The Princesse De Cleves Page 18

  If he had known whom he was avoiding, how urgently he would have retraced his steps; but he continued along the avenue, and Mme de Clèves saw him leave by a gate behind which his carriage was waiting. How great was the effect of this fleeting vision on Mme de Clèves’s heart! How great was the dormant passion that once more consumed her, and with what force! She went and sat in the place that M. de Nemours had just left, and remained there, as if stricken. The prince appeared to her more adorable than anything in the world, having loved her for so long, passionately, respectfully and loyally, rejecting everything for her, even respecting her grief, dreaming that he might see her without dreaming that he might be seen, leaving the court, which was his delight, merely to gaze on the walls that enclosed her and meditate in places where he could not hope to meet her; in short, a man worthy of being loved for his fidelity alone, and one for whom she felt so strong an attraction that she would have loved him even if he had not loved her; yet, moreover, a man of high quality, in rank equal to herself. Duty and virtue no longer stood in the way of her feelings, all obstacles had been removed and nothing remained of their former state, except M. de Nemours’s passion for her and that which she felt for him.

  None of these ideas had previously occurred to the princess. Her grief at the death of M. de Clèves had preoccupied her too much for her to consider them. M. de Nemours’s presence brought them crowding into her mind; but, when it was entirely taken up with them and she also remembered that this same man, whom she thought of as being able to marry her, was the man whom she had loved while her husband was still alive and who was the cause of his death; that, as he died, he had even expressed his fear that she might marry him; then her stern conscience was so mortified at the notion, that she found it scarcely less of a sin to marry M. de Nemours, than she had thought it to love him during her husband’s lifetime. She gave herself over to these ideas, which were so hostile to her happiness, and strengthened them further with several arguments concerning her peace of mind and the misfortunes she could anticipate, were she to marry the prince. At last, after staying for two hours in the same place, she returned home persuaded that she should avoid seeing him, since to do so would be precisely the opposite of what duty required.

  But that certainty, imposed by reason and virtue, did not carry her heart. This remained attached to M. de Nemours with such force that she was reduced to a truly pitiable state, and was unable to rest: she spent one of the most unhappy nights that she had ever known. In the morning, her first impulse was to go and see if there was anyone at the window overlooking hers; she went and saw M. de Nemours. She was startled and drew back with a suddenness that made the prince think he had been recognized. Often, he had wanted to be seen, since the time when his love had discovered this means of seeing Mme de Clèves; and now, when he did not expect to have that pleasure, he went to meditate in the same garden where she had found him.

  Exhausted at length by his unhappiness and uncertainty, he resolved to try some means to clarify his fate. ‘What am I waiting for?’ he wondered. ‘I have known for a long time that she loves me; she is free and duty no longer stands in her way. Why should I be reduced to seeing her, without being seen or speaking to her? Can love have deprived me utterly of reason and daring, and made me so different from what I have been in the other passions of my life? I had to respect Mme de Clèves’s grief, but I am paying it too much respect and giving it time to extinguish her feelings for me.’

  At this point, he considered what means he should use to see her. He thought that nothing any longer obliged him to conceal his love for her from the Vidame de Chartres. He decided to speak to him and declare his intentions towards his niece.

  The Vidame was then in Paris: everyone had come to the city to order clothing and finery, before following the King who was to accompany the Queen of Spain. So M. de Nemours went to the Vidame and made a full admission of everything he had hidden up to then, except for Mme de Clèves’s feelings, not wishing to appear to know them.

  The Vidame received all that he told him with great joy and assured him that, without knowing his mind, he had often thought that, since losing her husband, Mme de Clèves was the only woman worthy of him. M. de Nemours begged him to arrange for him to speak to her and learn her feelings on the matter.

  The Vidame proposed accompanying him to visit her, but M. de Nemours felt that she would be shocked by this, as she was not yet seeing anybody. They decided that the Vidame must invite her to his house, on some pretext or other, and that M. de Nemours would enter by a secret staircase, so as not to be seen. Everything happened as they had arranged: Mme de Clèves arrived, the Vidame went to greet her and showed her into a large study at the far end of his apartments. Shortly afterwards, M. de Nemours came in, as if by chance. Mme de Clèves was most astonished at seeing him; she blushed and tried to hide her blushes. At first, the Vidame talked about other things; then he went out, on the excuse of having some instructions to give his servants. He told Mme de Clèves that he begged her to welcome his guest and that he would return shortly.

  It is impossible to describe the feelings of M. de Nemours and Mme de Clèves on finding themselves alone and able to speak for the first time. For some while they remained without saying anything, until at last M. de Nemours broke the silence:

  ‘Madame, can you forgive M. de Chartres,’ he said, ‘for having given me an opportunity to see you and speak with you that you have always so cruelly denied me?’

  ‘I should not forgive him,’ she replied, ‘for having forgotten my present circumstances and the danger to my reputation.’

  On saying this, she wanted to leave; but M. de Nemours, restraining her, said:

  ‘Fear nothing, madame. No one knows I am here and you need fear no danger. Hear me out, madame, hear me, if not through kindness to me, then at least for your own sake and to protect you from the excess to which I must surely be driven by a passion I can no longer control.’

