I
A fashionable victoria, drawn by two magnificent black horses, stood at the doorstep of the mansion. It was about half past five on an evening towards the end of June, and between the gables which fenced the courtyard, gleamed the sky, full of bright light, heat and brilliance.
The Comtesse de Mascaret appeared on the doorstep exactly at the moment in which her husband, who was coming home, reached the gateway. He stopped for several seconds to watch his wife, and turned a little pale. She was very lovely, supple, noticeable for her long oval face, her complexion of old ivory, and her large grey eyes and black hair: she stepped into the carriage without glancing at him, without even appearing to have seen him, with a grace so extraordinarily well-bred that the hideous jealousy by which he had been so long devoured tore at his heart afresh. He went up to her, and, bowing:
“You’re going for a drive?” he said.
She let four words slip through her scornful lips:
“You see for yourself.”
“The park?”
“Probably.”
“May I be allowed to come with you?”
“The carriage is yours.”
Without surprise at the tone in which she answered him, he stepped in and seated himself beside his wife; then he gave the order: “The park.”
The footman leaped on to the seat beside the coachman and the horses, as they always did, pawed and tossed their heads until they had turned into the street.
The couple remained side by side without speaking. He sought how to begin the conversation, but she maintained so obstinately hard an expression that he did not dare.
At last, he stealthily slid his hand towards the gloved hand of his wife and touched it as if by accident, but the gesture that she made in withdrawing her arm was so swift and so expressive of disgust that he hesitated anxiously, in spite of his habitual authority and despotism.
At length he muttered:
“Gabrielle.”
Without turning her head, she asked:
“What do you want?”
“You are perfectly adorable.”
She made no answer, and remained leaning back in the carriage with the expression of an infuriated queen.
By now they were going up the Champs-Élysées, towards the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile. The enormous monument at the bottom of the long avenue, spread out its colossal arch against a fiery sky. The sun seemed to fall on it, scattering from the horizon a flaming dust.
And the flood of carriages, splashed with the rays of the sun on copper fittings and on the silver plating and crystal of harness and lamps, was flowing in a double stream towards the park and the city.
The Comte de Mascaret began again:
“Dear Gabrielle.”
Then, unable to stand it any longer, she replied in an exasperated voice:
“Oh, leave me alone, I beg you. I have no longer liberty to be alone in my carriage now.”
He pretended not to have heard, and went on:
“I have never seen you look as pretty as you do today.”
She was nearly at the end of her patience and replied, with an anger which she could contain no longer:
“You are making a mistake in noticing it, for I give you my word that I’ll never be yours again.”
He was obviously stunned and overwhelmed, and, his customary violence getting the better of him, he flung a “What’s that you say?” which revealed more of the brutal master than of the man in love.
In a low voice, although the servants could hear nothing amid the deafening rumbling of the wheels, she repeated:
“What’s that you say? What’s that you say? How well I recognise you! You want me to tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell you everything?”
“Yes.”
“Everything that I have held in my heart since I became the victim of your ferocious egoism?”
He turned scarlet with astonishment and rage. He muttered between his clenched teeth:
“Yes, go on.”
He was a man of tall build, with broad shoulders, with a great tawny beard, a handsome man, a nobleman, a man of the world who passed for a perfect husband and an excellent father.
For the first time since they had left the house, she turned towards him and looked him full in the face.
“Well, you are going to hear some unpleasant things, but you may as well know that I am ready for anything, that I will outface everybody, that I fear nothing, and today, you less than anybody.”
He too looked her in the face, and a storm of anger shook him already. He whispered:
“You must be mad.”
“No, but I will no longer be the victim of the detestable torture of maternity that you have made me undergo these last eleven years! I wish to live as a woman in society should, as I have the right, as all wives have the right.”
Suddenly turning pale again, he stammered:
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, yes, you do. It is now three months since my last child was born, and as I still have all my beauty—which, in spite of your efforts, it is practically impossible to ruin, as you recognised just now when you saw me on the doorstep—you realise that it is time I became enceinte again.”
“You are out of your mind.”
“No. I am thirty and have seven children. We’ve been married for eleven years, and you hope that this will go on for another ten, after which you will cease from being jealous.”
He seized her arm, and squeezing it:
“I am not going to allow you to talk to me like this any longer.
“And I shall talk to you to the end, until I have finished everything I have got to tell you. If you try to stop me, I shall raise my voice loud enough to be understood by the two servants on the box. I only let you sit beside me for this purpose, because I should have these witnesses who would compel you to listen to me and to keep a tight rein on yourself. Now listen to me. You have always been distasteful to me and I have always let you see it, for I have never lied. You married me against my will, you brought pressure to bear on my parents, who were shamed into giving me to you because you were very rich. They forced me to it by making me cry.
