Mallarmé, "Dans le jardin"

A work ("In the garden") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

The lady youth who walks upon the lawn,
In summer trim of apples and of charms,
Where noon eclipses twelve with both its arms, 
And stops her lovely steps amidst its brawn,

As tragic, forlorn spouse, one time did tell 
To Death, seducing then her poet: "Woe!
"You lie, O vain realm! Jealous am I so
"Of this false Eden sad where he shan't dwell."

'Tis why the deepest flowers of the earth, 
Love him with silence, mystery and lore,
While in their hearts the purest pollen sleeps;

And come the breeze, by these delights he keeps
A name for goblets to be drunk in mirth:
"Helène!" his feeble voice will always roar!

The Ring of Thoth

There is undoubtedly no more romantic vocation than that of the Egyptologist.  Every young soul fascinated with the greatest civilization that ever was will at one time or another have fancied himself a decipherer of ancient riddles and symbols.  After years in splendid scholarly isolation, he will see the fruits of his labor as another gilded tomb is unearthed and another series of mystic rituals uncovered.  Whatever you may think of Ancient Egypt, it owns permanent property in our imagination precisely because so much of it has yet to be explained, the technology of the Pharaohs and their peons being so remarkably advanced (such as the embalming methods, which have never been duplicated) as to make many believe it the achievement of extraterrestrials.  And some elements of the otherworldly surely inform this well-known tale. 

We begin with a brief if cluttered review of the accomplishments of a young British academic by the name of John Vansittart Smith.  Our man may make some claim to lofty provenance, yet the bookends of his nomenclature could not be any more common.  Smith was once an up-and-coming zoologist, a "second Darwin" according to those compulsive labelers we find indigenous to all societies at all times, who eventually turned his attention to chemistry and garnered equal acclaim.  He dabbled in metals – he is very much an alchemist in his relentless self-aggrandizement – before shifting specializations once more and joining the Oriental Society.  Soon thereafter he was deemed a full-fledged expert on Ancient Egypt, as if that job description could ever really apply to the subject matter.  It is in this role, then, that our burgeoning academic finds his way to that most enchanting of European metropolises, the City of Lights:

He set himself to collect materials for a work which should unite the research of Lepsius and the ingenuity of Champollion.  The preparation of his magnum opus entailed many hurried visits to the magnificent Egyptian collections of the Louvre, upon the last of which, no longer ago than the middle of last October, he became involved in a most strange and noteworthy adventure.  The trains had been slow and the Channel had been rough, so that the student arrived in Paris in a somewhat befogged and feverish condition.  On reaching the Hotel de France, in the Rue Laffitte, he had thrown himself upon a sofa for a couple of hours, but finding that he was unable to sleep, he determined, in spite of his fatigue, to make his way to the Louvre, settle the point which he had come to decide, and take the evening train back to Dieppe.  Having come to his conclusion, he donned his greatcoat, for it was a raw rainy day, and made his way across the Boulevard des Italiens and down the Avenue de l'Opera.  Once in the Louvre he was on familiar ground, and he speedily made his way to the collection of papyri which it was his intention to consult.

A rainy Paris in October would be heaven enough for anyone with the faintest romantic streak, but we stand at merely the threshold of our discoveries.  Smith proceeds into the museum where our noticeably ornithic scholar ("His high-beaked nose and prominent chin had something of the same acute and incisive character which distinguished his intellect") overhears a snatch of conversation between two Englishmen punctuated by the observation, "What a queer-looking mortal!"  Further comments imply that they may be talking about Smith, whose birdlike features, odd "pecking motion with which, in conversation he threw out his objections and retorts," and general fineness of feature all suggest a resemblance to our titular god.  He turns to find out, "to his surprise and relief," that he was mistaken: the subject of discussion was "one of the Louvre attendants":

He moved his position slightly in order to catch a glimpse of the man's face.  He started as his eyes fell upon it.  It was indeed the very face with which his studies had made him familiar.  The regular statuesque features, broad brow, well-rounded chin, and dusky complexion were the exact counterpart of the innumerable statues, mummy-cases, and pictures which adorned the walls of the apartment.  The thing was beyond all coincidence.  The man must be an Egyptian.  The national angularity of the shoulders and narrowness of the hips were alone sufficient to identify him.

Who this alleged descendant of the pharaohs may be and what secrets he may possess need no further mention on these pages.  What we can say is Smith is such an exemplary student that he retreats to a dark corner of the world's most famous museum to edit his notes on those papyri and watch the soporific twilight limit his ambitions – and that will do.

Our author is still read with avidity in dozens of languages, but almost exclusively thanks to the immortal glory of perhaps the most recognizable literary figure of all time (elsewhere I bestowed this honor upon this character but may have to retract that comment).  Such is the price of renown: even those of discernible public influence during their lifetimes such as Conan Doyle cannot possibly tame the vicissitudes of taste.  For better or worse Holmes and Conan Doyle will be bound together for all eternity, like Melville and his whale or Nabokov and his mermaid or nymphet or whatever that poor girl was in the end.  The creation outgrows the creator and assumes an uneven proportion of the laurels.  Laurels that (usually posthumously) adorn the brow of the literary genius whom all know by reputation, but not, sadly, by word and deed.  For that reason alone would the judicious reader be wise to explore the other works of Holmes's designer, if only to find passages as soft and menacing as this:

The complete silence was impressive.  Neither outside nor inside was there a creak or a murmur.  He was alone with the dead men of a dead civilisation.  What though the outer city reeked of the garish nineteenth century!  In all this chamber there was scarce an article, from the shrivelled ear of wheat to the pigment-box of the painter, which had not held its own against four thousand years.  Here was the flotsam and jetsam washed up by the great ocean of time from that far-off empire.  From stately Thebes, from lordly Luxor, from the great temples of Heliopolis, from a hundred rifled tombs, these relics had been brought.  The student glanced around at the long-silent figures who flickered vaguely up through the gloom, at the busy toilers who were now so restful, and he fell into a reverent and thoughtful mood.  An unwonted sense of his own youth and insignificance came over him. 

So great is the power of Egypt that it can render even an insufferable egomaniac like Smith helpless and unripe before its magnificent legacy, but I think that was evident from the very beginning.  Four thousand years ago never felt so palpable, so immediately accessible, as when they leapt from the papyrus to the naked, barely trained eye.  Even to an evolutionary Renaissance man like Smith. 

Le bonheur dans le crime (part 7)

The final part of a story ("The happiness in crime") by this French writer.  You can read the original here.

"Poisoned!" I cried.

