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 THIS BOOK IS ONE OF A 
 COLLECTION MADE BY 
 
 BENNO LOEWY 
 1854-1919 
 
 AND BEQUEATHED TO 
 CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
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 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027275761 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PQ 2199.C96 1887 
 
 Cruel enijama. 
 
 3 1924 027 275 761 
 
 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 PAUL BOUKGET. 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 BY PAUL BOUEGET. 
 
 AUTHOE OF "A LOVE CRIME. 
 
 TBANSLATED WITHOUT ABRIDGMENT FROM THE 18rH FRENCH EDITION 
 
 BY JULIAN CRAY. 
 
 Xon&on: 
 
 VIZETELLY & CO., 42, CATHERINE ST., STRAND. 
 . Bbentanos: new yobk, Washington and Chicago, 
 
 1887. 
 

PAUL BOUEGET. 
 
 A POET of merit, an acute, clear-sighted critic, and an 
 accomplished and successful novelist, 51. Paul Bourget 
 occupied an important position among the brilliant crowd of 
 modern French litUrateurs, upon the younger generation 
 especially of whom he exercises an acknowledged and a con- 
 stantly widening influence. Nor will this influence appear 
 other than natural if it be borne in mind that, gifted with no 
 naean qualifications for the task, M. Bourget has made a 
 deep and particular study of just those problems which, to 
 this self-conscious, introspective ftge of ours, are possessed of an 
 all-absorbing interest. Complex as his nature undoubtedly is, 
 and many-sided as its accomplishment might, to a first and 
 superficial view, appear, he is in all his writings primarily a 
 critic, while his criticism has, moreover, uniformly occupied 
 itself with the same objects, with the hidden movements of the 
 mind, that is to say, considered in their bearings upon external 
 manifestation, with all the varied promptings which underlie 
 the surface of conduct. 
 
 For the prosecution of such psychological studies, M. Bourget 
 is in every needful particular well fitted. He possesses keen in- 
 sight, and a remarkable power of sympathetically appreciating 
 the play and counter-play of motives, passions, and delicate 
 shades of feeling ; while he is also endowed with that tact, 
 subtlety, refinement, and, above all, exact lucidity of expression, 
 by which a writer is enabled to convey his divinings unimpaired 
 to the reader. This flexibility of sympathy, with its answering 
 
IV PAUL BOUKGET. 
 
 flexibility of language, enabling to the expression alike of 
 widely sundered ?i,nd of delicately blending diversities of 
 thought and emotion, correspond to, and are, perhaps, partly 
 the outcome of, a richly varied life-experience. Just as M. 
 Bourget has made himself equally at home in London and in 
 Florence, in Paris and in Morocco, so is he equally at ease 
 and equally successful whether he be engaged in indicating 
 some of the consequences wrought by cosmopolitan existence 
 in the characters of Stendhal, Tourg^niev, and Amiel ; in 
 analysing the conceptions of modern love presented in the 
 writings of Baudelaire and M. Alexandre Dumas ; in measuring 
 the modifioations produced by science in the imaginations and 
 diverse sensibilities of Flaubert, M. Leconte de Lisle, and 
 jr. Taine ; or, finally, in living the life of his own fictitious 
 characters, and portraying for us a Hubert or a Theresa de 
 Sau-ve. 
 
 It is evident that the wielder of such exceptional powers 
 must be obvious to peculiar dangers with which the mere dead- 
 level narrator of outer phenomena has little or no acquaint- 
 ance. To the very fulness of these powers, and to their 
 supremely overmastering presence are due faults from which 
 less gifted writers are shielded by their mediocrity as by a 
 wall. It would be possible, did space and inclination serve, to 
 point out instances of affectation both of idea and of expression 
 in 51. Bom'get's writiiis^. As in the case of some of our own 
 premier authors — George Eliot, for instance, and Mr. rreorge 
 Jleredith — his thought is not invariably worthy of the richness 
 of its setting, while his analysis is occasionally pushed so far 
 as to be superfluous, not to say absurd. The charge of "literary 
 dand3'ism " brought against him by M. Jules Lemaitre is not 
 destitute of foundation. It must be acknowledged that his 
 subtlety borders at times on pedantry, and his refinenrent on 
 conceit. Having said this, it is only fair to add that these 
 flaws do not enter excessively into the texture of his work ; 
 indeed, they rather serve, by force of sufficiently rare and 
 
PAUL BOUEGET. V 
 
 sharply defmed contrast, to throw into relief its general 
 sterling excellence. And such imperfections should not 
 be allowed to weigh overmuch with us in attempting to 
 estimate the worth of our author's achievement. It is 
 notorious that — si parva licet componere mcujnis — there are 
 spots on the sun. 
 
 Conversant as he is with the entire gamut of human feeling, 
 M. Bourget has in all his novels — with the single exception of 
 the last of them, " Andr6 Cornells " — elected to direct exclusive 
 attention to the passion of love. His treatment of this theme 
 is as characteristic as it is fresh. It is, further, in complete 
 harmony with what appears to be his doctrine of life. 
 Accuracy of vision, assisted, doubtless, by the breadth of 
 cosmopolitan experience, has produced in him a. result not 
 uncommon with men of his calibre. In spite of his own 
 protestation to the contrary, it has, in fact, made him a 
 pessimist. Like JTlaubert, with whom he has some affinity, 
 and on6 of the most striking of whose phrases he, in the course 
 of the foUowmg pages, unconsciously adopts, he discerns too 
 clearly to be greatly pleased with what he sees. The pessimism 
 of the two men was, however, arrived at by somewhat different 
 routes. Setting aside any origins of a purely physical nature, 
 it arose with Flaubert mainly from the inconsistency of his 
 external surroundings with his inward ideals, and denoted 
 simply that his objective world and his subjective world were 
 at strife. M. Bourget's dissatisfaction flows from the unpleasing 
 result of his analyses of the inward feelings themselves. He 
 probes them and penetrates them throughout their complex 
 ramifications and windings until he reaches some ultimate 
 fact or some irreducible instinct, from which he draws the 
 moral of an unbending necessity. And here he finds the 
 aspirings of his imagination and the decrees of destiny at 
 daggers drawn. 
 
 In these considerations we have a key to the proper inter- 
 pretation of the present volume. " Love," its author has said 
 
vi PAUL BOUEGET. 
 
 elsewhere, " has, like death, remained irreducible to human 
 conventions. Id is wild and free in spite of codes and modes. 
 The woman who disrobes to give herself to a man, lays aside 
 her entire social personality with her garments. For him 
 she again becomes what he, too, becomes again for her— the 
 natural, solitary creature to whom no protection can guarantee 
 happiness, and from whom no decree can avert woe." These 
 lines sum in brief the teachmg of the book. Its author has, 
 after his own fashion, made an uncompromising analysis of the 
 passion that he undertakes to describe, and, stripping from it 
 all the adventitious grace and mysticism and sentiment with 
 which society is wont to shroud it, has found it to consist, 
 in the last resort, of a single and simple fact : the physical, 
 fleshly desire of man for woman and woman for man. Hence 
 it is that Theresa, while receiving, and rejoicing exceedingly in, 
 Hubert's loftier and more ideal affection, betrays it at the first 
 opportunity for the sensual brutishness of a, hard-living roiiSr 
 and hence, too, it is that the pure-souled Hubert, even while 
 he scorns his mistress for her treachery and loathes himself for 
 his weakness, returns loveless and despairing to her arms. 
 
 The book is a pitiless study of the inevitable. We are made 
 to feel that, given the particular primary conditions, the results 
 specified could not but follow. It would almost seem that In 
 the modern scientific conception of the universal reign of Law, 
 and the comparatively remote possibilities of modifying its- 
 operation, we are approximating to a renewed, but far more 
 vividly realised, enthronement of the old Greek idea of that 
 Necessity against which the gods themselves were believed to- 
 strive in vain, and M. Bourget is too completely a man of his 
 century not to reflect faithfully one of the most striking phases 
 of latter-day thought. The contemplation of a fatalistic order- 
 ing of the moral world cannot be otherwise than exceptionally 
 painful to one who, like M. Bourget, is as sensitive to moral 
 and spiritual, as he is to physical and natural beauty. His 
 nobler nature is wounded by the hard sequence of inevitable 
 
PAUL BOUKGET. Vll 
 
 law, and would fain have a deeply different moulding of 
 ciroumstanoe, but for all that the true novelist can tell us only 
 what he sees, and what he believes to be true, and so it comes 
 to pass that in M. Bourget's] novels, with, perhaps, a 
 single exception, we find the eternal contrast between the 
 "might be" and the "must be" consistently indicated. In 
 his " L'lrr^parable " and its companion tale, " DeuxiJme 
 Amour," in "Crime d' Amour" and in "Cruelle Enigme," 
 the topic which engrosses him is still the same. In all alike- 
 we are sensible of the antagonism between the cherished 
 aspirations of the moralist and the conclusions which the 
 psychologist finds himself unwillingly compelled to draw. 
 And not in them only, but throughout his other writings 
 also, we can trace the spirit-workings of the man to whom 
 life in its entirety, no less than certain sorrowful ' phases oi 
 it is " a cruel enigma." 
 
 JULIAN CBAY. 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 To Mb. Henry James. 
 
 Allow me, my dear Henry James, to place 
 your name on the first page of this book in 
 memory of the time at which I was beginning 
 to write it, and which was also the time when 
 we became acquainted. In our conversations in 
 England last summer, protracted sometimes 
 at one of the tables in the hospitable Athenaeum 
 Club, sometimes beneath the shade of the trees 
 in some vast park, sometimes on the Dover 
 esplanade while it echoed to the tumult of 
 the waves, we often discussed the art of novel- 
 writing, an art which is the most modern of all 
 because it is the most flexible, and the most 
 capable of adaptation to the varied requirements 
 of every temperament. We were agreed that the 
 laws imposed upon novelists by the various 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 aesthetics resolve themselves ultimately into this : 
 to give a personal impression of life. Will 
 you find this impression in "A Cruel Enigma " ? 
 I trust so, that this work may be truly vi^orthy 
 of being offered to one whose rare and subtle 
 talent, intelligent sympathy, and noble character, 
 I have been able to appreciate as reader, 
 fellow-worker, and friend. 
 
 P.B. 
 Paris, 9th February, 1885. 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 All men accustomed to feel through their imagi- 
 nations are well acquainted with that unique 
 description of melancholy which is inflicted by 
 too complete a likeness between a -mother and 
 her daughter, when the mother is fifty years old 
 and the daughter twenty-five, and the one 
 happens thus to exhibit the looked-for spectre of 
 the old age of the other. How fruitful in bitterness 
 for a lover is such a vision of the inevitable 
 withering reserved for the beauty that he loves ! 
 To the eye of a disinterested observer such like- 
 nesses abound in singularly suggestive reflections. 
 Earely, indeed, does the analogy between the 
 features of the two faces extend to identity, and 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 still more rarely are the expressions completely 
 alike. There has usually been a sort of onward 
 march in the conlmon temperament from one 
 generation to the next. The predominant quality 
 in the physiognomy has become more predomi- 
 nant still — a visible symbol of a development of 
 character produced by heredity. Already too 
 refined, the face has become still more so; 
 sensual, it has been materialised ; vv^ilfal, it has 
 grown hard and dry. 
 
 But it is especially at the period when life has 
 done its work, when the mother has passed her 
 sixtieth year and the daughter her fortieth, that 
 this gradation in likenesses becomes palpable to 
 the student, and with it the history of the moral 
 circumstances wherein the soul of the race of 
 which the two beings mark two halting-places 
 has striven. The perception of fatalities of blood 
 is then so clear that it sometimes turns to pain. 
 It is in such cases that the implacable, tragical 
 action of the laws of Nature is revealed even to 
 minds which are the most destitute of general 
 ideas, and if this -action be at all exercised against 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 1 3 
 
 creatures who — apart even from love — are dear to 
 us, hovs? it hurts us to admit it ! 
 
 Although a man who had started formerly as a 
 private soldier and has been retired as General of 
 division, Who is seventy-two years old, who has 
 a liver complaint contracted in Africa, five wounds 
 and the experience of fifteen campaigns, is not 
 very prone to philosophical dreamings, it was 
 nevertheless to impressions of this kind that 
 General Count Alexander Scilly resigned him- 
 self one evening, on leaving the drawing- 
 room of a small house in the Eue Vaneau, where 
 he had left his old friend Madame Castel, and 
 this friend's daughter, Madame Liauran, alone 
 together. Eleven had just struck from a clock 
 of the purest style of the Empire — a gift from 
 Napoleon I. to Madame Castel's father — which 
 -Stood on the mantelpiece in this drawing-room, 
 and, as was his custom, the General had risen 
 at precisely the first stroke, to go to his carriage, 
 which had been announced. 
 
 Truth to tell, the Count had the strongest 
 reasons in the world to be dimly and profoundly 
 
14 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 disquieted. After the campaign of 1870, which 
 had won him his last epaulets, but in which the 
 ruin of his health had been completed, this man 
 had found himself at Paris with no relations but 
 distant cousins whom he did not hke, having 
 had grounds of complaint against them on the 
 occasion of the succession to a common cousin. 
 Had they not impugned the old lady's will, 
 and made a charge of undue influence against — 
 whom ? Against him. Count Scilly, own son to 
 the Leipsic hero ! Feeling that desire, which dis- 
 tinguishes bachelors of all ages, to replace, by 
 settled habits, the tranquility of the family that 
 he lacked, the General had been led to create a 
 home external to the rooms of the resting soldier. 
 Circumstances had thus made him the 
 almost daily guest of the house in the Rue 
 Vaneau, where the two ladies to whom he had 
 long been attached resided. The eldest, Madame 
 Marie Alice Castel, was the widow of his first 
 protector. Captain Hubert Castel, who had been 
 killed at his side in Algeria, when he, Scilly, was 
 as yet only a plain sergeant. The second, 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA.. 1 5 
 
 Madame Marie Alice Liauran, was the widow 
 of his dearest protege, Captain Alfred Liauran, 
 who had been killed in Italy. 
 
 All those who have given any study to the 
 character of an old bachelor and old soldier — a 
 combination of two celibacies in one — will, from 
 the mere announcement of these facts, understand 
 the place occupied by the mother and daughter in 
 the General's existence. Whenever he left their 
 house, and during the whole of the time which 
 it took his carriage to bring him home again, 
 his one mental occupation was to recur to all 
 the incidents in his visit. This interval was 
 a long one, for the General lived on the Quai 
 d'Orleans on the ground floor of an old house 
 which had been formally bequeathed to him by 
 his cousin. The carriage went but slowly; it 
 was drawn by an old army horse, very aged and 
 very quiet, gently driven by an old orderly 
 soldier, faithful Bertrand, who would not have 
 whipped the animal for a cask of grape-skin 
 brandy, his favourite drink. 
 
 The carriage itself did not run easily, low and 
 
l6 A CRUEL EXIGIIA. 
 
 heavy as it was — a regular dowager's chariot which 
 the General had preserved unaltered, with the 
 pale green leather of its lining and the dark green 
 shade of its panels. Is there any need to add that 
 Scilly had inherited this carriage at the same time 
 as the house ? In the ignorance of an old soldier 
 accustomed to the roughness of a profession to 
 which he had taken very seriously, he ingenuously 
 considered this lumbering vehicle as the height of 
 comfort, and seated with his hand in one of the 
 slings, on the edge of those cushions on which 
 his cousin used once to stretch herself volup- 
 tuously, he unceasingly saw again before him the 
 drawing-room in the Eue Vaneau, and the two 
 inmates of that calm retreat — oh ! so calm ; ^\ith 
 its lofty closed windows, beyond which' extended 
 the princely garden reaching from the Eue 
 Varireau to the Eue de Babylon ; yes, so calm 
 and so well known to him, Scilly, in its slightest 
 details ! 
 
 On the walls hung three large portraits, witness- 
 ing that, since the Eevolution, all the men of the 
 family had been soldiers. There was first the 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 7 
 
 grandfather, Colonel Hubert Castel, represented 
 by the painter Gros in the dark uniform of the 
 cuirassiers of the Empire, his head bare, his 
 sturdy neck confined in its blue-black collar, his 
 torso clad in its cuirass, his arms enclosed in the 
 dark cloth of their sleeves, and his hands covered 
 with their white rounded gauntlets. Napoleon 
 had fallen from his throne too soon to reward, as 
 he wished, the officer who had saved his life in 
 the Eussian campaign. Next, there was the son 
 of this stern cavalier, a captain in the African 
 army, painted by Delacroix in the blue tunic with 
 its plaited folds, and the wide red trousers, tight 
 fitting at the feet ; then the portrait, painted by 
 Flandrin, of Alfred Liauran, in the uniform of an 
 officer of the line, such as Scilly himself had 
 worn. On both sides were miniatures represent- 
 ing Colonel Castel again, but before he had 
 attained to that rank, and also some men and 
 women of the old regime; for Madame Castel 
 was a Mademoiselle de Trans, of the De Transes 
 of Provence, a very numerous and noble family 
 belonging to the district of Aix.- Colonel na,Rtp,rs 
 
1 8 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 father, who had been merely the steward of Marie 
 Alice's father, had saved the, in truth, somewhat 
 inconsiderable property of the family during the 
 storm of 1792, and when in 1829 Mademoiselle 
 de Trans had wished to marry this wealthy man's 
 grandson, who happened to be the son of a 
 celebrated soldier, she had met with no opposition. 
 All Madame Castel's past, and that of her 
 daughter, was, therefore, spread over the walls of 
 this drawing-room, which was at once austere 
 and homely, like all apartments which are much 
 occupied, and pccupied by persons who have 
 cherished recollections. The furniture, which was 
 composed of a curious mixture of objects of the 
 First Empire, the Eestoration, and the July 
 Monarchy, certainly had no correspondence with 
 the fortune of the two ladies, which had become 
 very large owing to the modesty of their mode of 
 Hfe ; but of this furniture there was not a single 
 piece that did not speak of someone dear both to 
 them and to Scilly, who from childhood had found 
 interest in everything belonging to this family. 
 Had not his father been made a Count on the 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 9 
 
 same day that his companion-in-arms, Castel, 
 had been made a Colonel ? 
 
 And it was just this intimate acquaintance with 
 the life of these two women which rendered the 
 old man so strangely sensitive in respect of them. 
 He had identified himseK with them to the 
 extent of being unable to sleep at night when he 
 had left them visibly pre-occupied. This spare 
 man, sunk as it were into himself, in whom every- 
 thing revealed strict discipline from the stohdity 
 of his look to the regularity of his gait, and the 
 punctilious rigour of his dress, disclosed, when 
 his two friends were in question, all those 
 treasures of feeling which his mode of life had 
 given him little opportunity to expend ; and on 
 this evening, in the month of February, 1880, he 
 was in a state of agitation, Hke that of a lover 
 who has seen his mistress's eyes bathed in tears 
 the cause of which is unknown to him. 
 
 " What subject of grief can they have which 
 they would not tell me ? " This question passed 
 again and again through the General's head 
 while his carriage drove along, beaten by the 
 
20 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 ■wind and lashed by the rain. It was " regular 
 Prussian weather," as the Count's coachman 
 expressed it ; but his master never thought of 
 pulling up the open window through which 
 squalls were coming in every five minutes, 
 and he constantly reverted to his question, 
 for his poor friends had been dreadfully dull 
 the whole evening, and the General could see 
 them mentally just as his last glance had caught 
 them. The mother was seated in an easy-chair 
 at the corner of the fireplace, with her white 
 hair, her profile which had not yet lost its pride, 
 and her strangely-black eyes set in a face wrinkled 
 with those long vertical wrinkles which tell of 
 nobleness of life. The extraordinary paleness of 
 her colom-less and, as it were, bloodless com- 
 plexion betrayed at all times the great sorrows 
 of a widowhood which had found nothing to 
 divert or console it. But that evening this 
 paleness had appeared to the Count even more 
 startling, as, too, had the restlessness in the 
 physiognomy of the daughter. 
 Although Madame Liauran was past forty, not 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 21 
 
 one thread of silver mingled as yet with the 
 bands of black hair crowning the faded yet 
 not withered face, in which all her mother's 
 features were reproduced, but with more emacia- 
 tion and pain. A nervous complaint kept her 
 always lying on her couch, which, that evening, 
 was exactly opposite to Madame Castel's easy 
 chair, so that the General, on leaving the 
 drawing-room had been able to see both women 
 at once, and to feel confusedly that on the second 
 there was weighing a double widowhood. No, 
 there was nothing left in this creature to enable 
 her to support life without suffering. To Scilly, 
 who knew in what an atmosphere of tenderness 
 and sorrow the second Marie Alice had grown up, 
 before herself entering an atmosphere of new 
 troubles, this sort of intensified widowhood 
 afforded an easy explanation of the existence in 
 the daughter of a sensitiveness that was already 
 keen in the mother. 
 
 But then, were there not years in which the 
 melancholy of the two widows was enlivened or 
 rather warded off by the presence of a child. 
 
22 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 Alexander Hubert Liauran, who had been bom 
 a few months before the Italian war — a charming 
 creature, somewhat too frail to suit the taste of 
 his godfather, the General, who was fond of 
 calling him " Mademoiselle Hubert," and as 
 graceful as all young people are who have been 
 brought up only by women? In the circumstances 
 in which his mother and grandmother found 
 themselves, how could this boy have been 
 anything but the whole world to them? 
 
 " If they are so downcast, it can only be on his 
 account," said the Count to himself; "yet there 
 is no question of war — " for the old soldier 
 recollected the promise which the young man 
 had made to him to enlist at once if ever a 
 new strife should bring Germany and France 
 into conflict. This one condition had induced 
 him not to dispute the frightened wish of the two 
 women who had been desirous of keeping the 
 son by their side. The young man, in fact, had 
 at first been attracted by the military profession ; 
 but the mere idea of seeing their child dressed 
 in uniform had been too stern a martyrdom 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 23 
 
 for Madame Castel and Madame Liauran, and 
 the child had remained with them, unprovided 
 with any career but that of loving and of being 
 loved. 
 
 The remembrance of his godson, Hubert, 
 awakened a fresh train of musing in the Count. 
 His brougham had gone down the Eue du Bac, 
 and was now advancing along the quays. A 
 rain-splash fell on the old soldier's cheek and 
 he closed the pane which had remained open. 
 The sudden sensation of cold made him shrink 
 further into the corner of his carriage and into 
 his thoughts. That kind of backset which is 
 produced by physical annoyance often ha,s the 
 strange effect of heightening the power of 
 remembrance within us. Such was the case 
 with the General, who suddenly began to reflect 
 that for several weeks his godson had rarely spent 
 the evening at the Eue Vaneau. He had not 
 been disturbed by this, knowing that Madame 
 Liauran was very anxious that her son should 
 go into society. They were so much afraid lest 
 he 'should weary of their narrow life. 
 
24 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 Scilly was now compelled by a secret instinct 
 to connect this absence with the inexplicable sad- 
 ness overspreading the faces of the two women. 
 He miderstood so well that all the keen forces of 
 the grandmother's and of the mother's heart, had 
 their supreme centre in the existence of their 
 child ! And he pictured to himself pell-mell the 
 thousand scenes of passionate affection which he 
 had witnessed since the time of Hubert's birth. 
 He remembered Madame Castel's recrudescent 
 paleness, and Madame Liauran's deadly head- 
 aches at the shghtest uneasiness in the child. 
 He could see again the days of his education, the 
 course of which was followed by the mother 
 herself. How many times had he admired the 
 young woman as, with her elbow resting on a 
 little table, she employed her evening hours in 
 studying the page of a Latin or Greek book, 
 which the boy was to repeat next day ? 
 
 With a touching, infatuated tenderness such 
 as is pecuhar to certain mothers who would be 
 pained by the shghtest divorce between their 
 own mind and their son's, Madame Liauran had 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 25 
 
 sought to associate herself hour by hour with the 
 development of her child's intelligence. Hubert 
 had not taken a lesson in the upper room in the 
 little house at which his mother was not present, 
 engaged with some piece of charitable work, such 
 as knitting a coverlet or hemming handkerchiefs 
 for the poor, but listening with all her attention 
 to what the master was saying. She had pushed 
 the divine susceptibility of her soul's jealousy so 
 far as to be unwilling to have a private tutor. 
 Hubert had, therefore, received instruction from 
 different masters whom Madame Liauran had 
 engaged on the recommendations of her confessor, 
 the Vicar of Sainte-Clotilde, and none of them had 
 been able to dispute with her an influence which 
 she would share only with the grandmother. 
 
 When it was necessary that the youth should 
 learn how to ride and fence, the poor woman, 
 to whom an hour spent away from her son was 
 a period of ill-dissembled anguish, had taken 
 months and months to make up her mind. At 
 last she had consented to fit up a room on 
 the ground-floor as a fencing school. An old 
 
26 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 regimental instructor, who was settled in Paris, 
 and whom General Scilly had had under him in 
 the service, used to come three times a week. 
 The mother did not venture to acknowledge that- 
 the mere noise of the clashing of the swords 
 awakened within her a dread of some accident, 
 and caused her almost insurmountable emotion. 
 The Count had likewise induced Madame 
 Liauran to entrust her son to him to be taken 
 to the riding-school ; but she had done so on con- 
 dition that he would not leave him for a minute, 
 and every departure for this horse-exercise had 
 continued to be an occasion of secret agony. 
 
 Foreign as they might be to his own character, 
 all these shades of feehng, which had made the 
 education of the young man a mysterious poem 
 of foolish terror, painful felicity, and continual 
 effusiveness, had been understood by Count 
 Scilly, thanks to the intelligence of the most 
 devoted affection, and he knew that Madame 
 Castel, though outwardly more mistress of her- 
 self, was little better than her daughter. How 
 many glances from the pale woman had he not 
 
caught, wrapping Marie Alice Liauran and 
 Hubert in too ardent and absolute idolatry ? 
 
 The days had passed away ; their child was 
 reaching his twenty-second year, and the two 
 widows continued to entwine and bind him 
 with the thousand attentions by which impas- 
 sioned women, whether mothers, wives, or lovers, 
 know how to keep the object of their passion 
 beside them. With a careful minuteness that 
 was fruitful in intimate delight, they had taken 
 pleasure in furnishing for Hubert the most charm- 
 ing bachelor's rooms that could be imagined. 
 They had enlarged a pavilion running out from 
 behind the house into a little garden which was 
 itself contiguous to the immense garden in the 
 Eue de Varenne. From her own bedroom win- 
 dows Madame Liauran could see those of her 
 son, who had thus a httle independent universe 
 to himself. The two women had had the sense 
 to understand that they could keep Hubert 
 altogether with themselves only by anticipating 
 the wish for a personal existence inevitable in a 
 man of twenty. 
 
28 A CEUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 On the ground floor of this pavilion were two 
 spacious rooms on a level with the garden — one 
 containing a billiard table, and the other every 
 requisite for fencing. It was here that Hubert 
 received his friends, consisting of some people 
 from the Faubourg Saint-Germain ; for, although 
 Madame Castel and Madame Liauran did not 
 visit, they had maintained continuous relations 
 with all those in the Faubourg who occupied 
 themselves with works of charity. These formed 
 a distinct society, very different from the worldly 
 clan, and united in a mode aU the closer, because 
 its relations were very frequent, serious and 
 personal. But certainly none of Hubert's young 
 friends moved in an establishment comparable to 
 that which the two women had organised on the 
 first story of the pavilion. They who lived in 
 the simplicity of unexpectant widows, and who 
 would not for the world have modified anything 
 in the antique furniture of their house, had had 
 modern luxury and comfort suddenly revealed to 
 them by their feehngs towards Hubert. 
 
 The young man's bedroom was hung with 
 
A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 29 
 
 prettily and coquettishly fantastical Japanese 
 stuflfs, and all the furniture had come from 
 England. Madame Castel and Madame Liauran 
 had been charmed with some specimens which 
 they had seen at the house of a furious Anglo- 
 maniac and distant relation of their own, and 
 with the caprice of love they had proposed to 
 give themselves the pleasure of affording this 
 original elegance to their child. Accordingly, 
 the room, which looked towards the south 
 and always had the smi upon it, contained a 
 charming, triple-panelled wardrobe, a wooden 
 wainscot and a what-not mirror over the mantle- 
 piece, two graceful brackets, a low square bed, 
 and arm-chairs that one could lounge in for 
 «ver — in short, it was really such a liome of 
 refined convenience as every rich EngUshman 
 likes to obtain. A bath-room and a smoking-room 
 adjoined this apartment. 
 
 Although Hubert was not as yet addicted to 
 tobacco, the two women had anticipated even 
 this habit, and it had afforded them a pretext for 
 fitting up a little room in quite an Oriental 
 
30 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 fashion, with a profusion of Persian carpets and 
 a broad divan draped with Algerian stuffs brought 
 back by the General from his campaigns, while 
 similar stuffs adorned ceilings and walls, upon 
 which might be seen all the weapons which 
 three generations of officers had left behind them. 
 Some Egyptian sabres recalled the first campaign 
 in which Hubert Castel had served in Buona- 
 parte's retinue. The Captain in the African Army 
 had been the owner of these Arab weapons, and 
 those memorials of the Crimea bore witness to the 
 presence of Sub-Lieutenant Liauran beneath the 
 walls of Sebastopol. 
 
 On leaving the smoking-room you entered the 
 study, the windows of which were double, those 
 inside being of coloured glass, so that on dull 
 days it was possible not to notice the aspect of 
 the hour. The two women had endured such 
 frightful recurrences of melancholy on gloomy 
 afternoons, and beneath cruel skies ! A large 
 writing-table standing in the middle of the room 
 had in front of it one of those revolving arm- 
 chairs which allows the worker to turn round 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 3 1 
 
 towards the fireplace without so much as rising. 
 A little Tronchin table presented its raised desk, 
 if the young man took a fancy to stand as he 
 wrote, while a couch awaited his idleness. A 
 cottage piano stood in the corner, and a long, 
 low bookshelf ran along the back part of the 
 room. 
 
 Perhaps the books with which the shelves of 
 the last-named piece of furniture were provided 
 interpreted even better than aU the other details 
 the anxious solicitude with which Madame Castel 
 and Madame Liauran had made every arrange- 
 ment in order to remain mistresses of the son 
 during those difficult years which intervene 
 between the twentieth and the thirtieth. Having 
 both, as soldiers' widows, preserved a reverence 
 for a life of action while, at the same time, their 
 extreme tenderness for Hubert rendered them 
 incapable of enduring that he should face it, they 
 had found a compromise for their consciences in 
 the dream of a studious life for him. They 
 ingenuously cherished a wish that he should 
 undertake a large and long work of military 
 
32 A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 history, such as one of the De Trans family 
 had left behind him in the eighteenth centmy. 
 A¥as not this the best means for ensuring that he 
 would remain a great deal at home — that is to 
 say, with them ? Accordingly, thanks to Scilly's 
 advice, they had formed a tolerable collection 
 of books suitable for this project. Some religious 
 works, a small number of novels, and, alone 
 among modern writers, the works of Lamartine 
 completed the equipment of the shelves. 
 
 It is right to say that in that comer of the 
 world where no journal was taken in, contem- 
 porary literature was completely unknown. The 
 ideas of the General and of the two women were 
 identical on this point. And the case was nearly 
 the same in respect of the whole contemporary 
 world as it was in respect of literature. Aston- 
 ishing conversations might have been heard in 
 that drawing-room in the Eue Vaneau, in the 
 course of which the Count would explain to his 
 friends that France was governed by the delegates 
 of the secret societies, with other political theories 
 of similar scope. The same causes always produce 
 
A CBUEIi ENIGMA. 33 
 
 the same effects. Precisely as happens in very 
 small country towns, monotony of habit had 
 resulted, with the two widows, in monotony of 
 thought. Feelings were very deep and ideas very 
 narrow in that old house the entrance gate of 
 which was opened but rarely. On such occasions 
 the passer-by could see, at the end of a court, a 
 building on the pediment of which might be read 
 a Latin motto, engraved in former times in honour 
 of Marshal de Crequy, the first owner of the 
 house : Marti invicto atque indefesso — to uncon- 
 quered and indefatigable Mars. The lofty windows 
 of the first storey and of the ground floor, the old 
 colour of the stone, the appropriate silence of the 
 court, all harmonised with the characters of the 
 two residents, whose prejudices were infinite. 
 
