Part 16

She had a rich friend, a comrade from the convent, whom she no longer visited, because she suffered from seeing the things she could not have, and on returning wept whole days for grief, regret, despair, and distress.

One evening her husband came home radiant, holding in his hand a large envelope.

"See," said he, "here is something for you."

She nervously tore open the envelope, drew out a card, on which these words were printed:

"The Minister of Public Instruction and Madame Georges Ramponeau beg the honor of the company of Monsieur and Madame Loisel for the evening of Monday, January 18th."

Instead of being wild with delight, as he had expected, she threw the invitation on the table, with an exclamation of disgust, saying sullenly:

"What do you wish me to do with that?"

"But, my dear, I thought you would be so pleased. You never go out, and this is an event. I only obtained it after infinite trouble. Everybody wants one; they are much sought after, and they are not generally given to employees. You will see there all of the official world."

She looked at him with supreme disdain, and said impatiently:

"What would you like me to wear?" The secret was out. Manlike, he had not thought of that.

"But--the dress--that you wear to the theatre," stammered he. "You always look beautiful to me in that."

He stopped speaking, stupefied and dismayed on seeing his wife in tears. Two large tears trickled slowly down her cheeks.

"What is the matter? What is the matter?" asked he tenderly. By violent effort she conquered her grief and calmly said, while wiping her humid cheeks:

"Nothing; only I have no toilet, and, of course, can not go. Give the card to one of your comrades whose wife is fortunate enough to have something suitable for the occasion."

Despairingly he said:

"See, Mathilde, how much will a dress cost to wear to this ball; one which can also be used for other occasions--something very simple."

She reflected a few moments, figuring in her own mind the sum she could ask without danger of immediate refusal and frightening her economical husband. Finally she hesitatingly said:

"I do not know exactly; but it seems to me I might manage with about 400 francs."

He paled a little, because he had been saving just that sum to buy a gun for the following summer, when he would go with some of his friends to the plains of Nanterre on Sundays to shoot larks. Stifling his regrets, however, he replied:

"Very well, I will give you 400 francs, but try to have a beautiful dress."

The day of the fête drew near; but Madame Loisel seemed sad, anxious, and uneasy. Her toilet was ready, what could it be? Her husband said to her one evening:

"What is the matter? You have been so queer for the last few days!"

She replied: "It worries me that I have not one jewel, not a precious stone to wear. What a miserable figure I shall be! I think I would rather not go at all!"

"You can wear natural flowers; it is all the rage at this season, and for ten francs you can have two or three magnificent roses."

But she was not convinced.

"No; there is nothing more humiliating than to be poorly dressed among so many rich women."

"But how silly you are! Go to your friend, Madame Forestier, and ask her to lend you her jewels. You are friendly enough with her to do that."

She gave a cry of joy.

"Yes; that is true--I had not thought of it."

The following day she went to her friend and explained her predicament. Madame Forestier went to a closet and took out a large casket, and, opening it, said:

"Choose, my dear; they are at your service."

She saw first bracelets, then a necklace of pearls, a Venetian cross, gold and precious stones of exquisite workmanship. She tried them on before the glass, unable to decide whether to wear them or not.

"Have you nothing else?" said she.

"Oh, yes; look them over, I don't know what might please you."

Suddenly she opened a black satin case, disclosing to view a superb rivière of diamonds, her heart beat furiously with the desire of possession. She took them in her trembling hands and put them on over her simple high-neck gown, and stood lost in an ecstasy of admiration of herself. Then, fearfully, hesitatingly, dreading the agony of a refusal:

"Can you lend me only that?"

"Why, certainly; if it pleases you."

She fell on her friend's neck, embraced her tempestuously, and then left hastily with her treasure.

The day of the ball arrived. Madame Loisel was a success. Among all the beautiful women she was the most beautiful, elegant, gracious, and smiling with joy. She attracted the attention of some of the most distinguished men present, and on all sides was heard:

"Who is she?"

All the attachés of the cabinet sought her dancing card eagerly, and even the Minister himself expressed his approval. She danced with pleasure, thinking of nothing but the triumph of her beauty and the glory of her success. Intoxicated by all the admiration, she seemed to float through a cloud of happiness, intensified by her complete victory and the tribute paid to her charms, so sweet to the hearts of women. She left about four o'clock in the morning; her husband had slept since midnight in a small room, deserted except by two or three gentlemen who also awaited their wives.

