My adventure had caused some talk in Parisian society, and I refrained in vain from lodging a complaint against my husband. I learned from the doctor that the police were searching for him but could not lay their hands on him. I found out later that he was in England, and I was relieved by that, for it would have been painful for me, whatever harm that man had done to me, to see him dragged before a court and condemned to forced labor.
During the malign fever that followed that terrible encounter with Monsieur d’Ingrande, I did not want to have anyone else with me but the excellent Baptiste. It often happened that I demanded the mirror from him, only to throw it away as soon as I had seen myself. He, the good soul, was astonished then by the movement of repulsion for my image, and he declared that I hadn’t changed, not in the least.
I could see, myself, that it was entirely the contrary; I no longer recognized myself. So, as soon as my wounds had scarred over and I began to get up, I resolved no longer to show myself in person without a veil or a velvet mask, and for a year, in spite of Baptiste’s urgings, I do not remember having failed once in the promise I had made myself. I only made an exception for him, for it is impossible always to hide my face from him.
In what fashion has that year passed? In the greatest distress, alas, between Batiste, my dog and my cat.
By virtue of an eccentricity of character from which I take no honor, but which I can explain marvelously, I have thus far kept at a distance all the people that I knew before. They believe that I am far from Paris. I am sparing them pity for my condition, and sparing myself the shame of their pity. If I have changed my name, it is to put them off the track.
The double misfortune that has struck me renders me unsociable, so to speak; I am something between a woman and a statue, a hybrid being.
I have encountered a man in the Champs-Élysées, Monsieur Alphonse Méril, who has claimed that I pleased him veiled and mute. If that is not vain gallantry, he must be very eccentric. In fact, I am not astonished that one man had that strange state of mind—only one, for one would not be able to find two.
XI
Here ends, my dear friend, the story of the marquise. Has it interested you? It seems to me that, for being so short, it is very vivid. That is, I think, because the essential things are detailed there, and nothing but the essential things.
As for me, it did more than interest me; it completed rendering me amorous. The honest heart of that poor woman, the disgust in which the marriage was steeped, the frightful disgrace that her pride earned her and her great sentiment of virtue, together with the confidence I seemed to inspire in her, all concurred to make me desire more and more to know her. Yes, certainly, I would have liked her to be my mistress.
Exiled from frivolous society by her mutism and her veil, she would only me more completely mine. Finally, I would realize the dream I had always had and that has given me the false air, the utterly false air, of a Don Juan: that of encountering, not the ideal woman but an ordinary woman for whom I would be the only possible man.
I know now that, far from being a monster, she is pretty; that at twenty-two, her present age, the essential beauty remains to her, the beauty that comes from the purity of the blood and the harmony of the figure.
The stains that the vitriol has hollowed out in her privileged face and mar it, I ought not to see, but were I to see them a hundred times they would appear to me as one more reason for attaching myself to her.
I shall bring her to forsake her veil, first by begging her to substitute for it a mask uncovering the mouth and the eyes, the two principal agents of amour. I have just written to her and I have emphasized everything that I have said to you here. I add that she is making me die of impatience by not coming.
28 August
Finally, she has come. Scarcely had she come in than she whipped my nose with a bouquet of Chinese asters that she had in her hand; then she threw the bouquet on to the table, and, to my great surprise, undid the strings of her hat, which went precipitately to join the bouquet, along with the veil.
I had had a moment of mad hope; I had thought that the vitriol was a fable invented by her to render her beauty more gripping. Alas, I had reckoned without the velvet mask. It was there, the rascally mask, and it hid everything from me with the exception of the gaze, the hips and the ears.
She had also taken off a black silk bodice decorated with jet trimmings. Underneath it there was a corsage as white as snow, which contrasted in the most gallant fashion with the black velvet mask: a divine corsage which served to highlight her pink shoulders, impregnated with a light perfume, and divine by virtue of its curvature full of promise.
The black velvet mask was not simply tied on. It enclosed the face hermetically and a part of the neck, one section of it attached beneath the chignon and the other where little wisps of hair have the habit of straying. It was more like a second face molded on to the face than a true mask. The nose, the forehead, the chin and the cheeks must have been copied exactly. The hair over the forehead and the temples hid the edge of the mask, from which stood out, like jewels in a casket, eyes of sapphire, lips of coral and two dainty ears reminiscent in their form and their color of the rarest sea-shells.
What I could not see was so well modeled by the velvet, and what I could see was so evocative, that I could flatter myself with grasping the physiognomy of the charming woman.
I experience a certain embarrassment in telling you how we spent that day. We had an entire explanation without words; we both sang the most beautiful ballad without music.
So why did she have a muslin corsage and no longer a hat on her head? Whatever her reasons were, I understood them and I showed that I understood them...
Delightful creature!
I did not know yet, before having held her, all the intelligence and heart that a woman can put into certain details of amour, even without speaking.
Sometimes her lips, forcing the door of their narrow prison, dilated in order to smile; sometimes her beautiful eyes allowed great silent tears to fall, like large, warm, perfumed drops of summer rain.