"By her lady in waiting, Eulalie, who mistook one flask for another and who, it was said, made her mistress swallow a bottle of double ink instead of a medicine that I had prescribed.  It was possible, after all, that this was a mistake.   But I knew – I knew – that Eulalie was Hauteclaire!  I had seen both of them forming Canova’s statue of Amor and Psyche on the balcony!  The world had not seen what I had seen.  The world had the impression of merely a terrible accident.  But when, two years after this disaster, it was learned that Count Serlo of Savigny publicly married the daughter of Stassin – because who she was, the false Eulalie, had to come out – and he was going to bed her in the still-warm sheets of his first wife, Miss Delphine of Cantor – oh, well then!

"Then was a roar of thunder of suspicion, all in a low voice, as if one were afraid of what was said and what one thought.  The only thing was that, basically, no one knew.  One only knew about this monstrous mésalliance, which pointed a finger at the Count of Savigny and isolated him as a pariah.  And, what is more, that was enough.  You know what a shame it is – or rather was, for things have since changed in that region – to say of a man: he married his servant!  This disgrace spread and remained with Serlo like a smear.  As for the awful buzz that had circulated about the suspected crime, it was soon swallowed up like a horsefly falling tired in a rut.  But there was, however, someone who knew and who was certain –"

"And this could only be you, doctor?" I asked.

"Indeed, it was I," he said, resuming his narrative.  "But I was not alone.  If I had been the only one to know, I would have never had more than vague glimmers, worse than total ignorance.  I would never have been sure."  Here, leaning on his words with the aplomb of complete assurance, he said: "And I most certainly am! 

"And listen to how much I am!" he added, taking my knee with his gnarled fingers, as if with a clamp.  For his story would grab me even more than this system of crab-like articulations which formed his formidable hand.

"You must surely think," he continued, "that I was the first to know of the poisoning of the Countess.  Guilty or not, they had to send for me since I was the doctor.  They did not even bother to saddle a horse.  A stable boy came bareback and at a fast gallop to find me in V., from where I followed him, at the same frantic pace, to Savigny. 

"When I arrived – had all this been calculated? – it was no longer possible to stop the ravages of the poisoning.  Serlo – devastated, to judge by his physiognomy – came out in front of me in the courtyard and said, as I disengaged myself from the stirrup, as if he were afraid of the words he was about to use:

"'A servant has made a mistake (he avoided saying Eulalie, whom everyone would name the following day).  But, doctor, this is not possible! Could double ink truly be a poison?'

"'This depends on the substances with which it is made,' I rebutted.  He led me into the chamber of the Countess who was exhausted in pain, and whose retracted face resembled a ball of white yarn fallen in green dye.  In this state she was frightening.  She smiled at me, a horrible, black-lipped smile of the kind that a silent person might make with the meaning: 'I know what you’re thinking.'  My eyes circled the room to see whether Eulalie was there.  I wanted to behold her countenance at such a moment; but she was not there.  As valiant as she was, was she afraid of me?  Oh, I still only had uncertain information.   

"When seeing me, the Countess made an effort and raised herself on her elbow.

"'Ah, there you are, doctor,' she said.  'But you have come too late.  I am dead.  You shouldn't have sent for a doctor, Serlo, but a priest.  Go on!  Order him to come, and leave me two minutes alone with the doctor.  This is what I want!'

"She said this – 'this is what I want' – as I had never heard her talk before, as the woman with the forehead and the chin of which I have already spoken to you.

"'Even I?' said Savigny weakly.

"'Even you,' she said.  And she added, almost in a caress: 'My dear, you know that women are most prudish in front of those they love.'

"Hardly had he left the room than she underwent an atrocious change.  Her caress became the claws of a wild beast.

"'Doctor,' she said in a voice filled with hate.  'It is no accident that my death is a crime.  Serlo loves Eulalie and it was she who poisoned me!  I did not believe you when you told me that this girl was too beautiful to be a lady in waiting.  I was wrong.  He loves this treacherous, this dreadful girl who has killed me.  And he is even guiltier than she is, because he loves her and he has betrayed me for her.  For several days now the looks exchanged from both sides of my bed have provided me with sufficient warning.  And then the abominable taste of that ink with which they poisoned me!  But I drank it all, despite its horrible taste, because I was quite ready to die.  Do not even mention antidotes!  I want none of your remedies.  I want to die.'

"'So why then did you have me come, Madame?'

"'Well then!' she said, panting.  'Here's why: to tell you that they poisoned me, and to obtain your word of honor that you will conceal this fact.  All of this will make a terrible scene.  It must not occur.  You are my doctor and people will believe you when you speak of a misunderstanding that others have made up, and when you say that I would not even be dead, that I could have been saved, if my health had not abandoned me so long ago.  This is what you must swear to me, doctor.'

"And as I did not reply, she saw what was in me.  I considered that perhaps she loved her husband to the point of wanting to save him.  That was the idea that came to me, a natural and vulgar idea, one that pertained to those women so frozen by love and its abnegation that they do not return the blow that slays them.  But the Countess of Savigny had never given me the impression of being one of those women!

"'Ah!  It is not what you think that makes me ask you to swear this to me, doctor!  Oh no!  Despite his betrayal, I hate Serlo too much at this time not to love him still.  But I am not so cowardly as to forgive him!  I depart from this life, jealous of him and implacable.  But it is not a matter of Serlo, doctor,' she went on with more energy, revealing to me a side of her character that I had already glimpsed but whose depths I had never penetrated.  'It concerns the Count of Savigny.  When I am dead I do not want the Count to be known as his wife’s murderer.  I do not want him to be dragged into the court of assizes to be accused of complicity with an adulterous servant girl poisoner!  I do not want this blemish to remain on the name of Savigny, which I once bore.  Oh, if it were only about him, him, so deserving of all the gallows!  But I would eat his heart out!   Yet it is a matter for all of us proper people in this region!  If we were still what we should be, I would have had this Eulalie tossed into one of the dungeons of the castle of Savigny, and it would never again have been an issue!  But now we are no longer the masters here.  We no longer have our silent and expeditious justice, and I in no way want any scandals or publicity from your side, doctor.  I would prefer to die enraged and leave them in each other’s arms, happy and delivered from me, than to think, as I die, that the nobility of V. would incur the ignominy of a poisoner in its ranks.'

"Despite the shaking of her jaw which was clacking so hard that her teeth could have been shattered, she spoke with unprecedented vibration.  I recognized her and yet I was still learning about her!  She was full well that noble girl who was nothing but that – noble and stronger, as she died, than the jealous woman within her.  She died as a daughter of V., the last noble city in France.  And touched more by this than I perhaps ought to have been, I promised and swore to her that if I didn’t save her, I would do as she had asked.

