ALPHONSE DAUDET. • » • • * • »« Copyright, iS^^, by Littijf, Brovm. Geupa it C? FarCs . ' ! • ,' Copyright, 1S99, By Ljtti-e, Brown, and Company. A /I rights reserved. John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. FOR MY SONS WHBN THEY ARE TWENTY YEARS OLD. 9 V\c\jj\ Zay\^ iMa*"'^ U'.b re* (I- CONTENTS. Pack Sappho . , . ^ Between the Flies and the Footlights: I. The Actor at Work 261 II. Madame d'fipinay's Dream 275 III. Provincial Circuits 282 IV. Theatrical Mourning 289 V. Stage-Setting and Rehearsals 298 VI. Drunkenness on the Stage 315 VII. Sixty Years on the Stage 320 VIII. Diderot's Advice to an Actress 329 IX. Fanny Kemble after her Memoirs 345 849303 SAPPHO. I. " Come, look at me. I like the color of your eyes. What 's your name ? " *' Jean." *' Just Jean?" "Jean Gaussin." ** From the South, I can see that. How old are you ? " ** Twenty-one." "An artist?" " No, madame." " Ah ! so much the better." These brief sentences, almost unintelligible amid the shrieks and laughter and dance music of a masquerade party, were exchanged, one night in June, by a bagpiper and a female fellah in the conservatory of palms and tree-like ferns which formed the background of Dechelette's studio. To the Egyptian's searching examination, the piper replied with the ingenuousness of his tender years, the recklessness and the sigh of relief of a Southerner who has been silent for a long while. A stranger to all that throng of painters and sculp- tors, lost sight of immediately after his arrival by 2 Sappho. the friend who had brought him, he had been sauntering" about for two hours with his attractive fair face tanned and gilded by the sun, his curly h.^iif ' close atid sh-ort as the sheepskin costume he wore ; and a triumph, which he was far from sus- pecting, arose and whispered around him. Dancers jostled him roughly with their shoulders, studio fags laughed and jeered at the bagpipe slung over his shoulder and his mountain costume, heavy and uncomfortable on that summer night. A Jap- anese woman, with eyes suggestive of the faubourg, her high chignon held in place by steel knives, hummed as she ogled him : Ah I qu'il est beaUy qtCil est beau, le postilion ! while a Spanish novia, passing on the arm of an Apache chief, vio- lently thrust her bouquet of white jasmine into his face. He failed to understand these advances, ima- gined that he was cutting an exceedingly absurd figure, and took refuge in the cool shadows of the glass gallery, where a divan was placed against the wall under the plants. That woman had come at once, and taken a seat by his side. Young, beautiful? He could not have told. From the long sheath of blue woollen stuff, in which her full figure swayed with an undulating motion, emerged two round and shapely arms bare to the shoulder; and her little hands laden with rings, her wide-open gray eyes increased in ap- parent size by the curious iron ornaments hanging from her forehead, formed a harmonious whole. An actress without doubt. Many actresses Sappho. 3 came to Dechelette's ; and the thought was not calculated to put him at his ease, as persons of that sort had great terror for him. She sat very- near him, with her elbow on her knee, her head resting on her hand, and spoke with grave sweet- ness, with a touch of weariness in her tone. ** From the South, really? And such light hair! That's an extraordinary thing." Then she wanted to know how long he had lived in Paris, if the examination for admission to the diplomatic service that he was preparing for was very hard, if he knew many people, and how he came to be at that party at Dechelette's on Rue de Rome, so far from his Latin quarter. When he told her the name of the student who had brought him — *' La Gournerie, a relative of the author — no doubt you know him" — the ex- pression of the woman's face changed, suddenly darkened ; but he did not notice, being of the age when eyes shine without seeing. La Gournerie had promised that his cousin would be there, that he would introduce him. " I like his verses so much ! I shall be so glad to know him ! " She smiled compassionately at his Innocence, with a pretty drawing together of the shoulders, '.and at the same time put aside the light leaves of a bamboo with her hand, and looked into the ball- room, to see if she could not discover his great man. The festivity at that moment was as animated and resplendent as the transformation scene of a 4 Sappho. fairy spectacle. The studio — the hall rather, for little work was ever done there — extended to the roof, making one enormous room, and its light and airy summer draperies, its shades of fine straw or gauze, its lacquered screens, its multi-colored glassware, and the cluster of yellow roses which embellished the opening of a high Renaissance fireplace, were illuminated by the variegated, bizarre reflections of innumerable Chinese, Persian, Moorish, and Japanese lanterns, some in perforated iron carved like the door of a mosque, others in colored paper shaped like different fruits, others like open fans, flowers, birds, and serpents ; and flashes of electricity, of a bluish tinge, would suddenly pale all those thousands of lights, and cast a frosty gleam, like a ray of moonlight, on the faces and bare shoulders, on all the phantasmagoria of dresses, feathers, spangles, and ribbons, jostling one another in the ball-room, and sitting in tiers on the Dutch staircase, with its massive rail leading to the galleries on the first floor, which were over- topped by the long necks of the double basses, and the frenzied flourishes of the conductor's baton. From his seat the young man saw it all through a network of green branches, of flowering convol- vuli, which blended with the decorations, formed a frame for them, and by an optical illusion, in the constant motion of the dance, threw wreaths of glycine on the silver train of a princess's gown, and placed a head-dress of dracaena leaves above a Pompadour shepherdess's pretty face; and the interest of the spectacle was doubled now for him Sappho, 5 by the pleasure of learning from his gypsy the names, all renowned, all well known, which were concealed beneath those fancy costumes, so amus- ing in their variety and oddity. That whipper-in, with his short whip slung saltire-wise, was Jadin ; while that shabby country cure's cassock a little farther on disguised old Isabey, who had made himself taller by putting a pack of cards in his buckled shoes. Pere Corot smiled from behind the huge visor of an Invalide's cap. She also pointed out Thomas Couture as a bull-dog, Jundt as a thief-catcher, Cham as a humming-bird. Several serious historical costumes, a beplumed Murat, a Prince Eugene, a Charles I., worn by young painters, marked clearly the difference be- tween the two generations of artists; the latest comers serious, cold, with the faces of members of the Bourse prematurely aged by the charac- teristic wrinkles traced by absorbing financial preoccupation; the elders much more boyish, mischievous, noisy and frolicsome. Despite his fifty-five years and the palm-leaves of the Institute, the sculptor Caoudal as a hussar in barracks, his bare arms exhibiting his herculean biceps, a painter's palette danghng against his long legs in guise of sabre-tascJie, was dancing a cavalier seiil of the time of the Grande Chaumiere, opposite the musician de Potter, in the costume of a muezzin on a spree, his turban awry, imitating the danse du ventre^ and whining " La Allah, il Allah ! " in a terribly shrill voice. 6 Sappho. Those frolicsome celebrities were surrounded by a large circle, the dancers resting meanwhile ; and in the front row stood Dechelette, the master of the house, wrinkling his little eyes, his Kal- muck nose, his grizzly beard, happy in the gayety of the others and highly entertained without seem- ing to be. Dechelette, the engineer, a typical figure of artistic Paris ten or twelve years ago, very good- natured, very wealthy, with a taste for art, and that free-and-easy manner, that contempt for public opinion, which result from a life of travel and bachelorhood, had at that time a contract for a railroad from Tauris to Teheran ; and every year, to recuperate after ten months of fatigue, of nights under canvas, of wild gallops across sandy deserts and swamps, he came to Paris to pass the very hot season in that house on Rue de Rome, built from his own plans and furnished like a summer palace, where he got together clever men and pretty girls, calling upon civilization to give him in a few weeks the essence of its most piquant and dehcious products. ** Dechelette has arrived." The news spread through the studios as soon as the great linen shades which covered the glass front of the house were seen to rise like a stage-curtain. That meant that the fetes were about to begin, and that they were to have two months of music and merry- making, of dancing and feasting, breaking in upon the silent torpor of Quartier de I'Europe at that season of villas and sea-baths. Sappho, 7 Personally D(^chelette took no part in the bac- chanalian festivities that woke the echoes of his studio night and day. That indefatigable rake brought to his pleasures a cold-blooded passion, a glance vague and smiling, as if deadened by hasheesh, but of imperturbable calmness and lu- cidity. An exceedingly loyal friend, giving boun- tifully without counting, he entertained for women the contempt of an Oriental, compounded of in- dulgence and courtesy ; and of those who came there, attracted by his great wealth and the joyous eccentricity of the festivities, not one could boast of having been his mistress more than one day. " A good fellow, all the same," added the gypsy, who gave Gaussin this information. Suddenly she interrupted herself, — " There 's your poet." ''Where?" " In front of you, dressed as a village bride- groom." The young man uttered an '' Oh ! " of disap- pointment. His poet! That fat, shiny, perspir- ing man, performing awkward antics in the false collar with two points and the flowered waistcoat of Jeannot. The despairing, piercing shrieks of the Livre de l Amour came to his mind, the book that he never read without a quickening of the pulse; and instinctively he murmured aloud, — " Pour animer le marbre orgueilleux de ton corps, O Sapho, j'ai donnd tout le sang de mes veines."i * To give life to the haughty marble of thy body, O Sappho, I have given all the best blood in my veins. 8 Sappho. She turned quickly, jangling her barbarian or- naments. ** What's that you say?" They were lines written by La Gournerie; he was surprised that she did not know them. "I don't like poetry," she said shortly; and she remained standing, with a frown on her face, watch- ing the dancing and nervously toying with the beautiful lilac clusters hanging before her. Then, with an effort, as if forcing herself to a painful deci- sion, she said " Good-night," and disappeared. The poor piper was dumfounded. " What *s the matter with her? What did I say to her?" He cudgelled his brains, but could think of nothing, except that he would do well to go to bed. He picked up his bagpipes with a melancholy air, and returned to the ball-room, less annoyed by the gypsy's departure than by the thought that he must pass through all that crowd to reach the door. The consciousness of his own obscurity among so many celebrities made him still more timid. They were no longer dancing, except a few couples here and there clinging desperately to the last strains of a dying waltz; among them Caoudal, superb and gigantic, with head erect, whirling around with a little knitting-woman in his red arms, her hair flying in the wind. Through the great window at the rear, which was wide open, entered puffs of early morning air with the white light of dawn, rustling the leaves of the palms, prostrating the flames of the candles as Sappho, 9 if to extinguish them. A paper lantern took fire, bobeches burst, and all around the room the ser- vants were arranging small round tables as on the terraces of cafes. At Dechelette's the guests al- ways supped thus, by fours and fives ; and at that moment congenial spirits were seeking one another and forming groups. There were shouts and fierce calls, the ^^ Pil- ouit" of the faubourgs answering the " Yoii you you you!^ in imitation of a rattle, of the girls of the Orient; and conversations in undertones and the voluptuous laughter of women led away with a caress. Gaussin was availing himself of the confusion to glide toward the outer door, when his student- friend, dripping with perspiration, his eyes like saucers, a bottle under each arm, stopped him: "Why, where in the deuce were you? I've been looking for you everywhere. I have a table and some girls, little Bachellery from the Bouffes — dressed as a Japanese, you know. She sent me to find you. Come quick ! " and he ran off. The piper was thirsty ; then the wild excitement of the ball tempted him, and the pretty face of the little actress, who was making signs to him in the distance. But a sweet grave voice murmured close to his ear, — " Don't go there." The woman who had just been sitting by him was close beside him now, leading him away; and he followed her unhesitatingly. Why? It was not because of her personal attraction ; he had scarcely lo Sappho, glanced at her, and the other over yonder, who was calling him, adjusting the steel knives in her hair, pleased him much more. But he obeyed a will superior to his own, the headstrong violence of a desire. " Do not go there." Suddenly they both found themselves on the sidewalk on Rue de Rome. Cabs were waiting in the pale morning light. Street-sweepers, mechan- ics going to their work, glanced at that uproarious revel, overflowing into the street, that couple in fancy dress, a Mardi Gras in midsummer. "To your house or mine?" she asked. With- out stopping to consider why, he thought that it would be better to go to his house, and gave his distant address to the driver. During the drive, which was long, they talked little. But she held one of his hands in hers, which he felt were small and cold ; and except for that icy, nervous pres- sure, he might have thought that she was sleeping, as she lay back against the cushion with the waver- ing reflection of the blue curtain on her face. The cab stopped on Rue Jacob in front of a students' lodging-house. Four flights of stairs to ascend ; they were long and steep. " Shall I carry you?" he said with a laugh, but in an under- tone, because of the sleeping house. She looked him over with a slow, contemptuous, yet tender glance, — the glance of experience, which gauged his strength and said plainly, *' Poor little fellow ! " Thereupon, with a fine outburst of energy, char- acteristic of his age and his southern blood, he Sappho, 1 1 seized her and carried her like a child, — for he was a sturdy, strapping youth for all his fair girlish skin, — and he went up the first flight at a breath, exulting in the weight suspended about his neck by two lovely, cool bare arms. The second flight was longer, less pleasant. The woman hung more heavily as they ascended. Her iron pendants, which at first caressed him with a pleasant tickling sensation, sank slowly and pain- fully into his flesh. At the third flight he panted like a piano-mover ; his breath almost failed him, while she murmured ecstatically, " Oh ! niarni, how nice this is ! how comfortable I am ! " And the last stairs, which he climbed one by one, seemed to him to belong to a giant staircase, whose walls and rail and nar- row windows twisted round and round in an inter- minable spiral. It was no longer a woman he was carrying, but something heavy, ghastly, which suffocated him, and which he was momentarily tempted to drop, to throw down angrily at the risk of crushing her brutally. When they reached the narrow landing, "Al- ready ! " she exclaimed, and opened her eyes. He thought, " At last ! " but could not have said it, for he was very pale, and held both hands to his breast, which seemed as if it would burst. The ascent of those stairs in the melancholy grayness of the morning was an epitome of their whole history. 12 Sappho. IT. He kept her two days; then she went away, leaving behind her a memory of soft flesh and fine linen. He knew nothing of her but her name, her address, and these words : " When you want me, call me — I shall always be ready." The little card, dainty and perfumed, read : — FANNY LEGRAND b Rue de V Arcade He stuck it in his mirror, between an invitation to the last ball at the Department of Foreign Af- fairs and the fanciful, illuminated programme of Dechelette's evening-party, his only two appear- ances in society of the year ; and the memory of the woman, which hovered for several days around the fireplace in that faint, delicate perfume, faded away with it ; nor was Gaussin, who was a serious, hard-working youth, especially distrustful of the temptations of Paris, conscious of an inclination to renew that amourette of a day. The ministerial examination took place in November. He had but three months to prepare for it. After that would come a probationary term of three or four years in the offices of the consular service ; then he would be sent away somewhere, Sappho, 1 3 a long distance away. That idea of exile did not alarm him; for a tradition among the Gaussins d'Armandy, an old Avignon family, demanded that the oldest son should follow what is called the career, with the example, the encouragement, and the moral protection of those who had preceded him in it. In the view of that young provincial Paris was simply the first port in a very long voyage, which fact prevented him from forming any serious connection, either by way of love or friendship. One evening, a week or two after the D^chelette ball, as Gaussin, having lighted his lamp and arranged his books on the table, was about to begin to work, some one knocked timidly; and when he opened the door, a woman appeared, dressed in a light and fashionable costume. He did not recognize her until she lifted her veil. ** You see, it's I. I have come back." As she detected the anxious, annoyed glance he cast at the task awaiting him, she added, — ** Oh ! I won't disturb you — I know what that is." She removed her hat, took up a number of Le Tour de Monde, settled herself in a chair, and did not stir, being apparently absorbed by what she was reading ; but every time that he raised his eyes, he met her glance. And in very truth, it required courage for him to refrain from taking her in his arms at once, for she was very tempting and very charming, with her little face with its low forehead, short nose, sen- 14 Sappho, sual and kindly lip, and the mature suppleness of her figure in that dress, thoroughly Parisian in its faultless style, and less terrifying to him than her Egyptian costume. She left him early the next morning, and re- turned several times during the week, always with the same pallor, the same cold, moist hands, the same voice trembling with emotion. '' Oh ! I know perfectly well that I bore you," she would say to him, " that I tire you. I ought to be more proud. Would you believe it? Every morning, when I leave you, I swear that I will not come again ; and then at night it seizes me again like an attack of insanity." He gazed at her, amused, surprised, in his scorn of the woman, by that amorous persistence. The women he had known hitherto, met at beer-shops or skating-rinks, and, sometimes young and pretty, left behind them a feeling of disgust with their idiotic laughter, their cooks' hands, and with a certain vulgarity in their instincts and their speech which led him to open the window when they had gone. 1 1n his innocence, he fancied that all women of pleasure were of the same sort. So that he was amazed to find in Fanny a genuine womanly gentleness and reserve, with the superiority over the bourgeois women he was accustomed to meet in his mother's house in the province, due to a smattering of art, a familiarity with all sorts of subjects, which made their conversations varied and interesting. And then she was musical, accompanied herself Sappho. 1 5 on the piano, and sang, in a somewhat worn and uneven but well-trained voice, romanzas by Chopin or Schumann, provincial ballads, airs of Berri, Bourguignon, or Picardie, of which she had an extensive repertory. Gaussin, who was mad over music, that art of indolence and of the open air in which the people of his province take such pleasure, was spurred on by music in his working hours, and found it deli- ciously soothing in his moments of repose. And from Fanny's lips it was especially delightful to him. He was surprised that she was not engaged at any theatre, and learned that she had sung at the Lyrique. " But not for long ; it was too much of a bore." There was no suggestion about her of the studied, conventional manners of the stage-performer ; not a shadow of vanity or of falseness. Simply a cer- tain mystery concerning her life away from him, a mystery not divulged even in the hours of passion ; nor did her lover try to solve it, being neither jeal- ous nor inquisitive, allowing her to arrive at the stated time without even looking at the clock, ignorant as yet of the sensation of suspense, of those violent blows of the heart against the breast betokening desire and impatience. From time to time, (the weather being very fine that summer, they set out on voyages of discovery among the charming nooks in the outskirts of Paris, with which her acquaintance was most pre- cise and thorough. They formed part of the noisy multitude at some suburban railway station, break- 1 6 Sappho. fasted at a cabaret on the edge of a forest or lake, avoiding only certain too frequented spots. One day he suggested that they go to Vaux-de-Cernay, " No, no, not there ; there are too many painters." And he remembered that that antipathy of hers for artists had been the beginning of their love. When he asked her the reason for it, she said, — " They are crazy, inexplicable creatures, who always tell more than they know. They have done me a great deal of harm." " But," he protested, " art is a noble thing. There is nothing like it to embellish, broaden one's views of hfe." *' Ah ! my dear, the noble thing is to be simple and upright as you are, to be twenty years old, and to love dearly." Twenty years old ! you would have said she was no more than that, to see her so full of life, always ready, laughing at everything, pleased with every- thing. One evening they arrived at Saint-Clair in the valley of Chevreuse the night before a holiday, and could find no room. It was late, and they must pass through a league of forest in the dark to reach the next village. At last they were offered an un- occupied cot-bed at the end of a barn in which masons slept. " Come on," said she, with a laugh ; *' it will remind me of my days of poverty." So she had known poverty ! They crept along, feeling their way between the occupied beds in the great roughly whitewashed Sappho. 1 7 apartment, where a night light was smoking in a niche in the wall ; and all night long, lying side by- side, they smothered their kisses and their laughter, hstening to the snoring, the groans of weariness of their room-mates, whose cotton caps and heavy working-shoes lay close beside the Parisian girl's silk dress and dainty boots. At day-break a wicket opened in the lower part of the great door, a ray of white light touched lightly the bed-cords and the hard earth, while a hoarse voice shouted, " Ohe ! time to get up ! " Then there ensued a slow, painful commotion in the barn, once more in darkness ; yawnings, stretch- ings, hoarse coughs, the depressing sounds of a room full of human beings just aroused from sleep ; and the Limousins went away one by one, heavily and in silence, having no suspicion that they had slept in close proximity to a lovely girl. After they had gone, she rose, put on her dress by feeling, and hastily twisted up her hair. "Wait here, I will come back in a moment." She came back in a moment with an enormous armful of wild flowers dripping with dew. *' Now let us go to sleep," she said, scattering over the bed the cool perfume of the early morning blossoms, which revivified the atmosphere about them. And she had never seemed so pretty to him as she did standing in the doorway of that barn, laughing in the morning light, with her light curls flying and her riotous nosegay. Another time they breakfasted at Ville d'Avray, beside the pond. An autumn morning enveloped ig Sappho, with mist the placid water and the ruddy foliage of the woods in front of them ; they were alone in the little garden of the restaurant, kissing as they ate their fish. Suddenly, from the rustic paviHon in the branches of the plane-tree at the foot of which their ^table stood, a loud, bantering voice called down to them, ** I say, you people, when do you propose to be done with your billing and cooing?" And the lion's face and red mus- tache of the sculptor Caoudal peered through the opening of the Httle rustic chalet. ** I should very much like to come down and breakfast with you. I 'm as bored as an owl here in my tree." Fanny did not reply, being visibly annoyed by the meeting; Jean, on the other hand, accepted the suggestion instantly, for he was curious to see the famous artist and flattered to have him at his table. Caoudal, very coquettishly attired in what seemed to be a iieglig^ costume, although everything was carefully studied, from the cravat of white crepe de Chine to enhven a complexion seared with wrinkles and pimples, to the jacket fitting tightly to the still slender figure and the sweUing muscles — Caoudal looked older than at Dechelette's ball. But what surprised and even embarrassed him a little was the intimate tone which the sculptor adopted with his mistress. He called her Fanny, addressed her in the most familiar way. " You know," he said, as he placed his plate on their table, " I have been a widower for a fortnight. Sappho, 19 Maria has gone off with Morateur. I did n't mind it at first. But this morning, when I went to the studio, I found I was as lazy as the deuce. Impos- sible to work. So I left my group and came out to breakfast in the country. It 's a wretched idea when one 's alone. A little more and I should have cried into my stew." He glanced at the Provencal, whose wavy beard and curly hair were of the color of the Sauterne in the glasses. " Youth 's a fine thing ! No danger of any one leaving him ! And the strangest part of it is that it 's catching. She looks as young as he does." ** Saucy creature ! " she exclaimed with a laugh ; and her laughter rang with the fascination that knows no age, the youth of the woman who loves and wishes to be loved. " Astonishing ! astonishing ! " muttered Caoudal, scrutinizing them both as he ate, with a contor- tion of melancholy and envy at the corners of his mouth. " I say, Fanny, do you remember a breakfast here — it was a long while ago, damme ! — there was Ezane, Dejoie, the whole crowd, and you fell into the pond. We had dressed you up as a man, with the fish-warden's jacket. It was mightily becoming to you." " Don't remember," she replied coldly and truthfully; for such changing, hap-hazard crea- tures never see aught but the present moment of their love. They have no memory of what has gone before, no fear of what may come after. Caoudal, on the contrary, his mind dwelling on 20 Sappho. the past, punctuated with copious draughts of Sauterne the exploits of his lusty youth, in love and drinking, picnic parties, opera balls, profes- sional achievements, battles, and conquests. But when he turned toward them with the reflection of all the flames he had kindled gleaming in his eyes, he saw that they were not listening to him, but were picking grapes from each other's lips. ** How tiresome it must be to listen to what I 'm telling you ! Oh ! yes, I am a terrible bore. Damme ! It 's a beastly thing to be old ! " He rose and threw down his napkin. ** Charge the breakfast to me, Pere Langlois," he shouted in the direction of the restaurant. He walked sadly away, dragging his feet as if suffering from an incurable disease. For a long while the lovers looked after his tall figure stoop- ing under the golden-hued leaves. *' Poor Caoudal ! he certainly is getting heavy," murmured Fanny, in a tone of sweet compassion; and when Gaussin expressed his indignation that Maria, a harlot, a model, could find any amuse- ment in the sufferings of a Caoudal and prefer to the great artist — whom? — Morateur, an obscure painter, of no talent, with nothing in his favor but his youth, she began to laugh, " Oh ! you inno- cent ! you innocent ! " and throwing his head back on her knees with both hands, she buried her face in his eyes and hair as in a bouquet. That evening Jean slept for the first time in his mistress's room, after she had tormented him to do it for three months : — Sappho. 2 1 " Come, tell me — why you don't want to." ^' I don't know — I don't like the idea." " But I tell you that I am free, that I am alone.'* Assisted by the fatigue of the excursion into the country, she succeeded in enticing him to Rue de I'Arcade, which was quite near the station. On the entresol of a plain, substantial house an old servant in a peasant's cap, with a sullen air, opened the door for them. "This is Machaume. Good-evening, Machaume," said Fanny, throwing her arms around her neck. "This is he, you know, my beloved, my king; I have brought him to the house. Light every- thing at once, make the place beautiful." Jean was left alone in a very small salon with low- arched windows hung with curtains of the same common blue silk with which the divans and several pieces of lacquered furniture were covered. On the walls were three or four landscapes, which lightened and enlivened the monotony of the hangings ; all of them bore a dedication : " To Fanny Legrand," " To my dear Fanny." On the mantel was a half-size copy in marble of Caoudal's Sappho, which is to be found every- where in bronze, and which Gaussin had seen in his father's study in his childhood. By the Hght of the single candle which stood near the base, he detected in that work of art a resem- blance, refined and rejuvenated as it were, to his mistress. The Hues of the profile, the movement of the figure under the drapery, the tapering roundness of the arms wound about the knees, 22 Sappho. were familiar, well known to him ; his eye gloated on them with the memory of more tender sensations, Fanny, finding him in rapt contemplation before the figure, said to him with an indifferent air: "There is a touch of me in it, isn't there? Caoudal's model looked like me." And she led him forthwith into her bedroom, where Machaume was sulkily laying two covers upon a small table ; all the candles lighted, even those beside the mir- ror in the wardrobe door, a lovely wood fire, bright as a first flame, crackling under the spark- fenders, — the chamber of a woman dressing for a ball. " I preferred to sup here," she said with a laugh. Never had Jean seen such a daintily furnished room. The Louis XVI. silks, the light musHns of his mother's and sisters' rooms had nothing whatever in common with that downy, fluffy nest where the woodwork was hidden behind delicate satins, where the bed was simply a couch wider than the others, placed at the end of the room on white furs. Delicious was that caressing touch of light, of warmth, of blue reflections prolonged in the bevelled mirrors, after their wandering through the fields, the shower they had encountered, the mud of the sunken roads in the fading light. But the one thing that prevented his enjoying that for- tuitous luxury like a true provincial was the ser- vant's ill-humor, the suspicious look with which she eyed him, so noticeably that Fanny dismissed her with a word : *' Leave us, Machaume ; we will Sappho, 23 wait on ourselves." And as the woman went out, slamming the door behind her, she added : '* Don't take any notice of her ; she 's angry with me for loving you too well. She says that I am throw- ing away my life. These country people are so greedy ! Her cooking, by the way, is better than she is. Just taste this terrinc of hare." She cut the pie, poured out the champagne, forgot to help herself in order to watch him eat, at every movement throwing back to the shoulder the sleeves of an Algerian gandoiiray of soft white wool, which she always wore in the house. She reminded him so of their first meeting at Deche- lette's; and, crowded into the same chair, eating from the same plate, they talked of that evening. " Oh ! for my part," said she, " as soon as I saw you come in, I wanted you. I would have liked to seize you, to carry you off at once, so that the others should n't have you. Now tell me what you thought when you saw me?" At first she had frightened him; then he had felt full of confidence, perfectly at home with her. '' By the way," said he, " I never asked you why you got angry. Was it on account of those two lines of La Gournerie's? " She frowned again, the same frown as at the ball, then said, with a toss of the head, " Non- sense ! let us say no more about it." And with her arms around him, she continued : " The fact is that I was a little bit afraid, myself I tried to escape, to recover myself, but I could n't, and now I never can." 24 Sappho. "Oh! never?'* " You will see ! " He contented himself with answering with the sceptical smile of his years, heedless of the pas- sionate, almost threatening tone in which that " You will see ! " was uttered. The pressure of her arms was so soft, so submissive; he firmly believed that he had only to make a gesture to release himself. But why release himself ? He was so comfort- able in the cosseting atmosphere of that voluptu- ous chamber, so dehciously benumbed by that caressing breath upon his drooping eyelids, heavy with sleep, closing upon fleeting visions of golden woods, meadows, dripping mill-wheels, their whole day of love in the country. In the morning he was awakened abruptly by Machaume's voice shouting unceremoniously at the foot of the bed ; " He is here ; he wants to speak to you." " What 's that ! he wants to speak to me ? So I am no longer in my own house, it seems ! And you allowed him to come in ! " In a rage, she leaped out of bed and rushed from the chamber, half naked, her night-dress open. *' Don't stir, my dear, I will come back." But he did not wait, nor did he feel at ease until he too had risen and was fully dressed, his feet safely in his boots. As he was putting on his clothes in the hermeti- cally closed ropm, where the night-light still shone Sappho, 25 upon the confusion of the little supper, he heard the sounds of a terrific quarrel, muffled by the hangings of the salon. A man's voice, angry at first, then imploring, its outbursts ending in sobs, in helpless tears, alternated with another voice which he did not recognize at once, it was so harsh and hoarse, laden with hatred and with degrading words, reminding him of a dispute between prostitutes in a beer-shop. All that amorous luxuriousness was marred by the incident, besmirched as if the silk were spat- tered with mud ; and the woman, too, was degraded to the level of the others whom he had despised hitherto. She returned to the room panting, twisting her dishevelled hair with a graceful gesture : " Is there anything so stupid as a man crying?" Then, seeing that he was up and dressed, she uttered an angry exclamation : " You have gotten up ! — go back to bed — at once. — I say you shall." Then suddenly softened, embracing him with voice and gesture: "No, no! — don't go — you cannot go like this. In the first place, I am sure that you won't come back." '* Why, yes, I will. What makes you think so?" *' Swear that you 're not angry, that you will come again. Ah ! you see I know you." He swore whatever she wanted, but would not return to bed, despite her entreaties, and her re- peated assurances that she was in her own house, perfectly free as to her life and her acts. At last 26 Sappho, she seemed to be resigned to allowing him to go, and accompanied him as far as the door, with no trace about her of the female satyr in a frenzy, but very humble, trying to obtain forgiveness. A long, cHnging farewell caress detained them in the anteroom. "Well, when shall it be?" she asked, her eyes buried in his. He was about to reply, with a false- hood doubtless, in his haste to be gone, when a ring at the door-bell checked him. Machaume came out of her kitchen, but Fanny motioned to her: " No, do not open the door." And they stood there, all three, motionless, without speaking. They heard a stifled groan, then the rustling of a letter being pushed under the door, and foot- steps slowly descending the stairs. '' Did n't I tell you that I was free? Look ! " She handed her lover the letter which she had opened, — a poor, miserable love-letter, very cring- ing, very cowardly, scrawled in haste on a cafe table, in which the poor devil asked forgiveness for his madness of the morning, acknowledged that he had no right over her save such as she chose to accord him, begged her on his knees not to banish him irrevocably, promising to agree to anything, to be resigned to anything — but not to lose her, great God ! not to lose her. *' Fancy ! " she said with a wicked laugh ; and that laugh finally closed to her the heart that she sought to win. Jean thought her cruel. He had not learned as yet that the woman who loves has no bowels of compassion save for her love ; that all Sappho, 27 her active powers of charity, kindness, pity, devo- tion are absorbed for the benefit of one human being, a single one. " You do very wrong to make sport of him. That letter is horribly pathetic and heartrending." And he added in a low voice, holding her hands : " Tell me, why do you turn him away? " " I don't want him any more. I don't love him." " But he was your lover. He provided this lux- ury in which you live, in which you have always lived, which is necessary to your happiness." " My dear," she said in her frank way, "when I did n't know you, I thought this was all very nice. Now it is a bore, a disgrace ; my heart rises against it. Oh ! I know you will tell me that you 're not in earnest about it, that you don't love me. But I make that my business. I will force you to love me, whether you will or no.'