Camille (La Dame aux Camilias)
affectionate voice:
“My child, do not take what I have to say to you amiss; only remember
that there are sometimes in life cruel necessities for the heart, but
that they must be submitted to. You are good, your soul has generosity
unknown to many women who perhaps despise you, and are less worthy than
you. But remember that there is not only the mistress, but the family;
that besides love there are duties; that to the age of passion succeeds
the age when man, if he is to be respected, must plant himself solidly
in a serious position. My son has no fortune, and yet he is ready to
abandon to you the legacy of his mother. If he accepted from you the
sacrifice which you are on the point of making, his honour and dignity
would require him to give you, in exchange for it, this income, which
would always put you out of danger of adversity. But he can not accept
this sacrifice, because the world, which does not know you, would give
a wrong interpretation to this acceptance, and such an interpretation
must not tarnish the name which we bear. No one would consider whether
Armand loves you, whether you love him, whether this mutual love means
happiness to him and redemption to you; they would see only one thing,
that Armand Duval allowed a kept woman (forgive me, my child, for what
I am forced to say to you) to sell all she had for him. Then the day of
reproaches and regrets would arrive, be sure, for you or for others,
and you would both bear a chain that you could not sever. What would
you do then? Your youth would be lost, my son’s future destroyed; and
I, his father, should receive from only one of my children the
recompense that I look for from both.
“You are young, beautiful, life will console you; you are noble, and
the memory of a good deed will redeem you from many past deeds. During
the six months that he has known you Armand has forgotten me. I wrote
to him four times, and he has never once replied. I might have died and
he not known it!
“Whatever may be your resolution of living otherwise than as you have
lived, Armand, who loves you, will never consent to the seclusion to
which his modest fortune would condemn you, and to which your beauty
does not entitle you. Who knows what he would do then! He has gambled,
I know; without telling you of it, I know also, but, in a moment of
madness, he might have lost part of what I have saved, during many
years, for my daughter’s portion, for him, and for the repose of my old
age. What might have happened may yet happen.
“Are you sure, besides, that the life which you are giving up for him
will never again come to attract you? Are you sure, you who have loved
him, that you will never love another? Would you not suffer on seeing
the hindrances set by your love to your lover’s life, hindrances for
which you would be powerless to console him, if, with age, thoughts of
ambition should succeed to dreams of love? Think over all that, madame.
You love Armand; prove it to him by the sole means which remains to you
of yet proving it to him, by sacrificing your love to his future. No
misfortune has yet arrived, but one will arrive, and perhaps a greater
one than those which I foresee. Armand might become jealous of a man
who has loved you; he might provoke him, fight, be killed. Think, then,
what you would suffer in the presence of a father who should call on
you to render an account for the life of his son!
“Finally, my dear child, let me tell you all, for I have not yet told
you all, let me tell you what has brought me to Paris. I have a
daughter, as I have told you, young, beautiful, pure as an angel. She
loves, and she, too, has made this love the dream of her life. I wrote
all that to Armand, but, absorbed in you, he made no reply. Well, my
daughter is about to marry. She is to marry the man whom she loves; she
enters an honourable family, which requires that mine has to be no less
honourable. The family of the man who is to become my son-in-law has
learned what manner of life Armand is leading in Paris, and has
declared to me that the marriage must be broken off if Armand continues
this life. The future of a child who has done nothing against you, and
who has the right of looking forward to a happy future, is in your
hands. Have you the right, have you the strength, to shatter it? In the
name of your love and of your repentance, Marguerite, grant me the
happiness of my child.”
I wept silently, my friend, at all these reflections which I had so
often made, and which, in the mouth of your father, took a yet more
serious reality. I said to myself all that your father dared not say to
me, though it had come to his lips twenty times: that I was, after all,
only a kept woman, and that whatever excuse I gave for our liaison, it
would always look like calculation on my part; that my past life left
me no right to dream of such a future, and that I was accepting
responsibilities for which my habits and reputation were far from
giving any guarantee. In short, I loved you, Armand.
The paternal way in which M. Duval had spoken to me; the pure memories
that he awakened in me; the respect of this old man, which I would
gain; yours, which I was sure of gaining later on: all that called up
in my heart thoughts which raised me in my own eyes with a sort of holy
pride, unknown till then. When I thought that one day this old man, who
was now imploring me for the future of his son, would bid his daughter
mingle my name with her prayers, as the name of a mysterious friend, I
seemed to become transformed, and I felt a pride in myself.
The exaltation of the moment perhaps exaggerated the truth of these
impressions, but that was what I felt, friend, and these new feelings
silenced the memory of the happy days I had spent with you.
“Tell me, sir,” I said to your father, wiping away my tears, “do you
believe that I love your son?”
“Yes,” said M. Duval.