"And I did so, my dear fellow.  I did not save her.  I could not save her: she obstinately refused all remedies.  I said what she had wanted me to say when she died and I was persuasive.  Twenty-five years have now passed between that time and ours.  Now everything about this horrible episode has been calmed, silenced, and forgotten.  Many people who lived through it are now dead.   Ignorant and indifferent generations have grown on their tombs, and the first word I have said of this sinister story was to you!

"And yet, it took what we have just seen for me to tell you.  It took these two beings, unchangeably beautiful despite time’s march, unchangeably happy despite their crime, powerful, passionate, wholly self-absorbed, as they passed so magnificently through both life and this garden, similar to two altar angels who abscond united in the golden shadow of their four wings!"

I was appalled.  "But, doctor," I said, "if what you say is true, then the happiness of these people is a terrifying disorder in creation."

"A disorder or an order, as you please," said Dr. Torty, that hidebound atheist, as calm, as it were, as the people of whom he spoke.  "They are exceptionally happy and insolently happy.  I am quite old and have seen in my life many joys that have not lasted.  But I have seen only this one happiness that is so deep and that still lasts!

"And believe me when I say that I have studied, examined and reexamined the matter!  Believe me when I say that I have picked at this happiness.  Please pardon the expression, but I can well say that I have loused it!  I have placed my two feet and two eyes as much as possible into the lives of these two beings to see whether there weren't any flaws in their surprising and revolting happiness, a crack, however small, in some hidden place.  Yet I have never been able to find anything but enviable felicity, which would be an excellent and triumphant joke on the part of the Devil against God, if there were a God and a Devil! 

"After the death of the Countess, I remained, as you may well imagine, on good terms with Savigny.  Since I had lent my support to the affirmation of the fable they had concocted to explain the poisoning, they had no interest in chasing me away; and I had a very keen interest in finding out what would occur next, what they would do, what they would become.  I was exasperated, but I braved my exasperations.  What ensued was, first of all, Savigny’s period of mourning, which lasted the customary two years, and which Savigny bore with a manner that confirmed the publicly-held idea that he was the most excellent of husbands, past, present and future.  During those two years he saw absolutely no one.  He remained buried in his castle with such rigorous solitude that no one knew he had kept Eulalie there with him, the involuntary cause of the Countess’s death and whom he should have, for convenience’s sake alone, shown the door, even in the certitude of his innocence.   

"The carelessness of keeping such a girl at home after such a catastrophe proved to me the phenomenal passion in Serlo that I had always suspected.  I was also in no way surprised when one day, coming back from one of my rounds of house calls, I encountered a domestic servant on the way to Savigny from whom I asked for the latest news as to what was happening in the Castle, and he told me that Eulalie was still there.  From the indifference with which he told me this I saw that no one among the Count’s people suspected that Eulalie was his mistress.  'They’re still playing it very close to the vest,' I said to myself.  But why didn’t they leave the region?  The Count was rich.  He could live a luxurious life anywhere.  Why didn’t he flee with this beautiful she-devil (and as to the fact that she was a devil, I have no doubt) who, so as to pin him down all the better, preferred to live in the house of her lover, in constant danger, than to be his mistress in V. in some reclusive abode where he could have gone to see her on the sly without much worry?  There was something beneath all this that I did not understand.  Were they, therefore, so deep in their delirium and their devouring of one another that they had become blind to all the prudence and precautions of life?  Hauteclaire, whom I thought to be the stronger of the two in character, Hauteclaire, whom I thought of as the man in their love affair, did she wish to remain in the castle where one had seen her as a servant and where one should have seen her as a mistress?  And if one were to discover her game and a scandal were to ensue, was she, in remaining, preparing for an even more appalling scandal, that of her marriage to the Count of Savigny?

"At this point of my story, I had not considered whether the idea had occurred to her.  Hauteclaire Stassin – daughter of that old fencing hall stalwart, the Pointe-au-corps, whom we had all seen in V. giving lessons and cracking with every move in those tight-fitting pants – would now become the Countess of Savigny!  Come on!  Who would have believed such a reversal, such an end of the world?  Oh heavens, for my part, I thought in petto that the concubinage would continue to take its course between these two proud animals that had recognized, at first blush, that they were of the same species and had dared into adultery under the Countess’s very nose.  But the marriage, the marriage concluded as an effrontery to both God and man, this defiance of an entire outraged region in both sentiments and mores … I was, I admit, miles away from such a conclusion!  And I was still farthest away from such thoughts when the thing suddenly happened, the lightning bolt of surprise fell upon my head as if I had been one of those imbeciles who never anticipated what could happen, and who would begin to bawl in the countryside like those dogs, whipped during the night, would bawl at the crossroads.       

"Moreover, during Serlo’s two years of mourning which were so strictly observed and, once one saw how they culminated, accused of hypocrisy and baseness, I did not go much to the castle of Savigny.  What would I do there?  Things were well over there, and apart from the odd moment perhaps when I was sent for at night for a birth that one would still have had to hide, there was no need for my services.  Nevertheless, from time to time, I risked it and paid a visit to the Count.  Politeness coupled with eternal curiosity.  Serlo would receive me here or there, depending on the event and where he was at the time I arrived.  He evinced no embarrassment with me; he had regained his benevolence; he was serious.  I had already noticed that happy human beings are serious.  They bear their hearts attentively within themselves, like a full glass which the slightest movement could spill or shatter.  Despite his gravity and black garb, Serlo had in his eyes the incoercible expression of immense felicity.  It was no longer the expression of relief or deliverance that shone through, like on that day when, in his wife’s chambers, he had perceived that I had recognized Hauteclaire but decided to pretend that I had not.  No, damn it all!  This was well and truly happiness!   

"Although in these quick, ceremonial visits we only discussed superficial and extraneous subjects, the voice of the Count of Savigny in pronouncing these words was not the same voice he had had at the time of his wife.  In a plenitude now almost warm in its intonations, his voice revealed he was having trouble containing his innermost sentiments that sought to be expressed.  As for Hauteclaire (still Eulalie and still at the castle, as the domestic servant had informed me), it took me a long time to run into her again.  When I dropped in she was no longer in the corridor where, during the time of the Countess, she had sat working at her embrasure.  True enough, she was not there; nevertheless, the pile of laundry was in the same place, as were the scissors, and the eyeglass case, and the thimble on the window sill – all  of which told me that she should still be working there, perhaps on that warm, empty chair which she had left upon hearing me arrive.  You will remember that I had the fatuity to believe that she feared the penetration of my glance; yet at present she no longer had any reason to fear it.  She did not know the awful information which the Countess had confided to me.  Owing to her audacious and haughty nature (something I have always noticed about her), she must have been happy to be able to face the wise soul who had guessed her game.  And, as it were, what I presumed to be true was indeed the truth: the day that I finally ran into her she had happiness written all over her face in such a radiant manner that one couldn't have wiped it off even if one were to use the entire bottle of double ink with which she had poisoned the Countess!