* He made no reply, agreed to meet her the next day, and made his escape, leaving a few louis for Machaume, the drainings of his student's purse, to pay for the terrine. So far as he was concerned it was all over. What right had he to bring con- fusion into that woman's existence, and what could he offer her in exchange for what she would lose through him? He wrote her to that effect the same day, as gently, as sincerely as he could, but without tell- ing her that he had felt that their liaison, that pleasant, attractive caprice, had suffered a violent and fatal blow when he heard, after his night of love, that betrayed lover's sobs alternating with 28 Sappho, her own sneering laughter and her laundress's oaths. In that tall youth, whose heart was far away from Paris, in the midst of the Provencal moors, there was a touch of the paternal roughness and all the delicacy of feehng, all the nervous tempera- ment of his mother, whom he resembled as closely as a portrait. And to defend him against the al- lurements of pleasure he had in addition the ex- ample of a brother of his father, whose dissipation and wild career had half ruined the family and endangered the honor of the name. Uncle Cesaire ! With just those two words and the domestic drama they recalled, one might de- mand from Jean sacrifices much more painful than that of this amourette^ to which he had never at- tached great importance. However, it was harder to break than he had imagined. Although formally dismissed, she returned again and again, undiscouraged by his refusals to see her, by the closed door, by his inexorable orders. *' I have no self-esteem," she wrote him. She watched for him to go to the restaurant for his meals, waited for him in front of the cafe where he read the newspapers. And no tears, no scenes. If he were with other men she contented herself with following him, with watching for the moment when he should be alone. " Do you want to see me to-night? No? Some other time then." And she would go her way with the gentle resignation of the peddler strapping up his pack, leaving him remorseful for his cruelty Sappho, 29 and humiliated by the lie he stammered at every meeting. '* The examination was close at hand — he had no time. After that, later, if she still cared." As a matter of fact, he intended, as soon as he had passed, to take a month's vacation in the South, expecting that she would forget him in that time. Unfortunately, when the examination was over, Jean fell sick, — a severe inflammation of the throat, caught in a corridor at the department, which as- sumed serious proportions as the result of neglect. He knew no one in Paris save a few students from his province, whom his engrossing liaison had estranged and scattered. Moreover, under the circumstances, something more than ordinary de- votion was required, and the very first night Fanny Legrand established herself beside his bed and did not leave him for ten days, nursing him tire- lessly, without fear or disgust, as deft as a profes- sional nurse, with affectionate, coaxing ways, and sometimes, in his hours of fever, carrying him back to a serious illness of his childhood, so that he called her his aunt Divonne and said, *' Thank you, Divonne," when he felt Fanny's hands on his burning forehead. " It is n't Divonne, it 's I — I am taking care of you." She saved him from mercenary nursing, from fires stupidly allowed to go out, from draughts brewed in a concierge's lodge ; and Jean was con- stantly surprised at the activity, the ingenuity, the nimbleness of those indolent, pleasure-loving hands. 30 Sappho. At night she slept two hours on the couch, — a boarding house couch, as soft as the plank bed of a police-station. " Pray do you never go home, my poor Fanny? " he asked her one day. " I am better now. You must go and set Machaume's mind at rest." She began to laugh. A fine time she was hav- ing, was Machaume, and all the house with her. They had sold everything, furniture, clothes, even the bedding. All she had left was the dress on her back, and a little fine linen saved by her maid. Now, if he turned her away, she would be in the gutter. Sappho. 31 III. "This time I think I have found what we want. Rue d'Amsterdam, opposite the station. Three rooms and a great balcony. If you choose, we will go and look at it when you leave the office. It's high up, fifth floor — but you can carry me. That was so nice, do you remember?" Highly amused by the memory, she clung to him, nestled against his neck, seeking the old place, her place. Their life had become intolerable in their fur- nished lodgings, with all that the term implies, the chattering of girls in nets and old shoes on the stairways, the paper partitions behind which other households swarmed, the promiscuous mixing up of keys, candlesticks, and boots. Not to her, cer- tainly; with Jean, the roof, the cellar, even the sewer would have made a satisfactory nesting-place for her. But the lover's refinement took offence at certain associations, to which, as a bachelor, he had given no thought. Those one-night households annoyed him, seemed to cast dishonor upon his own establishment, caused him something of the same sadness and disgust caused by the cage of monkeys at the Jardin des Plantes, mimicking all the gestures and expressions of human love. He was tired of the restaurant too, of having to go twice a day for his meals to Boulevard Saint-Michel, a 32 Sappho, great room crowded with students, pupils at the Beaux-Arts, painters and architects, who, although they did not know him, had become familiar with his face during the year he had dined there. He blushed, as he opened the door, to see all those eyes turned upon Fanny, and entered with the aggressive, embarrassed air characteristic of very young men accompanied by a woman; and he also was afraid of meeting one of the chiefs of his department, or some one from his province. Then there was the question of economy. " How expensive this is ! " she would say every time, running over the bill for the dinner, which she carried away with her. '' If we were house- keeping, I could run the house three days for that money." ''Well, what's to hinder us?" And they set about finding a suitable place. That is the pitfall. Everybody falls into it, the best, the most honorable of men, by virtue of the instinct of neatness, the longing for a '* home, " instilled in them by early education and the genial warmth of the fireside. The apartment on Rue d' Amsterdam was rented at once and voted delightful, despite its rooms en enfilade y of which the kitchen and living-room looked out on a damp backyard where odors of dishwater and chlorine arose from an EngHsh tavern, and the bedroom on the sloping, noisy street, shaken day and night by jolting vans and drays, cabs and omnibuses, by the shrill whistles of arriving and departing locomotives, all the up- Sappho. 33 roar of the terminus of the Chemin de Fer de rOuest, which displayed its glass roof of the color of muddy water directly opposite. The great ad- vantage of the location was the knowledge that the train was close at hand, and Saint-Cloud, Ville d 'Avray, Saint-Germain, and all the verdure-clad stations on the banks of the Seine almost under their balcony. For they had a balcony, broad and commodious, which retained from the munificence of the former tenants a zinc tent painted to imi- tate striped canvas, dripping wet and melancholy enough under the pattering of the winter rains, but a very pleasant place to dine in summer, in the fresh air, as in a mountain chalet. They turned their attention to the matter of furniture. Jean having informed Aunt Divonne, who was the family steward as it were, of his project of keeping house, she sent him the neces- sary money ; and her letter announced at the same time the speedy arrival of a wardrobe, a commode, and a large cane-seated easy-chair taken from the Cliambre dti Vent^ for the behoof of the Parisian. That chamber, which he saw in his mind's eye at the end of a corridor at Castelet, always unocupied, the shutters closed and barred, the door secured with a bolt, was exposed by its position to the full fury of the mistral, which made its walls creak like a room in a Hghthouse. It was used as a store- room for old cast-off articles, for what each genera- tion relegated to the past to make room for new purchases. 1 The Windy Chamber. 3 34 Sappho, Ah ! if Divonne had known what strange siestas would be taken in the cane-seated chair, what India silk skirts and flounced pantalettes would fill the drawers of the Empire commode ! But Gaussin's remorse on that account was swallowed up in the numberless little delights of the beginning of housekeeping. It was such fun, after the office, between daylight and dark, to set off arm-in-arm on a voyage of discovery, and to visit some street in the faubourg to select a dining-room outfit — the sideboard, the table, and six chairs — or cretonne curtains for the windows and the bed. He would accept anything with his eyes closed; but Fanny scrutinized for two, tried the chairs, experimented with the leaves of the table, showed herself an experienced shopper. She knew the shops where they could buy at the cost of manufacture a complete kitchen equip- ment for a small family, the four iron saucepans, the fifth glazed for the morning chocolate; no copper, because it takes too long to clean. Six metal covers with soup spoons, and two dozen plates of English ware, strong and bright-colored, all counted and packed and ready for shipment, like a doll's teaset. For sheets, napkins, toilet and table linen, she knew a dealer, the agent of a great factory at Roubaix, to whom they could pay so much a month; and as she was always watching the shop-windows, on the lookout for bankrupt sales, for the wreckage which Paris con- stantly washes ashore in its scum, she discovered on Boulevard Chchy, at second hand, a magnificent Sappho, 35 bed, almost new, and large enough for the ogre's seven young women to sleep in a row. He too tried his hand at making purchases as he returned from the office; but he knew nothing about it, could not bear to say no or to leave a shop empty-handed. Going into a second-hand place to buy an old-fashioned oil-cruet which she had described to him, he brought away as a sub- stitute for the article, which was already sold, a salon chandelier with glass pendants, which was quite useless to them, as they had no salon. ** We will put it in the veranda," said Fanny, to console him. And the pleasure of taking measurements, the discussions as to placing a piece of furniture ; and the shouts, the wild laughter, the arms thrown up in despair, when they discovered that, despite all their precautions, despite the very complete Hst of indispensable purchases, something had been forgotten. For instance, the sugar-grater. Fancy their starting to keep house without a sugar-grater ! Then, when everything was bought and put in place, the curtains hung, a wick in the new lamp, what a delightful evening was that first one in the new home, the careful scrutiny of the three rooms before going to bed, and how she laughed as she held the hght while he locked the door: "An- other turn ; one more — lock it tight. Let us be sure that we 're at home." Thereupon began a new, delightful life. On leaving his work, he returned home at once, long- 36 Sappho. ing to be sitting by the fire in his sHppers. And as he splashed through the dark streets, he imag- ined their warm, brightly lighted room, enlivened by its old provincial furniture, at which Fanny turned up her nose at first as rubbish, but which had turned out to be very pretty antique pieces ; especially the wardrobe, a Louis XVI. gem, with its painted panels, representing Proven9al fetes, shepherds in jackets of flowered stuff dancing to the flute and the tambourine. The presence of those antiquated articles, familiar to his eyes in his childhood, reminded him of his father's house and sanctified his new home, whose comforts he was still to enjoy. In answer to his ring, Fanny appeared, neatly and coquettishly dressed, *' on deck," as she said. Her dress of black woollen stuff, without ornament, but cut by a fashionable dressmaker's pattern, — the simplicity of a woman who has worn fine rai- ment, — her sleeves rolled up, and a great white apron; for she herself did their cooking, and simply had a charwoman for the heavy work which chaps the hands or injures their shape. She was very clever at it, knew a multitude of receipts, dishes of the North and South, as varied as her repertory of popular ballads, which, when the dinner was at an end and the white apron hung behind the closed door of the kitchen, she sang to him in her worn but passionate contralto. Below, the street roared, a rushing torrent. The cold rain pattered on the zinc of the veranda; and Gaussin, in his easy-chair, with his feet stretched Sappho, 37 out to the fire, watched the windows in the railway station opposite and the clerks stooping to write by the white light of great reflectors. He was very comfortable ; he allowed himself to be coddled. In love? no; but grateful for the love with which she enveloped him, for that never- varying affection. How could he have deprived himself so long of that happiness, in the fear — at which he laughed now — of being bewitched, of assuming a yoke? Was not his life more respect- able than when he used to go about recklessly from girl to girl? There was no danger for the future. Three years hence, when he went away, the separation would come about naturally, without any shock. Fanny was forewarned ; they talked about it to- gether, as about death, — a distant but inevitable fatality. There remained the great grief of his people at home when they learned that he did not live alone ; the wrath of his father, that man of rigid principles and so quick to act. But how could they find out? Jean saw no one in Paris. His father, " the consul," as he was called at home, was detained in Provence the whole year by the superintendence of his very considerable estates, which he cultivated himself, and by his hard battles with the vines. His mother was help- less, could not step or move without assistance, and left to Divonne the management of the house and the care of the two little twin sisters, Marthe and Marie, whose unexpected double birth had taken away her strength and activity forever. As 38 Sappho, for Uncle Cesaire, Divonne's husband, he was a great child who was not allowed to travel alone. And now Fanny knew the whole family. When he received a letter from Castalet, at the foot of which the httle girls had written a few lines in their big handwriting with their little fingers, she read it over his shoulder, shared his emotion. Of her own previous existence he knew nothing, asked no questions. He had the attractive, unconscious egotism of his years, no jealousy, no anxiety. Full of his own life, he allowed it to overflow, thought aloud, laid bare his heart, while the other remained mute. Thus the days and weeks passed in a happy tranquillity disturbed for a moment by a circum- stance which moved them deeply, but in different ways. She thought that she was enceinte^ and told him of it with such dehght that he could not fail to share it. But at heart he was afraid. A child, at his age! What would he do with it? Should he acknowledge it? And what a pledge between himself and that woman, what a complication in future ! Suddenly the chain became visible to him, heavy, cold, and riveted about his neck. He did not sleep at night, nor did she ; and, lying side by side in their great bed, they dreamed, open-eyed, a thousand leagues apart. Luckily that false alarm was not repeated, and they resumed their peaceful, delightfully secluded life. Then, when the winter had passed and the real sun had returned once more, their Httle abode Sappho. 39 became still more charming, enlarged by the bal- cony and the tent. At night they dined there be- neath the sky tinged with green and streaked by the whistling flight of swallows. The street sent up its hot puffs and all the sounds of the neighboring houses ; but the slightest breath of fresh air was theirs, and they forgot themselves for hours, hand in hand, conscious of nothing. Jean remembered similar nights on the bank of the Rhone, and dreamed of distant consulates in very warm countries, of a ship's deck, leaving the harbor, where the breeze would have that same long breath which fluttered the curtain of the tent. And when an invisible caress upon his lips mur- mured, "Do you love me?" he always returned from very far away to answer, '' Oh ! yes, I love you." — That is what comes of taking them so young; they have too many things in their heads. On the same balcony, separated from them by an iron raihng garlanded with climbing flowers, another couple billed and cooed, M. and Madame Hettema, husband and wife, very vulgar persons, whose kisses resounded like slaps on the face. They were wonderfully well-mated in age, in tastes, in heavy build, and it was touching to hear those two mature lovers singing in low tones, as they leaned on the balustrade, old-fashioned sentimen- tal ditties. " Mais je I'entends qui soupire dans Tombre ; C'est un beau reve, ah ! laissez-moi dormir." i 1 But I hear him sighing in the darkness ; 'T is a lovely dream, ah ! let me sleep. 40 Sappho. They appealed to Fanny ; she would have liked to know them. Sometimes indeed she and her neighbor exchanged a loving, happy woman's smile over the blackened railing; but the men, as always, were more distant, and they never spoke. Jean was returning home from Quai d'Orsay one afternoon when he heard some one call him by name at the corner of Rue Royale. It was a lovely day, bright and warm, and Paris was sun- ning itself at that corner of the boulevard, which has not its equal in the world at sunset on a fine day, about the hour for returning from the Bois. *' Sit down here, my handsome youngster, and have something to drink; it rejoices my eyes to look at you." Two long arms had seized him and seated him under the awning of a cafe which encroached up- on the sidewalk with its three rows of tables. He made no resistance, flattered to hear the throng of provincials, foreigners, striped jackets and round hats, whispering curiously the name of Caoudal. The sculptor, sitting at a table in front of a glass of absinthe, which went well with his military fig- ure and the rosette of an officer of the Legion of Honor, had beside him the engineer Dechelette, who had arrived the day before, always the same, sunburned and yellow, his prominent cheekbones crowding his good-natured Httle eyes, his nostrils greedily sniffing Paris. As soon as the young man was seated, Caoudal pointed to him with comic rage, — Sappho, 41 "Isn't that a handsome animal? To think that I was that age once, and that my hair curled like that ! Oh ! youth, youth ! " *' Still the same, eh?" said Dechelette, greeting his friend's tirade with a smile. " Don't laugh, my dear fellow. All that I have, all that I am, — medals, cross, the Institute, the palsy, — I would give for that hair, that sunlike complexion." Then he turned again to Gaussin in his abrupt way. "And Sappho, what have you done with her? We never see her now." Jean stared at him, failing to understand. "Aren't you with her now?" And in face of his evident bewilderment, Caoudal added impa- tiently : '' Sappho, you know — Fanny Legrand — Ville d'Avray." " Oh ! that 's all over, a long while ago." How came that lie to his lips? From a sort of shame, of disgust, at hearing that name of Sappho appHed to his mistress ; the embarrassment of dis- cussing her with other men ; perhaps, too, a desire to learn things which they would not otherwise have told him. " What 's that ? Sappho ? Is she still on earth ? " queried Dechelette absent-mindedly, absorbed by the intoxicating joy of seeing once more the steps of the Madeleine, the flower-market, the long line of the boulevards between two rows of green bouquets. " Why, don't you remember her at your house 42 Sappho, last year? She was superb in her fellah's tunic. And that autumn morning when I found her break- fasting with this pretty boy at Langlois', you'd have said she was a bride of a fortnight." " How old is she, anyway? Since the days when I used to know her — " Caoudal raised his head to reckon. " How old? how old? Let me see, she was seventeen in 1853, when she posed for my figure; now it's '73. So figure for yourself." Suddenly his eyes kindled. *' Ah ! if you had seen her twenty years ago — tall, slender, with arching lips and a high forehead. Her arms and shoulders were a little thin still, but that was all right for the rough cast of Sappho. And the woman, the mistress ! — the capacity for pleasure there was in her, the fire in that stone, that harpsichord in which not a note was missing ! * The whole lyre ! ' as La Gournerie used to say." Jean, very pale, asked, *' Was he her lover too? " *'La Gournerie? I should say so; I suffered enough on that account. Four years we Hved together as husband and wife ; four years I brooded over her and drained myself dry to gratify all her whims, — singing teachers, piano teachers, riding teachers, and God knows what. And when I had cut and smoothed and poHshed her into a fine stone, after picking her up out of the gutter one night in front of the Bal Ragache, that dandified poetaster came and took her from my house, from the hospitable table at which he sat every Sun- day ! " He breathed very hard, as if to blow away the Sappho, 43 old love-rancor which still vibrated in his voice; then resumed more calmly, — " However, his sneaking conduct did him no good. Their three years together were a perfect hell. That poet with his wheedling ways was stingy, ugly, a perfect maniac. You should have seen how they used to decorate each other ! When you went to their house you 'd find her with a patch over her eye, or his face all marked with claws. But the best thing was when he undertook to leave her. She clung to him like the itch, fol- lowed him about, burst in his door, and waited for him, lying across his door-mat. One night in mid- winter she stayed five hours in the street outside La Farcy's, where the whole crowd was. A pitiful thing ! But the elegiac poet remained implacable, and one day he resorted to the police to get rid of her. Ah! he's a fine fellow! And as a fitting conclusion, a final acknowledgment to that lovely girl who had given him the best of her youth, her intelligence, and her flesh, he emptied on her head a volume of spiteful, filthy verse, of impre- cations and lamentations, the Livre de V Amour y his best book." Motionless, leaning back in his chair, Gaussin listened, drinking very slowly through a long straw the iced drink in front of him. Surely it was some poison that had been poured into the glass and was freezing him from the heart to the vitals. He shivered despite the splendid weather, saw shadows going and coming in a vague mist, a 44 Sappho, watering-cart standing in front of the Madeleine, and carriages rolling in both directions over the soft earth, as silently as over a pavement of down. There was no sound in all Paris, nothing save what was said at that table. Now Dechelette was speaking ; he was pouring out the poison. " What an atrocious thing such ruptures are ! " And his calm, mocking voice took on a tone of gentleness, of infinite pity. '' You have lived to- gether, slept side by side, mingled your dreams for years. You have said everything, given every- thing to each other. You have adopted each other's habits, ways of acting and speaking, even each other's features. You are united from head to foot. In fact, you are husband and wife ! Then suddenly you tear yourselves apart and separate. How is it done? How does any one muster cour- age to do it? For my part I never could. No; I might be deceived, insulted, besmirched with filth and ridicule, and if the woman should weep and say to me, * Stay ! ' I would n't go. And that 's why, when I take one, I never do it until dark. No to-morrow, as old France used to say — or else marriage. That is final and more decent." "No to-morrow — no to-morrow. You say it very glibly. There are women whom a man does n't keep just one night, — the one we 're talk- ing about, for instance." " I did n't give her a minute's grace," said Dechelette, with a placid smile which seemed hideous to the poor lover. Sappho. 45 " In that case you were not her style, or else — She 's the kind of a girl who clings when she loves. She has a taste for domestic life. By the way, she 's had poor luck in her housekeeping. She sets up with Dejoie, the novelist ; he dies. She goes to Ezano, and he marries. After him came the hand- some Flamant, the engraver, the ex-model — for she has always had a fancy for talent or beauty — and you know her horrible adventure — " "What adventure?" asked Gaussin, in a chok- ing voice ; and he began again upon his straw as he listened to the love drama which stirred Paris to its depths a few years ago. The engraver was poor, mad over the woman ; and for fear of being abandoned by her, he made counterfeit bank-notes in order to maintain her in luxury. Discovered almost immediately and arrested with his mistress, he was sentenced to ten years' penal servitude, while she escaped with six months' detention at Saint-Lazare, her inno- cence being established. And Caoudal reminded D6chelette — who had followed the prosecution — how pretty she was in her little Saint-Lazare cap, and plucky too, not whimpering, and loyal to her man to the end. And her reply to that old greenhorn of a judge, and the kiss she threw to Flamant over the gendarmes* chapeaux, calling to him in a voice to move the very stones : *' Don't be discouraged, m' ami. The happy days will return, we will love each other still ! " That experience had disgusted her a little with housekeeping, all the same. 46 Sappho. " After that, starting out in chic society, she took lovers by the month or week, and never an artist. Oh ! she 's a Httle afraid of artists. I beheve I was the only one that she continued to see. From time to time she used to come and smoke a cigarette at the studio. Then I passed months without hearing her name mentioned, until the day I found her breakfasting with this hand- some child and eating grapes out of his mouth. I said to myself, * Ah ! my Sappho is at her old tricks.' " Jean could listen to no more. He felt as if he were dying with all the poison he had absorbed. The shivering of a moment before was succeeded by a burning heat which scorched his breast, as- cended to his buzzing head, which seemed on the point of bursting like white-hot sheet-iron. He crossed the street, staggering among the wheels. Drivers shouted at him. What was the matter with them, the imbeciles? As he passed the Madeleine flower-market, he was annoyed by the odor of heliotrope, his mis- tress's favorite perfume. He quickened his pace to escape it, and thought aloud, in a heartrending frenzy: " My mistress ! — oh! yes, a fine mess of filth. Sappho, Sappho ! To think that I have lived a year with such a creature ! " He repeated the name fiercely, remembering that he had seen in the newspapers, among other sobriquets of harlots, in the grotesque Almanach de Gotha of gallantry, Sappho, Cora, Caro, Phryne, Jeanne de Poitiers, the Seal. Sappho. 47 And with the six letters of her abominable name that woman's whole life passed before his eyes like refuse in a sewer. — Caoudal's studio, the fracases at La Gournerie's, the sentry duty at night in front of brothels or on the poet's door-mat. Then the handsome engraver, the counterfeiting, the assizes, and the little convict's cap that was so becoming to her, and the kiss she threw to her counterfeiter: "Don't be discouraged, m' ami.'' M' ami! the same pet name, the same caress as for him ! What a disgrace ! Ah ! but he proposed to make a clean sweep of those abominations. And still that smell of heliotrope pursued him through a twilight of the same pale lilac as the tiny flower. Suddenly he noticed that he was still pacing the market like the deck of a ship. He hurried away to Rue d'Amsterdam without pausing for breath, firmly determined to drive that woman out of doors, to throw her down the stairs without ex- planation, hurling her insulting name at her back. At the door he hesitated, reflected, walked a few steps farther on. She would cry out, sob, howl through the house her whole sidewalk vocabulary, as she did once before on Rue de 1' Arcade. Should he write to her ? — yes, that was the idea ; it was much better to write, to settle her account in four words, very savage words. He entered an English tavern, deserted and dismal under the gas which was just being lighted, seated himself at a sticky table near the only customer, a girl with a death's head, who was eating smoked salmon, with- out drinking. He ordered a pint of ale, did not 48 Sappho, touch it, and began a letter. But too many words rushed into his head, struggHng to come out all at once, and the thick, clotted ink would write them as slowly as it chose. He tore up two or three beginnings, and was going away at last without writing, when a full, greedy mouth at his elbow inquired timidly: "Aren't you drinking? May I?" He made an affirmative sign. The girl pounced upon the pew- ter, and emptied it with a fierce gulp which dis- closed the poverty of the wretched creature, having just enough in her pocket to satisfy her hunger, but not to water it with a little beer. A feehng of compassion stole over him and appeased him, en- lightened him suddenly as to the miseries of a woman's life; and he began to reflect upon and judge his misfortune more humanely. After all, she had not lied to him ; and if he knew nothing of her life, it was simply because he had never cared about it. With what could he reproach her? Her time at Saint-Lazare ? But she had been acquitted, and almost borne in triumph when she was discharged. What else was there? Other men before him? Did he not know it? What reason was it for being more disgusted with her, that the names of her lovers were well known, famous, that he might meet them, talk with them, see their pictures in the shop-windows? Should he attribute to her as a crime her having preferred such men? And in the depths of his being there sprang to life an unworthy, unavowable pride in sharing her Sappho. 49 with those great artists, in saying to himself that they thought her beautiful. At his age one is never sure, one does not know. One loves woman and love ; but eyes and experience are lacking, and the young lover who shows you his mistress's portrait craves a glance, a word of approbation to reassure him. Sappho's face seemed to him embellished, surrounded with a halo, since he knew that she had been sung by La Gournerie, immortalized in marble and bronze by Caoudal. But, his fury suddenly resuming possession of him, he left the bench on the outer boulevard upon which he had flung himself in his meditation, amid the cries of children and the gossip of work- men's wives in the dusty June evening; and he began to walk again, to talk aloud, angrily. Very pretty the bronze cast of Sappho, — bronze made for sale, exhibited everywhere, as trite as a barrel- organ tune, as that name Sappho, which, by dint of being bandied about for centuries, has become incrusted with obscene legends concerning her primitive charm, and from being the name of a goddess has become the label of a disease. Great God ! how sickening it all was ! He gave vent thus, calm and furious by turns, to that maelstrom of opposing ideas and sentiments. The boulevard became darker and more deserted. There was a stale, acrid odor in the hot air, and he recognized the gateway of the great cemetery whither he had come the preceding year with all the youth of the quarter to attend the dedication of a bust by Caoudal on the tomb of Dejoie, the . 