The Lady of the Camellias (14 page)

“Well then, I'm glad to see that Marguerite is not grieving over me,” I continued with a forced smile.

“And she's absolutely right. You've done what you had to do; you were more reasonable than she was, because that girl loved you, she spoke of nothing but you, and would have been capable of some great folly.”

“Why didn't she reply, if she loves me?”

“Because she understood that she had been wrong to love you. Women will sometimes forgive someone who deceives them, but never someone who wounds their pride, and you always wound a woman's pride when, two days after you have become her lover, you break with her, whatever reasons you may give for this rupture. I know Marguerite, and she would rather die than respond.”

“Then what should I do?”

“Nothing. She will forget you, you will forget her, and neither of you will have anything with which to reproach the other.”

“But what if I wrote her to ask her to forgive me?”

“Don't do it; she will forgive you.”

I almost flung myself around her neck.

A quarter hour later I was home, writing to Marguerite:

“Someone who repents for a letter he wrote yesterday, who will leave town tomorrow if you do not forgive him, would like to know at what hour he may come to beg forgiveness at your feet.

“When will you be alone? As you know, confessions must be made without outside observers.”

I folded this madrigal in prose, and sent it via Joseph, who gave the letter to Marguerite herself, who told him she would reply later.

I did not leave the house for one moment except to dine, and at eleven o'clock at night I still had no response.

I resolved therefore not to suffer any longer and to leave town the next day.

As a consequence of this resolution, convinced I would not be able to sleep if I went to bed, I began packing my trunks.

For about an hour Joseph and I had been preparing for my departure, when someone rang violently at my door.

“Should I get it?” Joseph asked me.

“Get it,” I told him, asking myself who could possibly come at such an hour to see me, and not daring to believe it was Marguerite.

“Sir,” Joseph told me upon returning, “two ladies are here.”

“It's us, Armand,” cried a voice that I recognized as Prudence's.

I came out of my bedroom.

Prudence, standing, was looking at the various curios in my living room; Marguerite was sitting on the sofa looking pensive.

When I entered, I went up to her, got on my knees, took her two hands in mine, and, terribly moved, said to her, “Forgive me.”

She kissed my forehead and said, “That makes three times already that I have forgiven you.”

“I was going to leave tomorrow.”

“How can my visit change your resolve? I have not come to keep you from quitting Paris. I have come because I did not have time to reply to you today, and did not want you to leave thinking that I was angry with you. And Prudence didn't want me to come; she said I might disturb you.”

“You, disturb me? You, Marguerite? How?”

“Why, of course, you might have had a woman here,” said Prudence, “and it would not have been pleasant for her to see two ladies walk in.”

During this remark of Prudence's, Marguerite watched me closely.

“My dear Prudence,” I replied, “you do not know what you are saying.”

“How nice your apartment is,” Prudence replied. “May we see the bedroom?”

“Yes.”

Prudence entered my bedroom, less to inspect it than to make up for the foolish thing she'd just said, and to leave us alone, Marguerite and me.

“Why did you bring Prudence?” I asked.

“Because she was with me at the theater, and because when I left this place, I wanted to have someone to accompany me.”

“Wouldn't I have been here?”

“Yes, but apart from the fact that I did not want to disturb you, I was sure that if you came to my door, you would insist on coming up to see me, and as I would not be able to grant you that, I did not want you to leave town with the right to reproach me for a rejection.”

“And why would you have been unable to invite me up?”

“Because I am being watched, and the least suspicion could do me great harm.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“If there were another, I would tell you; we are no longer to keep secrets from each other.”

“Marguerite, I do not want to beat around the bush. Do you love me a little?”

“Very much.”

“Then why did you deceive me?”

“My friend, if I were Mme the Duchess So-and-So, or if I had two hundred thousand francs of income, if I were your mistress and I had another lover besides you, you would have the right to ask me why I deceived you. But I am Mlle Marguerite Gautier, I am forty thousand francs in debt, I have not a penny to my name, and I spend a hundred thousand francs a year, which makes your question idle and my response futile.”

“Fair enough,” I said, letting my head fall into Marguerite's lap, “but I—I am crazy in love with you.”

