She had a certain fantasy and a certain perversity.
This was what she wished: that on the very night when her husband returned from his excursion, her somewhat timid lover, tender and frail, would remain beside her until the morning hour when the train was due; and still remain, until they heard the noise of the carriage drawing up before the door; and still remain, until the key was tremulously turned in the lock!
For it is liable to tremble, the master’s key, at the moment of opening the casket of its amours: he loves me, and already the thrill of impending pleasure has excited his heart, and the cage is closed upon the shivering bird. It expands with the warmth of seeing me; but as for me, my own thrill is of a different kind. I have no love at all for the man who has the right to take me by surprise, and to impose on me, at any hour decided and determined by him, his lordly pleasure. My meagre kisses signify nothing but the hatred I have for him!
And why do I love him not? What reasons have I? Alas, alas, there are none!
“There you are, my love! Give me your lips, my darling. You’re very pale. Are you afraid?”
“Of what?”
“Of what we’re going to do. Look at me! There’s nothing untoward in my eyes.”
“But there is! Little flames, almost. …”
“Almost?”
“Almost miserable.”
“Oh yes, my darling, tonight I am miserable with all the affection which has built up in me for you. I melt like wax; I run like a burning candle set at the head of a bed where joy lies dying – but I must compose myself, for the funeral ceremony which we must undertake.”
“Is it ended, madwoman?”
“It is ended. He is returning. I feel the vibration of the train, the disengagement of the signals, the swarming crowds at the station, the opening of the carriage-doors. That door opens, too – the one there, by which you will leave!”
“When? Already? What time?”
“We have the time.”
Ah yes! Shall I amuse myself? A dream: he thinks of me, he sees me. Yes, my dear, he sees me all alone, somnolent, ears pricked, eyes straining to see what time it is, avid for the exquisite and definitive moment – he sees me! Does he see me with your lips upon my mouth? Here is something I want you to know! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Her darling understood his lover’s kiss far better than her earlier ramblings. He was wont to call her Lover, or even Madwoman, but she had never before seemed to him so impudently the Lover, or so completely the Madwoman. To believe it, or not to believe it, was equally hazardous; she was capable of bizarre imaginings, of hallucinations – and also capable of being true and certain. What had he understood, after all? The kiss. The return? Yes, to be sure, he needed to know about that …
“Seriously,” he said, “what time will he be back?”
“At four.”
“You are right, madwoman, we do have the time … but it is sad, sad, sad.”
“Sad? Not at all,” said the Lover/Mistress. She undressed her darling, and her little darling stripped his mistress; they gave themselves to pleasure now, teasing one another as if they were male and female cats; but it was the frail amoroso who seemed the timid she-creature, because his mistress was taller and stronger than he, an imperious queen of sensuality.
They enjoyed one another, and they loved one another; and while she leant her own head over the pale forehead of her happy lover, she lost herself in contemplation …
He is so pale and so still. There is not the least quiver in the muscles of his face! That half-open mouth, those half-closed eyes – it is as though he has fainted!
What of his heart, his little heart? Oh, they are so feeble, the beats of his little heart! So feeble, indeed that one can hardly hear them …
They cannot be heard at all.
“My darling!”
No reponse at all: no movement; no flutter of the eyelashes.
She takes him in her arms then, but he is a dead weight, and quite heavy. Unexpectedly heavy. So heavy, this frail lover, that even the powerful arms of the queen of sensuality are too weak to lift him up.
Spirits! Water … vinegar … smelling salts!
But he is dead.
Little darling is dead. He is dead, he is dead, he is dead …
He is dead!
She says it, she sings it, she weeps it: dead, dead, dead! And it is true.
She dresses herself, once she has come to her senses and is once again mistress of herself. She is no longer mad with love, nor with pain. She is serious, and decisive, and brave.
In the rumpled bed of their union, now carefully remade, she calmly laid out her lover in the most chaste attitude she could contrive, in the purest attitude possible, with the bedclothes tucked under his chin, his arms on the counterpane, his hands crossed upon his breast. She put a crucifix in his hand, because that is the most evident symbol of death, which clearly proclaims the final truth and the final state of man in a voice which is mute, but nevertheless eloquent, funereal, and absolute!
When she had placed the crucifix between the fingers of her darling, the courageous adulteress became fearful again, and so afflicted by her fear that a momentary weakness made her incline her head towards the pale head which sank into the pillow, and her lips towards his pale and cold lips; but she straightened up immediately.
This display must be taken to a grander extreme. A more startling ostentation was required to provide a proper satisfaction and a worthy justification of her love.
She stripped the antechamber and the drawing-room of all their flowers. All the favours of spring were strewn upon the funeral bed: lilacs and roses, lilies and mimosas; all the scented tresses of a fairy garden!
When she had done that, she felt almost contented and slightly intoxicated.
Standing up straight, her fingers clenched and her breathing rapid, she surveyed the mad heap of flowers, and the pale head that was now nearly hidden beneath the roses. Suddenly, feeling that her discomfited brain was under assault from a chaotic army of sensations, she set out to arrange the flowers – artistically!
She did not wish to pause for reflection, nor to give a moment’s thought to what had gone before and what might happen afterwards. She wished only to be brave; to exceed the bounds of womanly bravery and to be recklessly heroic. She wished to do her duty as a beautiful and benevolent adulteress, and then to lay herself down beneath the anger which would explode like a thunderclap in that insolent room, over the insolent peace of the vainglorious lover.
But how best to light the scene?
This final concern finally and decisively chased away the army of chaotic sensations.
She lit the candelabras which stood on the mantelpiece. Placed at the head of the bed, on a side-table, they looked like two burning bushes, their flames solemn and inextinguishable. But beneath that avalanche of light the dead man became hideous: the pale head displayed a whiteness more livid than the bedsheet, ghastly against the cambric of the pillow; pits of shadow were hollowed out under his eyes, and his nose was villainously elongated, and even the mouth seemed wicked – his mouth, which was so very gentle!
It was necessary to put it all in proper focus, carefully organising the play of the rays of light, maintaining an appropriate pallor on the pale head, arranging the shadows so as to display his calmness and his beauty. One of the candelabras remained at the bed-head, the other was set up at the foot of the bed.
And last of all: the devotional candle.
She found it in a drawer, scarcely diminished. It had wept but a few tears. It was a paschal candle, a candle of glory which he himself had taken pleasure in acquiring. It was a candle both adulterous and blasphemous, for had it not illuminated, in weeping its first tears, the first kisses of the Mistress and her Idol?
That candle! Oh what durance there was for her in the sight of this torch of love, encrusted with grains of incense: a torch of consolation and of remembrance which they had intended only to light on anniversaries, which had been destined to be the measuring-device of their years of joy – and which now would bestow upon the dead man his last illumination, weeping for his death its paramount tears.
At that moment, the bitterness of her sin constricted her throat and troubled her heart.
The adulterous candle! In buying it, in profaning it, in igniting within the sacred wax a sacrilegious flame, in erecting it to bear witness to illicit amours, had she not bought death? Had she not secured the damnation of one whom she adored – and her own, for was she not condemned also? Did she not know exactly what would come to pass, all that which would come to pass, when the tremulous key had opened to her lord and master the door of the house of adultery?
But she did not wish to think of it – not now, not ever! Her bravery was in her acts and not in her thoughts.
She lit the adulterous candle and immediately knelt down, with her hands together and set a little apart from her body. And without the slightest commotion in her frightened breast she awaited the hour at which her master was due to return: a beautiful, benevolent, brave and glorious Adulteress.