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PAQUERETTE.
BROTHERS, where is the sweetheart, queen of the lakes and clouds, or the harvest brunette whose glance is so deep as to suffice for a life of love?
Well, all is over: I have belied my youth; I am the fiancé of vice. The remembrance of my first hour of love is closely bound to that of an infamous den, of a couch over which strange kisses float. When, during the May nights, I shall evoke my fiancée, I shall see arise a half-clad, cynical girl, awaking and putting out her arms towards me. This pale and stained spectre will be a participant in all my love-affairs. It will stand between my mouth and that of my bride, claiming the kisses of my soiled lips. When I am asleep, it will visit me in a horrible dream. When my sweetheart shall whisper in my ear some delicious word, it will be there to tell me that it was the first to talk thus to me. When I shall lean my head upon the shoulder of my bride, it will present to me its shoulder on which I once reposed. Thus it will ever freeze my heart with the accursed remembrance of our betrothal.
Yes, that night has sufficed to deprive me of supreme peace. My first kiss has not awakened a soul. I have not felt the holy ignorance of pure caresses, my timid lips have not found lips as timid as themselves. I shall never experience that simple playfulness, that innocence of a couple who know not the ways of the world. They tremble, embrace, and weep for joy. But, as they kiss each other, hesitatingly, they realize that they are one, that their hearts beat in unison, and that God has joined them for the voyage of life.
Then, when this knowledge has come, when they have in a kiss divined the law of the Omnipotent, what must be their delight to owe to each other this revelation, this infinitude of joy! They have participated in a common blessing: they have put on their white robes and now are clad like the cherubim. Mingling their very breath, smiling with the same smile, they repose in their union. Holy hour, in which hearts beat more freely, finding a heaven to which they can ascend. Sainted hour, in which ignorant love suddenly learns the full measure of its strength, believes itself the master of the universe and is intoxicated with its first flight. Brothers, may God keep for you that hour, the remembrance of which perfumes one’s entire life. It will never be mine.
Such is fate. It is rare that two pure hearts meet; nearly always one heart of any twain can no longer give its ecstasy in its flower. To-day, most young men of twenty like ourselves, who are eager to love, lacking the power to force the bars and bolts of honest houses, hasten to the wide open doors of boudoirs easier of access. When we ask upon what shoulders we shall lean our heads, fathers hide their daughters and push us into the gloom of the lanes. They cry out to us to respect their children, who will some day be our wives; they prefer for them, instead of our first caresses, those learned elsewhere.
Hence how few keep their early love for their brides, how few, in the desert of their youth, refuse the companions into whose society they are driven by the singular behavior of parents! Some, foolish and wicked lads, glory in their shame; they drag their ignoble flirtations before the public eye. Others, when the soul awakes at the first summons of the sweetheart, are filled with overwhelming sorrow on vainly interrogating the horizon and at not knowing where to find the rightful claimant of the heart. They go straight ahead, staring at the balconies, leaning towards each youthful visage: the balconies are deserted, the youthful visages remain veiled. Some night an arm is slipped within their own, a voice makes them start. Already weary and despairing, unable to discover the angel of love, they follow the spectre.
Brothers, I do not wish to make an excuse for my fault, but let me say that it is strange to cloister purity and permit dissipation to walk in the glare of the sun with uplifted head. Let me deplore this distrust of love, which creates a solitude around the lover, and this guarding of virtue by vice, which causes a young man to encounter shame before reaching the door of innocence. He who yields to temptation may well say to his bride: “I am unworthy of you, but why did you not come to my rescue? Why did you not meet me in the flowery fields, before all those by-ways, each nook of which has its priestess? Why were you not the first to greet my eyes, thus sparing yourself in sparing me?”
On returning home this evening, I found upon the stairway the old woman of the other night. She was toilsomely ascending in front of me, aiding herself with the cord and placing both feet on each step. She turned around.
“Well, Monsieur, is your patient better?” she asked. “She no longer shivers, I imagine, and you yourself do not seem to have suffered from the cold. Ah! I well knew that a young man could take better care of a handsome girl than an old woman.”
She laughed, showing her empty mouth. The politeness of this aged wretch who had led a gay life made me blush.
“You need not color so!” she added. “I have seen others as proud as yourself enter without shame and depart singing. Youth loves to laugh, and girls who play the wise one are fools. Ah! if I were only fifteen again!”
I had reached my door. She caught me by the arm as I was about to go in, and continued:
“I had flaxen hair then, and my cheeks were so fresh that my admirers nicknamed me Pâquerette. If you had seen me, you would have been astonished. I lived on the ground floor, in a nest of silk and gold. Now, I lodge under the eaves. I have only to descend to go to the cemetery. Ah! your friend Laurence is happy: she is as yet but in the fourth story.”
So the girl was called Laurence. I had been ignorant even of her name.
CHAPTER VI.
DESPAIR.
I RESUMED my work, but with repugnance, and was weary from the commencement. Now that I had lifted a corner of the veil, I had neither the courage to let it fall again nor the boldness to draw it away altogether. When I seated myself at my table, I leaned sadly on my elbows, letting the pen slip from my fingers and muttering: “What is the good!” My intelligence seemed worn out; I dare not re-read the few phrases I had written; I no longer felt that joy of the poet, whom a happy rhyme fills with unreasoning and childish laughter. Scold me, brothers, for limping verses are shorn of their power to keep me awake.
My slim resources are diminishing. I can calculate the hour when everything will be gone. I eat my bread, being almost in haste to finish it that I may no longer see it melt away at each meal. I am surrendering to want like a coward; the struggle for food terrifies me.
Ah! how they lie who assert that poverty is the mother of talent! Let them count those whom despair has made illustrious and those whom it has slowly debased. When tears are caused by a heart wound, the wrinkles they dig are beautiful and noble; but when hunger makes them flow, when every night a baseness or a brutish task drys them, they furrow the face frightfully, without imparting to it the sad serenity of age.
No; since I am so poor that I may, perhaps, die tomorrow, I cannot work. When the closet was full I had great courage. I felt the strength to gain my bread. Now it is nearly empty and I am given over to lassitude. It would be easier for me to endure hunger than to make the smallest effort.
I well know that I am cowardly and false to my vows. I know that I have not the right already to take refuge in defeat. I am only twenty: I cannot be weary of a world of which I am ignorant. Yesterday, I dreamed of it as sweet and good. Is it a new dream which makes me form a bad opinion of it to-day?
Oh! brothers, my first step has been unfortunate: I am afraid to advance. I will exhaust my suffering, shed all my tears, and my smiles will return. I will work with a gayer heart tomorrow.