“Well, my friend, you'll have to love me a little less or understand me a little better. Your letter caused me great pain. If I had been free, first of all, I would not have entertained the count the day before yesterday, or, if I had let him in, I would have come to beg your pardon, and in future would not have received any lover but you. I thought for a moment I could permit myself that happiness for six months. You did not want it; you insisted on knowing the means. My God! The means were easy enough to guess. It was a greater sacrifice than you might think I would make. I could have told you, ‘I need twenty thousand francs.' You were in love with me; you would have come up with it, at the risk of holding it against me later. I would have preferred to owe you nothing, but you did not understand this scruple . . . for it
is
a scruple. Women like me, if we still have a little heart, we accord words and things a meaning and consequence unknown to other women. I repeat, then, that, on the part of Marguerite Gautier, the means she found to pay off her debts without asking you for the money necessary for it was a delicate operation from which you would have profited without needing to say a thing. If you had only met with me today, you would be only too happy with what I promised you, and you would not have asked me what I had done the day before yesterday. Sometimes we are forced to purchase a satisfaction required by our soul at the expense of our body; and we suffer all the more when, afterward, that satisfaction eludes us.”

I listened, and looked at Marguerite with admiration. When I thought that this magnificent creature, whose feet I longed to kiss, had made a place for me in her thoughts, that she had given me a role in her life, and that I had not been content with what she gave me, I asked myself if men's desire has any limit, when, satisfied as promptly as mine had been, it still seeks more.

“It's true,” she resumed. “Women who depend on luck as I do have immoderate desires and inconceivable passions. We leap into one thing, then another. Some men ruin themselves over us without obtaining anything in return; others can get us for a bouquet. Our hearts have whims; that is our lone distraction and our sole excuse. I gave myself to you more quickly than to any other man, I swear it to you. Why? Because when you saw me spit blood you took my hand, because you cried, because you are the only human creature who has ever pitied me. I will tell you a silly thing; but once I had a little dog who looked at me sadly whenever I coughed; that is the only creature I ever loved.

“When he died, I cried more than I did at my mother's death. It is true that she had beaten me for twelve years of her life. And I loved you instantly as much as I loved my dog. If men knew what they could win with one tear, they would love more successfully, and we would be less destructive.

“Your letter gave you away; it showed me that you lacked the wisdom of the heart. It did more to damage the love I had for you than anything else you might have done. It was provoked by jealousy, that is true, but by ironic and insolent jealousy. I was already sad when I got that letter; I had counted on seeing you at noon, on having lunch with you, so I could blot out by the sight of you a memory that tormented me, which before I met you would have been as nothing.

“Because,” Marguerite continued, “you were the only person who ever made me feel instantly that I could think and speak freely. Everyone who clusters around girls like me analyzes our every word, trying to draw consequence for themselves from our most insignificant actions. Naturally, we don't have friends. We have selfish lovers who spend their fortunes not on us, as they say, but on their own vanity.

“With men like that, we have to be lighthearted when they are joyful, in fine fettle when they want to have supper, in a skeptical mood when they are. We're forbidden to have any feelings of our own, on pain of being jeered at and having our credit ruined.

“We no longer belong to ourselves. We are not beings, but things. We are first in men's pride, last in their esteem. We have female friends, but they are friends like Prudence, former kept women who retain a taste for extravagance that their age will no longer afford them. So they become our friends, or, really, our dining companions. Their friendship goes as far as utility, but never reaches the point of disinterestedness. They will never give you any but mercenary advice. It matters little to them if we have ten lovers or more, so long as they get a few dresses or a bracelet out of it, and can go out in our carriages from time to time, and come to the theater and sit in our boxes. They get our bouquets from the night before, and they borrow our cashmere shawls. They never render us any service, however small, without getting twice what it's worth. You saw it yourself, the night when Prudence brought me the six thousand francs I'd begged her to go ask the duke to give me. She borrowed five hundred francs from me that she'll never give back, or that she'll make up in hats that will never leave their boxes.

“So we cannot have—or rather, I cannot have—any happiness but one, which is, unhappy as I sometimes am, in poor health as I always am, to find a man who is of superior enough character that he will not demand a full account of my life, and will love me more for myself than for my body. I had found that man in the duke, but the duke is old, and old age can neither protect nor console. I had thought I could accept the life that he wished for me; but what do you want? I was perishing of boredom, and as long as you're going to be consumed, you might as well hurl yourself into a fire, rather than slowly suffocate from coal smoke.

