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Updated: June 24, 2025
Desgenais was seated near the lamp at my side; he was firm and serious, although a smile hovered about his lips. He was a man of heart, but as dry as a pumice-stone. An early experience had made him bald before his time; he knew life and had suffered; but his grief was a cuirass; he was a materialist and he waited for death.
Desgenais looked at me but made no reply; taking me by the arm he led me away. "I am tired," he said, "and I am sad; this noise wearies me. Let us go to supper, that will refresh us." The supper was splendid, but I could not touch it. "What is the matter with you?" asked Marco. I sat like a statue, making no reply and looking at her from head to foot with amazement.
It seemed to me after a short time that the world which had at first appeared so strange would hamper me, so to speak, at every step; yet where I had expected to see a spectre, I discovered, upon closer inspection, a shadow. Desgenais asked what ailed me. "And you?" I asked. "What is the matter with you? Have you lost some relative? Or do you suffer from some wound?"
Thus spoke Desgenais; and the shadows of night began to fall. The following morning I rode through the Bois de Boulogne; the weather was dark and threatening. At the Porte Maillot I dropped the reins on my horse's back and abandoned myself to revery, revolving in my mind the words spoken by Desgenais the evening before. Suddenly I heard my name called.
Do you know that she confesses that another possesses her and do you expect me, loving her as I do, to share my love? If that is the way you love, I pity you." Desgenais replied that he was not so particular. "My dear Octave," he added, "you are very young. You want many things, beautiful things, which do not exist.
When I had spoken these words I fell into a delirium. She threw her cloak over her shoulders and fled from the room. When I told Desgenais about it he said: "Why did you do that? You must be very much disgusted, for she is a beautiful woman." "Are you joking?" I asked. "Do you think such a woman could be my mistress? Do you think I would ever consent to share her with another?
I was filled with hope and terror; the thought that I might feel myself seized by convulsive arms allured me, and at the same time thrilled me with horror; when I was exhausted with fatigue, I climbed back into my boat. Unless a man is brutalized by debauchery, eager curiosity is one of his marked traits. I have already remarked that I felt it on the occasion of my first visit to Desgenais.
All the while songs were being sung in various parts of the room, and three Englishmen, three of those gloomy figures for whom the Continent is a hospital, kept up a most sinister ballad that must have been born of the fogs of their marshes. "Come," said I to Marco, "let us go." She arose and took my arm. "To-morrow!" cried Desgenais to me, as we left the hall.
But I was soon attacked by fever. It was then I began to shed tears. I could understand that my mistress had ceased to love me, but not that she could deceive me. I could not comprehend why a woman who was forced to it by neither duty nor interest could lie to one man when she loved another. Twenty times a day I asked my friend Desgenais how that could be possible.
We did not speak a word and there were tears in our eyes. Desgenais especially, habitually the coldest and driest of men, was inexplicable on such occasions; he delivered himself of such extraordinary sentiments that he might have been considered a poet in delirium. But after these effusions he would be seized with furious joy.
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