 Madame Castel and her daughter beHeved in 
 presentiments, double sight, and somnambulists. 
 They were persuaded that the Emperor Napoleon 
 III. had undertaken the Italian war in fulfilment 
 of a carbonaro oath. Never would these divinely 
 good women have bestowed their friendship upon 
 a Protestant or an Israelite. The mere idea 
 
34 A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 that there might be a conscientious Freethinker 
 would have disconcerted them as though they had 
 been told of the sanctity of a criminal. In short, 
 even the General thought them ingenuous. But, 
 as it sometimes happens with officers condemned 
 to fleeting loves by their roving life and the timid 
 feelings hidden beneath their martial appearance 
 Scilly was not well enough acquainted with 
 women to appreciate the reahty of this ingenuous- 
 ness or the depth of the ignorance of evil in 
 which the two Marie Alices lived. He supposed 
 that all virtuous women were similar, and he 
 confounded all others under the term of "queans." 
 When his liver troubled him excessively he would 
 pronounce this word in a tone which gave 
 grounds for suspecting some bitter deception in 
 his past life. But who among the few. people 
 that he met at the house of " his two saints," as 
 he called Madame Castel and her daughter, 
 dreamed of troubling themselves about whether 
 he had been deceived by some garrison adven- 
 turess or not ? 
 
 Still lulled by the rolling of his carriage, the 
 
A CEUEL BNiaMA. 35 
 
 General continued to resign himself to the 
 memory-crisis through which he had been passing 
 since his departure from the Eue Vaneau, and 
 which had caused him to review, in a quarter of 
 an hour, the entire existence of his friends. 
 Other faces also were evoked around these two 
 forms, those, for instance, of Madame de Trans, 
 Madame Castel's first cousin, who lived in the 
 country for part of the year, and who used to 
 come with her three daughters, Yolande, Yseult 
 and Ysabeau, to spend the winter at Paris. 
 These four ladies used to take up their abode in 
 apartments in the Eue de Monsiem-, and their 
 Parisian life consisted in hearing low mass at 
 seven o'clock in the morning in the private chapel 
 of a convent situated in the Eue de La Barouillere, 
 in visiting other convents, or in busjdng them- 
 selves in workrooms during the afternoon. They 
 went to bed at about half-past eight, after dining 
 at noon and supping at six. 
 
 Twice a week " those De Trans ladies," as the 
 General called them, spent the evening with 
 their cousins. On these occasions they returned 
 
35 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 to the Eue de Monsieur at ten o'clock, and their 
 servant used to come for them with a parcel con- 
 taining their pattens and with a lantern that they 
 might cross the courtyard of Madame Castel's 
 house without danger. The Countess de Trans 
 and her three daughters had the simburnt and 
 freckled faces of peasant women, dresses home- 
 made by seamstresses chosen for them by the 
 nuns, parsimonious tastes written in the meanness 
 of their whole existence, and— ra detail revealing 
 their native aristocracy — charming hands and 
 delicious feet which could not be disgraced by 
 the ready - made boots purchased in a pious 
 establishment in the Eue de Sevres. 
 
 The most singular contrast existed between 
 these four women and George Liauran, another 
 cousin on the side of the second Marie Alice. 
 He represented all the fashions in the dravnng- 
 room in the Eue Vaneau. He was a man of 
 forty-five who had been launched into wealthy 
 society with a fortune that had at first been 
 a moderate one but had increased by clever 
 speculations on the Bourse He had his 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 37 
 
 rooms in his club, where he used to breakfast, 
 and every evening a cover was laid for him in 
 one of the houses in which he was a familiar 
 guest. He was small, thin, and very brown. 
 Whether or not he maintained the youth of his 
 pointed beard and very short hair by the 
 artifice of a dye, was a question that had long 
 been debated among the three Demoiselles de 
 Trans, who were stupefied at the sight of 
 George's superior appearance, the varnished soles 
 of his dress-shoes, the embroidered clocks of his 
 silk socks, the chased gold studs in his cuffs, the 
 single pearl in his shirt front, by the slightest 
 knick-knacks, in fact, belonging to this man with 
 the shrewd lively- eyes, whose toilet represented 
 to them a life of thrilling prodigality. It was 
 agreed among them that he exercised a fatal 
 influence over Hubert. 
 
 Such was doubtless not Madame Liauran's 
 opinion, for she had desired George to act 
 as a chaperon to the young man in the life 
 of the world, when she wished her son to 
 cultivate their family relations. The noble woman 
 
38 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 rewarded her cousin's lengthened attention by 
 this mark of confidence. He had come to the 
 quiet house very regularly for years, whether 
 it was that the security of this affection was 
 pleasing to him amid the falsities of Parisian 
 society, or that he had long conceived a secret 
 adoration for Marie Alice Liauran, such as the 
 purest women sometimes unconsciously inspire in 
 misanthropes — for George had that shade of 
 pessimism which is to be met with in nearly 
 all club-livers. The nature of the character of this 
 man, who was always inclined to believe the 
 worst of everything, was the object of an 
 astonishment on the part of the General that 
 custom had failed to allay ; but on this evening 
 he omitted to reflect upon it. The recollection 
 of George only served to heighten that of Hubert 
 etill more. 
 
 Irresistibly the worthy man came to recognise 
 the obviousness of the fact that his two friends 
 could not be so cruelly downcast except on 
 account of their child. Yes ; but why ? This 
 point of interrogation, which summed up the 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 39 
 
 whole of bis reverie, was more present than ever 
 to the Count's mind as his dowager equipage 
 stopped before bis house. Another carriage was 
 standing on the other side of the gateway, and 
 Scilly thought that in it be could recognise the 
 little brougham which Madame Liauran had 
 given to her son. 
 
 "Is that you, John?" he cried to the coach- 
 man through the rain. 
 
 "The Count, sir? . . . ." replied a voice which 
 Scilly was startled to recognise. 
 
 " Hubert is waiting for me within," he said to 
 himself ; and he crossed the threshold of the door 
 a prey to curiosity such as he had not experienced 
 for years. 
 
^O A CBUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of his curiosity, the 
 General did not make a gesture the quicker. The 
 habit of mihtary minuteness was too strong with 
 him to be vanquished by any emotion. He 
 himself put his stick into the stand, drew off his 
 furred gloves one after the other and laid them 
 on the table in the antechamber beside his hat, 
 which was carefully placed on its side. His 
 servant took off his overcoat with the same 
 slowness. Not until then did he enter the 
 apartment where, as his servant had just told 
 him, the young man had been awaiting him for 
 half-an-hour. 
 
 It was a cheerless looking room, and one which 
 revealed the simplicity of a life reduced to its 
 strictest wants. Oak shelves overladen with 
 books, the mere appearance of which indicated 
 official publications, ran along two sides. Some 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 4I 
 
 maps and a few weapon-trophies adorned the 
 rest. A writing-table placed in the centre of the 
 apartment displayed papers classified in groups — 
 notes for the great work which the Count had 
 been preparing for an indefinite time on the 
 reorganisation of the army. Two lustring sleeves, 
 methodically folded, lay among the squares and 
 rulers ; a bust of Marshal Bugeaud adorned the 
 fireplace, which was furnished with a grate, in 
 which a coke fire was dying out. 
 
 The tile-paved floor was tinted red, and the 
 carpet scarcely extended beyond the legs of the 
 table which rested upon them. On the table 
 stood a bright copper lamp, which was lighted at 
 the present moment, and the green cardboard 
 shade threw the light upon the face of young 
 Liauran, who was seated beside it in the straw 
 arm-chair, and was looking at the fire, with his 
 chin resting on his hand. He was so absorbed in 
 his reverie that he appeared to have heard neither 
 the rolling of the carriage-wheels nor the 
 General's entrance into the apartment. Never, 
 moreover, had the latter been so struck as he was 
 
42 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 just then with the astonishing likeness presented 
 by the physiognomy of the child with that of the 
 two women by whom he had been brought up. 
 
 If Madame Liauran appeared more frail than 
 her mother, and less capable of coping with the 
 bitterness of life, this fragility was still more 
 exaggerated in Hubert. The thin cloth of his 
 dress-coat — for he was in evening dress, with a 
 white nosegay in his button-hole — allowed the 
 outlines of his slender shoulders to be seen. The 
 fingers extended across his temple were as 
 delicate as a woman's. The paleness of his 
 complexion, which, owing to the extreme 
 regularity of his life, was usually tinged with 
 pink, betrayed, in this horn- of sadness, the depth 
 of vibration awakened by all emotion in this too 
 delicate organism. There were deep, nacreous 
 circles round his handsome black eyes ; but, at 
 the same time, a touch of pride in the line of the 
 nobly-cut forehead and almost perfectly straight 
 nose, the curve of the lips with its slender dark 
 moustache, the set of the chin marked with a 
 manly dimple, and other tokens still, such as the 
 
A CBUEL BNiaMA. 43 
 
 of the knitted eyebrows, betrayed the heredity 
 race of action in the over-petted child of two 
 sly women. 
 
 [ the General had been as good a connoisseur 
 lainting as he was skilled in arms, this face 
 lid certainly have reminded him of those 
 ;raits of young princes painted by Van Dyck, 
 7hich the almost morbid delicacy of an ancient 
 i is blended with the obstinate pride of heroic 
 )d. After pausing for a few seconds in con- 
 plation, the General walked towards the 
 e. Hubert raised the charming head which 
 brown ringlets, disordered as they were at 
 i moment, rendered completely similar to the 
 ;raits executed by the painter of Charles I. ; 
 law his godfather and rose to greet him. He 
 a slight and well-made figure, and merely in 
 graceful fashion in which he held out his 
 d could be traced the lengthened watchfulness 
 maternal eyes. Are not our manners the 
 istructible work of the looks which have 
 )wed us and judged us during our childhood? 
 And so you have come to speak to me on 
 
44 A CKUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 very serious business," said the General, going 
 straight to the point. " I suspected as much," 
 he added. " I left your mother and your grand- 
 mother more melancholy than I had ever seen 
 them since the Italian war. Why were you not 
 with them this evening? If you do not make 
 those two women happy, Hubert, you are cruelly 
 ungrateful, for they would give their lives for 
 your happiness. And now, what is going on?" 
 
 The General, in uttering these words, had 
 pursued aloud the thoughts which had been 
 tormenting him during the drive home from the 
 Hue Vaneau. He could see the young man's 
 features changing visibly as he spoke. It was 
 one of the hereditary fatalities in the tempera- 
 ment of this too dearly loved child that the sound 
 of a harsh voice always gave him a painful little 
 spasm of the heart ; but, no doubt, to the harsh- 
 ness of Count Scilly's accents there was added 
 the harshness of the meaning of his words. They 
 brutally laid bare a too sensitive wound. Hubert 
 sat down as though crushed ; then he replied in 
 a voice which, naturally somewhat clouded, was 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 45 
 
 at this moment more muffled than usual. He did 
 not even attempt to deny that he was the cause 
 of the sorrow on the part of the two women. 
 
 " Do not question me, godfather. I give you 
 my word of honour that I am not guilty, only I 
 cannot explain to you the misunderstanding 
 which makes me a subject of grief to them. I 
 cannot help it. I have gone out oftener than 
 usual, and that is my only crime." 
 
 " You are not telling me the whole truth," 
 replied Scilly, softened, in spite of his anger, by 
 the young man's evident grief. "Your mother 
 and your grandmother are too fond of keeping 
 you tied to their apron strings, and I have always 
 thought so. You would have been brought up 
 more hardily if I had been your father. Women 
 do not understand how to train a man. But 
 have they not been urging you for the last two 
 years to go into society? It is not your going 
 out, therefore, that grieves them, but your motive 
 for doing so." 
 
 As he uttered these words, which he considered 
 very clever, the Count looked at his godson 
 
45 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 through the smoke from a little brier pipe 
 which he had just lighted, a mechanical custom 
 sufficiently explaining the acrid atmosphere with 
 which the room was saturated. He saw Hubert's 
 cheeks colour with a sudden inflow of blood, 
 which to a more perspicacious observer would 
 have been an undeniable confession. Only an 
 allusion or the dread of an allusion to a woman 
 whom he loves, has the power to disturb a young 
 man of such evident purity as Hubert was. After 
 a few moments of this sudden emotion, he re- 
 pUed : 
 
 " I declare to you, godfather, that there is 
 nothing in my conduct of which I should be 
 ashamed. It is the first time that neither my 
 mother nor my grandmother has understood me — 
 but I shall not yield to them on the point in 
 dispute. They are unjust about it, frightfully 
 unjust," he continued, rising and taking a few 
 steps. 
 
 This time his face was no longer expressive of 
 submission, but of the indomitable pride which 
 military heredity had infused into his blood. He 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 47 
 
 did not give the General time to notice his 
 words, which in the mouth of a son, usually only 
 too submissive, disclosed an extraordinary in- 
 tensity of passion. He contracted his eyebrows, 
 shook his head as though to drive away some 
 tormenting thought, and, once more master of 
 himself, went on : 
 
 " I have not come here to complain to 
 you, godfather; you would give me a bad 
 reception, and you would not be wrong. I have 
 to ask a service of you, a great service. But I 
 would wish all that I am going to confide to 
 to you to remain between ourselves." 
 
 " I never enter into such engagements," 
 said the Count. " A man has not always the 
 right to be silent," he added. "All that I can 
 promise you is to keep your secret if my affection 
 for you know whom, does not make it a duty 
 that I should speak. Come, now, decide for 
 yourseK." 
 
 "Be it so," rejoined the young man, after a 
 silence, during which he had, no doubt, judged 
 of the situation in which he found himself ; " you 
 
48 A CEUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 will do as you please. "What I have to say to 
 you is comprised in a short sentence. God- 
 father, can you lend me three thousand 
 francs ? " 
 
 This question was so unexpected by the Count 
 that it forthwith changed the current of his 
 thoughts. Since the beginning of the conversa- 
 tion he had been trying to guess the young man's 
 secret, which was also the secret of his two 
 friends, and he had necessarily thought that 
 some intrigue was in question. To tell the truth, 
 he did not consider this very shocking. Though 
 very devout, Scilly had remained too essentially 
 a soldier not to have most indulgent theories 
 respecting love. Military life leads those who 
 follow it to a simplification of thought which 
 causes them to admit all facts, whatever they 
 may be, in their verity. A "quean" in Scilly's 
 eyes was a necessary malady with a young man. 
 It was enough if the malady did not last too 
 long, and if the young man came out of it with 
 tolerable impunity. Now he had suddenly a 
 misgiving that was more alarming to him, for, 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 49 
 
 owing to his regimental experience, he considered 
 cards much more dangerous than women. 
 
 "You have been gambling?" he said abruptly. 
 
 "No, godfather," replied the young man. " I 
 have merely spent more than my allowance for the 
 last few months ; I have debts to settle, and," he 
 added, " I am leaving for England the day after 
 to-morrow." 
 
 " And your mother knows of this journey? " 
 
 " Undoubtedly ; I am going to spend a fort- 
 night in London with my friend, Emmanuel 
 Deroy, of the Embassy, whom you know." 
 
 "If your mother lets you go," returned the old 
 man, continuing the logical pursuit of his inquiry, 
 "it is because your conduct in Paris is grieving 
 her cruelly. Answer me frankly — ^You have a 
 mistress ? " 
 
 "No," replied Hubert, with a fresh rush 
 of purple across his cheeks. " I have no 
 mistress." 
 
 "If it is neither the Queen of Spades nor the 
 Queen of Hearts," said the General, who did not 
 doubt his godson's veracity for a moment — ^he 
 
 D 
 
50 A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 knew him to be incapable of a falsehood — "will 
 you do me the honour of telling me what has 
 become of the five hundred francs a month, a 
 colonel's pay, which your mother gives you for 
 pocket-money ? " 
 
 "Ah! godfather," returned the young man, 
 visibly relieved ; " you do not know the require- 
 ments of a life in society. Why, to-day I gave a 
 dinner to three friends at the Cafe Anglais ; that 
 came to very nearly a hundred and fifty francs. 
 I have sent several bouquets, hired carriages to 
 go into the country, and given a few keepsakes. 
 The five bank-notes are so soon at an end ! In 
 short, I repeat, I have debts that I want to pay, 
 I have to meet the expenses of my journey, and 
 I do not want to apply to my mother or my 
 grandmother just now. They do not know what 
 a young man's life in Paris is like ; I do not want 
 to add a second misunderstanding to the first. 
 With our present relations what they are they 
 would see faults where there have been only 
 inevitable necessities. And, then, I am physi- 
 cally unable to endure a scene vdth my mother." 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 5 1 
 
 " And if I refuse ? " Scilly asked. 
 
 " I shall apply elsewhere," said Alexander 
 Hubert; " it will be terribly painful to me, but I 
 shall do so." 
 
 There was silence between the two men. The 
 whole story was darkening again in the General's 
 eyes, like the smoke which he was sending from 
 his pipe in methodical puffs. But what he did 
 see clearly was the definitive nature of Hubert's 
 resolve, whatever its secret cause might be. To 
 refuse him would be perhaps to send him to a 
 money-lender, or at all events to force him to 
 take some step wounding to his pride. On the 
 other hand, to advance this sum to his godson 
 was to acquire a right to follow out more closely 
 the mystery which lay at the bottom of his ex- 
 citement, as well as behind the melancholy of the 
 two women. And then, when aU is told, the 
 Count loved Hubert with an affection that 
 bordered closely on weakness. If he had been 
 deeply moved by Madame Liauran's and Madame 
 Castel's dull despair, he was now completely 
 upset by the visible anguish written on the face 
 
52 A CEUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 of this child, who was, in his thoughts, an 
 adopted son as dear as any real son could have 
 heen. 
 
 " My dear fellow," he said at last, taking 
 Hubert's hand, and in a tone of voice giving no 
 further token of the harshness which had marked 
 the beginning of their conversation, " I think 
 too highly of you to believe that you would 
 associate me in any action that could displease 
 your mother. I will do what you wish, but on 
 
 one condition " 
 
 Hubert's eyes betrayed fresh anxiety. 
 "It is merely to fix the date on which you 
 expect to repay me the money. I want to oblige 
 you," continued the old soldier, " but it would 
 not be worthy of you to borrow a sum that you 
 believed yourself unable to pay back again, nor of 
 me to lend myself to a calculation of the kind. 
 Will yon come back here to-morrow afternoon ? 
 You VTill bring me an account of what you can 
 spare from your allowance every month. Ah ! it 
 vdll not do to offer any more bouquets, or dinners at 
 the Cafe Anglais, or keepsakes. But, then, have 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 53 
 
 you not lived for a long time past without these 
 foolish expenses ? " 
 
 This little speech, in which the spirit of order 
 that was essential to the General, his goodness of 
 heart, and his taste for regularity of life were 
 blended in equal proportion, moved Hubert so 
 deeply that he pressed his godfather's fingers 
 without replying, as though crushed by emotions 
 which he had left unexpressed. He suspected 
 that while this interview was taking place at the 
 Quai d' Orleans, the evening was being lengthened 
 out at the house in the Bue Vaneau, and that the 
 two beings whom he loved so deeply were com- 
 menting on his absence. He himself suffered 
 from the pain that he was causing, as though a 
 mysterious thread linked him to those two women 
 seated beside their lonely hearth. 
 
 And, indeed, the General once gone, the " two 
 saints" had remained silent for a long time in the 
 quiet little drawing-room. Nothing of all the 
 tumult of Parisian life reached them but a vast, 
 confused murmuring analogous to that of the sea 
 when heard a long way off. The seclusion of 
 
54 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 this retired abode, with the hum of hfe outside, 
 was a symbol of what had so long been the 
 destiny of Madame Castel and her daughter. 
 Marie Alice Liauran, lying on her couch, and 
 looking very slight in her black attire, seemed to 
 be hstening to this hum, or to her thoughts, for 
 she had rehnquished the work with which she had 
 been engaged ; while her mother, seated in her 
 easy-chair, and also in black, continued to ply 
 her tortoiseshell crochet-hook, sometimes raising 
 her eyes towards her daughter with a look 
 wherein a twofold anxiety might be read. She 
 also experienced the sensation felt by her 
 daughter, on account both of Hubert and of 
 this daughter, whose almost morbid sensitiveness 
 she knew. It was not she, however, who first 
 broke the silence, but Madame Liauran, who 
 suddenly, and as though pursuing her reverie 
 aloud, began to lament : 
 
 " What renders my pain still more intolerable 
 is that he sees the wound which he has dealt my 
 heart, and that he is not to be stopped by it — he 
 who, from childhood until within the last six 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 55 
 
 months, could never encounter a shadow in my 
 look or a wrinkle on my forehead without a 
 change of countenance. That is what convinces 
 me of the depth of his passion for this woman. 
 "What a passion and what a woman !" 
 
 " Do not become excited," said Madame Castel, 
 rising and kneehng in front of her daughter's 
 couch. " You are in a fever," she said, taking 
 her hand. Then, in a low voice, and as though 
 probing her consciousness to the bottom, she 
 went on: "Alas! my child, you are jealous of 
 yoxu: son, as I have been jealous of you. I have 
 spent so many days — I can tell you this now — in 
 loving your husband " 
 
 " Ah ! mother," replied Madame Liauran, " that 
 is not the same kind of grief. I did not degrade 
 myself in giving part of my heart to the man 
 whom you had chosen, while you know that 
 cousin George has told us of this Madame de 
 Sauve, and of her education by that unworthy 
 mother, and of her reputation since she has been 
 married, and of the husband who can suffer his wife 
 to have a drawing-room in which the conversation 
 
56 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 is raore than free, and of the father, the old 
 prefect, who, on being left a widower, brought up 
 his daughter helter-skelter with his mistresses. 
 I confess, mamma, that if there is egotism in 
 maternal love, I"have had that egotism ; I have 
 been grieved by anticipation at the thought that 
 Hubert would marry, and that he would continue 
 his life apart from mine. But I blamed myself 
 greatly for feeling in that way, — whereas now he 
 has been taken from me, and taken from me 
 only to be disgraced ! " 
 
 For some minutes longer she prolonged this 
 violent lamentation, wherein was revealed that 
 kind of passionate frenzy which had caused aU 
 the keen forces of her heart to be concentrated 
 about her son. It was not only the mother that 
 suffered in her, it was the pious mother to whom 
 human faults were abominable crimes ; it was the 
 sad and isolated mother upon whom the rivalry 
 of a young, rich, and elegant woman inflicted 
 secret humiliation ; in fine, her heart was bleed- 
 ing at every pore. The sight of this suffering, 
 however, wounded Madame Castel so cruelly, and 
 
A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 57 
 
 her eyes expressed such sorrowful pity, that 
 Marie Alice broke off her complaint. She leaned 
 over on her couch, laid a kiss upon those poor 
 eyes, so like her own, and said : 
 
 " Forgive me, mamma ; but to whom should I 
 tell my trouble if not to you ? And then — would 
 you not see it? Hubert is not coming in," she 
 added, looking at the clock, the pendulum of which 
 continued to move quietly to and fro. " Do you 
 not think that I ought to have opposed this 
 journey to England ?" 
 
 " No, my child ; if he is going to pay a visit to 
 his friend, why should you exercise your authority 
 in vain ? And if he were going from any other 
 motive, he would not obey you. Remember that 
 he is twenty-two years old, and that he is a 
 man." 
 
 " I am growing foolish, mother ; this journey 
 was settled a long time ago — I have seen Emma- 
 nuel's letters ; but, when I am grieved, I can no 
 longer reason, I can see nothing but my sorrow, 
 
 and it obstructs all my thoughts- .Ah ! how 
 
 unhappy I am ! " 
 
58 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 If any proof of the thorough many-sidedness of 
 our nature were required, it might be found in 
 that law which is a customary object of indigna- 
 tion with morahsts, and which ordains that the 
 sight of the sorrow of our most loved ones 
 cannot, at certain times, prevent us from being 
 happy. Our feelings seem to maintain a sort of hfe 
 and death struggle against one another in our 
 hearts. Intensity of existence in anyone among 
 them, though it be but momentary, is only to be 
 obtained at the cost of weakening all the rest. It 
 is certain that Hubert loved his two mothers — 
 as he always called the two women who had 
 brought him up — to distraction. It is certain 
 that he had guessed that for many days they had 
 been holding conversations together analogous to 
 that of the evening on which he had borrowed 
 from his godfather the three thousand francs 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 59 
 
 which he required for settling his debts and 
 meeting the cost of his journey. 
 
 And yet, on the second day after that evening, 
 when he found himself in the train which was 
 taking him to Boulogne, it was impossible for him 
 not to feel his soul steeped, as it were, in divine 
 bliss. He did not ask himself whether Count 
 Scilly would or would not speak of the step that 
 he had taken. He put aside the apprehension of 
 this just as he drove away the recollection of 
 Madame Liauran's eyes at the moment of his de- 
 parture, and just as he stifled all the scruples that 
 might be suggested by his uncompromising piety. 
 
 If he had not absolutely lied to his mother in 
 telling her that he was going to join his friend 
 Jlmmanuel Deroy in London, he had neverthe- 
 less deceived this jealous mother by concealing 
 from her that he would meet Madarae de Sauve 
 at Folkestone. Now, Madame de Sauve was not 
 free. Madame de Sauve was married, and in the 
 eyes of a young man brought up as the pious 
 Hubert had been, to love a married woman con- 
 stituted an inexpiable fault. Hubert must and 
 
6o A CKUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 did believe himself in a condition of mortal sin. 
 His Catholicism, which was not merely a religion 
 of fashion and posture, left him in no doubt on 
 this point. But religion, family obligations of 
 truthfulness, fears for the future, all these 
 phantoms of conscience appeared to him — 
 conditioned only as phantoms, vain, powerless 
 images, vanishing before the hving evocation of 
 the beauty of the woman who, five months before 
 had entered into his heart to renew all within it, 
 the woman whom he loved and by whom he 
 knew himself to be loved. 
 
 Hubert had told the truth, in that he was not 
 Madame de Sauve's lover in that sense of entire 
 and physical possession in which the term is 
 understood in our language. She had never 
 belonged to him, and it was the first time that 
 he was going to be really alone with her, in that 
 solitude of a foreign land which is the secret 
 dream of everyone who loves. 
 
 While the train was steaming at full speed 
 through plains alternately ribbed with hills, in- 
 tersected with watercourses, and bristling with 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 6 1 
 
 bare trees, the young man was absorbed in 
 telling the rosary of his recollections. The 
 charm of the hours that were gone was rendered 
 still dearer to him by the expectation of some 
 immense and undefined happiness. 
 
 Although Madame Liauran's son was twenty- 
 two years of age, the manner of his education 
 had kept him in that state of purity so rare 
 among the young men of Paris, who, for the 
 most part, have exhausted pleasure before they 
 have had so much as a suspicion of love. But a 
 fact of which the young fellow was not aware was 
 that it had been this very purity which had 
 acted more powerfully than the most accom- 
 plished libertinism could have done upon the 
 romantic imagination of the woman whose profile 
 was passing to and fro before his gaze with 
 the motion of the carriage, and showing itself 
 alternately against woods, hills and dunes. How 
 many images does a passing train thus bear 
 along, and with them how many destinies rush- 
 ing towards weal or woe in the distant and the 
 unknown ! 
 
62 A CBUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 It was at the beginning of the month of 
 October, in the preceding year, that Hubert 
 had seen Madame de Sauve for the first time. On 
 account of Madame Liauran's health, which ren- 
 dered the shortest journey dangerous to her, the 
 two women never left Paris ; but the young man 
 sometimes went during the summer or autumn 
 to spend three or four days in some country house. 
 He was coming back from one of these visits 
 in company with his cousin George, when, getting 
 into a carriage at a station on the same northern 
 line along which he was now travelling, he had 
 met the young lady with her husband. The 
 De Sauves were acquainted with George, and 
 thus it was that Alexander Hubert had been 
 introduced. 
 
 Monsieur de Sauve was a man of about forty- 
 five years of age, very tall and strong, with a face 
 that was already too red, and with traces of 
 wear and tear which were discernible through 
 his vigour, and the explanation of which might 
 be found, merely by listening to his conversation, 
 in his mode of regarding life. Existence to him 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 63 
 
 was self-lavishment, and he carried out this pro- 
 gramme in all directions. Head of a ministerial 
 cabinet in 1869, thrown after the war into the 
 campaign of Bonapartist propaganda, a deputy 
 since then, and always re-elected, but an active 
 deputy, and one who bribed his electors, he had 
 at the same time launched forth more and more 
 freely into society. He had a salon, gave dinners, 
 occupied himself with sport, and still found 
 sufficient leisure to interest himself competently 
 and successfully in financial enterprises. Add to 
 this that before his marriage he had had much 
 experience of ballet dancers, green-rooms of small 
 theatres, and private supper-rooms. 
 
 There are temperaments of this kind which 
 nature makes into machines at a great outlay, 
 and consequently with great returns. Every- 
 thing in Andre de Sauve revealed a taste for 
 what is ample and powerful, from the construc- 
 tion of his great body to his style of dress, or to 
 the gesture with which he would take a long black 
 cigar from his case to smoke it. Hubert well 
 remembered how this man, with his hairy hands 
 
64 A CBUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 and ears, his large feet and his dragon's mien, had 
 inspired him with that description of physical 
 repulsion which we all endure on meeting with 
 a physiology precisely contrary to our own. 
 
 Are there not respirations, circulations of blood, 
 plays of muscle which are hostile to us, thanks, 
 probably, to that indefinable instinct of life 
 which impels two animals of different species to 
 rend each other as soon as they come face to 
 face ? Truth to tell, the antipathy of the delicate 
 Hubert was capable of being more simply 
 explained on the ground of an unconscious 
 and sudden jealousy of Madame de Sauve's 
 husband ; for Theresa, as her husband familiarly 
 called her, had immediately exercised a sort of 
 irresistible attraction upon the young man. In 
 his childhood he had often turned over a 
 portfolio of engravings brought back from Italy 
 by his illustrious grandfather, who had served 
 under Bonaparte, and at the first glance that fell 
 upon this woman, he could not help recalling the 
 heads drawn by the masters of the Lombardic 
 school, so striking was the resemblance between 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 65 
 
 her face and those of the familiar Herodiases 
 and Madonnas of Luini and his pupils. 
 
 There was the same full, broad forehead, the 
 same large eyes charged with somewhat heavy 
 eyelids, the same delicious oval at the lower 
 part of the cheek terminating in an almost 
 square chin, the same sinuosity of lips, 
 the same delightful union of eyebrow to the 
 rising of the nose, and over all these charming 
 features, a suffusion, as it were, of gentleness, 
 grace, and mystery. Madame de Sauve had 
 further, the vigorous neck and broad shoulders 
 of the women of the Lombardic school, as well 
 as all the other tokens of a race at once refined 
 and strong, with a slender waist and the hands 
 and feet of a child. What marked her out from 
 this traditional type was the colour of her hair, 
 which was not red and gold but very black, and 
 of her eyes, the mingled grey of which bordered 
 upon green. The amber paleness of her com- 
 plexion, as well as the languishing listlessness of 
 all her movements, completed the singular 
 character of her beauty. 
 
66 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 In the presence of this creature, it was im- 
 possible not to think of some portrait of pas1 
 times, although she breathed youth with the 
 purple of her mouth and the living fluid of hei 
 eyes, and although she was dressed in the fashior 
 of the day, and wore a jacket fitting close to he] 
 figure. The skirt of her dress, made of an Englisl 
 material of a grey shade, her feet cased in lacec 
 boots, her little man's coUar, her straight cravat 
 fastened with a diamond horseshoe pin, her Swede 
 gloves, and her round hat, scarcely suggested the 
 toilet of princesses of the sixteenth century ; anc 
 yet she presented to the eye a finished model a 
 Milanese beauty, even in this costume of Parisiai 
 elegance. By what mystery ? 
 
