THÉODORE.
And what does this young man think of you, who is your lover to-day in the eyes of the world?
ROSETTE.
The mind of a lover is a gulf deeper than the Bay of Portugal, and it is very difficult to say what there is in the depths of a man; if the lead were attached to a line a hundred fathoms long and every fathom unreeled, it would still sink without meeting anything to stop it. Yet I have touched bottom several times with this man, and the lead has sometimes brought up mud, sometimes lovely shells, but most frequently mud and fragments of coral mixed together.--As to his opinion of me, it has varied greatly; he began where others leave off, he despised me; young men with vivid imaginations are likely to do that. There is always a tremendous fall in the first step they take, and the passage from their chimera to reality cannot be made without a shock.--He despised me and I entertained him; now he esteems me and I bore him. In the early days of our liaison he saw only the commonplace side of me, and I think that the certainty of meeting with no resistance had much to do with his determination. He seemed in great haste to have an affair, and I thought at first that it was a case of a full heart seeking only an opportunity to overflow, one of those vague passions that a man has in the May of youth and that impel him, in default of women, to throw his arms around the trunks of trees, and to kiss the flowers and grass in the fields.--But it wasn't that;--he simply passed through me to reach something else. I was a means to him, and not an end.--Beneath the fresh exterior of his twenty years, beneath the first down of adolescence, he concealed profound corruption. He was tainted to the core; he was a fruit containing nothing but ashes. In that young and lusty body was a heart as old as Saturn--a heart as incurably wretched as heart ever was.--I confess, Théodore, that I was frightened and that I was almost taken with vertigo as I looked into the black depths of that existence. Your sorrows and mine are nothing compared to those. If I had loved him more I should have killed him. Something irresistibly attracts and summons him--something that is not of this world or in this world, and he cannot rest day or night; and like the heliotrope in a cellar, he twists about to turn toward the sun which he cannot see.--He is one of those men whose mind was not completely dipped in the waters of Lethe before being attached to his body, but retains memories of the eternal beauty of the heaven from which it comes--memories that work upon it and torment it--and remembers that it once had wings and now has feet only.--If I were God, I would deprive of poetry for two eternities, the angel guilty of such negligence.--Instead of being under the necessity of building a castle of bright-colored cards in which to shelter a fair, youthful fancy for a single spring, it was necessary to erect a tower higher than the eight temples of Belus piled one upon another. I had not the strength, I pretended not to have understood him, and I let him flutter about on his wings in search of a peak from which he could take flight into boundless space.--He thinks I have noticed nothing of all this, because I have fallen in with all his caprices without seeming to suspect their object. Being unable to cure him, I determined--and I hope that I shall receive credit for it some day before God--to give him at least the happiness of believing that he was passionately loved.--He aroused in me so much pity and interest that I was easily able to assume a tone and manner sufficiently affectionate to deceive him. I have played my part like a consummate actress; I have been playful and melancholy, sensible and voluptuous; I have feigned anxiety and jealousy; I have shed false tears, and I have summoned flocks of ready-made smiles to my lips. I have arrayed this counterfeit of love in the richest stuffs; I have taken him to drive through the avenues of my parks; I have requested all my birds to sing as he passed, and all my dahlias and daturas to bend their heads in salutation; I have sent him across my lake on the silvery back of my darling swan; I have concealed myself inside the manikin and bestowed my voice, my wit, my youth and beauty upon it and given it such a seductive appearance that the reality fell far short of my deception. When the time comes to shatter this hollow statue, I shall do it in such a way that he will think the wrong is all on my side and so will have no remorse. I shall be the one to make the pinhole through which the air with which the balloon is filled will make its escape.--Is not that sanctified prostitution and honorable deception? I have in a glass jar some tears that I have collected just as they were about to fall.--They are my jewel-case and my diamonds, and I shall present them to the angel who comes for me to lead me before God.
THÉODORE.
They are the loveliest that can glisten on a woman's neck. A queen's jewels are less precious than they. For my own part, I believe that the ointment Magdalen poured on Christ's feet was made of the tears of those she had comforted, and I believe, too, that the Milky Way is strewn with such tears, and not, as has been said, with drops of Juno's milk.--Who will do for you what you have done for him?
ROSETTE.
No one, alas! since you cannot.
THÉODORE.
O dear heart! would that I could!--But do not lose hope. You are lovely and still very young. You have many avenues of lindens and flowering acacias to pass through before reaching the damp road lined with box and leafless trees, which leads from the tomb of porphyry in which your happy dead years will be buried, to the tomb of rough and moss-covered stone where they will hasten to bestow the remains of what once was you, and the wrinkled, tottering spectres of the days of your old age. You still have much of the mountain of life to climb and it will be long before you reach the zone where the snow begins. You are now only at the level of aromatic plants, of limpid cascades over which the iris suspends its tri-colored arches, of stately green oaks and sweet-smelling larches. Mount a little higher and from that point, with the broader horizon spread out before you, perhaps you will see the blue smoke rising above the roof beneath which he who will love you sleeps. You must not, in the very beginning, despair of life, for vistas open in our destiny which we had ceased to expect. Man, in his life, has often made me think of a pilgrim toiling up the winding stairway of a Gothic tower. The long granite serpent winds upward in the darkness, every coil a stair. After a few circumvolutions the little light that came from the door dies out. The shadow of the houses, which are not yet passed, does not allow the loopholes to admit the sun: the walls are black and moisture oozes from them; you seem rather to be going down into a dungeon from which you are never to come forth, than ascending to the turret which, from below, seemed to you so slender and graceful, covered with lace-work and embroidery as if it were about starting for the ball.--You hesitate whether you ought to go higher, the damp shadows weigh so heavily upon your forehead.--A few more turns of the staircase and more frequent openings cast their golden trefoils on the opposite wall. You begin to see the notched gables of the houses, the carving of the entablatures, the strange forms of the chimneys; a few steps more and your eye overlooks the whole city; it is a forest of steeples, of spires and towers, bristling upon all sides, toothed and slashed and hollowed, stamped as with dies, and allowing the light to shine through their numberless apertures. The domes and cupolas raise their rounded forms like a giant's breasts or the skulls of Titans. The islets formed by houses and palaces appear through shadowy or luminous openings. A few steps more and you will be on the platform; and then you will see, beyond the walls of the city, the green fields, the blue hill-sides and the white sails on the changing ribbon of the stream. A dazzling light bursts upon you, and the swallows fly hither and thither, close at hand, with their joyous twitter. The distant sounds reach your eyes like a soothing murmur or the hum of a swarm of bees; all the bells scatter their necklaces of pearls of sound through the air; the breezes bring you the odors of the neighboring forest and of the mountain flowers: it is all light and melody and perfume. If your feet had been weary or discouragement had seized upon you, and you had remained on a lower step or had turned back and gone down again, that spectacle would have been lost to you.--Sometimes, however, the tower has only a single opening, in the centre or at the top.--The tower of your life is built so.--In that case you must have more obstinate courage, perseverance armed with sharper nails, to cling, in the darkness, to the protruding stones, and to reach the opening, resplendent with light, through which the eye embraces the surrounding country; or it may be that the loopholes have been filled up, or no one has thought to cut them, and then you must go on to the summit; but the higher one goes without looking out, the more extended the horizon seems, and the greater the surprise and pleasure.