“So, I met you, you—young, ardent, happy—and tried to make you into the man I had longed for in the middle of my noisy solitude. What I loved in you was not the man you were, but the man you might yet become. You refuse to accept this role, you reject it as unworthy of you, you are a vulgar lover. Do as the others do—pay me and let's speak of this no more.”

Marguerite, exhausted by this long confession, threw herself on the sofa, and to stifle a weak flight of coughing, brought her handkerchief to her lips and from there to her eyes.

“Forgive me; forgive me,” I murmured. “I had understood all this, but I wanted to hear you say it, my adored Marguerite. Let us forget the rest and remember only one thing: that we belong to each other, that we are young, and that we love each other.

“Marguerite, do with me what you will; I am your slave, your dog. But in the name of Heaven, tear up the letter I wrote you, and do not let me go away tomorrow; I would die.”

Marguerite withdrew the letter from the bodice of her gown and gave it to me, saying to me with a smile of ineffable sweetness, “Here, I've brought it back to you.”

I tore up the letter and kissed with tears the hand that had given it back to me.

At this moment Prudence reappeared.

“Well, Prudence, do you know what he asks of me?” said Marguerite.

“He asks you to forgive him.”

“Just so.”

“And you pardon him?”

“I should, but he wants one thing more.”

“What, then?”

“He wants to come have supper with us.”

“And do you consent?”

“What do you think?”

“I think the two of you are babies, with not a brain between you. But I also think that I'm very hungry and that the earlier you consent, the earlier we'll have supper.”

“Let's go,” said Marguerite. “The three of us can fit in my carriage. Take this,” she added, turning toward me. “Nanine will have gone to bed. You will open the door; take my key, and try not to lose it again.”

I smothered Marguerite with kisses.

Joseph came in behind her.

“Sir,” he told me with the air of a man delighted with himself, “the trunks are packed.”

“Entirely?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Unpack them, then; I'm not going away.”

I could have, said Armand, told you of the beginning of this liaison in a few sentences, but I wanted you to understand by what events and what steps we came to the understanding that I had to agree to everything Marguerite wished, and that she could not live with anyone but me.

It was the day after the evening she came to see me that I sent her
Manon Lescaut
.

From that moment on, as I could not change my mistress's ways, I changed mine. I wanted above all not to give myself the time to analyze the role I had just accepted, because, despite myself, I would have felt it as a great sorrow. Also, my life, usually so quiet, reshaped itself immediately into a thing of noisiness and disorder. Don't think that, disinterested as it may be, the love a kept woman has for you comes for free. Nothing is more expensive than satisfying the thousand whims for flowers, theater boxes, suppers, and country picnics that one can never refuse one's mistress.

As I told you, I did not have a large fortune. My father was and is the tax collector at C . . . . The job has a great reputation for security, which permitted him to raise the commission that was required for him to take up the position. This job brings him forty thousand francs a year, and in the ten years since he's had it, he has paid back his commission, and busied himself with putting aside my sister's dowry. My father is the most honorable man you could ever meet. My mother, when she died, left behind six thousand francs in income, which he divided between my sister and me on the day he obtained the job he had sought, and once I was twenty-one, he added an annual allowance of five thousand francs to this small income, assuring me that with eight thousand francs a year I could be very happy in Paris, if I took a job either at the bar or in medicine. So I came to Paris, I studied law, I became a lawyer, and like many young men, I tucked my diploma in my pocket and let myself enjoy the carefree life of Paris for a time. My expenses were quite modest, but still I would run through my annual income in eight months, and spend the four summer months with my father, which allowed me to live as if I had an income of twelve thousand francs, and gave me the reputation of being a good son. Besides, I did not have a penny of debt.

That was the state of my affairs when I met Marguerite.

You will understand that, in spite of myself, my manner of living became more extravagant. Marguerite had a changeable nature, and she was one of those women who never regard the thousand distractions that comprise their life as a serious expense. The result was that, wanting to spend as much time with me as possible, she would write me in the morning that she would dine with me that evening not at her house but at some restaurant, either in Paris or in the countryside. I would go pick her up, we would dine together, we would go to the theater, we often had supper together, and on any given night I would spend four or five louis, which is to say two thousand or three thousand francs per month, which shortened my year to three and half months, and made it necessary for me either to go into debt, or to leave Marguerite.

I could accept everything except that last eventuality.

Forgive me for giving you so many details, but you will see that they were the cause of the events that followed. What I am telling you is a true and simple story, to which I have attached all the naïveté of the details and the simplicity of the developments.