 She was the daughter of Madame Lussac, nei 
 Bressuire, whose relations had not left the Eu( 
 Saint-Honore for three generations, and o 
 Adolphus Lussac, Prefect under the Empire 
 who had come from Auvergne in Monsieu 
 Bouher's train. The chronicle of the drawing 
 rooms would have answered the question by re 
 calhng the Parisian career of the handsome Coun 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 67 
 
 Branciforte, somewhere about tlie year 1858, 
 his greenish-grey eyes, his dead-white com- 
 plexion, his attentions to Madame Lussac, and 
 his sudden disappearance from surroundings 
 in which for months and months he had always 
 lived. But Hubert was never to have these 
 particulars. By education and by nature he 
 belonged to the race of those who accept life's 
 official gifts and ignore their deep-lying causes, 
 their thorough animality, and their tragic lining 
 — a happy race, for to them belongs the enjoy- 
 ment of the flower of things, but a race devoted 
 beforehand to catastrophes, for only a clear 
 view of the real will admit of any manipu- 
 lation of it. 
 
 No ; what Hubert Liauran remembered of this 
 first interview did not consist of questions con- 
 cerning the singularity of Madame de Sauve's 
 charm. Neither had he examined himself as to 
 the shade of character that might be indicated 
 by the movements of the woman. Instead of 
 studying her face he had enjoyed it as a child 
 will relish the freshness of the atmosphere, with 
 
68 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 a sort of tinconscious delight. The complete 
 absence of irony which distinguished Theresa, 
 and which might be noted in her gentle smile, 
 her calm gaze, her smooth voice, and her tranquil 
 gestures, had instantly been sweet to him. He 
 had not felt in her presence those pangs of pain- 
 ful timidity which the incisive glance of most 
 Parisian ladies inflicts upon all young men. 
 
 During the journey which they had made 
 together, while De Sauve and George Liauran 
 were speaking of a law concerning religious con- 
 gregations, the tenour of which was at that time 
 exciting every party, he had sat opposite to her, 
 and had been able to talk to her softly and, 
 without knowing why,'with intimacy. He who 
 was usually silent about himseK, with a vague 
 idea that the almost insane excitabihty of his 
 being made him a unique exception, had opened 
 his mind to this woman of twenty-five, whom he 
 had not known for half-an-hour, more than he 
 had ever done to people with whom he dined 
 every fortnight. 
 
 In answer to a question from Theresa about 
 
A CEUEL ENiaMA. 69 
 
 his travels in the summer, he had naturally, as it 
 were, spoken of his mother and her complaint, 
 then of his grandmother, and then of their 
 common life. He had given this stranger a 
 glimpse of the secret retreat in the house in the 
 Eue Vaneau, not indeed without remorse ; but 
 the remorse had been later, when he was no 
 longer within the range of her glances, and had 
 come less from a feeling of outraged modesty 
 than from a fear of having been displeasing to 
 her. How captivating, in truth, were those 
 gentle glances. There emanated from them an 
 inexpressible caress, and when they settled upon 
 your eyes, full in your face, the resultant sensa- 
 tion was like that of a tender touch, and bordered 
 upon physical voluptuousness. 
 
 Days afterwards Hubert still remembered the 
 species of intoxicating comfort which he had 
 experienced in this first chat merely through 
 feeling himself looked at in this way, and this 
 comfort had only increased in succeeding inter- 
 views, until it had almost immediately become a 
 real necessity for him, like breathing or sleeping. 
 
70 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 When leaving the carriage she had told him that 
 she was at home every Thursday, and he had 
 soon learnt the way to the house in the Boulevard 
 Haussmann, where she lived. In what recess of 
 his heart had he found the energy for paying this 
 visit, which fell on the next day but one after 
 their meeting? Almost immediately, she had 
 asked him to dinner. He remembered so vividly 
 the childish pleasure which he took in reading 
 and re-reading the insignificant note of invitation, 
 in inhaling its sUght perfume, and in following 
 the details of the letters of his name, written 
 by the hand of Theresa. It was a handwriting 
 which, from the abimdance of little, useless 
 flourishes, presented a peculiarly light and fan- 
 tastic appearance, in which a graphologist would 
 have been prepared to read the sign of a romantic 
 natxu:e; but, at the same time, the bold fashion 
 in which the lines were struck and the firmness 
 of the dovra-strokes, where the pen pressed 
 somewhat liberally, denoted a willingly practical 
 and almost material mode of life. 
 
 Hubert did not reason so much as this ; but, 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 7 1 
 
 from the first note, every letter that he received 
 in the same handwriting became to him a person 
 whom he would have recognised among thousands 
 of others. With what happiness had he dressed 
 to go to that dinner, telling himself that he was 
 about to see Madame de Sauve during long hours, 
 hours which, reckoned in advance, appeared 
 infinite to him ! He had felt a somewhat angry 
 astonishment when his mother, at the moment 
 that he was taking leave of her, had uttered a 
 critical observation on the familiarity that was 
 customary in society now-a-days. Then, separated 
 though he was by months from those events, he 
 was able, thanks to the special imagination with 
 which, like all very sensitive creatures, he was 
 endowed, to recall the exact shade of emotion 
 which had been caused him by the dinner and 
 the evening, the demeanour of the guests and 
 that of Theresa. It is according as we possess a 
 greater or smaller power of imagining past pains 
 and pleasures anew that we are beings capable of 
 cold calculation, or slaves to our sentimental life. 
 Alas ! all Hubert's faculties conspired to rivet 
 
72 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 round his heart the bruising chain of memories 
 that were too dear. 
 
 Theresa wore, that first evening, a dress of black 
 lace with pink knots, and, for her only orna- 
 ment, a heavy bracelet of massive gold on one 
 wrist. Her dress was not low enough to shock 
 the young man, whose modesty was of virginal 
 susceptibility on this point. There were some 
 persons in the drawing-room, not one of whom, 
 with the exception of George Liauran, was 
 known to him. They were, for the most part, 
 men celebrated by different titles in the society 
 more particularly denominated Parisian by those 
 journals which pique themselves on following the 
 fashion. Hubert's first sensation had been a 
 slight shock, OA\ing merely to the fact that 
 some of these men presented to the malevolent 
 observer several of the little toilet heresies 
 famihar to the more fastidious if they have gone 
 too late into society. Such is a coat of anti- 
 quated cut, a shirt-collar badly made and worse 
 bleached, or a neck-tie of a white that borders 
 upon blue, and tied by an unskilful hand. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 73 
 
 These trifles inevitably appeared signs of a 
 touch of Bohemianism — the word in which 
 correct people confound all social irregularities — 
 in the eyes of a young man accustomed to live 
 under the ■ continuous superintendence of two 
 women of rare education, who had sought to 
 make him something irreproachable. But these 
 small signs of unsatisfactory dress had rendered 
 Theresa's finished distinction still more graceful 
 in his eyes, just as, to him, the sometimes 
 cynical freedom of the talk uttered at table had 
 imparted a charming significance to the silence of 
 the mistress of the house. Madame Liauran had 
 not been mistaken when she affirmed that there 
 was very daring conversation at the house of the 
 De Sauves. 
 
 The evening that Hubert dined there for the 
 first time a divorce suit was discussed during the 
 first half-hour, and a great lawyer gave some 
 unpublished details of the case — the abominable 
 character of a politician who had been arrested in 
 the Champs Elysees, the two mistresses of another 
 politician and their rivalry — but all related, as 
 
74 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 things are related only at Paris, with those hints 
 which admit the telling of everything. Many 
 allusions escaped Hubert, and he was accordingly 
 less shocked by such narrations than by other 
 speeches bearing upon ideas, such as the follow- 
 ing paradox, started by one of the most famous 
 novelists of the day. 
 
 "Ah ! divorce ! divorce! " said this man, whose 
 renown as a daring realist had crossed the thres- 
 hold even of the house in the Bue Vaneau, " it 
 has some good in it ; but it is too simple a 
 solution for a very complicated problem. Here, as 
 elsewhere, Catholicism has perverted all our ideas. 
 The characteristic of advanced societies is the 
 production of many men of very different kinds, 
 and the problem consists in constructing an 
 equally large number of moralists. For my 
 part, I would have the law recognise marriages 
 in five, ten, twenty categories, according to the 
 sensitiveness of the parties concerned. Thus we 
 should have life-unions intended for persons of 
 aristocratic scrupulosity ; for persons of less 
 refined consciences, we should establish contracts 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 75 
 
 with facilities for one, two or three divorces ; for 
 persons inferior still, we should have temporary- 
 connections for five years, three years, one 
 year." 
 
 "People would marry just as they grant a 
 lease," it was jestingly observed. 
 
 " Why not ? " continued the other ; " the age 
 boasts of being a revolutionary one, and it has 
 never ventured upon what the pettiest legislator 
 of antiquity undertook without hesitation — inter- 
 ference with morals." 
 
 " I see what you mean," replied Andre de 
 Sauve ; "you would assimilate marriages with 
 funerals — first, second, or third class ." 
 
 None of the guests who were amused by this 
 tirade and the reply, amid the brightness of the 
 crystal, the dresses of the women, the pyramids 
 of fruit and the clusters of flowers, suspected the 
 indignation which such talk aroused in Hubert. 
 Who would notice the silent and modest youth 
 at one end of the table ? He himself, however, 
 felt wounded to the very soul in the inmost 
 convictions, of his childhood and his youth, and 
 
76 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 he glanced by stealth at Theresa. She did not 
 utter fifty words during this dinner. She seemed 
 to have wandered in thought far away from the 
 conversation which she was supposed to control, 
 and, as though accustomed to this absence of 
 mind, no one sought to interrupt her reverie. 
 She used to pass whole hours in this way, 
 absorbed in herself. Her pale complexion became 
 warmer ; the brilliancy of her eyes was, so to 
 speak, turned within ; and her teeth appeared 
 small and close through her half-opened Hps. 
 What was she thinking of at minutes such as 
 these, and by what secret magic were these 
 same minutes those which acted most strongly 
 upon the imagination of those who were sensible 
 of her charm? 
 
 A physiologist would doubtless have attributed 
 these sudden torpors to passages of nervous 
 emotion, were they not the token of a sensual 
 aberration against which the poor creature 
 struggled with all her strength. Hubert had seen 
 in the silence of that evening only a delicate 
 woman's disapprobation of the talk of her friends 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 77 
 
 and her husband, and he had found it a supreme 
 pleasure to go up to her and talk to her on leaving 
 the dinner-table, at which his dearest beliefs had 
 been wounded. He had seated himself beneath 
 the gaze of her eyes, now limpid once more, in 
 one of the corners of the drawing-room — an 
 apartment furnished completely in the modern 
 style, and which, with its opulence that made it 
 like a little museum, its plushes, its ancient 
 stuffs, and its Japanese trinkets, contrasted with 
 the severe apartments in the Eue Vaneau 
 as absolutely as the lives of Madame Castel 
 and Madame Liauran could contrast with the 
 life of Madame de Sauve. 
 
 Instead of recognising this evident difference 
 and making it a starting-point for studying the 
 newness of the world in which he found himself, 
 Hubert gave himself up to a feeling very natural 
 in those whose childhood has been passed in an 
 atmosphere of feminine solicitude. Accustomed 
 by the two noble creatures who had watched 
 over his childhood always to associate the idea 
 of a woman with something inexpressibly delicate 
 
78 A CE0EL ENIGMA. 
 
 and pure, it was inevitable that the awakening 
 of love should in his case be accompUshed in a 
 sort of religious and reverential emotion. He 
 must extend to the person he loved, whoever 
 she might be, all the devotion that he had 
 conceived for the saints whose son he was. 
 
 A prey to this strange confusion of ideas, he 
 had, on that very first evening on his return 
 home, spoken of Theresa to his mother and 
 his grandmother, who were waiting for him, in 
 terms which had necessarily aroused the mistrust 
 of the two women. He understood that now. 
 But what young man has ever begun to love 
 without being hurried by the sweet intoxication 
 of the beginnings of a passion into confidences 
 that were irreparable, and too often deathful, 
 to the future of his feelings ? 
 
 In what manner and by what stage had this 
 feeling entered into him ? He could not have 
 told that. When once a man loves, does it not 
 seem as though he has always loved ? Scenes 
 were evoked, nevertheless, which reminded 
 Hubert of the insensible habituation which had 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 79 
 
 led him to visit Theresa several times a week. 
 But had he not been gradually introduced at 
 her house to all her friends, and, as soon as he 
 had left his card, had he not found himself invited 
 in all directions into that world which he scarcely 
 knew, and which was composed partly of high 
 functionaries of the fallen administration, partly 
 of great manufacturers and "political financiers, 
 and partly, again, of celebrated artists and wealthy 
 foreigners. 
 
 It formed a society free from constraint and 
 full of luxury, pleasure and life, but one the tone 
 of which ought to have displeased the young 
 man, for he could not comprehend its qualities 
 of elegance and refinement, and he was very 
 sensible of its terrible fault- — the want of silence, 
 of moral life, and of long custom. Ah ! he was 
 not much concerned with observations of this 
 kind, occupied solely as he was to know where 
 he should perceive Madame de Sauve and her 
 eyes. He called to mind countless times at 
 which he had met her — sometimes at her own 
 house, seated at the corner of her fire-place. 
 
8o A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 towards the close of the afternoon, and lost in 
 one of her silent reveries ; sometimes visiting in 
 full costume and smiling with her Herodias lips 
 at conversations about dresses or bonnets ; some- 
 times in the front of a box at a theatre and 
 talking in undertones during an interval ; some- 
 times in the tumult of the street, dashing along 
 behind her bright bay horse and bowing her head 
 at the window with a graceful movement. 
 
 The recollection of this carriage produced a 
 new association of ideas in Hubert, and he could 
 see again the moment at which he had confessed 
 the secret of his feelings for the first time. 
 Madame de Sauve and he had met that day 
 about five o'clock in a drawing-room in the 
 Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and as it was 
 beginning to rain in torrents the young woman 
 had proposed to Hubert, who had come on foot, 
 to take him in her carriage, having, she said, 
 a visit to pay near the Rue Vaneau, which 
 would enable her to leave him at his door on 
 the way. He had, in fact, taken his seat beside 
 her in the narrow double brougham lined with 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 8i 
 
 greeu leather, in which there lingered something 
 of that subtle atmosphere which makes the 
 carriage of an elegant woman a sort of little 
 boudoir on wheels, with all the trifling objects 
 belonging to a pretty interior. The hot-water jar 
 was growing lukewarm beneath their feet ; the 
 glass, set in its sheath in front, awaited a glance ; 
 the memorandum book placed in the nook, with its 
 pencil and visiting cards, spoke of worldly tasks ; 
 the clock hanging on the right marked the rapid 
 flight of those sweet minutes. A half-opened 
 book, slipped into the place where portable 
 purchases are usually put, showed that Theresa 
 had obtained the fashionable novel at the book- 
 seller's. 
 
 Outside in the streets, where the lamps were 
 beginning to light up, there was the wildness of 
 a glacial winter storm. Theresa, wrapped in 
 a long cloak which showed the outlines of her 
 figure, was silent. In the triple reflection from 
 the carriage lamps, the gas in the street and the 
 expiring day, she was so divinely pale and beautiful 
 that Hubert, overpowered by emotion, took her 
 
82 A CEUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 hand. She did not withdraw it ; she looked at 
 him with motionless eyes, that were drowned, as 
 it were, in tears which she would not have dared 
 to shed. Without even hearing the sound of 
 his own words, so intoxicated was he by this 
 look, he said to her : 
 
 " Ah ! how I love you ! " 
 
 She grew still more pale, and laid her gloved 
 hand upon his mouth to make him be silent. He 
 began to kiss this hand madly, seeking for the 
 place where the opening of the glove allowed him 
 to feel the living warmth of the wrist. She 
 rephed to this caress by that word which all 
 women utter at like moments — a word so simple, 
 but one into which creep so many inflexions, 
 from the most, mortal indifference to the most 
 emotional tenderness — 
 
 " You are a child." 
 
 " Do you love me a little? " he asked her. 
 
 And then, as she looked at him with those 
 same eyes which sent forth a ray of happiness, 
 he could hear her murmur in a stifled voice : 
 
 "A great deal." 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA, 83 
 
 For most Parisian young men, such a scene 
 would have been the prelude to an effort towards 
 the complete possession of a woman so evidently 
 smitten — an effort which might, perhaps, have 
 miscarried ; for a woman of the world who wishes 
 to protect herself finds many means,- if she be 
 anything of a coquette, of avoiding a surrender, 
 even after avowals of the kind, or still more 
 compromising marks of attachment. But there 
 was as little coquetry in the case of Madame de 
 Sauve as there was physical daring in that of the 
 child of twenty-two who loved her. Did. not 
 these two beings find themselves placed .by 
 chance in a situation of the strangest delicacy ? 
 He was incapable of any further enterprise by 
 reason of his entire purity. As for her, how 
 could she fail to understand that to offer herself 
 to him was to risk a diminution of his love ? 
 Such difficulties are less rare under the conditions 
 imposed upon the feelings by modern manners 
 than the fatuity of men will allow. 
 
 As manners are at present, all action between 
 two persons who love each other simultaneously 
 
84 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 becomes a sign, and how could a woman who 
 knows this fail to hesitate about compromising 
 her happiness for ever by seeking to embrace it 
 too soon ? Did Theresa obey this prudential 
 motive, or did she, perchance, find a heart's 
 delight of delicious novelty in the burning respect 
 of her friend ? With all men whom she had met 
 before this one, love had been only a disguised 
 form of desire, and desire itself an intoxicated 
 form of self-pride. But whatever the reason 
 might be, she granted the young man all the 
 meetings that he asked for dming the months 
 following this first avowal, and all these meetings 
 remained as essentially innocent as they were 
 clandestine. 
 
 While the Boulogne train was carrying Hubert 
 towards the most longed-for of these meetings he 
 remembered the former ones — those passionate 
 and dangerous walks, nearly all hazarded across 
 early Paris. They had in this way adventm'ed 
 their ingenuous and guilty idyll in all the places 
 in which it seemed unlikely that anyone belong- 
 ing to their set would meet them. How many 
 
A Cr.UEL ENIGMA. 85 
 
 times, for instance, had they visited the towers 
 of Notre Dame, where Theresa loved to walk in 
 her youthful grace amid the old stone monsters 
 carved on the balustrades ? Through the slender 
 cgive windows of the ascent they looked alter- 
 nately at the horizon of the river confined between 
 the quays, and that of the street confined between 
 the houses. In one of the buildings crouching 
 in the shadow of the cathedral, on the side of 
 the Eue de Chanoinesse, there was a small 
 apartment on the fifth storey running out into 
 a terrace, behind the panes of which they used 
 to imagine the existence of a romance similar to 
 their own, because they had twice seen a young 
 woman and a young man breakfasting there, 
 seated at the same round table, with the window 
 half open. 
 
 Sometimes the squalls of the December wind 
 v/ould roar round the pile, and storms of melted 
 snow would beat upon the walls. Theresa was 
 none the less punctual to the appointment, 
 leaving her cab before the great doorway and 
 crossing the church to go out of it at the side, 
 
86 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 and there join Hubert in the dark peristyle which 
 comes before the towers. Her delicate teeth 
 shone in her pretty smile, and her slender figure 
 appeared still more elegant in this ornament of 
 the ancient city. Her happy grace seemed to 
 work even upon the old caretaker who, sur- 
 rounded by her cats, gives out the tickets from 
 the depths of her lodge, for she used to give her 
 a grateful smile. 
 
 It was on the staircase of one of these ancient 
 towers that Hubert had ventured, for the first 
 time, to print a kiss upon the pale face that to 
 him was divine. Theresa was climbing in front 
 of him that morning up the hollowed steps 
 which turn about the stone pillar. She stopped 
 for a minute to take breath ; he supported her in 
 his arms, and, as she leaned back gently and 
 rested her head upon his shoulder, their lips met. 
 The emotion was so strong that he was like to 
 die. This first kiss had been followed by another, 
 then by ten, then by such numbers of others 
 that they lost count of them. Oh, those long, 
 thrilling, deep kisses, of which she used to say 
 
A OEUEL ENIGMA. 87 
 
 tenderly, as though to justify herself in the 
 thought of her sweet accomplice : 
 
 " I am as fond of kisses as a little girl ! " 
 They had thus madly peopled all the retreats 
 wherein their imprudent love had taken shelter 
 with these adorable kisses. Hubert could remem- 
 ber having embraced Theresa when they both 
 were seated on a tomb-stone in a deserted walk 
 of one of the Paris cemeteries one bright, warm 
 morning, while around them stretched the garden 
 of the dead, with its funereal landscape of ever- 
 greens and tombs. He had embraced her again 
 on one of the benches in the distant park of 
 Montsouris, one of the least known in the town 
 — a park quite recently planted, crossed by a 
 railway, overlooked by a pavilion of Chinese 
 architecture, and having a horizon formed by 
 the factories in the mournful Glaciere quarter 
 stretching around it. 
 
 At other times they had driven in an indeter- 
 minate fashion along the dull slopes of the 
 ■ fortifications, and when it was time to return 
 home Theresa was always the first to depart. 
 
88 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 Himself hidden in the cah, which remained 
 stationary, he could see her crossing the kennels 
 with her dainty feet. She would walk along 
 the footpath, not a spot of mud dishonouring her 
 dress, and would turn as though involuntarily 
 to enwrap him in a last look. It was on such 
 t;ccasions that he was only too sensible of the 
 dangers which he was causing this woman to 
 incur, but when he spoke to her of his fears 
 she would reply, shaking her head with so easily 
 tragic an expression : 
 
 "I have no children. What harm can be 
 done to me unless you are taken from me ? " 
 
 Although they did not belong entirely to each 
 other they had come to employ those familiarities 
 in language which accompany a mutual passion. 
 Nearly every morning they wrote notes to each 
 other, a single one of which would have been 
 sufficient to prove Theresa to be Hubert's mis- 
 tress, and yet she was nothing of the kind. But 
 whatever the detail over which the young man's 
 memory lingered, he always found that she had not 
 opposed any of the marks of tenderness which 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 8g 
 
 he had - asked of her. However, he had never 
 ventured to imagine anything beyond clasping 
 her hands, her waist, her face, or resting, Hke 
 a child, upon her heart. She had with him that 
 entire, confiding, indulgent abandonment of soul 
 which is the only token of true love that the 
 most skilful coquetry cannot imitate. 
 
 And in contrast with this tenderness, and 
 
 serving to heighten its sweetness still more, 
 
 each scene in this idyll had corresponded to some 
 
 painful explanation between the young man and 
 
 his mother, or some cruel anguish on finding 
 
 Madame de Sauve in the evening with her 
 
 husband. The latter, in reality, paid no attention 
 
 to Hubert, but Madame Liauran's son was not 
 
 yet accustomed to the dishonouring falsehood 
 
 of the cordial hand-shake offered to the man 
 
 who is being deceived. What mattered these 
 
 trifles, however, since they were going — he to 
 
 join her, and she to wait for him in the little 
 
 English town at which they were to spend two 
 
 days together ? Was it to Hubert or to Theresa 
 
 that this idea had occurred? The young man 
 
go A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 could not have told. Andre de Sauve was in 
 Algeria for the purpose of a Parliamentary 
 inquiry. 
 
 Theresa had a convent friend who lived in the 
 country, and was sufficiently trustworthy to 
 allow her to give out that she had gone to see 
 her. On the other hand she affirmed that the 
 position of Folkestone, on the way from Paris 
 to London, made it the safest shelter in winter, 
 because French travellers pass through the town 
 without ever stopping there. At the mere 
 thought of seeing her again, Hubert's heart 
 melted in his breast, and, with a quivering . 
 impossible of definition, he felt himself on the 
 point of rolling into a gulf of mystery, of intoxi- 
 cating forgetfulness and felicity. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. QI 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 The packet was approaching the Folkestone pier. 
 The slender hull heaved on the sea, which was 
 perfectly green, and was scantily striated with 
 silver foam. The two white funnels gave forth 
 smoke which curved behind under the pressure 
 of the air rent by the course of the vessel. The 
 two huge red wheels beat the waves, and behind 
 the boat stretched a hollow moving track — a sort 
 of glaucous path, fringed with foam. It was a 
 day with a pale, hazy blue sky, such as frequently 
 occurs on the English coast towards the end of 
 winter — a day of tenderness, and one which 
 harmonised divinely with the young man's 
 thoughts. He had rested his elbows on the 
 netting in the fore part of the vessel, and had 
 not stirred since the beginning of the passage, 
 which had been one of rare smoothness. He 
 could now see the smallest details of the approach 
 
92 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 to the harbour : the chalky Hne of coast to the 
 right, with its covering of meagre turf; to the 
 left the pier resting on its piles ; and beyond the 
 pier, and still more to the left, the little town, 
 with its houses rising one above another from the 
 base of the cliff to the crest. One by one he 
 scanned these houses, which stood out with a 
 clearness that grew constantly more distinct. 
 Which among them all was the refuge where 
 his happiness was awaiting him in the loved 
 features of Theresa de Sauve? Which of them 
 was the Star Hotel, chosen by his friend from 
 the guide-book on account of its name ? 
 
 " I am superstitious," she had said childishly ; 
 " and then, are you not my dear star ?" 
 
 She would employ these sudden caresses in 
 language which afterwards occupied Hubert's 
 thoughts for an indefinite time. He. was quite 
 aware that she would not be waiting for him on 
 the quay, and his eyes sought for her in spite of 
 himself. But she had multiplied precautions even 
 to arriving herself the evening before by Calais and 
 Dover. The packet is still approaching. It is 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA'. 93 
 
 possible to distinguish the faces of some inhabi- 
 tants of the town, whose only diversion consists in 
 coming to the end of the pier in order to witness 
 the arrival of the tidal boat. A. few minutes more 
 and Hubert will be beside Theresa. Ah, if she 
 were to fail him at the rendezvous ! "What if she 
 had been sick or overtaken, or if she had died on 
 the way ! The whole legion of foolish suppositions 
 file before the thoughts of the restless lover. 
 
 The boat is in the harbour ; the passengers land 
 and hurry to the train. Hubert was almost the 
 only one to halt in the little town. He allowed 
 his-trunk to go on to London, and took his seat 
 with his portmanteau in one of the flies 
 standing in front of the terminus. He had felt 
 something like a touch of melancholy when 
 speaking to the driver and thus ascertaining 
 how correct and intelligible his English was, 
 notwithstanding that it was his first journey to 
 England. He recalled his childhood, his York- 
 shire governess, his mother's cafe to make him 
 speak every day. If this poor mother were 
 to see him now ! Then these memories were 
 
94 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 gradually effaced as the light vehicle, drawn by 
 a pony at a trot, briskly climbed the rude ascent 
 by which the upper part of the town is reached. 
 To the left of the young man stretched the 
 wonderful landscape of the sea, an immense gulf 
 of pale green, blending in its extreme line with a 
 gulf of blue, and dotted all over with barques, 
 schooners, and steamers. On the summit the 
 road turned. 
 
 The carriage left the cliff, entered a street, then 
 a second, and then a third, all lined with low 
 houses, whose projecting windows showed rows 
 of red geraniums and ferns behind their panes. 
 At a turning Hubert perceived the door of a 
 vast Gothic building and a black plate, the mere 
 inscription on which, in its gilt letters, made his 
 heart leap. He found himself in front of the Star 
 Hotel. There was an interval for inquiring at 
 the office whether Madame Sylvie had arrived — 
 this was the name that Theresa had chosen to 
 assume on account of the initials engraven on 
 all her toilet articles, and she was to have been 
 entered in the books as a dramatic artist ; for 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 95 
 
 ascending two storeys and passing down a long 
 corridor ; then the servant opened the door of a 
 small apartment, and there, seated at a table in 
 a drawing-room, the paleness of her face increased 
 by deep emotion, and her form clad in a garment 
 of a red silky material whose graceful folds out- 
 lined without accentuating her figure, — there was 
 Theresa. The coal fire glowed in the fireplace, 
 the inner sides of which were covered with 
 coloured ware. A rotunda-like window, of the 
 kind that the English call "bow windows," was 
 at the end of the apartment, to which the furni- 
 ture usual in such rooms in Great Britain gave 
 an aspect of quiet homeliness. 
 
 "Ah! it is really you," said the young man, 
 going up to Theresa, who was smiling at him, 
 and he laid his hand upon his mistress's bosom 
 as though to convince himself of her existence. 
 This gentle pressure enabled him to feel beneath 
 the slight material the passionate beatings of 
 the happy woman's heart. 
 
 " Yes, it is really I," she replied, with 
 more languor than usual. 
 
96 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 He sat down beside her and their hps met. 
 It was one of those kisses of supreme dehght 
 in which two lovers meeting after absence 
 strive to impart, together with the tenderness 
 of the present hour, all the unexpressed tender- 
 nesses of the hours that have been lost. A 
 tap at the door separated them. 
 
 " It is for your luggage," said Theresa, 
 pushing her lover away with a gesture of regret ; 
 then, with a subtle smile : " Would you like 
 to see your room ? I have been here since 
 yesterday evening; I hope that you will be 
 pleased with everything. I thought so much 
 of you in getting the little room ready." 
 
 She drew him by the hand into an apartment 
 which adjoined the drawing-room, and the 
 window of which looked upon the garden of 
 the hotel. The fire was hghted in the fireplace. 
 Vases, gay with flowers, stood on the bracket 
 and also on the table, over which Theresa, 
 to give it a more homelike appearance, had 
 spread a Japanese cloth which she had brought. 
 On it she had placed three frames with those 
 
A CaUEL ENIGMA. 97 
 
 portraits of herself which the young man 
 preferred. He turned to thank her, and he 
 encountered one of those looks which make the 
 heart quite faint, and with which an affectionate 
 woman seems to thank him whom she loves for 
 the pleasure which he has been pleased to 
 receive from her. But the presence of the 
 servant engaged in setting down and opening 
 the portmanteau prevented him from replying 
 to this look with a kiss. 
 
 "You must be- tired," she said; "while you 
 are settling down I will go and tell them to get 
 tea ready in the drawing-room. If you knew 
 how sweet it is to me to wait on you ." 
 
 " Go," h« said, unable to find a phrase in reply, 
 so completely was his soul possessed with happy 
 emotion. " How I love her ! " he added in a 
 whisper, and to himself, as he watched her 
 disappearing through the door with that figure 
 and walk of a young girl which were still left her 
 by her childless marriage ; and he was obliged to 
 sit down that he might not swoon before the 
 evidence of his felicity. The human creature is 
 
 G 
 
g8 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 naturally so organised for misfortune that there is 
 something ravishing in the complete realisation 
 of desire, like a sudden entry upon a miracle or 
 a dream, and, at a certain degree of intensity, it 
 seems as if the joy were not true. And then, 
 was not the novelty of the situation bound to act 
 like a sort of opium upon the brain of this child, 
 who could not comprehend that his mistress had 
 seized upon the circumstance to evade by this 
 very strangeness the difficulties preliminary to a 
 more complete surrender of her person ? 
 
 Yes, was this joy true? Hubert asked himself 
 the question a quarter of an hour later, seated 
 beside Madame de Sauve in the little drawing- 
 room at the square table, on which were placed 
 all the apparatus necessary to lend it enjoyment : 
 the silver teapot, the ewer of hot water, the delicate 
 cups. Had she not brought those two cups from 
 Paris with her in order, doubtless, always to have 
 them ? She waited on him, as she had said, with 
 her pretty hands, from which she had taken her 
 wedding ring, in order to remove from the young 
 man's thoughts all occasion for remembering that 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 99 
 
 she was not free. During those afternoon hours, 
 the silence of the httle town was ahnost palpable 
 around them, and the sense of a common solitude 
 deepening in their hearts was so intense that 
 they did not speak, as though they feared that 
 their words might awake them from the intoxi- 
 cating kind of sleep which was creeping over 
 their souls. Hubert had his head resting upon 
 his hand, and was looking at Theresa. He felt 
 her at this moment so completely his own, so 
 near to his most secret being, that he had even 
 ceased to experience the need of her caresses. 
 
 She was the first to break the silence, of which 
 she suddenly became afraid. She rose from her 
 chair and came and sat down upon the ground at 
 the young man's feet, with her head on his knees, 
 and, as he still continued motionless, there was 
 disquiet in her eyes ; then submissively, and in 
 that subdued tone of voice which no lover has 
 ever resisted, she said : 
 
 " If you knew how I tremble lest I should 
 displease you ! I cried yesterday evening beside 
 the fire in this room, where I was waiting for 
 
100 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 you, thinking that you would be sure to love me 
 less after my coming here. Ah ! you will be 
 angry with me for loving you too much, and for 
 venturing to do what I have done for you!" 
 