4 50 Sappho, novelist of the Latin Quarter and author of Cen- derinette. Dejoie, Caoudal ! How strangely those names sounded in his ears since two hours ago ! And how false and mournful the story of the girl student and her little household seemed to him, now that he knew the pitiful secret beneath it, and had learned from Dechelette the horrible nickname given to those sidewalk marriages ! The dark shadows, made darker by the prox- imity of death, terrified him. He retraced his steps, brushing against blouses that prowled about as stealthy and silent as birds of night, and soiled skirts loitering at the doors of brothels whose dirty windows were illuminated by broad shafts of light as from a magic lantern, in which couples passed to and fro and embraced. What time was it? He felt thoroughly exhausted, like a raw recruit at the end of a day's march; and of his benumbing pain, which had descended into his legs, naught re- mained but extreme weariness. Oh ! to go to bed, to sleep. Then, when he awoke, he would say to the woman, coldly, without anger : " Come — I know who you are. It is n't your fault nor mine ; but we cannot live together any longer. Let us part." And in order to avoid her persecution, he would go and embrace his mother and sisters, throw off in the Rhone breezes, in the free and life-giving mistral, the defilement and the terror of his ghastly dream. She had gone to bed, tired of waiting, and was sleeping in the bright light of the lamp, a book Sappho, 5 1 open on the sheet in front of her. His entrance did not awaken her ; and he stood beside the bed, gazing at her curiously as if she were a new woman, a stranger whom he had found there. Lovely, oh ! she was lovely ; arms, throat, shoul- ders of a delicate amber, well formed, without spot or blemish. But on those reddened eyelids — per- haps it was the novel she was reading, perhaps the anxiety, the suspense — on those features relaxed in repose and no longer sustained by the fierce desire of the woman who is resolved to be loved, what weariness, what confessions ! Her age, her history, her excesses, her caprices, her many mar- riages, and Saint-Lazare, the blows, the tears, the terror, all were visible, clearly displayed ; and the violet rings of dissipation and sleepless nights, and the curl of disgust on the drooping lower lip, as worn and fatigued as the curbstone of a well to which the whole village goes to drink, and the inchoate puffing which prepares the flesh for the wrinkles of old age. That treachery of sleep, the silence that en- veloped the whole scene, was grand and awful ; it was like a battlefield at night, with all the horrors that one sees and those that one divines from the vague movements of the shadows. And suddenly the poor child was seized with an intense, a sufibcating desire to weep. 52 Sappho, IV. They had finished dinner, the windows were open, and the prolonged whisthng of the swal- lows hailed the fading light. Jean was not speak- ing, but he was on the point of speaking, and of saying the same cruel things which had haunted him and with which he had tormented Fanny since his meeting with Caoudal. She, noticing his down- cast eyes and the air of feigned indifference with which he approached new subjects, divined his purpose and anticipated it. '* Come, I know what you 're going to say to me ; spare us both, I beg you ; one gets exhausted at last. As long as all that is dead and gone, as I love only you, as you are the only man in the world to me — " " If all that past were dead and gone, as you say," and he looked into the depths of her lovely eyes, of a quivering gray that changed with every new impression, "■ you would not keep the things that remind you of it; yes, up there in the cupboard." The gray became a velvety black. "You know, then?" All that medley of love letters, portraits, those glorious archives of gallantry saved from so many Sappho, 53 catastrophes, she must at last make up her mind to destroy ! " You will at least believe me afterward ? " And as he replied with an incredulous smile of suspicion, she ran to fetch the lacquer casket with the carved iron work, lying among the piles of fine" Hnen, which had puzzled her lover so for some days, " Burn them ; tear them up ; they are yours." But he did not hurry to turn the httle key, gaz- ing at the cherry-trees with pink pearl fruit, and the flying storks carved on the lid, which he at last broke open without ceremony. Colored paper of all sizes and covered with all kinds of writing, with designs in gilt at the top, old yellow letters broken at the folds, pencil scrawls on leaves from note-books, visiting-cards in heaps, with no sem- blance of order, as in a drawer often searched and tossed about, into which he himself now plunged his trembling hands. *' Give them to me. I will burn them before your eyes." She spoke feverishly, crouching before the fire- place, a Hghted candle on the floor by her side. *' Give them to me." But he replied, "No — wait," and added in a lower tone, as if ashamed, " I would like to read them." "What for? You will only make yourself still more unhappy." She thought solely of his suffering, and not of the indelicacy of thus laying bare the secrets of 54 Sappho, passion, the confessions made on the pillow of all those men who had loved her ; and drawing near to him, still on her knees, she read with him, watching him out of the corner of her eye. Ten pages, signed La Gournerie, 1861, in a long, feline handwriting, in which the poet, who had been sent to Algeria to prepare an official and at the same time poetical account of the journey of the emperor and empress, gave his mistress a dazzling description of the festivities. Algiers, overflowing with swarming thousands, a genuine Bagdad of the Thousand and One Nights; all Africa heaped up around the city, beating at its gates as if it would break them down, like a simoom. Caravans of negroes and camels laden with gum, tents of skins, an odor of human musk hovering over all that monkeyish multitude, camping on the seashore, dancing at night around great fires, making way respectfully every morn- ing for the chiefs from the South, who arrived, like Magian kings, with oriental pomp, discordant music, reed flutes, hoarse little drums, the goum ^ surrounding the tri-colored standard of the Prophet ; and behind, led by negroes, the horses intended as a present to the Emberour, caparisoned in silk and silver, with a jingling of bells and chains at every step. The poet's genius made the scene very lifelike and vivid ; the words gleamed on the page, like un- 1 An Arabian word, used in connection with the French army in Algiers to denote the contingent of troops furnished by each native tribe. Sappho, 55 mounted stones which jewellers examine on paper. Truly the woman at whose feet such treasures were cast might well be proud. Surely he must have loved her, for, notwithstanding the interest aroused by the singularity of the festivities, the poet thought only of her, was dying for a sight of her. " Oh ! last night I was with you on the great divan at Rue de I'Arcade. You were wild with ecstasy under my caresses ; then I abruptly awoke rolled in a rug on my terrace under the starry sky. The cry of the muezzin ascended from a neighbor- ing minaret, in a clear and limpid outpouring of sounds, voluptuous rather than prayerful, and it seemed to be your voice that I heard as I emerged from my dream." What evil power impelled him to continue his reading despite the horrible jealousy that whitened his lips, contracted his hands? Gently, coaxingly, Fanny tried to take the letter from him ; but he read it to the end, and after it another, then an- other, letting them fall one by one with a gesture of contempt and indifference, without looking at the flame in the fireplace feeding on the great poet's impassioned lyrical effusions. And some- times, in the overflow of that passion, exaggerated by the tropical temperature, the lover's poetic flights were sullied by some vile mess-room ob- scenity which would have surprised and scandal- ized the fair readers of the Livre de VAmouVy whose spirituality was as refined and spotless as the Jungfrau's silvery peak. To what depths of baseness the heart will stoop ! 56 Sappho, Jean dwelt longest upon those passages, those blots upon the page, with no suspicion of the nervous spasm that distorted his features each time. He even had the courage to emit a sneering laugh at this postscript, following a vivid description of a fete at Aissaouas : " I have read my letter over ; there are some things in it that really are not bad ; put it aside for me, I may be able to make some use of it." *' A gentleman who threw away no chances ! " he exclaimed as he passed to another letter in the same hand, wherein, in the frigid tone of a man of business, La Gournerie demanded the return of a collection of Arabian ballads and a pair of Turk- ish slippers made of rice-straw. That was the liquidation of their haison. Ah ! he had known how to leave her, he was clever, that fellow ! And Jean, without pausing, continued to drain that bog, from which a hot, unhealthy vapor arose. When it grew dark he placed the candle on a table and ran through a multitude of short notes, almost illegible, as if written with a bodkin by fingers which were too large for it, and which, every moment or two, in an outburst of desire or of anger, gashed and tore the paper. The early days of her liaison with Caoudal, assignations, suppers, parties in the country; and altercations, importunate repentance, shrieks, base, degrading billingsgate, abruptly interlarded with amusing, laughable sallies, sobbing reproaches, a revelation of all the great artist's weakness when face to face with separation and desertion. Sappho, 57 The fire seized upon it and licked it with long red tongues in which the flesh and blood and tears of a man of genius smoked and crackled ; but what mattered that to Fanny, whose whole heart now belonged to the young lover whom she was watch- ing, whose burning fever scorched her through their clothing? He had found a pen portrait signed Gavarni, with this dedication : " To my friend Fanny Legrand, in an inn at Dampierre, one rainy day." An intelligent, sorrowful face, with hollow eyes, an expression of bitterness and despair. *' Who is this?" *' Andre Dejoie. I prized it because of the signature." He said, ** Keep it, I have no objection ; " but in such a constrained, unhappy tone that she took the sketch, tore it in pieces, and threw it into the fire, while he plunged into the novelist's corre- spondence, a heartrending succession of letters, dated at winter seashore resorts, at watering-places, in which the writer, sent thither for his health, cried out in despair at his mental and physical distress, cudgelling his brain to find an idea at that distance from Paris, and mingled with re- quests for potions and prescriptions, with anxie- ties concerning money or business, advices of the forwarding of proofs, of renewals of notes, and always the same cry of despair and adoration addressed to his Sappho's lovely body, which was prohibited by his physicians. ** In God's name, what was the matter with them 58 Sappho, all that they were mad after you like that?" mut- tered Jean, distracted but outspoken. To him that was the only thought suggested by those despairing letters, avowing the utter up- heaval of one of those glorious existences which young men envy and of which romantic women dream. What was the matter with them all? What did she give them to drink? He experi- enced the horrible agony of a man who, being bound and helpless, should see the woman he loved outraged before his eyes ; and yet he could not make up his mind to empty the box at one stroke, with his eyes closed. Now it w^as the turn of the engraver, who, wretch- edly poor and obscure as he was, with no other celebrity than that afforded by the Gazette des Tribtmaux, owed his place in the reliquary solely to the great love she had had for him. Very de- grading were those letters from Mazas, and stupid, clumsy, sentimental, like those of a soldier to his country sweetheart. But beneath the romantic commonplaces one was conscious of an accent of sincerity in his passion, a respect for the woman, a forgetfulness of self which distinguished him from the others ; for instance, when he asked Fanny's pardon for the crime of loving her too dearly, or when, from the waiting-room at the Palais de Justice, immediately after his conviction, he told his mistress of his joy to know that she was acquitted and free. He complained of nothing. Thanks to her, he had had two years of such per- fect, profound happiness with her that the memory Sappho, 59 of it would suffice to fill his life with joy, to miti- gate the horror of his lot ; and he ended by asking a favor, — " You know that I have a child in the provinces whose mother died a long while ago ; he lives with an old aunt, in such an out-of-the-way corner that they will never hear of my trouble. I have sent them what money I had left, saying that I was go- ing on a long journey, and I rely on you, my dear Nini, to inquire about the poor little fellow from time to time and let me know about him." Fanny's interest was demonstrated by another letter, of quite recent date, hardly six months old : " Oh ! you were good to come. How lovely you were ! How sweet you smelt beside my convict's jacket, which made me so ashamed — " "So you have continued to see him?" de- manded Jean fiercely, interrupting his reading. " At long intervals, as an act of charity." " Even since we have been together? " " Yes, once, only once, in the visitors' room ; nobody can see them anywhere else." " Ah ! you 're a fine girl ! " The thought that, notwithstanding their liaison, she had visited that counterfeiter, exasperated him more than all the rest. He was too proud to say so. But a package of letters, the last, tied with a blue ribbon and written in a fine, sloping hand, a woman's hand, unchained all his wrath. "I change my tunic after the chariot race — come to my dcessing-room." 6o Sappho. " No, no — don't read that." She threw herself upon him, snatched away the whole package and threw it into the fire ; nor did he understand at first, even when he saw her at his knees, her face flushed by the reflection of the fire and the shame of her confession. '' I was young : it was Caoudal, the great fool. I did what he wanted." Not till then did he understand, and he turned pale as death. "Oh! yes — Sappho — ' the whole lyre.' " And pushing her away with his foot, like an unclean beast, he added : *' Leave me ! Don't touch me ! You make me sick ! " Her shriek was drowned by a terrible peal of thunder, very near and prolonged, at the same instant that a vivid flash illumined the room. Fire ! She sprang to her feet in terror, instinctively seized the carafe that stood on the table and emptied it on the mass of papers which had set fire to the winter's soot ; then the watering-pot and the pitch- ers ; and seeing that she was helpless, that the flames were shooting out into the room, she ran to the balcony, crying, '' Fire ! fire ! " The Hettemas arrived first, then the concierge and the police. " Lower the fire-board ! " they cried ; " go up on the roof! Water ! water ! No, a blanket ! They gazed in dismay at their invaded, be- draggled home; and when the alarm was at an end, and the fire extinguished, when the black crowd under the gas-lights in the street below had Sappho. 6 1 dispersed, and their neighbors had returned to their own apartment with their minds at ease, the two lovers, left amid that chaos of water, muddy- soot, overturned, drenched furniture, felt sick at heart and cowardly, without strength to renew their quarrel or to put the room in order. Some- thing ominous and degrading had entered their hfe ; and that night, forgetting their former repug- nance, they slept at the lodging-house. Fanny's sacrifice was destined to be of no avail. Of those burned, vanished letters, whole passages which he knew by heart haunted the lover's mem- ory, rose to his cheeks in waves of blood, like cer- tain passages in unclean books. And those former lovers of his mistress were almost all famous men. The dead survived; the portraits and names of the living were seen everywhere; people talked of them before him, and every time he had a feel- ing of oppression as of a family tie painfully severed. As his trouble sharpened his wits and his eyes, he soon began to detect in Fanny the marks of early influences, and the expressions, the ideas, the habits which she had retained. That fashion of putting out the thumb as if she were shaping, moulding the object of which she was speaking, with a " You can see it from here," belonged to the sculptor. From Dejoie she had borrowed the mania for long words, and the popular ballads of which he had published a collection famous in every corner of France; from La Gourncrie, his 62 Sappho, haughty, contemptuous tone and his severe judg- ments concerning modern literature. She had assimilated it all, heaping incongruity upon incongruity, by the same phenomenon of stratification which makes it possible to ascertain the age and revolutions of the earth at its different geological periods ; and perhaps she was not so intelligent as she had seemed to him at first. But intelligence was of small consequence ; though she had been the stupidest of women, vulgar, and ten years older than she really was, she would have held him by the power of her past, by that base jealousy which gnawed his vitals ; and he no longer imposed silence upon its irritation or its rancorous, hatred, but burst out on every occasion against one or the other of her lovers. There was no sale for Dejoie's novels; any one of them could be bought on the quay for twenty- five centimes. And to think of that old fool of a Caoudal persisting in making love at his age ! " He has n't any teeth, you know ; I watched him at that breakfast at Ville d'Avray. He eats in the front of his mouth, like a goat." His talent was all gone too. What a dead failure his Female Faun was at the last Salon ! '' It was no good." That ** it was no good," was an expression which he got from her, and which she herself retained from her intimacy with the sculptor. When he attacked in that way one of his past rivals, Fanny chimed in with him ; and you should have heard that youngster, ignorant of art, of life, of every- thing, and that superficial girl, who had rubbed Sappho, 63 off a little wit in her contact with those famous artists, pass judgment on them from a superior level, and condemn them oracularly. But Gaussin's special antipathy was Flamant the engraver. Of him he knew nothing save that he was handsome, as fair of complexion as himself, that she called him " m' ami!' that she went to see him in prison, and that, when he attacked him as he did the others, calling him the " Sentimental Convict," or the " Pretty Recluse," Fanny turned her face away without a word. Erelong he ac- cused his mistress of retaining a fond feeling for that brigand, and she was forced to explain her- self, gently but with decision. " You know perfectly well that I no longer love him, Jean, since I love you. I don't go there now, I don't answer his letters ; but you will never make me speak ill of the man who loved me to madness, to crime." At that frank avowal, voicing the best sentiment that she possessed, Jean did not protest, but he was devoured by a jealous hatred, sharp- ened by distrust, which led him to return some- times to Rue d'Amsterdam unexpectedly at midday. " Suppose she had gone to see him ! " He always found her at home, sitting idle in their little apartment, like an Oriental, or else at the piano giving a lesson in singing to their stout neighbor, Madame Hettema. They had formed an intimacy since the night of the fire with those good people, placid and plethoric souls who lived in a perpetual current of fresh air, with doors and windows open. 64 Sappho, The husband, a draughtsman at the Artillery Museum, brought his work home with him, and every evening in the week and all day Sunday he could be seen leaning over his great table, in his shirt-sleeves, puffing and perspiring, waving his hands to make the air circulate, with his beard almost to his eyes. His stout wife, sitting beside him in a dressing-sack, also melted with the heat, although she never did anything ; and at intervals they would strike up one of their favorite duets to cool their blood. The two households were soon on an intimate footing. About ten in the morning Hettema's loud voice would be heard at the door : ** Are you there, Gaussin?" And as their departments lay in the same direction, they kept each other company. The draughtsman — a heavy, vulgar creature, several rungs lower on the social ladder than his young companion — said but little, talked as thick as if he had as much beard in his mouth as on his cheeks; but you felt that he was an honest fellow, and Jean's moral disorganization needed just such an association. He clung to it especially because of his mistress, who was living in a solitude peopled with memories and regrets, more dangerous, perhaps, than the connections she had voluntarily renounced, and who found in Ma- dame Hettema, constantly engrossed with her man's welfare, with the toothsome surprise she was preparing for his dinner, and with the new air she would sing to him at dessert, a welcome and wholesome acquaintance. Sappho, 65 But when the friendship proceeded so far as an exchange of invitations, he had scruples. Those people doubtless believed that they were married, his conscience refused to prolong the deception, and he told Fanny to tell her friend, so that there might be no misunderstanding. That made her laugh heartily. Poor b^be! no one was ever so innocent as he. ** Why, they have never for one moment believed that we were married. And little they care about it ! If you knew where he went to get his wife. All that I ever did was worthy of Saint-Jean in comparison. He married her only so that he might have her all to himself, and the past troubles him very little, you see." He could not believe it. An ex-prostitute, that good old soul, with the bright eyes, the childlike smile on her soft, fat face, the drawling provincial- isms, for whom romanzas were never sentimental enough, nor language too distinguished ; and he, the man, so placid, so secure in his amorous well- being ! He watched him as he walked at his side, with his pipe between his teeth, with little sighs of beatitude, while he himself was always deep in thought, devouring himself with impotent rage. *' You will get over it, 7n! ami,'' Fanny would say gently in the hours when they told each other everything; and she would soothe him, as affec- tionate and charming as on the first day, but with the addition of a sort of recklessness which Jean could not define. It was her freer manner, her fashion of express- ing herself, a consciousness of her own power, 5 66 ' Sappho, strange confidences, for which he did not ask, con- cerning her past Hfe, her dissipation, the wild peaks of her curiosity. She no longer abstained from smoking, rolling in her fingers the everlasting cigarette which shortens the day for women of her sort, and leaving it about on all the furniture ; and in their discussions she put forth the most cynical theories concerning Hfe in general, the infamy of men, the roguery of women. Even the expression of her eyes changed, made heavy by a vapor as of sleeping water through which flashed the lightning of a wanton laugh. And the private manifestations of their passion likewise underwent a transformation. Reserved at the outset on account of the youth of her lover, whose first illusion she respected, the woman threw off all restraint after she had seen of her aban- doned past the effect upon that child, when it was suddenly disclosed to him, and the swamp fever she had kindled in his blood. And she gave free rein to the diabolical caresses she had so long held in check, to all the delirious words her clenched teeth had arrested, displayed herself without reserve in all the plenitude of her charms as an amorous, ac- complished courtesan, in all the horrible glory of Sappho. Modesty, reserve, of what use were they? Men are all alike, crazy after vice and corruption, — that little fellow, like the rest. To tempt them with what they love is the best way to retain one's hold on them. And all that she knew, all the forms of depravity in pleasure with which she had been Sappho, 67 inoculated, Jean learned in his turn, to pass them on' to others. Thus the poison circulates, propa- gates itself, consuming body and soul, like those torches of which the Latin poet speaks, which ran from hand to hand through the circus. 68 Sappho, In their bedroom, beside a fine portrait of Fanny by James Tissot, a relic of her pristine splendor, there was a Southern landscape, all in black and white, roughly represented in the sunHght by a country photographer. A stony hillside with terraces of vines supported by stone-walls, and higher up, sheltered from the north wind by rows of cypresses and nestling against *a small forest of pines and myrtles on which the sun shone brightly, was the great white house, half farm-house, half chateau, with a broad stoop, Italian roof, escutcheoned doors, and be- yond, the red walls of the Provencal mas, the perches for the peacocks, the crib for the cattle, and the open sheds with ploughshares and har- rows gleaming in their dark depths. The ruins of ancient fortifications, an enormous tower outlined against a cloudless sky, overlooked the whole, with a few roofs and the Roman church tower of Chateauneuf-des-Papes, where the Gaussins d 'Ar- mandy had dwelt for all time. The domain of Castelet, vineyard and farm, rich in its vines, which were as famous as those of La Nerte and L' Ermitage, was transmitted from father to son, held in common by all the children, but always worked by the younger son, in accordance Sappho. 69 with the family tradition that required the eldest son to enter the consular service. Unluckily nature often interferes with such arrangements ; and if ever there was a human being incapable of managing a farm, of managing anything under heaven, it was Cesaire Gaussin, upon whom that heavy responsi- bility fell when he was twenty-four years of age. A libertine, a haunter of village gambling-hells and brothels, Cesaire, or rather Le Fenat, — the good-for-naught, the bad boy, — to give him his youthful sobriquet, was an exaggerated specimen of the incongruous type which appears from time to time in the most austere families, like a sort of safety-valve. After a few years of neglect, of idiotic waste, of disastrous games of botcillotte at the clubs of Avignon and Orange, the estate was mortgaged, the reserve cellars drained dry, the growing crops sold in advance ; and one day, on the eve of the final levy, Le Fenat imitated his brother's signa- ture, and drew three drafts payable at the consu- late at Shanghai, feehng assured that he could procure the money to take them up before they matured; but they were presented to the elder brother in due course, with a desperate letter con- fessing the ruin of the family and the forgeries. The consul hastened to Chateauneuf, remedied the desperate condition of affairs by the aid of his savings and his wife's dowry, and, realizing Le Fenat's incapacity, he renounced the " career," although it was opening brilliantly before him, and became a simple vine-grower. 70 Sappho. A true Gaussin he, in whom adherence to tra- dition was a mania, alternately violent and calm, like an extinct volcano with a remnant of eruptive power in reserve, threatening at times to break out; hard-working withal, and an exceedingly well-informed agriculturist. Thanks to him, Cas- telet prospered, extended its boundaries to include all the property as far as the Rhone, and, as human chances and mischances never come singly, little Jean made his appearance under the myrtles of the homestead. Meanwhile Le Fenat wandered about the house, crushed under the weight of his wrong-doing, hardly daring to look at his brother, whose contemptuous silence overwhelmed him; he breathed freely only in the fields, hunting or fishing, tiring out his disappointment by trifling tasks, picking snails from the vines, cutting superb canes of myrtle or reed, and breakfasting alone out-of-doors on a brochette of little birds, which he cooked over a fire of olive-branches in the middle of the pasture. Returning at night to dine at his brother's table, he did not speak a word, notwith- standing his sister-in-law's indulgent smile, for she pitied the poor creature and supplied him with pocket-money, unknown to her husband, who dealt sternly with Le Fenat, less on account of his past follies than on account of those still to come ; and in truth, the great catastrophe was no sooner re- paired than the elder Gaussin's pride was subjected to a new test. Three times a week, a pretty fisher-girl came to Castelet to sew, — Divonne Abrieu, born in the Sappho, "J I osier-bed on the bank of the Rhone, a genuine river-plant, with a long, undulating stalk. In her Catalan cap of three pieces fitting tightly to her little head, the ribbons thrown back and disclosing the curve of the neck, slightly tanned like the face, down to the delicate snow-white lines of the breast and shoulders, she made one think of some donna of the old courts of love held all around Chateau- neuf, at Courthezon, at Vacqueiras, in the old donjons whose ruins are crumbling away on the hillsides. That historical suggestion had nothing to do with Cesaire's love, for he was a simple soul, de- void of imagination, and unread ; but, being short in stature, he liked tall women, and was caught the first day. He was an expert, was Le Fenat, in village intrigues ; a contradance at the ball on Sunday, a present of game, and afterward the meeting in the fields. He found that Divonne did not dance, that she herself brought game to the kitchen, and that, being as strong and firm on her legs as one of the flexible white poplars on the river-bank, she was able to hurl the seducer headlong ten feet away. After that she kept him at a distance with the points of her scissors, which hung at her belt by a steel chain, and drove him mad with love, so that he talked of marrying her and confided in his sister-in-law. She, having known Divonne Abrieu from childhood, and know- ing her to be virtuous and refined, thought in her inmost heart that that mesalliance would perhaps be Le Fenat's salvation; but the consul's pride 72 Sappho, rebelled at the idea of a Gaussin d'Armandy marry- ing a peasant : '' If Cesaire does that, I will never see him again." And he kept his word. Cesaire married, left Castelet, and went to Hve with his wife's relations on the bank of the Rhone, on a small allowance which his brother made him and which his indulgent sister-in-law carried to him every month. Little Jean accompanied his mother on her visits, taking the keenest delight in the cabin of the Abrieus, a round smoke-be- grimed structure, shaken by the tramontane or the mistral, and supported by a single, vertical timber like a mast. The open doorway formed a frame for the little jetty where the nets lay dry- ing, with the silvery, pearly scales gleaming and sparlding among the meshes; below lay two or three great fishing-boats, tossing and straining at their cables, and the broad joyous river, aglow with light, splashing against its islands in pale green masses. And Jean, when he was very young, acquired there his fondness for long jour- neys, and for the sea which he had never seen. Uncle Cesaire's exile lasted two or three years ; it might never have ended except for a momen- tous event in the family, the birth of the two little twins, Marie and Marthe. The mother fell sick as a result of that double birth, and Cesaire and his wife were granted permission to go and see her. The visit was followed by a reconciliation between the two brothers, illogical, instinctive, due to the irresistible power of community of blood ; Cesaire and his wife took up their abode at Castelet, and Sappho. 73 as the poor mother was completely disabled by incurable anaemia, soon complicated by rheumatic gout, it fell to Divonne to keep the house, to su- perintend the rearing of the little girls, to take charge of the numerous staff of servants, and to go twice a week to see Jean at his school at Avignon, to say nothing of the nursing of her invalid, who required her constant attention. Being a woman of orderly instincts and clear- headed, she made up for her lack of education by her intelligence, her peasant's shrewdness, and the stray bits of learning that had remained in the brain pf Le Fenat, now thoroughly tamed and disci- plined. The consul relied upon her to overlook all the outlay for household expenses, which were very heavy with the increased burdens and the constantly diminishing revenues, sapped at the foot of the vines by the phylloxera. All the out- lying fields suffered, but the home farm was still free from the pest ; and the consul was constantly preoccupied by his endeavors to save the home farm by investigation and experiment. This Divonne Abrieu, who clung to her peasant cap and her artisan's steel chain, and performed so modestly her duties as housekeeper and com- panion, kept the family out of financial difficulty in those critical years; the invalid was always supplied with the same costly luxuries ; the little girls were reared beside their mother, like young ladies, and Jean's allowance regularly paid, first at the boarding-school, then at Aix, where he studied law, and finally at Paris, whither he had 74 Sappho, gone to finish his course. By what miracles of orderly management, of vigilance, she succeeded in accomplishing so much, they were all as igno- rant as she. But whenever Jean thought of Cas- telet, whenever he raised his eyes to the photograph with its pale tones faded by the hght, the first face that it recalled, the first name that he uttered, was Divonne's, the great-hearted peasant woman who, he felt, was hidden behind the house of his fathers, holding it erect by the force of her will. For some days, however, since he had known what his mis- tress was, he had avoided pronouncing that revered name before her, as well as his mother's and those of all his family ; it even annoyed him to look at the photograph, it was so out of place, so lost, on that wall above Sappho's bed ! One day, on returning home to dinner, he was surprised to find three covers laid instead of two, and even more surprised to find Fanny playing cards with a little man whom he did not recognize at first, but who, on turning toward him, displayed the light wild-goat's eyes, the enormous triumphant nose in a sunburned simpering face, the bald pate and the Leaguer's beard of Uncle Cesaire. He answered his nephew's exclamations without put- ting down his cards : — '' I make myself at home, you see ; I 'm playing bezique with my niece," His niece ! And Jean had taken such pains to conceal his liaison from everybody ! That familiarity dis- Sappho, 75 pleased him, and the remarks Cesaire made in an undertone while Fanny was busy with the dinner. ** I congratulate you, my boy — such eyes and arms ! a morsel for a king ! " It was much worse when Le Fenat began, at the table, to talk without the slightest reserve of the state of affairs at Cas- telet, of the errand that brought him to Paris. The pretended object of his journey was to col- lect a sum of money, eight thousand francs, which he had loaned long ago to his friend Courbebaisse and never expected to see again ; but a letter from a notary had informed him of Courbebaisse's death, pechhe ! and that his eight thousand francs were ready for him at any time. But the real cause, for the money might have been sent to him, *' the real cause is your mother's health, my poor boy. She has failed very rapidly of late, and there are times when her head 's all astray and she forgets everything, even the children's names. The other night, when your father left her room, she asked Divonne who that pleasant gentleman was who came to see her so often. No one but your aunt has noticed this as yet, and she only mentioned it to me to induce me to come to Paris and consult Bouchereau about the poor woman's condition, for he treated her once before." " Has there ever been any insanity in the family?" inquired Fanny, with a grave and learned air, her La Gournerie air. "Never," said Le Fenat; adding, with a sly smile that extended to his temples, that he had been a little cracked in his youth; "but my in- 76 Sappho. sanity was not displeasing to the ladies, and I did n't have to be shut up." Jean gazed at them, heartbroken. The grief caused by the sad news was increased by an op- pressive feeling of disgust at hearing that woman talk about his mother, her infirmities and her crit- ical time of life, with the unvarnished language and the experienced air of a matron, while she sat with her elbows on the table, rolling a cigarette. And the other, talkative and indiscreet, threw aside all reserve and told all the family secrets. Oh ! the vines — the vines were in a wretched state ! And even the home place itself would not last long; half of the young shoots were de- stroyed already, and they saved the rest only by a miracle, tending each bunch, each grape like sick children, with drugs which cost a lot. The alarming part of it was that the consul persisted in planting new slips, which the worms attacked at once, instead of letting olive-trees and caper- bushes grow at will on all that excellent land, now entirely useless, covered with leprous and withered vines. Luckily he, Cesaire, had a few hectares on the bank of the Rhone, which he treated by immer- sion, a magnificent discovery appHcable only on low lands. Already he had been encouraged by an excellent crop, which produced a light wine, not very heady, — " frog's wine," the consul con- temptuously called it — but Le Fenat was obsti- nate too, and with Courbebaisse's eight thousand francs he proposed to buy Piboulette. Sappho. 