after her. Lobrichon, who had come to Paris about the same time as himself, had started as a dealer in old clothes and rags; later on, he had become a cloth merchant, and in this trade had made a nice round fortune. Férat had every confidence in this old comrade.

He told Madeleine that he would come back in the evening; he nearly fainted as he received the caresses of her little arms, and went out reeling like a drunken man. He bade farewell to Lobrichon in the next room.

“If I die out yonder,” he said to him in a choking voice, “you will be a father to her.’’

He never reached America. The vessel which carried him, caught in a sudden gale, was driven back and wrecked on the coast of France. Madeleine only heard of the death of her father a long time after.

The day after Férat had started, Lobrichon took the child to a boarding-school at Les Ternes, which an old lady with whom he was acquainted had recommended to him as an excellent establishment. The two thousand Frances were amply sufficient to pay for her board and tuition, and the former dealer in secondhand clothes was not sorry to get rid at once of a little brat whose noisy games disturbed the selfish upstart’s quiet.

The school, surrounded by big gardens, was a very comfortable retreat. The ladies who kept it, took only a few pupils; they had put their terms high so as to have none but rich men’s daughters. They taught their scholars excellent manners; the tuition was more in bows and fashionable simpers than in the catechism and orthography. When a young lady left their school, she was perfectly ignorant, but she could enter a drawingroom, a perfect mistress of coquetry, equipped with every Parisian grace. The ladies knew their trade, and had succeeded in earning for their establishment a reputation for stylish elegance. They conferred an honour on a family by taking charge of a child and undertaking to turn her out a wonderful charming doll.

Madeleine was never at home amongst such surroundings. She was wanting in pliancy, she was noisy and impulsive. During play-hours, she romped like a boy, with joyous transports that disturbed the elegant retreat. Had her father brought her up by his side, she would have become fearless, frank, straightforward, and proudly strong.

It was her little schoolmates who taught her to be a woman. At first, by her actions and shouts, she displeased these young ten year old dolls who were already learned in the art of not disarranging the folds of their skirts. The pupils played very little: they used to walk up and down the paths like important personages, and there were little brats no higher than one’s stick who could already throw a kiss with their gloved fingers. Madeleine learnt from these charming dolls a host of things which she was completely ignorant of. In secluded corners, behind the foliage of some hedge, she came on knots of them who were talking about men: she joined in these conversations, with the eager curiosity of the woman awakening in the child, and thus received the precocious education of her life. The worst thing was that these little imps, knowing as they thought themselves to be, chattered aloud; they openly declared their wishes for a lover: they confided to one another their little fondnesses for the young fellows they had met the last time they walked out; they read to one another the long love letters they used to write during the English class, and never concealed their hope of being carried off some night or other. There was no danger to sly compliant beings in such talk as this. In the case of Madeleine, on the contrary, it exerted a lifelong influence.

She inherited from her father his clear head, his rapid and logical workman’s decision. Directly the child thought that she was beginning to know something of life, she tried to form a definite idea of the world, from what she saw and heard in the school. She concluded, from the childish chatter of her school-companions, that there was no harm in falling in love with a man, and that she might take the first that came. The word marriage was hardly ever pronounced by these young misses. Madeleine, whose ideas were always simple ideas, ideas of action, imagined that a woman picked up a lover in the street and walked away quietly on his arm. These thoughts never made her uneasy in the slightest, she was of a cold temperament and talked about love with her friends as she would have talked of her toilet. She used to say to herself only: “If I am ever in love with a man, I will do as Blanche does: I will write long letters to him, and try to make him run away with me.” And there was, in her reverie, a thought of opposition which filled her with delight: it was the only thing that she looked forward to with pleasure.

In later life, when she knew from experience something of the infamy of the world, she would smile sadly as she remembered her girlish thoughts. But there always remained deep down in her heart, unknown even to herself, the idea that it is quite logical and straightforward for a woman, when she is in love with a man, to tell him so and to go off with him.