"It was on the main staircase of the castle that we finally crossed paths once more.  She was coming down and I was going up.  She was going down, it should be said, a bit quickly; but when she saw me, she slowed her movements planning, doubtless, a sumptuous showing of her face to allow me to graze the depths of those eyes which could make a panther blink, and yet did not make me do so.  As she descended the stairs, her skirts floated behind her beneath the breaths of a rapid movement, and she seemed to be descending straight from heaven.  She was sublimely happy.  Oh, her happy state was miles above that of Serlo!  And I passed her by without the niceties that politeness necessitates, for if Louis XIV greeted his chambermaids on the stairs, at least they were not poisoners! 

"On that day then, she was still a chambermaid in dress, in situation, in white apron.  But her happy appearance, that of the most triumphant and despotic mistress, had replaced the impassiveness of the slave.  That appearance has not left her.  I have just seen her and you were able to judge for yourself.  It is more striking than the beauty itself of the face on which that happiness is spread.  This superhuman sensation of pride in happy love which she must have bestowed upon Serlo, who initially did not possess this feeling; she continues to have it, twenty years on, and I have never seen it wane nor hide itself on the faces of these two strange persons so privileged by life.  It is with this sensation that they have always responded victoriously and with a certain amount of reckless abandon to everyone, to all the ill comments, to the contempt of the indignant public, and made those they encounter believe that the crime of which for a while they stood accused was nothing more than atrocious calumny."

"But you, doctor," I interrupted.  "With all that you know can you not forsake this sensation?  I take it you have not followed them everywhere?  And, of course, you cannot see them at all hours."

"Except in their bedroom at night, and this is not where they lose it," said the strapping Doctor Torty, who retained his profound air.  "I have seen them, I believe, at all the moments of their lives since their wedding, which they went to have who knows where so as to avoid the uproar that the inhabitants of V., as irate in their way as nobility is in its own, promised to inflict upon them.  When they returned married, she, now authentically the Countess of Savigny, and he, absolutely dishonored by a marriage to a servant, were left alone in their castle of Savigny.   Everyone simply turned his back on them.  They were left to revel in one another as much as they wanted.  The only thing was, they seem to have never reveled in one another, as far as one could tell; their hunger for each other has yet to be assuaged.  As for me, who does not want to die, in my capacity as a doctor, without having written a treatise on teratology, they interested me like monsters, so I did not join the line of those who avoided them.  When I saw the false Eulalie now perfectly a Countess, she received me as if she had been one all her life.  She was concerned that I still remembered her tray and white apron!

"'I'm no longer Eulalie,' she told me.  'I am Hauteclaire – Hauteclaire, happy to have been his servant.'

"I thought she was something very different; but as I was the only one in the region that had visited Savigny after their return, I was immune to all shame and ended up going there quite often.  I can say that I continued to burn with curiosity as I looked at the intimacy of these two beings, so completely happy in love.  Well, then!  You may believe me if you choose, my dear fellow, but of this happiness, sullied by a crime of which I was certain, I did not see the purity – I will not say fade, but darken for a single minute of a single day.  In this morass of a crime which hadn’t had the courage to be bloody I never once saw a stain upon its azure happiness.  Stunning, don’t you think?  All the moralists of the world who invented the axiom of vice punished and virtue rewarded!  Abandoned and solitary as they were, seeing only me, who did not annoy them and had become almost a friend owing to my frequent visits, they no longer were watchful.  They forgot me and lived very well, even with me present, in the intoxication of a passion incomparable to anything I might find amidst all the memories of my life.    

"You just witnessed it a moment ago: they passed by and did not even notice me an arm’s length away!  One part of my life with them and they saw me no more.  Polite, kind, but most often distracted, their manner with me was such that I would not have returned to Savigny if I hadn’t wished to examine microscopically their incredible happiness, and to catch – if only for my own personal edification – a grain of sand of lassitude, of suffering, and, let us utter the big word here, of remorse.  But there was nothing!  Nothing!  Love took everything, filled everything, and blocked everything in them, moral sense and conscience, as you say, all of you.  And it was in watching them, these happy people, that I understood the seriousness of the joke by my old chum Broussais when he said of conscience: 'That's thirty years that I’ve dissected this small animal and I have yet to find even an ear!'

"And you shouldn't think," continued this old devil as if he had read my thoughts.  "That what I say to you is but a thesis, the proof of a doctrine that I believe to be true and which flatly denies conscience as Broussais denied it.  There is no thesis here.  I do not seek to make incursions upon your opinions.  There are only facts, which have surprised me as much as you. There is the phenomenon of a continual happiness, of a soap bubble that is still growing and that will never die!  When happiness goes on and on, this is already what we must call a surprise; but this happiness in their crime is simply so amazing, and now twenty years on I have returned to this amazing sensation.  The old doctor, the old observer, the old moralist… or immoralist," he corrected himself, seeing my smile, "is confounded by this spectacle, which he has been obliged to watch for so many years.  A spectacle, I may add, which cannot be seen in detail because if there is one adage that lingers everywhere – and it is so very true – it is that happiness has no history.  Nor does it have any description.  One can no more paint happiness, this infusion of a superior life within life, than one can paint the circulation of blood in the veins.  That the blood circulates is attested by the beats of the arteries, and it is in this way that I attest to the happiness of these two beings whom you have just seen, this incomprehensible happiness whose pulse I have touched for so long.

"Every day the Count and Countess of Savigny recreate, without thinking, the magnificent chapter of love in the marriage of Madame de Staël, or even the most beautiful verse of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  By my own reckoning, I have never been very sentimental or very poetic.  Yet they, with the ideal that they have realized, made me – which I thought impossible – become disgusted with the best marriages that I had hitherto known, marriages which people like to call 'charming.'  I have long since found these 'charming' marriages so inferior to theirs, so colorless, so cold!   Destiny, their star, chance, whatever it was, was such that they were able to live for themselves.  Rich, they had this gift of idleness without which there is no love, but which often kills the love necessary for its birth.  As an exception, idleness has not killed this love of theirs.  Love, which simplifies everything, has made their life into a sublime simplification.  There are none of those vulgar things which one calls events in the life of those two spouses, who have lived, it would seem, like all other castle owners on earth, far from the world of which they have nothing to ask, caring as little about the world’s esteem as its contempt. 