77 "You know, my boy, the little island in the Rhone, below the Abrieus' place ; but this is be- tween ourselves, no one at Castelet must have a suspicion of it." " Not even Divonne, uncle ? " queried Fanny, with a smile. At his wife's name tears gathered in Le Fenat's eyes. " Oh ! Divonne — I never do anything without her. She has faith in my idea too, and would be so happy if her poor Cesaire should repair the fortunes of Castelet after being the beginning of its ruin." Jean shuddered ; in God's name, did he propose to confess, to tell the lamentable story of the for- geries? But the Provencal, thinking only of his affection for Divonne, had begun to talk about her, of the happiness she gave him. And she was so lovely too, such a magnificent frame ! " Here, my niece, you 're a woman, you ought to be a good judge." He took from his wallet and handed her a photo- graph which never left him. From Jean's filial tone when he spoke of his aunt, from the peasant woman's maternal advice written in a coarse, slightly tremulous hand, Fanny had imagined her to be like one of the common white-capped village women of Seine-et-Oise, and was speechless with amazement at sight of that pretty face with its pure contour, brightened by the narrow white headgear, that graceful and flexible figure of a woman of thirty-five. 78 Sappho. " Very lovely indeed," she said, pursing up her lips and with a strange inflection. " And such a frame ! " said the uncle, clinging to his image. Then they went out on the balcony. After a day of such extreme heat that the zinc of the veranda still burned one's hand, a fine rain was falling from a stray cloud, cooling the air, pat- tering gayly on the roofs, drenching the sidewalks. Paris laughed merrily under that shower, and the noise of the crowd and the carriages, the uproar ascending from the streets intoxicated the provin- cial, rang in his empty, volatile head like a bell, recalling his youth and a stay of three months in Paris thirty years before, with his friend Courbe- baisse. *' Such sport, my children, such high old times ! " And he told how they went to the Prado one Mi-Careme, Courbebaisse as Chicard, and his mis- tress. La Mornas, as a ballad-monger, — a disguise which brought her good luck, as she had become a cafi concert celebrity. He himself, the uncle, moored his boat to a little hussy of the quarter whose name was Pellicule. And he laughed from his mouth to his temples, as merry as a cricket, hummed dance-tunes, and beat time with his arm about his niece's waist. At midnight, when he left them to return to Hotel Cujas, the only hotel he knew in Paris, he sang at the top of his voice on the stairs, threw kisses to his niece, who held the light for him, and shouted to Jean, — "• I say, look out for yourself! " Sappho. 79 As soon as he had gone, Fanny, upon whose forehead there remained a preoccupied fold, passed hastily into her dressing-room, and through the half-open door, while Jean was preparing for bed, she began in an almost indifferent tone : " I say, your aunt 's very pretty — I am not surprised now that you talked about her so often. You prob- ably gave poor old Le Fenat plenty of cause for jealousy." He protested with the utmost indignation. Divonne ! a second mother to him, who used to take care of him and dress him when he was a little child ! She saved him when he was sick, from death ! No, no ! he never had had the slightest temptation to commit such an infamous act. " Nonsense ! nonsense ! " retorted the woman's strident voice, with hair-pins between her teeth; " you can't make me believe that with those eyes and the ^vio^ frame that imbecile talked about, his Divonne could ever have remained indifferent be- side a dainty blond with a woman's skin, like you ! We 're all alike, you see, on the banks of the Rhone or anywhere else." She said it with conviction, believing that her whole sex was quick to yield to every caprice and conquered by the first desire. He reiterated his denial, but he was disturbed in mind, searching his memory, asking himself if the breath of an innocent caress had ever warned him of any peril whatsoever ; he could remember nothing, but the purity of his affection was sullied, the pure cameo marred with a scratch. 8o Sappho, " There ! look — this is the way they arrange the hair in your country." Upon her lovely hair, massed in two long bands, she had pinned a handkerchief which made a very good imitation of the catalane, the cap in three pieces worn by the girls of Chateauneuf; and, standing very straight in front of him, in the milk- white folds of her night-dress, with flashing eyes, she asked him, — " Do I look like Divonne? " Oh ! no, not at all ; she resembled no one but herself, in that little cap which recalled the other, the Saint-Lazare cap, in which she looked so pretty, they said, when she threw her convict a farewell kiss in the courtroom : " Don't be dis- couraged, m' ami ; the happy days will return." And that reminiscence affected him so unpleas- antly that, as soon as his mistress was in bed, he hurriedly extinguished the hght, to avoid looking at her. Early the next morning the uncle arrived in fine feather, twirling his cane, and called out, ** Oho ! bebes! " in the gamesome, patronizing tone that Courbebaisse used to adopt when he came to look for him in Pellicule's arms. He seemed even more excited than on the previous day : the Hotel Cujas, doubtless, and more than all else, the eight thou- sand francs stowed away in his wallet. The money to purchase Piboulette, to be sure ; but he cer- tainly had the right to abstract a few louis in order to offer his niece a breakfast in the country. Sappho, 8i " How about Bouchereau? " queried his nephew, who could not absent himself from his office two days in succession. It was agreed that they should breakfast on the Champs-Elysees and that the two men should go afterwards to consult the doctor. That was not what Le Fenat had dreamed of, — the arrival at Saint-Cloud in great state, with the carriage filled with champagne ; but the breakfast was charming none the less, on the terrace of the restaurant under the shade of the acacias and Jap- anese varnish-trees, with occasional snatches of choruses from a day rehearsal at the neighboring caf<6-concert. C^saire, very talkative, very gallant, aired all his fascinations to dazzle the Parisian. He " slanged " the waiters, complimented the chef on his sauce nieunihe ; and Fanny laughed with a silly, forced heartiness, a private supper-room giggle, which annoyed Gaussin, as did the intimacy established between the uncle and the niece over his head. You would have said that they were friends of twenty years' standing. Le Fenat, becoming sen- timental with the wines served at dessert, talked about Castelet, Divonne, and also about his little Jean ; he was happy to know that he was with her, a serious-minded woman who would prevent him from making a fool of himself. And he proceeded to advise her, as if she were a young bride, con- cerning the young man's somewhat morose dispo- sition and the best way to treat him, tapping her arms, with thick tongue and glazed, watery eyes. He sobered off at Bouchereau's. Two hours of 6 82 Sappho. waiting on the first floor on Place Vendome, in those huge salons, high and cold, filled with a silent, afflicted crowd; the hell of pain of which they traversed all the zones in succession, passing from room to room to the doctor's office. Bouchereau, with his prodigious memory, re- membered Madame Gaussin very well, having been called to see her in consultation at Castelet ten years before, at the beginning of her illness ; he made them describe its different phases, looked over the former prescriptions, and lost no time in reassuring the two men concerning the symptoms of cerebral disturbance which had developed and which he attributed to the use of certain drugs. While he sat motionless at his desk, with his heavy lashes lowered over his sharp, searching little eyes, writing a long letter to his professional brother at Avignon, the uncle and nephew hstened, holding their breath, to the scratching of that pen, which, so far as they were concerned, drowned all the noises of aristocratic Paris; and suddenly the power of the physician in modern times became manifest to them, the high-priest, the supreme faith, the unconquerable superstition. Cesaire left the house, grave and subdued. '' I am going back to the hotel to strap my trunk. The air of Paris does n't agree with me, I 'm afraid, my boy ; if I stayed on here I should make a fool of myself I shall take the seven-o'clock train to- night. Make my excuses to my niece, won't you?" Jean was careful to say nothing to detain him, Sappho. ^z dreading the results of his childishness, his frivol- ity; and the next morning he was congratulating himself on the knowledge that he was once more under Divonne's wing, when he suddenly appeared, with dejected features and his linen in sad dis- order. " Great God ! uncle, what has happened to you ? " Collapsing into an arm-chair, voiceless and limp at first, but reviving by slow degrees, the uncle confessed to a meeting with a friend of the Cour- bebaisse time, a too copious dinner, and the loss of the eight thousand francs in a gambling-hell during the night. Nothing left, not a sou ! How could he go home and tell Divonne that? And the purchase of Piboulette. Suddenly attacked with a sort of delirium, the Southerner put his hands over his eyes, stuffed his thumbs into his ears, howled, sobbed, cursed himself without stint, gave vent to his remorse in a general confession covering his whole life. He was the shame and the curse of his family; when individuals of his type appeared in families, their relatives would have the right to destroy them hke wolves. Ex- cept for his brother's generosity, where would he be ? At the galleys with thieves and forgers. " Uncle, uncle ! " cried Gaussin, distressed be- yond measure, and trying to stop him. But the other, wilfully blind and deaf, took de- light in that public declaration of his crime, which he described in its most trivial details, while Fanny gazed at him in pity blended with admiration. He was a passionate fellow, at all events, just such 84 Sappho. a scapegrace as she liked ; and, deeply moved by his predicament, like the good-natured creature she was, she tried to devise some way of assisting him. But what could she do? She had seen no- body for a year, Jean had no connections. Sud- denly a name came to her mind : Dechelette ! He was undoubtedly in Paris at that moment, and he was such a kind-hearted fellow ! " But I hardly know him," said Jean. ** I will go to him myself." *'What! do you mean it?" "Why not?" Their glances met and understood each other. Dechelette also had been her lover, the lover of a night whom she hardly remembered. But he never forgot one ; they were all arranged in order in his head, like the saints on a calendar. " If it annoys you," she began, a little embar- rassed. Thereupon Cesaire, who, during that short discussion, had ceased his howHng, be- stowed upon them such a despairing, imploring glance that Jean submitted, consented between his teeth. How interminable that hour seemed to both of them, distracted as they were by thoughts which they did not divulge to each other, as they leaned on the balcony rail, waiting for the woman's return. ** Does this Dechelette live very far away? " "Why, no, on Rue de Rome — only a step," replied Jean fiercely, for he too thought that Fanny was very slow in returning. He tried to comfort himself with the engineer's motto in love : Sappho. 85 " No to-morrow," and the scornful tone in which he had heard him speak of Sappho as of an ex- star of the world of gallantry ; but his lover's pride rebelled, and he could almost have wished that Dechelette would still consider her beautiful and desirable. Ah ! why need that crack-brained old Cesaire reopen all his wounds thus ! At last Fanny's cape turned the corner of the street. She returned with a beaming face. *' It 's all right ; I have the money." When the eight thousand francs were spread out before him, the uncle wept with joy, insisted on giving a receipt, on fixing the rate of interest and the date of repayment. ''There's no need of it, uncle. I didn't men- tion your name. I am the one to whom the money was loaned, and you owe it to me for as long a time as you please." ** Such a service," replied Cesaire, beside him- self with gratitude, " is repaid with a friendship that never ends." And at the station, whither Gaussin accompanied him to make sure that he really took the train, he said with tears in his eyes : " What a woman ! what a treasure ! You must make her happy, I tell you." Jean was much depressed by that episode, feel- ing that his chain, already so burdensome, was drawn tighter and tighter, and that two things had become blended which his innate delicacy had always kept separate and distinct : his family and his liaison. Now Cesaire kept the mistress informed about all his labors, his plantations, gave 86 Sappho, her all the news of Castelet ; and Fanny criticised the consul's obstinacy in the matter of the vines, talked about his mother's health, irritated Jean with her solicitude or with misplaced advice. Never an allusion to the service she had rendered him. No, indeed, nor to Le Fenat's former experience, that blot on the fair fame of the house of Armandy, which the uncle had laid bare before her. Once only did she use it as a weapon of retort, under the following circumstances. They were returning from the theatre, and, as it was raining, they took a cab at a stand on the boulevard. The cab, one of those lumbering affairs which appear only after midnight, was a long while in starting, the man half asleep and the horse shaking his nose-bag. While they were waiting inside the vehicle out of the rain, an old driver, who was tying a new lash on his whip, calmly walked up to the door, his twine between his teeth, and said to Fanny in a cracked voice, reeking with hquor, — '' Good-evening. How goes it?" "Hallo, is it you?" She gave a little start, quickly repressed, and said to her lover in an undertone, " My father ! " Her father — that night-prowler in a long ex- livery cape, stained with mud and minus some of its metal buttons, and displaying in the light of the street lamp a bloated face, purple with alcohol, in which Gaussin fancied that he could recognize, in a vulgarized form, Fanny's regular, sensuous profile, her great lustful eyes ! Without paying Sappho, 87 any heed to the man who accompanied his daugh- ter, and as if he had not seen him, Pere Legrand proceeded to give her news of the family. '* The old woman 's been at Necker a fortnight ; she 's in a bad way. Go and see her some day; it will cheer her up. As for me, luckily the box-seat holds firm; still a good whip and a good lash. But business ain't very good. If you happened to want a good coachman by the month, that would just suit me. No? All right, then, and good-bye till I see you again." They shook hands limply ; the cab started. " Well, would you believe it ? " murmured Fanny ; and she began at once to tell him at length about her family, a subject which she had always avoided, ** it was so ghastly, so degrading! " but they knew each other better now ; they had nothing to con- ceal from each other. She was born at the Moulin-aux- Anglais, an inn in the suburbs, of that father, an ex-dragoon, who drove the stage from Paris to Chatillon, and of an inn-servant, between two trips to the bar. She had never known her mother, who died in giving birth to her; but the proprietors of the house, like honest people, compelled the father to acknowledge his little one and to pay for her nursing. He dared not refuse, for he owed a large sum there ; and when Fanny was four years old, he took her on the stage like a little dog, perched away up under the hood, highly delighted to bowl along the roads, to watch the lights of the lanterns running alongside, the smoking, panting flanks of 88 Sappho. the horses, and to fall asleep in the darkness and the wind, listening to the tinkling bells. But Pere Legrand soon tired of that essay in paternity; little as it cost, he had to feed and dress the brat. And then, too, she was an em- barrassment to him in the matter of a marriage with a market-gardener's widow upon whose melon- beds and long hnes of cabbages, by which his route lay, he had cast a longing eye. She had at that time a very well-defined conviction that her father intended to destroy her ; that was the drunkard's absorbing idea, to rid himself of the child at any price ; and if the widow herself, good Mere Machaume, had not taken her under her protection — " By the way, you knew Machaume," said Fanny. "What! that servant I saw at your old apart- ments?" " She was my step-mother. She was so kind to me when I was little ; I took her into my service to rescue her from her cur of a husband, who, after using up all her property, beat her and compelled her to wait on a trollop with whom he was Hving. Ah ! poor Machaume, she knows what a hand- some man costs. Well, when she left me, in spite of all I could say to her, she lost no time in taking up with him again, and now here she is at the hos- pital. How fast he goes backward without her, the old rascal ! how dirty he was ! what a rag- picker's look ! there 's nothing left of him but his whip — did you see how straight he held it? Even when he 's too drunk to stand, he '11 carry it in Sappho, 89 front of him like a taper and put it in his room ; he never kept anything decent but that. * Good whip, good lash/ that 's his motto." She talked about him unconsciously, as a stran- ger, without disgust or shame ; and Jean was ap- palled to hear her. Such a father ! such a mother ! — compared with the consul's stern features and Madame Gaussin's angelic smile ! And realizing suddenly the full significance of her lover's silence, his revolt against that social filth with which he was splashed by living with her, Fanny observed in a philosophical tone : ** After all, there seems to be something of the sort in all families, and we 're not responsible for it. I have my Pere Le- grand ; you have your Uncle Cesaire." 90 Sappho. VI. " My dear Boy, — As I write you I am still all in a tremble from the terrible anxiety we have had ; our twins disappeared, away from Castelet a whole day and night and the morning of the next day ! ** It was Sunday at breakfast time that we noticed that the little ones were missing. I had dressed them nicely for the eight-o'clock mass to which the consul was to take them ; then I thought no more about it, being busy with your mother, who was more nervous than usual, as if she had a pre- sentiment of the misfortune that was hovering over us. You know, ever since she 's been sick, she has been able to foresee what was going to happen ; and the less able she is to move, the more busily her brain works. " Luckily your mother was in her chamber, and the rest of us were all in the living-room waiting for the little ones; we shouted for them all over the home-place, the shepherd blew the great whistle he calls the sheep with; then Cesaire in one direc- tion, I in another, Rousseline, Tardive, everybody rushed all about Castelet, and whenever one of us met another, it was : ' Well ? ' — ' Have n't found anything.' At last we did n't dare ask ; with beat- ing heart we went to the well below the long win- Sappho, 91 dows of the hay-loft. What a day ! And I had to go up every minute or two to your mother, to smile calmly, and explain the absence of the little ones by saying that I had sent them to pass Sun- day with their aunt at Villamuris. She seemed to believe it ; but late in the night, while I was sitting up with her, and looking through the window at the lights moving about in the fields and on the Rhone, searching for the children, I heard her cry- ing softly in her bed ; and when I questioned her, * I am crying on account of something which you are hiding from me, but which I have guessed all the same,' she replied, in the girlish voice which her suffering has brought back ; and without say- ing anything more, we both worried our hearts out, keeping our grief to ourselves. ** At last, my dear child, not to make the painful story too long, on Monday morning our little ones were brought back to us by the workmen whom your uncle employs on the island, who had found them on a pile of vine-branches, pale with cold and hunger after that night in the open air, and all sur- rounded by the water. And this is what they told us in the innocence of their little hearts. For a long time they had been beset by the idea of doing like their patron saints, Marthe and Marie, whose story they had read, of starting off in a boat without sails or oars or food of any sort, and spreading the Gospel on the first shore to which God's breath might carry them. And so, on Sunday after mass, they cast off a fishing-boat, and, kneeling in the bottom like the holy women, they floated quietly 92 Sappho, along with the current and ran aground among the reeds of Piboulette, notwithstanding the freshets, the high wind, the revouluns. Yes, the good Lord took care of them ! and it was he who gave them back to us, the pretties ! with their Sunday ruffles a Httle rumpled, and the gilding on their prayer- books marred. We had not the heart to scold them, but only to hug and kiss them ; but we are all still sick with the fright we had. ** The most affected of all was your mother, who, although we had told her nothing about it, felt death passing over Castelet, as she says ; and she, ordi- narily so placid and cheerful, still retains a sadness which nothing seems to cure, although your father and I and everybody are tenderly devoted to her. And suppose I should tell you, my dear Jean, that it is on your account more than any other that she is anxious and depressed? She dares not say so before your father, who wishes you to be left un- disturbed at your work, but you did n't come after your examination as you promised. Give us a surprise for the Christmas holiday ; help an invalid to recover her lovely smile. If you knew how bit- terly we regret, when we no longer have our old people with us, that we did not give them more of our time ! " Standing by the window, where the light of a winter's sun filtered sluggishly in through the fog, Jean read that letter, relished to the full its flavor of the fields, the cherished memories of affection and sunlight. " What's that? — let me see." Sappho. 93 Fanny had just awakened in the yellow light that found its way between the parted curtains, and, heavy with sleep, mechanically put out her hand to the box of Maryland tobacco that always stood on her night table. He hesitated, knowing how the mere name of Divonne always inflamed his mistress's jealousy; but how could he refuse to show her the letter, when she recognized the paper and the handwriting? At first the Httle girls' escapade appealed to her sympathies with charming effect, as she sat up in bed, with arms and breast bare, amid the waves of her brown hair, reading and rolling a cigarette; but the closing words irritated her to frenzy, and she crumpled up the letter and threw it across the room. " I '11 find a way to stop her mouth, about her holy women ! It 's all a scheme to make you leave Paris. She misses her handsome nephew, the — " He tried to check her, to prevent her uttering the filthy word which she hurled at him, followed by a long string of the same sort. She had never given vent to her passion in such vulgar language before him, in such an overflowing torrent of foul anger, as from a sewer that had burst and dis- charged its slime and its stench. All the slang of her past as prostitute and street arab swelled her throat and distended her lip. Easy enough to see what they all wanted down there. C^saire had tattled and there was a family scheme to break off their connection, to lure him 94 Sappho, back to the province with Divonne's fine frame as a bait. " Let me tell you this, if you go I '11 write to your cuckold. I '11 give him warning — ah ! upon my word ! — " As she spoke she gathered herself together on the bed with an expression of bitter hatred, with hollow cheeks and staring eyes, like a vicious beast preparing to spring. And Gaussin remembered that he had seen her so on Rue de 1' Arcade, but now it was against him that that bellowing hatred was directed, which tempted him to fall upon his mistress and beat her ; for in such carnal passions, where respect and esteem for the loved one are null, brutality always comes to the surface in wrath or in caresses. He was afraid of himself, left the house abruptly for his office, and as he walked along inveighed bit- terly against the hfe he had marked out for him- self That would teach him to put himself in the power of such a woman ! What infamous, ghastly insults ! His sisters, his mother, no one was spared. What ! had he not even the right to go and see his people? Why, in what sort of a prison had he voluntarily confined himself? And the whole course of their Haison passed through his mind ; he saw how the Egyptian's lovely bare arms, twined about his neck on the night of the ball, had clung to him despotically and firmly, isolating him from his friends and his family. Now his mind was made up. That very night, come what may, he would start for Castelet. Sappho, 95 Some matters of business despatched, his leave of absence obtained at headquarters, he returned home early, expecting a terrible scene, prepared for anything, even a rupture. But the sweet greet- ing with which Fanny met him, her heavy eyes, her cheeks, softened as it were with tears, left him hardly the courage to assert his will. " I am going to-night," he said, straightening himself up. " You are quite right, m! ami. Go and see your mother, and above all — " she drew nearer to him coaxingly — ''forget how naughty I was; I love you too much, it is my mania." All the rest of the day, while she packed his trunk with coquettish solicitude, as sweet and at- tractive as in the early days, she maintained that penitent attitude, perhaps with the idea of detain- ing him. But not once did she say to him, "Stay; " and when, at the last moment, all hope having vanished in face of the final preparations, she nestled close to her lover, trying to impregnate him with her for the whole time of his journey and his absence, her farewell, her kiss murmured only this : " Tell me, Jean, you are not angry with me, are you ? " Oh ! the intoxicating joy of awaking in the morning in the room that was his when he was a child, his heart still warm from the embraces of his dear ones, the outpouring of joy at his arrival, of finding in the same place, on the mosquito bar of his little bed, the same shaft of light that he had g6 Sappho. always looked for when he awoke, of hearing the cries of the peacocks on their perches, the creaking of the well-chain, the cattle rushing from the sheds with hurrying feet, and, when he had thrown his shutters back against the wall, of seeing once more that lovely warm light which entered the room in sheets, as if the floodgates had been opened, and that marvellous prospect of sloping vineyards, cypresses, olive trees and gHstening pine woods, stretching away to the Rhone beneath a deep, cloudless sky, without a fleck of mist notwithstand- ing the early hour, — a green sky, swept all night by the mistral, which still filled the great valley with its strong cheery breath. Jean compared that awakening to those in Paris beneath a sky as murky as his love, and felt happy and free. He went downstairs. The house, white with sunlight, was still asleep, all the shutters closed like the eyes of those within ; and he was glad of a moment of soHtude to recover himself, in that moral convalescence which he felt was just beginning for him. He walked a few steps along the terrace, took an ascending path in the park — in what they called the park, a forest of pines and myrtles planted at random on the rough hill of Castelet, cut by irregular paths made slippery by dry pine needles. His dog. Miracle, very old and lame, had come out of his kennel, and followed silently at his heels ; how often they had taken that walk together in the morning ! At the entrance to the vineyards, where the tall Sappho. 97 cypresses that formed the line of demarcation bent their graceful pointed tops, the dog hesitated ; he knew how hard the thick layer of sand — a new remedy for the phylloxera with which the consul was experimenting — and the embankments sup- porting the terrace would be for his poor old paws. The joy of accompanying his master turned the scale at last, however; and at every obstacle there were painful struggles, a timid little whine, brief halts, and the awkward antics of a crab on a rock. Jean did not look at him, being entirely absorbed by the new alicant plants, of which his father had had much to say to him the night before. The shoots seemed to be flourishing in the smooth, glistening sand. At last the poor man was to be re- paid for his persistent labors ; the Castelet vintage would still live when La Nerte, L'Ermitage, all the famous native wines of the South were dead ! A little white cap suddenly appeared in front of him. It was Divonne, the first one astir in the house ; she had a reaping-hook in her hand, and something else which she threw away ; and her cheeks, ordinarily so colorless, were dyed with a sudden crimson flush. "Is it you, Jean? You frightened me; I thought it was your father." She recovered her self-possession in an instant, and kissed him. "Did you sleep well?" " Very well, aunt ; but why did you dread my father's coming?" "Why?" She picked up the root she had just torn from the ground. 7 98 Sappho, " The consul told you, did n't he, that this time he was sure of success ? Well, look ! there 's the creature." Jean saw a tiny bit of yellowish moss buried in the wood, the imperceptible mould that has brought ruin step by step upon entire provinces ; and it seemed an ironical freak of nature, on that glorious morning, in that vivifying sunlight — that infinitesimal object, destructive and indestructible. "That's the beginning. In three months the whole farm will be destroyed, and your father will begin all over again, for his pride is at stake. There will be more new plants and new remedies until the day when — " A despairing gesture completed and emphasized her sentence. " Really? is it as bad as that? " " Oh ! you know the consul. He never says a word, and gives me the money for the month as usual ; but I see that he 's preoccupied. He goes to Avignon and Orange. He is trying to raise money." "And C^saire? what about his immersions?" the young man asked in dismay. Thank God, everything was going finely in that direction. They had had fifty casks of wine from the last crop ; and this year the product would be twice that. In view of his success the consul had surrendered to his brother all the vineyards in the plain, which had hitherto been allowed to lie fallow, with long hnes of dead stumps like a cemetery ; and now they were under water for three months. Sappho, 99 And the Provencal, proud of her man's work, of her Fenat, pointed out to Jean from their elevated position several great ponds — clairs she called them — kept full by embankments of lime as on the salt-marshes. " Those plants will bear in two years ; and so will Piboulette, and the island of Lamotte, which your uncle has bought without telling anybody. Then we shall be rich, but we must hold hard till then ; every one must contribute and sacrifice him- self." She talked cheerfully of sacrifice, like a woman who has ceased to wonder at it, and with such contagious enthusiasm that Jean, impelled by a sudden thought, replied in the same tone : " We will sacrifice ourselves, Divonne." That very day he wrote to Fanny that his parents could not continue his allowance, that he should be reduced to his salary at the department, and that, under those conditions, it was impossible for them to live together. The result was an earlier separation than he expected, three or four years before his anticipated departure from France ; but he felt sure that his mistress would accept those weighty reasons, and that she would take pity upon him and his trouble, would assist him in that painful performance of a bounden duty. Was it really a sacrifice? Was he not, on the contrary, relieved to put an end to an existence which seemed hateful and unhealthy to him, es- pecially since he had returned to nature, to his family, to simple and upright affections? His lOO Sappho. letter written, without great effort and without pain, he relied upon the virtuous and loyal affec- tion of the honest hearts about him, upon the ex- ample of that father, proudest and most upright of men ; upon the innocent smile of the httle holy women, and also upon that boundless, peaceful horizon, the health-giving emanations from the mountains, the sky above him, the swift-flowing, eager river, to defend him against what he foresaw would be a fierce reply, full of threats and extrava- gant language ; for, as he thought of his passion, of all the villainous elements of which it was com- posed, it seemed to him that he was just recover- ing from a wasting fever of the sort caused by the exhalations from swamp-lands. Five or six days passed in the silence that fol- lows a decisive blow. Morning and night Jean went to the post and returned empty-handed, strangely perturbed in mind. What was she do- ing? What had she decided upon, and, in any event, why not reply? He thought of nothing else. And at night, when everybody at Castelet was sleeping soundly, and the wind crooning through the long corridors, he and Cesaire dis- cussed it in his little room. " She 's likely to turn up here ! " the uncle de- clared ; and his anxiety was greatly increased by the fact that the letter of rupture contained two notes, on six months and a year's time, to adjust his debt and the interest thereon. How could he pay those notes? How could he explain to Divonne? He shuddered at the bare thought, Sappho, loi and made his nephew unhappy when he remarked with a long face, as he shook the ashes from his pipe at the conchision of their midmghl-.iiiten'iew, **Well, good-night; at all events^ .what you have done is quite right." , . .' At last this reply arrived, and after reading the first Hnes — " My dear man, I have not written to you sooner, because I was determined to prove to you otherwise than by words how well I under- stand you and love you," — Jean stopped, as sur- prised as a man who hears a symphony instead of the signal for capitulation that he dreaded. He turned hastily to the last page, where he read — "' remain until death your dog who loves you, whom you can beat if you choose, and who sends you a passionately loving kiss." So she had not received his letter ! But when he read it through, line by line, with tears in his eyes, it proved to be really a reply, and said that Fanny had long anticipated the bad news of the trouble at Castelet, which would hasten the inevi- table separation. She had at once set about find- ing some employment in order that she might no longer remain a burden to him, and she had found a position as manager of a lodging-house on Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, in the service of a very wealthy lady. A hundred francs a month with board and lodging, and her Sundays free. *' You understand, my man, one day a week to love each other ; for you will still love me, won't you ? You will repay me for the great effort I am making, working for the first time in my life, for I02 Sappho. the night and day slavery which I accept, with humiliations which you cannot imagine and which will be a sgs that she had always concealed. Rosa's whole object was to part her from him, to afford her opportunities to deceive him. "When I think of all she has said to me to make me take up with that Dutch- man ! Just now again they all went at me. I love you too well, you see ; it bothers her in her vices, for she has them all, the vilest, the most monstrous." She checked herself, seeing that he was very pale, that his lips were trembling as on the even- ing when he stirred the dunghill of letters. " Oh ! have no fear," she said ; " your love has cured me of all those horrors. She and her pes- tiferous chameleon are equally disgusting to me." *' I don't want you to stay there," said the lover, agitated by unhealthy jealousy. ** There is too Sappho. 