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The Gods are Athirst, a novel by Anatole France |
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Chapter 5 |
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_ CHAPTER V By nine in the morning Evariste reached the gardens of the Luxembourg, to find Elodie already there seated on a bench waiting for him. It was a month ago they had exchanged their vows and since then they had seen each other every day, either at the _Amour peintre_ or at the studio in the Place de Thionville. Their meetings had been very tender, but at the same time characterized by a certain reserve that checked their expansiveness,--a reserve due to the staid and virtuous temper of the lover, a theist and a good citizen, who, while ready to make his beloved mistress his own before the law or with God alone for witness according as circumstances demanded, would do nothing save publicly and in the light of day. Elodie knew the resolution to be right and honourable; but, despairing of a marriage that seemed impossible from every point of view and loath to outrage the prejudices of society, she contemplated in her inmost heart a liaison that could be kept a secret till the lapse of time gave it sanction. She hoped one day to overcome the scruples of a lover she could have wished less scrupulous, and meantime, unwilling to postpone some necessary confidences as to the past, she had asked him to meet her for a lover's talk in a lonely corner of the gardens near the Carthusian Priory. She threw him a tender look, took his hand frankly, invited him to share the bench and speaking slowly and thoughtfully: "I esteem you too well, Evariste, to hide anything from you. I believe myself worthy of you; I should not be so were I not to tell you everything. Hear me and be my judge. I have no act to reproach myself with that is degrading or base, or even merely selfish. I have only been weak and credulous.... Do not forget, dear Evariste, the difficult circumstances in which I found myself. You know how it was with me; I had lost my mother, my father, still a young man, thought only of his own amusement and neglected me. I had a feeling heart, nature has dowered me with a loving temper and a generous soul; it was true she had not denied me a firm will and a sound judgment, but in those days what ruled my conduct was passion, not reason. Alas! it would be the same again to-day, if the two were not in harmony; I should be driven to give myself to you, beloved, heart and soul, and for ever!" She expressed herself in firm, well-balanced phrases. She had well thought over what she would say, having long ago made up her mind to this confession for several reasons--because she was naturally candid, because she found pleasure in following Rousseau's example, and because, as she told herself reasonably enough: "One day Evariste must fathom a secret which is known to others as well as myself. A frank avowal is best. It is unforced and therefore to my credit, and only tells him what some time or other he would discover to my shame." Soft-hearted as she was and amenable to nature's promptings, she did not feel herself to be very much to blame, and this made her confession the easier; besides which, she had no intention of telling more than was absolutely requisite. "Ah!" she sighed, "why did I not know you, Evariste, in the days when I was alone and forsaken?" Gamelin had taken her request quite literally when Elodie asked him to be her judge. Primed at once by nature and the education of books for the exercise of domestic justice, he sat ready to receive Elodie's admissions. As she still hesitated, he motioned to her to proceed. Then she began speaking very simply: "A young man, who with many defects of character combined some good qualities, and only showed the latter, found me to his taste and courted me with a perseverance that was surprising in such a case; he was in the flower of his youth, full of charm and the idol of a bevy of charming women who made no attempt to hide their adoration. It was not his good looks nor even his brilliance that appealed to me.... He touched my heart by the tokens of true love he gave me, and I do think he loved me truly. He was tender, impassioned. I asked no pledge save of his heart, and alas! his heart was fickle.... I blame no one but myself; it is my confession I am making, not his. I lay nothing to his charge, for indeed he is become a stranger to me. Ah! believe me, Evariste, I swear it, he is no more to me than if he had never existed." She had finished, but Gamelin vouchsafed no answer. He folded his arms, a steadfast, sombre look settling in his eyes. His mistress and his sister Julie were running together in his thoughts. Julie too had hearkened to a lover; but, unlike, altogether unlike, he thought, the unhappy Elodie, _she_ had let him have his will and carry her off, not misled by the promptings of a tender heart, but to enjoy, far from her home and friends, the sweets of luxury and pleasure. He was a stern moralist; he had condemned his sister and he was half inclined to condemn his mistress. Elodie resumed in a very pleading voice: "I was full of Jean-Jacques' philosophy; I believed men were naturally honest and honourable. My misfortune was to have encountered a lover who was not formed in the school of nature and natural morality, and whom social prejudice, ambition, self-love, a false point of honour had made selfish and treacherous." The words produced the effect she had calculated on. Gamelin's eyes softened. He asked: "Who was your seducer? Is he a man I know?" "You do not know him." "Tell me his name." She had foreseen the question and was firmly resolved not to answer it. She gave her reasons: "Spare me, I beseech you. For your peace of mind as for my own, I have already said too much." Then, as he still pressed her: "In the sacred name of our love, I refuse to tell you anything to give you a definite notion of this stranger. I will not give your jealousy a shape to feed on; I will not bring a harassing shadow between you and me. I have not forgotten the man's name, but I will never let you know it." Gamelin insisted on knowing the name of the seducer,--that was the word he employed all through, for he felt no doubt Elodie had been seduced, cajoled, trifled with. He could not so much as conceive any other possibility,--that she had obeyed an overmastering desire, an irresistible craving, listened to the tempter's voice in the shape of her own flesh and blood; he could not find it credible that the fair victim, a creature of hot passion and a fond heart, had offered herself a willing sacrifice; to satisfy his ideal, she must needs have been overborne by force or fraud, constrained by sheer violence, caught in snares spread about her steps on every side. He questioned her in guarded terms, but with a close, searching, embarrassing persistency. He asked her how the liaison began, if it was long or short, tranquil or troubled, under what circumstances it was broken off. And his enquiries came back again and again to the means the fellow had used to cajole her, as if these must surely have been extraordinary and unheard of. But all his cross-examination was in vain. She kept her own counsel with a gentle, deprecatory obstinacy, her lips tightly pressed together and tears welling in her eyes. Presently, however, Evariste having asked where the man was now, she told him: "He has left the Kingdom--France, I mean," she corrected herself in an instant. "An _emigre_!" ejaculated Gamelin. She looked at him, speechless, at once reassured and disheartened to see him create in his own mind a truth in accordance with his political passions and of his own motion give his jealousy a Jacobin complexion. In actual fact Elodie's lover was a little lawyer's clerk, a very pretty lad, half Adonis, half guttersnipe, whom she had adored and the thought of whom, though three years had gone by since, still thrilled her nerves. Rich old women were his particular game, and he deserted Elodie for a woman of the world of a certain age who could and did recompense his merits. Having, after the abolition of offices, attained a post in the Mairie of Paris, he was now a _sansculotte_ dragoon and the hanger-on of a _ci-devant_ Countess. "A noble! an _emigre_!" muttered Gamelin, whom she took good care not to undeceive, never having been desirous he should know the whole truth. "And he deserted you like a dastard?" She nodded in answer. He clasped her to his heart: "Dear victim of the vile corruption of monarchies, my love shall avenge his villainy! Heaven grant, I may meet the scoundrel! I shall not fail to know him!" She turned away, at one and the same time saddened and smiling,--and disappointed. She would fain have had him wiser in the lore of love, with more of the natural man about him, more perhaps even of the brute. She felt he forgave so readily only because his imagination was cold and the secret she had revealed awoke in him none of the mental pictures that torture sensuous natures,--in a word, that he saw her seduction solely under a moral and social aspect. They had risen, and while they walked up and down the shady avenues of the gardens, he informed her that he only esteemed her the more because she had suffered wrong, Elodie entertained no such high claims; however, take him as he was, she loved him, and admired the brilliant artistic