"They have never parted.  Where one of them goes, the other goes along in accompaniment.  The roads in the vicinity of V. again bear witness to Hauteclaire on horseback, like during the time of old Pointe-au-corps.  But now it is the Count of Savigny who is with her; and the local women who, as they used to do, pass by in coaches, no longer stare at her as they once did when she was a grand, mysterious girl in a dark blue veil and they couldn’t see her.  Now her veil is raised, and she boldly shows the face of the servant girl who knew how to marry herself off; and the local women return home indignant but swathed in daydreams.  The Count and Countess of Savigny hardly travel; they sometimes come to Paris but stay only a few days. Thus their life is entirely concentrated in this castle of Savigny, which was the theater for a crime whose memory may now be lost to them both, lost perhaps in the bottomless abyss of their hearts."

"And they’ve never had children, doctor?" I said.

"Ah!" said Dr. Torty.  "You believe that here lies the crack, the revenge of fate, and what you call the vengeance or justice of God?   No, they’ve never had children.  Remember that I once got the impression that they would not.  They love each other too much.  A fire which devours consumes and does not produce.  One day, I said to Hauteclaire:

"'So you aren’t sad not to have had any children, Madame?'

"'I do not want any!' she said, imperiously.  'I would love Serlo less.  Children,' she added with some contempt, 'are good for unhappy women!'"

And on this phrase, which he believed to be profound, Dr. Torty abruptly concluded his story.

He had interested me, so I said to him: "As criminal as she was, one cannot but take an interest in this Hauteclaire; without his crime I could understand Serlo's love."

"And perhaps even with his crime!" said the hardy fellow, "so could I!"

Le bonheur dans le crime (part 6)

Part six of a story ("The happiness in crime") by this French writer.  You can read the original here.

"I was awaiting drama and catastrophe, which I considered to be inevitable.  And yet apart from Savigny’s paleness and repressed trances, I saw nothing of the love affair they were having with one another.  How far into it were the two of them?  This was the secret of their romance that I wanted to unmask.  It seized control of my thoughts like the sphinx’s claw upon a problem, and became so strong that from observation I fell into espionage, which is simply observation at any price.  Ha, ha!  By a sharp flavor are we soon debauched.  To find out what I didn’t know, I allowed myself more than a few little despicable acts that were very unworthy of me.  Even at the time I had judged them to be so, and yet allowed myself to do them nonetheless.   Oh, the habit of testing and probing, my dear fellow!   I made use of it everywhere.

"When stabling my horse in my visits to the Castle, I would get the servants to gossip about their masters without giving them the impression of being at all interested in their blather.  I spied (oh, I do not spare myself the word) upon them on behalf of my own curiosity.  But the servants were all as mistaken as the Countess.  They took Hauteclaire in very good faith for one of their own.  And I too would have made the same assumption, even with all that my curiosity cost me, had it not been for an accident which, as always, brought at once more to light than all my attempts at synthesis, and taught me more than all my efforts at espionage.

"It had been more than two months since I had gone to see the Countess, whose health was not improving.  She exhibited more symptoms of this debilitation so common now, but which the doctors of that excitable age called anemia.  Savigny and Hauteclaire continued to play, with the same perfection, the very difficult comedy which my arrival and my presence in this castle had not derailed.  Nevertheless, one would have said that there was a little fatigue in the actors.  Serlo had lost weight, and I had heard in V.: 'What a good husband that Mr. Savigny is!  He has already completely changed because of the illness of his wife.  What a beautiful thing it is to love!'  Hauteclaire, that immobile beauty, had lowered eyes, but not the lowered eyes as one might find when someone has wept, because these eyes had perhaps never cried once in their life.  No, they were as if they had been sleepless for a long time and, in their shine, only burned more ardently from the bottom of their purplish circle.  What is more, the emaciated Savigny and Hauteclaire’s rings around her eyes could have come from something other than the compressive life imposed upon them.  They could have come from so many things in this hellish subterranean environment! 

"I was observing these treacherous signs in their faces that questioned me quietly, not knowing how to answer me, when, one day, having made my house calls in the vicinity, I came by Savigny in the evening.  My intention was to enter the castle, as usual; but a country woman’s very laborious birth had delayed me significantly, and, when I passed by the Castle, the hour was much too late for me to enter the house.  I didn't even know what time it was; my hunting watch had stopped.  But the moon had begun to descend from the other side of its curve in the sky, and indicated against this vast watch face of blue that it was a little after midnight.  And with the lower tip of its crescent it almost grazed the tops of the high firs of Savigny, behind which it would have disappeared –

"Have you ever visited Savigny?" said the doctor, interrupting himself suddenly and turning to me.  "Yes, you have," he said at my nod.  "Well then, you know that one is obliged to enter through the woods of fir trees and pass along the walls of the castle, from which one should double back like rounding a cape in order to take the road that leads directly to V.  Suddenly in the thickness of these black woods, where I saw neither a drop of light nor heard the faintest noise, to my ear came a sound that I took to be a beating, the beating of some poor woman.  Having toiled all day in the fields, she now made use of the moonlight to wash her linen in a pond or a ditch.  It was only in advancing towards the castle that this regular slamming became intermeshed with a second noise that informed me as to the nature of the first.  It was a clash of swords that crossed, and rubbed, and scraped.  You know how one hears everything in the silence and thin air of the dead of night and how the slightest sounds assume a precision of singular distinguishability!  I heard – and could not have been mistaken – the animated rustling of iron.  An idea crossed my mind; but when I exited the castle’s woods of fir, it stood there, a window open, pale beneath the moon:

"'Will you look at that,' I said, admiring the strength of tastes and habits.  'This is still their way of making love!'

"It was obvious that it was Serlo and Hauteclaire who were fencing at this hour.  One could hear their swords as if one had seen them.  What I had taken for the sound of the beatings were the fencers stepping hard with their feet, signaling covertly to one another.  The open window was in the most distant of the four pavilions – the same pavilion in which the Countess had her bedroom.  The castle was asleep, dreary and white beneath the moon, like something dead.  Everywhere apart from in this pavilion, chosen by design, whose patio door was outfitted with a balcony and which gave out onto half-closed shutters, all was silence and darkness.  But it was from these blinds, half-closed and striped with light on the balcony, that this doubled noise of steps and clashing foils emanated. 

"It was so lucid and so crisply defined to the ear that I presumed – with good reason, as you will see – that since it was very hot (we were in July), they had opened the door to the balcony under the blinds.  Having stopped my horse on the edge of the woods, I was listening to their skirmish (which seemed very distinct and sharp), fascinated by this assault of weapons between lovers loving each other, their weapons in hand.  They continued to love each other in this way, when, after a period of time, the clanking of the foils and the slamming of the feet stopped. The shutters of the glass door to the balcony were advanced and opened and, on this clear night, I only had time to conceal myself and back my horse up in the shadow of the fir woods.  Serlo and Hauteclaire came out to lean upon the balcony rail.   