137 much filth in the bread you earn ; you must go home with me ; we will pull through somehow." She expected that cry, had been trying for a long time to call it forth. And yet she resisted, objecting that it would be very hard to keep house with the three hundred francs from the depart- ment, and that they would perhaps have to sepa- rate again. *^And I suffered so when I left our poor httlc house ! " Benches were placed at intervals under the acacias which lined the road, with telegraph wires covered with swallows ; to talk more at ease, they sat down, both deeply moved, and arm in arm. "Three hundred francs a month," said Jean; " why, what do the Hettemas do, who have only two hundred and fifty?" " They live in the country at Chaville, all the year round." " Well, let 's do as they do ; I do not care for Paris." " Really? do you really mean it? oh, my dear! my dear ! " People were passing along the road, a galloping line of asses carrying the debris of a wedding- party. They could not embrace, and they sat motionless, very close together, dreaming of a rejuvenated happiness on summer evenings in the country, sweet with that same perfume of green fields, tranquil and warm, and enlivened by carbine- shots in the distance and by the barrel-organ tunes of a suburban fete. 138 Sappho, VIII. They settled at Chaville, between the upper and the lower town, along that old forest road called the Pav6 des Gardes, in an old hunting- box at the entrance to the woods : three rooms hardly larger than those in Paris, and the same furniture, the cane-seated chair, the painted ward- robe, and to adorn the horrible green paper in their bedroom, nothing but Fanny's portrait, for the photograph of Castelet had its frame broken in moving and was fading away in the lumber- room. They hardly mentioned poor Castelet now, since the uncle and niece had broken off their correspondence. " A pretty kind of a friend ! " she said, remem- bering Le Fenat's readiness to promote the first rupture. Only the little girls kept their brother informed of the news, for Divonne had ceased to write. Perhaps she still entertained a grudge against her nephew; or did she guess that the bad woman had returned, to unseal, and criticise her poor, motherly letters in the coarse peasant handwriting. At times they might have believed that they were still on Rue d'Amsterdam, when they were awakened by the singing of the Hettemas^ once Sappho, 1 39 more their neighbors, and the whistling of the locomotives passing constantly in both directions on the other side of the road, and visible through the trees of a large park. But instead of the murky glass walls of the great Western station, its curtainless windows, through which could be seen the silhouettes of clerks bending over their work, and the roar and rumble of the sloping street, they enjoyed the silent, green space be- yond their little orchard, surrounded by other gardens, by villas in clumps of trees, sliding down to the foot of the hill. Before starting for Paris in the morning, Jean breakfasted in their little dining-room, with the window open on the broad paved road, grass- grown in spots, and lined by rows of white thorn with its pungent perfume. That road took him to the station in ten minutes, skirting the rustling, chirping park; and when he returned, those sounds grew fainter as the shadows crept out of the thickets to the moss in the green road, em- purpled by the rays of the setting sun, and as the calls of the cuckoos in every corner of the wood blended with the trills of the nightingale among the ivy. But as soon as they were fairly settled, and his surprise at the unaccustomed tranquillity of his surroundings had subsided, the lover fell a victim anew to the torments of a sterile and prying jeal- ousy. His mistress's rupture with Rosa and her departure from the lodging-house had led to an appalling explanation between the two women, 140 Sappho. full of ambiguous insinuations, which revived his suspicions, his most disturbing anxieties; and when he went away, when he looked out from the train at their little low house, with just a ground- floor surmounted by a round attic window, his glance seemed to pierce the wall. He would say to himself, *'Who knows?" and the thought haunted him even among the papers on his desk. When he returned at night, he made her give him an account of her day, of her most trivial acts, of her thoughts, generally most uninterest- ing, which he tried to surprise with a " What are you thinking about? tell me, quick," always fear- ing that she regretted something or some one in that horrible past, admitted by her every time with the same imperturbable frankness. When they met only on Sundays and were thirsty for each other, he did not waste time in these insulting and minute searchings of the mind. But now that they were together once more, with no break in their life a deux, they tormented each other even in their caresses, in their most secret communing, excited by the dull wrath, the painful consciousness, of the irreparable. Then, too, their energies seemed to relax ; per- haps it was satiety of the senses in the warm en- velopment of nature, or more simply the proximity of the Hettemas. Of all the households encamped in the suburbs of Paris, not one perhaps ever en- joyed the freedom of life in the country as that one did, — the delight of going about clad in rags, in hats made of bark, Madame without corsets, Sappho, 141 Monsieur in canvas shoes ; of carrying crusts from the table for the ducks, scrapings for the rabbits ; and hoeing and raking and planting and watering. Oh, that watering ! The Hettemas set about it as soon as the hus- band, after returning from the office, had ex- changed his office coat for a Robinson Crusoe jacket; after dinner they went at it again, and long after nightfall, in the little dark garden, from which a fresh smell of damp earth arose, could be heard the creaking of the pump, the colliding of the great watering-pots, and elephantine gasps wandering among the flower-beds, with a splash- ing which seemed to be caused by water falling from the toilers' brows into their watering-pots, and from time to time a triumphant exclamation : — " I Ve put thirty-two pots on the marrowfat peas ! " ** And I fourteen on the balsams ! " They were people who were not content to be happy, but gloated over their own happiness and relished it in a way to make your mouth water ; especially the man, by the irresistible way in which he described the joys of their household in winter. " It 's nothing now, but just wait till December, then you '11 see ! You come home wet and muddy, with all the vexations of Paris on your back ; you find a good fire, a bright lamp, the soup smoking on the table, and under the table a pair of clogs filled with straw. Ah ! when you Ve stowed away a dish of sausages and cabbage with a slice of gruyere kept fresh under a cloth, and when you 've 142 Sappho. poured on it a glass of wine that never saw Bercy, free of christening and duty, how pleasant it is to draw your armchair up to the fire, light a pipe while you drink your coffee laced with a drop of brandy, and take a little snooze opposite each other, while the ice melts on the windows ! Just a bit of a nap, you know, long enough for the heavy part of the digestion. Then you draw a few minutes, the wife clears the table, hustles about fixing the bedclothes and the hot-water bottle ; and when she 's gone to bed and the place is warm, in you jump, and you feel a warmth all over your body just as if you 'd crawled into the^ straw in your shoes." He waxed almost eloquent over his material joys, the hairy, heavy-jawed giant, on ordinary occasions so shy that he could not say two words without blushing and stammering. That absurd shyness, which contrasted so comi- cally with his black beard and colossal frame, was responsible for his marriage and his tranquil life. Hettema at twenty-five, overflowing with lusty health, knew nothing of love or women ; but one day at Nevers, after a corps dinner, some of his comrades enticed him, half-tipsy, to a house of prostitution and forced him to choose one of the inmates. He left the place in the utmost bewil- derment, went there again and again, always chose the same one, paid her debts, took her away, and, taking fright at the idea that some one might steal her from him, so that he would have to begin a fresh conquest, he ended by marrying her. Sappho, 143 ** A legitimate household, my dear," said Fanny, with a triumphant laugh, to Jean, who listened to her in dismay. ** And it is the cleanest and most virtuous of all of that kind I have ever known." She affirmed it in the sincerity of her ignorance, for the legitimate households to which she had been admitted doubtless deserved no kinder judg- ment ; and all her ideas of life were as sincere and as false as that. As neighbors these Hettemas had a calming effect, being always good-humored, capable of rendering services that were not too burdensome, and having an especial horror of scenes, of quar- rels in which they must take part, and in general of anything calculated to interfere with a peaceful digestion. The wife tried to initiate Fanny in the science of raising chickens and rabbits, in the sa- lubrious delights of watering, but in vain. Gaussin's mistress, a child of the faubourg and graduate of studios, did not like the country ex- cept in snatches, on picnics, as a place where one can shout and roll on the grass and lose oneself with one's lover. She detested effort and labor, and as her six months' experience as manager had exhausted her power of energy for a long while, she sank into a dreamy torpor, a drunkenness of comfort and fresh air, which almost left her with- out strength to dress, to arrange her hair, or even to open her piano. The cares of housekeeping being confided en- tirely to a country-woman, when, at night, she reviewed her day in order to describe it to Jean, 144 Sappho, she could think of nothing but a visit to Olympe, gossip over the wall, and cigarettes, heaps of cigar- ettes, the remains of which disfigured the marble mantel. Six o'clock already ! Barely time to slip on a dress and pin a flower in her waist to go and meet him on the grass-grown road. But with the coming of the fogs and rains of autumn, and night falling so early, she had more than one excuse for not going out; and he fre- quently surprised her on his return in one of the white woollen gandouras with broad pleats, which she put on in the morning, and with her hair twisted in a knot as when he went away. He thought her charming so, with her still youthful flesh, well kept and tempting, which was ready to his hand, with nothing in the way. And yet that lack of energy ofl"ended him, alarmed him as a source of danger. He himself, after a tremendous effort to increase their resources a little without having recourse to Castelet, after passing nights over plans, reproduc- tions of pieces of artillery, caissons, muskets of a new pattern, which he designed for Hettema, was assailed by the enervating influence of the country and of solitude, by which the strongest and most energetic allow themselves to be overcome, its benumbing seed having been implanted in him by his early childhood in an out-of-the way corner. And the materiality of their stout neighbors as- sisted in the process, infecting them, in the endless going and coming from one house to the other, Sappho, 145 with a little of their mental degradation and their abnormal appetite. Gaiissin and his mistress also reached the point of discussing the question of meals and bedtime. Cesaire having sent a cask of his " frog's wine," they passed a whole Sunday bottling it, with the door of their little cellar open to the last sun of the year, a blue sky flecked with pink clouds, of the shade of wood-heather. They were not far away from the period of clogs filled with warm straw and the after-dinner nap. Luck- ily something occurred to divert their thoughts. He found her one evening highly excited. Olympe had been telling her the story of a little boy, brought up by a grandmother in Morvan. The father and mother, dealers in wood in Paris, had not written or paid any money for months. The grandmother having died suddenly, some bargemen had brought the urchin through the Yonne Canal to turn him over to his parents; but they could not find any one. The wood-yard closed, the mother gone off with a lover, the father become a drunkard, a bankrupt, disappeared ! Fine things, these lawful households ! And there was the Httle fellow, six years old, a perfect love, without bread or clothes, in the gutter ! She was moved almost to tears, then said abruptly, — " Suppose we should take him? Are you will- ing?" " What madness ! " "Why so?" And nestling close to him, she continued coaxingly : " You know how I have 146 Sappho, longed for a child by you ; we could bring this one up, give him an education. After a while you love the little ones you pick up in the street as dearly as if they were your own." She also reminded him what a source of distrac- tion it would be to her, alone as she was all day, growing stupid by dint of overhauling heaps of un- pleasant thoughts. A child is a safeguard. Then, when she saw that he had taken fright at the ex- pense : *' Why, the expense is nothing. Just think, six years old ! we will dress him with your old clothes. Olympe, who knows what she's talking about, assures me that we should never notice it." "Why doesn't she take him, then?" said Jean, with the testiness of a man who feels that he is vanquished by his own weakness. He tried to re- sist, however, resorting to the convincing argu- ment : " And when I am no longer here, what will happen?" He rarely mentioned his departure, in order not to sadden Fanny, but he thought of it, and was reassured by the thought against the dan- gers of his present mode of life and De Potter's melancholy confidences. " What a complication the child will cause, what a burden he will be to you in the future ! " Fanny's eyes grew dim. " You are mistaken, my dear ; he will be some one to talk to about you, a consolation, a respon- sibility too, which will give me strength to work, to retain a desire to hve." He reflected a moment, imagined her all alone, in the empty house. Sappho, 147 "Where is the little fellow? " " At Bas-Meudon, with a bargeman who has taken him in for a few days. After that it 's the hospital, the almshouse." " Well, go and get him, as your heart is set on it." She threw her arms around his neck, and all the evening, as joyous as a child, she played, and sang, happy, exuberant, transfigured. The next morn- ing, in the train, Jean mentioned their decision to Hettema, who seemed to know about the episode, but to be determined to have no hand in it. Buried in his corner reading the Petit Journal ^ he muttered in the depths of his beard, — " Yes, I know — the women did it — it 's none of my business. Your wife seems to me to be very ro- mantic," he added, showing his face above the paper. Romantic or not, she was dismayed beyond mea- sure that evening, as she knelt on the floor, a plate of soup in her hand, trying to tame the little fel- low from Morvan, who stood against the wall in a shrinking attitude, his head hanging down, — an enormous head with flaxen hair, — and energeti- cally refused to talk, to eat, even to show his face, but repeated again and again in a loud, choking, monotonous voice, — " See Menine, see Menine." ** Menine was his grandmother, I imagine. Since two o'clock I have n't been able to get anything else out of him." Jean took a hand in trying to make him swallow his soup, but without avail. And there they re- 148 Sappho. mained, kneeling so that their faces were on a level with his, one holding the plate, the other the spoon, as if he were a sick lamb, trying to move him by encouraging, affectionate words. "■ Let us go to dinner ; perhaps we frighten him ; he will eat if we stop looking at him." But he continued to stand there, wild as a hawk, repeating like a little savage his wailing '' See Me- nine," which tore their hearts, until he fell asleep leaning against the sideboard, — such a deep sleep that they were able to undress him and lay him in the rough, rustic cradle borrowed from a neighbor, without his opening his eyes for a second. " See how handsome he is ! " said Fanny, very proud of her acquisition ; and she compelled Gaus- sin to admire that wilful brow, those refined and delicate features beneath the sunburn of the fields, that perfect little body with the well-knit loins, the full arms, the legs like a young satyr's, already covered with down below the knee. She forgot herself gazing at that childish beauty. " Cover him up ; he '11 be cold," said Jean, whose voice made her start, as if awakened from a dream ; and as she carefully tucked him in, the little one drew several long sobbing breaths, as if struggling in a sea of despair, notwithstanding his sleep. In the night he began to talk of his own accord : " Guerlande me, Menine." **What does he say? listen." He wanted to be guerlanded', but what did that patois word mean? Jean at all hazards put out his arm and began to rock the heavy cradle ; grad- Sappho. 149 ually the child became quieter and fell asleep hold- ing in his chubby little hand the hand which he believed to be his " Menine's," who had been dead a fortnight. He was like a little wild cat in the house, claw- ing and biting, eating apart from the others, and growling when any one approached his bowl ; the few words that they extorted from him were in the barbarous dialect of Morvan wood-cutters, which no one could ever have understood with- out the aid of the Hettemas, who were from the same province as he. However, by dint of con- stant attention and gentleness they succeeded in taming him a httle, " tm pso,'* as he said. He consented to exchange the rags he wore when he arrived for the neat warm clothes, the sight of which at first made him tremble with rage as a jackal would, if one should try to dress him in a greyhound's coat. He learned to eat at the table, to use a fork and spoon, and to answer, when any one asked him his name, that in the country '* i li dision Josaph." ^ As for giving him the slightest elementary no- tions in the way of education, they could not think of that as yet. Brought up in the midst of the woods, in a charcoal-burner's hut, the murmur of rustling, swarming nature haunted his tough little rustic's pate as the sound of the sea rings in the spiral folds of a shell ; and there was no way of forcing anything else into it, nor of keeping him in the house even in the most severe weather. In 1 They called him Josaph. 1 50 Sappho. the rain and the snow, when the bare trees stood hke columns of frost, he would slip out of the house, prowl among the bushes, search the holes and burrows with the ingenious cruelty of a ferret, and when he returned home, in a state of collapse from hunger, he always had in his torn fustian jacket, or in the pockets of his little breeches, cov- ered with mud to his waist, some stunned or dead creature, a bird or mole or field-mouse, or, in its place, potatoes or beets he had dug in the fields. Nothing could overcome those poaching, ma- rauding instincts, coupled with a peasant's mania for stowing away all sorts of glittering trifles, copper buttons, bits of jet, tinfoil, which he would pick up, hiding them in his hand, and carry them ofT to hiding-places worthy of a thieving magpie. All this booty was Included by him in a vague, generic name, "the harvest" {la denr^e), which he pronounced denraie ; and neither arguments nor blows would have deterred him from making his denraie at the expense of everybody and everything. Only the Hettemas could keep him in order, the draughtsman keeping always within reach, on the table around which the Httle savage prowled, attracted by the compasses and colored pencils, a dog-whip which he cracked about his legs. But neither Jean nor Fanny would resort to such threats, although the little one, in his deahngs with them, was sly, suspicious, untamable even by the most affectionate cajolery, as if Meninej when she died, had deprived him of all power of affec- Sappho, 151 tion. Fanny sometimes succeeded in keeping him for a moment on her knees, *' because she smelt good ; " but to Gaussin, although he was very- gentle with him, he was always the wild beast of the first night, with the same suspicious glance and outstretched claws. That unconquerable, almost instinctive repulsion on the child's part, the inquisitive, mischievous ex- pression of his little blue eyes, with their Albino- like lashes, and, above all, Fanny's sudden and blind affection for the little stranger who had sud- denly fallen into their lives, tormented the lover with a new suspicion. Perhaps he was her own child, brought up by a nurse or by her stepmother ; and Machaume's death, of which they learned about that time, was a coincidence that seemed to justify his suspicions. Sometimes at night, when he held that little hand, which clung tightly to his, — for the child in the vague land of dreams always thought that Mhiine was holding it, — he ques- tioned him with all his inward, unacknowledged unrest: ''Where do you come from? Who are you?" hoping that the mystery of the little fel- low's birth might be made known to him through contact with his warm flesh. But his anxiety vanished at a word from P^re Legrand, who came to ask for assistance in pay- ing for a fence around his deceased helpmeet's grave, and called out to his daughter when he saw Josaph's cradle : — " Hallo ! a kid ! you must be pleased, when you 've never been able to raise one." 152 Sappho, Gaussin was so happy that he paid for the fence without even asking to see the plans, and kept Pere Legrand to breakfast. The 6ld cabman, now employed on the tramway between Paris and Versailles, his face flushed with wine and apoplexy, but still lusty and active under his glazed leather hat, surrounded for the occasion by a heavy crepe band, which made It a genuine " mute's " hat, — the old cabman seemed delighted by his reception at the hands of his daughter's gentlemauy and came again at intervals, to break bread with them. His white hair a la Mr. Punch, surrounding his shaven, bloated face, his majestic, tipsy air, the respect with which he treated his whip, leaning it against the wall In a safe corner with the precautions of a nurse, made a deep im- pression on the child ; and the old man and he at once became very intimate. One day, just as they had finished dining together, the Hettemas sur- prised them. '^ Oh ! excuse us, you are having a family party," said Madame, in a mincing tone, and the words struck Jean in the face, as humiliating as a blow. His family! That foundhng who was snoring with his head on the cloth, that weather-beaten old pirate, with his pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth and the voice of a fishwife, explaining for the hundredth time that two sous* worth of whipcord would last him six months, and that he had n't changed his handle for twenty years ! His family, nonsense ! they were no more his family than she was his wife, that Fanny Legrand, that Sappho. 153 played out, prematurely old creature, leaning on her elbows amid the cigarette smoke. Within a year it would all have disappeared from his life, leaving only the vague memory of travelling ac- quaintances or a neighbor at table d'hote. But at other times that thought of approaching departure, which he invoked as an excuse for his weakness when he felt that he was falling, being dragged lower and lower, that idea, instead of comforting him, of encouraging him, caused him to feel more keenly the manifold bonds that held him fast, to realize what a wrench that departure would be, not one rupture, but ten ruptures, and that it would cost him dearly to let go that little child's hand, which rested freely in his at night. Even La Balue, the golden thrush who sang and whistled in his too small cage, which they were always going to change, and in which he was forced to stoop, like the old cardinal in his iron cage, — yes, even La Balue had taken possession of a small corner of his heart, and it would hurt to cast him out. And yet that inevitable separation was drawing nigh ; and the gorgeous month of June, which arrayed all nature in festal garb, would probably be the last they would pass together. Was it that that made her nervous and irritable, or was it the burden of Josaph's education, which she had un- dertaken with sudden ardor, to the intense disgust of the little Morvandian, who sat for hours staring at his letters without seeing or pronouncing them, his forehead locked with a bar like the wings of a 154 Sappho. farmyard gate? From day to day her woman's nature found vent in violent outbursts and in tears, in constantly recurring scenes, although Gaussin exerted himself to be indulgent; but she was so insulting, her wrath exhaled such reeking fumes of malice and hatred against her lover's youth, his education, his family, the gulf between their two destinies, which fate was about to widen, she was so skilful in touching him on the sensitive spots, that he finally lost his temper too, and answered her. But his wrath maintained the reserve, the com- passion of a man of good breeding, refrained from dealing blows which he deemed too painful and too easily dealt, whereas she gave free rein to the bhnd rage of a prostitute, devoid of responsibihty or shame, made a weapon of everything, watched with cruel joy on her victim's face the contraction of pain which she caused, then suddenly threw herself into his arms and besought his forgiveness. The faces of the Hettemas, when they were present at these quarrels, which almost always broke out at the table, just as they were seated and ready to remove the lid of the soup tureen or plunge the knife into the joint, were a study for a painter. They would exchange a glance of comical dismay across the table. Might they ven- ture to eat, or was the leg of mutton about to fly away through the garden with the platter, the gravy, and the stewed beans? " On condition that there 's to be no scene ! " they would say whenever there was a suggestion Sappho. 155 of a reunion of the families; and that was the remark with which they greeted a project for breakfasting together in the forest, which Fanny threw at them over the wall one Sunday. Oh, no ! they would not quarrel to-day ; it was too fine ! And she ran to dress the child and pack the baskets. Everything was ready, and they were about to start when the postman brought a stout letter for which Gaussin had to sign a receipt, so that he was detained. He overtook the party at the en- trance to the woods, and said to Fanny in an undertone, — " It 's from my uncle. He is wild with delight. A superb crop, sold as it stands. He sends back Dechelette's eight thousand francs, with many thanks and comphments for his niece." " His niece, oh, yes ! a la mode de Gascogne. The old wretch ! " said Fanny, who had lost all her illusions concerning uncles from the South. In a moment she added, with joyful satisfaction : " We shall have to invest that money." He gazed at her in blank amazement, because he had found her always very scrupulous in money matters. *' Invest? why, it isn't yours." "Well, you see, I never told you — "with the glance which lost its sparkle at the slightest de- parture from the truth ; Dechelette, like the good fellow he was, having heard what they were doing for Josaph, had written her that that money would help them to bring up the little one. "But you 156 Sappho, know, if it annoys you, we '11 send back his eight thousand francs ; he 's in Paris." The voice of Hettema, who had discreetly gone on ahead with his wife, echoed through the trees : *'To the right or left?" **To the right, to the right, — to the Ponds! " cried Fanny; then, turning to her lover: ** Come, come, you 're not going to begin to eat your heart out over trifles ; we 're an old couple, deuce take it!" She knew that trembling pallor of the lips, that glance at the boy, interrogating him from head to foot ; but this time there was only a momentary thrill of jealousy. He had reached now the stage of acting the coward from habit, of conceding any- thing for the sake of peace. " What is the need of tormenting myself, of going to the bottom of things? If this child is hers, what more natural than that she should take him in and conceal the truth from me after all the scenes, all the ques- tionings, I have forced her to submit to ! Is n't it better to take things as they are and pass the few remaining months in peace?" And he plodded along the forest roads through the valley, carrying their picnic luncheon in its heavy basket covered with white cloth, resigned to his fate, his back bent like an aged gardener's, while the mother and child walked together in front of him, Josaph resplendent and awkward in a complete outfit from the Belle-JardinUre, which made it impossible for him to run, she in a light peignoivy her head and neck bare under a Japan- Sappho. 157 ese parasol, her waist less sylph-like than of yore, indolent of gait, and in her lovely twisted hair a broad white streak which she no longer took the trouble to conceal. In front of them, and farther down the sloping path, the Hettema couple, in gigantic straw hats like those of the Touarez horsemen, dressed in red flannel and laden with provisions, fishing tackle, nets, crab-spears; and the wife, to lighten her husband's burden, gallantly wearing saltire-wise across her colossal breast the hunting-horn with- out which the draughtsman could not be induced to walk in the forest. As they walked, they sang : " J'aime entendre la rame Le soir battre les flots ; J'aime le cerf qui brame — "^ Olympe's repertory of those sentimental curb- stone ditties was inexhaustible; and when one considered where she had picked them up, in the degrading half-light behind closed blinds, and to how many men she had sung them, the husband's serenity as he sang a second to them assumed ex- traordinarily grand proportions. The remark of the grenadier at Waterloo, "■ There are too many of them," must have been the key to that man's philosophical indifference. While Gaussin musingly watched the huge couple plunge into a hollow, whither he followed them at a short distance, a creaking of wheels 1 I love to hear the oar Beating the waves at night ; I love the braying stag — 158 Sappho, came up the path with a volley of hearty laughter and childish voices ; and suddenly, a few steps away, a wagon-load of little girls, ribbons, and waving hair appeared, in an English cart drawn by a little donkey, with a young girl, hardly older than the others, leading him by the bridle over that rough road. It was easy to see that Jean belonged to the party whose heterodox costumes, especially that of the fat woman with a hunting-horn slung over her shoulder, had excited the young people to inextinguishable laughter ; and the older girl tried to impose silence on them for a moment. But that other Touarez hat called forth a still louder burst of mocking laughter ; and as she passed the man who stood aside to make room for the little cart, a pretty smile tinged with embarrassment asked his pardon, and expressed naive surprise to find that the old gardener's face was so youth- ful and attractive. He bowed timidly, blushed with no very clear idea as to what he was ashamed of; and as the cart stopped at the top of the hill at a cross-road, and a babel of little voices read aloud the names on the sign-post, half-effaced by the rain, " Road to the Ponds," *^ The Grand Huntsman's Oak," " False Repose," " Road to Velizy," Jean turned and watched them disappear in the green path flecked with sunlight and carpeted with moss, where the wheels rolled as on velvet, — a whirl- wind of fair-haired childhood, a wagon-load of happiness arrayed in the colors of spring, with Sappho, 159 laughter exploding like fireworks under the branches. A fierce blast on Hettema's bugle, roused him abruptly from his reverie. They had estabhshed themselves on the shore of the pond and were unpacking the provisions; and from a distance one could see in the water the reflection of the white cloth spread on the short grass, and of the red flannel jackets standing out amid the verdure like a huntsman's pink coat. ** Come, hurry up ; you have the lobster ! " cried the fat man ; and Fanny's nervous voice added, — *' Was it little Bouchereau who stopped you on the road ? " Jean started at the name of Bouchereau, which carried him back to Castelet, to his sick mother's bedside. "■ Yes," said the draughtsman, taking the basket from his hands ; " the tall one, the one leading the pony, is the doctor's niece. A daughter of his brother, whom he has taken into his family. They live at Velizy in summer. She 's a pretty girl." " Oh ! very pretty, — especially that brazen-faced air." And Fanny as she cut the bread, watched her lover, disturbed by the far-away look in his eyes. Madame Hettema, unpacking the ham the while, solemnly expressed her disapprobation of that fashion of allowing young girls to roam about the woods at will. ''You will tell me that it's the English way, and that she was brought up in London ; but that does n't make any difference, it really isn't proper." i6o Sappho, " No, but very convenient for adventures.'