If I were your wife?
I would snatch you away for five or six months, far
from this horrible town, and keep you all to myself.
You would soon have enough of me.
No, no!
Yes, yes!
Do you know that it is absolute torture to love a
woman like you?
Mme. De Sallus [bridles]
And why?
Because I covet you as the starving covet the food
they see behind the glassy barriers of a restaurant.
Oh, Jacques!
I tell you it is true! A woman of the world belongs
to the world; that is to say, to everyone except the
man to whom she gives herself. He can see her
with open doors for a quarter of an hour every three
days—not oftener, because of servants.
In exceptional cases, with a thousand precautions,
with a thousand fears, with a thousand subterfuges,
she visits him once or twice a month, perhaps, in
a furnished room. Then she has just a quarter
of an hour to give him, because she has just left
Madame X in order to visit Madame Z, where she has
told her coachman to take her. If he complains,
she will not come again, because it is impossible
for her to get rid of her coachman. So, you see,
the coachman, and the footman, and Madame Z, and Madame
X, and all the others, who visit her house as they
would a museum,—a museum that never closes,—all
the he’s and all the she’s who eat up her
leisure minute by minute and second by second, to
whom she owes her time as an employee owes his time
to the State, simply because she belongs to the world—all
these persons are like the transparent and impassable
glass: they keep you from my love.
Mme. De Sallus [dryly]
You seem upset to-day.
No, no, but I hunger to be alone with you. You
are mine, are you not? Or, I should say, I am
yours. Isn’t it true? I spend my life
in looking for opportunities to meet you. Our
love is made up of chance meetings, of casual bows,
of stolen looks, of slight touches—nothing
more. We meet on the avenue in the morning—a
bow; we meet at your house, or at that of some other
acquaintance—twenty words; we dine somewhere
at the same table, too far from each other to talk,
and I dare not even look at you because of hostile
eyes. Is that love? We are simply acquaintances.
