The Complete Works: Short Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs and more. Guy de Maupassant
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to outbursts of enthusiasm, was excited by this innocent sorrow, agitating, ingenuous, and cruelly charming.
He stretched forth his hand toward her with an unstudied movement such as one might use in order to caress, to calm a child, and he drew it round her waist from behind over her shoulder. Then he felt her heart beating with rapid throbs, as he might have heard the little heart of a bird that he had caught. And this beating, continuous, precipitate, sent a thrill all over his arm into his heart, accelerating its movements. And he felt those quick heart-beats coming from her and penetrating him through his flesh, his muscles, and his nerves, so that between them there was now only one heart wounded by the same pain, agitated by the same palpitation, living the same life, like clocks connected by a string at some distance from one another and made to keep time together second by second.
But suddenly she uncovered her flushed face, still tear-dimmed, quickly wiped it, and said:
“Come, I ought not to have spoken to you about this. I am foolish. Let us go back at once to Madame Honorat, and forget. Do you promise me?”
“I do promise you.”
She gave him her hand. “I have confidence in you. I believe you are very honest!”
They turned back. He lifted her up in crossing the stream, just as he had lifted up Christiane, the year before. How often had he passed along this path with her in the days when he adored her! He reflected, wondering at his own changed feelings: “How short a time this passion lasted!”
Charlotte, laying a finger on his arm, murmured: “Madame Honorat is asleep. Let us sit down without making a noise.”
Madame Honorat was, indeed, slumbering, with her back to a pine-tree, her handkerchief over her face and her hands crossed over her stomach. They seated themselves a few paces away from her, and refrained from speaking in order not to awaken her. Then the stillness of the wood was so profound that it became as painful to them as actual suffering. Nothing could be heard save the water gurgling over the stones, a little lower down, then those imperceptible quiverings of insects passing by, those light buzzings of flies or of other living creatures whose movements made the dead leaves flutter.
Where then were Louise and Gontran? What were they doing? All at once, the sound of their voices reached them from a distance. They were returning. Madame Honorat woke up and looked astonished.
“What! you are here again! I did not notice you coming back. And the others, have you found them?”
Paul replied: “There they are! They are coming.”
They recognized Gontran’s laughter. This laughter relieved Charlotte from a crushing weight, which had oppressed her mind — she could not have explained why.
They were soon able to distinguish the pair. Gontran had almost broken into a running pace, dragging by the arm the young girl, who was quite flushed. And, even before they had come up, so great a hurry was he in to tell his story, he shouted:
“You don’t know what we surprised. I give you a thousand guesses to discover it! The handsome Doctor Mazelli along with the daughter of the illustrious Professor Cloche, as Will would say, the pretty widow with the red hair. Oh! yes, indeed — surprised, you understand? He was embracing her, the scamp. Oh! yes — oh! yes.”
Madame Honorat, at this immoderate display of gaiety, made a dignified movement:
“Oh! M. le Comte, think of these young ladies!”
Gontran made a respectful obeisance.
“You are perfectly right, dear Madame, to recall me to the proprieties. All your inspirations are excellent.”
Then, in order that they might not be all seen going back together, the two young men bowed to the ladies, and returned through the wood to the village.
“Well?” asked Paul.
“Well, I told her that I adored her and that I would be delighted to marry her.”
“And she said?”
“She said, with charming discretion, ‘That concerns my father. It is to him that I will give my answer.’”
“So then you are going to— “
“To intrust my ambassador Andermatt at once with the official application. And if the old boor makes any row about it, I’ll compromise his daughter with a splash.”
And, as Andermatt was again engaged in conversation with Doctor Latonne on the terrace of the Casino, Gontran stopped here, and immediately made his brother-in-law acquainted with the situation.
Paul went off along the road to Riom. He wanted to be alone so much did he find himself invaded by that agitation of the entire mind and body into which every meeting with a woman casts a man who is on the point of falling in love. For some time past he had felt, without quite realizing it, the penetrating and youthful fascination of this forsaken girl. He found her so nice, so good, so simple, so upright, so innocent, that from the first he had been moved by compassion for her, by that tender compassion with which the sorrows of women always inspire us. Then, when he had seen her frequently, he had allowed to bud forth in his heart that grain, that tiny grain, of tenderness which they sow in us so quickly, and which grows to such a height. And now, for the last hour especially, he was beginning to feel himself possessed, to feel within him that constant presence of the absent which is the first sign of love. He proceeded along the road, haunted by the remembrance of her glance, by the sound of her voice, by the way in which she smiled or wept, by the gait with which she walked, even by the color and the flutter of her dress. And he said to himself:
“I believe I am bitten. I know it. It is annoying, this! The best thing, perhaps, would be to go back to Paris. Deuce take it, it is a young girl! However, I can’t make her my mistress.”
Then, he began dreaming about it, just as he had dreamed about Christiane, the year before. How different was this one, too, from all the women he had hitherto known, born and brought up in the city, different even from those young maidens sophisticated from their childhood by the coquetry of their mothers or the coquetry which shows itself in the streets. There was in her none of the artificiality of the woman prepared for seduction, nothing studied in her words, nothing conventional in her actions, nothing deceitful in her looks. Not only was she a being fresh and pure, but she came of a primitive race; she was a true daughter of the soil at the moment when she was about to be transformed into a woman of the city.
And he felt himself stirred up, pleading for her against that vague resistance which still struggled in his breast. The forms of heroines in sentimental novels passed before his mind’s eye — the creations of Walter Scott, of Dickens, and of George Sand, exciting the more his imagination, always goaded by ideal pictures of women.
Gontran passed judgment on him thus: “Paul! he is a pack-horse with a Cupid on his back. When he flings one on the ground, another jumps up in its place.” But Bretigny saw that night was falling. He had been a long time walking. He returned to the village.
As he was passing in front of the new baths, he saw Andermatt and the two Oriols surveying and measuring the vineflelds; and he knew from their gestures that they were disputing in an excited fashion.
An hour afterward, Will, entering the drawingroom, where the entire family had assembled, said to the Marquis: “My dear father-in-law, I have to inform you that your son Gontran is going to marry, in six weeks or two months, Mademoiselle Louise Oriol.”
M. de Ravenel was startled: “Gontran? You ‘say?”
“I say that he is going to marry in six weeks or two months, with your consent, Mademoiselle Louise Oriol, who will be very rich.”
Thereupon the Marquis said simply: “Good heavens! if he likes it, I have no objection.”
And the banker related how he had dealt with the old countryman. As soon as he had learned from the Comte that the young girl would consent, he wanted to obtain, at one interview, the vinedresser’s assent without giving