"I could make them out with wonderful clarity.  The moon had fallen behind the little woods; but in the apartment the light from a candelabrum behind them highlighted their double silhouette.  Hauteclaire was dressed, if this is to be called dressed, as I had seen her so many times giving lessons in V.: she was laced up in her fencing vest of chamois leather that served her as a sort of breastplate, her legs molded by those silk shoes which so correctly outlined her muscular contours.  Savigny was wearing almost the same outfit.  Streamlined and robust both, they appeared against the luminous background which framed them like two beautiful statues of youth and strength.  You have just had the chance to admire in this garden the proud beauty of one and the other, beauty still undestroyed through all these years.  Well then!  Let these images help you forge an idea of the magnificence of the couple I saw then, on that balcony, in clothes so tight they seemed at moments to be nude.  They were talking as they leaned upon the ramp, alas, too softly for me to hear their words; yet the positions of their bodies spoke the words for them.  At one point Savigny passionately threw his arm around the waist of this horsewoman made, it seemed, for all sorts of resistance and yet who exerted none at all; almost at the same time, the proud Hauteclaire had her arms draped around Serlo’s neck.  In this way the two formed for themselves Canova’s famous and voluptuous pair which has remained in all memories.  And upon my word, they remained so sculpted, without interruption or recommencement, mouth to mouth for the time needed to consume at least a bottle of kisses!  This all lasted more than sixty heartbeats, as measured by a pulse that was throbbing more quickly than at present, and the spectacle made it beat faster still.      

"'Oh, Oh!' I said when I had exited my woods and they had gone back inside, still intertwined, and lowered the curtains, large dark curtains.  'One of these mornings they will have to confide in me.  It is not only themselves that they will have to hide.'  Seeing these caresses and this intimacy revealed to me everything and I attempted, in my role as physician, to derive the consequences.  But their ardor was to deceive my predictions.  You know like I do that beings who love each other too much (the cynical doctor used another word) do not have children.  The next morning, I went to Savigny.  I found Hauteclaire once again as Eulalie, sitting in the embrasure of one of the windows of the long corridor that led to the bedroom of her mistress, a mass of laundry and rags on a chair before her, and busy sewing and cutting, she, the master foil of the night before!

"Did one have any suspicions, I thought, seeing her with her white apron and these forms that I had seen, as if they were naked, in the framed luminescence of the balcony, now drowning in the folds of a skirt that could not swallow them?  I passed by but did not address her because I spoke to her as little as possible, not wanting to give her the impression of knowing what I knew, which could easily have been betrayed by my voice or my glance.  I felt I was much less of an actor than she was, and I was afraid.  Usually, when I would walk along the corridor where she always worked when she was not waiting upon the Countess, she heard me come so acutely, she was so certain that it was I, that she never even raised her head.

"She remained bent forward beneath her starched cambric headgear, or beneath that Norman cap she would also wear some days and which resembled the hennin of Isabeau of Bavaria, her eyes on her work and her cheeks veiled by long curls of blue-black hanging before their pale oval, offering nothing to my view but the curve of a neck blurred by thick ringlets twisted like the desires which they provoked.  In Hauteclaire, it was mainly the animal element which was magnificent.  No woman could have been a greater example of this type of beauty than she was!  Men who amongst themselves said everything had quite often noticed this.  In V. whenever she gave fencing lessons, the men called her 'Miss Esau.'  The Devil teaches women what they are; or, rather, they would teach the Devil if he didn’t happen to know.  But at present, since she had become the chambermaid, I had never seen her once permit herself that gesture of power, of playing with fire, even when she looked at Savigny.

"My dear fellow, my parenthesis is long; but everything that might help you to know properly the Hauteclaire Stassin of those times is important to my story.  That same day, she was forced to inconvenience herself and come show me her face.  The Countess rang for her and commanded her to give me pen and paper which I needed to write out a prescription, and she came.  She came without having taken the time to remove the steel thimble from her finger, and having stuck the threaded needle in the fabric that cloaked her provocative bosom where she had stuck a mass of others that now embellished her with their steel.  Even steel needles suited this she-devil, made as she was for steel, and who, had she been in the Middle Ages, would surely have worn armor.  She stood in front of me as I wrote, offering me the desk with that noble and gentle movement in her forearms which her fencing years had given to no one as much as to her.  When I had finished, I lifted my eyes and looked at her so as not to seem affected.  And I found her face tired from her night.  Savigny, who was not there when I had come, suddenly entered the room. He was much more tired than she was.  He told me about the Countess’s condition, which was not improving.  He spoke as a frustrated man might about this lack of a cure, the curt, bitter and violent tone of a man whose patience had long abandoned him.  He paced the floor, still talking.  I looked at him coldly, finding the matter really overdone and his Napoleonic tone with me a little inappropriate.  'But if I healed your wife,' I thought to myself rudely, 'you could not fence and make love all night with your mistress.'  I could have reminded him of the sense of reality and politeness that he had forgotten, to shove up his nose, if I had so wished, the smelling salts of a good response.  But I contented myself with just watching him.  He was becoming more interesting than ever, because it was clear to me that he was acting more than he ever had before."

And the doctor stopped again. He plunged his large thumb and index into his silver guilloche box and breathed in a pinch of Macouba snuff, which he had the habit of pompously calling his tobacco.  He was so interesting to me in his way that I made no comment and he recommenced his story, having absorbed his pinch and passed his crooked finger along the curve of his greedy nose shaped like a chough’s beak.

"Oh, he was truly frustrated, but not because his wife was not convalescing, this woman to whom he was so decidedly unfaithful.  What a devil!  He who has taken as a concubine a servant in her own home, can hardly be enraged because his wife was not healing!  Thus, if she were to heal, wouldn’t adultery become more difficult?  And yet it was true that the dragging out of this suffering without end was getting to him and affecting his nerves.  Had he thought that it wouldn’t take this long?  Afterwards when I thought about it, I wondered whether the idea to put an end to it first came to him or to her, or to both of them at once, as her illness and her doctor were showing no signs of leaving, it is possible that from that moment on …" 

"What, doctor, therefore they ...?"

I did not finish, as the idea he gave me left me speechless.

He lowered his head in looking at me, as tragic as the statue of the Commendatore when it agrees to dinner.

"Yes!" he whistled slowly in a low voice, responding to my thought.  "A few days later at least, the whole region learned with horror that the Countess had been poisoned."

Le bonheur dans le crime (part 5)

Part five of a story ("The happiness in crime") by this French writer.  You can read the original here.