  For the first time, Mme de Clèves ceded to her feelings for M. de Nemours and, looking at him with eyes full of beauty and tenderness:

  ‘But what can you hope to obtain,’ she said, ‘from the indulgence you require of me? You may well regret having obtained what I shall surely regret having granted. You deserve a happier fate than you have enjoyed up to now; a happier one, too, than you can hope to find in the future, unless you seek it elsewhere!’

  ‘I, madame!’ he said. ‘Am I to seek my happiness elsewhere! Is there any for me, except to be loved by you? Though I have never declared it to you, I cannot believe, madame, that you are unaware of my love or that you do not know that none could ever be truer or more impassioned than mine. Has it not been tried in ways that you cannot know? And to what trials have you submitted it by your severity?’

  ‘Since you wish me to speak and since I am resolved to it,’ Mme de Clèves replied, sitting down, ‘I shall do so with a frankness that you would be hard put to find in those of my sex. I shall not tell you that I did not observe your attachment

  to me; you would probably not believe me if I were to say so. Hence, I admit not only that I observed it but that I interpreted it as you would have wished me to do.’

  ‘And if you did observe it, madame,’ he interrupted, ‘is it possible that you could remain unmoved? Might I dare ask if it made no impression on your heart?’

  ‘That you must have seen from the way I behaved,’ she replied. ‘But I should like to know what you thought of it.’

  ‘I could only dare speak about that if I were in a more favourable situation,’ he answered. ‘And what I might tell you has too little to do with the outcome. All I can say, madame, is that I should dearly have wished you had not confessed what you were hiding from me to M. de Clèves and that, what you allowed me to see, you had concealed from him.’

  ‘How did you discover,’ she asked, with a blush, ‘that I had confessed something to M. de Clèves?’

  ‘I learned it from your own lips, madame,’ he replied. ‘But, to
excuse my boldness in listening, consider whether I misused what I had heard, whether my hopes were raised by it and whether I became bolder in speaking to you.’

  He began to tell her how he had overheard her conversation with M. de Clèves, but she interrupted before he had finished.

  ‘Tell me no more,’ she said. ‘I can now understand how you came to know so much. You already appeared only too well-informed at the Dauphine’s, after she had learned of this matter from those in whom you confided.’

  M. de Nemours then described the means by which this came about.

  ‘Do not justify yourself,’ she continued. ‘I forgave you a long time ago without hearing your reasons. But since you learned from me something that I intended always to hide from you, I admit that you aroused feelings in me that I had never experienced before seeing you, and of which I even had so little conception that they took me at first by surprise, still further increasing the turmoil that always accompanies them.

  I confess this with less shame at a time when it is not sinful for me to do so and when you have seen that my conduct was not governed by my feelings.’

  ‘Madame,’ said M. de Nemours, falling to his knees, ‘can you imagine that I do not expire at your feet, transported with joy?’

  ‘What I have told you,’ she replied, smiling, ‘is nothing more than you know already only too well.’

  ‘Oh, madame,’ he answered, ‘how different it is from learning such a thing by chance, to hear it from your own lips and see that you truly wish me to know it!’

  ‘You are right,’ she said, ‘I do truly wish you to know it and I do find it pleasing to tell you. I am not even sure whether I am saying it more from love of myself than of you. For in the end this admission will lead to nothing and I shall follow the strict rules that my duty commands.’

  ‘You cannot think of such a thing, madame,’ M. de Nemours replied. ‘No duty binds you now, you are free. And, if I dared, I should even say that it is within your power to make it your duty, one day, to preserve the feelings you have for me.’

  ‘My duty,’ she answered, ‘forbids me ever to think of anyone, and less of you than of anyone else in the world, for reasons which you do not know.’

  ‘Perhaps I do know them, madame,’ he said. ‘But these are not valid reasons. I believe that M. de Clèves considered that I had been more fortunate than I was and imagined that you had sanctioned a folly to which I was driven by passion, without your consent.’

  ‘Let us not speak of that adventure,’ she said. ‘I cannot bear to think about it: it fills me with shame and also with too much distress, because of its consequences. It is only too true that you were the cause of M. de Clèves’s death: the suspicions that he derived from your ill-considered conduct cost him his life, no less than if you had taken it with your own hands. Consider what course I should have to follow, if the two of you had gone to such lengths and the same misfortune been the result. I know that it is not the same thing in the eyes of the world; but to mine there is no difference, since I know that it was through you and because of me that he died.’

  ‘Ah, madame!’ exclaimed M. de Nemours. ‘What is this phantom of duty that you raise up in the path of my happiness? What! Must some empty and baseless fancy prevent you bestowing happiness on a man whom you do not hate? What! Have I nurtured the hope of spending my life with you; has fate induced me to love the most admirable person in the world; have I not seen in her everything proper to make her the beloved object of my affections; has she found me not detestable, and have I seen in her conduct nothing but what can make a woman desirable? For, indeed, madame, you are perhaps the only person in whom those two things have ever been seen to the degree that they are in you. Every man who marries a woman by whom he is loved, marries her in fear and trembling, when he considers her behaviour towards him in relation to other men. But with you, madame, there is nothing to fear, only to admire. Have I, as I say, conceived such immense happiness, simply to see you yourself raise up obstacles against it? Oh, madame, you forget that you have distinguished me above all other men; or, rather, you have not distinguished me, you have mistaken me, and I flattered myself.’

