In the presence of this quiet and smiling young man, bending over his law books and extending to me his cool hand, I thought of myself, brothers, of my poor being incessantly shaken by the fever of wishes and regrets. I advance staggeringly; I have not to protect me Jacques’ imperturbable tranquility, his silence of heart and of soul. I am all flesh, all love; I feel myself profoundly vibrate at the least sensation. Events lead me; I can neither conduct nor surmount them. Tomorrow, in my free life, if I should happen to wound the world, the world will turn from me, because I obeyed my pride and my tenderness. Jacques will be saluted, having followed the common route. I dare not say aloud that virtue is a question of temperament; but, brothers, I think all the same that the Jacqueses upon this earth are basely virtuous, while the Claudes have the frightful misfortune of having in them an eternal tempest, an immense desire for the good, which agitates them and leads them beyond the judgment of the crowd.
The young woman had taken her glance from the ceiling and was looking at me, with partially open lips and curious eyes. Her face had the transparent whiteness of wax, with dull flushes on the cheeks; her pale lips, her soft and brown eyelids gave to her visage the air of a sick and resigned child. She was fifteen, and, at times, when she smiled, one would have thought her scarcely twelve.
While Jacques was talking to me in his slow voice, I could not take my eyes from the young girl’s touching countenance, so youthful and so faded. There were upon her frank forehead profound lassitude and languor; the blood no longer flowed beneath her skin; the shivers of life no longer made her slumbering flesh tremble. Have you ever seen, in her cradle, a little girl whom fever has rendered whiter and more innocent than usual? She sleeps with her eyes wide open; she has the gentle and peaceful visage of an angel; she suffers and she seems to smile. The strange little girl whom I had before me, that woman who had remained a child, resembled her sister in the cradle. Only, in her case, it was more pitiful to see upon a forehead of fifteen so much purity and so much pallor, all the innocent graces of a young girl and all the shameful fatigues of a woman.
She had thrown back her arms and was supporting her languishing head upon her hands. I was ignorant of her history; I knew not who she was or what she was doing in this chamber. But, from her entire being, I saw the innocence of her heart and the disgrace of her life; I recognized the youthfulness of her glances and the premature age of her blood; I said to myself that she was dying of decrepitude at fifteen, with a spotless soul. Emaciated and weakened, she would expire like a fallen creature, but with the smile of an angel upon her lips.
I sat for two full hours between Jacques and Marie, contemplating these two beings, studying their countenances. I could not conjecture what had brought such a man and such a woman together. Then, I thought of Laurence, and comprehended that unions existed which could not be avoided.
Jacques seems to me satisfied with the existence he leads. He toils, he regulates his pleasures and his studies; he lives the life of a student without impatience, even with a certain tranquil satisfaction. I noticed that he showed some pride in receiving me in such a beautiful chamber; he does not see all the ignoble ugliness of the false and wretched luxury which surrounds him. Besides, he is neither vain nor a coxcomb; he is a great deal too practical to have such defects. He spoke to me only of his hopes, of his future position; he is in haste to be no longer young and to live as becomes a grave man. Meanwhile, in order to be like the rest of mankind, he consents to inhabit a chamber at fifty francs per month rent, he wishes to smoke, to drink a little, and even to have a sweetheart. But he considers all this simply as a custom which he cannot refuse; he designs, after having passed his final examination, to disembarrass himself of his cigar, of Marie and of his glass as pieces of furniture thenceforward useless. He has calculated, nearly to the minute, the time when he will have a right to the respect of worthy people.
Marie listened to Jacques’ theories with perfect calmness. She did not appear to comprehend that she was one of those pieces of furniture which a young man would abandon on removing from one circle of society to another. The poor girl, doubtless, cares very little who protects her, provided that she has a sofa upon which she can rest her painful limbs.
Besides, Jacques and Marie talked together with a gentleness which surprised me. They seemed to accept each other, to take care of each other. There is not love, not even friendship in their discourse; it is a polite language which shuns every quarrel and keeps the heart in a state of complete indifference. Jacques must have been the inventor of this language.
After an hour had elapsed, Jacques declared that he could not afford to lose any more time; he resumed his work, begging me to remain, assuring me that my presence would not annoy him in any way whatever. I drew my chair up to the sofa, and chatted in a low voice with Marie. This woman attracted me; I felt for her all the tenderness and pity of a father.
She talked like a child, now in monosyllables, now with volubility, enthusiastically and without pausing. I had formed a correct opinion of her: her intelligence and heart have remained those, of an infant, while, physically, she has grown up and strayed from the path which leads to true happiness. She is exquisitely innocent; horribly so sometimes, when, with a sweet smile upon her lips and large, astonished eyes, she allows rude words to escape from her delicate mouth. She does not blush, being totally ignorant of blushes; she does not seem to realize her condition, and is slowly dying, without knowing either what she is or what are the other young girls who turn away their heads when she passes them on the streets.
Little by little, she told me the story of her life. I was able, phrase by phrase, to reconstruct this lamentable story. A connected narrative would not have satisfied me, for I should have hesitated to believe. I preferred that she should make a confession, without knowing she was doing so, by partial avowals, in the course of conversation.
Marie thinks she is fifteen years old. She does not know where she was born, but vaguely remembers a woman who beat her, her mother without doubt. Her earliest recollections date from the streets; she recalls that she played there and that she slept there. In fact, her life has been a long walk in the thoroughfares. It would be very difficult for her to tell what she did up to the age of eight; when I questioned her in regard to her early years, she replied that she had forgotten all about them, except that she was very hungry and very cold. In her eighth year, like all the little outcasts, she sold flowers. She slept then at the Fontainebleau gate, in a large, gloomy garret which was the refuge of a whole herd of children of the same age as herself, all of whom had been abandoned by their parents to the cold charity of the world. Until she was fourteen, she went to this kennel, choosing her corner every night, sometimes well received by her companions, sometimes beaten by them, growing up amid wretchedness and want, nobody stretching out a hand to save her or uttering a word to awaken her heart. She was in the deepest ignorance, and did not even know that she possessed a mind and a soul. She acquired evil ways, without suspecting that evil existed; at present, though she had become a woman of the world, she still had her childish face and her mind was yet infantile and innocent. She had strayed too early in life for sin to touch her soul.
I now understood the meaning of her strange visage, made up of shamelessness and innocence, of beauty at once youthful and faded. I had the key to the mystery of this cynical girl, this weary woman, who was dying with the calmness and the whiteness of a martyr. She was the daughter of the great city, and the great city had made of her a monstrous creature neither a child nor a woman. In that being, whose soul no one had awakened, that soul still slumbered. The body itself had, doubtless, never been aroused. Marie was a creature simple in mind and flesh, who, while she had trodden muddy paths, had remained pure amid the mud, knowing nothing and accepting everything. I saw her before me, already branded, with her sweet smile, talking to me of herself, in her somewhat hoarse voice, as our little sisters talk to us of their dolls, and I felt a sickening sensation take possession of my heart.
When