* "Oh! Fanny — " " Excuse me, I forgot ; Monsieur believes in in- nocent girls." " Come, come, suppose we have our luncheon,'* said Hettema, beginning to take alarm. But Fanny must needs tell all she knew about young girls in society. She had some fine stories on that sub- ject ; convents, boarding-schools, were the scenes of them. Girls left those establishments worn out, withered, disgusted with men, not even capable of having children. " And then they give them to you, you dupes! An ingmue ! As if there was any such thing as an ingenue I as if all girls, in society or not in society, did n't know from their birth what 's what ! I myself had nothing to learn when I was twelve years old ; nor had you, Olympe, eh?" " Of course not," said Madame Hettema, with a shrug ; but the fate of the luncheon engrossed her attention when she heard Gaussin, whose temper was rising, declare that there were girls and girls, and that one could still find in some families — " Oh ! yes, families," retorted his mistress, scorn- fully, " I like to hear you talk about families ; especially your own." "Hush! I forbid you — " " Bourgeois ! " " Wretch ! Luckily this will soon end. I have n't much longer to live with you." " Go, go ! clear out ! I shall be glad enough." They were hurling insults at each other's heads. Sappho, i6i before the maliciously inquisitive child, who lay- face downward in the grass, when a terrible blast from the bugle, repeated in a hundred echoes by the pond and the terraced masses of the forest, suddenly drowned their dispute. " Have you had enough of it? Do you want me to do it again?" And the bulky Hettema, with purple cheeks and swollen neck, unable to find any other way of making them hold their peace, waited, with the mouthpiece to his lips and the orifice threatening to belch forth afresh. IV 1 62 Sappho. IX. Their quarrels usually lasted but a short time, vanishing under the influence of a little music and Fanny's effusive cajolery; but this time he was more seriously angry with her, and for several days in succession kept the same wrinkle on his brow and maintained the same indignant silence, sitting down to draw immediately after meals and refusing to go anywhere with her. It was as if he were suddenly ashamed of the abject life he was leading, afraid of meeting again the little cart ascending the path and that guile- less youthful smile of which he thought constantly. Then, with the confusion of a vanishing dream, of scenery broken to facilitate the transformations of a fairy spectacle, the apparition became indistinct, faded away in the windings of the forest path, and Jean saw it no more. But there remained in him a substratum of melancholy of which Fanny thought that sihe knew the cause, and she determined to banish it. *' I have done it," she said to him joyfully one day. *' I have seen Dechelette. I have returned the money to him. He agrees with you that it is better so ; upon my word, I wonder why. How- ever, it 's done. Later, when I am alone, he will Sappho. 163 remember the little one. Are you satisfied ? Are you still angry with me?" And she described her visit to Rue de Rome, her amazement at finding there, instead of the wild, noisy, caravansary filled with excited crowds, a tranquil, bourgeois household, governed by very strict rules. No more revels, no more fancy-dress balls ; and the explanation of the change, written in chalk over the small door of the studio by some parasite, enraged at being refused admittance: " Closed by reason of marriage." ''And that's the truth, my dear. D6chelette, soon after arriving in Paris, lost his head over a skating-rink girl, Alice Dore; he has had her with him a month, keeping house, actually keep- ing house ! A very nice, sweet little creature, a pretty lamb. They make very little noise both together. I promised that we would go and see them ; that will be a little change for us from hunt- ing-horns and barcaroles. What do you say now to the philosopher and his theories? No to-mor- row, no collage} Ah ! I chaffed him well ! " Jean allowed himself to be taken to Dechelette's, whom he had not seen since their meeting at the Madeleine. He would have been vastly surprised then if any one had told him that there would come a time when he would fraternize without a feeling of disgust with that cynical and disdainful former lover of his mistress, and become almost his friend. Even at that first visit, he was surprised to feel so ^ A slang expression meaning — living as husband and wife though unmarried. 164 Sappho, much at home, charmed by the gentle nature and the ingenuous, kindly laughter of that man with the beard of a Cossack and with a serenity of disposi- tion undisturbed by the painful antics of his liver, which gave a leaden tinge to his complexion and the circles around his eyes. And how readily one could understand the affec- tion he inspired in that Alice Dor6, with her long, soft, white hands and her insignificant blond beauty, heightened by the splendor of her Flemish flesh, as golden {doree) as her name, by the glint of gold in her hair and in her eyelashes, fringing the eye- Hds and making the skin sparkle even to the nails. Picked up by Dechelette on the asphalt of the skating-rink, among the vulgarities and brutalities of the crowd, and the clouds of smoke which a man, as he cuts a flourish, blows into the painted face of a strumpet, she had been surprised and touched by his courtesy. She found herself a woman once more instead of the poor beast of pleasure she had been ; and when he would have sent her away in the morning, conformably to his theories, with a hearty breakfast and a few louis, her heart was so heavy, she said to him so gently and so earnestly, " Keep me a httle longer ! " that he had not the courage to refuse. Afterwards, partly from self-respect, partly from weariness, he kept his door locked on that fortuitous honey- moon, which he passed in the cool tranquillity of his summer palace, so admirably supplied with the comforts of life ; and they lived thus very happily, she because of such tender consideration as she Sappho, 165 had never known, he because of the happiness which he was bestowing upon that poor creature and her gratitude, being subjected thus for the first time, and without reaHzing it, to the penetra- ting charm of real intimacy with a woman, the mysterious enchantment of Hfe a dctix, in commu- nity of kindness of heart and gentleness of nature. To Gaussin the studio on Rue de Rome was a diversion from the base and degrading environ- ment of his life as a petty clerk with an illegitimate household ; he enjoyed the conversation of that scholar with artistic tastes, of that philosopher in a Persian dressing-gown as airy and loose as his doctrines, and the tales of travel which Dechelette told in the fewest possible words, and which were so appropriate among the Oriental hangings, the gilded Buddhas, the bronze chimeras, the exotic luxuriousness of that vast hall where the light fell from a high window, the same light that we find in the heart of a park, stirred by the slender foli- age of the bamboos, by the denticulated fronds of the tree-ferns, and the enormous leaves of the siil- lingiaSy mingled with philodendrons as thin and flex- ible as water-plants seeking shade and moisture. On Sunday especially, with the great bay- window looking on a deserted street of Paris in summer, there was almost as much country and forest there as at Chaville, minus the promiscu- ousness of the company and the Hett^mas' hunting- horn. There was never any company ; but on one occasion Gaussin and his mistress, arriving for dinner, heard several voices in animated conver- 1 66 Sappho, satlon as soon as they entered the house. Night was falling, they were drinking raki in the conser- vatory, and the discussion seemed to be quite warm. " For my part, I consider that five years in Mazas, the loss of one's name, and the ruin of one's life, are a high price to pay for an act of passion and madness. I '11 sign your petition, Dechelette." ** That 's Caoudal," whispered Fanny, with a start. Some one rejoined, with a pitilessly curt refusal : " For my part, I '11 sign nothing. I '11 not connect myself in any way with that rascal." "■ And that 's La Gournerie ! " said Fanny; press- ing close to her lover, she murmured : *' Let us go, if it annoys you to see them." "Why so? not at all." In reality he was not quite certain how he should feel when he found himself face to face with those men, but he did not propose to shirk the test, being desirous per- haps to ascertain the present extent of that jeal- ousy which had formed so large a part of his wretched love-affair. " Let us go in ! " he said ; and they made their appearance in the reddish light of the close of day, which shone upon the bald heads and grizzly beards of Dechelette's friends as they reclined on the low divans around an Oriental table with three legs, on which the spiced and milky beverage which Alice was serving trembled in five or six glasses. The women kissed. '' You know these Sappho, 167 gentlemen, Gaussin?" said Dechelette, rocking gently in his chair. Did he know them? Two^ of them at least were familiar to him, by virtue of his having stared at their pictures for hours in the show-cases of celeb- rities. How they had made him suffer, what bitter hatred he had conceived for them, the hatred of a successor, a fierce longing to leap upon them when he met them in the street, and claw their faces ! But Fanny had well said that that would pass away; now they were simply the faces of ac- quaintances, almost of kinsmen, distant uncles whom he saw again after many years. " The youngster *s still handsome ! " said Ca- oudal, his gigantic form stretched out at full length, holding a screen over his eyes to protect them from the glare. *' And, Fanny, let us look at you ! " He lifted himself on his elbow and winked his expert eyes : '' The face still holds its own; but the waist, — you do well to lace good and tight ; however, console yourself, my girl. La Gournerie is stouter than you are." The poet pursed up his thin lips disdainfully. Sitting Turkish fashion on his pile of cushions, — since his trip to Algiers he claimed that he could sit no other way, — an enormous, pulpy mass, with no trace of intelligence remaining save his noble forehead beneath a white forest, and his stern negro-like glance, he affected a well-bred reserve with Fanny, an exaggerated courtesy, as if to give Caoudal a lesson. Two landscape painters with sun-burned, rustic 1 68 Sappho, faces completed the party ; they too knew Jean's mistress, and the younger of them said to her, pressing her hand, — ** Dechelette has told us the story of the child, and what you have done is very fine, my dear." *' Yes," said Caoudal to Gaussin ; " yes, exceed- ingly chic. Not in the least provincial." She seemed embarrassed by their laudatory words; but at that moment some one stumbled against a piece of furniture in the dark studio, and a voice inquired, " No one here? " *' Here 's Ezano," said Dechelette. Jean had never seen him ; but he knew how great a place that Bohemian, that imaginative creature, now reformed and married, and chief of a division at the Beaux- Arts, had played in Fanny Legrand's life, and he remembered a package of passionate and charming letters. A small man came forward, hollow-cheeked, wrinkled, walking stiffly, who gave his hand at a distance, kept people at arm's length as a result of the habit of speaking from a plat- form, of administrative exclusiveness. He seemed much surprised to see Fanny, especially to find her still lovely after so many years. " Why, Sappho ! " and a furtive flush enlivened his cheek-bones. That name Sappho, which carried her back to the past, and brought her nearer to all her former lovers, caused a certain embarrassment. " And this is Monsieur d'Armandy, who brought her," said Dechelette, hastily, to warn the new- comer. Ezano bowed ; they began to talk. Sappho. 169 Fanny, reassured when she saw how her lover took the state of affairs, and being proud of him, of his beauty and his youth, in that party of art- ists and connoisseurs, was very animated, in high feather. Engrossed by her present passion, she hardly remembered her liaisons with those men ; but years of cohabitation, of life in common, left behind them the stamp of habits, of peculiarities communicated by contact and surviving it, even to the way of rolling cigarettes, which, like her preference for Maryland tobacco, was a legacy from Ezano, Without the slightest annoyance Jean remarked that little detail, which would once have exasper- ated him, experiencing, when he found how calm he was, the joy of a prisoner who has filed his chains and feels that a slight effort will suffice for his escape. " Hein ! my dear Fanny," said Caoudal, in a chaffing tone, pointing to the others, " what a faUing off! see how old they are, how they've flattened out ! we two are the only ones who hold our own." Fanny began to laugh : " Ah ! I beg your par- don, colonel," — he was called so sometimes be- cause of his moustaches, — " it is n't altogether the same thing. I 'm of another promotion." " Caoudal always forgets that he 's an old fogy,'* said La Gournerie; and at a gesture from the sculptor, whom he knew that he had touched to the quick, he cried in his strident voice : '* Medal of 1840; that 's a date to reckon from, my boy ! " 1 70 Sappho. Those two old friends always adopted an aggres- sive tone toward each other ; there was an under- current of antipathy between them, which had never separated them, but which came to the sur- face in their glances, in their lightest words ; and it dated from the day when the poet stole the sculptor's mistress. Fanny was no longer of any consequence to them ; they had both known other joys, other mortifications, but the bitterness re- mained, sinking deeper and deeper with the years. " Just look at us two, and say honestly whether I am the old fogy ! " Caoudal stood erect, in the tightly fitting jacket, which showed his bulging muscles, with his chest thrown out, shaking his fiery mane in which not a white hair could be seen. " Medal of 1840, — fifty-eight years old in three months. Even so, what does that prove? Is it age that makes old men ? It 's only at the Come- die-Francaise and the Conservatoire that men drool at sixty and keep their heads nodding and totter along with bent back and limp legs and senile tricks of all sorts. Sacrebleu! at sixty a man 's more erect than at thirty, because he takes care of himself; and the women will love you still as long as your heart remains young and warms and stirs up your whole carcass." '' Do you think so?" said La Gournerie, glanc- ing at Fanny with a sneer. And Dechelette re- joined with his kindly smile, — " And yet you always said that there 's nothing like youth ; you 're a tiresome fellow." "It was my little Cousinard who made me Sappho. 171 change my views, — Cousinard, my new model. Eighteen years old, rounded outlines, dimples everywhere, a Clodeon. And such a bright one, such a typical child of the people, of the Paris of the Market, where her mother sells poultry ! She makes absurd remarks that make you want to kiss her; on my word, they do. The other day in the studio she takes up one of Dejoie's novels, looks at the title, Therhe, and throws it down again with her pretty little pout : * If he 'd called it Poor Therese, I 'd have read it all night ! ' I am mad over her, I tell you." " Before you know it you '11 be keeping house. And six months hence another rupture, tears as big as your fist, distaste for work, and fits of tem- per when you want to kill everybody." Caoudal's brow grew dark. " It is true that nothing lasts. We take up with one another, then part — " " In that case why take up with one another?" ** Indeed, and what about yourself ? Do you think that you are settled for life with your Fleming?" " Oh ! as for us, we are not housekeeping, are we, Alice?" " Of course not," replied the girl, in a sweet, distraught voice; she was standing on a chair picking glycine and leaves to decorate the table. Dechelette continued, — " There '11 be no rupture between us, hardly a parting. We have taken a lease of two months to be passed together ; on the last day we shall sepa- 172 Sappho. rate without surprise on either side and without despair. I shall return to Ispahan, — ! have al- ready taken my berth in the sleeper, — and Alice to her Httle apartment on Rue La Bruyere, which she has not given up." '' On the third floor above the entresol, the most convenient place in the world for throwing one- self out of window ! " As she spoke the young woman smiled, red- cheeked and luminous in the fading light, her heavy bunch of purple flowers in her hand ; but the tone of her voice was so deep, so solemn, that no one replied. The wind freshened ; the houses opposite seemed taller. " Let us adjourn to the table," cried the colonel, " and let us say idiotic things." *' Yes, that's the id^diy gaudeamus igitur, — let us amuse ourselves while we're young, eh, Caoudal?" said La Gournerie, with a laugh that rang false. A few days later Jean went again to Rue de Rome; he found the studio closed, the great canvas shade lowered over the window, death- like silence from the cellar to the terraced roof. Dechelette had gone at the appointed time, the lease having expired. And he thought : *' It is a fine thing to do what one chooses in hfe, to gov- ern one's mind and one's heart. Shall I ever have the courage to do what he has done? " A hand was placed on his shoulder. *' How are you, Gaussin ? " Dechelette, looking worn and weary, sallower Sappho. 173 and sterner than usual, explained to him that he had not yet left Paris, being detained by some business matters, and that he was living at the Grand Hotel, having a horror of the studio since that frightful thing happened there. ** What do you mean ? " "To be sure, you don't know. Alice is dead. She killed herself. Wait a moment, till I see if there are any letters for me." He returned almost immediately; and as he tore the wrappers from the newspapers with nervous fingers, he talked in a low voice, like a somnambu- list, without looking at Gaussin, who was walking beside him, — " Yes, killed herself, threw herself out of the window, as she said the evening you were there. What would you have? for my part, I did not know, I could not suspect. The day I was to go, she said to me calmly : * Take me, Dechelette ; don't leave me alone ; I can't live without you now. ' That made me laugh. Imagine me with a woman among those Kurds ! The desert, the fever, the nights in camp. At dinner she said again : * I won't be in your way ; you will see how good I '11 be.' Then, seeing that she annoyed me, she did not insist any farther. Later, we went to the Varietes, where we had a box; it was all planned beforehand. She seemed satisfied, held my hand all the time, and whispered, * I am happy.* As I was to start during the night, I carried her home in a cab ; we were both of us very melancholy, did not say a word. She did n't 1 74 Sappho, even thank me for a little package which I slipped into her pocket, to enable her to live in comfort for a year or two. When we reached Rue La Bruyere, she asked me to go up. I refused. ' I entreat you, just as far as the door.' But when I got there, I held to my word ; I would not go in. My berth was taken, my trunk packed, and, be- sides, I had talked too much about going. As I went downstairs, a little heavy-hearted, I heard her call after me something that sounded hke, * Sooner than you,' but I did n't understand till I got down to the street. Oh ! " He paused, his eyes fixed on the ground, before the horrible vision which the sidewalk presented now at every step, that black, inert mass in the agony of death. '^ She died two hours later, without a word, with- out a complaint, her golden eyes looking into mine. Did she suffer? Did she recognize me? We laid her on her bed, fully dressed, a long lace mantle wrapped around her head on one side to conceal the wound in her skull. Very pale, with a little blood on her temple, she was pretty still, and so sweet and gentle ! But as I stooped to wipe away that drop of blood, which was instantly replaced by another, from an inexhaustible source, her face seemed to me to assume an indignant, terrible expression. It was as if the poor girl hurled a silent malediction at me. Indeed, what harm would it have done to remain here a little longer, or to take her with me, ready for anything as she was, and so little trouble ? No pride, but ob- Sappho, 175 stinacy in keeping to what I had said — Well, I did not yield, and she is dead, dead by my fault; and yet I loved her." He grew more and more excited, talked very loud, to the amazement of the people whom he jostled as they walked down Rue d' Amsterdam; and Gaussin, as he passed his former lodging, whose balcony and zinc tent he could see from the street, thought of Fanny and their own story, and felt a shudder run through his veins as Deche- lette continued : — " I took her to Montparnasse, without friends or relatives. I wanted to be alone to think about her. And since then I have stayed on here, always thinking of the same thing, unable to make up my mind to go away, with that idea in full possession of me, and avoiding my house, where I passed two months so happily with her. I live out of doors ; I go from place to place ; I try to distract my thoughts, to escape that dead woman's eye, which accuses me under a thread of blood." Possessed by his remorse, he stopped, while two great tears glided down his little flat nose, so kindly, so in love with life, and said, — '' So it is, my friend ; and yet I am not cruel. But what I did was a little hard, all the same." Jean tried to comfort him, attributing everything to chance, to an unkind fate ; but Dechelette, shaking his head, repeated through his clenched teeth, — 1 76 Sappho, '' No, no ; I shall never forgive myself. I would like to punish myself." That longing for expiation did not cease to haunt him ; he talked about it to all his friends, to Gaussin, whom he went to the office to meet in the afternoon. " Why don't you go away, D6chelette ? Travel, work; it will divert your mind," Caoudal and the others said to him again and again, being a little disturbed by his fixed idea, by his persistence in repeating that he was not naturally cruel. At last, one evening, — whether it was that he had felt a desire to see the studio once more before going away, or that he had gone thither in pursuance of a fixed determination to put an end to his misery, — he returned to his own house ; and in the morn- ing, workmen, going down from the faubourg to their work, found him, with his skull fractured, on the sidewalk in front of his door, dead by the same form of suicide as the woman, with the same shocking circumstances, the same horrible com- motion caused by despair cast naked into the street. In the half-light of the studio, a crowd of artists, models, actresses, all the dancers, all the guests of the latest festivities, pushed and jostled one another. There was a noise of tramping feet and whisper- ing, the sounds of a mortuary chapel under the short flame of the tapers. Through the convol- vuli and the foliage they gazed at the body, dressed in a gown of flowered silk with gold flowers, a Sappho. 177 turban on the head to hide the ghastly wound, lying at full length, the white hands by the sides in an attitude that told of the final collapse and surrender, on the low couch, shaded by glycines, where Gaussin and his mistress had become ac- quainted on the night of the ball. 13 178 Sappho. X. So these ruptures sometimes ended in death ! Now, when they quarrelled, Jean no longer dared to mention his departure, he no longer exclaimed in his exasperation : *' Luckily this won't last long." She would simply have had to retort: "Very well, go; I will kill myself; I will do as she did." And that threat, which he fancied that he could read in her melancholy expression, in the melancholy songs she sang, and in her reveries when she was silent, disturbed him even to terror. Meanwhile he had passed the examination which closes the stage of service in the department offices for consular attaches ; as he had acquitted himself creditably, he would be appointed to one of the first vacant posts, — it was only a matter of weeks, of days ! And all about them, in those last days of the season, as the hours of sunlight grew shorter and shorter, everything was hastening on toward the changes that winter brings. One morning Fanny cried, as she opened the window to the first fog, — " Look, the swallows have gone ! " One after another the bourgeois country houses put up their shutters ; on the Versailles road there was a constant succession of furniture vans, of great country omnibuses laden with bundles, with Sappho. 179 plumes of green plants on the roof, while the leaves blew away in eddying multitudes, swept along like flying clouds under the low sky, and the windmills stood alone in the bare fields. Be- hind the orchard, stripped of its fruits and made smaller in appearance by the absence of foliage, the closed chalets, the red-roofed drying-houses of the laundries, huddled together in the melan- choly landscape ; and on the other side of the house, the railway, no longer masked, extended along the colorless forest in an endless black line. How cruel to leave her all alone amid those melancholy surroundings ! He felt his heart fail him in anticipation; he should never have the courage to bid her adieu. That was precisely what she relied upon, awaiting that supreme mo- ment, and until then maintaining a tranquil de- meanor, never mentioning the subject, true to her promise to place no obstacles in the way of his departure, which had been foreseen and agreed to in the beginning. One day he returned home with this news, — *' I have been appointed." *' Ah! to what place?" She asked the question with feigned Indiffer- ence, but the color faded from her lips and the light from her eyes, and her features were so con- tracted by pain, that he did not prolong the tor- ture: "No, no; not yet. I have let Hedouin have my turn ; that gives us at least six months." Then there was a flood of tears and laughter and frantic kisses, and she stammered: "Thanks, 1 80 Sappho. thanks ! How happy I will make your life now ! That was what made me spiteful, you see, — the thought of your going away." She proposed now to prepare herself better, to resign herself gradu- ally. And then, six months hence, it would no longer be autumn, with the horror of those two deaths in addition. She kept her word. No more nervous out- breaks, no more quarrels; and, furthermore, to avoid the annoyance of the child's presence, she made up her mind to put him at a boarding-school at Versailles. He came home only on Sunday; and if the new order of things did not at once abate his wild and rebellious nature, it taught him hypocrisy, at all events. They lived in a tranquil atmosphere, the dinners with the Hette- mas passed off without a tempest, and the piano was opened once more for the favorite melodies. But at heart Jean was more disturbed, more per- plexed than ever, asking himself where his weak- ness would lead him, and thinking seriously at times of abandoning the consular service for per- manent departmental work. That meant Paris, and an indefinite renewal of the lease of his present life ; but it meant also the demolition of all his youthful dreams, the despair of his family, and an inevitable rupture with his father, who would never forgive that backsliding, especially when he knew the reasons. And for whom ? For a faded, prematurely old creature, whom he no longer loved — he had proved that to his satisfaction in presence of her Sappho. i8i lovers. That being so, what witchcraft was there in that life? One morning in the last days of October, as he entered the train, a young girl's glance met his and suddenly reminded him of his encounter in the woods, of the radiant charm of that child- woman whose image had haunted him for months. She wore the same light dress which the sun flecked so prettily under the trees, but over it was thrown an ample travelling cloak ; and a package of books, a little bag, and a bunch of long reeds and the latest flowers, that lay beside her on the seat, told the story of the return to Paris, of the end of the season in the country. She had recognized him, too, with a half smile quivering in her eyes, as clear and pure as spring water ; and for an in- stant there was the unexpressed concord of identity of thought between those two. "How's your mother, Monsieur d'Armandy?" suddenly inquired old Bouchereau, whom the be- wildered Jean had not noticed at first, buried in his corner, his pale face bending over his news- paper. Jean answered his question, deeply touched that he should remember hirn and his ; and his emotion was greatly increased when the girl asked about the two little twins, who had written her uncle such a pretty letter to thank him for what he had done for their mother. She knew of them ! that thought filled him with joy; then, as he was, it would 1 82 Sappho, appear, in an unusually susceptible mood that morning, he instantly became depressed when he learned that they were returning to Paris, and that Bouchereau was about to begin his lectures at the Ecole de Medecine. He would have no further opportunities to see her. And the fields flying by the windows, beautiful but a moment before, seemed dark and dismal to him as if the sun were in eclipse. The locomotive blew a long whistle; they had arrived. He bowed and lost sight of them; but at the exit from the station they met again, and Bouchereau amid the uproar of the crowd informed him that after the following Thursday he should be at home on Place Vendome — if his heart prompted him to drink a cup of tea. She took her uncle's arm, and it seemed to Jean that it was she who invited him, without speaking. After having decided several times that he would call upon Bouchereau, then that he would not — for what was the use of subjecting himself to un- necessary regrets? — he announced at home that there was soon to be a large evening party at the department, which it would be necessary for him to attend. Fanny examined his coat, ironed his white cravats ; and when Thursday evening came he suddenly discovered that he had not the slightest wish to go out. But his mistress argued with him as to the necessity of the task, reproaching herself for having monopolized him too much, for having selfishly kept him to herself, and she persuaded him, finished dressing him with affectionate play- Sappho, 183 fulness, retouched the bow of his cravat and his hair, laughed because her fingers smelt of the cigarette, which she laid on the mantel and took up again every minute, and it would make his partners turn up their noses. And when he saw her so bright and good-humored, he was filled with remorse for his lie, and would gladly have re- mained with her by the fire if she had not insisted, "I want you to go — you must!" and lovingly pushed him out into the dark road. It was late when he returned ; she was asleep, and the lamplight shining on that sleep of fatigue reminded him of a similar home-coming, already three years ago, after the terrible revelations that had been made to him. What a coward he had shown himself then ! By what strange caprice of fate had the very thing which should have broken his chain riveted it more tightly? He was fairly nauseated with disgust and loathing. The room, the bed, the woman, all were equally horrible to him; he took the light and softly carried it into the adjoining room. He longed so to be alone that he might reflect upon what had happened to him — oh! nothing, almost nothing — He was in love I There is in certain words in common use a secret spring which suddenly lays open their inmost depths, and explains them to us in their excep- tional private signification ; then the word shuts itself up again, resumes its commonplace form and goes its way, unmeaning, worn threadbare by auto- 184 Sappho. matic, every-day use. Love is one of those words ; those to whom its whole significance has been once made clear will understand the delicious agony in which Jean had been living for an hour, with no very definite idea at first as to what his feelings meant. On Place Vendome, in the corner of the salon where they had talked together for a long while, he was conscious of nothing save a sense of perfect comfort, a sweet charm which encompassed him. Not until he was outside the house once more and the door closed behind him, was he seized by a wild outburst of joy, then by a great wave of faintness as if all his veins were opened : — ''Great God! what is the matter with me?" And the Paris through whose streets he walked toward his home seemed to him entirely novel, fairylike, magnified, radiant. Yes, at that hour when the beasts of night are set free and are lurking about, when the filth from the sewers comes to the surface, makes itself mani- fest and swarms under the yellow gas, the Paris that he saw, he, Sappho's lover, interested in all forms of debauchery, was the Paris that the inno- cent maiden may see as she returns from the ball with her head filled with dance music, which she hums to the stars beneath her white dress, — that chaste Paris bathed in moonlight wherein virgin souls open to the light ! And suddenly, as he ascended the broad staircase at the station, almost on the threshold of his wretched home, he sur- prised himself saying aloud : '' Why, I love her ! Sappho, 185 I love her ! " and that was the way he had learned it. " Are you there, Jean ? What on earth are you doing?" Fanny awoke with a start, frightened because she did not feel him by her side. He must needs go and kiss her, lie to her, describe the ball at the department, tell her whether there were any pretty dresses there and with whom he had danced ; but to escape that inquisition and, above all, the car- esses which he dreaded, impregnated as he was with the memory of the other, he invented some urgent work, drawings for Hettema. ''The fire's out; you will be cold." **No, no." *' At least, leave the door open, so that I can see your lamp." He must act his lie out to the end, put the table in position and the plans ; then he sat down, hold- ing his breath, and thought, recalled all the inci- dents of the evening, and, to fix his dream in his mind, described it to C^saire in a long letter, while the night wind stirred the branches, which creaked and groaned without the rustling of leaves, while the trains rumbled by one after another, and while La Balue, annoyed by the light, moved about in his little cage and jumped from one perch to the other with hesitating cries. He told him everything, the meeting in the woods, in the railway carriage, his strange emo- 1 86 Sappho. tion on entering those salons which had seemed to them so dismal and tragic on the ,day of the consultation, with all the furtive whispering in the doorways and the sorrowful glances exchanged from chair to chair, and which, on that evening, were thrown open to him, full of life and anima- tion, in a long brilliantly lighted line. Even Bouchereau himself had not that stern counte- nance, that black eye, searching and disconcerting under its great, bushy eyebrow, but the placid, paternal expression of a worthy bourgeois who is pleased to have people enjoy themselves in his house. " Suddenly she came toward me, and I saw nothing more. Her name is Irene, my dear uncle; she is very pretty, with an attractive manner, hair of the golden brown common among English girls, a child's mouth always ready to laugh — but not that laughter without merriment that excites one in so many women ; a genuine overflow of youth and happiness. She was born in London; but her father was French, and she has no foreign accent at all, only an adorable way of pronounc- ing certain words, of saying ' uncle,' which brings a caress to old Bouchereau's eyes every time. He took her into his family to relieve his brother, who has numerous children, and to replace Irene's sister, the oldest child, who married the chief of his clinical staff two years ago. But doctors don't suit her at all. How she amused me with the idiocy of that young savant who demanded that his fiancee, first of all, should enter into a solemn Sappho. 