 The anguish preying upon this charming 
 woman was so great that Hubert saw her 
 features change somewhat as she uttered these 
 words. The whole drama which had been enacted 
 within her from the beginning of this attachment 
 took form for the first time. At this moment 
 especially, seeing him so young, so pure, so free 
 from brutality, so completely in accordance with 
 her dream, she felt a mad longing to lavish marks 
 of her tenderness upon him, and she trembled 
 more than ever lest she should offend him, or 
 perhaps — for there are such strange recesses in 
 feminine consciences — corrupt him. Giving her- 
 self up to the pleasure of thinking aloud upon 
 these things for the first time, she went on : 
 
 " AVe women, when we love, can do nothing 
 else but love. From the day when I met you 
 coming back from the country I have belonged to 
 you. I would have followed you wherever you 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. lOI 
 
 had asked me to follow you. Nothing has had 
 any further existence for me — nothing but 
 yourself; no," she added with a fixed look, 
 " neither good nor evil, nor duty, nor remem- 
 brance. But can you understand that — you who 
 think, as all men .do, that it is a crime to love 
 when one is not free ? ' ' 
 
 " I have ceased to know," replied Hubert, 
 bending towards her to raise her, " except that 
 you are to me the noblest and dearest of women." 
 
 "No, let me remain at your feet, like your 
 little slave," she rejoined, with an expression of 
 ecstasy ; " but is it truly true ? Ah ! swear to me 
 that you will never speak ill to yourself of this 
 hour." 
 
 " I swear it," said the young man, who was 
 overcome by his mistress's emotion without well 
 k?! owing why. 
 
 At this' simple speech she raised her head ; 
 she stood up as lightly as a young girl, and 
 leaiLing over Hubert began to cover his face 
 with passionate kisses, then, knitting her brows 
 and making an effort, as it were, over herself, she 
 
102 A CEUEri ENIGMA. 
 
 left him, drew her hands over her eyes, and said 
 in a calmer, though still uncertain voice : 
 
 " I am foolish ; we must go out. I will go and 
 put on my bonnet and we will take a drive. Will 
 you be so kind as to ask for a carriage?" she 
 added in English. 
 
 When she spoke this language her pronuncia- 
 tion became something perfectly graceful and 
 almost child-like ; and giving him a coquettish 
 little salute with her hand she left the drawing- 
 room by a door opposite to that of Hubert's 
 apartment. 
 
 This same mixture of fond anxiety, sudden 
 exaltation, and tender childishness continued on 
 her part through the whole drive, which, to both 
 of them, was made up of a sequence of supreme 
 emotions. By a chance such as does not occur 
 twice in the com-se of a human life, they found 
 themselves placed precisely in such circumstances 
 as must lift their souls to the highest possible 
 degree of love. The social world, with its mm"- 
 derous duties, was far away. It had as little 
 existence for their minds as the driver, who. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. IO3 
 
 perched np behind them and invisible, drove the 
 light cab in which they found themselves alone 
 together, along the route from Folkestone to 
 Sandgate and Hythe. The world of hope, on the 
 other hand, opened up before them like a garden 
 arrayed in the most beautiful flowers. They 
 saw themselves rewarded — he for his innocence, 
 and she for the reserve imposed by her upon 
 her reason, with an experience as delicious as it is 
 rare : they enjoyed the intimacy of heart which 
 usually comes only after long possession, and they 
 enjoyed it in all the freshness of timid desire. 
 But this timid desire had in both cases a back- 
 ground of intoxicating certainty, lucid to Theresa 
 though still obscure to Hubert ; and it was in 
 a vast and noble landscape that they were filled 
 with these rare sensations. 
 
 They were now following the road from Folke- 
 stone to Hythe, a slender ribbon running 
 along by the sea. The green cliff is devoid of 
 rocks, but its height is sufficient to give the road 
 over which it hangs that look of a sheltered 
 retreat which imparts a restful charm to valleys 
 
104 ^ CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 lying af mountain bases. The shingle beach was 
 covered by the high tide. Not a bird was flying 
 over the wide, moving sea. Its greenish immensity 
 shaded to violet as the closing day shadowed the 
 cold azure of the sky. The vehicle went quickly 
 on its two wheels, drawn by a strong-backed 
 horse, whose over-large bit forced him at times to 
 throw up his head with a wrench of his mouth. 
 Theresa and Hubert, close to each other in their 
 sort of sentry-box on wheels, held each other's 
 hands beneath the travelling plaid that was 
 wrapped about them'. They suffered their passion 
 to dilate like the ocean, to tremble within them 
 with the plentitude of the billows, to grow wild 
 like that barren coast. 
 
 Since the young woman had asked that singular 
 oath of her lover, she seemed somewhat calmer, 
 in spite of flashes of sudden reverie which dis- 
 solved into mute effusions. On his side, he had 
 never loved her so completely. He could not 
 refrain from taking her ceaselessly to him and 
 pressing her in his arms. An infinite longing to 
 draw frtill more closely to her mounted to his 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. I05: 
 
 brain and intoxicated him, and yet he dreaded 
 the coming of the evening with the mortal 
 anguish of those to whom the feminine miiverse 
 is a mystery. In spite of the proofs of passion 
 that Theresa showed him, he felt himself in her 
 presence a prey to an insurmountable impotence 
 of will, which would have grown to pain had he 
 not at the same time had an immense confidence 
 in the soul of this woman. The feeling of an 
 unknown abyss into which their love was about 
 to plunge, and which might have terrified him 
 with an almost animal fear, became more tranquil 
 because he was descending into the abyss with her. 
 In truth she had a charming understanding of 
 the. troubles which must agitate him whom she 
 loved ; was it not in order to ' spare his over- 
 strung nerves that she had brought him for 
 this drive, during which the grandeur of the 
 prospect, the breeze from the offing, and the 
 walking at intervals, kept both herself and 
 him above the disquietude inevitable to a too 
 ardent desire. 
 
 They went on in this manner until the tragic. 
 
I05 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 hour when the stars shine in the nocturnal sky, 
 
 now walking over the shingle, now getting into 
 
 the little carriage again, ceaselessly following the 
 
 same paths again and again, without being 
 
 able to make up their minds to return, as though 
 
 understanding that they might again experience 
 
 other moments of happiness, but of happiness 
 
 such as this, never ! The dim intuition of the 
 
 universal soul, of which visible forms and invisible 
 
 feelings are alike the effect, revealed to them, 
 
 unknown to themselves, a mysterious analogy, 
 
 and, as it were, a divine correspondence between 
 
 the particular face of this corner of nature and 
 
 the undefined essence of their tenderness. She 
 
 said to him : 
 
 "To be with you here is a happiness too 
 great to admit of a return to life," and he did 
 not smile with incredulity at these words, as she 
 felt assured when he said to her : 
 
 " It seems to me that I have never opened 
 my eyes upon a landscape until this moment." 
 
 And when they walked it was he who took 
 Theresa's arm and leaned coaxingly upon it. 
 
A CKUEL ENIGMA. I07 
 
 Without knowing it he thus symbolised the 
 strange reversal of parts in this attachment in 
 accordance with which he, with his frail 
 person, his entire innocence, and the purity of 
 his timorous emotions, had always represented the 
 feminine element. Certainly she, on her part, was 
 quite a woman, with the suppleness of her gait, 
 the feline refinement of her manners, and those 
 liquid eyes which threw themselves into every 
 look. Nevertheless she appeared a stronger 
 creature and one better armed for life than the 
 delicate child, the fragile handiwork of the 
 tenderness of two pure women, whom she had 
 enmeshed in so slight a tissue of seduction, and 
 who, scarcely taller than herself by a quarter of 
 an inch of forehead, surrendered himself with 
 fraternal confidence ; while the mere movement of 
 th'eir gait spoke clearly enough in its perfect, 
 rhythmical harmony, of the complete union of 
 their hearts, causing them to beat at that 
 moment closely together. 
 
 They went in again. The dinner following 
 this afternoon of dreams was a silent and almost 
 
Io8 A CKUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 sombre one. It seemed as though they were 
 both afraid the one of the other. Or was it merely 
 with her a recrudescence of that dread of dis- ■ 
 pleasing him which had made her defer the 
 surrender of her person until this hour, and 
 with him that sort of intractable melancholy 
 which is the last sign of primitive animality, 
 and which precedes in man every entry into 
 complete _ love ? As happens at such times, 
 their speech was calmer and more indifferent 
 in proportion as the disquietude of their hearts 
 was increased. These two lovers, who had 
 spent the day in the most romantic exaltation, 
 and who were met in the solitude of this foreign 
 retreat, seemed to have nothing to say to each 
 other but sentences concerning the world that 
 they had left. 
 
 They separated early, and just as if they had 
 said good-bye until the following daj', although 
 they both knew perfectly well that to sleep 
 apart from each other was impossible to them. 
 Thus Hubert was not astonished, although his 
 heart beat as if it would break when, at the very 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. ICg 
 
 moment that he was about to seek her, he heard 
 the key tiurn in the door, and Theresa entered, 
 clad in a long, pliant wrapper of white lace, and 
 with an impassioned sweetness in her eyes. 
 
 " Ah ! " she said, closing Hubert's eyelids with 
 her perfumed fingers, " I Vi^ant so much to rest 
 upon your heart." 
 
 Towards midnight the young man awoke, and 
 seeking the face of his mistress with his hps, 
 found that her cheeks, which he could not see, 
 were bathed in tears. 
 
 " You are grieved," he said to her. 
 
 " No," she replied, " they are tears of grati- 
 tude. Ah ! " she went on, " how could they fail 
 to take you from me beforehand, my angel, and 
 how unworthy I am of you ! " 
 
 Enigmatic words which Hubert was often to 
 remember later on, and which, even at this 
 moment, and in spite of the lasses, raised sudden- 
 ly within him that vapour of sadness which is the 
 customary accompaniment of pleasure. Through 
 it he could see, as by a lightning flash, a house 
 that was familiar to him, and, bending down 
 
no A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 beneath the lamp, among the family portraits, 
 the faces of the two women who had reared 
 him. It was only for a second, and he laid his 
 head upon Theresa's breast, there to forget all 
 thought, while the vague complaining of the 
 sea reached him, softened by the distance — a 
 mysterious and distant murmur like the approach 
 of fate. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 A FORTNIGHT later Hubert Liauran stepped upon 
 the platform of the Northern Terminus about 
 five o'clock in the evening, on his return from 
 London by the day train. Count Scilly and 
 Madame Castel were waiting for him. But what 
 were his feelings when, among the faces press- 
 ing around the doors, he recognised that of 
 Theresa? They had made an appointment by 
 letter to meet on the evening - of that day, 
 which was a Tuesday, in her box at the Theatre 
 Francais. Nevertheless, she had not withstood 
 the desire of seeing him again some hours earlier, 
 and in her eyes there shone supreme emotion, 
 formed of happiness at beholding him and sorrow 
 at being separated from him ; for they could only 
 exchange a bow, which, fortunately, escaped the 
 grandmother. 
 
 Theresa disappeared, and while the young man 
 
112 A CHUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 was standing in the luggage-room an involuntary 
 impulse of ill-humour arose within him and 
 •caused him to tell himself that the two old 
 people, who, nevertheless, loved him so much, 
 really ought not to have been there. This little 
 painful impression, which, at the very moment 
 •of his return, showed him the weight of the 
 ■chain of family tenderness, was renewed as soon 
 as he found himself again face to face with his 
 mother. From the first glairce he felt that he 
 was being studied, and, as he was but little 
 accustomed to dissimulation, he believed that 
 he was seen through. The fact was that his 
 own eyes had been changed, as those of a young 
 girl who has become a woman are changed, with 
 one of those imperceptible alterations which reside 
 in a shade of expression. 
 
 But how could the mother be deceived by 
 them — she who for so many years had watched 
 all the reflections of those dark pupils, and who 
 now grasped within them a depth of intoxicated 
 and fathomless fehcity ? But to the putting of a 
 question on the subject the poor woman was not 
 
A CKUBL ENIGMA. II3 
 
 equal. Sliades of feeling, the principal events in 
 the life of the heart, elude the formulas of phrases, 
 and thence arise the worst misunderstandings. 
 Hubert was very gay during dinner, with a gaiety 
 that was rendered somewhat nervous by the 
 prevision of an approaching difficulty. How 
 would his mother take his going out in the 
 evening? Half-an-hour had not elapsed since 
 leaving table when he rose like one who is 
 about to say good-bye. 
 
 " You are leaving us ? " said Madame Liauran. 
 
 " Yes, mamma," he replied, with a slight blush 
 on his cheeks; "Emmanuel Deroy has entrusted 
 me with a commission, which is extremely press- 
 ing, and which I must execute to-night." 
 
 " You cannot put it off until to-morrow, and 
 give us your first evening?" asked Madame 
 Castel, who wished to spare her daughter the 
 humiHation of a refusal which she could foresee. 
 
 " Indeed no, grandmother," he replied, in a 
 tone of childish playfulness ; " that would not be 
 courteous to my friend, who has been so kind to 
 me in London." 
 
11^ A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 " He is deceiving us," said Madame Liauran to 
 herself, and, as silence had fallen upon those in 
 the drawing-room after Hubert's departure, she 
 listened to hear whether the hall-door would be 
 opened immediately. Half-an-hour passed with- 
 out her hearing it. She could not stand it, and 
 she begged the General to go to the yoimg man's 
 room, under pretence of fetching a book, in order 
 to learn whether he had dressed that evening. 
 He had, in fact, done so. He was going, then, 
 to Madame de Sauve's house, or else somewhere 
 in order to meet her again. Such was the con- 
 clusion drawn from this indication by the jealous 
 mother, who, for the first time, confessed her 
 lengthened anxieties to the Count. The tone in 
 which she spoke prevented the latter from 
 confessing, in his turn, the loan of one hundred 
 and twenty pounds which Hubert had received 
 from him, and which, so he thought to himself, 
 had doubtless been spent in following this woman. 
 
 " He has deceived me once more," exclaimed 
 Madame Liam'an ; " he who had such a horror of 
 deceit. Ah ! how she has changed him ! " 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. II5 
 
 Thus the evidence of a metamorphosis of 
 character undergone by her son tortured her on 
 that first day. It became even worse during 
 those which followed. She would not, however, 
 admit all at once that her dear, innocent Hubert 
 was Madame de Sauve's lover. She would not 
 resign herself to the idea that he could be guilty 
 of an error of the kind without terrible remorse. 
 She had brought him up in such strict principles 
 of religion ! She did not know that Theresa's 
 first care was just to lull all the young man's 
 scruples of conscience by leading him insensibly 
 from timid tenderness to burning passion. Caught 
 in the mesh of this sweet snare, Hubert had 
 literally never judged his life for the past five 
 months, and nature had become his lover's 
 accomplice. We easily repent of our pleasures, 
 but it is difficult to have remorse for happiness, 
 and the youth was happy with such an absolute 
 felicity as cannot even see the sufferings that it 
 causes. 
 
 Nevertheless, it was upon the influence of lier 
 suffering that Madame Liauran almost solely 
 
Il6 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 relied in the campaign which she had under- 
 taken — she, a simple woman, who knew nothing- 
 of life but its duties — against a creature whom she 
 imagined as being at once fascinating and fatal, 
 bewitching and deadly. She had adopted the- 
 ingenuous system which is common to all tender 
 jealousies, and which consisted in showing her 
 distress. She said to herself, " He will see that 
 I am in an agony ; will not that suffice?" The 
 misfortune was that Hubert, in the intoxication 
 of his passion, saw in his mother's distress 
 only tyrannical injustice to a woman whom he 
 looked upon as divine, and to a love which he 
 considered sublime. When he returned from 
 the Bois de Boulogne in the morning, after 
 taking a ride on horseback and seeing Madame 
 de Sauve pass in the carriage drawn by two 
 grey ponies which she drove herself, he would at 
 breakfast encounter the saddened profile of his- 
 mother, and would say to himself : 
 
 " She has no right to be sad. I have not 
 taken any of my affection from her." 
 
 He reasoned instead of feeling. His mother 
 
A CEUED ENIGMA. II7 
 
 laid her bleeding heart in the way before him 
 and he passed it by. When he was to dine out, 
 ■and his mother's good-bye at the moment of his 
 •departm-e forewarned him that Madame Liauran 
 would spend an evening of melancholy in re- 
 gretting him, he would think : 
 
 " Yet what if she knew that Theresa re- 
 j)roaches me for devoting too much of my time to 
 her love !" 
 
 And it was true. His mistress had the ready 
 .generosity of women who know that they are 
 vastly preferred, and who are very careful not to 
 .ask the man who loves them to act as they wish. 
 There is such a delicate pleasure in leaving 
 one's lover free, in encouraging him, even, to 
 sacrifice you, when it is certain what his decision 
 will be ! It thus happened that Hubert 
 would return to the house in the Eue Vaneau 
 after having a secret meeting with Theresa 
 -during the day, — for Emmanuel Deroy had 
 put his small bachelor abode in the Avenue 
 Jriedland at his friend's disposal. But then, 
 -whether it was that the nervous sadness which 
 
Il8 A CEUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 accompanies over-keen pleasures made him cruel, 
 or that secret remorse of conscience came to 
 torment him, or that there was too strong a 
 contrast between the charming forms assumed 
 by Theresa's tenderness and the sad ones in 
 which that of Madame Liauran was arrayed, 
 the young man became really ungrateful. 
 
 Irritation, not pity, increased within him before 
 the sorrow of her whose idolised son he neverthe- 
 less was. Marie Alice apprehended this shade of 
 feeling, and she suffered more from it than from 
 all the rest, not divining that the excess of her 
 grief was an irreparable error of management, 
 and that' a demoralising comparison was being 
 set up in Alexander Hubert's mind between the 
 severities of his relatives and the fond delights 
 of his chosen affection. 
 
 Spent by continual anxiety, the mother had 
 exhausted her strength when an event, unexpected 
 though easy to be foreseen, gave still gi'eater 
 prominence to the antagonism which brought 
 her into ceaseless collision with her son. It was 
 Holy AVeek. She had counted upon Hubert's 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. II9 
 
 confession and communion for making a supreme 
 attempt, and inducing him to sever relations 
 whicli she considered as yet incompletely guilty, 
 but full of danger. It could not enter into 
 her head as a fervent Christian that her son 
 would fail in his paschal duty. Thus she felt no 
 doubt with respect to his reply as she asked him 
 at a time when they were alone together : 
 
 " On what day will you receive the sacrament 
 this year? " 
 
 " Mamma," replied Hubert, with evident em- 
 barrassment, " I ask your forgiveness for the 
 sorrow that I am going to cause you. I must, 
 however, confess to you that doubts have come 
 upon me, and that conscientiously I do not think 
 that I can approach the holy table." 
 
 This reply was the lightning-flash which sud- 
 denly showed Marie Alice the abyss wherein her 
 son had sunk, while she believed him to be 
 merely on the brink. She was not for a moment 
 deceived by Hubert's imaginary pretext. And 
 whence could religious doubts come to him who 
 for months had not read a book? She knew. 
 
120 A CKUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 further, her child's simplicity of soul towards the 
 instruction over which she had herself presided. 
 No ; if he would not communicate it was because 
 he would not confess. He had a horror of 
 acknowledging some unacknowledgable fault. 
 And what was this if not that one which had 
 been the evil work of the past six months ? . . . 
 
 An adulterer ! Her son was an adulterer ! A 
 terrible word, which to her, so loyal and pure and 
 pious, described the most repellant baseness, the 
 ignominy of falsehood mingled with the turpitude 
 of the flesh. In her indignation she found energy 
 to at last open up her whole heart to Hubert. 
 Agitated as she was by religious fears for the 
 salvation of her beloved child, she uttered sen- 
 tences which she would never have believed herself 
 capable of pronouncing, mentioning Madame de 
 Sauve by name, heaping the harshest reproaches 
 upon her, withering her with all the scorn which 
 a woman who is virtuous can harbour for one who 
 is not, invoking the memory of their common 
 past, threatening and beseeching in tiu:ns — in 
 short, throwing aside all calculation. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 121 
 
 " You are mistaken, mamma," replied Hubert, 
 ■who had endured this first assault without 
 speaking. " Madame de Sauve is not at all 
 ■what you say ; but as I cannot allow my friends 
 to be insulted in my presence, I warn you that, 
 on the next conversation of the kind that we 
 have together, I shall leave the house." 
 
 And with this rejoinder, uttered with all the 
 coolness that the feeling of his mother's injustice 
 had left him, he quitted the room vnthout 
 another word. 
 
 " She has perverted his heart, she has made 
 a, monster of him," said Madame Liam'an to 
 Madame Castel when telling her of this scene, 
 ■which was followed by three weeks of silence 
 between mother and son. The latter appeared 
 at breakfast, kissed his mother's forehead, asked 
 her how she was, sat down to table, and did not 
 ■open his mouth during the entire meal. Most 
 frequently he was not present at dinner. He 
 had confided this grief, as he confided all his 
 ^iefs, to Theresa, who had entreated him to 
 jield. 
 
122 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 " Do this," she said, " if it be only for m3. It 
 is cruel to me to think that I am the prompter 
 of an evil action in yom' life." 
 
 "Noble darling!" the young man had said, 
 covering her hands with kisses, and drowning 
 himself in the look from those eyes which were 
 so sweet to him. 
 
 But if his love for his mistress had been 
 increased by this generosity, so, too, had his 
 sensibility to the rancour which the expressions 
 used in their painful quarrel had stirred up 
 within him against his mother. The latter, 
 however, had been so shaken by this disagree- 
 ment as to have a recurrence of her nervous 
 malady, which she was able to conceal from 
 him who was its cause. She was almost entirely 
 forbidden to move, which did not prevent her 
 from dragging herself at night to her window, 
 at the cost of grievous suffering. She would 
 open the panes and then the shutters silently, 
 and with the precaution of a criminal, in order 
 to see the illumination of Hubert's casements 
 on his return, and as she gazed at this light 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 23 
 
 filtering in a slender stream, and witnessing to 
 the presence of the son at once so dear and so 
 completely lost, she would feel her anger relax, 
 and despair take possession of her. 
 
 They were reconciled, thanks to the interven- 
 tion of Madame Castel, who, between these two 
 hostihties, suffered a double martyrdom. From 
 the mother she obtained the promise that Madame 
 de Sauve should never again be spoken of, and 
 from the son apologies for his sulkiness during so 
 many days. A fi-esh period began, in which 
 Marie Ahce sought to keep Hubert at home by 
 some modification in her mode of hfe. Obsti- 
 nately hoping even in despair, as happens when- 
 ever the heart holds too passionate a deske, 
 she told herself that this woman's power over 
 her son must be largely the result of the 
 recreation that he derived from the society sur- 
 rounding her. Was not the home in the Eue 
 Vaneau very monotonous for an idle young 
 man? 
 
 She now felt that she had been very imprudent 
 in considering Huberii's health too dehcate, and 
 
124 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 in being, moreover, too desirous of his presence 
 to give him a profession. She was ingenious 
 enough to tell herself that she ought to enliven 
 their solitude, and, for the first time during her 
 widowhood, she gave some large dinner-parties. 
 'The doors of the house were thrown open. The 
 ■chandeliers were lighted. The old silver plate, 
 with the De Trans' arms upon it, adorned the 
 table, around which crowded some old people, 
 and some charming young girls as elegant and 
 pretty as the De Trans' cousins were countrified 
 .and awkward. 
 
 But since Hubert had been in love with Theresa 
 he had, with a sweet exaggeration of fidelity, 
 forbidden himself ever to look at any woman but 
 her. And then it was the month of May. The 
 ■days were warm and bright. 'His mistress and 
 he had ventured upon excursions in some of the 
 woods which surround Paris — at Saint Cloud, at 
 •Chaville, and in the Forest of Marly. Sitting in 
 the dining-room in the Kue Vaneau, Hubert 
 would recall Theresa's smile on offering him a 
 flower, the alternation of sunlight and shadow 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 125 
 
 from the foliage upon her forehead, the paleness 
 of her complexion among the greenness, a gesture 
 that she had made, the turn of her foot on the 
 grass of a pathway. 
 
 If he listened to the conversation it was tO' 
 compare the talk of Madame Liauran's guests 
 with the repartees of Madame de Sauve. The first 
 abounded in prejudice, which is the inevitable 
 ransom of all very profound moral life. The second 
 were impregnated with that Parisian wit the sad 
 vacuity of which was no longer apparent to the 
 young man. He assisted, then, at his mother's- 
 dinners with the face of one whose soul was 
 elsewhere. 
 
 " Ah ! what can I do — what can I do ?" sobbed 
 Madame Liauran ; " everything wearies him 
 of us, and everything amuses him with that 
 woman. 
 
 "Wait/' replied Madame Castel. 
 
 "Wait ! It is Wisdom's last word ; but the 
 impassioned soul devours itself grievously in the 
 waiting. As for Marie Alice, whose life was 
 wholly concentrated upon her child, every hour 
 
126 A CEUEL ENIGMA 
 
 now was turning the knife about in the wound. 
 She found it impossible not to abandon herself 
 ceaselessly to that inquisition into petty details 
 to which the noblest jealousies are victims. She 
 noticed in her son every new trifle such as young 
 men wear, and asked herself whether some 
 memory of his guilty love was not attached 
 to it. 
 
 Thus he had on his little finger a gold wedding 
 ring which she did not recognise as one of his 
 own. Ah ! what would she have given to know 
 whether there were words and a date engraved 
 on the inside ! Sometimes, when kissing him, she 
 would inhale a scent the name of which she did 
 not know, and which was certainly that used by his 
 mistress. Whenever Madame Liauran encountered 
 the penetrating and voluptuous delicacy of this 
 perfume, it was as though a hand had physically 
 bruised her heart. At last her passion had 
 reached such a pitch, that everything was bound 
 to inflict, and did inflict, a wound. If she as- 
 certained that his eyes looked worn and his 
 complexion pale, she would say to her mother : 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 127 
 
 " She will kill me." 
 
 It had always been the custom in this simple- 
 mannered famity that the letters should be given 
 into the hands of Madame Liauran herself, who 
 afterwards distributed them to their several 
 owners. Hubert had not ventured to ask 
 Firmin, the doorkeeper, to break the rule for 
 him. "Would not this have been to admit the 
 servant into the secret of the differences which 
 separated his mother and himself? Now, his 
 mistress and he used to correspond every day, 
 whether they had already met or not, with the 
 prodigality of heart characteristic of lovers who 
 know not how to give enough of themselves to each 
 other. Hubert often succeeded in preventing his 
 mother from seeing these letters by making an 
 agreement as to the exact time that Theresa 
 should despatch her note, and hastening down 
 in time to take the post himself from the 
 doorkeeper's hands. 
 
 Often, also, the letter would arrive unpunc- 
 tually, and had to come to him through Madame 
 Liauran. The latter was never deceived about 
 
128 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 it. She recognised the writing which to her was 
 the most hateful in the world. Often, again, 
 instead of a letter, Theresa would send one of 
 those little blue, quick-travelling missives, and 
 the sense that this paper had been handled by 
 her son's mistress an hour before was intolerable 
 to the poor woman. To save Hubert dis- 
 honourable strategies, and herself such terrible 
 palpitation of the heart, she resolved upon ordering 
 her son's letters to be delivered directly to himself. 
 But then she lost the only tokens she possessed 
 of the reality of the young man's relations with 
 Madame de Sauve, and this was a source of fresh 
 hopes, and consequently of fresh disillusions. 
 
 In the month of July, Hubert ceased to go out 
 in the evening, and she imagined that they had 
 quarrelled ; then George Liauran, whom she had 
 made a confidant of her anxieties, because she 
 knew that he was acquainted with Theresa, 
 informed her that the latter had left for TrouviUe, 
 and the deception was a blow the more to her. 
 It is the privilege and the scourge of those 
 organisms in which nerves predominate, that 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 1 29 
 
 griefs, instead of being lulled by habituation, 
 become incessantly more exaggerated and in- 
 flamed. The smallest details comprehend an 
 infinity of sorrow within them, as a drop of 
 water comprehends the infinity of heaven. 
 
130 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEK VI. 
 
 3f the few persons composing the home circle 
 n the Eue Vaneau, it was George Liauran him- 
 >elf who was most anxious about the sorrow of 
 Marie Alice, because it was to him that she most 
 jompletely betrayed her pain. She understood 
 ihat he was the only one who might some day 
 )e of service to her. At every visit he compared 
 ihe ravages which her one thought had wrought 
 ipon her. Her features were growing thin, her 
 ;heeks hollow, and her complexion livid, while 
 ler hair, hitherto so dark, was whitening in 
 sntire tresses. It sometimes happened that 
 3-eorge would go out into society at the con- 
 ;lusion of one of these visits, and meet his cousin 
 Hubert, nearly always in the same circle as 
 yiadame de Sauve, elegant, handsome, with 
 )rilliant eyes and happy mouth. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. I3I 
 
 The contrast roused within him strange feel- 
 ings, which were a mixture of good and evil. On 
 "the one hand, indeed, George was very fond of 
 Marie Alice, and with an affection which, during 
 the early days of their youth, had been a very 
 romantic one with them both. On the other, 
 ■"the, to him, indubitable connection between this 
 •charming Hubert and Theresa irritated him with 
 a nervous anger without his well knowing why. 
 He felt towards his cousin that insurmountable 
 ill-will which men of more than forty and less 
 "than fifty years of age profess for the very young 
 men whom they see making their way in society, 
 and, in fact, taking their own places. 
 
 And then he was one of those who have been 
 hard livers, and who hate love, whether because 
 i}hey have suffered too much from it, or because 
 they feel too much regret for it. This hatred of 
 love was complicated with a complete contempt for 
 women who make slips, and he suspected Theresa 
 ■of having already had two intrigues — one with a 
 young deputy, named Frederick Luzel, and the 
 other with Alfred Fanieres, a celebrated writer. 
 
132 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 He was one of those who judge a woman by her 
 lovers, wherein he was wrong, for the reasons 
 which lead a poor creature to surrender herself 
 are most frequently personal, and foreign to the 
 nature and character of him who is the cause 
 of the surrender. Now, the gi-eat frankness of 
 Frederick Luzel's manners was a cover to com- 
 plete brutality ; while Alfred Fanieres was a. 
 rather handsome fellow of refined manners, 
 whose cajolery scarcely concealed the fierce 
 egotism of the skilful artist, with whom every- 
 thing is simply a means for rising, from his 
 abilities as a prose vsrriter to his successes of the 
 alcove. 
 
 It was upon the germ of corruption deposited 
 by these two characters in Theresa's heart that 
 George secretly relied when imagining a probable 
 termination to Hubert's attachment. He told 
 himself that Madame de Sauve must have 
 acquired habits of pleasure and exigencies of 
 sensation with these two men, whose cynicism 
 and morals were known to him. He calculated 
 that Hubert's purity would some day leave her 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 133 
 
 unsatisfied, and on that day it was almost 
 inevitable that she should deceive him. " After 
 all," he said to himself, " it vyill give him pain, 
 but it will teach him life." George Liauran, in 
 this respect similar to three-fourths of those of 
 his own age and social standing, was persuaded 
 that a young man ought, as soon as possible, to 
 frame for himself a practical philosophy, that is 
 to say, he should, in accordance with the old 
 misanthropical formulas, have small belief in 
 friendship, look upon most women as rogues, and 
 explain all human actions by interest, avowed or 
 disguised. Worldly pessimism has not much 
 more originality than this. Unfortunately it is 
 nearly always right. 
 
 Such was the state of mind of Madame 
 Liauran's cousin respecting the sentiments of 
 Hubert and Theresa, when, in October of the 
 .same year, he happened to find himself dining 
 with five others in a private room at the Cafe 
 Anglais. The repast had been refined and well 
 contrived, and the wines exquisite, and coffee 
 havmg been served, and cigars lighted, they were 
 
.134 ^ CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 chatting as men do among themselves. The- 
 following is a scrap of dialogue which George 
 overheard between his left-hand neighbour and 
 one of the guests, and that at a time when he- 
 himself had just been talking with his right-hand, 
 neighbour, so that at first the full import of the. 
 words escaped him : 
 
 "We saw them," said the narrator, "through 
 the telescope, from the upper room in Arthur's, 
 chalet that he uses as a studio, as though thejr 
 had been only three yards distant. She entered,, 
 in fact, as we had heard that she did the day 
 before, and she had scarcely done so when he gave 
 her a kiss — but such a kiss ! . . ." and he 
 smacked his lips as he drained a last drop of 
 liquem' that had remained in his glass. 
 
