for it; and these are the virtues you
prescribe to woman. And that is
not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and add
to her sorrows by
trying to lead her
astray; and though you are
rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep
one's freedom, to follow one's inclinations in love, and die young!"
"Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?"
"Even then," she said, "instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my
life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is
secure, and there may come a hazy,
uncertain old age, during which I
can suffer at my leisure."
"She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's voice.
"She never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial
with
untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor
tried to stab more than one man to save her
sovereign lord, her king,
her
divinity. . . . Love, for her, meant a
fascinating colonel."
"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
like the wind, no one knows
whence. And, for that matter, if one of
those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
men in horror."
"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
sarcastic Aquilina.
"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.
"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
way," Raphael exclaimed.
"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with
dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
and
terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life
of pleasure, with your dead
hidden in your heart. . . ."
A moment's
consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
Pandemonium. The faces of those still
capable of drinking wore a
hideous blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were
kept up with wild
energy; excited
laughter and outcries broke out like
the
explosion of
fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room
were
strewn like a
battlefield with the
insensible and in
capable.
Wine, pleasure, and
dispute had heated the
atmosphere. Wine and love,
delirium and unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all
faces, upon the furniture; were expressed by the
surrounding disorder,
and brought light films over the
vision of those assembled, so that
the air seemed full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as
in the
luminous paths made by a ray of
sunlight, the most bizarre
forms flitted through it,
grotesque struggles were seen athwart it.
Groups of interlaced figures blended with the white marbles, the noble
masterpieces of
sculpture that adorned the rooms.
Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious
clearness in
their ideas and voices, a
feeble appearance and faint
thrill of
animation, it was yet almost impossible to
distinguish what was real
among the
fantastic absurdities before them, or what
foundation there
was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their
weary eyes. The strangest
phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
heavens, the fervid
sweetness caught by faces in our
visions, and
unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so
vividly, that
they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some
nightmare in which all
movement is silent, and cries never reach the
ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
difficulty, in
drawing his master into the ante-chamber to
whisper to
him:
"The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
sir."
"If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw before their
doors?" was Taillefer's rejoinder.
Raphael's sudden burst of
laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt,
that his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.
"You will hardly understand me," he replied. "In the first place, I
must admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was
about to throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no
doubt, my motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an
almost
miraculous chance the most
poetic memorials of the material
world had but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical
interpretation of human
wisdom;
whilst at this minute the remains of
all the
intellectual" target="_blank" title="n.知识分子">
intellectual treasures ravaged by us at table are
comprised in
these two women, the living and
authentic types of folly, would you be
any the wiser? Our
profoundapathy towards men and things supplied the
half-tones in a crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so
diametrically opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch
a gleam of
philosophy in this."
"And if you had not both feet on that
fascinating Aquilina, whose
heavy breathing suggests an
analogy with the sounds of a storm about
to burst," replied Emile,
absently engaged in the
harmless amusement
of winding and unwinding Euphrasia's hair, "you would be
ashamed of
your inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a
phrase, and reduced to a single idea. The mere
routine of living
brings a
stupid kind of
wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence
with work; and on the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the
abstract or in the abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of
wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed up in brief; we may
extinguish
emotion, and so live to old age, or we may choose to die
young as martyrs to contending passions. And yet this
decree is at
variance with the temperaments with which we were endowed by the
bitter
jester who modeled all creatures."
"Idiot!" Raphael burst in. "Go on epitomizing yourself after that
fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to
formulate those
two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the
exercise of his wits, and purified by
ignorance. You are
calling the
whole
fabric of society to
account. But whether we live with the wise
or
perish with the fool, isn't the result the same sooner or later?
And have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both
systems been before expressed in a couple of words--Carymary,
Carymara."
"You make me doubt the
existence of a God, for your
stupidity is
greater than His power," said Emile. "Our
beloved Rabelais summed it
all up in a shorter word than your 'Carymary, Carymara'; from his
Peut-etre Montaigne derived his own Que sais-je? After all, this last
word of moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set
betwixt good and evil, or Buridan's ass between the two measures of
oats. But let this
everlasting question alone,
resolved to-day by a
'Yes' and a 'No.' What experience did you look to find by a jump into
the Seine? Were you
jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre
Dame?"
"Ah, if you but knew my history!"
"Pooh," said Emile; "I did not think you could be so
commonplace; that
remark is hackneyed. Don't you know that every one of us claims to
have suffered as no other ever did?"
"Ah!" Raphael sighed.
"What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah'! Look here, now. Does some
disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back
of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with
Damiens once upon a time? Were you
driven to sup off your own dog in a
garret, uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, 'I
am hungry'? Have you sold your
mistress' hair to
hazard the money at
play? Have you ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious
uncle at a sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to
take it up? Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown
yourself for some woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer
dulness, I disown you. Make your
confession, and no lies! I don't at
all want a
historicalmemoir. And, above all things, be as
concise as
your clouded
intellect permits; I am as
critical as a professor, and
as
sleepy as a woman at her vespers."
"You silly fool!" said Raphael. "When has not
suffering been keener
for a more
susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a
pitch that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when
they are named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families;
into crustaceae, fossils, saurians, infusoria, or
whatever it is,--
then, my dear fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as
tender and
fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises
that some stony hearts do not even feel----"
"For pity's sake, spare me thy exordium," said Emile, as, half
plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael's hand.
II
A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART
After a moment's silence, Raphael said with a
carelessgesture:
"Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch--I really cannot tell--
this
clearness of mind that enables me to
comprise my whole life in a
single picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and half-tones
are
faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised at this