I’m no longer young enough, enthusiastic enough, or noble enough to try marriage again—or living together, if you prefer.
Allow me to await—adorned, idle, alone in my secluded room—the arrival of the man who has chosen me for his harem.
All I’d want to know of him is his tenderness and his ardor; in short, I want only the amorous side of love . . .”
“I know a lot of people,” Hamond says after a silence, “who’d call that kind of love dissolute.”
I shrug my shoulders, irritated at being so misunderstood:
“Yes,” Hamond persists, “dissolute!
But since I know you . . . a little, I would rather conjecture that you have a fanciful, childish craze for the unattainable: the loving couple locked in a warm bedroom and cut off by its four walls from the rest of the world . . .
That’s the familiar dream of a girl who knows very little of life . . .”
“Or of a woman already mature, Hamond!”
He protests, with an evasive but polite gesture, and avoids a direct reply.
“In any case, my dear child, it isn’t love.”
“Why?”
My old friend tosses away his cigarette with a gesture that’s nearly impetuous:
“Because!
You said to me a few minutes ago,
‘For a woman, marriage is a home life of sad submission and humiliation; marriage is “tie my cravat, prepare me an enema, keep an eye on my cutlet, submit to my bad moods and my infidelities.” ’ You should have said, ‘love,’ not ‘marriage.’
Because only love makes that bondage you speak of easy, happy, and glorious!
Right now you hate it, you reject it, you spew it out, because you no longer love Taillandy!
Remember the days when, through the power of love, the cravat, the footbath, and the camomile tea became sacred, revered, and awesome symbols.
Remember the wretched part you played!
I used to tremble with indignation to see you used as an accomplice, almost as a bawd, between Taillandy and his girlfriends, but if I had ever lost all my discretion and patience, you would have replied,
‘To love is to obey!’ . . .
Be frank, Renee, be lucid and tell me whether all your sacrifices don’t have greater value in your eyes ever since you’ve recovered your freedom of will?
You gauge them at their real value now that you no longer love him!
Before then—I’ve seen you at work, I know you, Renee!—didn’t you subconsciously enjoy the merciful anesthesia that love dispenses?”
What’s the good of answering? . . .
Yet I’m ready to argue, as dishonestly as I can: today I couldn’t feel any pity, except for this poor man who is enumerating all my marital misfortunes while thinking of his own . . .
How young he is, and vulnerable, and totally imbued with the poison he wanted to be cured of! . . .
Here we are, far from my own adventure and from Maxime Dufferein-Chautel . . .
I wanted to confide in Hamond and ask him for advice . . . What road has led us inescapably to the past, so that we’re flayed all over by dead thorns?
I feel that, if Maxime were to come in, Hamond and I wouldn’t have time to remove from our faces quickly enough those expressions which no one ought to display: Hamond is all yellow with bile and has a little tic over his left cheekbone, and I am drawing my eyebrows together as if they were oppressed by a headache, and stretching my neck forward stiffly—my neck, which is still robust but is losing the soft suppleness of young flesh . . .
“Hamond,” I say very softly, “you’re not forgetting that I must leave on tour, to enjoy a change?”
“Leaving . . .
Yes, yes,” he says, like a man being awakened. “Well?”
“Well, what about Maxime?”
“You’re taking him along, naturally?”
“ ‘Naturally!’
It’s not as simple as you seem to believe!
That life on tour is awful . . . for a couple!
Getting up and catching a train in the wee hours or the dead of night, the endless evenings for the man who’s waiting, and then the hotels! . . .
What a beginning for a honeymoon! . . .
Even a twenty-year-old woman wouldn’t expose herself to the shocking revelations of the dawn hour, to being seen asleep on the train—that sleep at the end of exhausting days which makes you look like a somewhat bloated corpse . . . No, no, it’s too great a risk for me!
Besides, he and I deserve better!
I had been thinking, vaguely, . . . of postponing our . . .”
“Meeting of the hearts . . .”
“Thank you . . . until the tour was over; then we’d begin a life—oh, what a life! . . .
Not to have to think any more, Hamond; to hide away somewhere, with him, in a countryside that would actually afford me, within reach of my mouth and hands, all that is merely offered to me, and then snatched away, through the train window: damp leaves, flowers swaying in the breeze, dewy fruit, and especially brooks, free, capricious water, living water . . . You see, Hamond, after someone has been living on trains for a month, you can’t possibly know how the sight of running water between banks of fresh grass makes her skin tingle all over with a kind of indefinable thirst . . . During my last tour, I recall, we were traveling all morning and often through the afternoon, as well.
At noon, in the meadows, the farmgirls were milking the cows: in the tall grass I’d see the polished copper pails into which the foaming milk spurts in stiff, thin jets.
What a thirst, what a painful desire I felt for that warm milk topped with foam!
It was a real little daily torture, I assure you . . . When that day comes, I want to enjoy, all at the same time, everything I’ve been missing: fresh air, a fertile, abundant countryside, and my man . . .”