 " Who is ' he ' ? " asked George Liam-an. 
 
 " La Croix-Firmin." 
 
 " And ' she ' ? " 
 
 " Madame de Sauve." 
 
 " By Jove ! " said George to himself, " this is a. 
 strange business ; it was worth while accepting: 
 this fool's invitation." 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. I35 
 
 And with this thought he looked at his host — 
 an exquisite of low degree — who was exulting 
 with joy at entertaining a few clubmen who were 
 quite in the fashion. 
 
 " We were expecting something better," the 
 other went on to say, " but she insisted on 
 lowering the curtains. How we chaffed Ludovic 
 about his jaded look in the morning ! Nothing 
 else was spoken of for a week between Trouville 
 and Deauville. She suspected it, for she left very 
 quickly. But I will wager a pony that she will 
 be received everywhere this winter as well as 
 before. The tolerance of Society is becom" 
 
 mg " 
 
 " Home-like," said the interlocutor, and the 
 talk continued to go round, the cigars to be 
 smoked, the kummel cognac to fill the little 
 glasses, and these moralists to pass judgment 
 upon hfe. The young man who had told the 
 scandalous anecdote about Madame de Sauve in 
 the course of the conversation, was about thirty 
 years old, pale, slight, already used up, and, for 
 the rest, very amiable and one of those whose 
 
136 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 name universally attracts the epithet of " good 
 •ellow." In fact he would have blown his brains 
 Dut sooner than not have paid a gambhng debt 
 within the appointed time. He had never decHned 
 m affair of honour, and his friends could rely 
 upon him for a service though difficult, or an 
 idvance of money though considerable. 
 
 But as to speaking, after drinking, of what 
 one knows about the intrigues of women of the 
 world, where should we be if we tried to forbid 
 om'selves this subject of conversation, as well as 
 hypotheses concerning the secrets of the birth of 
 adulterine children ? Perhaps the very chatterer 
 who had boi'ne eye-witness to the levity of 
 Theresa de Sauve would have shed genuine tears 
 of sorrow if he had known that his speech would 
 have been employed as a weapon against the 
 young woman's happiness. It is an exhaustless 
 30urce of melancholy for one who mixes with the 
 world without corrupting his heart, to see how 
 cruelties are sometimes effected in it with com- 
 plete security of conscience. But furthermore, 
 would not George Liauran have learnt from 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 137 
 
 another source all the. details which the indiscre- 
 tion of his table companion had just revealed to 
 him so suddenly and with such unassailable 
 precision ? 
 
 Truth to tell, he was not astonished by it for a 
 moment. Two or three times, indeed, on his way 
 home, he repeated the words " Poor Hubert ! " 
 to himself, but he secretly felt the mean and 
 - irresistible egotistic titillation which is nine 
 times out of ten produced by the sight of other 
 people's misfortunes. Were not his prognostica- 
 tions verified ? And this, too, was not devoid of 
 a certain charm. Vulgar misanthropy has many 
 such satisfactions, which harden the heart that 
 feels them. When a man despises humanity with 
 an indiscriminating contempt, he ends by feeling 
 satisfaction at its wretchedness, instead of being 
 distressed by it. 
 
 As for doubt, he did not admit it for a moment, 
 especially when recalling what he knew of Ludovic 
 de la Croix-Firmin. The latter was a species 
 of coxcomb, who might, on reflection, appear to 
 be devoid of any superiority; but he was liked 
 
138 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 by women, for those mysterious reasons which 
 we men can no more understand than women 
 can understand the secret of the influence- 
 exercised over us by some of themselves. It is. 
 probable that into these reasons there enters a. 
 good deal of that bestiality which is always- 
 present at the bottom of our personal relations. 
 La Croix-Firmin was twenty-seven years old, the 
 age of the fullest vigour, with light hair bordering- 
 upon red, blue eyes, a clear complexion, and teeth 
 whose whiteness gleamed between a pair of very 
 fresh lips at every smile. When he smiled in 
 this way, with his dimpled chin, his square= 
 nose, and his curly locks, he recalled that type, 
 immortal through the races, of the countenance^ 
 of Faunus, which the ancients made the incar- 
 nation of happy sensuality. 
 
 To complete that quality of physical charm 
 to which many fancies that he had inspired were 
 due, he had a suppleness of movement peculiar 
 to those in whom the vital force is very complete. 
 He was of medium height, but athletic. Although 
 his ignorance was absolute and his intelligence 
 
A CBUBL ENIGMA. 139^ 
 
 Yery moderate, he possessed the gift which ren- 
 ders a man of his make a dangerous person ; he 
 had, in a rare degree, that tact and perception 
 which reveal the moment when a venture may be 
 made, and when woman, a creature of rapid 
 moods and fleeting emotions, belongs to the- 
 libertine who can divine it. 
 
 This La Croix-Firmin had had many intrigues,, 
 and, although his birth and his future ought to- 
 have made him a perfect gentleman, he liked 
 to relate them ; these indiscretions, instead of 
 ruining him, served him, so to speak, as advertise- 
 ments. In spite of his light conversation and 
 his conceit, he had not made a single enemy 
 among the women who had compromised them- 
 selves for him ; perhaps because he imaged to- 
 .their memories nothing but happy sensation — 
 " 'tis the material of the best recollections," the 
 cynics say, and, in respect of souls devoid of 
 loftiness, what can be more true ? 
 
 It was precisely upon La Croix-Firmin's indis- 
 cretion that George relied for mustering some 
 fresh proofs in support of the fact which he had. 
 
140 A CEUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 learned at the dinner at the Cafe Anglais. 
 Being an old bachelor, he had a gloomy imagina- 
 tion, and could foresee ill-fortune rather than good. 
 He had, consequently, long been accustomed to 
 see clearly through the surface of the social 
 world. He understood the art of going in 
 pursuit of secret truth, and he excelled in com- 
 Inning into a single whole the scattered sayings 
 floating in the atmosphere of Parisian conversa- 
 tion. In this particular case there was no need 
 of so many efforts. It was simply a matter of 
 finding corroboration for a detail indisputable 
 in itself. 
 
 A few visits to women in society who had 
 spent the season at Trouville, and a single one 
 to Ella Virieux, a woman belonging to the demi- 
 monde, and the recognised mistress of La Croix- 
 Firmin's best comrade, were sufi&cient for the 
 inquiry. It was quite certain that Ludovic had 
 been Madame de Sauve's lover, and that the fact 
 was not only one of public notoriety, but had 
 been established by his own avowal at the 
 seaside. A hasty departure had alone preserved 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. I41 
 
 Theresa from an inevitable affront, and now that 
 Parisian life was beginning again, ten new 
 scandals were causing this summer scandal, 
 destined to become dubious like so many others, 
 to be already forgotten. 
 
 George Liauran perceived in it a sure means 
 of at last breaking the connection between 
 Hubert and Theresa. It was sufficient for this 
 purpose to warn Marie Alice. He felt, indeed, a 
 moment's hesitation, for after all he was med- 
 dling with a story which did not at all concern 
 him; but the unacknowledged hatred towards 
 the two lovers which was hidden at the bottom 
 of his heart carried him over this delicate 
 scrupulousness, as well as the real desire to 
 free a woman whom he loved from mortal 
 distress. 
 
 On the very evening of the day of his conver- 
 sation with Ella Virieux, who, without attaching 
 any further importance to the matter, had reported 
 to him the secrets which Ludovic had confided to 
 her lover, he was at the Eue Vaneau and relating 
 to Madame Liauran, who was reclining beside 
 
142 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 Madame Castel's easy chair, the unlooked-for 
 news which was at a stroke to change the aspect 
 -of the strife between mother and mistress. 
 
 "Ah ! the wretch ! " cried the poor woman, 
 half-dead from her lengthened anguish, " she 
 was not even capable of loving him " 
 
 She uttered these words in a deep tone, 
 wherein were condensed all the ideas which she 
 had formed so long before about her son's 
 mistress. She had thought so much about what 
 the nature of this guilty creature's passion could 
 possibly be to render it more potent over 
 Hubert's heart than her ovra. love, which, for all 
 that, she knew to be infinite ! Shaking her 
 whitened head, so wearied with musing, she 
 went on : 
 
 " And it is for such a woman as this that he 
 has tortured us ! Ah ! mamma, when he com- 
 pares what he has sacrificed vnth what he has 
 preferred, he will not understand his own 
 -behaviour." 
 
 Then, holding out her hand to George : 
 
 " Thank you, cousin," she said. " You have 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 43 
 
 saved me. If this horrible intrigue had lasted, I 
 should have died." 
 
 " Alas, my poor daughter," said Madame 
 €astel, stroking her hair, •" do not feed upon vain 
 hopes. If Hubert has ever loved you he loves 
 jou still. Nothing is changed. There is only 
 ■one evil action the more committed by this 
 woman, and she must be accustomed to it.'' 
 
 " Then you think that he will not know of all 
 "this ? " said Marie Alice, raising herself. " But I 
 should be the basest of the base if I were not to 
 •open this unhappy child's eyes.- So long as I 
 helieved that she loved him, I was able to keep 
 silence. Guilty as such love might be, it never- 
 theless had passion ; it was something sincere 
 after all, something erring, yet exalted — but now, 
 what name can you give such abominations?" 
 
 " Be prudent, cousin," said George Liauran, 
 somewhat disquieted by the anger with which 
 these last words had been uttered ; " remember 
 that we are not in a position to give poor Hubert 
 such palpable and undeniable proofs as would 
 baffle all discussion." 
 
144 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 " But what further proof do you want," she 
 broke in, " than the assertion of a spectator ?" 
 
 " Pooh ! " said George ; "for those who are in 
 love " 
 
 " You do not know my son," returned the 
 mother, proudly. " There is no such compliance 
 in him. I only want a promise from you before 
 taking action. You will relate to him what you 
 have told to us, and as you have told it to us, if 
 he asks you." 
 
 "Certainly," said George, after a pause; "I 
 will tell him what I know, and he will draw what 
 conclusions he pleases." 
 
 " And what if he were to pick a quarrel with 
 this Monsiem- de la Croix-Firmin ? " asked 
 Madame Castel. 
 
 " He could not," rejoined the mother, whose 
 hopeful over-excitement rendered her at that 
 moment as keen-sighted respecting the laws of 
 society as George himself could have been ; 
 " our Hubert is too honourable a man to allow 
 a woman's name to be talked about through him, 
 even though it were hers." 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 1 45 
 
 Yes, poor Hubert ! Hour by hour there was 
 "thus drawing closer to him that destiny which 
 the sound of the sea, as heard in the night, would 
 have symbolised to him during his divine waking 
 •at Folkestone had he possessed more knowledge 
 of life. It was drawing closer, this destiny, taking 
 for its instrument alternately George Liauran's 
 malevolent indifference and Marie Alice's blind 
 jassion. The last-named, at least, believed that 
 she was working for her son's happiness, not 
 Tjnderstanding that, when in love, it is better to 
 be deceived even a great deal than to suspect the 
 fact a little. 
 
 And yet, notwithstanding what she had said in 
 her conversation with her cousin, she did not feel 
 ■equal to speaking herself to her son. She was 
 incapable of enduring the first outbreak of his 
 .grief. Assuredly the proofs given by George 
 appeared to her impossible of refutation, and 
 again, in her conscience as a pious mother, she 
 ■considered that it was her absolute duty to snatch 
 her son from the monster who was corrupt- 
 ing him. But how could she receive the 
 
 ic 
 
146 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 counter-stroke of rebellion which would follow 
 the revelation? 
 
 / Nevertheless, she hoped that he would return 
 to her in his moments of despair. She would 
 open her arms to him, and all this nightmare of 
 misunderstandings would vanish in effusiveness 
 — as of old. Involuntarily, through a mirage 
 familiar to all mothers as to all fathers, she 
 took no acctu'ate account of the change of soul 
 which possibly had been wrought in her son. She 
 still saw in him the child that once she had 
 known, coming to her with his smallest troubles. 
 Through the false logic of her tenderness it 
 seemed to her that, the obstacle which had 
 separated them once removed, they would find 
 themselves again face to face and the same as 
 before. Her first thought was to send him 
 immediately to see George ; then, with her 
 dehcate woman's sense, she reflected that this 
 would involve an inevitable wounding of his 
 pride. Once more, therefore, she had recourse 
 to General Scilly's old friendship, requesting 
 him to tell the young man all. 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 1 47 
 
 "You are giving me a terribly difficult com- 
 mission," he replied, when she had explained 
 everything to him. " I will obey you if you 
 require it. I have gone through it myself," 
 he added, "and under almost similar conditions. 
 A quean is a quean, and they are all like one 
 another. But the first man who had hinted as 
 much to me would have spent a bad quarter of 
 an hour. Besides, they had not to speak to me 
 about it, for I learnt it all myself." 
 
 " And what did you do ? " asked Marie Alice. 
 
 " What a man does when he has a leg broken 
 by the bursting of a shell," said the old soldier ; 
 "I amputated my heart bravely. It was hard, but 
 I cut clean." 
 
 " You can quite see that my son must learn 
 all," replied the mother, in a tone at once of 
 triumph and of pity. 
 
148 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 ■It was after lunching with one of Madame de 
 Sauve's friends, and tasting the dehcious pleasure 
 of seeing his mistress come in with the coffee, 
 that Hubert Liauran betook himself to the Quai 
 d'Orleans, where a line from the General had 
 asked him to be at about three o'clock. The 
 young man had fancied, on receiving his god- 
 father's note, that it had to do with the arrears 
 of his debt. He knew that the Count was fasti- 
 dious, and be had allowed two months to pass 
 away without clearing off the promised amount. 
 The conversation accordingly began with some 
 words of excuse, which he stammered out imme- 
 diatel}^ on entering the apartment on the ground 
 floor. 
 
 He had not revisited it since the eve of his 
 departure for Folkestone, and he experienced in 
 thought all his former sensations on finding the 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. I49 
 
 ,spect of the room exactly sucli as he had left it. 
 Che notes on the re-organisation of the army 
 till covered the table ; the bust of Marshal 
 Sugeaud adorned the mantel-piece ; and the 
 3-eneral, attired in a pelisse-shaped dressing- 
 acket, was methodically smoking his briarwood 
 )ipe. To the first words uttered by -his godson 
 le merely replied : 
 
 " That is not the question, my dear fellow," in 
 I voice that was at once grave and sad. 
 
 By the mere intonation Hubert understood 
 ;oo well that a scene was preparing of capital 
 mportance to himself. If it is puerile to believe 
 n presentiments in the sense in which the crowd 
 ;ake the term, no creature gifted with refinement 
 3an deny that the slightest of details are sufficient 
 io invoke an accurate perception of approaching 
 langer. The General was silent, and Hubert 
 30uld see the name of Madame de Sauve in his 
 3yes and on his lips, although it had never been 
 ittered between his godfather and himself. He 
 waited, therefore, for the resumption of the con- 
 versation with that passionate beating of the 
 
150 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 heart which makes impatience an almost in- 
 tolerable torture to highly-strung natures. 
 
 ScilJy, whose whole sentimental experience 
 since his youth was summed up in a single de- 
 ception in love, now felt himself seized with 
 great pity for the blow that he was about to 
 inflict upon a youth so dear to himself, and the 
 phrases which he had been putting together 
 during the whole of that morning appeared to 
 him to be devoid of common sense. Neverthe- 
 less, it was necessary to speak. At times of 
 supreme uncertainty it is the characteristic im- 
 pressed upon us by our callings in life which 
 usually manifests itself and guides our action. 
 Scilly was a soldier, brave and exact. He was 
 bound to go, and he did go, straight to the point. 
 
 " My boy," he said, with a certain solemnity, 
 "you must first know that I am acquainted 
 with your life. You are the lover of a married 
 woman, who is called Madame de Sauve. Do 
 not deny it. Honour forbids you to tell me the 
 truth. But the essential point is to take immediate 
 precautions." 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. I51 
 
 P " Why do you speak to me of this," replied 
 the young man, rising and taking up his hat, 
 ^' when you acknowledge that honour commands 
 me not even to listen to you ? Look here, god- 
 father, if you have brought me here to broach 
 this subject, let us have no more of it. I prefer 
 to bid you good-bye before quarrelling with you." 
 
 " But it was not to question you nor to lecture 
 you that I asked for this interview," replied 
 the Count, taking the hand which Hubert had 
 stiffly held out to him. "It was to tell you a 
 very grave fact, and one of which you must, 
 yes, must be informed. Madame de Sauve has 
 another lover, Hubert, who is not yom'self." 
 
 " Godfather," said the young man, disengaging 
 his fingers from those of the old General, and 
 growing pale with sudden anger, " I do not know 
 why you wish me to cease to respect you. It is 
 infamous to say of a woman what you have jus 
 said of her." 
 
 " If you were not concerned," replied the 
 Count, rising, and the sad gravity of his counten- 
 ance contrasted strangely with the wild looks of 
 
152 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 his godson, " you know very well that I would 
 not speak to you of Madame de Sauve or of any 
 other woman. But I love you as I should love- 
 a son of my own, and I tell you what I would 
 tell him. You have misplaced your love ; the 
 woman has another lover ! " 
 
 "Who? When? Where? AVhat are your 
 proofs?" replied Hubert, exasperated heyond all 
 bounds by the insistence and coolness of the 
 General ; "tell me, tell me " 
 
 "When? — this summer. Who? — a Monsieur 
 de La Croix-Firmiu. Where ? — at Trouville. 
 But it is the talk of all the drawing-rooms," con- 
 tinued Scilly; and, without naming George, he 
 related the indisputable details which the latter 
 had confided to Madame Liauran, from the state- 
 ment of the eye-witness to the indiscreet utter- 
 ances of La Croix-Firmin. 
 
 The young man listened without interruption, 
 but to one who knew him the expression of his face 
 was terrible. Anger that was blended of grief 
 and indignation made him grow pale to the lips. 
 "And who told you this story?" he asked. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 53 
 
 "How does that concern you?" said the 
 General, who understood that to indicate the real 
 author of the whole statement to Hubert just at 
 first would be to expose George to a scene which 
 might have a tragical issue. "Yes, how does 
 that concern you since you are not Madame de 
 Sauve's lover?" 
 
 "I am her friend," rejoined .Hubert; "and I 
 have the right to protect her, as I would protect 
 you, against odious calumnies. Moreover," he 
 added, looking fixedly at his godfather, "if you 
 refuse to^ answer my question, I give you my 
 word of honour that within two days I will find 
 this Monsieur de La Croix-Firmin who indulges 
 in these knavish calumnies, and I will have some- 
 thing to say to him without any woman's name 
 being mentioned." 
 
 The General, seeing Hubert's state of over- 
 excitement, and not knowing what words to use 
 against a frenzy which he had not foreseen, — for 
 it was based upon the most absolute incredulity, 
 — said to himself that Madame Liauran alone 
 possessed the power to calm her son. 
 
154 ^ CBUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 " I have told you what I had to tell you," he 
 returned, in a melancholy tone; " if you want to 
 know more, ask your mother." 
 
 " My mother? " said the young man violently, 
 " I might have suspected as much. Well ! I will 
 go to her." 
 
 And half-an-hour later he entered the little 
 drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, where Madame 
 Liauran was at that moment alone. She was 
 waiting, in fact, for her son, but with mortal 
 anguish. She knew that it was the time for his 
 explanation with Scilly, and the issue of it now 
 frightened her. The sight of Hubert's physiog- 
 nomy increased her fears. He was livid, with 
 bistre rings beneath his eyes, and Marie Alice 
 immediately felt the counter-shock of this visible 
 emotion. 
 
 " I have come from my godfather's, mother," 
 the young man began, "and he has said things to 
 me that I shall not forgive him as long as I live. 
 What pained me still more was that he pretended 
 to have from yom'self the calumnies which he 
 repeated to me concerning one whom you may 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 155 
 
 not like — but I do not recognise your right to 
 brand her to me, to whom she has always been 
 perfect — " 
 
 " Do not speak to me in that tone, Hubert," 
 said Madame Liauran, " you hurt me so. It is 
 just as though you were burying a knife in me 
 here." She pointed to her bosom. 
 
 Ah ! it was not only Hubert's tone, his short, 
 hard tone, that was torturing her ; it was above 
 all, and once again, the evidence of the feeling 
 that bound him to Madame de Sauve. 
 
 " Of us two," she thought, "he would choose 
 her." The immediate result of her grief was to 
 revive her hatred for the woman who was its 
 cause, and in her impulse of aversion she found 
 strength to continue the conversation. 
 
 " You have lost the feelings of our home, my 
 child," she said, in a calmer voice; " you do not 
 understand what tenderness binds us to yourself, 
 and what duties it imposes upon us." 
 
 " Strange duties, if they consist in echoing 
 degrading reports about one whose only offence 
 13 that she has inspired me with a deep affection." 
 
156 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 " No," said Madame Liauran, who was growing 
 excited in her turn ; " it is not a question of re- 
 suming a discussion which has ah-eady set us face 
 to face as though for a duel," and the glances of 
 mother and son crossed at that moment like two 
 sword-blades. " It is a question of this — that 
 you love a creature who is unworthy of you, and 
 that I, your mother, have had you told so and tell 
 you so again." 
 
 "And I, your son, reply to you — ," and he 
 had the word lie on his lips; then, as though 
 frightened at what he had been going to say — 
 " that you are mistaken, mother. I ask your 
 pardon for speaking to you in this strain," he 
 added, taking her hand and kissing it ; "I am 
 not master of myself." 
 
 " Listen, my child," said Marie Alice, from 
 whose eyes the unlooked-for kindness of this 
 gesture caused the tears to flow; "I cannot go 
 into all those sad details with you." Here she 
 touched his hair just as in the days when he was 
 a little child. "Goto your cousin George. He 
 will repeat to you all that he has told us. For it 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 57 
 
 was he who, in his anxiety, thought it his duty to 
 warn us. But remember what your mother tells 
 you now. I believe in the double sight of the 
 heart. I should not have hated this woman as I 
 have hated her from the very first, if she had not 
 been bound to prove fatal to you.. Now, good-bye, 
 my child. Kiss me," she added, in broken tones. 
 Did she understand that from that hour her son's 
 kisses would never be to her what they had 
 formerly been? 
 
 Hubert dashed from the room, leaped into a 
 cab, and gave the driver the address of the club 
 at which he hoped to find George — a small and 
 very aristocratic one in the Eue du Cirque. But 
 while the man, stimulated by the promise of a 
 large tip, was whipping his horse, the unhappy 
 youth was beginning to reflect upon the entirely 
 unexpected blow which had just fallen upon him. 
 The character of the race of action to which he 
 belonged manifested itself in the recovery of his 
 self-possession. 
 
 From the very first he set aside all notion of 
 calumnious invention on the part of his mother 
 
158 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 and godfather. That they both detested Theresa, 
 he knew. That they were capable of venturing a 
 great deal in order to detach him from her, had 
 just been proved to him. Yes, Madame Liauran 
 and the Count might venture upon anything, 
 except falsehood. They believed, therefore, what 
 they had said, and they believed it on the word of 
 George Liauran, who had been hawking about 
 one of the thousand infamous reports of Paris ; 
 but with what purpose ? Hubert's mind did not, 
 at this moment, admit that there was an atom of 
 truth in the story of his mistress's relations with 
 another man. 
 
 He did not wait to discuss the fact within 
 himself; he thought only of the person from 
 whose lips the tale had come. What motive, 
 then, had prompted his cousin, to whom he was 
 now going in order to demand an explanation? 
 He saw him in imagination with his thin face, 
 •his pointed beard, his short hair, and his shrewd 
 look. The vision raised within him a strangely 
 uncomfortable feeling, which, though he did not 
 suspect it, was the work of Madame de Sauve. 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 159 
 
 George had never up to the present spoken to 
 Hubert about her in any way that could admit of 
 allusion or banter. 
 
 But women possess a sure instinct of mistrust, 
 and from the first she had noticed that her love 
 was repugnant to Hubert's cousin. She guessed 
 that he saw only the whim of a blasee woman 
 where she herself saw a religion. A woman for- 
 gives formal slanders sooner than she forgives the 
 tone in which she is spoken of, and she under- 
 stood that the accent of George's voice as he 
 pronounced her name was in absolute disagree- 
 ment with the feelings with which she wished to 
 inspire Hubert. And then, to keep back nothing, 
 she had a past, and George might be acquainted 
 with that past. A shudder passed through her 
 at the mere idea of this. 
 
 For these diverse reasons she had employed her 
 shrewdest and most secret diplomacy to part the 
 two cousins from each other. This work was now 
 bearing its fruit, and was the means of inspiring 
 Hubert with unconquerable distrust, while the cab 
 was taking him to the club in the Eue du Cirque. 
 
l6o A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 " In what way," he thought, " can I question 
 George ? I cannot say to him : ' I am Madame de 
 Sauve's lover, and you have accused her of having 
 deceived me ; prove it to me.' " 
 
 The moral impossibility of such a conversation 
 had become a physical one at the moment when 
 the cab stopped in front of the club. 
 
 "After all," said Hubert to himself, "I am a 
 very child to trouble myself about what Monsieur 
 George Liauran believes or does not believe." 
 
 He dismissed his cab, and instead of entering 
 the club, walked in the direction of the Champs 
 Elysees. 
 
 That which constitutes the marvellous essence 
 and the unique charm of love, is that it gathers, 
 as into a bundle, and sets vibrating in unison, the 
 three beings within us, of thought, feeling, and 
 instinct, — the brain, the heart, and all the flesh. 
 But it is also this unison which forms its terrible 
 infirmity. It remains defenceless againt the en- 
 croachment of physical imagination, and this 
 feebleness appears especially in the birth of 
 jealousy. In this way is explained the monstrous 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. l6l 
 
 facility with which suspicion rises in the soul of a 
 man that knows himself loved above all others, 
 if any particulars frame, before his mind's eye, a 
 picture wherein he sees his mistress deceiving him. 
 
 To be sure the lover does not believe in the 
 truth of this picture, yet he is none the more able 
 to forget it entirely, and it gives him pain until a 
 proof comes to render the image absurd at every 
 point. But as there enters a great part of 
 physical life into the formation of the picture, 
 the more material the proof is the more com- 
 plete is the cure. It is exactly what happens to 
 one awaking from a nightmare, when the 
 assault of surrounding sensations comes to dissi- 
 pate the torturing image which has occasioned 
 the hallucination of the sleeper. 
 
 Certainly, for a year past, during which he had 
 been in love with Theresa de Sauve, Hubert had 
 never, even for a minute, doubted a love of which, 
 through a feeling of delicagy that was a creature 
 of^ prudence, he had never spoken to any one ; 
 and even now, after the accusations formulated 
 against her by Count Scilly and Madame Liauran, 
 
l62 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 he did not believe her capable of treachery. 
 Nevertheless, these accusations carried a possible 
 reality with them, and while he was going up again 
 again towards the Arc de Triomphe he was pursued 
 by the recollection of the phrases uttered by his 
 godfather and his mother, evoking within him the 
 spectacle of Theresa resigning herself to another 
 man. 
 
 It was but a flash, and scarcely had this vision 
 of hideousness occurred to Hubert's mind than it 
 induced a reaction. By a violent effort he drove 
 away the image, which vanished for a few 
 minutes and then reappeared, this time accom- 
 panied by a whole train of probative ideas. 
 Hubert suddenly recollected that during the trip 
 to Tourville several of his mistress' letters had 
 been written from day to day in a somewhat 
 changed hand. She seemed to have sat down to 
 her table in great haste to perform her labour of 
 love, as though it were a task to be hurriedly 
 accomplished. Hubert had been pained by this 
 little momentary change, and then he had re- 
 proached himself for a tender susceptibility of 
 heart which was like ingratitude. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 63 
 
 Yes ; but was it not immediately after this 
 short period of negHgent letters that Theresa had 
 left Trouville, under the pretext that the sea air 
 was doing her no good? Her departure had 
 been decided upon in twenty-four hours. Hubert 
 could agaiii feel the impulse of wondering joy 
 which had been caused him by this sudden 
 return. He had not expected to see his mistress 
 back in Paris before the month of October, and 
 he met her again in the first week of September 
 The joy of that time was transformed by retro- 
 spection into vague anxiety. Had the evident 
 perturbation of the letters written before the 
 departure, and had the departure itself, no connec- 
 tion with the abominable action of which Theresa 
 was. accused ? But it was infamous on his part to 
 admit such ideas, even in imagination. He threw 
 back his head, closed his eyes, knit his forehead, 
 and, mustering all his energy of soul, was enabled 
 to drive the suspicion away once more. 
 
 He was now in the highest part of the avenue. 
 He felt so tired that he did what was for him an 
 extraordinary action, he looked for a cafe at 
 
164 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 ■whicTa he might stop and rest. He noticed a 
 little English tavern, hidden in this corner of 
 fashionable Paris, for the use of coachmen and 
 bookmakers. He went in. Two men, with red 
 faces and of sturdy appearance, who looked as 
 though they must be redolent of the stable, 
 were standing before the counter. The shadow 
 of a closing autumn afternoon was gloomily in- 
 vading this deserted nook. 
 
 Facing the bar ran an empty bench, and on a 
 long wooden table lay an English newspaper in 
 several sheets, Here Hubert sat down and 
 ordered a glass of port wine, which he drank 
 mechanically and which had the effect of freshly 
 exciting his strained nerves. The vision came 
 back to him a'third time, accompanied by a still 
 greater number of ideas, which automatically 
 grouped themselves into a single body of 
 argument. Theresa had then returned to Paris 
 so speedily, andjhad repaired to one of their 
 clandestine meetings. But why had she had 
 such a violent fit of sobbing in his very arms'? 
 She was often melancholy in her voluptuousness. 
 
A CKUEL ENIGMA. I65 
 
 The intoxications of love usually ended with her 
 in sad emotion. But how far removed was this 
 frenzy of despair from her habitual, dreamy 
 languor ! Hubert had been almost frightened at 
 it, and then she had answered him : 
 
 " It was so long since I had tasted your kisses ! 
 They are so sweet to me that they pain me. 
 But it is a dear pain," she had added, drawing 
 him to her heart and cradling him in her arms. 
 
 Nevertheless her despair had not entirely 
 disappeared on the following day or during the 
 weeks which ensued, and which she had spent 
 in the neighbourhood of Paris at a country 
 house belonging to one of her friends who was 
 acquainted with Hubert. He had gone there to 
 see her and had found her as silent as ever, and 
 at times almost dull. She had returned to Paris 
 in the same condition, and with her face some- 
 what altered ; but he had attributed the change to 
 physical uneasiness. A sudden and new associa- 
 tion of ideas now caused him to say to himself : 
 
 " What if this were remorse ? Eemorse for 
 what ? Why, for her infamy ! " 
 
l66 A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 He got up, went out of the cafe, resumed his 
 walk, and shook off this frightful hypothesis. 
 
 "Fool that I am," he thought, "if she had 
 deceived me it would have been because she 
 did not love me, and what motive would she 
 then have to lie to me? " 
 
 This objection, which appeared irrefutable to 
 him, drove away the suspicion for a few minutes. 
 Then it came back again as it always does : 
 "But who is this Count de la Croix-Firmin ? 
 Has she ever spoken of him to me ? " he asked 
 himself. 
 
 He searched anxiously through all his recollec- 
 tions, but could not find that this name had ever 
 been uttered by her. Still, if — • Suddenly in a 
 hidden corner of his memory he perceived the 
 syllables of the already hateful name. He had 
 seen them printed in a newspaper article on the 
 festivities at Trouville. It was certainly in a 
 Boulevard paper, and in a connection in which 
 he hud also remarked his mistress's name. By 
 what chance did this little fact, in itself insigni- 
 ficant, retm'n to torment him at this moment ? 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 167 
 
 He had a doubt as to his accuracy, and he took a 
 carriage to go to the office of the only paper that he 
 read habitually. He searched through the collec- 
 tion, and laid his hand upon the short paragraph, 
 which he recollected, doubtless, because he had 
 read it several times on Theresa's account. It 
 was the report of a garden party given by a 
 Marchioness de Jussat. Did it merely prove 
 that this Monsieur de la Croix-Firman had been 
 introduced to Madame de Sauve ? 
 