187 and formal agreement to bequeath both their bodies to the Anthropological Society ! She is a migratory bird. She is fond of boats and the sea ; the sight of a bowsprit pointed seaward touches her heart. She told me all this freely, as to a comrade, a true miss in her manners despite her Parisian grace ; and I listened to her, enchanted by her voice, her laughter, the similarity of our tastes, a secret certainty that the happiness of my life was there at my hand, and that I had only to grasp it, to carry it far away, wherever the chances of * the career ' might send me." " Do come to bed, my dear." He started, stopped writing, instinctively hid the unfinished letter : ** In a few minutes. Go to sleep ; go to sleep." He spoke angrily, and, bending over the table, listened for the return of sleep in her breathing ; for they were very near together, and so far apart ! "Whatever happens, this meeting and this love will be my salvation. You know what my life is ; you will have understood, without my ever men- tioning it, that it is the same as before, that I have not been able to free myself. But what you do not know is that I was ready to sacrifice fortune, future, everything, to this fatal habit, in which I was sink- ing a little deeper every day. Now I have found the mainspring, the prop that I lacked ; and in order to give my weakness no further opportunity, I have sworn never to go to that house again un- 1 88 Sappho. til we have separated and I am free. To-morrow I make my escape." But he did not do it the next day or the day after. He needed some excuse for flight, some pretext, the climax of a quarrel in which one ex- claims, " I am going away ! " to cover his failure to return ; and Fanny was as sweet and cheerful as in the early illusion-ridden days of their house- keeping. Should he write, " It is all over between us," without any further explanations ? But that violent creature would never be resigned to that, she would ferret him out, would pursue him to the door of his house, of his office. No, it would be much better to attack her face to face, to convince her of the irrevocableness, of the finality of the rup- ture, and to enumerate the reasons for it without anger, but without pity. But with these reflections the dread of a sui- cide like Alice Dore's recurred to his mind. In front of their house, on the other side of the street, was a lane running down to the railroad track and closed by a gate; the neighbors went that way when they were in a hurry, and walked along the track to the station. And in his mind's eye, the Southerner saw his mistress, after the final scene, rush across the road, down the lane, and throw her- self under the wheels of the train which whirled him away. That dread beset him so, that the bare thought of that gate between two ivy-covered walls made him postpone the explanation. Sappho, 189 If he had only had a friend, some one to take care of her, to assist her in the first paroxysm ; but living underground as they were, like mountain rats in their collage, they knew no one ; and the Hettemas, those abnormal egoists, shiny and swim- ming in fat, whose animalism became more marked with the approach of the season for hibernating, like the Esquimaux, were not people upon whom the poor creature could call for help in her despair and her abandonment. He must break with her, however, and do it quickly. Despite his promise to himself, Jean had been to Place Vendome two or three times, and had fallen deeper and deeper in love ; and although the subject had not as yet been mentioned, the hearty welcome accorded him by old Bouchereau, and Irene's attitude, wherein reserve was blended with affectionate indulgence and what seemed to be ex- cited anticipation of a declaration, — everything urged him to delay no longer. And then, too, the torture of lying, the pretexts he invented to satisfy Fanny, and the species of sacrilege in going from Sappho's kisses to lay his respectful, faltering hom- age at the other's feet. 196 Sapph 10. XI. While he was hesitating between these alter- natives, he found a card on his table at the depart- ment, the card of a gentleman who had already- called twice during the morning, said the usher, with a certain respect for the following nomen- clature : — C. GAUSSIN D'ARMANDY, President of the Submersionists of the Rhone Valley, Member of the Central Committee of Study and Vigilance, Departmental Delegate, etc., etc. Uncle C^saire in Paris ! Le Fenat, a delegate, member of a vigilance committee ! He had not recovered from his stupor when his uncle appeared, still as brown as a pineapple, with the same won- dering eyes, the laugh wrinkling his temples, and the beard of the days of the League ; but, instead of the everlasting fustian jacket, a new broadcloth frock-coat buttoned tightly over his stomach and endowing the little man with truly presidential majesty. What brought him to Paris? The purchase of an elevating machine for the immersion of his new vines, — he uttered the word elevatoire with an air of conviction which magnified him in his ovm eyes, — and to arrange for a bust of himself which his Sappho. 191 colleagues desired as an ornament to the directors' room. " As you have seen by my card," he said mod- estly, " they have chosen me president. My idea of submersion is making a great sensation in the South. And to think that I, Le Fenat, am actu- ally the man to save the vineyards of France ! Only the crazy fellows are good for anything, you see." But the principal object of his journey was the rupture with Fanny. Realizing that the affair was dragging, he had come to lend a hand. " I know all about such creatures, as you can imagine. When Courbebaisse let his go, in order to get married — " Before attacking his story, he stopped, unbuttoned his coat and produced a Httle wallet with well-rounded sides. " In the first place, relieve me of this. Take it, I say! money — to grease the wheels." He mis- understood his nephew's gesture and thought that he refused from motives of delicacy. " Take it ! take it I It makes me proud to be able to repay the son for a little of what the father has done for me. Besides, Divonne wants me to do it. She knows all about the affair, and is so glad to know that you 're thinking of marrying and shaking off your old crampfish ! " Jean thought that '' old crampfish " was a little unjust in Cesaire's mouth after the service his mistress had done him, and he replied with a touch of bitterness, — ''Take back your wallet, uncle ; you know 192 Sappho, better than any one how indifferent Fanny Is to such considerations." "Yes, she was a good girl," said the uncle, by way of funeral oration ; and he added, winking his crow's foot, — " Keep the money all the same. There are so many temptations in Paris that I prefer to have it in your hands instead of mine ; and then, too, you need it for ruptures just as you do for duels." With that he rose from his chair, declaring that he was dying of hunger and that that momentous question could be discussed more satisfactorily at the breakfast table, fork in hand. It was the typi- cal airy, jesting tone of the Southerner in discuss- ing questions relating to women. "Between ourselves, my boy," — they were seated in a restaurant on Rue de Bourgogne, and the uncle, his napkin tucked in his neck, was beam- ing with satisfaction, while Jean nibbled with the ends of his teeth, unable to eat, — " it seems to me that you take the thing too tragically. I know very well that the first step is hard, the explana- tion an infernal bore ; but if you feel that it 's too much for you, say nothing at all, — do as Courbe- baisse did. Up to the very morning of the wed- ding. La Mornas knew nothing about it. At night, on leaving his intended, he would go to the place where the singer was squalling and escort her home. You will say that that was n't very regu- lar, nor very honest either. But when one is n't fond of scenes, and with such terrible creatures as Sappho. 193 Paola Mornas ! For nearly ten years that tall, handsome fellow had trembled before that little hussy. When it came to cutting loose, he had to manoeuvre, to resort to stratagem." And this is how he went about it. On the day before the wedding, one Fifteenth of August, the day of the great festival, Cesaire pro- posed to the young woman that they should go and fish in the Yvette. Courbebaisse was to join them for dinner; and then they would all three return together on the following evening, when Paris would have evaporated its odor of dust, of exploded fire-crackers and oil-lamps. She as- sented. Behold them both lying at full length on the bank of that little stream, which purls and gleams between its low shores, and makes the fields so green and the willows so leafy. After the fishing, the bath. It was not the first time that he and Paola had swum together, like two boys, like comrades; but on that day that little Mornas, with her bare arms and legs, her perfectly moulded gypsy-like body, to which the wet cos- tume clung closely everywhere — perhaps, too, the thought that Courbebaisse had given him carte blanche. Ah ! the little wretch ! She turned, looked him in the eyes, and said sternly, — " You understand, Cesaire ; don't try that again." He did not insist, for fear of spoiling his chances, but said to himself, " I will wait till after dinner." Very merry the dinner was, on the wooden bal- cony of the inn, between the two flags which the landlord had hoisted in honor of the Fifteenth of 13 1 94 Sappho, August. It was very warm, the sweet bay was very fragrant, and they could hear the drums and fire- works and the music of the hurdy-gurdy trundhng through the streets. '' How stupid it is of that Courbebaisse not to come till to-morrow," said La Mornas, stretching out her arms, with a gleam of champagne in her eyes. *' I feel like having some fun to-night." '' Gad ! and so do I ! " He was leaning by her side on the balcony rail, which was still burning hot from the scorching rays of the sun, and slyly, as an experiment, slipped his arm around her waist, " Oh, Paola ! Paola !" That time, instead of being angry, the singer began to laugh, but so loud and heartily that he ended by doing the same. A similar attempt was repulsed in the same way in the evening, when they returned from the fete, where they had danced and eaten sweets ; and as their bedrooms adjoined, she sang to him through the partition : " You are too small, oh ! you are too small," — with all sorts of uncomplimentary comparisons between Courbe- baisse and himself He was strongly tempted to retort, to call her the widow Mornas; but it was too soon. The next day, however, as they sat before a bountiful breakfast, and when Paola had become impatient and finally anxious at her man's failure to appear, it was with considerable satis- faction that he drew his watch and said solemnly : '' Noon ! it is all over." " What do you mean ? " ** He is married." Sappho. 195 ''Who?" " Courbebalsse." Vlan! '* Ah ! my boy, what a blow ! In all my love- making I never received such a one. And on the instant she insisted on starting off. But there was no train till four o'clock. And meanwhile the un- faithful one was scorching the rails of the P., L., and M. on his way to Italy with his wife. There- upon she turned on me again and took it out of me with her fists and her claws, — such luck ! — when I had turned the key in the door; then she went for the furniture, and finally fell on the floor in a terrible attack of hysteria. At five they put her on her bed and held her there ; while I, all torn and bleeding as if I had just been through a thicket of brambles, hurried off to find Doctor d'Orsay. In such affairs it 's just the same as it is in duelling, you should always have a, doctor in attendance. Fancy me rushing along the road with an empty stomach, and in such a hot sun ! It was dark when I returned with him. Suddenly, as I approached the inn, I heard the sound of voices and saw a crowd under the windows. Great God ? had she killed herself? had she killed some one else? With La Mornas the latter was more probable. I rushed forward, and what did I see? The balcony strung with Venetian lanterns, and the singer standing there, consoled and superb, wrapped in one of the flags and shrieking the Marseillaise as a contribution to the imperial holi- day, above the applauding multitude. 196 Sappho, " And that, my boy, is how Courbebaisse's liaison came to an end ; I won't say that it was all ended at one stroke. After ten years of imprisonment, one must always expect a brief period of surveillance. But the worst of it fell on me, at all events ; and I will stand as much from yours, if you choose." *' Ah ! uncle, she 's not the same kind of a woman." " Nonsense," said Cesaire, breaking the seal of a box of cigars and holding them to his ear to make sure that they were dry; ''you're not the first man who has left her." " That is true enough." And Jean joyfully grasped at that suggestion, which would have torn his heart a few months before. His uncle and his amusing story really encouraged him a little, but what he could not endure was the living a twofold lie for months, the hypocrisy, the division of his time ; he could never make up his mind to that, ariH had waited only too long. ''What do you mean to do, then?" While the young man was struggling with his perplexities, the member of the vigilance commit- tee combed his beard, experimented with smiles, attitudes, different ways of carrying the head, then inquired with a careless air, — " Does he live very far from here?" "Who, pray?" " Why, this artist, this Caoudal, whom you sug- gested to me for my bust. We might go and in- quire his prices while we are together." Sappho. 197 Caoudal, although he had become famous, was a great spendthrift and still lived on Rue d'Assas, the scene of his early successes. C^saire, as they walked thither, inquired concerning his rank as an artist ; he would ask a big price, of course, but the gentlemen of the committee insisted upon a work of the first order. " Oh ! you need have no fear, uncle, if Caoudal is willing to undertake it." And he enumerated the sculptor's titles, — Member of the Institute, Commander of the Legion of Honor, and a multi- tude of foreign orders. Le Fenat opened his eyes in amazement. " And you are friends?" "Very good friends." "What a place this Paris is? What fine ac- quaintances one makes here ! " Gaussin would have been somewhat ashamed to confess that Caoudal was one of Fanny's old lovers, and that she had brought them together. But one would have said that Cesaire was thinking of it. " Is he the one who did that Sappho we have at Castelet? Then he knows your mistress and can help you, perhaps, to break with her. The Insti- tute, the Legion of Honor, — those things always make an impression on a woman." Jean did not reply ; perhaps he too thought that he might make use of the first lover's influence. The uncle continued with a hearty laugh : — " By the way, you know the bronze is no longer in your father's room. When Divonne learned, when I was unlucky enough to have to tell her 1 98 Sappho. that it represented your mistress, she wouldn't have it there. Considering the consul's whims, his objections to the slightest change, it was n't an easy matter to move it, especially without letting him suspect the reason. Oh, these women ! She managed so cleverly that to-day Monsieur Thiers presides over your father's mantel, and poor Sappho lies in the dust in the windy chamber, with the old firedogs and cast-off furniture; she suffered too in the moving, — her head-dress was smashed and her lyre broken off. Doubtless Divonne's spite was the cause of her misfortune." They reached Rue d'Assas. In view of the modest, hard-working aspect of that city of artists, of studios with numbered barn-Hke doors, opening on both sides of a long courtyard at the end of which were the ugly buildings of a district school with a perpetual murmur of reading, the president of the Submersionists conceived fresh doubts as to the talent of a man so modestly quartered ; but as soon as he entered Caoudal's studio, he knew what to expect. *' Not for a hundred thousand francs, not for a million ! " roared the sculptor at Gaussin's first word ; and slowly raising his long body from the couch on which he lay in the centre of the dis- orderly, neglected studio, he added: *'A bust! Oh, yes ! just look at that mass of plaster in a thousand pieces on the floor, — my group for the next Salon, which I have just pulverized with a mallet. That's all I care for sculpture, and tempt- ing as monsieur's lineaments are — " Sappho, 199 ** Gaussin d'Armandy, president — " The uncle collected all his titles, but there were too many of them ; Caoudal interrupted him and turned to the younger man, — *' You are staring at me, Gaussin. Do you think I have grown old ? " It was quite true that he looked his full age in that light from above falling upon the scars, the furrows and wrinkles of his dissipated, fatigued face, his Hon's mane showing bald spots like old carpet, his cheeks hanging and flabby, and his moustache of the color of tarnished gilt, which he no longer took the trouble to curl or dye. What was the use? Cousinard, the little model, had gone. " Yes, my dear fellow, with my moulder, a savage, a brute, but twenty years old ! " His tone was fierce and ironical, and he strode up and down the studio, kicking aside a stool that stood in his path. Suddenly, halting in front of the mirror with a carved copper frame over the couch, he looked at himself with a ghastly grim- ace : " What an ugly, played-out thing ! veins and dewlaps like an old cow ! " He put his hand to his face, and in a piteous, comical tone, with the fore- sight of an old beau bewailing his charms : " To think that I shall regret even this, next year ! " The uncle was horrified. The idea of that acad- emician talking in that tone and telling about his vile love-affairs ! So there were crackbrains every- where, even in the Institute ; and his admiration for the great man lessened with the sympathy he felt for his weaknesses. 200 Sappho. ** How's Fanny? Are you still at Chaville?** said Caoudal, suddenly subsiding and sitting down beside Gaussin, and tapping him familiarly on the shoulder. " Oh, poor Fanny ! we have n't much longer to live together." "Are you going away?" " Yes, very soon ; and I am going to be married first. I have got to leave her." The sculptor laughed a savage laugh. " Bravo ! I am delighted to hear it. Avenge us, my boy; avenge us on those trollops. Deceive them, throw them over, and let them weep, the wretches ! You will never do them as much harm as they have done to others." Uncle Cesaire was triumphant. " You see, monsieur does n't take such a tragic view of the afifair as you do. Can you imagine such a zany? What keeps him from leaving her is the fear that she will kill herself! " Jean frankly avowed the effect that Alice Dore's suicide had made upon him. " But this is a different matter," said Caoudal, earnestly. "That girl was a melancholy, soft creature, with hands always falling at her sides, — a poor doll without any sawdust. Dechelette was wrong in thinking that she died for him. A sui- cide from fatigue and disgust with life. While Sappho — ah! yes, she'll kill herself! She's too fond of love for that ; she '11 burn to the end, down to the bobhhes. She 's of the race of jeunes preinierSy who never change their line of Sappho, 201 parts and die, toothless and without eyelashes, in their jeune premier costumes. Just look at me. Do I kill myself? It's of no use for me to grieve. I know perfectly well that now she has gone I shall take another, that I must always have one. Your mistress will do as I do, as she has done before. Only she is no longer young, and it will be a harder task." Still the uncle was triumphant : ** You feel bet- ter now, eh ? " Jean said nothing, but his scruples were over- come and his mind made up. They were going away, when the sculptor called them back to show them a photograph which he took from the dust on his table and wiped with his sleeve. " See, there she is. Is n't she a pretty one, the hussy, to kneel before ? Those legs, that breast ! " The contrast was terrible between those glowing eyes, that passionate voice, and the senile trembling of the great, spatula-shaped fingers in which quivered the smiling image of Cousinard, the little model, with her dimpled charms. 202 Sappho. XII. ** Is it you ? How early you have come home ! " She came in from the garden, her skirt full of fallen apples, and ran quickly up the steps, dis- turbed by her lover's manner, which was at once embarrassed and determined. ''What's the matter?" "■ Nothing, nothing ; it 's this weather, this bright sunshine. I wanted to make the most of the last fine day to take a turn in the forest, we two. What do you say? " She gave her street urchin's cry, which came to her lips whenever she was pleased. '' Oh, what luck ! " For more than a month they had not been out, housed by the rains and winds of November. It was not always entertain- ing in the country ; one might as well live in the Ark with Noah and his beasts. She had a few orders to give in the kitchen, because of the Het- temas, who were coming to dinner; and while he waited outside on the Pave des Gardes, Jean gazed at the little house, warmed by that mild Indian summer light, and at the broad moss-covered pavement of the country street, with that farewell, all-embracing and endowed with memory, which we say with our eyes to places we are about to leave. Sappho, 203 The window of the living-room was wide open, so that he could hear the warbling of the thrush alternating with Fanny's orders to the servant: " Be sure and remember to have it ready at half- past six. First you will serve the wild duck. Oh ! I must give you the table linen." Her voice rang out clear and happy among the noises of the kitchen and the twittering of the bird pluming himself in the sun. And he, knowing that their household had only two hours more to live, felt sick at heart in presence of those festal prepa- rations. He longed to go in, to tell her everything, on the spot, at one stroke ; but he dreaded her shrieks, the horrible scene which the neighbors would over- hear, and a scandal that would stir Upper and Lower Chaville to their depths. He knew that when she had thrown off all restraint, nothing had any effect upon her, and he adhered to his plan of taking her into the forest. " Here I am, all ready." She joyously took his arm, warning him to speak low and walk fast as they passed their neighbors' house, fearing that Olympe would want to accom- pany them and spoil their little party. Her mind was not at rest until they had crossed the track and turned to the left into the woods. It was a bright, mild day, the sun's rays sifting through a silvery, floating mist which bathed the whole atmosphere, clung to the thickets, where some trees still displayed magpies' nests and tufts of mistletoe, at a great height among the few golden 204 Sappho. leaves clinging to the branches. They heard the cry of a bird, maintained without a break, like the noise made by a file, and those blows of the beak on the wood which answer the woodcutter's axe. They walked slowly, keeping step on the rain- soaked ground. She was warm from having walked so fast ; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkled, and she stopped to take off the lace mantle, a gift from Rosa, which she had thrown over her head as she came out, — a fragile and costly relic of bygone splendors. The dress she wore, a poor black silk, ripped under the arms and at the waist, had been familiar to him for three years ; and when she raised it, walking in front of him because of a puddle, he saw that the heels of her boots were badly worn. How cheerfully she had endured that semi- poverty, without regret or lamentation, thinking solely of him, of his comfort, never happier than when she was rubbing against him, her hands clasped on his arm. And Jean, as he glanced at her, rejuvenated by that new supply of sunshine and of love, marvelled at the never-faihng energy of such a creature, at the wonderful power of for- getting and forgiving which enabled her to re- tain such a store of cheerful spirits and heedless gayety, after a life of passions, of disappointments and tears, all marked upon her face, but vanishing at the slightest effusion of merriment. " It 's a mushroom ; I tell you it 's a mushroom ! '* She plunged into the underbrush up to her knees in the dead leaves, returned with dishevelled Sappho, 205 hair and her dress torn by the brambles, and pointed out the little network at the foot of the mushroom which distinguishes the genuine from the false variety. "You see, it has the tulle!'' And she was triumphant. He did not listen ; he was thinking of other things, asking himself: " Is this the best time? Shall I? " But his courage failed him ; she was laughing too heartily, or the place was not favorable ; and he led her on and on like an assassin planning his crime. He was on the point of making up his mind, when, at a bend in a path, some one appeared and disturbed their tete-a-tete^ — the keeper of that district, Hochecorne, whom they sometimes met. A poor devil, who had lost, one after another, in the little house in the woods on the edge of the pond, which the state allotted him, two children and his wife, all by malignant fevers. At the time of the first death the doctors declared the house unhealthy, as being too near the water and its emanations; but, despite the certificates and re- ports, they had left him there two years, three years, long enough to see his whole family die with the exception of one little girl, with whom he had finally moved into a new house on the outskirts of the woods. Hochecorne had a square Breton face, with bright, brave eyes, a forehead receding beneath his forage cap, — a typical specimen of fidelity to duty, of superstitious obedience to all orders ; he had his rifle barrel over one shoulder and on the other the head of his sleeping child, whom he was carrying. 2o6 Sappho. " How is she ? " Fanny inquired, smiling at the little four-year-old girl, pale and shrunken with fever, who awoke and opened her great eyes sur- rounded by pink circles. The keeper sighed. '' Not very well. I take her everywhere with me, but it's no use: she doesn't eat anything, she doesn't want anything; I can't help thinking it was too late when we changed the air, and that she had already caught the disease. She 's so light — just see, madame, you'd think she was a leaf. One of these days she '11 run away like the others ! Good God ! " That '' good God ! " muttered in his mustache, was the whole of his revolt against the cruelty of departments and clerks. '' She is trembling ; she seems to be cold." *' It 's the fever, madame." "Wait a moment; we will warm her." She took the mantle that was hanging on her arm and wrapped the little one in it: *' Yes, yes, let it stay; it shall be her bridal veil later." The father smiled a heartbroken smile, and shak- ing the child's hand, — she had fallen asleep again and was ashen-hued like a little dead girl,- in all that white, — he bade her thank the lady, then went his way with a ** good God ! " drowned by the cracking of the branches under his feet. Fanny was no longer merry, but clung closely to him with all the timorous fondness of the woman whom her emotion, be it sad or joyous, draws nearer to the man she loves. Jean said to himself, *' What a kind-hearted girl ! " but with- Sappho. 207 out weakening in his resolve, on the contrary be- coming more determined to put it in execution ; for Irene's face rose before him on the sloping path on which they were entering, the memory of the radiant smile he had met in that path, which had taken his heart captive at once, even before he knew its enduring charm, the secret spring of intelligence and sweetness of character. He re- flected that he had waited until the last moment, that it was Thursday. ** Come, I must do it ; " and, spying a cross-road a short distance away, he mentally fixed upon that as the limit. It was a clearing where the wood had recently been cut away, trees lying prostrate amid chips, fragments of bark, twigs, and charcoal kilns. A little farther on was the pond, from which a white vapor arose, and on the shore the little abandoned house, with its dilapidated roof, windows open and broken, the lazaretto of the Hochecornes. Be- yond, the woods ascended toward Velizy, a vast hillside of ruddy foliage, of lofty trees, crowded closely together and melancholy to look upon. Suddenly he stopped. ** Suppose we rest a moment? " They sat down on a long trunk- lately felled, an old oak whose branches could be counted by the wounds of the axe. It was a warm corner, en- livened by a pallid reflection of the sun's rays, and by a perfume of belated violets. ** How nice it is here ! " she said, letting her head fall languidly on his shoulder and seeking the place for a kiss in his neck. He drew back a 2o8 Sappho. little, took her hand. Thereupon she took alarm at the expression of his face, which had suddenly grown stern. '' What 's the matter? What is it? " ** Bad news, my poor girl. You know Hddouin, who went away in my place." He spoke hesi- tatingly, in a hoarse voice, the sound of which astonished himself, but which gained in firmness toward the end of the story he had prepared be- forehand. Hedouin had fallen sick on arriving at his post, and he was appointed by the department to replace him. He had concluded that that would be easier to say, less painful than the truth. She listened to him to the end, without interrupting him, her face of a grayish pallor, her eyes staring into vacancy. " W^hen are you going?" she asked, withdrawing her hand. " Why, this evening, to-night." And in a false, whining voice he added, *' I intend to pass twenty- four hours at Castelet, then sail from Marseille." " Enough, don't lie to me ! " she cried with a savage explosion which brought her to her feet. " Don't lie to me any more ; you don't know what you 're doing. The truth is that you 're going to be married. Your family 's been working on you long enough. They're so afraid that I'll keep you, that I '11 prevent you from going in search of the typhus or the yellow fever ! At last they 're satisfied. The young lady's to your taste, of course. And when I think how I fussed over the knot in your cravat that Thursday! What an idiot I was, eh?" Sappho, 209 She laughed a ghastly, atrocious laugh, which distorted her features and showed the gap made on one side by the breaking — of recent occurrence, doubtless, for he had never before noticed it — of one of her lovely, pearly teeth of which she was so proud ; and the absence of that tooth in that clay- colored, wrinkled, distorted face caused Gaussin a horrible pang. " Listen to me," he said, taking her arm and forcing her to sit close beside him. '* It is true ; I am going to be married. My father was set upon it, as you know so well ; but what difference can that make to you, since I am to leave France ? " She released herself, preferring to keep her temper at the boiling point. " And it was to tell me this that you made me walk a league through the woods ! You said to yourself: 'At all events, they won't hear her if she cries,' But no : not an outcry, you see, not a tear. In the first place, I 've had my fill of a pretty boy like you ; you can go, I sha'n't be the one to call you back. Run away to the Indies with your wife, your little one, as they say where you come from. She must be a sweet creature, the little one, ugly as a gorilla, or else enceijite with a big waist, for you 're as big a gull as those who chose her for you." She no longer restrained herself, launching out upon a sea of insults and abominations, until she was able to do no more than falter in his face, tauntingly, as one shakes one's fist, " Coward ! liar ! coward ! " 14 2i6 Sappho, It was Jean's turn to listen to her without a word, without attempting to stop her. He liked her better so, insulting, degraded, Pere Legrand's own daughter ; the separation would be less cruel. Did she realize it? At all events, she suddenly ceased, fell at her lover's feet, her head and breast foremost, with a great sob which shook her whole frame, and from which emerged a broken wail: " Forgive me ! mercy ! I love you ; I have no- body but you. My love, my life, do not do this thing ; do not leave me ! What do you suppose will become of me?" He began to yield to her emotion. Oh ! that was what he had dreaded. The tears rose from her to him, and he threw back his head to keep them in his overflowing eyes, trying to calm her by stupid words, and by insisting upon that sen- sible argument, *' Why, as long as I must leave France, anyway." She sprang to her feet, crying in words which disclosed her whole hope, — ** Ah ! but you would not have gone. I would have said to you, 'Wait; let me love you still.' Do you suppose that it happens twice to a man to be loved as I love you ? You have time enough to marry, you are so young ; but it will be all up with me before long. I shall be at the end of my strength, and then we shall part naturally." He tried to rise; he had courage enough for that, and to say to her that all that she could do would be of no avail; but by clinging to him, dragging herself on her knees through the mud Sappho, 211 that still remained in that hollow spot, she forced him to resume his seat; and kneeling before him, twining her arms around him, with her lips and the clinging embrace of her eyes, her childlike caresses, patting that stern face with her hands, twining her fingers in his hair, she tried to kindle anew the cold embers of his love, she reminded him in whispers of their past happiness, of their joyous Sunday afternoons. All that was nothing compared to the happiness she would give him hereafter. And while she whispered in his ear words like these, great tears rolled down her face, distorted as it was by an expression of anguish and terror, and she struggled and shrieked in the voice that one hears in dreams : "■ Oh, it cannot be ! tell me that it is n't true that you are going to leave me ! " And more sobs and groans and calls for help, as if she saw a knife in his hand. The executioner was hardly more courageous than the victim. He feared her wrath no more than her caresses, but he was defenceless against that despair, that bf^''*- -Wrh filled the woods and died away over the fever-laden, .•^'^o-nant water whereon the sun lay, red and melancholy . '^ expected to suffer, but not so intensely as that; and it required all the dazzling splendor of the new love to enable him to resist the impulse to lift her with both hands and say to her, *' I will stay; hush ! I will stay." For how long a time did they thus exhaust each other's strength? The sun was no longer aught 212 Sappho, but a red bar, constantly narrowing, on the ho- rizon ; the pond was of a slate-gray hue, and one would have said that its unhealthy vapor was in- vading the moor and the woods and the hillsides opposite. In the growing darkness he saw noth- ing but that pale face raised to his, that open mouth emitting a lament to which there was no end. A little later, when it was quite dark, her cries subsided. Then there was the rushing sound of floods of tears, without end, one of those showers that follow the greatest fury of the tempest, and from time to time an " Oh ! " deep and low, as if called forth by some horrible vision which she drove away and which constantly returned. Then nothing at all. It was all over ; the beast was dead. A cold north wind arose, rustled among the branches, bringing the echo of a dis- tant clock striking the hour. ^' Come, let us go ; don't stay here." He raised her gently, and felt that she was like wax in his hands, as submissive as a child and convulsed by heartrending sobs. It seemed to him that she retail "^ '-^'n dread, a certain respect, for the man who had shown himself so sLrong. She walked beside him, keeping step with him, but timidly, without taking his arm ; and to see them thus, walking uncertainly in gloomy silence along the paths where the yellow reflection of the ground guided them, one would have said that they were a couple of peasants returning home exhausted after a long and fatiguing day in the open air. Sappho, 213 As they came out of the woods a light appeared at Hochecorne's open door, and against it they saw the silhouettes of two men. " Is that you, Gaussin?" asked Hettema, walking toward them with the keeper. They were beginning to be anx- ious because of their failure to return and of the groans they had heard in the woods. Hochecorne was just going to get his gun, to set out in search of them. " Good-evening, monsieur, madame. The little one 's much pleased with her shawl. I had to put it in the bed with her." It was their last act in common, that almsgiving of a short time before ; their hands had joined for the last time around the moribund's little body. *' Good-night, good-night, Pere Hochecorne." And they hurried away, all three, toward the house, Hettema still greatly puzzled concerning those noises which filled the woods. " They rose and fell and rose again ; you 'd have thought some- body was killing an animal of some sort. But didn't you hear anything?" Neither of them replied. At the corner of the Pavd des Gardes Jean hesitated. " Stay to dinner," she whispered imploringly. " Your train has gone ; you can take the nine o'clock." He went into the house with them. What need he fear? Such a scene is not acted twice, and the least he could do was to give her that trifling consolation. 