"And I came back, my finger on my mouth, fully resolved not to breathe a word to anyone about that which no one in the region could have suspected.  Ah, the pleasures of the observer!  I have always valued the impersonal and solitary pleasures of the observer above all others.  And I was about to give myself over to them completely, in a corner of the countryside, in this old, isolated castle where, as a doctor, I could come by whenever I pleased.  Happy to be delivered from his solicitude, Savigny said to me:

"'Until further notice, doctor, come every day.'

"I could therefore study, with as much interest and continuity as I might monitor a disease, the mystery of a situation which, if told to anyone, would have seemed impossible.  And since from the first day I had perceived it this mystery had aroused my faculty of reasoning – the walking cane of the learned and especially of the doctor – amidst the passionate curiosity of its investigations, I began immediately to reason out this situation in order to explain it.   For how long had this situation existed?  Did it date from Hauteclaire’s disappearance?  Had it been going on for more than one year?  Had Hauteclaire been the lady in waiting to the Countess of Savigny for that long as well?  How was it that, apart from me, whom it had been necessary to summon, no one had seen what I had seen so easily and so quickly?  All questions were mounted and came with me in pillion to V., accompanied by many others raised and amassed on my way thither.

"The Count and Countess of Savigny, who would pass by to be admired, lived, admittedly, quite removed from all types of people.  But, after all, a visit from time to time would have to be paid to the Castle.  It was also true that if the visitors were men, Hauteclaire could not appear.  And if they were women, these women of V. had for the most part never seen her well enough to be able to recognize her, that girl barricaded for years by lessons at the back of a fencing hall, and who, made out from far, either on horseback or at church, invariably wore a veil that rendered her, quite by design, even more mysterious.  For Hauteclaire (I have told you) always had this pride of those very proud beings whom too much curiosity offended, and who hid themselves even more when they felt themselves to be the target of looks and gazes. 

"As for the people of Mr. Savigny with whom she was forced to live, if they were from V. they did not recognize her, and perhaps they weren’t from there anyway.  And it was in this way that I replied, while trotting, to the first questions which, after a certain amount of time and a certain path, found their answers.  And before I had gotten down from the saddle, I had already constructed an entire edifice of more or less plausible suppositions to explain what – to someone other than a rationalist like me – would have been inexplicable.  The only thing that perhaps I did not explain well was that the startling beauty of Hauteclaire had somehow not been an obstacle to her entrance in the service of the Countess of Savigny, who loved her husband and who had to have been jealous.

"Moreover, the patrician women of V., no less proud than the wives of the paladins of Charlemagne, did not assume (a grave error; but they had not read The Marriage of Figaro!) that the most beautiful chambermaid could be for their husbands any more than the most beautiful lackey could be for them.  I finish by saying, quitting the stirrups, that the Countess of Savigny had her reasons for believing herself to be loved, and that, after all, this rascal Savigny was quite capable, if she were to be seized by doubt, to add to these reasons."

"Harrumph!" I said skeptically to the doctor, whom I could not help but interrupt.  "All this is good and well, my dear doctor, but the situation was still not lacking in carelessness."

"Certainly not!" he replied.  "But was it," added this great connoisseur of human nature, "even carelessness which led to such a situation?  It is of those passions which carelessness lights aflame, and which would not exist without the danger that they cause.  In the sixteenth century, which was a century as passionate as any epoch may possibly be, the most magnificent cause of love was the very danger of love.  Quitting the arms of a mistress one risked being stabbed; or the husband poisoned you in his wife's muff which you kissed and against which you had committed all the stupidities of advantage and use; and, far from making love scary and terrible, this constant danger perturbed it, lit it aflame and made it irresistible!  In our flat modern morals, where the law has replaced passion, it is clear that the section of the code that applies to the husband guilty of having – as the law states vulgarly – 'introduced the concubine into the marital home' is a rather ignoble danger.  But for noble souls, this danger, only because it is so ignoble, is all the greater.  And in exposing himself to such danger, Savigny found in it perhaps the only anxious pleasure that really intoxicates strong souls.

"The next day, you can well believe," continued Dr. Torty, "I was in the castle early.  But neither that day nor the following day did I see anything that would be out of the ordinary in all the houses where everything is normal and regular.  I noticed nothing either from the part of the patient or from that of the count, or even from the part of the false Eulalie – who, of course, performed her tasks as if she had been raised exclusively for that purpose – that could have informed me as to the secret into which I had stumbled.  What could be said with certainty, however, was that the Count of Savigny and Hauteclaire Stassin played the appallingly impudent comedy with the simplicity of consummate actors, and they had conspired to play their roles as such.  But what was not as certain, and what I wanted to know first of all, was whether the Countess was actually their dupe and, in the event that she was, whether it were possible that she had been one for so long.  Therefore it was upon the Countess that I concentrated my attention. 

"I had all the less trouble delving into her mind thanks to the fact that she was my patient, and, with her illness, the focal point of my observation.  She was, as I have told you, a true woman of V. who knew nothing and I mean nothing more than that.  It was simply that she was noble and that, outside of the nobility, people were not worthy of her glance.  The feeling of their nobility is the only passion in V. among the women of the upper class, and in all classes they are very passionate.  Raised in a school run by Benedictine nuns where, without any religious vocation, she was terribly bored, Miss Delphine Cantor ended up leaving the school to be bored with her family.  That is, bored until she married the Count of Savigny, whom she loved or thought she loved, with the ease of those bored girls to love the first suitor presented to them.

"She was quite fair, of soft skin and tissue but hard of bone, with a milky complexion floating in freckles, little blotches of red certainly darker than her hair, which was of a very soft red.  When she handed me her pale arm, veined like a bluish mother-of-Pearl, a fine wrist of high pedigree, her pulse, as was its normal condition, languished in its beat.  Yet as she did this, she imbued me with the impression of having been created for this world solely as a victim to be crushed under the feet of this proud Hauteclaire, who towered over her even in the role of servant.  This idea, which initially arose from looking at her, was contradicted, however, by a chin that at the end of her thin face became a chin like that of Fulvia on Roman medals, lost below a ruffled countenance, as well as by a stubbornly bulging forehead beneath hair bereft of any gleam.   All of this ultimately would make judgment and analysis all the more burdensome a task.

"It was perhaps from Hauteclaire’s feet that the obstacle came.  It was impossible for a situation such as the one I perceived in this house – at present, quite uneventful – not to end in some kind of horrible scene.  With this future scene in mind, I doubled my auscultations of this small woman who could not remain a closed book to her physician for too long.  He who hears the confessions of the body soon has those of the heart.  If there were moral or immoral causes behind the current suffering of the Countess, in vain would she curl up in a ball with me and fill that ball with her impressions and thoughts.  No, she would have to lay them out.  That's what I told myself; nevertheless, you can trust that I turned the matter over in my keen medical mind – but to no avail.  After a few days, it became obvious that she did not have the slightest suspicion of the complicity of her husband and Hauteclaire in a domestic crime for which her house was the silent and discreet theater.