 '' Ah ! " exclaimed the poor fellow after these 
 murderous reflections, " am I going to become 
 jealous? " 
 
 This represented an insupportable idea to him, 
 for nothing was more contrary to the innate 
 loyalty of his whole nature, than distrust. Then 
 he remembered the warm tenderness which she 
 had lavished upon him from the first, and as he 
 had ever since followed the sweet practice of 
 opening up his whole heart to her, he said to him- 
 self that he had a sure means of removing this 
 evil vision for ever. He had simply to see 
 Theresa and tell her everything. In the first 
 
l6S A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 place this would warn her of a calumny which she 
 must immediately put down. Then, he felt that 
 a single word coming from the lips of this woman 
 would immediately dissipate every shadow of 
 anxiety in his mind. He entered a post-office 
 and scrawled on the blue paper of a little pneu- 
 matic despatch : 
 
 " Tuesday, five o'clock. — The lover is sad, and 
 cannot do without his mistress. Wicked persons 
 have been maligning her to him. Who should 
 hear all this, if not the dear confidante of every 
 sorrow and every joy ? Can she come to-morrow, 
 she knows where, at ten o'clock in the morning ? 
 Let her do so, and she shall be loved still more, 
 if that be possible, by her H.L., — which denotes 
 this closing afternoon: Horrible lassitude." 
 
 It was in this strain of tender childishness that 
 he wrote to her, with the fondness of language 
 wherein passion often dissembles its native 
 violence. He slipped the slender despatch into 
 the box, and was astonished to find himself feel- 
 ing almost placid again. He had acted, and the 
 presence of the real had driven the vision away. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 69 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 At the moment when Theresa de Sauve re- 
 ceived Hubert's despatch she was preparing to 
 dress for dining out. She immediately counter- 
 raanded her carriage, and wrote a hasty Hne, 
 pleading headache as an excuse for absence. 
 She had been seized with trembling and an icy 
 sweat on reading the simple phrases of the blue 
 note. She gave orders that she was not at home, 
 and cowered down in a low chair before her bed- 
 room fire^, with her head in her hands. 
 
 Since her return from Trouville she had been 
 living in continued agony, and what she had 
 been dreading like death was come. Her darling, 
 whom she had left so perfectly tranquil and 
 cheerful at two o'clock, could not have fallen into 
 -the state of mind which she could feel through 
 the graceful childishness of his note, if some 
 catastrophe had not happened. "What catastro- 
 phe ? Theresa guessed it too well. 
 
J 70 A CBUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 George Liauran had been told the truth. 
 During the unhappy woman's stay at the seaside 
 "there had been enacted in her life one of those 
 ■secret dreams of infidelity which frequently occur 
 in the lives of women who have once deviated from 
 the straight path. But our actions, however guilty 
 they may be, do not always give the measure of 
 our souls. Madame de Sauve's natm'e comprised 
 very lofty portions by the side of very low ones, 
 a,nd was a singular mixture of corruption and 
 nobility. She might, indeed, commit abominable 
 faults, but to forgive them in herself, after the 
 happy custom of most women of the same descrip- 
 tion, that she could not do, and now less than 
 ■ever after what her passion for Hubert had been 
 to her life for several months. 
 
 Ah ! her life ! her life ! It was this that 
 Theresa de Sauve saw in the flickering flames 
 in the fireplace that autumn evening, with her 
 heart racked with apprehension. The whole 
 weight of her former errors, her criminal errors, 
 was now falling upon her heart, and she remem- 
 bered her state of dull agony when she had met 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. I7I 
 
 Hubert. Theresa de Sauve had been endowed 
 by nature with those dispositions which are most 
 fatal to a woman in modern society, unless she 
 marries under rare conditions, or unless maternity 
 saves her from herself by breaking the energies of 
 her physical, and engrossing the fervour of her 
 moral, vitality. She had a romantic heart, while 
 her. temperament made her a creature of passion, 
 that is to say, she fostered both dreams of feeling 
 and unconquerable appetites for sensation. 
 
 When persons of this kind meet on the thres- 
 hold of their lives, with a man who satisfies the 
 twofold needs of their nature, there are between 
 them and this man such mysterious festivities 
 of love as poets conceive but never embrace. 
 Where their destiny wills that they shall be 
 delivered, as Theresa had been to her husband, 
 to a man who treats them from the very first 
 like courtesans, who initiates them in deed and 
 thought into the whole science of pleasure, but 
 who has not sufficient poetry to satisfy the other 
 half of their souls, such women necessarily be- 
 come curiosos, capable of falling into the worst 
 
1/2 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 experiences, and then their sterility even be- 
 comes a happiness, for they at least do not 
 transmit that flame of sentimental and sensual 
 life which they have commonly inherited from 
 a mother's error. 
 
 It was, in fact, from her mother, who, cold 
 though she was, had been led by weariness and 
 abandonment into guilty misconduct, that Theresa 
 derived her dreamy imagination, while there 
 flowed in her veins the burning blood of her 
 true father, the handsome Count Branciforte. 
 Further, this child of license and infatuation had 
 been brought up without religious principles or 
 bridle of any kind, by Adolphe Lussac, a most 
 immoral man, who was amused by the little girl's 
 vivacity, and had early made her a guest at many 
 dinners, where she heard all that she ought not to 
 have beard, and guessed all that she ought not to 
 have known. Who can calculate the amount of 
 influence over the falls of a woman of twenty-five 
 that is attributable to the conversations listened 
 to or overheard by the young girl in short 
 frocks ? 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 73 
 
 "Nevertheless, Theresa, who had married when 
 very young, had had only two intrigues up to 
 the time of her chance meeting with Hubert, 
 and these two amours had caused her such 
 disgust that she had sworn that she would never 
 again fall into the folly of taking a lover. The 
 good resolutions of a woman who has fallen, and 
 who has suffered for her fault, are like the firm 
 intentions of a gambler who has lost two thousand 
 pounds, or a drunkard who has told his secrets 
 during his intoxication. The deep-lying causes 
 which have produced the first adultery continue 
 to subsist after the fault has given the guilty one 
 cruelly to taste of every bitterness. 
 
 The woman who takes a lover is not so much 
 attached to this lover as she is to love, and she 
 continues to be still attached to love when the 
 chosen lover has deceived her, until disillusion 
 after disillusion brings her to love pleasure 
 without love, and sometimes pleasure of the 
 most degrading nature. Theresa de Sauve could 
 never descend so far as this, because a sentiment 
 of the ideal persisted within her, too feeble to 
 
174 A. CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 counterbalance the fever of the senses, but strong 
 enough to illumine in her own eyes the abyss of 
 her weaknesses. This taciturn woman, through 
 whom there passed at times the tremors of almost 
 brutal desire, was no epicurean, no light and 
 cheerful courtesan of the world. 
 
 Conceived amid her mother's remorse, Theresa 
 had a tragic soul. She was capable of depravity, 
 but incapable of that amused forgetfulness which 
 plucks the fleeting hour, and cannot, without 
 effort, recall the first lover's name among all 
 the rest. Ko ; this first lover, this Frederick 
 Suzel, whom George Liauran had justly sus- 
 pected, could never be thought of by her with- 
 out causing her thorough nausea by the recollec- 
 tion of the sad motives of her surrender to him. 
 He was a man gay even to buffoonery, and witty 
 even to cynicism, with that sort of wit which is 
 current between the Opera House, Tortoni, and 
 the Cafe Anglais. 
 
 When paying his addresses to Theresa, he had 
 the good sense not to lose himself in the tricks of 
 fashionable flirtations as did his numerous rivals 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 175; 
 
 troop of beasts of prey on the scent of a. 
 m. AVith great skilfulness of language and 
 jrtain penetration of vice, he had frankly 
 •ed to arrange with her a kind of partnership 
 pleasure which should be secret, sure, and 
 I no future, and the unfortunate woman had 
 pted his proposal. "Why ? Because she was 
 ,dfully dull ; because she was carrying off 
 el from one of her friends ; because she was 
 :dy for new sensations, and this person, with 
 dishonouring talk, had about him a sort of 
 Qge prestige of libertinism. Of this connec- 
 , in which Frederick had at least been 
 iful to his promise in not seeking to prolong 
 'heresa had soon been deeply ashamed, and 
 had escaped from it as from the galleys. 
 :ter a year spent in enduring her remorse, 
 in feeling herself sullied by all the know- 
 3 of evil that her intimacy with this man 
 revealed to her, she had thought to find 
 faction for the needs of her heart in the 
 on of Alfred Fanieres, one of the most 
 le novelists of the day. Did not all the 
 
176 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 books of this charming narrator, from his first 
 and only volume of poetry to his last collection 
 of tales, reveal the most minute and tender 
 understanding of the gentle feminine mind ? 
 In this second connection, begun with the most 
 intoxicating hope — -that, namely, of consoling all 
 the deceptions of an admired artist — Theresa 
 had soon struck upon the implacable barrenness 
 of the inmost nature of the worn-out literary 
 man, in whom there is an absolute divorce 
 between feeling and written expression. 
 
 Though undeceived, she nevertheless persisted 
 in remaining this man's mistress, from that 
 reason which causes a woman's second love affair 
 to be the longest of all in coming to a conclu- 
 sion. She will admit that the first has been 
 a mistake ; but the mistake of her marriage 
 and the mistake of her first amour make two ; 
 at the third error she acknowledges that the 
 fault in her conduct is due to herself, and 
 not to the circumstances of her life, and this 
 is a cruel confession for secret pride. Then the 
 writer's egotism had manifested itself so harshly, 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 1 77 
 
 when he had believed himself sure of her, that 
 the revolt had been too strong, and Theresa had 
 broken with him. 
 
 It was during the period of hard distress 
 subsequent to this rupture that she had met 
 Hubert Liauran. From the corner of her 
 solitary hearth, beside which she watched per- 
 sistently, she could see so v.ery clearly what the 
 discovery of this tender child's heart had been 
 to her. In an existence which had com- 
 prised nothing but wounding or disgrace 
 — had not her keenest sorrows been dis- 
 honoured beforehand by their cause? — with 
 what delighted emotion had she measured the 
 purity of this young man's heart ? What anxiety 
 had she felt, and what a dread of not pleasing 
 him ! What a dread, too, knowing that she had 
 pleased him, of being ruined in his thoughts ! 
 
 How she had trembled lest one of the cruel 
 talkers of society should reveal her past to 
 Hubert ! How had she employed all her woman's 
 art to make this love an adorable poem, wherein 
 should be lacking nothing that might enchant a 
 
 M 
 
17S A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 soul innocent and new to life ! How had 
 she enjoyed his reverence, and how had she 
 allowed it to be prolonged ! Ah ! when she 
 thought now of those two days at Folkestone 
 she could scarcely believe that they had been 
 real, and that she had had the courage to survive 
 them. She remembered that she had gone 
 with Hubert to the terminus in spite of every 
 consideration of prudence ; she had seen him 
 disappear in the direction of London, leaning 
 out of the carriage window to watch her the 
 longer ; she had re-entered the rooms which they 
 had both occupied, before herself taking train 
 for Dover, and there she had spent two hours 
 in the grievous loneliness of a soul overwhelmed 
 with simultaneous despair and felicity. 
 
 Her soul bent beneath its weight of recollec- 
 tions like a flower overladen with dew. She had 
 there known a complete union between her two 
 natures — an almost passionate vibration of her 
 entire being. She had half forgiven herself the 
 past, excusing herself by saying mentally to 
 Hubert the words which so many women have 
 
A CKUEL ENIGMA, 1 79 
 
 said aloud to men jealous of those bygone days 
 which belonged to others : "I did not know 
 you!" 
 
 On their subsequent return to Paris, how care- 
 fully and piously had she set herself, during the 
 spring and summer, to hve in such a way as not 
 to lose his affection for a single minute ! She 
 had resumed all the modesty admitted by love 
 that is complete, but is ennobled by the soul. 
 She trembled constantly lest her caresses should 
 be a cause of corruption to this being, so young 
 both in heart and in body, whom she wished to 
 intoxicate without defiling. 
 
 Although she was enamoured to distraction, she 
 had desired the meetings in the little abode in 
 the Avenue Friedland to be far between, lest she 
 should not long enough preserve in his eyes her 
 charm of divine novelty. They had not been very 
 numerous — she might have counted them, tasting 
 in thought the distinct sweetness of each — those 
 afternoons when, with all the shutters closed, and 
 with no light, she had again found the delights 
 of the Folkestone time, sunk in her lover's arms. 
 
l8o A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 and dead to everything but the present moment 
 and its intoxication. 
 
 She had gone so far in her idolatry of Hubert 
 as to worship Madame Liauran, although she well 
 knew that she was hated by her. She wor- 
 shipped her for haviiig brought up this son in 
 such an atmosphere of pure and shrinking sensi- 
 bility. She worshipped her for having kept him 
 for her during the years of adolescence and youth, 
 so delicate, so graceful, so tender, so much her 
 own, so absolutely her own in the past, the 
 present, and the future. For there was loftiness, 
 almost folly, in her pride. She would say 
 to him : 
 
 " Yours is beginning and mine is ending. Yes, 
 child, at twenty-six a woman is almost at the end 
 of her youth, and you have so many years before 
 you ! But never, never will you be loved as I love 
 you, and never will you forget me, never, never." 
 And at other times : " You will marry," she 
 would say ; " she lives, she breathes, and yet she 
 is not known to me, she who is to take you from 
 me, and who will sleep every night upon your 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. l8l 
 
 heart as I did at Folkestone. Ah ! must it indeed 
 be that I have met you so late, and that I cannot 
 bind you to my kisses." 
 
 And she would encircle his neck with the 
 loosened tresses of her long, black hair. Since 
 she had belonged to him she had again acquired 
 the habit which she had had as a young girl, of 
 dressing her own hair, so that he might handle 
 her beautiful locks. Then when she had dressed 
 them again quite alone, and was attired and 
 veiled, she would come back to him, not wishing 
 to bid him good-bye anywhere but in the room 
 where they had loved each other, and she would 
 understand 'from the throbbings of Hubert's 
 heart that no sensation told so much upon him 
 as this good-bye kiss which she gave him 
 with nearly cold lips. She would depart a prey 
 to a nameless sadness, but one at least of which 
 she told her lover. For she did not tell him 
 of every sadness. 
 
 She was married, and although she had at all 
 times had a room of her own, she was sometimes 
 obliged to receive her husband in it. Alas ! it 
 
1 82 A CEXJBL ENIGMA. 
 
 was all the more necessary because she had a 
 lover. It was a sinister expiation of her passion, 
 and one which she justified on her part by 
 telling herself that she owed as much to Hubert. 
 If she ever became a mother could she fly with 
 him and take from him his whole life ? and the 
 pitiless necessity of baleful lies and degrading 
 partitions would thus come to torture her at the 
 height of her happiness; She acquitted herself, 
 nevertheless, since it was for him, her darling, 
 that she lied. 
 
 Yes, but what monstrous enigma suddenly 
 reared itself before her? Oh, the cruel, cruel 
 enigma ! With this divine love in her heart, 
 how had she been able to do what she had 
 done? For it had been, indeed, herself, and 
 none other — she, with those feet of hers 
 which now were feeling icy cold, with those 
 hands which now were pressing her fever- 
 ishly-throbbing brow — she, in short, with her 
 ^^■hole physical being, who had left for Trouville 
 at the end of the month of July— she, Theresa 
 de Sauve, who had installed herself for the season 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 183 
 
 in a villa on ^he hill. Yes, it had been herself. 
 And yet no ! It was not possible that Hubert's 
 mistress had done this. What — this? Oh, cruel, 
 cruel enigma ! 
 
 From what depths of the memory of her 
 senses had there issued those strange impulses, 
 those secret, lustful temptations which had com- 
 menced to assail her ? But have the senses 
 really a memory? Can it be that the guilty 
 fevers will not depart for ever from the blood 
 which they have fired in evil hours ? 
 
 Once settled in her villa, she had met again 
 with old friends who had been"greatly neglected 
 since the beginning of her connection with Hubert. 
 With these women and their admirers — their 
 ■" fancy men," as a lady said who mixed in their 
 ■" set " — she had formed several very cheerful and 
 innocent country parties, and here she was, day 
 by day, beginning, not to love Hubert less, but 
 to live somewhat apart from her love, and to 
 take pleasure anew in habits of masculine 
 familiarities which she had forbidden to herself 
 for a year past. She was so idle in her villa 
 
184 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 witli no indoor occupation — ^not even reading. 
 For she had never Hked books much, and her 
 connection with Alfred Fanieres had disgusted 
 her for ever with the falsity of fine phrases. 
 When she had vsrritten lengthily to Hubert, 
 and then briefly to her husband — who, more- 
 over, came to see her every week — it was 
 necessary to beguile the tedious hours ; and at 
 times fitful thoughts came to her which she 
 dared not acknowledge to herself. Hanker- 
 ings after sensations arose within her, and 
 astonished her. 
 
 She knew by hearsay that almost all men, 
 however tender they may be, and however dearly 
 loved their mistresses, cannot remain long away 
 from the latter without experiencing irresistible 
 temptations to deceive her with the first girl 
 that they meet. But this was true of men, and 
 not of women. Why, then, did she find herself 
 a prey to this inexplicable agitation, to this 
 thirst for sensual intoxications, of which she 
 had believed herself for ever cm-ed by the 
 influence of her ennobling, her ideal love? 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 1 85 
 
 3 depraved creature that she had formerly 
 n awoke by degrees. At night, in her sleep,, 
 
 was haunted by visions of her past. In 
 1 had she striven, and in vain had she 
 3ed her secret perversion, 
 'hen she had allowed herself to hsten to th& 
 resses of the young Count de la Croix-Firmin> 
 i remembered with horror the kind of nervous- 
 lination which this man's presence, his smile, 
 his eyes had exerted upon her. Then — 
 
 would fain have died at the recollection of 
 ; — one afternoon, when he had come up to- 
 
 her, and there was a torrid heat, such as- 
 £es the will feel itself drooping, he had 
 a venturesome, and she had given herself to- 
 I, faintly at first, and then impetuously and 
 lly. For three days she had been his. 
 tress^a prey to the wildness of physical 
 3ion — ^banishing, ever banishing, the recollec- 
 . of Hubert, feeling herself rolling into a 
 ' of infamy, and flinging herself still further 
 
 it, until the day when she had awakened 
 a this sensual frenzy as from a dream.. 
 
1 86 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 She had opened her eyes, measured her shame, 
 and, like a wounded and dying creature, had 
 ■fled from the accursed spot and from her detested 
 accompHce to return — to what ? — and to whom ? 
 
 A melancholy and heart-breaking return to 
 what had been the restoration of her entire life, 
 to what she had blasted for ever ! She had 
 returned to the room of those sweet hours, and 
 she had found Hubert, her Hubert— but could 
 she still call him so ?^more tender, more loving, 
 and more loved than before. Alas ! alas ! had 
 her inexpiable deceit rendered her for ever 
 powerless to taste that of which she was no 
 longer worthy ? In the young man's arms, and 
 on his heart, she had remembered the other, 
 and the ecstacy of former times, the delicious and 
 unspeakable swooning in the excess of feehng, 
 had fled from her. 
 
 It was then that Hubert had seen her sobbing 
 despairingly, and an immense sadness had come 
 upon her, a death-like torpor, crossed by a cruel 
 anxiety lest some indiscreet speech should reach 
 her lover and awake his suspicions. Her own 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 1 87 
 
 utation she heeded but little ; she was well 
 ire that after acting as she did with La Croix- 
 min, she could count on little but contempt 
 [ hatred from him. She also knew what the 
 lOur of those men who make it their profession 
 have women is worth. What tortured her, 
 vevex, was not a fear lest he might compro- 
 le her personal security by speaking. After all, 
 at had she, childless, and rich with an inde- 
 dent fortune, to dread from her husband ? 
 Jut a look of distrust in Hubert's eyes was 
 it she felt to be beyond her powers of endu- 
 36. Perhaps, nevertheless, it might be better 
 ; he should know the frightful truth ? He 
 lid drive her from him like an unfortunate ; 
 at times anything seemed preferable to the 
 nent of having such remorse at her heart, and 
 j^ing ceaselessly to so noble a fellow. She had 
 in set herself to love him with desperate 
 zy, and, as her revolt against the baser part 
 ler nature hurried her to an extreme in the 
 3r or romantic direction, a mad desire came 
 n her to tell him everything, that at least the 
 
1 88 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 voluntary humiliation of her confession might 
 be, as it were, a ransom for her infamy. And 
 yet, although silence was a very lie, this lie she 
 had still the strength to sustain ; but, as for- an 
 actual lie, she suffered too much to have the 
 shameful energy for it, if ever he questioned her. 
 
 And this questioning she was now about to 
 face ; she could read it between the lines of 
 the despatch. Ah ! what was she now to do, 
 if she had guessed aright ? She had drunk 
 as much of the gall of shame as she could bear. 
 Would she have heart enough still to drink this, 
 the bitterest drop, and once more betray her only 
 love by a fresh deception? If she were frank 
 Hubert must at least esteem her for her frankness, 
 and if she were not how could she endure her- 
 self? Yes, but to speak was the death of her 
 happiness. 
 
 Alas ! had not this been dead ever since her 
 return? Would she ever recover what she had 
 once felt ? What was the use of disputing with 
 fate for this mutilated, sullied remnant of a divine 
 dream ? And all that night she was bowed beneath 
 
A CKUEL ENIGMA. 1 89 
 
 -the agony of these thoughts, a poor creature 
 horn for all the nohihty of a single and faithful 
 love, who had caught a ghmpse of her dream and 
 had possessed it, to be then dispossessed of it by 
 the fault of a nature hidden within her, but 
 "which, nevertheless, was not her entire self. 
 
igo A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 In the cab which brought her to the Avenue 
 Friedland on the day following this night of 
 agony, Theresa de Sauve took none of the pre- 
 cautions that were habitual with her, such as 
 changing vehicles on the way, tying a double 
 veil across her face, or peeping at the street 
 corners through the little pane of glass behind, 
 to see whether anything of a suspicious nature 
 was accompanying her clandestine drive. All 
 these timorous secrecies of forbidden love used 
 formerly to please her delightfully on Hubert's 
 account. "Was not the continuance of their 
 intrigue secured by securing its mysteriousness ? 
 There was little question of that now. In her . 
 ungloved hand she held a little gold key hanging 
 to the chain of a bracelet — a pretty trinket of 
 tenderness which her lover had had contrived 
 for her. This key, which never left her wrist. 
 
A OEUEL ENIGMA. igi 
 
 ed to open the door of the ground floor lent 
 ilmmanuel Deroy, the worshipped refuge of 
 'ew days during which she had really lived her 
 -a dream-oasis to which the unhappy woman 
 now going as to a cemetery, 
 bere was likely to be a storm in the course of 
 day, for the atmosphere of the autumn morn- 
 vas heavy, and completely charged with a sort 
 ectric torpor, the influence of which irritated 
 further her weak, womanish nerves. She did 
 tell the cabman, as she always used to do, 
 rive into the entry, — for the house had two 
 i, and the large open gateway allowed her 
 3 brought in the cab to the very door of the 
 tments without being seen by the porter, 
 se discretion was, moreover, guaranteed by 
 profits resulting from the amom- of his 
 nt's friend. She had fastened her eyes the 
 le way upon the slightest details in the 
 its successively passed through ; she knew 
 1 well, frorii the signs of the shops to the 
 of the houses, because these images were 
 ciated with the happiest memories of her too 
 
:92 A CRUEL ENIGMA, 
 
 hort romance. She uttered to them in thought 
 he same mournful farewell as to her happiness. 
 
 A prey, too, to the hallucinations of terror, she 
 ould no longer distinguish the possible from the 
 eal, and she no longer doubted that Hubert knew 
 ,11. She read again the note which she had 
 eceived the day before, and every word of which, 
 her who knew the young man's character so 
 fell, betrayed profound anguish. Whence had 
 his anguish come if not from an. event relating 
 3 their love ? And from what event if not from 
 revelation of the horrible deception, the infamous 
 ct committed by her, yes, by herself? Ah ! if 
 here were somewhere a lustral water to cleanse 
 he blood, and with it the recollection of all evil 
 3vers ! But, no ; it continues to course in our 
 eins, this blood, laden with the most shameful 
 ins. There is no interruption between the beat- 
 ig of our pulse in the hour of our remorse and 
 ;s beating in the hour of our fault. And Theresa 
 ould again feel pressing upon her face the kisses 
 f the man with whom she had betrayed Hubert. 
 et she had paid back these frightful kisses. 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 1 93 
 
 A.I1 ! if lie questions me, how could I find 
 igth to lie to him, and what would be the 
 ) " 
 
 bese words had terminated all her medita- 
 3 since the day before, and she uttered them 
 erself again when she found herself in front of 
 door within which there was doubtless going to 
 macted one of the, to her, most tragical scenes 
 he drama of her life. Her fingers trembled 
 hat she h£||d some trouble in slipping the little 
 I key into the lock — the key which had been 
 m to be handled with other feelings ! She 
 w, beyond doubt, that at the mere sounding 
 ,his key turning on the bolt Hubert would be 
 re behind the door awaiting her. 
 [e was there, in fact, and received her in his 
 LS. He felt her lips to be perfectly cold. He 
 vsd at her, as he did on each occasion, after 
 3sing her to him. It seemed as though he 
 hed to persuade himself of the truth of her 
 sence. This first kiss always gave Theresa a 
 sm at the heart, and it needed all her dread of 
 pleasing her lover to make her release herself 
 
194 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 from his arms. Even at this moment, and in 
 spite of all the tortures of the night before, she 
 thrilled to the very depths of her being, and she 
 was seized w^ith something like a mad desire to 
 intoxicate Hubert with so many endearments 
 ' that they should both forget — he, what he had to 
 ask, and she, what she had to reply. It was but 
 a quiver, nevertheless, and it died away on simply 
 hearing the young man's voice questioning her 
 with anxiety. 
 
 "You are ill?" he said. 
 
 Seeing her quite pale, the tender-hearted fellow 
 reproached himself for having brought her there 
 that morning, and, at the sight of her evident 
 suffering, he had already forgotten the motive of 
 their meeting. Moreover, his confidence as to the 
 result of the conversation was such that he had 
 had no renewal of his suspicions since the day 
 before. 
 
 " You are ill?" he repeated, drawing her into 
 the next room and making her sit down on a 
 divan. 
 
 As Emmanuel Deroy had been attached to the 
 
A OEUEL ENIGMA. I95 . 
 
 embassy at Constantinople before going to Lon- 
 don, bis apartments were adorned tbrougbout 
 witb Oriental materials, and tbis large divan, 
 bung witb drapery, and placed just opposite tbe 
 door of a little garden, was particularly dear to 
 Hubert and Tberesa. Tbey bad cbatted so mucb 
 among tbese cusbions, witb~ tbeir beads resting 
 unitedly upon tbem, at tbose moments of in- 
 timacy wbicb follow upon tbe intoxications of 
 love, and wbicb, by bim at least, were preferred 
 to tbem; for, altbougb be loved Tberesa to tbe 
 point of sacrificing everytbing for ber, be bad^ 
 nevertbeless, at tbe bottom of bis conscience, 
 remained a Catbolic, and a dim remorse mingled 
 its secret bitterness witb tbe sweetness tbat was 
 given bim. by tbe kisses. He used to tbink of bis 
 own fault, and especially of tbe sin wbicb be 
 caused Tberesa to commit ; for in tbe simplicity 
 of bis beart be imagined tbat be bad seduced ber. 
 Sbe sank ratber tban sat down on the deep 
 divan, and be began to take off ber veil, bonnet, 
 and mantle. Sbe allowed bim to do so, smiling 
 at bim tbe wbile witb infinite tenderness. After 
 
196 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 her hours of torturing sleeplessness, there was to 
 her something at once very bitter and very affecting 
 in the impress of the young man's coaxing. She 
 found him so affectionate, so delicately intimate, 
 so like himself, that she thought that she had 
 without doubt been mistaken as to the meaning 
 of the note, and, to rid herself immediately of 
 uncertainty, she said, in reply to his question 
 about her health : 
 
 " No, I am not ill ; but the tone of your note 
 was so strange that it has made me uneasy." 
 
 "My note?" rejoined Hubert, pressing her 
 cold hands, in order to warm them. " Ah ! it 
 was not worth while. Look here, I dare not 
 now acknowledge to you why I wrote it." 
 
 "Acknowledge it all the same," she said, with 
 an already anguish-stricken insistence, for 
 Hubert's embarrassment had just brought back 
 to her the anxiety which had caused her so much 
 suffering. 
 
 " People are so strange ! " replied the young 
 man, shaking his head. " There are times when 
 in spite of themselves they doubt what they 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 197 
 
 V hist. But first you must forgive me 
 L-ehand." 
 
 Forgive you, my angel ! " she said. " Ah ! 
 fe you too well ! Forgive you !" she repeated ; 
 these syllables, which she heard her own 
 3 uttering, echoed in an almost intolerable 
 ion through her conscience. How willingly, 
 ed, would she have had reason to forgive 
 jad of to be forgiven. " But for what ? " she 
 d, in a lower tone, which revealed the renewal 
 sr inward emotion. 
 
 For having allowed myself to be disturbed 
 a moment by an infamous calumuj^ which 
 ons who hate our love have repeated to me 
 it your life at Trouville. But what is the 
 ter ? " 
 
 hese words, and still more the tone of voice in 
 ;h they were uttered, had entered like a blade 
 Theresa's heart. If Hubert had received 
 on her arrival with those words of sus- 
 )n which men know how to devise, and every 
 i of which implies an absence of faith that 
 cipates the proofs, she might, perhaps, have 
 
igS A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 found in her woman's pride sufficient energy to 
 face the suspicion and to deny it. 
 
 But from the outset of this explanation, the 
 young man's whole attitude had displayed that 
 kind of tender and candid confidence which 
 imposes sincerity upon every soul that possesses 
 any remnant of nobility ; and in spite of her 
 weaknesses, Theresa had not been born for the 
 compromises of adultery, nor, above all, for- the 
 complications of treachery. She was one of those 
 creatures who are capable of great impulses of 
 conscience and sudden returns of generosity, and 
 who, after descending to a certain depth, say : 
 " This is debasement enough," and prefer to 
 destroy themselves altogether rather than sink 
 still lower. 
 
 Moreover, the remorse of the last few weeks 
 had brought her into that state of suffering 
 sensibility which impels to the most unreasonable 
 acts, provided that these acts bring the suffering 
 to an end. And then the unnerving of the 
 sleepless nights, increased still further by the 
 uneasiness of the stormy day, rendered it as 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 1 99 
 
 ossible for her to dissemble her emotions as it 
 jr a- panic-stricken soldier to dissemble his 
 At that moment her countenance was 
 ally thrown into confusion by the effect of 
 ,t she had just been listening to, and by the 
 3ctation of what her unconscious tormentor 
 
 going to say. 
 
 or a minute there was a silence that was 
 :e than painful to them both. The young 
 2, seated on the divan by the side of his 
 tress, was looking at her with drooping 
 lids, his mouth half open and his face death- 
 . The excessiveness of her emotion was so 
 mishingly significant that all the suspicions 
 ch had been raised and banished the day 
 3re awoke simultaneously in the mind of the 
 th. He suddenly saw abysses before him by 
 
 lightning-flash of one of those instantaneous 
 litions which sometimes illumine the whole 
 in at times of supreme emotion. 
 ' Theresa ! " he cried, terror-stricken by his own 
 ion and by the sudden horror that was seizing 
 )n him. "No, it is not true ; it is not possible — " 
 
200 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 "What ?" she said again; " speak, and I will 
 answer you." 
 
 The transition from the tender " thou" of their 
 intimacy to this "you," rendered so humble by her 
 subdued accents, completed Hubert's distraction. 
 