“So, having bought me, from the moment when I was in your power, when I began to become a companion ready to attach myself to you, to forget your campaign of intimidation and coercion, in remembering only that I ought to be a devoted wife and to love you as much as it was possible for me to do, you became jealous, yes, as no other man has ever been, the jealousy of a spy, base, ignoble, degrading to yourself and insulting to me. I had only been married eight months when you suspected me of every treachery. You even let me hear you say so. What shame! And since you could not prevent me from being beautiful and pleasing, from being spoken of in drawing rooms and even in the papers as being one of the prettiest women in Paris, you sought what you could discover to cut me off from flirtations, and so you hit on this abominable idea of making me pass my life in a state of perpetual pregnancy, until the time came when I should disgust every man. Oh, don’t deny it. For a long time I understood nothing, then I guessed. You boasted of it even to your own sister, who told me, because she loves me and was horrified by your peasant grossness.
“Think of our battles, doors broken open, locks forced. Think of the existence to which you have condemned me these eleven years, the existence of a brood mare in a stud. Then, the moment I became pregnant, you too lost your taste for me, and I would not see you for months. I was sent into the country to the family seat, to grass, to pasture, to have my baby. And when I reappeared, fresh and beautiful, indestructible, as alluring as ever, and as ever the centre of attraction, hoping at last that I was going to live for a short time like a young wealthy society woman, jealousy overtook you again, and once more you began to pursue me with the infamous and hateful desire by which you are tortured at this moment as you sit beside me. It is not the desire to possess me—I would never refuse myself to you—it is the desire to deform me.
“It is of old standing, this abominable and quite mysterious thing, the full implication of which I was so long in realising (but I have grown quick to note your acts and thoughts): you are attached to your children by all the security which they have given you during the time I carried them in my body. You made your affection for them with all the aversion that you had for me, with all your shameful fears, momentarily set at rest, and with joy at seeing me grown big.
“Oh, how often have I felt that joy in you, recognised it in your eyes, guessed it. You love your children as victories and not as flesh of your flesh. They are victories over me, over my youth, over my beauty, over my charm, over the compliments paid to me, and over those whispered round me and left unspoken. And you are proud of it: you parade with them, you take them to ride in a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne, and on donkeys at Montmorency. You escort them to the theatre in the afternoon so that people shall see you in the middle of them, and say: ‘What a good father!’ and repeat it …”
He had seized her wrist with savage brutality, and was gripping it so violently that she fell silent, a groan tearing her throat.
And speaking very softly he said:
“I love my children, do you hear! What you have just told me is a shameful thing for a mother to have said. But you are mine. I am the master … your master … I can exact from you what I like, when I like … and I have the law … on my side.”
He tried to crush her fingers in the pincer-like pressure of his heavy masculine fist. Livid with pain, she struggled in vain to withdraw her hand from this vice that was grinding it; and the suffering made her gasp for breath, and tears came to her eyes.
“You realise that I am the master,” he said, “the stronger.”
He had loosed his grasp a little. She replied:
“You believe I am a pious woman?”
Surprised, he stammered:
“Of course.”
“You think that I believe in God?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think that I could lie in swearing an oath to you before an altar that holds the body of Christ?”
“No.”
“Will you accompany me into a church?”
“What to do?”
“You’ll see. Will you come?”
“If you insist, yes.”
She raised her voice, calling:
“Philippe.”
The coachman, bending his neck slightly, without taking his eyes off the horses, seemed to turn only his ear towards his mistress, who went on:
“Drive to the Church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule.”
And the victoria, which had just reached the entrance to the park, turned back in the direction of Paris.
Wife and husband exchanged no further word during their new journey. Then, when the carriage had stopped before the entrance to the church, Mme. de Mascaret, jumping out, went in, followed a few paces behind by the comte.
She went without a pause, straight to the railings of the choir, and falling on her knees beside a chair, hid her face in her hands and prayed. She prayed for a long time, and, standing beside her, he saw at last that she was crying. She cried silently, as women cry in moments of terrible poignant grief. It was a sort of shudder that ran through her body and ended in a little sob, hidden and stifled under her fingers.
But the Comte de Mascaret decided that the situation was lasting too long, and he touched her on the shoulder.
The contact roused her as if it had burnt her. Standing up, she looked him straight in the eyes:
“This is what I have to say to you. I’m not afraid, you can do what you like. You can kill me if that is what you want to do. One of your children is not yours. I swear it to you before God who hears me in this place. It was the only revenge I could take on you, against your abominable masculine tyranny, against the forced labour of procreation to which you have condemned me. Who was my lover? You will never know. You will suspect the whole world. You will not discover him. I gave myself to him without love and without pleasure, solely to deceive you. And he too made me a mother. Who is the child? You will never know. I have seven children; find out the one! I had intended to tell you this later, since one is not avenged on a man by deceiving him until he knows it. You have forced me to confess it to you today: I have finished.”
And she fled through the church, towards the door open on the street, expecting to hear behind her the swift footsteps of the husband she had defied, and to lie crushed on the pavement under the stunning blow of his fist.
But she heard nothing and reached the carriage. She climbed in at one bound, shaken with anguish, fainting with fear, and cried to the coachman:
“Home.”
The horses set off at a quick trot.