I understood that, since nothing in the world could induce me to forget my mistress, I would have to find a way to afford the expense she put me to. Then again, this love consumed me to the point that every moment I spent away from Marguerite felt like years, and I felt the need to burn through those moments in a passion and to live them so quickly that I would not be altogether conscious of what I was doing.

I began by borrowing five or six thousand francs off my small capital, and then I started gambling, because once they'd closed down the gaming houses, gambling popped up everywhere. In the past, when you entered Frascati you had the chance of striking it rich—you played with real money, and if you lost you had the consolation of telling yourself you could have won—whereas now, except in circles where a certain scrupulousness prevails regarding payment, the moment one wins a substantial sum one is almost sure that one will never get it. You will easily understand why.

Gambling can be practiced only by young men who have enormous financial needs but who lack the necessary fortune to support the life they lead. This is why they gamble, and here is the natural result: Either they win, in which case the losers pay for their horses and mistresses, which is extremely awkward; or debts are contracted, and dealings that began across a green cloth end in quarrels that tear apart both honor and life to some degree, and if you're an honest man, you soon find yourself ruined by very honest young people who have no flaw except for the lack of two hundred thousand francs a year.

I don't need to tell you about those men who cheat, and of whom one day you hear that they were forced to leave town and were belatedly brought to justice.

I threw myself, therefore, into the fast life, noisy and volcanic, which had formerly frightened me when I'd thought about it, but which had become for me the inevitable backdrop of my love for Marguerite. What would you have expected me to do?

The nights I didn't spend on the rue d'Antin I spent alone at home. I couldn't sleep; jealousy kept me awake, burning my mind and blood. As long as I gambled, I was distracted for the moment from the fever that had invaded my heart, which transformed itself into a mania whose interest consumed me, despite myself, until the hour struck when I was to go and see my mistress. This is how I could recognize the power of my love—that, whether I was winning or losing, I always left the table pitying those I left behind, who would not find the happiness I did when they left it.

For most people gambling was a necessity. For me it was a cure.

If I could be cured of Marguerite, I would be cured of gambling.

In the midst of all that, I was fairly clearheaded; I never lost more than I could pay, and I won only what I could have spared.

Also luck favored me. Without getting into debt, I was able to spend three times more money than before I started gambling. It was not easy to resist a life that allowed me to satisfy Marguerite's thousand whims without inconvenience to myself. As for her, she loved me as much as before, and still more.

As I told you, I began at first by visiting her from midnight until six in the morning; then I was admitted occasionally into her theater boxes; then she sometimes would come dine with me. One morning I didn't leave until eight o'clock, and a day came when I didn't leave until noon.

As I awaited her moral metamorphosis, a physical transformation had worked itself on Marguerite. I had undertaken her cure, and the poor girl, guessing my aim, obeyed me to prove her gratitude. Without imposing extreme changes and without effort, I had very nearly managed to wean her from her old habits. My doctor, whom I had made her consult, had told me that only rest and calm could restore her health, so I began to supplant her suppers and insomniac nights with a healthful regimen and regular sleep. Despite herself, Marguerite started getting used to this new existence, whose salutary effects she could feel. Soon she began spending some nights at home, or if the weather was good, she would wrap herself in a shawl, cover herself with a veil, and we would go on walks, like two children, strolling the dark lanes along the Champs-Élysées in the night. She would return home tired, have a light supper, then go to bed after playing a little music, or reading—something she'd never done before. The coughing, which broke my heart every time I heard it, had almost completely disappeared. At the end of six weeks, the count was no longer in the picture; he had been definitively sacrificed. Only the duke still forced me to conceal my liaison with Marguerite, and even he had been sent away during my visits, on the pretext that madam was sleeping, and had forbidden that she be woken.

As a result of the habit, the need, even, that Marguerite had developed for my company, I was able to give up gambling at just the moment when a shrewd gambler would have quit. All being counted, I found myself, with my gains, in command of ten thousand francs, a sum that appeared to me inexhaustible.

The time of year when I was accustomed to rejoin my father and my sister had arrived, but I did not leave town. I began to receive frequent letters from one or the other of them, letters imploring me to come see them. To each letter I responded as decently as I could, repeating always that I was doing well and did not need money, two things I thought would reassure my father a little about the postponement of my annual visit.

While all this was taking place, one morning Marguerite, who had been awoken by dazzling sunshine, jumped out of bed and asked me if I would take her into the country for the day.

We sent for Prudence, and the three of us went together, after Marguerite told Nanine to inform the duke that she had decided to make the most of the day, and had gone to the countryside with Mme Duvernoy.

In addition to the fact that the presence of Mme Duvernoy was necessary to satisfy the old duke, Prudence was one of those women who are expressly made for such outings. With her unfailing high spirits and her bottomless appetite, she did not permit a moment of boredom to those who accompanied her, and she expertly saw to the eggs, the cherries, the milk, the fried rabbit, and everything else that is required for a traditional picnic on the outskirts of Paris.

There was nothing left for us to do but to decide where to go.

It was Prudence again who came to the rescue.

“Do you want to go to the true countryside?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then let's go to Bougival, to the Point du Jour, the Widow Arnould's auberge. Armand, go rent a barouche.”

An hour and a half later we had arrived at the Widow Arnould's.

You may know this auberge, a hotel where you can rent by the week, or visit on a day trip. From the garden, which rises as high as the second story of a building, you can take in a spectacular view. To the left there's the aqueduct of Marly on the horizon; to the right the view extends to an infinity of hills. The river, which barely flows in this spot, unspools like a wide, pale taffeta ribbon between the plains of Gabillon and the island of Croissy, eternally lulled by the whispering of tall poplars and the murmur of weeping willows.

At the bottom, in a broad patch of sunlight, rise little white houses with red roofs, and factories that lose their hard and commercial character from a distance, admirably completing the landscape.

And beyond that, Paris, in a haze.

As Prudence had told us, it was the true countryside, and I must say, it was a true luncheon.

It is not out of gratitude for the happiness I owed to her that I say this, but Bougival, despite its horrible name, is one of the prettiest parts of the country you could imagine. I've traveled a great deal, and I've seen many grander sights, but none more charming than this little village, nestled cheerfully at the foot of the hill that protects it.

Mme Arnould offered us a boat ride, which Marguerite and Prudence accepted with joy.

The countryside has always been associated with love, and rightly so: Nothing is a better frame for the woman one loves than a blue sky and the scents, flowers, breezes, and shining solitude of the fields or the woods. However much a man loves a woman, however much he trusts her, however much confidence in the future her past permits him, a man is always jealous, to a greater or lesser degree. If you have ever been in love, seriously in love, you must have felt that need to isolate from the world that being in whom you would like to be entirely enveloped. However indifferent she may be to her surroundings, the woman one loves seems to lose her fragrance and her plenitude when she comes into contact with other men and things. I felt this much more than any other man. I was as much in love as an ordinary man can be, but my lover was no ordinary lover; when it came to Marguerite Gautier—in Paris, that is—at every step I was likely to bump into a man who had been this woman's lover, or who might be on the following day. In the countryside, however, among people we had never seen and who paid no attention to us, in the bosom of nature decked out in springtime (that annual reprieve), and removed from the sounds of the city, I could have my lover all to myself, and love without shame and without fear.

The courtesan in her had begun to fade away, little by little, and I had beside me a young, beautiful woman whom I loved, by whom I was loved, and who was named Marguerite. The past held no more shadows; the future no more clouds. The sun shone on my mistress as it would have shone on the chastest fiancée. The two of us strolled in those charming places that seem made for reciting the verses of Lamartine, or for singing the melodies of Scudo. Marguerite wore a white dress, she leaned on my arm, she repeated to me under the starry sky the words she had spoken to me the night before, and the world rumbled on at a distance without marring with its shadows the smiling tableau of our youth and our love.

That is the dream that the day's hot sun carried to me through the leaves of the trees, as I lay on the grass on the island where we had alighted, free of all the human connections that usually oppressed my mind. I let my thoughts run free and gather all the hopes they could find.

Add to this that, from the place where I was, I could see on the riverbank a charming little two-story house with a semicircular fence around it; through the fence, in front of the house, a green lawn, smooth as velvet; and behind the building a little woods full of mysterious nooks, whose mosses would erase every morning the steps made there the night before.

Flowering vines hid the front stoop of this house, and embraced the facade, climbing as high as the second story.

I looked at this house so long that I ended by persuading myself it was mine, so neatly did it complete the dream I'd been dreaming. I pictured Marguerite and me spending the day in the woods that covered the hillside, sitting on the lawn at night, and I asked myself if any earthly creatures were ever as lucky as we were.