 " No !" he went on, rising and beginning to 
 walk about the room with an abrupt step, the 
 sound of which trampled upon the poor woman's 
 heart; "I cannot formulate that — I cannot — well, 
 yes!" he said, stopping in front of her; "I was 
 told that you were the mistress of Count de la 
 Croix-Firmin at Trouville, that it was the talk 
 of the place, that some young men had seen 
 you entering his room and kissing him, that he 
 himself had boasted of having been your lover. 
 That is what I was told, and told with such 
 persistence that for a moment I was maddened 
 by the calumny, and then I felt the morbid longing 
 to see you, to hear you only declare to me that it 
 is not true. Answer, my love, that you forgive 
 me for having doubted you, that you love me, 
 that you have loved me, that all this is nothing 
 but a hateful He." 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 201 
 
 [e had thrown himself at her feet as he said 
 se words ; he took her hands, her arms, her 
 st ; he hung to her as, when drowning, he 
 lid have caught at the body of one who had 
 )t into the water to save him. 
 It is true that I love you," she replied, in a 
 rcely audible voice. - 
 
 'And all the rest is a lie?" he besought her 
 ;ractedly. 
 
 ih ! he would have given his life at that 
 ment for a word from those lips. But the 
 3 remained mute, and upon the woman's pale 
 jeks slow, long tears began to flow, without 
 ) or sigh, as though it had been her soul 
 it was weeping thus. Did not such a silence' 
 I such tears, at such a moment, form the 
 arest, the most cruel, of all replies ? 
 'It is true, then?" he asked again, 
 ^nd as she continued silent : " But answer, 
 5wer, answer," he went on, with a frightful 
 lence, which wrung from those lips — at the 
 •ners of which the slow tears were still 
 ^ing — a " Yes " so feeble that he could 
 
^02 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 scarcely hear it ; and yet he was destined to 
 hear it, for ever ! 
 
 He leaped up, and cast his eyes wildly around 
 him. Some weapons hung on the walls. A 
 temptation seized upon the soldier's son to 
 mangle this woman with one of those shining 
 blades ; and so strong was it that he recoiled. 
 He looked again at that face, upon which the 
 same tears were flowing freely. He uttered that 
 •"Ah!" of agony — that cry, as of an animal 
 Wounded unto death, which is drawn forth by 
 a sight of horror; and as though he were afraid 
 of everything— of the sight before him — of the 
 walls — of this woman — of himself — he fled from 
 the room and the house, bare-headed and with 
 soul distraught. He had been strong enough 
 to feel that in five minutes he would have 
 become a murderer. 
 
 He fled, whither ? how ? by what routes ? He 
 never knew with clearness what he had done that 
 day. On the morrow he recollected, because he 
 had the palpable proof of it before him, that once 
 he had caught sight of his haggard face and wind- 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 203 
 
 blown hair in the glass of a shop window, and that, 
 with an odd survival of carefulness about his dress, 
 he had entered a shop to buy a hat. Then he had 
 walked straight before him, passing through innu- 
 merable Paris districts. Houses succeeded houses 
 indefinitely. At one time he was in the country of 
 the suburbs. The storm burst, and he had been- 
 able to take shelter under a railway-bridge. How 
 long did he remain thus? The rain fell in 
 torrents. He was leaning against one of the 
 walls of the bridge. Trains passed at intervals, 
 shaking all the stones. 
 
 The rain ceased. He resumed his walk, 
 splashing through the puddles of water, without 
 food since the morning, and heedless of his fast. 
 The automatic movement of his body was neces- 
 sary to him that he might not founder in madnesp, 
 and instinctively he walked on. The monstrous 
 thing which he had perceived through the shock 
 of a terrible dread was there before his eyes ; he 
 could see it ; he knew it to be real, and he did 
 not understand it. He was Uke a crushed man. 
 He experienced a sensation so intolerable that it 
 
204 A CKUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 had even ceased to be pain, with such complete- 
 ness did it suppress the powers of his being and 
 overwhebn them. Evening was coming on. He 
 found himself again on the road towards home, 
 guided to it by the mechanical impulse which 
 brings back the bleeding animal in the direction 
 of its den. About ten o'clock he rang at the 
 door of the house in the Eue Vaneau. 
 
 "Nothing has happened to you, sir?" asked 
 the doorkeeper ; "the ladies were so anxious " 
 
 " Let them know that I have come in," said the 
 young man, " but that I am unwell and wish to be 
 alone, absolutely alone, Firmin; you understand." 
 
 The tone in which these words were uttered 
 cut short all questions on the lips of the old 
 servant. He followed Hubert, apparently dazed 
 by the furious lightning which he had just per- 
 ceived in the eyes of his young master and by 
 the disorder of his dress. He saw him cross the 
 hall and enter the pavilion, and went up himself 
 to the drawing-room to give his mistress the 
 strange message with which he was charged. 
 The mother had expected her son at luncheon. 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 205 
 
 ibert had not come in. Although he had 
 ^er before failed to appear without giving her 
 iicej she had striven not to be too anxious about 
 The afternoon passed without news, and 
 :n the dinner-hour struck. Still no news. 
 ' Mamma," Madame Liauran said to Madame 
 5tel, "some misfortune has happened. Who 
 I tell whither despair has led him ? " 
 ' He has been detained by friends," the old 
 y replied, concealing her own in order to 
 itrol her daughter's anxiety. 
 iVhen the door opened at ten o'clock, Madame 
 luran, with her quickness of hearing, caught 
 
 sound from the furthest end of the drawing- 
 m, and said to her mother and to Count 
 Uy, who had been informed since dinner ; "It 
 Hubert." 
 /Vhen Firmin repeated the young man's words 
 
 invalid exclaimed : " I must speak to him." 
 i.nd she sat upright, as though forgetting that 
 
 was no longer able to walk. 
 ' The Count will go to him," said Madame 
 itel, " and bring him back to us." 
 
206 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 At the end of ten minutes Scilly returned, but 
 alone. He had knocked at the door, and then 
 tried to open it. It was double-locked. He had 
 called Hubert several times, and the latter at last 
 entreated him to leave him. 
 
 "And not a word for us?" asked Madame 
 Liauran. 
 
 "Not a word," replied the General. 
 
 " What have we done?" rejoined the mother. 
 "What good will it do me to have separated him 
 from this woman if I have lost his heart ?" 
 
 "To-morrow," replied Scilly, "you will see 
 him returning to you more tender than ever. 
 Just at first, it is too much for you. He has been 
 seeking proofs for what we have told him, and he 
 has found them. This is the explanation of his 
 absence and his behaviour." 
 
 "And he has not come to grieve with me !" 
 said the mother. "Alas ! can it be that I have 
 loved him for myself alone, while believing that 
 I loved him for .his own sake ? Will j^ou ring,. 
 General, for them to take me to my room? " 
 
 And when the easy chair, which she never left 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 207 
 
 now, had been wheeled into the next room, and 
 she was in bed : 
 
 " Mamma," she said to Madame Castel, "draw 
 back the cm-tain that I may look at his win- 
 dows." 
 
 Then, as Hubert had not closed his shutters^ 
 and his shadow could be seen passing to and fro, 
 "Ah! mamma," she said again, "why do 
 children grow up ? Formerly, he never had a 
 trouble that he did not come and cry over it on 
 my shoulder, as I do on yours, and now " 
 
 " Now he is as unreasonable as his mother," 
 said the old lady, who had scarcely spoken during 
 the whole evening, and who, printing a kiss 
 upon her daughter's hair, silenced her by letting 
 fall these words, which revealed her own martyr- 
 dom : " My heart aches for you both." 
 
208 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 In the morning, when Madame Liauran sent 
 to ask for her son, the latter replied that he 
 would be down for luncheon. He appeared, in 
 fact, at noon. His mother and he exchanged 
 merely a look, and she at once understood the 
 extent of the suffering which he had undergone, 
 simply by the kind of shiver with which he was 
 affected on seeing her again. She was associated 
 with this suffering as its occasion, if not its 
 cause, and he could never forget the fact. His 
 eyes had something so particularly distant in theni^ 
 and his mouth so close a curve of lip, his 
 whole face was so expressive of a determination 
 to permit no explanation of any kind, that 
 neither Madame Liauran nor Madame Castel 
 ventured to question him. 
 
 For a year past these three persons had had 
 many silent meals in the antiquely-wainscoted 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 209 
 
 ling-room — an apartment so spacious as to 
 bke the round table placed in the centre appear 
 lall. But all three had never been sensible 
 an impression, as they were on this day, that, 
 3n when speaking to one another, there would 
 aceforth be a silence between them impossible 
 break, something which could not be put into 
 rds, and which, for a very long time, would 
 ate a background of muteness, even behind 
 jir most cordial expansions, 
 ifter luncheon, when Hubert, who had scarcely 
 iched the various dishes, took the handle of the 
 Dr, in order to leave the little drawing-room in 
 ich he had remained for scarcely five minutes, 
 mother felt a timid and almost repentant desire 
 ask his forgiveness for the pain that she 
 d on his taciturn countenance. 
 ' Hubert ? " she said. 
 ' Mamma ? " he replied, turning round. 
 ' You feel quite well to-day? " she asked. 
 ' Quite well," he replied in a blank tone, such 
 )ne as immediately suppresses all possibility of 
 versation ; and he added : "I shall be 
 ictual at dinner-time this evening." 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 The young man was now singularly pre- 
 occupied. After a night of torture, so continu- 
 ously keen that he could not remember having 
 ever undergone anything like it, he had become 
 master of himself again. He had passed through 
 the first crisis of his grief, a crisis after which a 
 man ceases to die from despair, because he has 
 really reached the deepest depth of sorrow. 
 Then he had recovered that momentary calm 
 which follows upon prodigious deperditions of 
 nervous energy, and had been able to think. It 
 was then that he had been seized with anxiety 
 respecting Madame de Sauve — an anxiety which 
 was devoid of tenderness, for at this moment, 
 after the assault of grief which he had just 
 sustained, his soul was dried up, his inward 
 lethargy was absolute, all capacity for feeling was 
 gone. 
 
 But he had suddenly remembered that he had 
 left Theresa in the little ground floor apartment 
 in Avenue Friedland, and his imagination dared 
 not form any conjectures upon what had taken 
 place after his departure. It was just at the 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 211 
 
 <end of luncheon that this thought had assailed 
 
 him, and, over and above his main sorrow, it had 
 
 immediately caused him a shiver of nervous 
 
 terror — the only emotion of vsrhich he wat 
 
 •capable: 
 
 He went straight from the Eue Vaneau to the 
 
 Avenue, and when he found himself in front of 
 
 "the house he dared not enter, although he had 
 
 -the key in his hand. He called the doorkeeper, 
 
 an ugly individual to whom he could never speak 
 
 Tvithout repugnance, so hateful to him was his 
 
 brazen, glabrous face, his servile and, at the same 
 
 i;ime, insolent eye, and the tone which he 
 
 .assumed as a generously-paid accomplice. 
 
 "I beg a thousand pardons, sir," said this man, 
 «ven before Hubert had questioned him. " I did 
 not know that the lady was still there. I had 
 seen you go out, sir, and in the afternoon I went 
 in to give a look round the place, as I do every 
 •day, and found the lady sitting on the sofa. She 
 seemed to be in great pain. Is she better to- 
 ^ay, sir?" he added. 
 
 " She is very well," rephed Hubert, and as he 
 
212 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 suddenly felt a strong repugnance to entering the 
 apartments, and on the other hand wished at all 
 costs to avoid giving this man, for whom he had 
 such an antipathy, any grounds for suspecting 
 the drama in his life, he replied, "I have come 
 to settle your bill. I am going on a journey." 
 
 " But you have already paid me, sir, at the 
 beginning of the month," said the other. 
 
 " I may be away for a long time," said Hubert' 
 drawing a bank-note from his pocket-book. ' ' You 
 will put this down to the account." 
 
 "You are not coming in, sir?" resumed the 
 doorkeeper. 
 
 " No," said Hubert, and he went away, saying 
 to himself, " I am a simpleton. Women of that 
 sort don't kill themselves !" 
 
 Women of that sort ! The phrase, which had 
 occurred naturally to him, the youth hitherto so 
 ingenuous, so gentle, and so refined, was a fitting 
 translation of the kind of feeling which now held 
 the ascendancy over him, and which lasted for 
 several days. It was a boundless disgust, a 
 thorough nausea; but so complete and so profound 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 213 
 
 was it, that it left no room in his heart for 
 anything else. He could not even have told 
 whether he was suffering, so entirely did contempt 
 absorb all the living energies of his being. 
 
 He perceived the woman whom he had idolised 
 so religiously and with so noble a fervour, 
 plunged, as it were, and wallowing in such an 
 abyss of uncleanness, that he felt as though by 
 loving her he had himself been rolling in the mire. 
 This was the physical sight of which he was 
 now the victim from one end of the day to the 
 other, and to such a degree that he was unable 
 to interpret it or form any hypothesis con- 
 cerning Theresa's character. The sight of it 
 was inflicted upon him vsdth a material exact- 
 ness which bordered on hallucination. Yes, he 
 could see the act, and the act alone, without 
 having strength enough to shake off the hideous, 
 besetting fellowship. It paralysed him with 
 horror, and he could think of nothing else. 
 
 A sort of mibroken mirage showed him the 
 abominable pollution of his mistress's prostitu- 
 tion, and, just as a man attacked by jaundice 
 
214 A CBUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 looks at all objects through bile-infected eyes, 
 so it was, through his disgust, that he viewed, 
 the whole of life. His soul was as though 
 saturated with bitterness, and yet was frightfully 
 dry. There was not an impression that was not 
 transformed in him into this perception of foulness, 
 and melancholy. 
 
 He rose, and spent the morning among his. 
 books, opening but not reading them. He 
 lunched, and the sight of his mother irritated, 
 instead of softening him. He went back to his- 
 room, and resumed the dull idleness of th& 
 morning. He dined, and then, immediately 
 after dinner, left the drawing-room, so as not. 
 to encounter either the General or his cousin,, 
 whose presence was intolerable to him. 
 
 At night he lay awake, continuing to see the 
 accursed scene with the same impossibility of 
 arriving at relaxation of grief. If he feU asleep,, 
 he had every second time to endure the night- 
 mare of this same vision. As he had no concep- 
 tion of the physiognomy of the man with whom 
 his mistress had deceived him, there rose up in 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 215 
 
 his morbid sleep horrible dreams wherein all 
 kinds of different faces were mingled together. 
 The distress which such imagining caused him 
 would awake him. His body would be bathed in 
 sweat, he could feel a rending of the bosom as 
 though his quick-beating heart were about to 
 leave its place, and with this suffering there was, 
 as before, such complete prostration of his affec- 
 tionate powers, that he was not even anxious to 
 know what had become of Theresa. 
 
 " After all," he said to himself one morning as 
 he was getting up, " I lived well enough before I 
 knew her ! I have only to put myself again in 
 thought into the condition in which I was before 
 that 12th of October." He had an exact recollec- 
 tion of the date. " It was scarcely more than a 
 year ago ; I was so tranqiiil then ! I have had an 
 evil dream, that is all. But I must destroy every- 
 thing that might bring back the memory of it 
 to me." 
 
 He sat down before his writing table after 
 putting fresh wood upon the fire to increase the 
 blaze, and double-locking the door. Involuntarily, 
 
2l5 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 ae recollected that he used so to act formerly, 
 ivhen he wished to see the precious treasure of 
 lis love-reUcs again. He opened the drawer in 
 yhich the treasure was hidden : it consisted of 
 I, black morocco box, on which were entwined 
 wo initial letters— a "T." and an " H." The- 
 esa and he had exchanged two of these boxes, 
 o keep their letters in them. Upon the one 
 vhich he had given to his mistress he had 
 laused Theresa's name to be autographed in 
 ull, instead of the two initials. 
 
 "What a child I was!" he thought, as he 
 ecoUected the thousand little weaknesses of 
 his order in which he had indulged. There 
 3 always puerility, indeed, in extreme weak- 
 lesses ; but it is on the day when we are on 
 he road to hardness of heart that we think so. 
 
 Beside this box lay two objects which Hubert 
 lad thrown there on the evening of the same 
 [ay on which he had learnt his mistress's 
 reachery : one was his ring, and the other a 
 lender gold chain, to which hung a tiny key. 
 le took the little hoop in his hand, and, in 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 217 
 
 spite of himself, looked at the inner surface. 
 Theresa had had a star engraved there, with 
 the date of their stay at Folkestone. This 
 simple token suddenly called up before Hubert 
 an indefinite perspective of reminiscences ; he 
 could again see the door of the hotel, the 
 staircase with its red carpet, the drawing- 
 room in which they had dined, and the waiter 
 who had waited on them, with his face of 
 Britannic respectability, his shaven lip, and his 
 over-long chin. He could hear him say: "I 
 beg your pardon," and Theresa's smile appeared 
 before him. What languishment swam then 
 in her eyes — those eyes, whose green-grey shade 
 was at such moments completely liquid — com- 
 pletely bathed with an entire abandonment of 
 the inmost nature ! — those eyes, wherein slum- 
 bered a sleep which seemed to invite you to be 
 its dream ! 
 
 Hubert mechanically slipped the ring upon his 
 finger, and then flung it almost angrily into the 
 drawer, causing the metal to rebound against the 
 wood. To open the box it was necessary to 
 
21 8 A CKUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 handle the chain. It was an old chain which he 
 had from Theresa. He had given her the 
 bracelet with the key of the apartments attached 
 to it, and she had given him this chainlet that he 
 might carry the key of the box at his neck. He 
 had worn this scapulary of love for months and 
 months, and often had he felt beneath his shirt 
 for the tiny trinket to hurt himself a little by 
 pressing it against his breast, and thus remind 
 himself of the tender mystery of his dear 
 happiness. 
 
 How far away to-day was all this intoxication, 
 ah ! how far and how lost in the abyss of the 
 past, whence there issues so frightful an odour of 
 death ! When he had raised the lid of the box 
 he leaned upon his elbow, and, with his forehead 
 in his hand, gazed upon what was left of his 
 happiness, the few nothings so perfectly insignifi- 
 cant to anyone else, but so full of soul to him : 
 an embroidered handkerchief, a glove, a veil, a 
 bundle of letters, a bundle of little blue notes, 
 placed within one another, and forming as it 
 were a tiny book of tenderness. And the 
 
A OEUEL ENIGMA. 2 1 9. 
 
 envelopes of the letters had been opened so 
 carefully, and the paper of the blue notes torn 
 with such precision. The slightest details re- 
 minded Hubert of the scruples of loving piety 
 which he had felt for everything that came from 
 his mistress. 
 
 Beneath the letters and blue note's there was- 
 still a likeness of her, representing her in the 
 costume which she had worn at Folkestone : a 
 plain, close-fitting cloth jacket, and a projecting 
 hat which cast a slight shadow upon the upper 
 part of the face. She had had this portrait taken 
 for Hubert alone, and, when giving it, she had 
 said to him : 
 
 "I thought so much of ourselves while I was- 
 sitting. If you knew how much this likeness- 
 loves you ! " 
 
 And Hubert felt himself really loved by it. It. 
 seemed to him that from the oval face, the 
 slender lips, and the dream-bathed eyes, thera 
 proceeded a tender effluence which encompassed 
 him, and it was there that, by the side of the 
 vision of perfidy, there began to rise afresh the- 
 
220 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 ■vision of Theresa's love. He knew as clearly 
 from the memories of this woman that she had 
 loved, and still loved him, as he knew from her 
 own confession that she had betrayed him. He 
 saw her again as he had left her on the sofa in 
 their retreat, with her face convulsed, and, 
 above all, her tears — ah, what tears ! For the 
 first time since the fatal hour he perceived the 
 nobility with which she had acknowledged her 
 fault, when it was so easy for her to speak falsely, 
 and he suddenly uttered a cry which hitherto 
 had not come to him through his days of parched 
 and passionate pain : 
 
 "But why? why?" 
 
 Yes, why ? why ? This anguish of a com- 
 pletely moral order henceforward accompanied 
 the anguish of physical sight. Hubert began to 
 think, not only about his trouble, but about the 
 cause of his trouble. To burn these letters, to 
 tear this likeness, to break and throw away the 
 chain and ring, to destroy this last remnant of 
 his love, would have been as impossible to him 
 as to rend with steel his mistress's quivering 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 221 
 
 body. These objects were living persons with 
 looks, caresses, pantings, voices. He closed 
 the drawer, unable any longer to endure the 
 presence of these things which to him seemed 
 made of the very substance of his heart. 
 
 He threw himself upon the couch and lost 
 himself in the gulf of his reflection. Yes, Theresa 
 had loved him, and Theresa loved him still. 
 There are tears, embraces, and a warmth of soul 
 which do not lie. She loved him and she had 
 betrayed him ! With his own name in her 
 heart she had given herself to another, less than 
 six weeks after leaving him ! But why ? why ? 
 Driven by what force? Led away by what 
 dizziness ? Overwhelmed by what intoxication ? 
 "What was the nature — not of women of that 
 sort now, for he had no longer any such fierceness 
 of thought — but of woman, that so monstrous an 
 action should be barely possible to her ? Of 
 what flesh was she formed, this deceiving 
 creature, that with all the appearances and all 
 the realities of love, it was not possible to place 
 more reliance upon her than upon water. 
 
^22 A CEUBIi ENIGMA. 
 
 How soft they were, those woman's hands, 
 Taow loyal they seemed ! but to entrust o 
 heart to them, believing in a mutual affeci 
 was the most foolish of follies ! She sn 
 upon you, and weeps for you, and already 
 has noticed a passer-by, to whom, if he an 
 her for an hour, she will sacrifice aU 3 
 tenderness, with flame in her eyes and grace 
 ter lips ! Ah ! why ? why ? Yet what ti 
 can there be in the world if even love is not tr 
 And what love? Hubert was now thorou^ 
 investigating his past ; he conscientiously 
 amined his attachment to Theresa, and he 
 laimself the justice to acknowledge that for mon 
 past he had not had a thought that was not 
 her. He had certainly made mistakes, but t' 
 had always been for her, and even at this h 
 he could not repent them. 
 
 He would have found relief for all his pain 
 kneeling before the priest who had trained h 
 and saying: "Father, I have sinned." But : 
 it was beyond his power to regret the actions 
 which Theresa, his Theresa, had been involv 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 22$ 
 
 Tes, he had idolised her with unswerving fervour, 
 and it was his first love, and it would be the last, 
 •or at least he thought so, and he had shown her 
 his confidence in the continuance of their feelings 
 vfith incalculable ingenuousness. Nothing of all 
 this had had suf&cient influence over her to 
 .arrest her at the moment when she committed 
 her infamy, — with the same body. 
 
 He could suddenly breathe its aroma, and 
 again feel its impression over his whole being; 
 then there was a resurrection of jealousy, painful 
 «ven to torture, and continually he harped on 
 "the "why? why?" — in despair, and pitiful, like 
 so many before him, from clashing against the 
 unanswerable riddle of a woman's soul, guilty 
 once, guilty again, guilty even to her grey hairs 
 .and to her death itself. 
 
 This new form of grief lasted for days and days 
 .afterwards. The young man was giving free rein 
 within himself to a new feeling of which he had 
 •never had a suspicion hitherto, and which he was 
 henceforward to endure continually — mistrust. 
 Prom his earliest years he had lived with a 
 
224 ^ CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 complete faith in the appearances which s 
 rounded him. He had believed in his motl 
 He had believed in God. He had believed 
 the sincerity of every word and caress. Abi 
 all, he had believed in Theresa de Sauve. 
 had assimilated her in thought with the rest 
 his life. All was truth' around him; tl 
 Theresa's love had appealed to him as a supre 
 truth, and now, by a mental revolution wh 
 betrayed the primitive flaw in his education, 
 was assimilating all the rest of his life with t 
 woman of falsehood. 
 
 His mother had accustomed him to hs 
 nothing to say to scepticism. This is probal 
 the surest method of causing the first decepti 
 to transform the too implicit believer into 
 absolute negator. It is never well to expect mu 
 from men or from nature, for the former are w: 
 animals scantily masked with decorum ; whi 
 as for the latter, her apparent harmony is t 
 result of an injustice which knows no remissio 
 To preserve the ideal within us until death at Is 
 releases us from the dangerous slavery to othe 
 
A OEUEL ENIGMA. 225 
 
 and to ourselves, we must early habituate our- 
 selves to regard the universe of moral beauty as 
 the opium-smoker regards the dreams of his 
 intoxication. Their charm consists in the fact 
 that they are dreams, and consequently corres- 
 pond to nothing that is real. 
 
 Hubert, quite on the contrary, was so accus- 
 tomed to move his intellect in one piece that he 
 was unable to doubt or to believe by halves. If 
 Theresa had lied to him why should not everyone 
 do the same ? This idea did not frame itself in 
 an abstract form, nor did he arrive at it by the 
 aid of reasoning : it was the substitution of one 
 mode of feeling for another. During this cruel 
 period he found himself suspecting Theresa in 
 their common past. 
 
 He asked himself whether her betrayal at 
 Trouville had been the first, whether she had 
 not had another lover than himself at the time of 
 their most infatuated passion. This woman's 
 perfidy was corrupting his very recollections. It 
 was doing worse. Under this misanthropical 
 influence he committed the greatest of moral 
 
226 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 crimes: he doubted his mother's tenderness. 
 Yes, in Madame Liauran's passionate affection 
 the unhappy fellow could see nothing but jealous 
 egotism. 
 
 " If she really loved me," he said to himself, 
 " she would not have told me what she did." 
 
 Thus, he found himself in that state of feeling 
 to which popular language has given the expres- 
 sive name of disenchantment. He had seen the 
 last of the beauty of the human soul, and he was 
 beginning to prove its misery, and always he fell 
 back upon this question as upon the point of a 
 sword : 
 
 "But why? why?" 
 
 And he sifted Theresa's character without 
 meeting with any reply. He might as well have 
 asked why Theresa had senses as well as a 
 heart, and why at certain times there was set 
 up, as with men, a divorce between the 
 longings of her heart and the tyranny of 
 her senses. Those debauchees in whom liber- 
 tinism has not killed sentimentality know the 
 secret of these divorces ; but Hubert was not a 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 227 
 
 debauchee. He must remain pure even in his 
 despair, and it never occurred to him to seek 
 forgetfulness of his trouble in the intoxication of 
 loveless kisses. He was still ignorant of venal 
 and consoling alcoves — where men lose indeed 
 their regrets, but at the cost of losing their 
 dreams. 
 
 And yet, since he was young, and since, in his 
 intimacy with Theresa, he had made a habit of 
 the most ardent pleasure — pleasure which exalts 
 both mind and body in divine communion — 
 he began, after some weeks of these sorrows and 
 reflections, to feel a dim desire, an unacknowledged 
 appetite for this woman of whom he wished to 
 know nothing more, whom he mast regard as 
 dead, and whom he so utterly despised. 
 
 This strange and unconscious return towards 
 the delights of his love, but a retm-n no longer 
 ennobled by any ideal, manifested itself in a 
 cm-iosity such as those are which issue from the 
 unfathomable depths of our being. He felt a 
 sickly longing to see with his own eyes this man 
 who had been Theresa's lover, this La Croix- 
 
228 A CBUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 Pirmin, to whom his mistress had given herself^ 
 and in whose arms she had quivered with volup- 
 tuousness as in his own. To a spiritual director 
 who had traced, period by period, the ravage- 
 wrought in this soul by the corrupt leaven inocu- 
 lated by Theresa's betrayal, such curiosity would 
 doubtless have appeared the most decisive symp- 
 tom of a metamorphosis in this youth who had 
 grown up amid all modesty. Was it jiot the 
 transition from that absolute horror of evil whict 
 is the torment and glory of virgin natures^ to- 
 that kind of still more frightful latt^ag^jfiJiP^hich 
 borders so closely upon depravity ? ; 
 
 But it was especially that frightful facility of 
 imagination about the impurity of a desired 
 woman, which, by one of the saddest laws of 
 our nature, brings it to pass that proof of infi- 
 delity, while degrading the lover, and dishonouring 
 the mistress, so frequently kindles love. It is- 
 probable that, in such cases, the conception of 
 the perfidy acts like an infamous picture, and 
 that this is the explanation of those fits of 
 sensuality which occur amid the hatred felt, and 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 229 
 
 Avhich astonish the moralist in certain law-suits 
 founded upon the dramas of jealousy. 
 
 Poor Hubert was certainly not one to harbour 
 -such base instincts ; and yet his curiosity to 
 become acquainted with his Trouville rival was 
 already a very unhealthy one. Its nature was 
 the same as that of Theresa's fault. It is the 
 obscure, indestructible recollection of the flesh 
 which operates without the knowledge of the 
 being who is under its influence. The memory 
 -of all the caresses given and received since the 
 night at Folkestone counted for something in this 
 -desire to feast his eyes on the real existence of 
 ihe hated man. It became something so sharp 
 ,and severe that after struggling for a long time, 
 and with the feeling that he was lowering himself 
 strangely, Hubert could resist no longer, and 
 he employed the following almost childish 
 procedure, for the realisation of his singular 
 desire. 
 
 He calculated that La Croix-Firmin must 
 helong to a fashionable club, and it was not long 
 Joefore he had discovered his name and address 
 
230 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 in the year-book of such a one. It was to this 
 club that he had recourse in order to ascertain 
 whether the individual in question was in Paris. 
 The reply was in the affirmative. Hubert recon- 
 noitred the Eue La Peyrouse, in which his 
 rival lived, and he immediately satisfied himself 
 that by standing on the footpath of one of the 
 Places intersected by this street, he could watch 
 the house, which was one of two stories in 
 height, and which certainly contained but a very 
 small number of tenants. 
 
 He had said to himself that he would take 
 up a position there one morning, and wait 
 until he saw some man come out who appeared 
 to be he whom he sought. He would then 
 question the porter, under some pretext or 
 other, and would, doubtless, thus receive infor- 
 mation. It was a method of primitive simpli- 
 city, and one in which all those who in their 
 youth have had a passionate adoration for some 
 celebrated writer will recognise the ingenuous- 
 ness of the strategems which they employed to 
 see their hero. If this plan failed, Hubert 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 23 1 
 
 could fall back npon an application to one of 
 those whom he knew among the members of the 
 club ; but he felt a great repugnance to taking 
 such a step. 
 
 Accordingly he found himself on the spot at 
 nine o'clock one cold December morning. The 
 weather was dry and clear, the sky of a pale 
 blue, and the half - fashionable, half - exotic 
 quarter given over to the traffic of its crowd of 
 tradesmen and grooms. Hubert saw emerge 
 successively from the house which he was exam- 
 ining, some servants, an old lady, a little boy 
 followed by an abbe, and finally, at about half- 
 past eleven, a man who was still young, of me- 
 dium height, fashionably dressed, slender and 
 strong in his otter-lined overcoat. 
 
 This man was just buttoning up his collar as 
 he proceeded straight in Hubert's direction. The 
 latter also advanced, and brushed past the 
 stranger. He saw a somewhat heavy profile, 
 a moustache of the colour of burnished gold, 
 a complexion already coloured by the cold, and 
 the dull eye of a hard liver who has gone late to 
 
232 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 bed, after a night spent at the gaming table or 
 elsewhere. An inexpressible pain at his heart 
 caused the jealous lover to hasten to the house. 
 
 " Monsieur de la Croix-Firmin ? " he asked. 
 
 " The Count is not at home," replied the door- 
 keeper. 
 
 " But he made an appointment with me for 
 half-past eleven, and I am punctual," said Hubert, 
 drawing out his watch; "has he long gone 
 out?" 
 
 " No, sir ; you ought to have met him. The 
 Count was here five minutes ago ; he cannot have 
 turned the corner." 
 
 Hubert had learnt what he wanted. He 
 hurried in the direction of the place where he 
 had passed La Croix-Firmin, and, after a few 
 paces he saw him again, about to follow the 
 footpath of the Avenue towards the Arc de 
 Triomphe. It was he, then ! Hubert followed 
 him slowly at a little distance, and watched him 
 with a sort of devouring anguish. He saw him 
 walking daintily along, with a litheness that was 
 at once refined and strong. He remembered 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 233 
 
 "what had taken place at Trouville, and every one 
 •of La Croix-Firmin's movements revived the 
 physical vision. 
 
 Hubert compared himself mentally, frail and 
 slight as he was, with the sturdy, haughty fellow, 
 who, half a head taller than himself, was thus 
 passing along beneath the beautiful sky of this 
 winter's morning, with a step which spoke the 
 •certainty of strength, and holding his stick by 
 the middle, in the English fashion, at some 
 •distance from his body. The comparison sufEi- 
 ■ciently explained the determining cause of 
 Theresa's fault, and for the first time the young 
 man perceived those deadly causes in their 
 genuine brutishness. " Ah ! the why ! The 
 why ! There it is ! " he thought, as, with painful 
 envy, he observed this man's animal energy. His 
 first emotion was too bitter for him, and the 
 unhappy fellow was about to give up his pursuit 
 vyhen he saw La Croix-Firmin get into a cab. 
 He hailed one himself. 
 
 " Follow that vehicle," he said to the driver. 
 
 The thought that his enemy was going to see 
 
34 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 ^'heresa had just restored all Hubert's frenzy. 
 I'rom time to time he leaned out of the window 
 f his four-wheeler, and could see the one which 
 onveyed his rival driving along. This cab, 
 ^hich was of a yellow colour, went down the 
 Ihamps Elysees, passed along the Rue Eoyale, 
 ntered the Rue Saint Honore, and then stopped 
 1 front of the Cafe-Voisin. La Croix-Firmin was 
 lerely going out to breakfast. Hubert could not 
 spress a smile at the pitiful result of his curiosity, 
 rlechanically he also entered the cafe. The 
 oung Count was already seated at a table with 
 5V0 friends, who had been waiting for him. 
 At the other extremity of the hall there was a 
 ingle table unoccupied, at which Hubert placed 
 imself. From here he was able, not, indeed, to 
 ear the conversation of the three guests — the 
 oise in the restaurant was too loud for that — 
 ut to study the physiognomy of the man whom 
 e detested. He ordered his own meal at random, 
 nd sank into a kind of analysis known to those 
 bservers from taste or by profession, who will 
 inter a theatre, a smoking-room, or a railway 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 235 
 
 carriage with the sole desire of observing the 
 workings of human physiology, and of tracing 
 the instinctive manifestations of temperament in 
 gesture, look, sound of breathing, or posture. It 
 sometimes happened, indeed, that a raising of the 
 voice would cause a fragmentary sentence to 
 reach Hubert ; but he paid no heed to it, sunk 
 as he was in the contemplation of the man 
 himself, whom he saw almost in front of him, 
 with his bold eyes, his rather short neck, and 
 his strong jaws. 
 
 When La Croix-Firmin had entered, his com- 
 plexion had looked worn and pimply ; but when 
 breakfast was half over the work of digestion 
 began to send an influx of blood into his face. 
 He ate much and steadily, with potent slowness. 
 He laughed loudly. His hands, holding his knife 
 and fork, were strong, and displayed two rings. 
 His forehead, which was shown in all its narrow- 
 ness by his short curls, could never have been lit 
 up by a flame of thought. All this formed a 
 whole which, even in Hubert's hostile eyes, was 
 not devoid of a manly, healthy beauty ; but it 
 
236 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 was the brutish beauty of a being of flesh and 
 blood, as to whom it was impossible for a 
 person of refinement to entertain an illusion 
 for an hour. To say of a woman that she had 
 given herself to this man was to say that she had 
 yielded to an instinct of a wholly physical order. 
 
 The more Hubert identified himself by obser- 
 vation with this temperament, the clearer did 
 this become to him. He was interpreting 
 Theresa's nature better at this moment than 
 he had ever done before. He grasped its am- 
 biguousness with frightful certainty, and it was 
 then that there rose up within him the saddest, 
 but at the same time the noblest, feeling that 
 he had entertained since his accident, the only 
 •one truly worthy of what his soul had formerly 
 been, that one which, in the presence of woman's 
 perfidy, is man's preservation from complete ruin 
 of heart : — pity. 
 
 An emotion of infinite bitterness and melan- 
 ■choly combined came upon him at the thought 
 that the charming creature whom he had known, 
 his dear silent one, as he used to call her, she 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 237' 
 
 who had shown herself possessed of such dehcate 
 refinement in the art of pleasing him, should 
 have surrendered herself to the caresses of this- 
 man. 
 
 He suddenly recollected the tears of the night 
 at Folkestone, and the tears, also, at their last 
 interview ; and, as though he had at last under- 
 stood their meaning, he could find within him 
 but a single utterance, which he whispered thera 
 in the restaurant filled with the smoke of cigars, 
 then beneath the leafless trees of the Tuileries, 
 then in the soHtude of his own room in the 
 Eue Vaneau — a single utterance, but one filled 
 with the perception of the degrading fatalities- 
 of his life : 
 
 " What misery ! My God, what misery ! " 
 
238 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 CHAPTEE XI. 
 
 What was Theresa doing while he was 
 suffering thus, and why did she afford him no 
 sign of her existence ? Although the young man 
 had forbidden himself to think about her, he 
 thought of her nevertheless, and this question 
 came to add anxiety to his other anguish. 
 Contradictory hypotheses passed in turns 
 through his mind. Had Theresa died of 
 remorse? Had she ceased to love him? Had 
 she kept La Croix-Firmin for her lover ? Was 
 she pursuing a fresh intrigue. Everything 
 seemed possible to Hubert, the worst as well as 
 the best, on the part of this woman whom he 
 had learned to be so strangely compounded of 
 refinement and libertinism, of treachery and 
 nobility. He then ascertained by the heart- 
 burning caused him by some of his hypotheses, 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 239 
 
 by what living fibres he still clung to this being 
 from whom he wished himself released. 
 
 He was on the point of taking some steps in 
 order at least to learn what the inclinations of 
 her own soul were at that moment; then he 
 despised himself for the weakness, and, to 
 strengthen himself, he repeated some verses 
 which were in correspondence with his condition 
 of mind. He found them, by a strange irony of 
 destiny which he did not suspect, in the single 
 collection of poetry by Alfred Fanieres. This 
 volume, which had been reprinted after the poet's 
 novels had made him celebrated, bore a title which 
 was in itself a revelation of youthfulness : "Early 
 Pride." Hubert had dined, in company with 
 the writer, at Madame de Sauve's house without 
 suspecting what the poor woman felt at being 
 obliged by her husband to receive at her table 
 the lover whom she idolised and the man with 
 whom she had broken. Fanieres had talked 
 cleverly that evening, and it was after that dinner 
 that the young man, with very natural curiosity, 
 had obtained the book of verse at a bookseller's. 
 
240 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 The poem which pleased him just now was a, 
 
 sonnet, somewhat pretentiously called " Tender 
 
 Cruelty " :— 
 
 " Be still, my heart, but speak thou forth fierce pride, 
 And tell me that my sway no share must know, 
 Nor can I pardon her the grievous blow 
 Who knew another's couch although my bride. 
 At least, I've seen her as she vainly tried, 
 Her soul in tears dissolved, and crouching low. 
 To find the look my eyes could yet forego ; 
 And, kingly silent, I have turned aside. 
 She knew not that, when grief distraught, were heard 
 Her plaintive tones entreat a single word, 
 I suffered- even as she, and loved her still. 
 In silence only, outraged man is strong ; 
 For vengeance tells a tale of secret ill, 
 And I would be believed above aU wrong." 
 
 " Yes," said Hubert to himself, "he is right: 
 silence — " 
 
 The verses moved him childishly, as happens, 
 with ordinary readers of poetry, who require a. 
 literary work merely to excite or to soothe the 
 inward wound. 
 
 "Silence . . "he resumed. "Do we speak to 
 one that is dead ? Well, Theresa is dead to me." 
 
 Thus expressing himself in the solitude of his- 
 study, where he now spent nearly all his days. 
 
A CEUBIi ENIGMA. 24! 
 
 Hubert had no ill-will remaining against his 
 mistress. As no new fact came to rouse fresh 
 feelings within him, the old ones, which had 
 ■existed before the betrayal, reappeared. The 
 images of his remembrances abounded within 
 him, nor did he drive them away, and under 
 "their influence his anger little by little became 
 something abstract, rational, and, so to speak, 
 expedient in his eyes ; but in reality he had 
 never loved this woman so much as he did 
 now when he believed himself sure of never 
 seeing her again. 
 
 He loved her, in fact, as though she were dead ; 
 but who does not know that is the most inde- 
 structible and frantic tenderness ? When irrevo- 
 cable separation has not primarily resulted in the 
 killing of love, it exalts it on the contrary in a 
 strange fashion. Impossible to embrace, so pre- 
 sent and so far away, the dim shape of the 
 wished-for phantom hovers before our gaze with 
 the beauty that life will never wither more, and 
 our whole soul goes out sadly and passionately to 
 meet it. The duration of days is annihilated. The 
 
242 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 sweetness of the past flows back in its fulness 
 within us, and then begins a singular and retro- 
 spective kind of enchantment which is like 
 hallucination in the heart. 
 
 Theresa de Sauve might have been a woman 
 buried, sewn up in a shroud, laid in the coldness 
 of the funeral vault for ever, and Hubert would 
 not have abandoned himself more to the gnawings 
 of his memory, to the mad ardour of love which 
 lacks both hope and desire, and is wholly made 
 up of ecstacy of what once has been, — and can 
 never be again. By means of her notes, which 
 he had kept, and which he re-read until he knew 
 every word by heart, he reconstructed, hour by 
 hour, the delicious months of his past intoxica- 
 tion. Theresa was in the habit of never dating her 
 letters, but of simply writing the name of the day 
 at the head of them, " Thursday," " \\''ednesday," 
 " Saturday." Hubert found the day of the month 
 from the post-mark, thanks to the pious care with 
 which he had preserved all the envelopes, for the 
 childish reason that he could not have destroyed 
 a line of that handwriting without pain. 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 243 
 
 Even after so many weeks, he had failed to 
 become insensible to the emotion caused him by 
 the sight of the letters of his name traced by 
 Theresa's hand. Yes ; hour by hour he revived 
 the life already lived. The charm of the by-gone 
 moments reappeared so complete, so rapturous,, 
 so heart-breaking ! It had passed away as every- 
 thing does, and the young man had come to rebel 
 no longer against the enigma of which he was the 
 victim. The Christian notion of responsibility 
 was succeeded within him by an obscure fatalism. 
 The termination of his happiness was now ex- 
 plained in his eyes by the inevitable misery of 
 mankind. He almost acquitted his phantom of a 
 fault which seemed to him to be bound up with 
 natural fatalities ; and then he began to think 
 that this phantom was not that of a dead woman 
 with closed eyes, motionless bosom, and shut lips, 
 l^ut of a living creature with beating eye-lids,, 
 throbbing heart, and parted lips that were fresh 
 and warm ; and, tormented in spite of himself 
 by some vague, dim desire, he again began to 
 murmur : 
 
244 ^ CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 "What is she doing?" 
 
 "What then was Theresa doing, and how was it 
 that she had essayed no effort to see again the 
 man she loved? What thoughts and what feel- 
 ings had she experienced since the terrible scene 
 which had separated her from Hubert ? With 
 her, too, days had succeeded to days, but while 
 the young man, a prey to a metamorphosis of 
 soul provoked by the most unlooked-for and 
 tragic of deceptions, suffered these rapid burning 
 days to slip away as he passed from one ex- 
 tremity of the universe of feeling to the other, 
 she, the guilty one, the vanquished one, was 
 absorbed in a single thought. Herein like all 
 women who love, she would have given her 
 blood-drops, one after another, to cure the sorrow 
 that she had caused to her lover. It was not 
 that the visible details of her life were modified. 
 Except for the first week, during which she had 
 been overthrown, so to speak, by a continuous 
 and shooting headache, she had, as the result 
 of a reaction from the experience of so many 
 emotions, resumed her vocation as a woman of 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 245 
 
 fashion, her accustomed course of drives and 
 visits, great dinners and receptions, theatre- 
 goings or evening parties. 
 
 But this completely external movement has 
 never been able to hinder dreams any more 
 than the employment of the needle does in fancy 
 work. Though a strange fact at first sight, the 
 explanation in the Avenue Friedland had been 
 followed by a half-soothed relaxation in her soul, 
 simply because voluntary confession had lessened 
 remorse, as it always does. It is, too, on this 
 unexplained law of our consciousness that the 
 subtle psychology of the Catholic Church has 
 based the principle of confession. If Theresa 
 did not altogether forgive herself for her fault, 
 she was, at least, no longer compelled by her 
 thoughts of it to endure the contemplation of 
 absolute baseness. The notion of a certain 
 moral loftiness was now associated with it, 
 ennobhng it in her own eyes. This sleep of 
 remorse left her free to absorb herself in the 
 remembrance of Hubert. 
 
 She now lived in a condition of deadly anxiety 
 
246 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 «oncerniug him, and was dominated by a steady 
 longing to see him again, not that she hoped 
 to obtain her forgiveness from him, but she 
 knew that he was unhappy, and she felt within 
 her such a love for the youth whom she had 
 wounded, that she would willingly have found 
 means to dress and close the sore. How ? She 
 could not have told that ; but it was not possible 
 that such great, deeply -repentant tenderness 
 could be inefficacious. In any case she must, 
 at least, show Hubert the scope of the passion 
 which she felt for him. Could this fail to touch 
 him, to move him, to rescue him from despair ? 
 Now that she was no longer beneath the imme- 
 diate burden of her infidelity, she did not judge 
 of it from the essentially masculine standpoint, 
 that is, as being something absolute and 
 irreparable. 
 
 In woman, who is a creature much more instinc- 
 tive than we men, and much closer to nature, the 
 energies of renewing spring-time are much more 
 unimpaired. A woman who is deceived forgives, 
 provided that she knows herself to be loved, and 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 247 
 
 a woman who has deceived can scarcely under- 
 stand non-forgiveness provided that she loves. 
 The fault committed is an idea, a shadow, a 
 chimera. The love felt is a fact, a reality. Thus 
 Theresa had entirely emerged from the period 
 of moral depression, the extreme limit of which 
 had been marked by her confession. Certainly, 
 she did not regret the latter, as so many other 
 women would have done in like circumstances ; 
 but it was her longing, her hope, her wish that it 
 should not have marked the end of her happi- 
 ness, for, after all, she loved and was loved. 
 
 Nevertheless, her longing did not blind her to 
 such a degree as to make her forget what she 
 knew of her lover's character. Proud and pure 
 as she knew him to be, how difficult it was to 
 effect a reconciliation with him ! And, moreover, 
 what means could she employ to be alone with 
 him even for an hour ? Write '? She did so, not 
 once, but ten times. Having sealed the letter she 
 threw it into a drawer, and did not send it at 
 all. At first no expression seemed to her suffi- 
 ciently coaxing and humble, endearing and 
 
248 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 tender. Then she was terrified with the appre- 
 hension lest Hubert should not even open the 
 envelope, and should return it to her without a 
 reply. Meet him again in society ? She had a. 
 frightful dread of such an accident. With what 
 courage could she endure his glance, which would 
 be a cruel one, and one which she could not even 
 attempt to disarm ? Go to the Eue Vaneau and 
 obtain an interview from him ? She knew only 
 too well that this was not possible. Send him a 
 message ? By whom ? The only person ta 
 whom she had confided her love was her country 
 friend whom she had employed to post her letters 
 to her husband, while she herself was at Folke- 
 stone. Among all the men whom she met in so- 
 ciety, that one who was sufficiently intimate with 
 Hubert to act as a messenger in such an embassy 
 was also he in whom her woman's instinct showe'd 
 her the probable author of the indiscreet remarks 
 which had ruined her — George Liauran. She 
 was bound by the thousand tiny threads which 
 society fastens to the limbs of its slaves. 
 At last, without any calculation, and by 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 249 
 
 obeying the impulses of her own heart, she 
 succeeded in finding a means which appeared 
 almost infallible to her for coming to an explana- 
 tion. She experienced an irresistible longing to visit 
 the little abode in the Avenue Friedland, and she 
 told herself that Hubert would, sooner or later, feel 
 this longing like herself. Of inevitable necessity 
 she must meet him face to face on one of these 
 visits. Under the influence of this idea she began 
 to pay long solitary visits to those ground-floor 
 rooms, whose every nook spoke to her of her 
 lost happiness. The first time that she came 
 there in this way, the hour which she spent 
 among the furniture, was the occasion of such 
 intolerable emotion that she was nearly relapsing 
 into the extravagance of her first despair. She 
 returned, nevertheless, and by degrees it became 
 strangely sweet to her to accompHsh this pilgrim- 
 age of love nearly every day. The doorkeeper 
 lit the fire ; she allowed the flame to illu- 
 minate the Httle drawing-room with a flicker- 
 ing hght which struggled against the invasion 
 of the twilight ; she lay down upon the divan. 
 
250 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 to experience a sensation at once torturing and 
 delicious, a blending of expectation, melancholy, 
 and remembrance. Each time she was careful 
 to first ask : 
 
 " Has the gentleman been here ? " and the 
 negative reply would give her the hope that 
 chance might cause the young man's visit to 
 coincide with her own. 
 
 She noticed, with beating heart, the slightest 
 noise. All the objects, around her which were 
 not coloured by the blaze from the fireplace, 
 were drowned in the shadow. The apartment 
 was scented with the exhalations from the 
 flowers, the cups and vases of which she 
 used herself to trim, and she alternately dreaded 
 and desired the entry of Hubert. Would he 
 forgive her ? Would he repel her ? And finally 
 she had to leave this refuge of her last hope, and 
 she departed, her veil drawn down, her soul 
 flooded by the same sadness that she used for- 
 merly to feel when Hubert's kisses were still fresh 
 on her lips, at once comforted and terrified by 
 this thought : 
 
CRUEL ENIGMA. 25 1 
 
 " When shall I see him again? WiU it be to- 
 morrow? " 
 
 One afternoon when stretched thus upon the 
 divan and absorbed in her dreams, she seemed to 
 hear the turning of a key in the lock of the outer 
 door. She sat up suddenly with a wild throbbing 
 of heart. Yes, the door was opening and closing. 
 A step sounded in the ante-room. A hand was 
 opening the second door. She fell back again 
 upon the cushions of the divan, unable to endure 
 the approach of what she had so greatly hoped 
 for, and thus finding, through her very sincerity, 
 the vanquished attitude which the most refined 
 coquetry would have chosen and which was 
 calculated to work most powerfully upon her 
 lover, — if it were he. But what other could come, 
 and did she not immediately recognise his step ? 
 Yes, it was indeed Hubert who was just com- 
 ing in. 
 
 Since their rupture, he, too, had often wished to 
 come back to the little ground-floor rooms, where 
 the clock had struck for him so many sweet 
 hours, — the clock over which Theresa used grace- 
 
252 A CRUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 fully to throw the black lace of her second veil 
 " in order to veil the time better," she said. Then 
 he had not ventiu'ed. Fond memories made hira 
 timid. People are afraid, in renewing such, both 
 of feeling too much and of feeling too little. 
 This afternoon, however, was it the influence of 
 the gloomy winter sky and his own bewitching 
 melancholy? Was it the reading yesterday of 
 one of Theresa's most charming notes, dated a 
 year back on the very same day ? 
 
 Without thinking about it, Hubert had found 
 himself on the way to the Avenue Friedland. To 
 reach the latter he had mechanically pursued 
 a network of winding streets, as he used of 
 old in order to avoid spies. What Heed was 
 there of such stratagems to-day ? And the con- 
 trast had made his heart heavy. On his way he 
 had to pass a telegraph office which formerly he 
 used to enter after their meetings to prolong the 
 voluptuousness of 'them by writing Theresa a note 
 to surprise her just after she had reached home 
 — a stifled echo, distant and so tender of the 
 intoxicated sighs of that day ! He saw the door 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 253 
 
 of the of6.ce, its dark colour, its inscription, the 
 opening of the box reserved for telegraph cards, 
 and he nearly fainted. 
 
 But he was already pursuing the pathway of 
 the fatal Avenue, and he could see the house, the 
 closed Venetian blinds of the front rooms on the 
 ground-floor, and the entrance commanded by the 
 gateway. How did he feel when the door-keeper, 
 after asking whether " the gentleman had had a 
 good jom-ney," added, in his hatefully obsequious 
 tones : " The lady is there ? " 
 
 He had not yet taken the key from his pocket 
 when this news, less unexpected, perhaps, than 
 he would acknowledge to himself, struck him like 
 a full blow upon the breast. What was to be 
 done ? Dignity commanded him to depart im- 
 mediately. But the lurking, deep desire which 
 he had to see Theresa again suggested to him 
 one of those sophisms, thanks to which we 
 always find means to prefer with our reason 
 what we most desire with our instinct. 
 
 " If I do not go in," he said to himself, looking 
 towards the lodge, " this odious individual will 
 
254 ^ CEUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 understand that we have quarrelled. He is 
 capable of carrying his effrontery so far as to 
 speak to Theresa of my interrupted visit. I owe 
 it to her to spare her this humiliation, and 
 besides, the matter of the rooms must be settled 
 once for all. Shall I never be a man? " 
 
 It was at this moment, after the lightning" 
 flash of this sudden reasoning, that he opened the 
 door, being aware the while that there was one 
 in the adjoining room who was being thrown 
 into agitation from feet to hair by this 
 simple noise. He had often warmed those 
 slender feet with many kisses, and so often 
 handled that long black hair ! 
 
 " If she has come, it is because she loves me 
 still." 
 
 This thought moved him in spite of himself, 
 and he was trembling as he passed into the 
 drawing-room, where the dying of the twilight 
 was striving with the flames on the hearth. He 
 was surprised by the caressing aroma of the 
 flowers standing in the vases on the mantel- 
 shelf, with which was blended the odour of a. 
 
A CEUBL ENIGMA. 255 
 
 perfume that he knew too well. On the divan 
 at the back of the room he saw the prostrate 
 form of a body, then the movement of a bust, the 
 paleness of a face, and he found himself face to 
 face with Theresa, now sitting up and looking at 
 him. 
 
 The silence of both was such that he could 
 hear the sharp beats of his own heart and the 
 breathing of the woman, who was evidently wild 
 with emotion. The presence of his mistress had 
 suddenly restored to him all his nervous anger. 
 What he felt at this moment was that frightful 
 longing to brutally ill-treat the woman, the being 
 of stratagem and falsehood, which takes hold of 
 the man, the being of strength and fierceness, 
 whenever physical jealousy awakes the primitive 
 male within him, placed opposite the female in 
 the truth of nature. At a certain depth, all the 
 differences of education and character are anni- 
 hilated before the inevitable necessities of the 
 laws of sex. 
 
 It was Theresa who first broke the silence. 
 She understood too well the gravity of the ex- 
 
256 A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 planation which was about to ensue not 
 to bring all her powers of feminine artifice 
 into play. She loved Hubert at this , moment 
 as passionately as on the day when she con- 
 fessed her inexplicable fault to him ; but 
 she was mistress of herself now, and could 
 measure the scope of her words. Moreover, she 
 had no play to act. It was enough for her to 
 show herself just as she was, in the infinite 
 humiHty of the most repentant tenderness, and it 
 was in a nearly hoarse voice that she began to 
 speak from the corner of the shadow in which she 
 remained seated. 
 
 " I ask your forgiveness for being here," she 
 said ; " I am just going. When I allowed 
 myself to come into this room sometimes, quite 
 alone, I did not think that I was doing anything 
 to displease you. It was the pilgrimage to that 
 which has been the only happiness in my life ; 
 but I promise you that I will never do so again." 
 
 " It is for me to withdraw, madame," rephed 
 Hubert, who, at the sound of her voice, found 
 himself disquieted by an emotion impossible of 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 257 
 
 definition. " She has come several times," he 
 thought, and the notion irritated him, as hap- 
 pens when one is unwilling to give way to a 
 tender feeling. " I acknowledge," he continued, 
 in quite a loud voice, " that I did not expect to 
 see you here again after what has taken place. 
 It seemed to me that you would fly from certain 
 memories rather than seek for them again." 
 
 " Do not speak harshly to me," she replied, still 
 more softly. " But why should you speak to me 
 otherwise ? " she added, in a melancholy tone ; 
 " I cannot justify myself in your eyes. Yet reflect 
 that had I not clung, as I did, to the beauty of 
 the feeling which united us, I should not have 
 been sincere with you as I was. Alas ! it was 
 because I loved you as I love you still, as I 
 shall always love you." 
 
 "Do not employ the word 'love,'" returned 
 Hubert ; " you have no longer the right to do 
 so." 
 
 " Ah ! " she replied, with growing excitement ; 
 " you ' cannot prevent me from feeling. Yes, 
 Hubert, I love you ; and if I can no longer hope 
 
 E 
 
258 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 that my love is shared, it is none the less living 
 here ;" and she struck her bosom. " And you must 
 kuow it," she continued. " My only comfort in 
 the most utter unhappiness will be the thought that 
 I have been able to tell you one last time what 
 I have so often told you in happy days : I love 
 you. Do not see in this a dream of forgiveness ; 
 I shall not seek to move you, and you will never 
 condemn me as much as I condemn myself. 
 But it is none the less true that I love you more 
 than ever." 
 
 "WeU!" replied Hubert, "this love will be 
 the only vengeance that I wish to exact from 
 you. Know then that you have caused this man 
 whom you love to endure a martyrdom such as 
 may scarcely be survived ; you have rent his 
 heart, you have been his tormentor, the tor- 
 mentor of every hour and every minute. There 
 is nothing more within me but a wound, and it is 
 you, you who have opened it. I have ceased to 
 believe anything, hope for anything, love any- 
 thing, and you are the cause. And this will last 
 for a long time, a long time, and every morning 
 
A CEUEL ENIGMA. 259 
 
 and every evening you will have to say to 
 yourself : ' He v/hom I love is in his throes, and I 
 am killing him.' " 
 
 And so he went on relieving his soul of the 
 sorrow of so many days with all the cruel words 
 with which his anger supplied him for the 
 woman who was listening to him with downcast 
 eyelids, disconcerted face, and frightful paleness, 
 in the shadow wherein resounded the voice that 
 was terrible in her ears. "Was he not, merely by 
 obeying his passion, inflicting upon her the most 
 torturing of punishments, that of bleeding in her 
 presence from a wound which she had dealt him 
 and which she was unable to cure. 
 
 " Strike me," she replied simply, " I have 
 deserved all." 
 
 " These are useless words," said Hubert, after 
 a fresh silence, during which time he had been 
 walking from one end of the room to the other to 
 exhaust his passion, " Let us come to deeds. 
 This interview must at least have a practical con- 
 clusion. We shall see each other again in society 
 and at your house. Need I tell you that I shall 
 
26o A CBUBL ENIGMA. 
 
 act as an honourable man, and that no one shall 
 suspect anything of what has passed between us "? 
 There remains the matter of these rooms. I 
 shall write to Emmanuel Deroy to let him know 
 that I shall come here no more. It is useless 
 for us to meet here again, is it not ? We have 
 nothing more to say to each other." 
 
 " You are right," said Theresa, in a crushed 
 voice ; then, as though forming a supreme resolu- 
 tion, she rose. 
 
 She passed both her hands across her eyes, 
 and loosing from her wrist the bracelet to which 
 the little key was suspended, she offered the 
 trinket to Hubert without uttering a word. He 
 -took the gold chainlet, and his fingers met those 
 of the young woman. They looked at each other, 
 and for the first time since his entry into the room 
 he saw her fully face to face. Her beauty at that 
 moment was sublime. Her mouth was half open, 
 as though respiration had failed her, her eyes 
 were laden with languor, her fingers pressed 
 those of the young man with a lingering caress, 
 and a quick flame swept suddenly through him. 
 
A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 26 1 
 
 As though seized with intoxication he went 
 np to her, took her in his arms, and gave her 
 a kiss. She gave way, and both fell upon the 
 shadowed divan together, clasping each other iix 
 one of those wild and silent embraces wherein 
 dissolves all animosity, just or imjust, but all 
 dignity as well. These are moments when neither 
 man nor woman utters the words, "I love you,"' 
 as though feeling that such frenzies have, in 
 fact, nothing in common with love. 
 
 When they recovered their senses, she looked 
 at him. She trembled lest she should see him 
 yield to the horrible impulse which is famihar to 
 men after similar lapses, and which prompts them 
 to punish their accomplice for their own weak- 
 ness by loading her with contempt. If Hubert 
 was seized with a shudder of revolt, he, at least, 
 had the generosity to spare Theresa the sight of 
 it, and then, in a voice rendered so captivating 
 by fear : 
 
 " Oh, Hubert !" she said, " I have you again 
 for my own. Could you but know it, I should not 
 have survived our separation. I should have died 
 
262 A CEUEL ENIGMA. 
 
 of it, for I love you too much. I will be so kind, 
 so kind to you, I will make you so happy. But 
 do not leave me. If you love me no longer, let 
 me love you. Take me, or send me away as 
 your fancy wills. I am your slave, your thing, 
 your property. Ah, if I could die now ! " 
 
 And she covered her lover's wasted face vrath 
 passionate tears. He nevertheless remained 
 motionless, with lips and eyes closed, and 
 thought of his downfall. Now that the intoxi- 
 cation was dispelled, he could compare what he 
 had felt just then vsdth what he had felt formerly. 
 The symbol of the change that had been wrought 
 was in the contrast between the brutality of the 
 pleasure taken thus upon this divan, and the 
 divine modesty of other days. He had not for- 
 given Theresa, and he had not been able to resist 
 her, but for this very reason he had for ever lost 
 the right of reproaching her with her betrayal. 
 
 And then, though he had had this right anew, 
 how could he have used it ? There was too strong 
 a witchery in this woman's caresses. He foresaw 
 that he would be subject to it from that day 
 
A CBUEL ENIGMA. 263 
 
 forth, and that his dream was over. He had 
 loved this woman with the sublimest love, and 
 she now held him by what was darkest and least 
 noble within him. Something was dead in his 
 moral life which he would never find again. It 
 was one of those wrecks of soul which are felt by 
 those suffering them to be irremediable. He 
 had ceased to value himself after ceasing to value 
 his mistress. The eternal Delilah had once more 
 accomplished her work, and, as the lips of the 
 woman were quivering and caressing, he paid her 
 back her kisses. 
 
264 A CRUEL ENiaMA. 
 
 CHAPTEK XII. 
 
 About a fortnight after this scene, Hubert 
 had again began to dine from home and to go 
 out nearly every evening, to the great stupefac- 
 tion of his mother, who, after being silent in the 
 presence of a grief that she was powerless to 
 control, now perceived in her son an air of 
 intoxicated feverishness which frightened her. 
 She could not forbear opening up her astonish- 
 ment to George Liauran when the latter had 
 come one evening, as was his wont, to take his 
 place in that little drawing-room which had been 
 the witness of so many of the poor woman's 
 agonies. 
 
 The wind was blowing outside as on the night 
 when General Scilly had commenced to think 
 of his friends' unhappiness ; and the old soldier, 
 who was also present in his customary easy- 
 chair, could not help observing the ravages which 
 
A CRUEL ENIGMA. 265 
 
 some ten months past had wrought upon the 
 two widows. 
 
 " I do not understand it at all," replied George 
 to the questioning of his cousin ; "Hubert and I 
 have had no interview. It is certain that his 
 despair is inexplicable if he did not believe in 
 Madame de Sauve's guilt, and it is certain that 
 he is again on the best of terms with her." 
 
 " Knowing what he does," said the Count, " he 
 is not proud." 
 
 " What would you ? " returned George, " he is 
 like the rest." 
 
 Madame Liauran, lying on her couch, was 
 holding Madame Castel's hand while her cousin 
 uttered these words, the scope of which he did 
 not realise. The fingers of mother and grand- 
 mother exchanged a pressure by which .the two 
 women told each other of the suffering of which 
 neither could ever be cured. They had not 
 brought up their child that he might become like 
 the rest. They caught a glimpse of the inevit- 
 able metamorphosis which was on the eve of its 
 accomplishment in Hubert just now. 
 
266 A CEUEIi ENIGMA. 
 
 Alas ! it is a profound truth that " raan is like 
 his love ; " but this love, why and whence does it 
 come to us ? A question without reply, and, like 
 woman's treachery, like man's weakness, like life 
 itself, A Cruel, Cruel Enigma ! 
 
 THE END. 
 
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