  ‘You did not flatter yourself,’ she replied. ‘The arguments of duty would perhaps seem less compelling to me without this distinction that you doubt in yourself, and which convinced me of the misfortune of an attachment to you.’

  ‘I have nothing to answer, madame,’ he said, ‘when you tell me that you fear misfortune; but I must admit that after everything you have been kind enough to say, I did not expect to hear you reason so unkindly.’

  ‘My reasoning is so far from reflecting badly on you,’ Mme de Clèves said, ‘that I even find it hard to express.’

  ‘Alas, madame,’ he replied, ‘how can you be afraid of too much flattering me, after what you have just said?’

  ‘I wish to continue to speak with the same sincerity as I began,’ she went on. ‘And I shall do so, without all the reserve and delicacy that I should show in a first conversation. But I beg you to listen without interrupting.

  ‘I believe that I owe your attachment for me the meagre return of hiding none of my feelings, but revealing them as they are. In all probability, this will be the only time in my life when I shall allow myself freely to exhibit them to you; yet I cannot confess, without shame, that the certainty of no longer being loved by you as I now am appears to me such a dreadful misfortune that, were the arguments of duty not insurmountable, I doubt whether I could bring myself to risk such unhappiness. I know you are free, as I am, and our situation is perhaps such that no public blame could be attached to you or to me, were we to commit ourselves to each other for ever. But does a man sustain love in such everlasting covenants? Should I hope for a miracle in my favour? And how can I prepare myself for the inevitable end of that passion, on which all my happiness would rest? M. de Clèves was perhaps the only man in the world able to preserve something of love within marriage. Fate decreed that I should be unable to profit by this good fortune; and it may also be true that his passion survived only because he found none in me. But I should not have the same means to guarantee yours: I even believe that the impediments to your love ensured its constancy. You encountered enough for you to be roused to overcome them, and my involuntary actions, or things that you learned by chance, gave you sufficient hope for you not to become disheartened.’

  ‘Ah, madame!’ interjected M. de Nemours. ‘I cannot keep the silence that you require of me. You are too unjust, and show me only too clearly how little you are predisposed in my favour.’

  ‘I admit,’ she replied, ‘that I may be led by passion; but it cannot blind me. Nothing can prevent me from knowing that you were born with every predisposition for courtship and every quality tending towards its success. You have already had many affairs and you will have many more; I should cease to bring you happiness; I should see you become for another what you had been for me. The pain that this would inflict would be deadly and I cannot guarantee that I should not suffer the misfortune of jealousy. I have said too much to hide the fact that you have already made me experience this: I suffered such cruel torments on the evening when the Queen gave me the letter from Mme de Thémines, supposedly addressed to you, as to instil an idea of that emotion in me which convinces me it is the greatest of ills.

  ‘All women, through vanity or inclination, wish to seduce you. Few are insensible to your charms, and my own experience would suggest that there are none to whom you might not appeal. I should think you always in love, and loved, and I should seldom be wrong. Yet, in this situation, I should have no choice but to endure; I do not even know if I should dare to complain. A lover may be reproached; but can one reproach a husband when one has nothing to blame except that he no longer feels love? And, even if I might become used to this kind of misfortune, could I grow accustomed to seeing the image of M. de Clèves accusing you of his death, reproaching me for having loved you and married you, and making me feel the difference between
his love and yours? It is impossible,’ she continued, ‘to overlook such powerful arguments: I must remain in my present state and adhere to my resolve never to quit it.’

  ‘What, madame! Do you think it possible?’ exclaimed M. de Nemours. ‘Do you think your resolve can withstand a man who adores you and is fortunate enough to have won your favour? It is harder than you think to resist those whom we love, and by whom we are loved. You have done so thanks to a code so strict as to be almost unexampled; but this is no longer in conflict with your feelings, and I hope you will follow them, in spite of yourself.’

  ‘I am perfectly well aware that there is nothing harder than what I intend,’ Mme de Clèves answered. ‘Even as I argue it, I mistrust my strength. What I feel I owe to the memory of M. de Clèves would be weak if it were not supported by the cause of my own peace of mind, and the arguments in favour of that must be sustained by those of duty. But, though I mistrust myself, I believe I never shall conquer my scruples, and hope also never to vanquish the feelings I have for you. They will make me miserable and I shall renounce seeing you, regardless of the cost to myself. I implore you, by whatever power I have over you, not to seek the opportunity of seeing me. I am in a condition that would make a sin of everything that might be legitimate at other times, and propriety alone forbids any communication between us.’

  M. de Nemours threw himself at her feet and gave way to all the varied emotions that convulsed him. Both in his words and in his tears, he exhibited the most powerful and tenderest passion that ever possessed a human heart. That of Mme de Clèves was not indifferent to it and, looking at the prince with eyes somewhat swollen with tears: