Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant

Author:Guy de Maupassant
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-1-59017-439-5
Publisher: New York Review Books

4

As soon as Mariolle had left Madame de Burne, the incisive charm of her presence vanished. He felt in and around himself, in his flesh, in his soul, in the air he breathed, in the entire world a sort of disappearance of that joy in being alive that for some time had animated and sustained him.

What had happened? Nothing, virtually nothing. She had been charming to him at the end of her party, telling him in one or two glances: “For me you’re the only person here.” And yet he felt she had shown him things he would have preferred not to know. That too was nothing, virtually nothing; and yet he remained stunned, like a man who learns of some shady activity on the part of his mother or father: he discovered that during those twenty days — twenty days he had believed to be completely dedicated, by her as by himself, to the emotions, so new and so intense, of their budding intimacy — that she had resumed her old ways, made visits, laid plans, recommenced those hateful flirtations, renewed those duels with her rivals, pursued men, received certain compliments with gratitude, and deployed all her charms and graces for others besides him.

Already! She had done all that already! Oh, later on he wouldn’t have been at all surprised. He knew the world, he knew women’s ways, especially where feelings were concerned, nor would he ever have made — being intelligent enough to understand such things — excessive demands, nor plagued her with easily hurt feelings. She was born to certain social usages, and besides she was so lovely, made to please, to receive homage and hear compliments. Among all the men she knew, she had chosen him, had given herself to him, boldly, royally. He would have remained, he remained the grateful servant of her whims, the resigned spectator of her life as a beautiful woman. But he was suffering now, in that dark cave of the heart where a man’s delicate sensibilities lie hidden.

No doubt he was wrong — he had always been wrong the same way as long as he could remember. He was too emotionally vulnerable for the world he lived in, too thin-skinned. Hence the sort of isolation he lived in, for fear of contacts, collisions. He was wrong, for such collisions are almost always caused by what we cannot endure or even acknowledge in others, a nature quite different from our own. He knew this was so — how often he had observed it! Yet he could not change the vibration to which his soul was tuned.

Certainly he could not blame Madame de Burne for the way he was suffering now; if she had kept him away from her salon and hidden from her circle during those days of happiness she had given him, it was to avoid prying eyes, to prevent suspicion, to belong to him all the more completely in the future. Then why this pain gnawing at his heart?

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