THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ÉMILE ZOLA. Эмиль Золя
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made her presents, for he was fond of giving. At the beginning she had received these presents with the joy of a child at the gift of a plaything. The value of the object made little difference. She was happy that her lover was constantly thinking of her, and she accepted jewels as mere keepsakes. After the shock which awoke her from her dream, she was strangely troubled at seeing herself dressed in robes of silk and adorned with diamonds that she had not paid for herself. Her life from that time was a continual bitterness, for she was hurt at the sight of this luxury which did not belong to her. She was pained by the lacework and the softness of her bed, and by the rich furniture in the house. She looked upon everything about her as the price of her shame.
“I am selling myself,” she would think sometimes, with a horrible oppression at her heart.
William, on one of their gloomy days, brought her a bracelet. She grew pale at the sight of the jewel and did not utter a word.
The young man, astonished not to see her fling her arms round his neck, as in the old days, said to her gently:
“You don’t like this bracelet, perhaps?”
She was silent for a moment; then in a trembling voice she said:
“My dear, you spend a lot of money on me. You do wrong. I don’t want all these presents and I should love you quite as much if you gave me nothing.”
She restrained a sob. William drew her quietly towards him, surprised and vexed, yet not daring to divine the cause of her paleness.
“What is the matter with you?” he answered. “Madeleine, those are horrid thoughts — Are you not my wife?”
She looked him in the face, and her steady, almost stern gaze, said plainly: “No, I am not your wife.” Had she dared, she would have proposed to him to pay for her food and dress out of her little income. Since her fall, her pride had become refractory; she felt that everything wounded her feelings and that irritated her all the more.
A few days after, William brought her a dress and she said to him with a nervous smile:
“Thank you; but, in future, let me buy these things. You don’t understand anything about them, and they cheat you.”
From that time she made her purchases herself. When her lover wanted to refund her the money that she had spent, she contrived a little plot to refuse it. Thus she was always on her guard, always making little attacks to defend her pride which was so easily wounded by a trifle. The truth was that life was beginning to prove unbearable to her in the Rue de Boulogne. She loved William, but she had made, herself so wretched by her daily revolts, that she would fancy that she did not love him, though this could not prevent her from feeling greatly distressed when she thought that he might leave her as James had done. Then she would weep for hours and ask herself into what new shame she would fall then.
William could see perfectly well that her eyes were at times red with weeping. He could guess in part the wounds that she was inflicting on herself. He would have wished to be kind, to console her by becoming more affectionate towards her, and yet, in spite of himself, he was becoming more distressed and more feverish every day. Why did she weep like that? was she unhappy with him? was she regretting a lover? This last thought made him very wretched. He too was losing the faith and blind confidence he used to have. He was thinking of that period of Madeleine’s past history of which he knew nothing, of which he wished to know nothing, and which however he could not help thinking of incessantly. The painful doubts that he had felt on the night of their walk at Verrières seized him again and tortured him. He felt anxious about the years gone by, he watched Madeleine in order to detect a confession in her gestures, or in her looks; then, when he thought that he could perceive a smile that he could not account for, he was distressed that she could be thinking of anything but himself. Now that she was his, she ought to be his without reserve. He would say to himself that his love ought to be sufficient to satisfy her. He would not admit of any ground for her reveries, and he felt himself painfully hurt by her passing fits of indifference. Often, when she was by his side, she was not listening to him; she would let him talk on, staring vacantly around, absorbed in secret thoughts; then he would stop talking, he would think himself slighted, and a sudden feeling of pride would change his love almost into disdain. “My heart is deceived,” he would think; “this woman is not worthy of me; she has already seen too much of life to be able to reward me for my affections.”
They never had an open quarrel. They continued in a state of tacit hostility. But the few bitter words they sometimes exchanged only left them more dejected and depressed.
“Your eyes are red,” William would often say to Madeleine, “what is the cause of your secret weeping?”
“I don’t weep, you are mistaken,” the young woman would reply, trying to smile.
“No, no, I am not mistaken,” was William’s answer; “I can hear you quite well sometimes in the night. Are you unhappy with me?”
She would give a shake of denial with her head, and put on a forced laugh, or the look of a persecuted woman. Then the young man would take her hands in his, and try to infuse a little warmth into them, and as these hands continued lifeless and cold, he would let go of them exclaiming:
“I am a poor lover, am I not? I don’t know how to win love — But there are some people who are never forgotten.”
Such an illusion would have a painful effect on Madeleine.
“You are cruel,” she would reply bitterly. “I can’t forget what I am, and that’s why I weep. What can you be thinking of, William?”
He would hang down his head, and she would add, earnestly:
“It would, perhaps, be better for you to know my past history. Anyhow you would know what to do, and you would no longer think about shame which does not exist. Would you like me to tell you all?”
He would vehemently ask her not to, and take her to his heart, beseeching her pardon. This scene, which took place again and again, never went any further: but an hour after, they would forget it all, and go back to their old state: William, to his selfish despair at not possessing her entire affection, Madeleine, to the regrets prompted by her pride and to the dread of being hurt.
At other times, Madeleine would throw her arms round William’s neck and shed tears unreservedly. These crises of weeping, which nothing could explain to him, were even still more painful to the young man. He did not dare to question his mistress, he consoled her, with a provoked air, which stopped her tears and made her assume a hard, implacable attitude. Then she refused to speak to him, and he had to relent so far as to sob, before they fell into each other’s arms, distressing and consoling one another mutually. And they would have been unable to say what it was that was making them wretched; they were inexpressibly sad, they knew not why; it seemed to them that they were breathing a tainted air and that a lingering, unrelenting dejection was crushing them beneath its oppressiveness.
There was no termination to a situation like this. There was only one remedy — a frank explanation. But from this Madeleine shrank, for this William was too feeble. For a month, they lived this life of oppression.
William had got James’s portrait richly framed, and this portrait, placed in the lover’s bedroom, troubled Madeleine. When she retired to rest, it would seem to her as if the eyes of the dead man were watching her get into bed. During the night, she would smother her kisses that he might not hear them. When she was dressing, in the morning, she hurried on her clothes so as not to stand naked before the photograph in broad daylight. Yet, she loved this likeness, and there was nothing painful in the distress that it caused it. Her memories of the past were less hard, yet she no longer looked on James with the eyes of a lover, but from the standpoint of a friend of his who is ashamed of the past. She even felt more modesty with regard to him than before William, and was really pained at seeing him look on at her new passions. Sometimes she thought that she ought to ask his pardon, she would forget herself before his portrait, with no other feeling but one of solace. The days when she wept, or when she had exchanged bitter words with her lover, she gazed at James with a still gentler expression. She regretted him in a vague way, forgetful of her former