The wound was healing quickly.
I saw, with regret, the day approaching when Madame F. would leave her bed and return to the ordinary occupations which would restore her to the world and take from me those dangerous liberties illness had granted.
The governor of the galleasses ordered a general review at Gouyn. M. F. left in his galley, telling me to join him there early the next morning with the felucca.
That evening, I supped alone with Madame F.
The happiness of the hour was already poisoned by the next day's separation.
"To be away from you even one day," I said, "is enough to make me unhappy."
"Let us make up to-night for to-morrow's disappointment," she answered, "and let us spend it together in conversation. Here are the keys; when you know that my maid has left me, come to me through my husband's room."
I did not fail to follow her instructions to the letter, and we found ourselves alone with five hours before us.
It was the month of June, and the heat was intense.
She was in bed. I took her in my arms. She pressed me to her breast with a warmth that made restraint almost cruel.
Yet she remained resolved.
She condemned herself to the same torture she imposed on me, and because she suffered too, she believed I had no right to complain. I pleaded. I reasoned. I begged. Nothing moved her beyond the limits she had chosen.
"Love," she said, "must be kept in check with a tight hand, and we can laugh at him, since, in spite of the tyranny which we force him to obey, we succeed all the same in gratifying our desires."
Cruel philosophy, but spoken with such tenderness that I could not hate it.
We gave ourselves to those lesser raptures which she permitted and which, while they do not extinguish the flame, can at least make it tremble with delight. After the first ecstasy, our eyes opened together, our lips parted, and we drew back just enough to look at one another.
That sight was almost another embrace.
Satisfaction shone on her face and, no doubt, on mine.
Our desires revived; she looked upon my state of innocence entirely exposed to her sight. She seemed vexed at my want of excitement, and, throwing off everything which makes the heat unpleasant and interferes with our pleasure, she threw herself upon me.
It was more than amorous fury, it was desperate lust.
I shared her frenzy, I hugged her with a sort of delirium, I enjoyed a felicity which was on the point of carrying me to the regions of bliss.... but, at the very moment of completing the offering, she failed me, moved off, slipped away, and came back to work off my excitement with a hand which struck me as cold as ice.
"Ah, thou cruel, beloved woman!" I said. "Thou art burning with the fire of love, and thou deprivest thyself of the only remedy which could bring calm to thy senses! Thy lovely hand is more humane than thou art, but thou has not enjoyed the felicity that thy hand has given me. My hand must owe nothing to thine. Come, darling light of my heart, come! Love doubles my existence in the hope that I will die again, but only in that charming retreat from which you have ejected me in the very moment of my greatest enjoyment."
While I spoke, she answered only with sighs.
They were not sighs of refusal.
She pressed me tightly in her arms, and I felt that she too was floating in that strange sea of incomplete delight which both satisfied and tormented us. For a while we said nothing.
Yet that unnatural felicity was imperfect, and increased my excitement.
"How canst thou complain," she said at last, with great tenderness, "when it is to that very imperfection of our enjoyment that we are indebted for its continuance? I loved thee a few minutes since, now I love thee a thousand times more, and perhaps I should love thee less if thou hadst carried my enjoyment to its highest limit."
"Oh! how much art thou mistaken, lovely one! How great is thy error! Thou art feeding upon sophisms, and thou leavest reality aside; I mean nature which alone can give real felicity. Desires constantly renewed and never fully satisfied are more terrible than the torments of hell."
"But are not these desires happiness when they are always accompanied by hope?"
"No, if that hope is always disappointed. It becomes hell itself, because there is no hope, and hope must die when it is killed by constant deception."
"Dearest," she said, "if hope does not exist in hell, desires cannot be found there either; for to imagine desires without hopes would be more than madness."
"Well, answer me then," I said. "If you desire to be mine entirely, and if you feel the hope of it, which, according to your way of reasoning, is a natural consequence, why do you always raise an impediment to your own hope? Cease, dearest, cease to deceive yourself by absurd sophisms. Let us be as happy as it is in nature to be, and be quite certain that the reality of happiness will increase our love, and that love will find a new life in our very enjoyment."
"What I see proves the contrary," she answered. "You are alive with excitement now, but if your desires had been entirely satisfied, you would be dead, benumbed, motionless. I know it by experience: if you had breathed the full ecstacy of enjoyment, as you desired, you would have found a weak ardour only at long intervals."
"Ah! charming creature, your experience is but very small; do not trust to it. I see that you have never known love. That which you call love's grave is the sanctuary in which it receives life, the abode which makes it immortal. Give way to my prayers, my lovely friend, and then you shall know the difference between Love and Hymen. You shall see that, if Hymen likes to die in order to get rid of life, Love on the contrary expires only to spring up again into existence, and hastens to revive, so as to savour new enjoyment. Let me undeceive you, and believe me when I say that the full gratification of desires can only increase a hundredfold the mutual ardour of two beings who adore each other."
She listened, troubled, tender, still resisting.
"Well," she said at last, "I must believe you; but let us wait. In the meantime, let us enjoy all the trifles, all the sweet preliminaries of love. Devour thy mistress, dearest, but abandon to me all thy being. If this night is too short, we must console ourselves to-morrow by making arrangements for another one."
"And if our intercourse should be discovered?"
"Do we make a mystery of it? Everybody can see that we love each other, and those who think that we do not enjoy the happiness of lovers are precisely the only persons we have to fear. We must only be careful to guard against being surprised in the very act of proving our love."
She drew closer, and her voice softened.
"Heaven and nature must protect our affection, for there is no crime when two hearts are blended in true love. Since I have been conscious of my own existence, Love has always seemed to me the god of my being, for every time I saw a man I was delighted; I thought that I was looking upon one-half of myself, because I felt I was made for him and he for me. I longed to be married. It was that uncertain longing of the heart which occupies exclusively a young girl of fifteen. I had no conception of love, but I fancied that it naturally accompanied marriage."
She paused.
"You can therefore imagine my surprise when my husband, in the very act of making a woman of me, gave me a great deal of pain without giving me the slightest idea of pleasure! My imagination in the convent was much better than the reality I had been condemned to by my husband! The result has naturally been that we have become very good friends, but a very indifferent husband and wife, without any desires for each other. He has every reason to be pleased with me, for I always shew myself docile to his wishes, but enjoyment not being in those cases seasoned by love, he must find it without flavour, and he seldom comes to me for it."
"When I found out that you were in love with me," she continued, "I felt delighted, and gave you every opportunity of becoming every day more deeply enamoured of me, thinking myself certain of never loving you myself. As soon as I felt that love had likewise attacked my heart, I ill-treated you to punish you for having made my heart sensible.
"Your patience and constancy have astonished me, and have caused me to be guilty, for after the first kiss I gave you I had no longer any control over myself. I was indeed astounded when I saw the havoc made by one single kiss, and I felt that my happiness was wrapped up in yours. That discovery flattered and delighted me, and I have found out, particularly to-night, that I cannot be happy unless you are so yourself."
"That is, my beloved," I said, "the most refined of all sentiments experienced by love, but it is impossible for you to render me completely happy without following in everything the laws and the wishes of nature."
The night was spent in tender discussions and in exquisite voluptuousness.
At daybreak, I tore myself from her arms to go to Gouyn.
She wept with joy when she saw that I left her still full of life and ardour. She had not believed such a thing possible.
After that night, so rich in delights, ten or twelve days passed without granting us any opportunity of quenching even a small particle of the amorous thirst which devoured us.
It was then that a fearful misfortune befell me.
One evening, after supper, M. D. R. withdrew. M. F., without ceremony, and without caring that I was present, told his wife that he intended to visit her after writing two letters which he had to dispatch early the next morning.
He left the room.
The door had hardly closed before Madame F. and I looked at one another.
No word was needed.
We fell into each other's arms.
All the desire held back for days broke loose at once. There was no reserve, no prudence, no argument, no philosophy. Our souls seemed to rush together like two flames meeting in the wind.
For one instant, I believed myself victorious.
The first storm had scarcely begun to soften when, without giving me time to think, to bless my happiness, or to taste the full triumph for which I had suffered so long, she tore herself away.
She repulsed me.
Then she threw herself into a chair near the bed, panting, trembling, her whole body shaken by the effort of having conquered herself.
Rooted to the spot, astonished, almost mad, I tremblingly looked at her, trying to understand what had caused such an extraordinary action.
She turned towards me and said, her eyes flashing with the fire of love,
"My darling, we were on the brink of the precipice."
"The precipice! Ah! cruel woman, you have killed me, I feel myself dying, and perhaps you will never see me again."
I left her in a state of frenzy, and rushed out, towards the esplanade, to cool myself, for I was choking.
Any man who has not experienced the cruelty of an action like that of Madame F----, and especially in the situation I found myself in at that moment, mentally and bodily, can hardly realize what I suffered, and, although I have felt that suffering, I could not give an idea of it.