"'Never accuse yourself, monsieur-I repress a tenderer name which rises to my lips-of being unable to give me consolation. Weary, disabused, as we are, and done with it all, let us sometimes permit our souls to speak to each other-low, very low-as I have spoken to you this night, for henceforth my thought is going to follow you wherever you are.'
"Four pages of the same tune," he said, turning the leaves, "but this is better:
"'Tonight, my unknown friend, one word only. I have passed a horrible day, my nerves in revolt and crying out against the petty sufferings they are subjected to every minute. A slamming door, a harsh or squeaky voice floating up to me out of the street… Yet there are whole hours when I am so far from being sensitive that if the house were burning I should not move. Am I about to send you a page of comic lamentations? Ah, when one has not the gift of rendering one's grief superbly and transforming it into literary or musical passages which weep magnificently, the best thing is to keep still about it.
"'I bid you a silent goodnight. As on the first day, I am harassed by the conflict of the desire to see you and the dread of touching a dream lest it perish. Ah, yes, you spoke truly. Miserable, miserable wretches that we are, our timorous souls are so afraid of any reality that they dare not think a sympathy which has taken possession of them capable of surviving an interview with the person who gave it birth. Yet, in spite of this fine casuistry, I simply must confess to you-no, no, nothing. Guess if you can, and forgive me for this banal letter. Or rather, read between the lines, and perhaps you will find there a little bit of my heart and a great deal of what I leave unsaid.
"'A foolish letter with "I" written all over it. Who would suspect that while I wrote it my sole thought was of You?'"
"So far, so good. This woman at least piqued my curiosity. And what peculiar ink," he thought. It was myrtle green, very thin, very pale. With his finger-nail he detached some of the fine dust of rice powder, perfumed with heliotrope, clinging to the seal of the letters.
"She must be blonde," he went on, examining the tint of the powder, "for it isn't the 'Rachel' shade that brunettes use. Now up to that point everything had been going nicely, but then and there I spoiled it. Moved by I know not what folly, I wrote her a yet more roundabout letter, which, however, was very pressing. In attempting to fan her flame I kindled myself-for a spectre-and at once I received this:
"'What shall I do? I neither wish to see you, nor can I consent to annihilate my overwhelming desire to meet you. Last night, in spite of me, your name, which was burning me, sprang from my lips. My husband, one of your admirers, it seems, appeared to be somewhat humiliated by the preoccupation which, indeed, was absorbing me and causing unbearable shivers to run all through me. A common friend of yours and mine-for why should I not tell you that you know me, if to have met socially is to "know" anyone?-one of your friends, then, came up and said that frankly he was very much taken with you. I was in a state of such utter lack of self-control that I don't know what I should have done had it not been for the unwitting assistance which somebody gave me by pronouncing the name of a grotesque person of whom I can never think without laughing. Adieu. You are right. I tell myself that I will never write you again, and I go and do it anyway.
"'Your own-as I cannot be in reality without wounding us both.'
"Then when I wrote a burning reply, this was brought by a maid on a dead run:
"'Ah, if I were not afraid, afraid!-and you know you are just as much afraid as I am-how I should fly to you! No, you cannot hear the thousand conversations with which my soul fatigues yours… Oh, in my miserable existence there are hours when madness seizes me. Judge for yourself. The whole night I spent appealing to you furiously. I wept with exasperation. This morning my husband came into the room. My eyes were bloodshot. I began to laugh crazily, and when I could speak I said to him, "What would you think of a person who, questioned as to his profession, replied, 'I am a chamber succubus'?" "Ah, my dear, you are ill," said he. "Worse than you think," said I.
"'But if I come to see you, what could we talk about, in the state you yourself are in? Your letter has completely unbalanced me. You arraign your malady with a certain brutality which makes my body rejoice but alienates my soul a little. Ah, what if our dreams could really come true!
"'Ah, say a word, just one word, from out your own heart. Don't be afraid that even one of your letters can possibly fall into other hands than mine.'
"So, so, so. This is getting to be no laughing matter," concluded Durtal, folding up the letter. "The woman is married to a man who knows me, it seems. What a situation! Let's see, now. Whom have I ever visited?" He tried vainly to remember. No woman he had ever met at an evening party would address such declarations to him. And that common friend. "But I have no friends, except Des Hermies. I'd better try and find out whom he has been seeing recently. But as a physician he meets scores of people! And then, how can I explain to him? Tell him the story? He will burst into a roar and disillusion me before I have got halfway through the narrative."
And Durtal became irritated, for within him a really incomprehensible phenomenon was taking place. He was burning for this unknown woman. He was positively obsessed by her. He who had renounced all carnal relations years ago, who, when the barns of his senses were opened, contented himself with driving the disgusting herd of sin to the commercial shambles to be summarily knocked in the head by the butcher girls of love, he, he! was getting himself to believe-in the teeth of all experience, in the teeth of good judgment-that with a woman as passionate as this one seemed to be, he would experience superhuman sensations and novel abandon.
And he imagined her as he would have her, blonde, firm of flesh, lithe, feline, melancholy, capable of frenzies; and the picture of her brought on such a tension of nerves that his teeth rattled.
For a week, in the solitude in which he lived, he had dreamed of her and had become thoroughly aroused and incapable of doing any work, even of reading, for the image of this woman interposed itself between him and the page.
He tried suggesting to himself ignoble visions. He would imagine this creature in moments of corporal distress and thus calm his desires with unappetizing hallucinations; but the procedure which had formerly been very effective when he desired a woman and could not have her now failed utterly. He somehow could not imagine his unknown in quest of bismuth or of linen. He could not see her otherwise than rebellious, melancholy, dizzy with desire, kindling him with her eyes, inflaming him with her pale hands.
And his sensual resurrection was incredible-an aberrated Dog Star flaming in a physical November, at a spiritual All Hallows. Tranquil, dried up, safe from crises, without veritable desires, almost impotent, or rather completely forgetful of sex for months at a time, he was suddenly roused-and for an unreality!-by the mystery of mad letters.
"Enough!" he cried, smiting the table a jarring blow.
He clapped on his hat and went out, slamming the door behind him.
"I know how to make my imagination behave!" and he rushed over to the Latin Quarter to see a prostitute he knew. "I have been a good boy too long," he murmured as he hurried down the street. "One can't stay on the straight and narrow path for ever."
He found the woman at home and had a miserable time. She was a buxom brunette with festive eyes and the teeth of a wolf. An expert, she could, in a few seconds, drain one's marrow, granulate the lungs, and demolish the loins.
She chid him for having been away so long, then cajoled him and kissed him. He felt pathetic, listless, out of breath, out of place, for he had no genuine desires. He finally flung himself on a couch and, enervated to the point of crying, he went through the back-breaking motions mechanically, like a dredge.