He threw over her shoulders the modest cloak which she had brought, whose shabbiness seemed to mock the elegance of the ball toilet. She felt the incongruity, and walked swiftly away in order not to be seen by those whose rich furs were more in accordance with the occasion.

"Wait," said her husband, "you will take cold; I will call a carriage."

But she heeded him not, and rapidly descended the staircase. When they reached the street, there was no carriage in sight, and they were obliged to look for one, calling to the drivers who passed by, but in vain. Shiveringly they walked toward the Seine and finally found on the quay one of those nocturnal coupés one finds only in Paris after dark, hovering about the great city like grim birds of prey, who conceal their misery during the day. It carried them to their door (Rue de Martyrs), and they slowly and sadly entered their small apartments. It was ended for her, and he only remembered that he would have to be at his desk at ten o'clock.

She took off her cloak in front of the glass in order to admire herself once more in all her bravery, but, suddenly, she cried out: "The diamonds are gone!" Her husband, almost half asleep, started at the cry and asked:

"What is the matter?"

She turned toward him with a frightened air.

"I--I have lost Madame Forestier's necklace!"

He rose dismayed.

"What--how! But it is not possible!" And they immediately began to search in the folds of the dress, the cloak, in the pockets--everywhere, and found nothing.

"Are you sure that you had it when you left the ball?"

"Yes; I felt it while still in the vestibule at the Minister's."

"But if you had lost it in the street we should have heard it drop. It ought to be in the carriage."

"Yes; it is possible. Did you take the number?"

"No; and you have not looked at it, either?"

"No."

They looked at each other fearfully; finally Loisel dressed himself.

"I shall go over the whole ground that we traveled on foot, to see whether I can not find it."

He went out. She sat still in her brilliant ball toilet; no desire to sleep, no power to think, all swallowed up in the fear of the calamity which had fallen upon them.

Her husband came in at seven o'clock. He had found nothing. He had been to the Prefecture of the Police, to the papers offering a reward, to all small cab companies, anywhere, in short, where he could have the shadow of hope of recovery.

She waited all day in the same state of fear in the face of this frightful disaster.

Loisel returned in the evening pallid and haggard. No news as yet.

"You must write to your friend that you have broken the clasp of the necklace and are having it repaired. That will give us time to look around."

* * * * *

At the end of the week they had lost all hope, and Loisel, to whom it seemed this care and trouble had added five years to his age, said:

"We must try and replace the jewels."

The following day they went to the jeweler whose name was stamped inside the case. He consulted his books: "I did not sell that necklace, madame, I only furnished the case."

Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, racking their memories to find the same, both of them sick with grief and agony. At last, in a small shop in the Palais Royal, they found one which seemed to them like the one they had lost. With beating hearts they asked the price.

Forty thousand francs; but they could have it for 36,000 francs.

They asked the jeweler not to dispose of it for three days, and he also promised to take it back at 34,000 francs if the first one was found before the end of February.

Loisel had inherited 18,000 francs from his father. He borrowed the rest.

He borrowed a thousand francs from one, five hundred from another, five louis here, five louis there--he gave notes, made ruinous engagements, had recourse to the usurers, ran the whole gamut of money-lenders. He compromised his whole existence risking his signature, without knowing that it would be honored, terrified by the agony of the future, by the black misery which enveloped him, by the prospect of all the physical privations and moral tortures. He went for the new necklace and deposited on the counter his 36,000 francs.

When Madame Loisel returned the necklace to Madame Forestier, she coldly said:

"You should have returned it sooner, as I might have needed it."

She did not open the case, the one thing Madame Loisel had dreaded. What if she had discovered the change--what would she have thought? Would she not be taken for a thief?

* * * * *

From that time on Madame Loisel knew what life meant to the very poor in all its phases. She took her part heroically. This frightful debt must be paid. Her share of privations was bravely borne. They discharged their one domestic, changed their location, and rented smaller apartments near the roof.