214 Sappho. The living-room was warm, the lamp burned brightly, and the sound of their footsteps in the by-path had warned the servant, who was placing the soup on the table. '* Here you are at last ! " said Olympe, already seated, her napkin under her short arms. She removed the lid of the soup-tureen, then suddenly paused with an exclamation, — " Mon Dieu! my dear — " It was Fanny, haggard of face, seemingly ten years older, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, with mud on her dress and even in her hair, the terri- fied disarray of a prostitute after a chase by the police. She breathed heavily a moment, her poor inflamed eyes blinking in the light; and little by little the warm atmosphere of the little house, the bright and attractive table, evoked memories of the happy days and caused a new outburst of tears, amid which could be distinguished the words: '* He is going to leave me ; he is going to be married." Hettema, his wife, and the peasant woman who was serving them looked at one another and at Gaussin. " At all events, let us dine," said the fat man, evidently in a passion; and the clashing of greedy spoons mingled with the sound of running water in the adjoining bedroom, where Fanny was sponging her face. When she returned, all blue with powder, in a white woollen peignoir, the Het- temas watched her with alarm, expecting some fresh outburst, and were greatly astonished to see her, without a word, attack the food greedily, like Sappho. 215 a shipwrecked sailor, and fill the hollow dug by her chagrin and the gulf made by her shrieks with whatever was within reach, — bread, cabbage, a wing of the wild duck, potatoes. She ate and ate. The conversation was somewhat constrained at first, but gradually became more spontaneous ; and as the Hettemas talked only upon commonplace, material topics, such as the method of making pan- cakes digest well with preserves, and whether hair or feathers were better to sleep on, they arrived safely at the coffee, which the stout couple flavored with a little burned sugar, and sipped slowly with their elbows on the table. It was a pleasure to see the trustful and placid glance exchanged by those two bulky crib and manger mates. They had no desire to part, not they. Jean surprised that glance, and in that familiar room, filled with souvenirs, with old habits crouching in every corner, the torpor of weariness, of digestion, of bodily comfort stole over him. Fanny, who was watching him closely, had softly approached his chair, rubbed against him, and passed her arm through his. " Listen," he said suddenly. " Nine o'clock ! adieu ! I will write to you." He sprang to his feet and was out-of-doors, across the street, feeling in the darkness for the latch of the gate at the entrance to the lane. Two arms were thrown about his waist: "Kiss me, at least." He felt that he was enveloped in her dress, that he was impregnated with the perfume, the warmth. 2i6 Sappho, of that woman's embrace, intoxicated hy that fare- well kiss, which left in his mouth the taste of fever and of tears. And she, feeling that he was weak, murmured, "Just a little while, only a httle while." A signal on the track. It was the train ! How had he the strength to tear himself free, to rush to the station whose lamps gleamed through the leafless branches ? He was still overcome with amazement as he sat panting in a corner of the carriage, gazing out through the window at the lighted windows of the little house and a white figure at the gate. *' Adieu ! adieu ! " And that cry banished the speechless dread he had felt at that curve in the track of seeing his mistress in the place she occupied in his dream of death. Putting out his head, he watched their little sum- mer house recede and grow smaller and rise and fall in the inequalities of the ground, until it was no more than a wandering star. Suddenly he felt a prodigious joy and sense of relief. How freely he breathed, how lovely the whole valley of Meu- don was, and those broad black hillsides ending far away in a twinkling triangle of innumerable lights, descending toward the Seine in regular lines ! Irene was waiting for him there, and he was flying to her with all the speed of the train, with all his lover's eagerness, with all his impulsive yearn- ing for a new and honorable Hfe. Paris ! He called a cab to be driven to Place Vendome. But under the gaslight he scrutinized his clothes, his shoes covered with mud, a thick, Sappho, 217 clogging mud, his whole past which still held him fast by burdensome and degrading bonds. " Oh, no ! not to-night." And he drove to his old lodg- ing-house on Rue Jacob, where Le Fenat had taken a room for him near his own. 2i8 Sappho. XIII. The next day Cesaire, who had taken upon him- self the dehcate commission of going to Chaville to get his nephew's books and other property, to con- summate the rupture by moving out of the house, returned very late, just as Gaussin was beginning to tire himself out with all sorts of wild and sinister conjectures. At last a cab with a rail around the top, heavy as a hearse, turned the corner of Rue Jacob, loaded with corded boxes and an enormous trunk which he recognized as his own, and his uncle entered, mysterious and heartbroken. '' I took plenty of time, in order to pick up every- thing at once and not have to go there again." He pointed to the boxes which two porters were placing in different parts of the room. ''Your clothes and your Hnen are in this one, your papers and books there. Nothing is missing but your let- ters ; she begged me to let her keep them, so that she could read them over again, could have some- thing from you. I could n't see that there was any danger in that. She 's such a soft-hearted girl ! " He sat down on the trunk, breathing hard, spong- ing his forehead with his brown silk handkerchief, as large as a napkin. Jean dared not ask him for details, in what mood he had found her ; the other furnished none for fear of making him sad. And Sappho. 219 they filled that painful silence, pregnant with things unexpressed, by remarks as to the sudden change in the weather, which had grown much colder since the preceding day, as to the depressing as- pect of that bare, desert suburb of Paris, planted with factory chimneys, and with enormous cast- iron cylinders, used as storehouses by market- gardeners. " Did she give you nothing for me, uncle?" Jean asked after a while. " No ; you need have no fear. She won't bother you ; she has chosen her course with much deter- mination and dignity." Why did Jean detect in those few words a sug- gestion of blame, a rebuke for his harshness? "I tell you," continued the uncle, ''job for job, I prefer La Mornas's claws to that unhappy crea- ture's despair." " Did she cry much?" ** Oh, my dear boy — And so hard, so heartily, that I sobbed myself as I sat opposite her with no strength to — " He blew his nose and shook ofif his emotion with a shake of the head like an old goat. ''However, what can you expect? It isn't your fault ; you could n't pass your whole life there. Things are settled quite as they should be; you leave her some money and her furniture. And now, on with the courting ! Try to arrange your marriage in good season. Such affairs are too se- rious for me. The consul will have to take a hand in it. As for me, I can only deal with left-handed connections." He was suddenly seized by a fresh 220 Sappho. paroxysm of melancholy, and added, as he stood with his forehead against the window, looking out at the low clouds from which the rain poured down upon the roofs, — '' I tell you, the world is growing dismal ; in my day we used to part more cheerfully than this." When Le Fenat had gone, accompanied by his elevating machine, Jean, deprived of that restless, talkative good-humor, had a long week to pass, an impression of emptiness and solitude, all the dark bewilderment of widowhood. In such cases, even without regret for a vanished passion, you seek for your double, you miss him ; for the life together, the sharing of table and bed, create a network of invisible, subtle bonds, whose strength is disclosed only by the effort and the pain of breaking them. The influence of close association and habit is so marvellously penetrating that two persons who live the same life end by resembling each other. His five years with Sappho had not as yet moulded him to that extent; but his body re- tained the marks of the chain and felt its heavy, dragging weight. And just as it happened on several occasions that his steps turned instinctively toward Chaville when he left his office, so, in the morning, he would feel on the pillow beside him for the heavy masses of black hair, released from their comb, upon which his first kiss was wont to fall. The evenings especially seemed interminable to him in those furnished lodgings which recalled the early days of their liaison, the presence of another Sappho. 221 mistress, reserved and silent, whose little card sur- rounded the mirror with an alcove perfume, and with the mystery of her name : Fanny Legrand. Thereupon he would leave the house and try to tire himself out, to distract his thoughts with the music and glare of some petty theatre, until old Bouchereau should give him the right to pass three evenings a week with his fiancee. They had reached an understanding at last. Irene loved him, UncU was content ; the marriage was to take place early in April, at the end of the course of lectures. They had the three winter months to see each other, to become acquainted with each other, to desire each other, to make the fond and charming paraphrase of the first glance, which binds hearts together, and the first avowal, which causes unrest. On the evening of his betrothal, Jean, returning home without the slightest inclination for sleep, felt an impulse to arrange his room so as to give it an orderly, hard-working appearance, obeying the natural instinct to make our life correspond with our thoughts. He put his table in place and his books, which he had not as yet unpacked, and which were tossed pell-mell into one of those packing-boxes made in haste, the Code between a pile of handkerchiefs and a gardening jacket. As he was arranging the books, a letter in his mistress's handwriting, with no envelope, fell from between the leaves of a Dictionary of Commercial Law, the book he consulted most frequently. Fanny had intrusted it to the hazard of his fut- 121 . Sappho, ure labors, distrusting the too short-lived emotion of Cesaire, and thinking that she would gain her object more surely in that way. He determined not to open it at first, but yielded at the very mild, very reasonable words with which it began, her agitation being evident in the trembling of the pen, the unevenness of the lines. She asked but one favor, a single one, that he would return to her from time to time. She would say nothing, she would reproach him with nothing, neither with his marriage nor with the separation, which she knew to be absolute and final. But if she could only see him ! *' Remember that it was a terrible blow to me, and so sudden, so unexpected ! I am just as If some one had died, or I had been burned out, — I don't know which way to turn. I weep, I expect you, I gaze at the place where my happiness used to lie. No one but you can accustom me to this new situation. As an act of charity, come and see me, so that I may feel not so entirely alone. I am afraid of myself." Those lamentations, that imploring summons, ran through the whole letter, with the constantly recurring refrain, ** Come, come." He could fancy himself in the clearing in the heart of the woods, with Fanny at his feet, and that piteous face raised to his under the pale violet sky of evening, all haggard and soft with tears, that mouth opening in the darkness to cry out. It was that that haunted him all night, and disturbed his sleep, and not the intoxicating bliss he had brought from Sappho, 223 Place Vendome. It was that worn, aged face that he constantly saw, despite all his efforts to place between it and him the face with pure outlines, the checks like a carnation in flower, which the declaration of love tinged with a Httle red flush under the eyes. That letter was dated a week before; for a whole week the unhappy creature had been await- ing a word or a visit, the encouragement she sought in resigning herself to her fate. But how did it happen that she had not written since? Perhaps she was ill ; and his former fears returned. He thought that Hettema might be able to give him news of her, and, relying upon the regularity of his habits, he went and waited for him in front of the Artillery headquarters. The last stroke of ten was striking at Saint Thomas d'Aquin's when the stout man turned the corner of the little square, with his collar turned up and his pipe between his teeth, and holding the latter with both hands to warm his fingers. Jean watched him approaching in the distance, deeply moved by all the memories that the sight of him recalled ; but Hettema greeted him with a repugnance which he hardly tried to conceal. "It's you, is it? Perhaps we haven't cursed you this week ! — and we went into the country to lead a tranquil life." As he stood in the doorway, finishing his pipe, he told him that on the preceding Sunday they had asked Fanny to dinner with the child, whose day it was to be at home, hoping to turn her mind from 224 Sappho. her miserable thoughts. The dinner passed off very cheerfully : she even sang something to them at dessert ; then about ten o'clock they separated, and the Hettemas were preparing to go comfort- ably to bed, when some one suddenly knocked on the shutters, and little Josaph cried in a terrified voice, — *' Come quick ; mamma 's trying to poison her- self! " Hettema rushed to the house and arrived in time to take the phial of laudanum from her by force. He had had to fight, to throw his arms around her and hold her, and at the same time defend himself against the blows of her head and her comb, which she aimed at his face. In the struggle, the phial broke, the laudanum was spilled on everything, and there was no harm done be- yond the spotting and perfuming of clothes with the poison. " But you can understand that such scenes, a whole drama of sensational news-items, don't suit peaceful folks like us. So, it 's decided, I Ve given my notice, and next month I move." He replaced his pipe in its case, and with a very affable adieu disappeared under the low arches of a small courtyard, leaving Gaussin thoroughly be- wildered by what he had heard. He pictured to himself the scene in that chamber which had been theirs, the terror of the little one calling for help, the rough struggle with the stout man, and he fancied that he could taste the bitter, sleep-producing flavor of the spilled laudanum. The horror clung to him all day, aggravated by Sappho. 225 the thought of the isolation that was soon to be her lot. When the Hettemas had gone who would restrain her hand when she made another attempt? A letter arrived, and comforted him to some ex- tent. Fanny thanked him for not being so hard- hearted as he chose to appear, since he still took some interest in the poor abandoned wretch, " He told you, did he not? I tried to die ; it was because I felt so lonely! I tried, but I could not; he stopped me ; perhaps my hand trembled, — the fear of suffering, of becoming ugly. Oh, how did that little Dore have the courage? After the first shame of failure, it was a joy to think that I could still write to you, love you at a distance, see you again ; for I have not lost the hope that you will come once, as one goes to see an unhappy friend in a house of mourning, for pity's sake, simply for pity's sake." Thereafter there came from Chaville every two or three days letters of varying length, a journal of sorrow which he had not the heart to send back, and which enlarged the sore spot in that tender heart made by a pity without love, no longer for the mistress, but for the fellow-creature suffering because of him. One day her theme was the departure of her neighbors, those witnesses of her past happiness, who carried away so many souvenirs. All that she had now to remind her of it was the furniture, the walls of their little house, and the servant, poor uncivilized creature, as little interested in 15 226 Sappho, anything as the thrush, which huddled sadly in a corner of his cage, shivering with the cold. Another day, when a pale sunbeam shone through her window, she awoke joyful in the firm conviction, "He will come to-day!" Why? for no reason, just an idea. She at once set about making the house attractive, and herself coquettish in her Sunday dress and with her hair arranged as he hked it; and then she counted the trains from her window until evening, until the last trace of light had vanished, and listened for his footstep on the Pave des Gardes. She must be mad ! Sometimes just a line: "It rains; it is dark; I am alone, and I am weeping for you." Or else she would content herself with placing in the envelope a poor little flower, all drenched and stiff with frost, the last flower from their little garden. That little flower, picked from under the snow, conveyed the idea of winter, of solitude and abandonment, better than all her lamentations ; he could see the place, at the end of the path, and a woman's skirt brush- ing against the flower-beds, wet to the hem, saun- tering to and fro in a solitary promenade. The result of this pity, which tore his heart, was that he still lived with Fanny notwithstanding the rupture. His mind was there, he pictured her to himself every hour of the day ; but, by a singular freak of his memory, although it was only five or six weeks since their separation, and the most trivial details of their home were still present to his mind, from La Balue's cage, opposite a wooden cuckoo won at a country fair, to the branches of Sappho, 227 the walnut-tree which tapped at their dressing- room window in the Hghtest breeze, the woman herself no longer appeared to him distinctly. He saw her in a sort of mist, with a single detail of her face clearly marked and painful to see, — the deformed mouth, the smile punctured by the gap once filled by the missing tooth. Thus withered and aged, what would become of the poor creature by whose side he had slept so long? When the money he had left her was spent, where would she go, to what depths would she de- scend? And suddenly there rose before him in his memory the wretched street-walker he had met one night in an English tavern, dying of thirst before her slice of smoked salmon. She whose attentions, whose passionate and faithful affection he had so long accepted, would become like her ! And that thought drove him to despair. But what could he do? Because he had had the misfortune to meet that woman, to live some time with her, was he doomed to keep her forever, to sacrifice his happiness to her? Why he, and not the others? In the name of what principle of justice? Although forbidding himself to see her, he wrote to her; and his letters, purposely matter-of-fact and dry, afforded glimpses of his emotion beneath soothing and prudent counsels. He urged her to take Josaph away from the boarding-school, to keep him at home with her to divert her thoughts ; but Fanny refused. What was the use of inflict- ing her sorrow, her discouragement, on that child ? The little fellow had quite enough of it on Sunday, 228 Sappho, when he prowled from chair to chair, wandered from the living-room to the garden, conscious that some great misfortune had cast a blight upon the house, and not daring to ask any more questions about " Papa Jean," since she had told him, sobbing, that he had gone away and would not come back. '* All my papas go away, don't they? " And that remark of the little foundling, repeated in a heartrending letter, weighed heavily on Gaus- sin's heart. Soon the thought that she was at Chaville became so oppressive to him that he ad- vised her to return to Paris, to see people. With her sad experience of men and separations, Fanny saw in that suggestion simply a shocking egotism, a hope to rid himself of her forever by one of those sudden fancies for which she had been famous ; and she stated her views frankly : — *' You know what I said to you long ago. I will remain your wife in spite of everything, your faith- ful and loving wife. Our little house encompasses me with you, and I would not leave it for anything on earth. What should I do in Paris? I am dis- gusted with my past, which keeps you away from me; and then just think what temptation you would expose us to ! Do you think you are very strong, pray? Then come, bad boy, once, only once." He did not go ; but one Sunday afternoon, when he was alone and working, he heard two little taps at his door. He was startled, recognizing her abrupt way of announcing her presence, as of yore. Fearing to find some order below, she had Sappho. 229 ascended the stairs at a breath, without asking any questions. He crept to the door, his footsteps muffled in the carpet, and heard her breathe through the crack, — "Are you there, Jean?" Oh, that humble, broken voice ! Once again, not very loud, '* Jean ! " then a sighing groan, the rustling of a letter, and the caress and farewell of a kiss thrown through the door. When she had descended the stairs, slowly, stair by stair, as if expecting to be recalled, then, not before, did Jean pick up the letter and open it. Little Hochecorne had been buried that morning at the Children's Hospital. She had come with the father and some few persons from Chaville, and had been unable to resist going up to see him or to leave these hues written beforehand. ''What did I tell you ? If I lived in Paris, I should be on your stairs all the time. Adieu, my dear; I am going back to our home." As he read, his eyes blurred with tears, he re- called a similar scene on Rue de I'Arcade, the grief of the discarded lover, the letter slipped under the door, and Fanny's heartless laughter. So she loved him better than he loved Irene ! Or is it true that man, being more involved than woman in the conflicts of business and of Hfe, has not, like her, the exclusiveness of love, the forgetfulness of and indifference to everything save her one absorb- ing passion? That torment, those pangs of pity, were allayed only in Irene's presence. There only did his 230 Sappho, agony relax, melt away beneath the soft blue rays of her glances. He was conscious of naught save a great weariness, a temptation to lay his head on her shoulder, and to remain there without speaking or moving, under her wing. " What is the matter ? " she would say to him. "Aren't you happy?" Yes, indeed, very happy. But why did his hap- piness consist of so much melancholy and weeping? At times he was tempted to tell her everything, as a kind friend who would understand his misery ; without considering, poor fool, the unhappiness that such confidences cause in untried hearts, the in- curable wounds they may inflict upon the trustful- ness of an attachment. Ah ! if he could only have carried her away, have fled with her ! he felt that that would be the end of his misery; but old Bouchereau would not advance by one hour the appointed time. " I am an old man ; I am sick. I shall never see my child again, so don't rob me of these last days." Beneath his stern exterior that great man was the kindest of men. Doomed irrevocably by the aflection of the heart, whose progress he himself followed and noted, he talked about it with mar- vellous sang-froid, continued his lectures when he could hardly breathe, ausculted patients who were less ill than he. There was but one weak side to that boundless mind, and it was one that betrayed the peasant origin of the native of Touraine : his respect for titles, for the nobility. And the re- membrance of the little towers of Castelet and Sappho, 231 the venerable name of Armandy were not without their influence on his readiness to accept Jean as his niece's husband. The marriage was to take place at Castelet, in order to avoid discommoding the poor mother, who sent every week to her future daughter an affectionate letter, dictated to Divonne or to one of the little saints of Bethany. And it was a sooth- ing delight to him to talk with Irene about his family, to find Castelet on Place Vendome, all his affections centred around his dear betrothed. But he was dismayed to feel so old, so weary, compared with her, to see her take a childish pleasure in things which no longer amused him, in the every-day joys of life, already discounted by him. For instance, the list that must be pre- pared of all that they would need to take to the distant consulate, furniture and coverings to be selected ; and one evening he paused in the middle of it, with hesitating pen, dismayed to find his mind returning to his installation on Rue d'Amsterdam, and by the thought that he must inevitably begin anew all the pleasures that were exhausted and forever ended for him by those five years with another woman, in a burlesque of mar- riage and domesticity. ^32 Sappho, XIV. " Yes, my dear fellow, he died last night in Rosa's arms. I have just taken him to the taxidermist's." De Potter, the musician, whom Jean met coming out of a shop on Rue du Bac, clung to him with an effusiveness hardly compatible with his features, the stern and impassive features of a man of busi- ness, and described to him the martyrdom of poor Bichito, slain by the Parisian winter, shrivelled with cold, despite the wads of cotton-wool, the saucer of spirits of wine that had been kept lighted for two months under his little nest, as for children born before their time. Nothing could keep him from shivering ; and the previous night, while they were all about him, one last shudder shook him from head to tail, and he died like a good Chris- tian, thanks to the quantities of holy water which Mamma Pilar poured on his scaly skin, where life vanished in changing hues, in prismatic displays, saying, with uplifted eyes : " God forgive him ! " ** I laugh about it, but my heart is heavy all the same ; especially when I think of the grief of my poor Rosa, whom I left in tears. Luckily, Fanny was with her." "Fanny?" '' Yes, we had n't seen her for ages. She ar- rived this morning just in the midst of the drama, Sappho, 233 and the dear girl remained to comfort her friend." Heedless of the effect produced by his words, he added: '' So it's all over between you? You aren't together now? Do you remember our conversation on the lake at Enghien? At all events, you profit by the lessons you receive." And a touch of envy could be detected in his approbation. Gaussin knit his brow, feeling genuinely dis- gusted at the thought that Fanny had returned to Rosario ; but he was angry with himself for such weakness, for, after all, he no longer had any sort of authority over her life or responsibility for it. De Potter stopped in front of a house on Rue de Beaune, a very old street of the aristocratic Paris of an earlier day, into which they had turned. There it was that he lived, or was supposed to Hve, for the purposes of propriety and for the world at large ; for in fact he passed his time on Avenue de Villiers or at Enghien, and made only brief visits to the conjugal domicile, so that his wife and child might not seem too entirely abandoned. Jean was walking on, his mouth already open to say adieu, but the other held his hand in his long, hard key-board crusher's hands, and, without a trace of embarrassment, like a man to whom his vice is no longer a matter for apology, — ** Pray do me a favor. Come upstairs with me. I was to dine with my wife to-day, but I really cannot leave my poor Rosa all alone with her de- spair. You will serve as a pretext for my going out and avoid a tiresome explanation." 234 Sappho, The musician's study, a superb but cold bour- geois apartment on the second floor, smelt of the solitude of the room in which no work is done. Everything was too clean, without the slightest disorder, with none of the feverish activity which infects objects and furniture. Not a book, not a paper on the table, which was occupied in solitary majesty by a huge bronze inkstand, without ink, and polished as if for exhibition in a shop-window ; nor was there a sign of music on the old spinet- shaped piano, by which the early works were in- spired. And a bust of white marble, the bust of a young woman with refined features and a sweet ex- pression, pale in the fading light, made the fireless, draped fireplace even colder, and seemed to gaze sadly at the walls covered with beribboned golden wreaths, with medals, with commemorative frames, a glorious, pompous collection generously left to his wife by way of compensation, and cared for by her as the decorations of the tomb of her happiness. They had hardly entered the study when the door opened again and Madame de Potter ap- peared. *' Is it you, Gustave? " She thought that he was alone, and stopped abruptly at sight of the strange face, with evident disquietude. Refined and pretty, fashionably but quietly dressed, she seemed to have more char- acter than her bust, the sweet expression of her face being replaced by a courageous and nervous determination. In society opinions were divided with regard to her. Some blamed her for endur- Sappho. 235 ing the advertised contempt of her husband, that second establishment known of all the world; others, on the contrary, admired her silent resigna- tion. And she was generally considered a placid creature, loving her repose above everything, find- ing sufficient compensation for her widowhood in the caresses of a lovely child and the satisfaction of bearing the name of a great man. But while the musician presented his companion and muttered some falsehood or other to escape the dinner at home, Jean could see by the change that passed over that youthful face, by the fixity of that glance which no longer saw nor listened, as if absorbed by mental suffering, that a terrible sor- row was buried alive beneath that worldly exterior. She seemed to accept the fable, which she did not believe, and simply said in a gentle tone, — " Raymond will cry ; I promised him that we would dine by his bed." " How is he ? " asked De Potter, distraught, impatient. " Better, but he still coughs. Are n't you com- ing to see him? " He muttered something in his mustache, pre- tending to be looking around the room: "Not now — in a great hurry — appointment at the club at six o'clock." What he was most anxious to avoid was being left alone with her. " Adieu, then," said the young woman, suddenly subdued, her features resuming their serenity, like a placid pool disturbed to its lowest depths by a stone. She bowed and disappeared. 236 Sappho. "Let us be off!" And De Potter, free once more, left the room, followed by Gaussin, who watched him as he went downstairs in front of him, stiff and correct in his long tight-fitting frock-coat of English cut, — that ill-omened lover, who was so deeply affected when he carried his mistress's chameleon to be stuffed, and left his house without kissing his sick child. "All this, my dear fellow," said the musician, as if in answer to his friend's thought, " is the fault of those who made me marry. A genuine favor to me and to that poor woman ! What an insane idea to try to make a husband and father of me ! I was Rosa's lover ; I remained so, and I shall re- main so until one of us dies. Does a man ever cut loose from a vice that seizes him just at the right moment and holds him fast? Take your own case, — are you sure that if Fanny had chosen — " He hailed an empty cab which was passing and added, as he stepped in, — " A propos of Fanny, do you know the news ? Flamant is pardoned ; he has left Mazas. It was Dechelette's petition. Poor Dechelette ! he did some good even after his death." Gaussin stood still, with a mad longing to run, to overtake those wheels jolting rapidly down the dark street where the lamps were being lighted, and was astounded to find himself so deeply moved. " Flamant pardoned — left Mazas ! " he repeated the words softly, seeing in them an explanation of Fanny's silence for several days, of her lamenta- Sappho, ^37 tions abruptly broken off, hushed under the ca- resses of a comforter; for the poor devil's first thought, when he was set free, must have been for her. He remembered the affectionate letters from the prison, his mistress's obstinacy in defending him alone, when she held the others so cheap ; and instead of congratulating himself upon a piece of good fortune which logically relieved him of all cause for anxiety, of all remorse, an indefinable heartache kept him awake and excited most of the night. Why? He no longer loved her; but he thought of his letters, still in that woman's hands, which she would read to the other, perhaps, and which — who knows ? — she might some day, under an evil influence, make use of to disturb his repose, his happiness. Whether it was false or genuine, or whether, un- known to him, it concealed a fear of another sort, that anxiety ^bout his letters led him to determine upon an imprudent step, the visit to Chaville which he had always obstinately refused to make. But to whom could he intrust so delicate and confiden- tial a mission ? One morning in February he took the ten o'clock train, very calm in mind and heart, with no other fear than that of finding the house closed and the woman already vanished with her felon. From the curve in the track, the sight of the open blinds and the curtains at the windows of the little house reassured him ; and remembering his emotion when he watched the little light receding 238 Sappho, behind him in the darkness, he laughed at himself and the fickleness of his impressions. He was no longer the same man, and certainly he should not find the same woman. And yet only two months had passed. The woods by which the train sped had taken on no new leaves, retained the same leprous blotches as on the day of the rupture and of her shrieking to the echoes. He alighted alone at the station in that cold, penetrating fog, took the narrow country road, slippery with the hard snow, passed under the railroad bridge, and met no one before he reached the Pave des Gardes, where a man and boy ap- peared at the entrance to the path, followed by a railway porter pushing his truck laden with trunks. The child, all muffled up in a comforter, his cap pulled over his ears, restrained an exclamation as they passed him. " Why, it 's Josaph ! " he said to himself, a little surprised and saddened by the child's ingratitude ; and as he turned to look be- hind him, he met the eyes of the man who was leading the boy by the hand. That clever, intel- ligent face, blanched by confinement, those second- hand clothes purchased the day before, that light beard close to the chin, not having had time to grow since Mazas — Flamant, /