Artists Wives | Page 8

they
opened the little window of their room and gazing at the stars rising on
high above the signal lights of the neighbouring railway, she made him
repeat again and again his wonderful verses:
Moi, je crois à l'amour comme je crois en Dieu.
And it was delightful!
[Illustration: p048-059]
Unfortunately it did not last. The husband left them too much
undisturbed. The fact is, that man was a philosopher. His wife gone, he
had closed the green door of his oasis and quietly set about trimming
his roses again, happy in the thought that these at least, attached to the
soil by long roots, would not be able to run away from him. Our
reassured lovers returned to Paris and then suddenly the young woman
felt that some change had come over her poet. Their flight, fear of
detection, and constant alarms,--all these things which had fed her
passion existing no longer, she began to understand and see the
situation clearly.
[Illustration: p049-060]
Moreover, at every moment, in the settling of their little household, in
the thousand paltry details of every day life, the man she was living
with showed himself more thoroughly.
The few and scarce generous, heroic or delicate feelings he possessed
were spun out in his verses, and he kept none for his personal use. He
was mean, selfish, above all very niggardly, a fault love seldom
forgives. Then he had cut off his moustaches, and was disfigured by the
loss. How different from that fine gloomy fellow with his carefully
curled locks, as he appeared one evening declaiming his Credo, in the
blaze of two chandeliers! Now, in the enforced retreat he was
undergoing on her account, he gave way to all his crotchets, the

greatest of which was fancying himself always ill. Indeed, from
constantly playing at consumption, one ends by believing in it. The
poet Amaury was fond of decoctions, wrapped himself up in plaisters,
and covered his chimney piece with phials and powders. For some time
the little woman took up quite seriously her part of a nursing sister. Her
devotion seemed to excuse her fault and give an object to her life. But
she soon tired of it. In spite of herself, in the stuffy room where the
poet sat wrapped in flannel, she could not help thinking of her little
garden so sweetly scented, and the kind nurseryman seen from afar in
the midst of his shrubs and flowerbeds, appeared to her as simple,
touching and disinterested, as this other one was exacting and
egotistical.
At the end of a month, she loved her husband, really loved him, not
with the affection induced by habit, but with a real and true love. One
day she wrote him a long letter full of passion and repentance. He did
not vouchsafe a reply. Perhaps he thought she was not yet sufficiently
punished. Then she despatched letter after letter, humbled herself,
begged him to allow her to return, saying she would die rather than
continue to live with that man. It was now the lover's turn to be called
"that man." Strange to say, she hid herself from him to write; for she
believed him still in love, and while imploring her husband's
forgiveness, she feared the exaltation of her lover.
"He will never allow me to leave," she said to herself. Accordingly,
when by dint of supplications she obtained forgiveness and the
nurseryman--I have already mentioned that he was a
philosopher,--consented to take her back, the return to her own home
bore all the mysterious and dramatic aspect of flight. She literally
eloped with her husband. It was her last culpable pleasure. One evening
as the poet, tired of their dual existence, and proud of his regrown
moustaches, had gone to an evening party to recite his Credo of Love,
she jumped into a cab that was awaiting her at the end of the street and
returned with her old husband to the little garden at Auteuil, for ever
cured of her ambition to be the wife of a poet. It is true that this fellow
was not much of a poet!

[Illustration: p055-066]

THE TRANSTEVERINA.
The play was just over, and while the crowd, with its many varied
impressions, hurried away and poured out under the glare of the
principal portico of the theatre, a few friends, of whom I was one,
awaited the poet at the artists' entrance in order to congratulate him. His
production had not, indeed, been very successful. Too powerful to suit
the timid and trivial imagination of the public of our day, it was quite
beyond the range of the stage, limited as that is by conventionalities
and tolerated traditions. Pedantic criticism declared: "It is not fit for the
stage!" and the scoffers of the boulevards revenged