Читать книгу A Love Crime - Paul Bourget - Страница 4

It was half-past eleven o'clock when Armand de Querne left the house in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. The wind had swept away all the clouds, and the sky was filled with stars. "What a beautiful night!" said Armand to himself; "I shall walk home." It was a long way, for he lived in the Rue Lincoln, in the upper part of the Champs-Élysées. Here, on the second floor of a wing projecting upon a garden, he had rooms which he had once amused himself with furnishing in quaint and exquisite fashion with all kinds of old-fashioned trifles. But how long had he ceased to spend the evening in this "home?"

He was following the pavement of the Rue St.-Lazare, which, after quite a narrow and slender beginning, suddenly, like a river swelled by tributaries, widens after the Place de la Trinité, when it receives, one after the other, the flood of passengers and vehicles drifting through the Rue de Chateaudun, the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and the Rue de Londres. Cabs were plying, omnibuses were changing horses, the crowd was surging. Sometimes a girl came out from the corner of a doorway, and with obscene speech accosted the young man, who put her away gently with his hand.

Was it the contrast between the intimacy of the little drawing-room and the swarming infamy of the pavement? Armand felt deeply melancholy. He could not help seeing Alfred's face again in thought, with Helen's close beside it. Yet, was he jealous? No. Pictures of childhood came back to him as they had done just before, but with increased precision, showing him Chazel dressed in the uniform of the "Vanabosteans"—a small jacket similar to that of the Barbistes. They always went side by side in the ranks. Poor Chazel! he was not rich. The head of the establishment had taken him as a foundationer, with a view, to making a show-pupil of him—a machine for winning prizes in competitions. How many times had Armand paid for him at the little wicket, when the porter sold to the pupils sweetmeats, fragments of iced chestnuts, cakes, and Parisian creams—tablets of chocolate having a thick and oversweet liquid inside!

They had gone through all their classes together from the fourth up, and had together passed through the evil days of the Commune, when, on returning both of them from the country, after the siege, they found themselves blockaded in Paris. Alfred had afterwards entered the École Polytechnique. And when he came on Wednesdays and Sundays to visit his old schoolfellow, who had already crossed the Seine and begun to lead the life of a rich and idle young man, how ludicrous he was in his military dress, embarrassed by his sword, not knowing how to set his hat upon his head, and invariably scarred with clumsy razor-cuts!

While Alfred was at the School of Bridges, Armand was travelling. He had gone round the world in the society of an amateur artist. On his return he found that his friend was no longer at Paris. The letters passing between them became rare. Could they have told why? Armand perhaps might. There was only one point left in common between Alfred's life and his own. Alfred had married Mademoiselle de Vaivre. They had made a trip to Paris, and Armand well remembered how he had been deliciously surprised by Helen's distinguished demeanour, when he had expected to find her awkward, pretentious, and a fright. But at this period he was taken up with another woman, little Aline, a mistress of his for whom he had cherished the only genuine passion of which he was capable—painful jealousy blended with delirium of the senses.

Later on, some one had spoken to him of Helen Chazel, and told him ugly stories about her. And who was it that had done so? Another school-fellow—big Lucien Rieume, who had been educated at the Vanaboste establishment like Alfred and himself—during one of these tête-à-tête luncheons when an opening of the heart usually accompanies that of the oysters between two college companions; and Lucien—cordial, indiscreet, intolerable—had talked a great deal, pouring out pell-mell whatever he knew concerning former friends. Armand could again hear him chuckle, leaning forward somewhat with kindled eye and humid lip:

"Poor Chazel, he hadn't a head worth a fig! It seems that his wife is tricking him. I heard the gentleman's name: Marades, Tarades—just wait a moment—yes, De Varades, an artillery officer. It was the talk of Bourges. He was never out of the house."

It was an unfortunate trait in Armand's character that he was unable to withstand the tempting of mistrust. When evil was asserted to him, he preserved an indelible impression of it. He did not altogether believe in it, and yet he believed in it sufficiently for a suspicion, and a busy suspicion, to be planted within him. When the Chazels had come to settle in Paris, ten months previously, and Armand had begun to interest himself in Helen, the scruples of an old friendship might perhaps have been stronger than his freak of curiosity if big Rieume's words had not risen before his recollection.

"Really," he had said to himself, "it would be too foolish,"—a criminal phrase which serves men for the justification of many a dastardly action. Helen had not been slow in displaying towards him a kind of passion which he had attributed to the natural exaltation of a provincial. "I am the first Parisian who has paid her attentions," he had said again to himself, and as she possessed charming gracefulness of gesture, so sweet an expression of countenance and such an air of complete refinement and nobility about her entire personality, he had taken a pleasure in completing her education in elegance, thinking to himself that she would be a delightful mistress.

But for many days she had refused really to become his mistress, and her resistance had made him obstinate. He had become bent upon overcoming her, recollecting the officer and telling himself that the officer had not been the only one. A few skilful conversations with Alfred had taught him that at one time Varades had really been a constant guest at the house; was he not the same year's student at the École Polytechnique as Alfred himself? Armand had lost his doubts, and in Helen's refusals to be his, he had seen nothing but coquetry. Now, in this respect like all men who hold the strange ethics of seducers, Querne considered coquetry in a women a justification for the worst behaviour. At last the long siege was about to issue in the coveted result. Madame Chazel had granted him an appointment for the following day. Twenty-four hours more and he would have a new mistress, as desirable and as pretty as those whose memory was the most flattering to the pride of his recollection. Why then did he, instead of being happy, feel so deeply melancholy. Was it remorse for the treason to his friend?

His friend? Was Alfred really his friend? Yes, that was understood between themselves, as well as in the eyes of others. But a friend is a man who knows you and whom you know, to whom you show your heart and who shows you his. Would he ever bring the tale of one of his hopes, his joys, his sadnesses, to the calculating machine that bore the name of Chazel? Had the latter ever confided a secret to him? So much the better, too, for the ideas of this worthy schoolboy who seemed to look upon life as the prolongation of a college task, must be silly enough. It was their college life that continued to link them together, and the recollections of their childhood. Their childhood? Turning down the Rue Royale and arriving at the Champs Élysées, Armand suddenly recalled the ranks of Vanaboste's school, on Thursdays, as they walked three and three under the superintendence of a poor wretch of an usher who strove to hide himself among the groups of people, so as to seem a passer-by like the rest and not a watch-dog charged with the duty of looking after a flock of schoolboys.

And what a flock it was! The majority had pale complexions, hollow eyes, an enervated exhaustion of the whole being that spoke of secret excesses. How much ignominy and baseness was there in that community, the eldest in which were nineteen years of age and the youngest eight! Within the walls of their prison, as within the walls of the great Lycée to which they repaired twice a day, nothing was thought of but the infamous amours existing between the elder boys and their juniors. Of these unnatural loves, some were partly sensual, and had for their theatre all the deserted corners in the house, from the dormitories to the infirmary. And of the French youth confined within similar colleges, how many were participators in this lewdness, while the rest defiled their imaginations, although they repelled it! Among these college boys there were also elevated and chaste connexions. The perusal of a certain eclogue of Virgil's, a dialogue of Plato's, and a few of Shakespeare's sonnets had excited the more literary of them, and Alfred Chazel, being then in the third class, had one day received a piece of poetry written by a sixth-form boy, beginning with the following astonishing line, which had made them laugh like mad creatures: