"How old is this adorable creature?" I asked De C----, for it was impossible to decide, even after examining her with the most careful attention.
"Ah! there you are! how old is she? that's a mystery and God only knows the clue. For my own part, and I pride myself on telling a woman's age almost to a minute, I have never succeeded in finding out hers. I can only estimate approximately that she is somewhere between eighteen and thirty-six.--I have seen her in full dress, in déshabille, in her linen, and I can tell you nothing in that connection: my knowledge is at fault; the age that you would generally take her to be is eighteen, and yet that can't be her age.--She is a combination of a virgin body and the soul of a harlot, and she must have had much time or much genius to corrupt herself so thoroughly and so speciously; she must have a heart of brass in a breast of steel; but she has neither; that makes me think that she is thirty-six, but in reality I know nothing about it."
"Hasn't she any intimate friend who could enlighten you on the subject?"
"No; she arrived here two years ago. She came from the provinces or from abroad, I don't know which--that is an admirable position for a woman who knows how to make the most of it. With such a face as she has, she can make herself any age she chooses and date only from the day she arrived here."
"That certainly is a most agreeable state of things, especially when some impertinent wrinkle doesn't give you the lie, and Time, the great destroyer, is kind enough to connive at that falsification of the certificate of baptism."
He pointed out several others, who, he said, would receive favorably whatever requests it might please me to prefer to them, and would treat me with peculiar philanthropy. But the woman in pink in the chimney-corner and the modest dove who was her antithesis were incomparably superior to all the others; and, if they had not all the qualities I require, they had some of them, at least in appearance.
I talked all the evening with them, especially with the last, and I took pains to cast my ideas in the most respectful mould;--although she hardly looked at me, I fancied sometimes that I could see her eyes gleaming behind the curtain of their lashes, and at some compliments that I ventured to address to her, decidedly broad but shrouded in the most modest gauze, I noticed just below the skin a tiny blush, held back and stifled, not unlike the effect produced by pouring a red liqueur into a glass that is half opaque.--Her replies were, in general, sedate and well-weighed, but keen and bright, and they implied much more than they expressed. The whole conversation was interspersed with pauses, unfinished phrases; veiled allusions, every syllable had its meaning, every pause its bearing; nothing could be more diplomatic or more charming.--And yet, however great my pleasure in it for the moment, I could not endure such a conversation very long. One must be forever on the alert and on his guard, and what I like best in conversation is ease, familiarity.--We talked first of music, which led us naturally to speak of the Opera, then of women, and then of love, a subject in which it is easier than in any other to find excuses for transition from general principles to special instances.--We vied with each other in amatory talk; you would have laughed to hear me. Verily, Amadis on poor La Roche was no better than a dull pedant beside me. It was generosity, abnegation, self-sacrifice enough to put the late Curtius of Rome to the blush.--Really I didn't believe myself capable of such transcendent humbug and bathos. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous, a more perfect scene for a comedy, than myself indulging in the quintessence of platonism? And then my sugary manner, my demure, hypocritical little ways! _tubleu_! I looked as if I could never touch anything, and any mother who had heard me argue wouldn't have hesitated to let me lie with her daughter, any husband would have trusted his wife with me. It was the one evening in all my life when I seemed to be most virtuous and was least so. I thought it was more difficult than that to be a hypocrite and say things one doesn't believe. It must be very easy or else I must be strongly predisposed that way, to have succeeded so satisfactorily at the first trial.--Really I have some inspired moments.
As for the lady, she made many remarks, very shrewdly worded, which, notwithstanding the innocent air with which she made them, denoted a very extensive experience; you can't conceive the subtlety of her distinctions. The woman would split a hair in three pieces lengthwise, and make fools of all the angelic and seraphic pundits that ever were. Indeed, from her way of talking, it was impossible to believe that she has the shadow of a body.--It is all immaterial, vaporous, ideal enough to break your arms; and if De C---- had not warned me beforehand of the creature's manœuvring, I should certainly have despaired of the success of my undertaking, and stood shamefacedly aside. How in the devil, when a woman tells you for two hours, with the most indifferent air you can imagine, that love lives only on privation and sacrifice and other fine things of that sort, can you decently hope to persuade her to get between two sheets with you some day to stir your blood and see if you are made alike?
In short, we parted the best of friends, mutually congratulating each other on the elevation and purity of our sentiments.
My conversation with the other was, as you will imagine, of a very different tenor. We laughed as much as we talked. We made fun, and very wittily too, of all the women there. When I say: "We made fun, and very wittily too," I am wrong; I ought to say: "She made fun;" a man never makes fun of a woman. I listened and approved, for it is impossible to draw with more telling strokes or to apply colors more brilliantly; it was the most interesting gallery of caricatures that I have ever seen. In spite of the exaggeration, you felt the truth underneath; De C---- was quite right; that woman's mission is to destroy the illusions of poets. There is an atmosphere of prose about her in which a poetic idea cannot live. She is charming, sparkling with wit, and yet when you are with her you think only of base, vulgar things; as I talked to her I felt a crowd of desires, incongruous and impracticable in that place; I felt like ordering wine and getting tipsy, taking her on my knee and kissing her neck--like lifting up her skirt to see if her garter was above or below the knee, like singing an obscene song at the top of my voice, smoking a pipe or smashing the windows: the devil knows what.--All the animal, all the brute rose in me; I would willingly have spat on Homer's Iliad and thrown myself on my knees before a ham.--I understand perfectly to-day the allegory of Circe changing the companions of Ulysses to swine. Circe was probably a wanton like my little woman in pink.
It is a shameful thing to say, but I felt a keen delight in the consciousness that the brute nature was gaining the upper hand; I did not resist it, I assisted it with all my strength, corruption is so natural to man and there is so much mud in the clay of which he is made.
[Illustration: Chapter II--_My conversation with the other was, as you will imagine, of a very different tenor. We laughed as much as we talked. We made fun, and very wittily too, of all the women there._]
And yet I was afraid for a minute of the gangrene that was gaining upon me, and I tried to leave my corrupter; but the floor seemed to have risen to my knees, and I was as if riveted to my place.
At last I made a determined effort and left her, and, it being then very late, I returned home in dire perplexity, very much disturbed in mind and with none too clear an idea what I ought to do.--I wavered between the prude and the wanton.--I found piquancy in the one, sensuousness in the other; and after a very close and very thorough examination of my conscience I discovered, not that I loved them both, but that I desired them both, one as much as the other, with sufficient eagerness to indulge in reverie and preoccupation.
According to all appearances, O my friend! I shall have one of those two women, perhaps I shall have them both, and yet I confess that I am only half satisfied by possessing them; it isn't that they're not very pretty, but at sight of them nothing cried out within me, nothing throbbed, nothing said: "It is they;"--I did not recognize them.--And yet I don't imagine that I shall find any one much better off in the way of birth and beauty, and De C---- advises me to try my hand with them. Most certainly I shall do it, and one or the other shall be my mistress before long or may the devil fly away with me; but way down in my heart a still small voice reproaches me for lying to my love and for pausing thus at the first smile of a woman I do not love, instead of seeking untiringly through the world, in cloisters and all sorts of bad places, in palaces and taverns, the woman who was made for me and whom God destines for me, be she princess or serving-maid, nun or courtesan.