do not judge lightly those whom you call unfortunate, and who should be
sacred to you, since they are unfortunate. The disdained and lost girl is
the docile clay under the finger of the Divine Potter: she is the victim
and the altar of the holocaust. The unfortunates are nearer God than the
honest women: they have lost conceit. They do not glorify themselves with
the untried virtue the matron prides herself on. They possess humility,
which is the cornerstone of virtues agreeable to heaven. A short
repentance will be sufficient for them to be the first in heaven; for
their sins, without malice and without joy, contain their own
forgiveness. Their faults, which are pains, participate in the merits
attached to pain; slaves to brutal passion, they are deprived of all
voluptuousness, and in this they are like the men who practise continence
for the kingdom of God. They are like us, culprits; but shame falls on
their crime like a balm, suffering purifies it like fire. That is the
reason why God will listen to the first voice which they shall send to
him. A throne is prepared for them at the right hand of the Father. In
the kingdom of God, the queen and the empress will be happy to sit at the
feet of the unfortunate; for you must not think that the celestial house
is built on a human plan. Far from it, Madame."

Nevertheless, he conceded that more than one road led to salvation. One
could follow the road of love.

"Man's love is earthly," he said, "but it rises by painful degrees, and
finally leads to God."

The Prince had risen. Kissing Miss Bell's hand, he said:

"Saturday."

"Yes, the day after to-morrow, Saturday," replied Vivian.

Therese started. Saturday! They were talking of Saturday quietly, as of
an ordinary day. Until then she had not wished to think that Saturday
would come so soon or so naturally.

The guests had been gone for half an hour. Therese, tired, was thinking
in her bed, when she heard a knock at the door of her room. The panel
opened, and Vivian's little head appeared.

"I am not intruding, darling? You are not sleepy?"

No, Therese had no desire to sleep. She rose on her elbow. Vivian sat on
the bed, so light that she made no impression on it.

"Darling, I am sure you have a great deal of reason. Oh, I am sure of it.
You are reasonable in the same way that Monsieur Sadler is a violinist.
He plays a little out of tune when he wishes. And you, too, when you are
not quite logical, it is for your own pleasure. Oh, darling, you have a
great deal of reason and of judgment, and I come to ask your advice."

Astonished, and a little anxious, Therese denied that she was logical.
She denied this very sincerely. But Vivian would not listen to her.

"I have read Francois Rabelais a great deal, my love. It is in Rabelais
and in Villon that I studied French. They are good old masters of
language. But, darling, do you know the 'Pantagruel?' 'Pantagruel' is
like a beautiful and noble city, full of palaces, in the resplendent
dawn, before the street-sweepers of Paris have come. The sweepers have
not taken out the dirt, and the maids have not washed the marble steps.
And I have seen that French women do not read the 'Pantagruel.' You do
not know it? Well, it is not necessary. In the 'Pantagruel,' Panurge asks
whether he must marry, and he covers himself with ridicule, my love.
Well, I am quite as laughable as he, since I am asking the same question
of you."

Therese replied with an uneasiness she did not try to conceal:

"As for that, my dear, do not ask me. I have already told you my
opinion."

"But, darling, you have said that only men are wrong to marry. I can not
take that advice for myself."

Madame Martin looked at the little boyish face and head of Miss Bell,
which oddly expressed tenderness and modesty.

Then she embraced her, saying:

"Dear, there is not a man in the world exquisite and delicate enough for
you."

She added, with an expression of affectionate gravity:

"You are not a child. If some one loves you, and you love him, do what
you think you ought to do, without mingling interests and combinations
that have nothing to do with sentiment. This is the advice of a friend."

Miss Bell hesitated a moment. Then she blushed and arose. She had been a
little shocked.




CHAPTER XVIII

"I KISS YOUR FEET BECAUSE THEY HAVE COME!"

Saturday, at four o'clock, Therese went, as she had promised, to the gate
of the English cemetery. There she found Dechartre. He was serious and
agitated; he spoke little. She was glad he did not display his joy. He
led her by the deserted walls of the gardens to a narrow street which she
did not know. She read on a signboard: Via Alfieri. After they had taken
fifty steps, he stopped before a sombre alley:

"It is in there," he said.

She looked at him with infinite sadness.

"You wish me to go in?"

She saw he was resolute, and followed him without saying a word, into the
humid shadow of the alley. He traversed a courtyard where the grass grew
among the stones. In the back was a pavilion with three windows, with
columns and a front ornamented with goats and nymphs. On the moss-covered
steps he turned in the lock a key that creaked and resisted. He murmured,

"It is rusty."

She replied, without thought "All the keys are rusty in this country."

They went up a stairway so silent that it seemed to have forgotten the
sound of footsteps. He pushed open a door and made Therese enter the
room. She went straight to a window opening on the cemetery. Above the
wall rose the tops of pine-trees, which are not funereal in this land
where mourning is mingled with joy without troubling it, where the
sweetness of living extends to the city of the dead. He took her hand and
led her to an armchair. He remained standing, and looked at the room
which he had prepared so that she would not find herself lost in it.
Panels of old print cloth, with figures of Comedy, gave to the walls the
sadness of past gayeties. He had placed in a corner a dim pastel which
they had seen together at an antiquary's, and which, for its shadowy
grace, she called the shade of Rosalba. There was a grandmother's
armchair; white chairs; and on the table painted cups and Venetian
glasses. In all the corners were screens of colored paper, whereon were
masks, grotesque figures, the light soul of Florence, of Bologna, and of
Venice in the time of the Grand Dukes and of the last Doges. A mirror and
a carpet completed the furnishings.

He closed the window and lighted the fire. She sat in the armchair, and
as she remained in it erect, he knelt before her, took her hands, kissed
them, and looked at her with a wondering expression, timorous and proud.
Then he pressed his lips to the tip of her boot.

"What are you doing?"

"I kiss your feet because they have come."

He rose, drew her to him softly, and placed a long kiss on her lips. She
remained inert, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. Her toque fell,
her hair dropped on her shoulders.

Two hours later, when the setting sun made immeasurably longer the
shadows on the stones, Therese, who had wished to walk alone in the city,
found herself in front of the two obelisks of Santa Maria Novella without
knowing how she had reached there. She saw at the corner of the square
the old cobbler drawing his string with his eternal gesture. He smiled,
bearing his sparrow on his shoulder.

She went into the shop, and sat on a chair. She said in French:

"Quentin Matsys, my friend, what have I done, and what will become of
me?"

He looked at her quietly, with laughing kindness, not understanding nor
caring. Nothing astonished him. She shook her head.

"What I did, my good Quentin, I did because he was suffering, and because
I loved him. I regret nothing."

He replied, as was his habit, with the sonorous syllable of Italy:

"Si! si!"

"Is it not so, Quentin? I have not done wrong? But, my God! what will
happen now?"

She prepared to go. He made her understand that he wished her to wait. He
culled carefully a bit of basilick and offered it to her.

"For its fragrance, signora!"




CHAPTER XIX

CHOULETTE TAKES A JOURNEY

It was the next day.

Having carefully placed on the drawing-room table his knotty stick, his
pipe, and his antique carpet-bag, Choulette bowed to Madame Martin, who
was reading at the window. He was going to Assisi. He wore a sheepskin
coat, and resembled the old shepherds in pictures of the Nativity.

"Farewell, Madame. I am quitting Fiesole, you, Dechartre, the too
handsome Prince Albertinelli, and that gentle ogress, Miss Bell. I am
going to visit the Assisi mountain, which the poet says must be named no
longer Assisi, but the Orient, because it is there that the sun of love
rose. I am going to kneel before the happy crypt where Saint Francis is
resting in a stone manger, with a stone for a pillow. For he would not
even take out of this world a shroud--out of this world where he left the
revelation of all joy and of all kindness."

"Farewell, Monsieur Choulette. Bring me a medal of Saint Clara. I like
Saint Clara a great deal."

"You are right, Madame; she was a woman of strength and prudence. When
Saint Francis, ill and almost blind, came to spend a few days at Saint
Damien, near his friend, she built with her own hands a hut for him in
the garden. Pain, languor, and burning eyelids deprived him of sleep.
Enormous rats came to attack him at night. Then he composed a joyous
canticle in praise of our splendid brother the Sun, and our sister the
Water, chaste, useful, and pure. My most beautiful verses have less charm
and splendor. And it is just that it should be thus, for Saint Francis's
soul was more beautiful than his mind. I am better than all my
contemporaries whom I have known, yet I am worth nothing. When Saint
Francis had composed his Song of the Sun he rejoiced. He thought: 'We
shall go, my brothers and I, into the cities, and stand in the public
squares, with a lute, on the market-day. Good people will come near us,
and we shall say to them: "We are the jugglers of God, and we shall sing
a lay to you. If you are pleased, you will reward us." They will promise,
and when we shall have sung, we shall recall their promise to them. We
shall say to them: "You owe a reward to us. And the one that we ask of
you is that you love one another." Doubtless, to keep their word and not
injure God's poor jugglers, they will avoid doing ill to others.'"

Madame Martin thought St. Francis was the most amiable of the saints.

"His work," replied Choulette, "was destroyed while he lived. Yet he died
happy, because in him was joy with humility. He was, in fact, God's sweet
singer. And it is right that another poor poet should take his task and
teach the world true religion and true joy. I shall be that poet, Madame,
if I can despoil myself of reason and of conceit. For all moral beauty is
achieved in this world through the inconceivable wisdom that comes from
God and resembles folly."

"I shall not discourage you, Monsieur Choulette. But I am anxious about
the fate which you reserve for the poor women in your new society. You
will imprison them all in convents."

"I confess," replied Choulette, "that they embarrass me a great deal in
my project of reform. The violence with which one loves them is harsh and
injurious. The pleasure they give is not peaceful, and does not lead to
joy. I have committed for them, in my life, two or three abominable
crimes of which no one knows. I doubt whether I shall ever invite you to
supper, Madame, in the new Saint Mary of the Angels." He took his pipe,
his carpet-bag, and his stick:

"The crimes of love shall be forgiven. Or, rather, one can not do evil
when one loves purely. But sensual love is formed of hatred, selfishness,
and anger as much as of passion. Because I found you beautiful one night,
on this sofa, I was assailed by a cloud of violent thoughts. I had come
from the Albergo, where I had heard Miss Bell's cook improvise
magnificently twelve hundred verses on Spring. I was inundated by a
celestial joy which the sight of you made me lose. It must be that a
profound truth is enclosed in the curse of Eve. For, near you, I felt
reckless and wicked. I had soft words on my lips. They were lies. I felt
that I was your adversary and your enemy; I hated you. When I saw you
smile, I felt a desire to kill you."

"Truly?"

"Oh, Madame, it is a very natural sentiment, which you must have inspired
more than once. But common people feel it without being conscious of it,
while my vivid imagination represents me to myself incessantly. I
contemplate my mind, at times splendid, often hideous. If you had been
able to read my mind that night you would have screamed with fright."

Therese smiled:

"Farewell, Monsieur Choulette. Do not forget my medal of Saint Clara."

He placed his bag on the floor, raised his arm, and pointed his finger:

"You have nothing to fear from me. But the one whom you will love and who
will love you will harm you. Farewell, Madame."

He took his luggage and went out. She saw his long, rustic form disappear
behind the bushes of the garden.

In the afternoon she went to San Marco, where Dechartre was waiting for
her. She desired yet she feared to see him again so soon. She felt an
anguish which an unknown sentiment, profoundly soft, appeased. She did
not feel the stupor of the first time that she had yielded for love; she
did not feel the brusque vision of the irreparable. She was under
influences slower, more vague, and more powerful. This time a charming
reverie bathed the reminiscence of the caresses which she had received.
She was full of trouble and anxiety, but she felt no regret. She had
acted less through her will than through a force which she divined to be
higher. She absolved herself because of her disinterestedness. She
counted on nothing, having calculated nothing.

