She got up, but he seized her hands. “Only
one word, Gabrielle. Tell me the truth!”
“I have just told you. I never have dishonored
you.”
He looked her full in the face, and how beautiful
she was, with her gray eyes, like the cold sky.
In her dark hair sparkled the diamond coronet, like
a radiance. He suddenly felt, felt by a kind of
intuition, that this grand creature was not merely
a being destined to perpetuate the race, but the strange
and mysterious product of all our complicated desires
which have been accumulating in us for centuries but
which have been turned aside from their primitive
and divine object and have wandered after a mystic,
imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There
are some women like that, who blossom only for our
dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization,
with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm
which surround woman, a living statue that brightens
our life.
Her husband remained standing before her, stupefied
at his tardy and obscure discovery, confusedly hitting
on the cause of his former jealousy and understanding
it all very imperfectly, and at last lie said:
“I believe you, for I feel at this moment that
you are not lying, and before I really thought that
you were.”
She put out her hand to him: “We are friends
then?”
He took her hand and kissed it and replied: “We
are friends. Thank you,
Gabrielle.”
Then he went out, still looking at her, and surprised
that she was still so beautiful and feeling a strange
emotion arising in him.
He was a clerk in the Bureau of Public Education and
lived at Batignolles. He took the omnibus to
Paris every morning and always sat opposite a girl,
with whom he fell in love.
She was employed in a shop and went in at the same
time every day. She was a little brunette, one
of those girls whose eyes are so dark that they look
like black spots, on a complexion like ivory.
He always saw her coming at the corner of the same
street, and she generally had to run to catch the
heavy vehicle, and sprang upon the steps before the
horses had quite stopped. Then she got inside,
out of breath, and, sitting down, looked round her.
The first time that he saw her, Francois Tessier liked
the face. One sometimes meets a woman whom one
longs to clasp in one’s arms without even knowing
her. That girl seemed to respond to some chord
in his being, to that sort of ideal of love which
one cherishes in the depths of the heart, without
knowing it.
He looked at her intently, not meaning to be rude,
and she became embarrassed and blushed. He noticed
it, and tried to turn away his eyes; but he involuntarily
fixed them upon her again every moment, although he
tried to look in another direction; and, in a few days,
they seemed to know each other without having spoken.
He gave up his place to her when the omnibus was full,
and got outside, though he was very sorry to do it.
By this time she had got so far as to greet him with
a little smile; and, although she always dropped her
eyes under his looks, which she felt were too ardent,
yet she did not appear offended at being looked at
in such a manner.
