The Complete Works: Short Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs and more. Guy de Maupassant
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ones, and as he eagerly stepped forward to meet her she said to him as he came near with a pleasant smile, in which there was a trace of uneasiness: “You are very imprudent! You must not show yourself like that; I saw you almost from the Rue de Rivoli. Come, we will go and take a seat on a bench yonder. There is where you must wait for me next time.”
He could not help asking her: “So you come here often?”
“Yes, I have a great liking for this place, and as I am an early walker I come here for exercise and to look at the scenery, which is very pretty. And then one never meets anybody here, while the Bois is out of the question on just that account. But you must be careful not to give away my secret.”
He laughed: “I shall not be very likely to do that.” Discreetly taking her hand, a little hand that was hanging at her side conveniently concealed in the folds of her dress, he sighed: “How I love you! My heart was sick with waiting for you. Did you receive my letter?”
“Yes; I thank you for it. It was very touching.”
“Then you have not become angry with me yet?”
“Why no! Why should I? You are just as nice as you can be.”
He sought for ardent words, words that would vibrate with his emotion and his gratitude. As none came to him, and as he was too deeply moved to permit of the free expression of the thought that was within him, he simply said again: “How I love you!”
She said to him: “I brought you here because there are water and boats in this place as well as down yonder. It is not at all like what we saw down there; still it is not disagreeable.”
They were sitting on a bench near the stone balustrade that runs along the river, almost alone, invisible from every quarter. The only living beings to be seen on the long terrace at that hour were two gardeners and three nursemaids. Carriages were rolling along the quay at their feet, but they could not see them; footsteps were resounding upon the adjacent sidewalk, over against the wall that sustained the promenade; and still unable to find words in which to express their thoughts, they let their gaze wander over the beautiful Parisian landscape that stretches from the île Saint-Louis and the towers of Notre-Dame to the heights of Meudon. She repeated her thought: “None the less, it is very pretty, isn’t it?” But he was suddenly seized by the thrilling remembrance of their journey through space up on the summit of the abbey tower, and with a regretful feeling for the emotion that was past and gone, he said: “Oh, Madame, do you remember our escapade of the ‘Madman’s Path?’”
“Yes; but I am a little afraid now that I come to think of it when it is all over. Dieu! how my head would spin around if I had it to do over again! I was just drunk with the fresh air, the sunlight, and the sea. Look, my friend, what a magnificent view we have before us. How I do love Paris!”
He was surprised, having a confused feeling of missing something that had appeared in her down there in the country. He murmured: “It matters not to me where I am, so that I am only near you!”
Her only answer was a pressure of the hand. Inspired with greater happiness, perhaps, by this little signal than he would have been by a tender word, his heart relieved of the care that had oppressed it until now, he could at last find words to express his feelings. He told her, slowly, in words that were almost solemn, that he had given her his life forever that she might do with it what she would.
She was grateful; but like the child of modern scepticism that she was and willing captive of her iconoclastic irony, she smiled as she replied: “I would not make such a long engagement as that if I were you!”
He turned and faced her, and, looking her straight in the eyes with that penetrating look which is like a touch, repeated what he had just said at greater length, in a more ardent, more poetical form of expression. All that he had written in so many burning letters he now expressed with such a fervor of conviction that it seemed to her as she listened that she was sitting in a cloud of incense. She felt herself caressed in every fiber of her feminine nature by his adoring words more deeply than ever before.
When he had ended she simply said: “And I, too, love you dearly!”
They were still holding each other’s hand, like young folks walking along a country road, and watching with vague eyes the little steamboats plying on the river. They were alone by themselves in Paris, in the great confused uproar, whether remote or near at hand, that surrounded them in this city full of all the life of all the world, more alone than they had been on the summit of their aerial tower, and for some seconds they were quite oblivious that there existed on earth any other beings but their two selves.
She was the first to recover the sensation of reality and of the flight of time. “Shall we see each other again tomorrow?” she said.
He reflected for an instant, and abashed by what he had in mind to ask of her: “Yes — yes — certainly,” he replied. “But — shall we never meet in any other place? This place is unfrequented. Still — people may come here.”
She hesitated. “You are right. Still it is necessary also that you should not show yourself for at least two weeks yet, so that people may think that you are away traveling. It will be very nice and mysterious for us to meet and no one know that you are in Paris. Meanwhile, however, I cannot receive you at my house, so — I don’t see— “
He felt that he was blushing, and continued: “Neither can I ask you to come to my house. Is there nothing else — is there no other place?”
Being a woman of practical sense, logical and without false modesty, she was neither surprised nor shocked.
“Why, yes,” she said, “only we must have time to think it over.”
“I have thought it over.”
“What! so soon?”
“Yes, Madame.”
“Well?”
“Are you acquainted with the Rue des Vieux-Champs at Auteuil?”
“No.”
“It runs into the Rue Tournemine and the Rue Jean-de-Saulge.”
“Well?”
“In this street, or rather lane, there is a garden, and in this garden a pavilion that also communicates with the two streets that I mentioned.”
“What next?”
“That pavilion awaits you.”
She reflected, still with no appearance of embarrassment, and then asked two or three questions that were dictated by feminine prudence. His explanations seemed to be satisfactory, for she murmured as she arose:
“Well, I will go tomorrow.”
“At what time?”
“Three o’clock.”
“Seven is the number; I will be waiting for you behind the door. Do not forget. Give a knock as you pass.”
“Yes, my friend. Adieu, till tomorrow.”
“Till tomorrow, adieu. Thanks; I adore you.” They had risen to their feet. “Do not come with me,” she said. “Stay here for ten minutes, and when you leave go by the way of the quay.”
“Adieu!”
“Adieu!”
She started off very rapidly, with such a modest, unassuming air, so hurriedly, that actually she might have been mistaken for one of Paris’ pretty working-girls, who trot along the streets in the morning on the way to their honest labors.
He took a cab to Auteuil, tormented by the fear that the house might not be ready against the following day. He found it full of workmen, however; the hangings were all in place upon the walls, the carpets laid upon the floors. Everywhere there was a sound of pounding, hammering, beating, washing. In the garden, which was quite large and rather pretty, the remains of an ancient park, containing a few large