"Was this owing, on her part, to a lack of acumen?  A muteness of jealous feelings?  What was it?  She had a somewhat haughty reserve with everyone, except with her husband.  With this false Eulalie who waited on her she was imperious but gentle.  This may seem contradictory – but it wasn’t at all.  This was nothing but the truth.  She issued brief orders but never raised her voice, for she was a woman made to be obeyed and confident of this unswerving obedience.  And she was so quite admirably.  Eulalie, this frightening Eulalie, insinuated herself with her, slipped into her home, I never knew how, and enveloped herself in her mistress’s cares which stopped just in time before they became a burden for the person who absorbed them.  What is more, she evinced in the details of her service a grace and an understanding of the character of her mistress which contained as much genius of willfulness as genius of intelligence.  I concluded by even speaking with the Countess about this Eulalie, whom I saw during my visits encircling her so naturally that it gave me chills down my spine.  It was like watching a serpent unfold and extend, without making any noise, in approaching the bed of a sleeping woman.

"One night, when the Countess asked her to go get I don't know what, I seized upon the occasion of Eulalie’s absence and her speed, on the most soundless of steps, with which she carried out her task, to risk a word or two which could shed some light:

"'What steps of velvet!' I said, watching her leave the chamber. 'You have there, Madam, a lady in waiting of good and pleasant service, as far as I can judge.  May I ask you where you found her?  Is she by any chance from V., this girl?'

"'Yes, she serves me very well,' replied the Countess indifferently.  At the time, she was looking into a small hand mirror framed in green velvet and surrounded by peacock feathers with that impertinent air one always has when one is busy with something other than what is being said to you.  'I could not be any more satisfied.  She is not from V.; and yet I could not tell you where she is from as I know nothing about it.  Ask Mr. Savigny if you really wish to know, doctor, for it was he who brought her here a short while after our marriage.  In introducing her he told me that she had worked for an old cousin of his who had just died, and she was left with no job.  I took her on this recommendation and I did well.   As a lady in waiting, she is sheer perfection!  I do not think she has a flaw.'

"'I happen to know one, Madam,' I said, feigning gravity.

"'Ah?  And what would that be?' she said languidly with a lack of interest in her own words, as she carefully studied her pale lips in the small mirror.

"'She is too beautiful,' I said.  'She really is too beautiful for a lady in waiting.  One of these days someone will take her away from you.'

"'You think so?' she said, still looking at herself and absent-minded about what I was saying.

"'And perhaps it will be, Madam, a proper gentleman from your world who will become infatuated with her!  She is beautiful enough to turn the head of a duke.'

"I measured my words as I spoke.  This was a test balloon, a probe; but if I met there with nothing, I could not try any more.

"'There is no duke in V.,' said the Countess, whose forehead remained as smooth as the mirror she was holding in her hand.  'And, anyway doctor,' she added, smoothing over one of her eyebrows, 'when all these girls want to leave, it is not the love that you may have for them that prevents them from doing so.  Eulalie is a charming servant; yet she, just like all the others, would abuse any affection I might develop for her.  So I would do well not to get too attached.'

"And on this day I realized it was no longer a question of Eulalie.  The Countess was absolutely fooled.  Who would not have been, as it were?  I, who before anyone else had recognized her, this Hauteclaire seen so many times, a simple sword’s length away, in the fencing hall of her father.  There were moments where I was tempted to believe Eulalie.  Savigny had much less than she; Savigny, who should have had more freedom and ease, and seemed more natural in the lie – ah, but it was she!  It was she who was moving and living as the most flexible of the fish might live and move in the water.

"It was necessary, of course, that she love him, and love him strangely, for her to do what she was doing, for her to have abandoned an exceptional existence.  She could have flattered her vanity by observing how the eyes of a small town – for her, the universe – were fixed upon her.  Later, amidst these young people, among her fans and worshippers, she could have found someone who would marry her for love and have her enter this high society, whose men were only known to her.  He, the lover, certainly played for lower stakes than did she.  He occupied, in devotion, the lower position.  His manly pride must have suffered in not being able to spare his mistress the indignity of a humiliating situation.  In all this there was an inconsistency with the impetuous character imputed to Savigny.  If he loved Hauteclaire to the point of sacrificing his young wife, he could abscond with her and go and live with her in Italy – this was already quite common in that epoch! – without enduring the abominations of a shameful and hidden concubinage.  Was it therefore he who loved less?  Or rather, did he let himself be loved by Hauteclaire more than he loved her?  Was it she who came, on her own, and forced her way into the staff of the matrimonial home?  Finding the move bold and saucy, did he then allow this new breed of Potiphar, who at all times filled him with temptation, to carry out her plan?

"What I saw did not inform me a great deal about Savigny and Hauteclaire.  Accomplices in adultery – for they were most certainly, for heaven’s sake! – was one thing.  But the feelings that he possessed as the foundation of this adultery, what were they?  What was the situation of these two people with regard to one another?  I was keen on releasing this unknown variable in my algebra.  Savigny was irreproachable in the presence of his wife; but when Hauteclaire-Eulalie was there he took, as far as I could see out of the corner of my eye, precautions which attested to a hardly peaceful mind.  When, in the day-to-day activities of life, he requested from his wife’s lady in waiting a book, a journal, or any object at all, he had a way of taking this object which would have revealed everything to any woman other than this small inmate, raised by Benedictine nuns, whom he had married.

"One noticed that his hand was afraid to meet that of Hauteclaire, as if, in touching it by chance, it would have been impossible not to do so.  Hauteclaire did not evince any of this burden or these horrible precautions.   A temptress as they all are who would tempt God in his heaven, if there were one, and the Devil in his hell, she seemed to wish to agitate, at once, both desire and danger.  I saw her once or twice – on the day when my visit coincided with dinner – as Savigny was devoutly at the bed of his wife.  It was she who served them, with the other servants never to enter the apartment of the Countess.  To put the dishes on the table, she needed to lean slightly over the shoulder of Savigny, and here I caught her: in placing the plates on the table she rubbed the tips of her blouse against the back of the neck and the ears of the Count, who became completely pale and looked to see whether his wife was looking.  My word!  I was still young at the time and the chaos of the molecules in the system, what one calls the violence of sensations, seemed to me to be the only thing for which it was worth living.  I also imagined that he must have taken incredible pleasure in this hidden concubinage with a false servant under the nose of a woman who could discover it all.  Yes, concubinage in the matrimonial home; as old Prudhomme said, it was at this point that I understood!