Doubtless, she had been wrong to yield, since she was not free; but she
had exacted nothing. Perhaps she was for him only a violent caprice. She
did not know him. She had not one of those vivid imaginations that
surpass immensely, in good as in evil, common mediocrity. If he went away
from her and disappeared she would not reproach him for it; at least, she
thought not. She would keep the reminiscence and the imprint of the
rarest and most precious thing one may find in the world. Perhaps he was
incapable of real attachment. He thought he loved her. He had loved her
for an hour. She dared not wish for more, in the embarrassment of the
false situation which irritated her frankness and her pride, and which
troubled the lucidity of her intelligence. While the carriage was
carrying her to San Marco, she persuaded herself that he would say
nothing to her of the day before, and that the room from which one could
see the pines rise to the sky would leave to them only the dream of a
dream.

He extended his hand to her. Before he had spoken she saw in his look
that he loved her as much now as before, and she perceived at the same
time that she wished him to be thus.

"You--" he said, "I have been here since noon. I was waiting, knowing
that you would not come so soon, but able to live only at the place where
I was to see you. It is you! Talk; let me see and hear you."

"Then you still love me?"

"It is now that I love you. I thought I loved you when you were only a
phantom. Now, you are the being in whose hands I have put my soul. It is
true that you are mine! What have I done to obtain the greatest, the
only, good of this world? And those men with whom the earth is covered
think they are living! I alone live! Tell me, what have I done to obtain
you?"

"Oh, what had to be done, I did. I say this to you frankly. If we have
reached that point, the fault is mine. You see, women do not always
confess it, but it is always their fault. So, whatever may happen, I
never will reproach you for anything."

An agile troupe of yelling beggars, guides, and coachmen surrounded them
with an importunity wherein was mingled the gracefulness which Italians
never lose. Their subtlety made them divine that these were lovers, and
they knew that lovers are prodigal. Dechartre threw coin to them, and
they all returned to their happy laziness.

A municipal guard received the visitors. Madame Martin regretted that
there was no monk. The white gown of the Dominicans was so beautiful
under the arcades of the cloister!

They visited the cells where, on the bare plaster, Fra Angelico, aided by
his brother Benedetto, painted innocent pictures for his companions.

"Do you recall the winter night when, meeting you before the Guimet
Museum, I accompanied you to the narrow street bordered by small gardens
which leads to the Billy Quay? Before separating we stopped a moment on
the parapet along which runs a thin boxwood hedge. You looked at that
boxwood, dried by winter. And when you went away I looked at it for a
long time."

They were in the cell wherein Savonarola lived. The guide showed to them
the portrait and the relics of the martyr.

"What could there have been in me that you liked that day? It was dark."

"I saw you walk. It is in movements that forms speak. Each one of your
steps told me the secrets of your charming beauty. Oh! my imagination was
never discreet in anything that concerned you. I did not dare to speak to
you. When I saw you, it frightened me. It frightened me because you could
do everything for me. When you were present, I adored you tremblingly.
When you were far from me, I felt all the impieties of desire."

"I did not suspect this. But do you recall the first time we saw each
other, when Paul Vence introduced you? You were seated near a screen. You
were looking at the miniatures. You said to me: 'This lady, painted by
Siccardi, resembles Andre Chenier's mother.' I replied to you: 'She is my
husband's great-grandmother. How did Andre Chenier's mother look?' And
you said: 'There is a portrait of her: a faded Levantine.'"

He excused himself and thought that he had not spoken so impertinently.

"You did. My memory is better than yours."

They were walking in the white silence of the convent. They saw the cell
which Angelico had ornamented with the loveliest painting. And there,
before the Virgin who, in the pale sky, receives from God the Father the
immortal crown, he took Therese in his arms and placed a kiss on her
lips, almost in view of two Englishwomen who were walking through the
corridors, consulting their Baedeker. She said to him:

"We must not forget Saint Anthony's cell."

"Therese, I am suffering in my happiness from everything that is yours
and that escapes me. I am suffering because you do not live for me alone.
I wish to have you wholly, and to have had you in the past."

She shrugged her shoulders a little.

"Oh, the past!"

"The past is the only human reality. Everything that is, is past."

She raised toward him her eyes, which resembled bits of blue sky full of
mingled sun and rain.

"Well, I may say this to you: I never have felt that I lived except with
you."

When she returned to Fiesole, she found a brief and threatening letter
from Le Menil. He could not understand, her prolonged absence, her
silence. If she did not announce at once her return, he would go to
Florence for her.

She read without astonishment, but was annoyed to see that everything
disagreeable that could happen was happening, and that nothing would be
spared to her of what she had feared. She could still calm him and
reassure him: she had only to say to him that she loved him; that she
would soon return to Paris; that he should renounce the foolish idea of
rejoining her here; that Florence was a village where they would be
watched at once. But she would have to write: "I love you." She must
quiet him with caressing phrases.

She had not the courage to do it. She would let him guess the truth. She
accused herself in veiled terms. She wrote obscurely of souls carried
away by the flood of life, and of the atom one is on the moving ocean of
events. She asked him, with affectionate sadness, to keep of her a fond
reminiscence in a corner of his soul.

She took the letter to the post-office box on the Fiesole square.
Children were playing in the twilight. She looked from the top of the
hill to the beautiful cup which carried beautiful Florence like a jewel.
And the peace of night made her shiver. She dropped the letter into the
box. Then only she had the clear vision of what she had done and of what
the result would be.




CHAPTER XX

WHAT IS FRANKNESS?

In the square, where the spring sun scattered its yellow roses, the bells
at noon dispersed the rustic crowd of grain-merchants assembled to sell
their wares. At the foot of the Lanzi, before the statues, the venders of
ices had placed, on tables covered with red cotton, small castles bearing
the inscription: 'Bibite ghiacciate'. And joy descended from heaven to
earth. Therese and Jacques, returning from an early promenade in the
Boboli Gardens, were passing before the illustrious loggia. Therese
looked at the Sabine by John of Bologna with that interested curiosity of
a woman examining another woman. But Dechartre looked at Therese only. He
said to her:

"It is marvellous how the vivid light of day flatters your beauty, loves
you, and caresses the mother-of-pearl on your cheeks."

"Yes," she said. "Candle-light hardens my features. I have observed this.
I am not an evening woman, unfortunately. It is at night that women have
a chance to show themselves and to please. At night, Princess Seniavine
has a fine blond complexion; in the sun she is as yellow as a lemon. It
must be owned that she does not care. She is not a coquette."

"And you are?"

"Oh, yes. Formerly I was a coquette for myself, now I am a coquette for
you."

She looked at the Sabine woman, who with her waving arms, long and
robust, tried to avoid the Roman's embraces.

"To be beautiful, must a woman have that thin form and that length of
limb? I am not shaped in that way."

He took pains to reassure her. But she was not disturbed about it. She
was looking now at the little castle of the ice-vender. A sudden desire
had come to her to eat an ice standing there, as the working-girls of the
city stood.

"Wait a moment," said Dechartre.

He ran toward the street that follows the left side of the Lanzi, and
disappeared.

After a moment he came back, and gave her a little gold spoon, the handle
of which was finished in a lily of Florence, with its chalice enamelled
in red.

"You must eat your ice with this. The man does not give a spoon with his
ices. You would have had to put out your tongue. It would have been
pretty, but you are not accustomed to it."

She recognized the spoon, a jewel which she had remarked the day before
in the showcase of an antiquarian.

They were happy; they disseminated their joy, which was full and simple,
in light words which had no sense. And they laughed when the Florentine
repeated to them passages of the old Italian writers. She enjoyed the
play of his face, which was antique in style and jovial in expression.
But she did not always understand what he said. She asked Jacques:

"What did he say?"

"Do you really wish to know?"

Yes, she wished to know.

"Well, he said he should be happy if the fleas in his bed were shaped
like you!"

When she had eaten the ice, he asked her to return to San Michele. It was
so near! They would cross the square and at once discover the masterpiece
in stone. They went. They looked at the St. George and at the bronze St.
Mark. Dechartre saw again on the wall the post-box, and he recalled with
painful exactitude the little gloved hand that had dropped the letter. He
thought it hideous, that copper mouth which had swallowed Therese's
secret. He could not turn his eyes away from it. All his gayety had fled.
She admired the rude statue of the Evangelist.

"It is true that he looks honest and frank, and it seems that, if he
spoke, nothing but words of truth would come out of his mouth."

He replied bitterly:

"It is not a woman's mouth."

She understood his thought, and said, in her soft tone:

"My friend, why do you say this to me? I am frank."

"What do you call frank? You know that a woman is obliged to lie."

She hesitated. Then she said:

"A woman is frank when she does not lie uselessly."




CHAPTER XXI

"I NEVER HAVE LOVED ANY ONE BUT YOU!"

Therese was dressed in sombre gray. The bushes on the border of the
terrace were covered with silver stars and on the hillsides the
laurel-trees threw their odoriferous flame. The cup of Florence was in
bloom.

Vivian Bell walked, arrayed in white, in the fragrant garden.

"You see, darling, Florence is truly the city of flowers, and it is not
inappropriate that she should have a red lily for her emblem. It is a
festival to-day, darling."

"A festival, to-day?"

"Darling, do you not know this is the first day of May? You did not wake
this morning in a charming fairy spectacle? Do you not celebrate the
Festival of Flowers? Do you not feel joyful, you who love flowers? For
you love them, my love, I know it: you are very good to them. You said to
me that they feel joy and pain; that they suffer as we do."

"Ah! I said that they suffer as we do?"

"Yes, you said it. It is their festival to-day. We must celebrate it with
the rites consecrated by old painters."

Therese heard without understanding. She was crumpling under her glove a
letter which she had just received, bearing the Italian postage-stamp,
and containing only these two lines:

"I am staying at the Great Britain Hotel, Lungarno Acciaoli. I shall
expect you to-morrow morning. No. 18."

"Darling, do you not know it is the custom of Florence to celebrate
spring on the first day of May every year? Then you did not understand
the meaning of Botticelli's picture consecrated to the Festival of
Flowers. Formerly, darling, on the first day of May the entire city gave
itself up to joy. Young girls, crowned with sweetbrier and other flowers,
made a long cortege through the Corso, under arches, and sang choruses on
the new grass. We shall do as they did. We shall dance in the garden."

"Ah, we shall dance in the garden?"

"Yes, darling; and I will teach you Tuscan steps of the fifteenth century
which have been found in a manuscript by Mr. Morrison, the oldest
librarian in London. Come back soon, my love; we shall put on flower hats
and dance."

"Yes, dear, we shall dance," said Therese.

And opening the gate, she ran through the little pathway that hid its
stones under rose-bushes. She threw herself into the first carriage she
found. The coachman wore forget-me-nots on his hat and on the handle of
his whip:

"Great Britain Hotel, Lungarno Acciaoli."

She knew where that was, Lungarno Acciaoli. She had gone there at sunset,
and she had seen the rays of the sun on the agitated surface of the
river. Then night had come, the murmur of the waters in the silence, the
words and the looks that had troubled her, the first kiss of her lover,
the beginning of incomparable love. Oh, yes, she recalled Lungarno
Acciaoli and the river-side beyond the old bridge--Great Britain
Hotel--she knew: a big stone facade on the quay. It was fortunate, since
he would come, that he had gone there. He might as easily have gone to
the Hotel de la Ville, where Dechartre was. It was fortunate they were
not side by side in the same corridor. Lungarno Acciaoli! The dead body
which they had seen pass was at peace somewhere in the little flowery
cemetery.

"Number 18."

It was a bare hotel room, with a stove in the Italian fashion, a set of
brushes displayed on the table, and a time-table. Not a book, not a
journal. He was there; she saw suffering on his bony face, a look of
fever. This produced on her a sad impression. He waited a moment for a
word, a gesture; but she dared do nothing. He offered a chair. She
refused it and remained standing.

"Therese, something has happened of which I do not know. Speak."

After a moment of silence, she replied, with painful slowness:

"My friend, when I was in Paris, why did you go away from me?"

By the sadness of her accent he believed, he wished to believe, in the
expression of an affectionate reproach. His face colored. He replied,
ardently:

"Ah, if I could have foreseen! That hunting party--I cared little for it,
as you may think! But you--your letter, that of the twenty-seventh"--he
had a gift for dates--"has thrown me into a horrible anxiety. Something
has happened. Tell me everything."

"My friend, I believed you had ceased to love me."

"But now that you know the contrary?"

"Now--"

She paused, her arms fell before her and her hands were joined.

Then, with affected tranquillity, she continued: