But when this was over and I saw her sleeping peacefully
as a little girl who was tired with playing, with
parted lips and disheveled hair, and measured the
full extent of the stupidity of my hatred and the
sacrilegious madness of my jealousy, my heart softened
and I fell into such a state of profound and absolute
distress that I thought I should have died of it,
and large drops of cold perspiration ran down my cheeks
and tears fell from my eyes, and I got up, so that
my sobs might not disturb her rest and wake her.
As this could not continue, however, I told her one
day that I felt so exhausted and ill that I should
prefer to sleep in my own room. She appeared
to believe me and merely said:
“As you please, my dear!” but her blue
eyes suddenly assumed such an anxious, such a grieved
look, that I turned my head aside, so as not to see
them....
I was again in the old house, and without her,
in the old house where Elaine used to spend all her
holidays, in the room whose shutters had not been
opened since our departure, seven months ago.
Why did I go there, where the calm of the country,
the silence of the solitude and my recollections,
irritated me and recalled my trouble, where I suffered
even more than I did in Paris, and where I thought
of Elaine every moment I seemed to see her and to
hear her, in a species of hallucination.
What did her letters that I had taken out of her writing
table, which she had used as a girl, what did her
ball cards which were stuck round her looking glass,
in which she used to admire herself formerly, what
did her dresses, her dressing gowns, and the dusty
furniture whose repose my trembling hands violated,
tell me? Nothing, and always nothing.
At table, I used to speak with the worthy couple who
had never left the mansion and who appeared to look
upon themselves as its second masters, with the apparent
good nature of a man who was in love with his wife
and who wished only to speak about her, who took an
interest in the smallest detail of her childhood and
youth, with all the jovial familiarity which encourages
peasants to talk, and when a few glasses of white wine
had loosened their tongues they would talk about her,
whom they loved as if she had been their child, and
at other times I used to question the farmers, when
they came to settle their accounts.
Had Elaine the bridle on her neck like so many girls
had; did she like the country, were the peasants fond
of her, and did she show any preference for one or
the other? Were many people invited for the shooting,
and did she visit much with the other ladies in the
neighborhood?
And they drank with their elbows resting on the table
in front of me, uttered her praises in a voice as
monotonous as a spinning wheel, lost themselves in
endless, senseless chatter which made me yawn in spite
of myself, and told me her girlish tricks which certainly
did not disclose what was haunting me, the traces
of that first love, that perilous flirtation, that
foolish escapade in which Elaine might have been seduced.
