He did not insist, but he was much disturbed; he no
longer knew what to think, though indeed he had need
for reflection. He went away after a quarter
of an hour of unimportant conversation.
SWEET POISON
With slow steps, Olivier returned to his own house,
troubled as if he had just learned some shameful family
secret. He tried to sound his heart, to see clearly
within himself, to read those intimate pages of the
inner book which seemed glued together, and which sometimes
only a strange hand can turn over by separating them.
Certainly he did not believe himself in love with
Annette. The Countess, whose watchful jealousy
never slept, had foreseen this danger from afar, and
had signaled it before it even existed. But might
that peril exist to-morrow, the day after, in a month?
It was the frank question that he tried to answer
sincerely. It was true that the child stirred
his instincts of tenderness, but these instincts in
men are so numerous that the dangerous ones should
not be confounded with the inoffensive. Thus
he adored animals, especially cats, and could not see
their silky fur without being seized with an irresistible
sensuous desire to caress their soft, undulating backs
and kiss their electric fur.
The attraction that impelled him toward this girl
a little resembled those obscure yet innocent desires
that go to make up part of all the ceaseless and unappeasable
vibrations of human nerves. His eye of the artist,
as well as that of the man, was captivated by her freshness,
by that springing of beautiful clear life, by that
essence of youth that glowed in her; and his heart,
full of memories of his long intimacy with the Countess,
finding in the extraordinary resemblance of Annette
to her mother a reawakening of old feelings, of emotions
sleeping since the beginning of his love, had been
startled perhaps by the sensation of an awakening.
An awakening? Yes. Was it that? This
idea illumined his mind. He felt that he had
awakened after years of sleep. If he had loved
the young girl without being aware of it, he should
have experienced near her that rejuvenation of his
whole being which creates a different man as soon
as the flame of a new desire is kindled within him.
No, the child had only breathed upon the former fire.
It had always been the mother that he loved, but now
a little more than recently, no doubt, because of
her daughter, this reincarnation of herself. And
he formulated this decision with the reassuring sophism:
“One loves but once! The heart may often
be affected at meeting some other being, for everyone
exercises on others either attractions or repulsions.
All these influences create friendship, caprices,
desire for possession, quick and fleeting ardors,
but not real love. That this love may exist it
is necessary that two beings should be so truly born
for each other, should be linked together in so many