genius she divined in him. As they left the Luxembourg, they came upon crowds thronging the Rue de l'Egalite and the whole neighbourhood of the Theatre de la Nation. There was nothing to surprise them in this; for several days great excitement had prevailed in the most patriotic Sections; denunciations were rife against the Orleans faction and the Brissotin plotters, who were conspiring, it was said, to bring about the ruin of Paris and the massacre of good Republicans. Gamelin himself a short time back had signed a petition from the Commune demanding the expulsion of the Twenty-one. Just before passing under the arcade, joining the theatre to the neighbouring house, they had to find their way through a group of citizens _en carmagnole_ who were listening to a harangue from a young soldier mounted on the top of the gallery. He looked as beautiful as the Eros of Praxiteles in his helmet of panther-skin. This fascinating warrior was charging the People's Friend with indolence: "Marat, you are asleep," he was crying, "and the federalists are forging fetters to bind us." Hardly had Elodie cast eyes on the orator before she turned rapidly to Evariste and begged him to get her away. The crowd, she declared, frightened her and she was afraid of fainting in the crush. They parted in the Place de la Nation, swearing an oath of eternal fidelity. * * * * * That same morning early the _citoyen_ Brotteaux had made the _citoyenne_ Gamelin the magnificent present of a capon. It would have been an act of indiscretion for him to mention how he had come by it; as a fact, he had it of a _Dame de la Halle_ at the Pointe Eustache for whom he sometimes acted as amanuensis, and as everybody knows, these "Ladies of the Market" cherished Royalist sympathies and were in correspondence with the _emigres_. The _citoyenne_ Gamelin had received the gift with heartfelt gratitude. Such dainties were scarce ever seen then; victuals grew dearer every day. The people feared a famine; the aristocrats, they said, wished it, and the "corner" makers were at work to bring it about. The _citoyen_ Brotteaux, being invited to eat his share of the capon at the midday dinner, appeared in due course and congratulated his hostess on the rich aroma of cooking that assailed his nostrils. Indeed a noble smell of rich, savoury broth filled the painter's studio. "You are very obliging, sir," replied the good dame. "To prepare the digestion for your capon, I have made a vegetable soup with a slice of fat bacon and a big beef bone. There's nothing like a marrowbone, sir, to give soup a flavour." "The maxim does you honour, _citoyenne_," returned the old man. "And you will be doing wisely to put back again to-morrow and the day after, all the week, in fact, to put back again, I say, this precious bone in the pot, which it will continue to flavour. The wise woman of Panzoust always did so; she used to make a soup of green cabbages with a rind of rusty bacon and an old _savorados_. That is what in her country, which is also mine, they call the medullary bone, the most tasty and most succulent of all bones." "This lady you speak of, sir," remarked the _citoyenne_ Gamelin, "was she not rather a saving soul, to make the same bone serve so many times over?" "Oh! she lived in a small way," explained Brotteaux, "she was poor, albeit a prophetess." At that moment, Evariste Gamelin returned, agitated by the confession he had heard and determined to know who was Elodie's betrayer, to avenge at one and the same time the Republic's wrong and his own on the miscreant. After the usual greetings had been exchanged, the _citoyen_ Brotteaux resumed the thread of his discourse: "It is seldom those who make a trade of foretelling the future grow rich. Their impostures are too soon found out and their trickery renders them odious. But indeed we should be bound to detest them much worse if they prophesied truly. A man's life would be intolerable if he knew what is to befall him. He would be aware of calamities to come and suffer their pains in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings whose end he would foresee. Ignorance is a necessary condition of human happiness, and it must be owned that in most cases we fulfil it well. We know almost nothing about ourselves; absolutely nothing about our neighbours. Ignorance constitutes our peace of mind; self-deception our felicity." The _citoyenne_ Gamelin set the soup on the table, said the Benedicite and seated her son and her guest at the board. She stood up herself to eat, declining the chair the _citoyen_ Brotteaux offered her beside him; she said she knew what good manners required of a woman. _ |
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