Such a character would have been fit to become the seat of the strongest will. Unfortunately, there was nothing to develop its frankness and strength. Madeleine wanted simply to follow a broad smooth road: her desire was for peace, for everything that is powerful and serene. It would have been enough to arm her against her hours of weakness, to cure her of that trembling feeling of servile love which she had inherited from her mother. She received, on the contrary, an education which redoubled this feeling, She had the look of a goodnatured noisy boy: her mistresses simply wished to turn her into a little hypocritical girl. If they had not succeeded, it was because her nature refused to school itself in little graceful bows, in languishing drooping looks, in false smiles which the heart and face belied. But, all the same, she grew up surrounded by young coquettes, in an atmosphere laden with the enervating perfumes of the drawingroom. The honeyed words of her governesses, who had instructions to make themselves the servants of their pupils, the chambermaids of this little colony of heiresses, all this softened her will. Every day she would hear around her the words: “Don’t think, don’t look strong: learn to be weak; it is for that that you are here.” She lost, as the result of all these instructions in coquetry, a few of her headstrong ways, without succeeding in marking out for herself a course of conduct, but her character was less complete and further astray from its true path. The notion of what was required of her as a woman almost escaped her: she replaced it by a deep love for frankness and independence. She was to walk straight before her, like a man, with strange moments of weakness, but never false, and strong enough to do penance the day she was guilty of infamous conduct.

The secluded life which she led implanted still more deeply in her mind the false notions which she had formed of the world. Lobrichon, under whose guardianship she had been placed, came to see her at rare intervals, and thought he did his duty by giving her a little pat on the cheek and enjoining on her to be very good. A mother would have enlightened her on the errors of her mind. She grew up with no companionship but her thoughts, and only listening to the advice of others with a sort of distrust. The most childish ideas assumed for her a serious nature, because she accepted them as the only possible rule of conduct. Her companions when they came back from their Sunday visit to their relations, would tell her each time something of the outer world. During this time, she remained in the school more and more persuaded of the correctness of her errors. She even spent her holidays shut up alone with her thoughts. Lobrichon, who was afraid of her noisiness, kept her at a distance. In this way nine years passed. Madeleine was then fifteen, already a woman and destined henceforth to preserve the indelible traces of the dreams in which she had grown up.

She had been taught dancing and music. She could paint very nicely in water-colour and do every imaginable kind of embroidery. Yet she would have been incapable of hemming dusters or making her own bed. As for her knowledge, it was composed of a little grammar, a little arithmetic, and a good deal of sacred history. Her handwriting had been carefully looked after, and yet, to the despair of her teachers, it had remained thick and cramped. Here her learning stopped. She was charged with bowing too stiffly and spoiling the effect of her smile by the cold expression of her grey eyes.

When she was fifteen, Lobrichon, who for some time had been coming to see her nearly every day, asked her if she would like to leave the school. She was in no hurry to enter on the unknown, but as she grew up she began to feel a disdain for the honeyed voice of her teachers and the acquired graces of her companions. She answered Lobrichon that she was ready to follow him. Next day, she was sleeping in a little house which her father’s friend had just bought at Passy.

The former secondhand clothes dealer was nursing a project. He had retired from trade at the age of sixty. For more than thirty years he had led the life of a miser, eating very little, depriving himself of a wife, entirely absorbed in the one object of increasing his fortune. Like Férat, he was a tremendous worker, but he worked for future enjoyment. He intended, when he was rich, to indulge his appetites to the full. When the fortune came, he hired a good cook, bought a quiet country house with a garden in front and a yard behind, and resolved to marry the daughter of his old friend.

Madeleine did not possess a sou, but she was tall and strong, and had already an amplitude of bosom which answered to Lobrichon’s ideal. Besides, he had only made up his mind after careful deliberation. The child was still young; he said that he could bring her up for his own sole delight, and let her develop slowly under his eyes, enjoying thus a foretaste of pleasure in the sight of her ripening beauty; then, he would have her a perfect virgin, he would fashion her to suit his own desires, like a seraglio slave. Thus there entered into his project of preparing a young girl to be his wife, the monstrous refinement of a man whose appetites have been weaned for many a year.

For four years, Madeleine lived peacefully in the little house at Passy. She had only changed her prison, but she did not complain of the active surveillance of her guardian; she felt no desire to go out, spending whole days in embroidery work, without experiencing any of those feelings of discomfort which are so oppressive to girls of her age. Her senses lay dormant till an unusually late period. Besides, Lobrichon was very attentive to his dear child; he would often take her delicate hands in his, or kiss her on the forehead with his warm lips. She received his caresses with a calm smile, and never noticed the strange looks of the old fellow, when she took her neckerchief off in his presence just as she would have done before her father.

She had just completed her eighteenth year, when one night the old rag-dealer so far forgot himself as to kiss her on the lips. She thrust him away with an instinctive movement of revolt, and looked him in the face, still unable to understand anything. The old man fell on his knees, and stammered out words unfit for her to hear. The wretch, who for months and months had been tormented by his burning passion, had been unable to act his part of disinterested protector to the end. Perhaps Madeleine would have married him, had he not been guilty of this outrage. She withdrew quietly, declaring in a distinct voice that she would leave the house next day.

Lobrichon, when left by himself, saw what an irreparable fault he had just committed. He knew Madeleine and was sure she would keep her word. He lost his head, and thought of nothing now but satisfying his passion. He said to himself that a forcible attempt might perhaps subdue the young girl, and make her cast herself vanquished into his arms. Towards midnight he went up to his ward’s bedchamber; he had a key for this room, and often, on warm nights, ho had slipped in, in order to look at the half-naked child as she lay in the disorder of sleep.

Madeleine was suddenly awakened by a strange feverish sensation. The night lamp had not been quite turned out, and she saw Lobrichon who had crept up to her side and was trying to press her to his breast. With incredible force she took him with both hands by the throat, jumped hastily on to the floor, and held the wretch on the bed till the death-rattle came through his teeth. The sight of this old fellow pale and livid, in his shirt, the thought that his limbs had touched hers, filled her with horrible disgust. It seemed to her that she was no longer a virgin. She held on to Lobrichon for a second without moving au inch, looking at him fixedly with her grey eyes and asking herself if she was not going to strangle him; then she thrust him away with such violence that he knocked his head against the wall of the recess and fell back in a swoon.

The young girl dressed herself hastily and left the house. She walked down towards the Seine. As she went along the embankments, she heard the clock strike one. She walked straight on, saying to herself that she would do so till morning and then look for a room. She had become calm, and merely felt profoundly sad. There was one idea only in her head; passion was infamous, and she would never love. There was always before her eyes the sight of the white legs of the old man in his shirt.

When she got to the Pont-Neuf, she turned off into the Rue Dauphine, to avoid a band of students who were hammering away at the walls. She continued to go straight on, no longer knowing where the road would take her to. Soon she noticed that a man was following her; she wanted to escape, but the man began to run and overtook her. Then, with the decision and frankness of her nature, she turned towards the stranger and, in a few words, told him her history. He politely offered her his arm, and advised her to accept his hospitality. He was a tall young fellow with a bright and sympathetic face. Madeleine examined him in silence, then, calmly and confidingly, she took his arm.

The young man had a room in an hotel in the Rue Soufflot. He told his companion to lie down on the bed; as for himself, he would sleep very well on the sofa. Madeleine pondered; she looked round the room which was littered with swords and pipes; she surveyed her protector, who treated her as a comrade with cordial familiarity. She noticed a pair of lady’s gloves on the table. Her companion smilingly reassured her; he told her that no lady would come to disturb them, and that, besides, if he had been married, he would not have run after her in the street. Madeleine blushed.

Next morning, she woke up in the young man’s arms. She had thrown herself into them of her own accord, impelled by a sudden surrender of herself for which she could not account. What she had refused to Lobrichon with savage revolt, she had actually granted two hours later to a stranger. She felt no regret. She was simply astonished.

When her lover learned that the story she had given the night before was no idle tale, he seemed very much surprised. He thought he had met a wily woman who was inventing falsehoods to make him run after her all the more. All the little scene she had acted before getting into the bed had seemed to him got up beforehand. Otherwise, he would have acted more discreetly, he would above all have reflected on the serious consequences of such an intimacy. He was a decent fellow who did not object to amuse himself, but he had a wholesome dread of serious love affairs. He had calculated that he was simply showing hospitality to Madeleine for a night and that he would see her go off next morning. He was very much cast down at his mistake.

“My poor child,” he said to Madeleine in a voice of emotion, “we have been guilty of a serious error. Forgive me and forget — me. I have to leave France in a few weeks and I don’t know if I shall ever come back.”

The young girl listened to this confession pretty calmly. In short, she was not at all in love with this young fellow. For him their intimacy was an adventure, for her an accident from which her ignorance had not been able to protect her. The thought of the coming departure of her lover could not yet break her heart, but the idea of an immediate separation was peculiarly distressing. In an indistinct way she said to herself that this man was her husband and that she could not leave him like that. She took one turn round the room, lost in thought, looking for her clothes; then she came back, sat down on the edge of the bed, and said hesitatingly; “Listen, keep me with yon as long as you stay in Paris. It will be more seemly.”

This last phrase, so touchingly naive, deeply affected the young fellow. He became aware of the lifelong misery be had just given to the life of this big child who had confided herself to him with the calmness of a little girl. He drew her to his breast, and answered that his home was hers.

During the day, Madeleine went to fetch her belongings. She had an interview with her guardian, and made him submit to everything she wished. The old man, fearing a scandal, and still all shaken with the struggle of the night, stood trembling before her. She made him promise never to try to see her again. She carried off the title-deeds of her income of two thousand francs. This money was a great source of pride to her; it enabled her to stay with her lover without selling herself.

That very night, she was peacefully embroidering in the room in the Rue Soufflot as she had been the night before at her guardian’s. Her life did not seem to her too much changed. She did not think she had anything to blush for. None of her feelings of independence and frankness had been wounded in the fault she had committed. She had surrendered herself freely, and she could not yet understand the terrible consequences of this surrender. The future did not concern her.

The esteem which her lover had for women was only that which young men feel who have to do with creatures of an inferior class; but he had the boisterous goodnature of a strong man who lives a happy life. To tell the truth, he speedily forgot his remorse and ceased to pity Madeleine’s fate. He was soon in love with her after his fashion; he thought her very handsome and took a pleasure in showing her to his friends. He treated her as his mistress, taking her on Sundays to Verrières or somewhere else, and to supper with his comrades’ mistresses during the week. These people now simply called her Madeleine.

She would perhaps have rebelled if she had not been charmed with her lover; he had a happy disposition, and made her laugh like a child even at the things that hurt her. She gradually accepted her position. Unknown to herself, her mind was becoming sullied, and she was growing accustomed to shame.

The student, who had just been appointed army-surgeon the day before they met, expected his orders to start every day. But they did not come, and Madeleine saw the months pass by, saying to herself that she would perhaps be a widow next day. She had only expected to stay a few weeks in the Rue Soufflot. She stayed there a year. At first she simply felt a kind of affection for the man she was living with. When at the end of two months she began to live in anxious expectation of his departure, her existence was a series of shocks which gradually bound her to him. Had he set off at once, she would perhaps have seen him go away without too much despair. But to be always fearing to lose him and yet have him always with her, this succeeded finally in uniting her to him in a close bond. She never loved him passionately; she rather received his impression, she felt herself becoming a part of him, and she saw that he was taking entire possession of her body and mind. Now she found that she could not forget him.

One day, she went with one of her new lady friends on a little journey. This friend, a law-student’s mistress, was called Louise, and she was going to see a child that she had put to nurse some sixty miles from Paris. The young women were not to return till the third day, but bad weather came on and they hastened back a day sooner than they had arranged. In a corner of the compartment of the train in which they were returning, Madeleine pondered with a feeling of sadness on the scene which she had just witnessed; the caresses of the mother and the prattle of the child had revealed to her a world of unknown emotions. She was seized with a sudden feeling of anguish at the idea that she too might have become a mother. Then the thought of the near departure of the man she was living with filled her with dismay, like an irreparable calamity of which she had never dreamed. She saw her fall, she saw her false and painful position; she was eager to get home to put her arms round her lover, to beseech him earnestly to marry her and never leave her.

She arrived in the Rue Soufflot in a state of feverish excitement. She had forgotten the slender tie, ready to be snapped at any moment, which she had accepted; she wished in her turn to take entire possession of the man whose memory would possess her for life. When she opened the door of the room in the hotel, she suddenly stopped stupefied on the threshold.

Her lover was bending down in front of the window, fastening the buckles of his trunk; by his side lay a travelling bag and another trunk already fastened up. Madeleine’s clothes and belongings were spread out in disorder on the bed. The young fellow had received his orders to set off that very morning, and he had hastened to make his preparations, emptying the drawers, separating his own things from Madeleine’s. He wanted to get away before his mistress came back, really believing himself to be acting under an impulse of kindness. He thought a letter of explanation would have been quite sufficient.

When he turned round and saw Madeleine on the threshold, he could not suppress a movement of vexation. He got up and went towards her with a somewhat forced smile.

“My dear girl,” he said as he kissed her, “the time for goodbye has come. I wanted to go away without seeing you again. That would have avoided a painful scene for both of us. You see, I was leaving your things on the bed.”

Madeleine felt as if she would faint. She sat down on a chair, without thinking of taking off her hat. She was very pale and could not find what to say. Her tearless burning eyes kept looking first at the trunks and then at the heap of her clothes; it was this unfeeling division of property which put the separation in such a harsh and odious light. Their linen no longer lay side by side in the same drawer; she was henceforth nothing to her lover.

The young fellow was just finishing the fastening up of his last trunk.

“They are sending me to the devil,” he went on, trying to laugh. “I am going to Cochin China.”

Madeleine was able to speak at last.

“Very well,” she said in a hollow voice. “I will go with you to the station.”

She could not think that she had any right to utter a single reproach to this man. He had warned her beforehand, and it was she who had wished to stay. But her feelings revolted, and she felt a strange longing to clasp him round the neck and beg him not to go. Her pride nailed her to her chair. She wished to appear calm, and not to show the young man, who was whistling coolly, how his departure was tugging at her heartstrings.

Towards evening, a few friends came. They all went in a body to the station, Madeleine smiling, and her lover gaily joking, comforted by her apparent good spirits. He had never felt towards her anything but a goodnatured affection, and he went away happy at seeing her so calm. Just as he was going into the waiting-room, he was cruel without meaning to be.

“I don’t ask you to wait for me, dear girl,” he said. “Console yourself and forget me.”

He went off. Madeleine, who had, up to this, preserved a strange pained smile, went mechanically out of the station, without feeling the ground under her feet. She did not even notice that one of the young doctor’s friends was taking her by the arm and going with her. She had been walking in this way nearly a quarter of an hour, stunned, hearing and seeing nothing, when the noise of a voice falling on the chilly silence of her brain, gradually compelled her to listen in spite of herself. The student was proposing to her unceremoniously to share his room with him, now that she was free. When she understood his meaning, she looked at the young fellow with an air of terror; then she let go his arm with a movement of supreme disgust, and ran and shut herself up in the room in the Rue Soufflot. There, all alone at last, she could sob to her heart’s desire.

Her sobs were sobs of shame and despair. She was A widow, and her grief at her desertion bad just been sullied by a proposal which, to her, seemed monstrous. Never yet had she so cruelly comprehended the misery of her position. The right to weep was being denied her. The world seemed to think that she had already been able to obliterate the kisses of her first lover. And yet she felt that these kisses were in her soul: she said to herself that they would always be burning there. Then, in the midst of her tears she swore to remain a widow. She felt the eternity of the bonds of the flesh; any fresh love would degrade her and fill her with avenging memories.

She did not sleep in the Rue Soufflot. She went the same night, and took up her quarters in another hotel in the Rue de l’Est. There she lived for two mouths, unsociable and solitary. One time, she had thought of shutting herself up in a convent. But she did not feel that she had faith enough. While she was at school, God had been represented to her as a nice young man. She did not believe in a God like that.

It was at this period that she met William.