It was thus that she responded to the things I said, and sometimes, if a precise word as necessary, as paper and pencil were out of season, she employed the language of the Abbé de l’Épée,16 or, more capriciously, she traced the word in the palm of my hand with her fingernail. I felt what she wrote, for want of being able to read it, and I almost always felt it at the first stroke.
Our embraces concluded, before leaving, she sat down at my table and left me by way of adieu, these singular phrases:
If your soul is capable of a veritable amour, you will love me as you have never loved, and that amour, which no disillusionment can ruin, will be a great joy for you. If your soul is incapable of a veritable amour, you will be able to substitute for it, as so many people do a pretty little artificial amour, which will still satisfy me a great deal, for it is necessary not to be too demanding in this world. As for me, I certainly count on giving you one or the other. See what an admirable day we have spent today! And that thanks to a few sentimental grimaces. Would you like to be my little Alphonse for good? But I’m asking you there something that you don’t know yourself. We have only to let our two hearts go their own way and see where they lead us. Those sorts of stupidities are not susceptible of direction; and when one spurs them, one renders them surly and restive.
What do you think, my dear friend, of her horoscope? “If your soul is capable of a veritable amour, you will love me as you have never loved.” It’s necessary, then, that she feels very strong, or that she has already judged me very weak. That naïve excess gives me a frisson. In truth, I reassure myself by taking what my tender sorceress adds thereafter in her letter, to wit, that the veritable amour with which I gratify her will not perish under the influence of any disillusionment.
I wager that you, a man of little faith, are convinced that a veritable amour and I are not made to lodge under the same sign. My vagabond humor is crossing your mind, and yo
u can see filing past all the women to whom I’ve paid court in the last ten years.
Reason no more, my friend, because today I am attached to one, and I love her as you have never loved.
What do you think of the “pretty artificial amour” and that confession worth its weight in gold that “I certainly count on giving you one or the other”? It seems to me that there is a very piquant frankness in that on the part of a woman, and that it will draw me with regard to Julie to become, as she puts it, “her little Alphonse for good.”
If she is only offering me in return a pretty artificial amour, I share her opinion; it will still satisfy me a great deal, for it’s necessary not to be too demanding in this world. And a few “sentimental grimaces,” grimaces though they are, will defray my days better than many other unsentimental grimaces appropriate to civilized humanity.
At the moment of separation, while I still had her hand on my lips, she suddenly drew it away; then, repeating a gesture already familiar, she thrust her ringed finger before my eyes. I looked at it. The marquise’s crown was no longer hanging from the end of the little chain. It had been replaced by two letters, delicately engraved: A.M.
“A.M.!” I exclaimed. “Why those two letters in the place of your crown? A.M.,” I added, laughing, that can only signify Assurance Mutuelle. That’s your plaque. You’re paying a premium to an insurance company against the disappointments of amour. What is that premium?”
She lifted her veil and her laughter was audible, like a flutter of wings; and again I saw my beautiful pink lips and my beautiful blue eyes; and I was unable to see them without giving them evidence of all my esteem.
She returned to the table and wrote:
You’re a conceited man playing the part of a modest one. You know perfectly well that A.M. means Alphonse Méril. But your idea of the Assurance Mutuelle is amusing, and I thank you for having had it. What premium am I paying? Perpetual suspicion—and it is a heavy premium. Don’t take out insurance yourself, I beg you; be confident. I am an exceptional woman, as you will see.
I read that over her head. When she got up from the table, I said to her, opening my arms to her for the first time: “Julie, do you love me?”
She shrugged her shoulders slightly, and headed for the door.
“Julie, tell me that you love me,” I repeated, as she disengaged herself from my hands in order to leave.
While blowing me a long kiss she shook her head, but although it has never been the rule, there was reason to think that, this time, her negation was worth two affirmations.
XII
That letter was the last I received from Méril. Three days later I quit the sea and I returned to Paris. There I found Méril very absorbed by his recent passion, and I had been able to imagine.
Having become perfectly happy, he had nothing else to tell me, Entire happiness does not support narration. That is a cliché.
We saw one another at rare intervals. If I mentioned Her to him, if I asked him about his amours, he replied, with a melancholy smile: “She’s charming, charming, my black cat; she only lacks speech.”
He called her “his black cat” because of the velvet mask. She only came to his home three times a week, in order, he said, to leave him time to desire her. But he was enraged that there was incessantly a day in between, not to mention the nights.
When she was here, they made music with four hands, or made love with four arms.
Six months passed in that fashion: six full months.
It seemed that their happiness was at its peak, and that it could only decline. However, something absolutely unexpected, and quasi-miraculous, opened up a new phase to it.
This is how Méril recounted the event to me himself:
Yesterday, she fainted, as sometimes happens to her during our best moments. Those faints, to which I’m accustomed, no longer frighten me. I know that they only last for five minutes or so. Until then, I had not thought of taking advantage of them to penetrate the secret of that visage, or if I had thought of it, it was a fleeting desire immediately dominated by the idea that I would be committing an abuse of rust, a veritable infamy.
Suddenly, I was seized by a vertigo. Like a criminal gripped by the demon of crime, I felt myself go pale and tremble throughout my being. And in spite of myself, so to speak, attracted by a blind force, taking no account whatsoever of the enormity of the act, I cut the cords of the mask with a pen-knife.
It was necessary that I see her; I had a ferocious need to sew her. With infinite tremulousness, I gradually lifted the mask. Finally, it was removed. I looked. I cried: “But you’re beautiful! You’re still beautiful! You’ve always been beautiful!”
And at the same time, I covered with burning kisses all the parts of her face that were revealed to me, even those that had been spoiled—especially those—at the bottom of the left cheek and the neck, over the breadth of four fingers.
She came round; she looked at me anxiously and, by virtue of I know not what presentiment, sought to put her hands to her mask. I held them back. I wanted her to learn from the contact of my lips on her cheek that she no longer had the mask, since it was also to show her that I loved her no less after having seen her. A futile precaution! She dissolved in tears, pulled her hands way from mine energetically, and plastered them over her face.
In vain I repeated, in every tone:
“My dear angel, forgive me. I confess that I’ve broken my word; I confess that it’s an indignity; but I wouldn’t have wanted not to have committed it, since I’m liberating you once and for all from that mask. I don’t want you to wear it any longer, you hear? You’re crazy to think that you’re disfigured. Get up, come with me to the mirror, look at yourself without prejudice. The physician, you remember, the physician…he was telling you the truth, the exact truth, I assure you, my Julie, my beautiful Julie, my adorable Julie…!”
She shook her head and her tears flowed more abundantly.
I got up, I went to fetch a small, mirror, and then. tearing her hands away from her face, I said to her: “Look at yourself. In the name of our amour, look at yourself!”
She darted a fearful glance at the mirror, and then shoved it away with one hand, while touching with the other the few scars that the vitriol had left on her face, murmuring in a voice that seemed to come from the antipodes: “There! There!” And she enveloped me with a gaze of indescribable sadness.
“Julie, you’re crazy. Don’t look at yourself in the mirror any more, look into my eyes.”
They were very moist, and they ought to have rendered three things very eloquently: an extreme amour, a sincere admiration and a flight of my entire being toward her.
“Look into my eyes, I beg you, and enjoy the impression you make on me.”
Her gaze plunged profoundly into mine, obedient to a sort of magnetism stronger than her, and stronger than me. Coloring by degrees, it finally took on an excessive, almost supernatural glare, a glare that I had never seen through the mask, and she cried—yes, my friend, she cried:
“Alphonse, I believe you, for I love you. But I’m speaking! That’s certain—I’m speaking! Oh, my God, I’m speaking.”
The commotion that those words caused me, the first that she had pronounced in my presence, was incomparable, I assure you, to any that I had ever felt before.
When Méril reached that point in his story, I could not help allowing a slight smile to appear on my lips.
“What does that smile signify?” Méril demanded.
“Nothing.”
“Be frank.”
“What’s the point? Nothing, I tell you.”
“I’ll wager that you find all that strange, don’t you?”
“Well, yes, if you need a confession, a little strange. That a woman should think herself completely disfigured by vitriol when her beauty is only trivially afflicted is already bizarre and somewhat contrary to our nature, which leads us to overestimate ourselves rather than depreciate ourselves. But I find the mutism gripping and then
leaving the marquise devoid of the slightest scientific reason, for she would have become mute by virtue of terror and would have ceased to be by virtue of joy, would she not?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Is that possible?”
“It’s a fact.”
“Still, it’s necessary to suppose that it’s true.”
“On what do you base your doubt on that matter?”
“On its implausibility.”
“Or on your ignorance of the laws on Nature. Oh, my dear friend, how little we know!” Méril added, philosophically.
“Then, she can speak now?”
“Like you and me, and I’m the happiest of men. By the way, I haven’t told you what Madame d’Ingrande had to sort out with the hotelier in the Rue du Dauphin on the evening when I encountered her in the Champs-Élysées, if you remember. I asked her today and she replied:
“‘I had read in a newspaper an announcement that an English physician, a specialist in maladies of the voice, was in Paris staying at The Hôtel du Dauphin. I had already gone to the hotel once to see whether he had arrived. I went back a second time without suspecting that my real physician was walking alongside me in the Rue de Rivoli.’
“‘Are you quite certain of that?’ I asked, clicking my tongue in a slightly jealous fashion.
“She didn’t make any reply, but she shrugged her shoulders slightly.
“‘You’re frightening me,’ I said, gaily, ‘If you don’t reply to me immediately. I’ll believe that you’ve become mute again…’
“She threw her arms around my neck and uttered a prolonged burst of laughter, which proved to me well enough that her voice had returned.”
XIII
When Méril left me, I immediately went to one of my friends, a physician, and submitted the case of mutism to him, for the tranquility of my conscience.
“It doesn’t astonish me at all,” he said, to my great astonishment.
Singular Amours Page 16