“With a disinterested love?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that I had made this love the hope, the dream, the
forgiveness of my life?”
“Implicitly.”
“Well, sir, embrace me once, as you would embrace your daughter, and I
swear to you that that kiss, the only chaste kiss I have ever had, will
make me strong against my love, and that within a week your son will be
once more at your side, perhaps unhappy for a time, but cured forever.”
“You are a noble child,” replied your father, kissing me on the
forehead, “and you are making an attempt for which God will reward you;
but I greatly fear that you will have no influence upon my son.”
“Oh, be at rest, sir; he will hate me.”
I had to set up between us, as much for me as for you, an
insurmountable barrier.
I wrote to Prudence to say that I accepted the proposition of the Comte
de N., and that she was to tell him that I would sup with her and him.
I sealed the letter, and, without telling him what it contained, asked
your father to have it forwarded to its address on reaching Paris.
He inquired of me what it contained.
“Your son’s welfare,” I answered.
Your father embraced me once more. I felt two grateful tears on my
forehead, like the baptism of my past faults, and at the moment when I
consented to give myself up to another man I glowed with pride at the
thought of what I was redeeming by this new fault.
It was quite natural, Armand. You told me that your father was the most
honest man in the world.
M. Duval returned to his carriage, and set out for Paris.
I was only a woman, and when I saw you again I could not help weeping,
but I did not give way.
Did I do right? That is what I ask myself to-day, as I lie ill in my
bed, that I shall never leave, perhaps, until I am dead.
You are witness of what I felt as the hour of our separation
approached; your father was no longer there to support me, and there
was a moment when I was on the point of confessing everything to you,
so terrified was I at the idea that you were going to hate and despise
me.
One thing which you will not believe, perhaps, Armand, is that I prayed
God to give me strength; and what proves that he accepted my sacrifice
is that he gave me the strength for which I prayed.
At supper I still had need of aid, for I could not think of what I was
going to do, so much did I fear that my courage would fail me. Who
would ever have said that I, Marguerite Gautier, would have suffered so
at the mere thought of a new lover? I drank for forgetfulness, and when
I woke next day I was beside the count.
That is the whole truth, friend. Judge me and pardon me, as I have
pardoned you for all the wrong that you have done me since that day.
Chapter XXVI
What followed that fatal night you know as well as I; but what you can
not know, what you can not suspect, is what I have suffered since our
separation.
I heard that your father had taken you away with him, but I felt sure
that you could not live away from me for long, and when I met you in
the Champs-Elysées, I was a little upset, but by no means surprised.
Then began that series of days; each of them brought me a fresh insult
from you. I received them all with a kind of joy, for, besides proving
to me that you still loved me, it seemed to me as if the more you
persecuted me the more I should be raised in your eyes when you came to
know the truth.
Do not wonder at my joy in martyrdom, Armand; your love for me had
opened my heart to noble enthusiasm.
Still, I was not so strong as that quite at once.
Between the time of the sacrifice made for you and the time of your
return a long while elapsed, during which I was obliged to have
recourse to physical means in order not to go mad, and in order to be
blinded and deafened in the whirl of life into which I flung myself.
Prudence has told you (has she not?) how I went to all the fêtes and
balls and orgies. I had a sort of hope that I should kill myself by all
these excesses, and I think it will not be long before this hope is
realized. My health naturally got worse and worse, and when I sent Mme.
Duvernoy to ask you for pity I was utterly worn out, body and soul.
I will not remind you, Armand, of the return you made for the last
proof of love that I gave you, and of the outrage by which you drove
away a dying woman, who could not resist your voice when you asked her
for a night of love, and who, like a fool, thought for one instant that
she might again unite the past with the present. You had the right to
do what you did, Armand; people have not always put so high a price on
a night of mine!
I left everything after that. Olympe has taken my place with the Comte
de N., and has told him, I hear, the reasons for my leaving him. The
Comte de G. was at London. He is one of those men who give just enough
importance to making love to women like me for it to be an agreeable
pastime, and who are thus able to remain friends with women, not hating
them because they have never been jealous of them, and he is, too, one
of those grand seigneurs who open only a part of their hearts to us,
but the whole of their purses. It was of him that I immediately
thought. I joined him in London. He received me as kindly as possible,
but he was the lover there of a woman in society, and he feared to
compromise himself if he were seen with me. He introduced me to his
friends, who gave a supper in my honour, after which one of them took
me home with him.
What else was there for me to do, my friend? If I had killed myself it
would have burdened your life, which ought to be happy, with a needless
remorse; and then, what is the good of killing oneself when one is so
near dying already?
I became a body without a soul, a thing without a thought; I lived for
some time in that automatic way; then I returned to Paris, and asked
after you; I heard then that you were gone on a long voyage. There was