She knew now what meant the duties of the household, the heavy work of the kitchen. Her pretty hands soon lost all semblance of the care of bygone days. She washed the soiled linen and dried it in her room. She went every morning to the street with the refuse of the kitchen, carrying the water, stopping at each flight of stairs to take breath--wearing the dress of the women of the people; she went each day to the grocer, the fruiterer, the butcher, carrying her basket on her arm, bargaining, defending cent by cent her miserable money.

They were obliged each month to pay some notes and renew others in order to gain time. Her husband worked in the evening balancing the books of merchants, and often was busy all night, copying at five cents a page.

And this life they endured for ten years.

At the end of this time they had paid all the tax of the usurers and compound interest.

Madame Loisel seemed an old woman now. She had become strong and hardy as the women of the provinces, and with tousled head, short skirts, red hands, she was foremost among the loud-voiced women of the neighborhood, who passed their time gossiping at their doorsteps.

But sometimes when her husband was at his office she seated herself at the window and thought of that evening in the past and that ball, where she had been so beautiful and so admired.

What would have happened if she had not lost the necklace? Who knows? Life is a singular and changeable thing, full of vicissitudes. How little it takes to save or wreck us!

* * * * *

One Sunday as she was walking in the Champs Elysées to divert herself from the cares and duties of the week she suddenly perceived a lady, with a little child, coming toward her. It was Madame Forestier, still young, beautiful and charming. Madame Loisel stopped short, too agitated to move. Should she speak to her? Yes, certainly. And now that the necklace was paid for she would tell her everything. Why not?

She walked up to her and said: "Good day, Jeanne."

Madame Forestier did not recognize her and seemed astonished at being spoken to so familiarly by this woman of the people.

"But--madame--I do not--I think you are mistaken."

"No; I am Mathilde Loisel."

"Oh!--my poor Mathilde, how you are changed!"

"Yes; I have had lots of trouble and misery since last I saw you--and all for you."

"For me! And how was that?"

"Do you remember the necklace of diamonds you lent me, to wear to the Minister's ball?"

"Yes; well?"

"Well, I lost it."

"Lost it! How could you, since you returned it to me?"

"I returned you one just like it, and for ten years we have been paying for it. You know, it was not easy for us, who had nothing--but it is finished, and I am very happy."

"You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine," said Madame Forestier.

"Yes; and you never found it out! They were so much alike," and she smiled proudly.

Touched to the heart, Madame Forestier took the poor, rough hands in hers, drawing her tenderly toward her, her voice filled with tears:

"Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine were false. They were not worth more than 500 francs at most."

THE WALL OPPOSITE BY PIERRE LOTI

[Illustration]

_Louis Marie Julien Viaud, known as Pierre Loti, was born at Rochefort in 1850, of an old Protestant family. He shipped aboard the "Borda" in 1867, and made many voyages to India and elsewhere in the East. This young naval officer was so modest and retiring that his comrades called him "Loti," after the name of a little flower of India which discreetly hides itself. In 1891 he was elected to the Academy. His chief works are "Le Marriage de Loti," 1882, "Madame Chrysanthème," 1887, "Japoneries d'Automne," "Le Roman d'un Spahi," etc._

_Loti is an impressionist, a personal psychologist--giving reflections of the passing show, fleeting things. "He has an exquisite instinct for the preservation of whatever is antique and beautiful--a Pied Piper who draws his admirers after him whether they will or no."_

_"The Wall Opposite" is an exquisite bit of symbolism, worthy to stand, as it does, in the same volume with the author's "Papillon de Mite."_

[Illustration]

THE WALL OPPOSITE BY PIERRE LOTI

Translated by R. W. Howes, 3d. Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son.

'Way at the farther end of a court they lived, in a modest little suite, the mother, the daughter, and a maternal parent already quite aged--their aunt and great-aunt--whom they had come to shelter.

The daughter was still very young, in the fleeting freshness of her eighteen years, when they were compelled, after a reverse of fortune, to withdraw there into the most secluded corner of their ancestral mansion. The rest of the familiar home, all the bright side that looked out on to the street, it had become necessary to let to some profane strangers, who changed there the aspect of things ancient and obliterated the cherished associations.

A judicial sale had stripped them of the most luxurious furniture of other days, and they had arranged their new little salon of recluses with objects a little incongruous: relics of ancestors, old things brought to light from the garret, the reserves of the house. But they fell in love with it at once, this salon so humble, which must now for years to come, on winter evenings, reunite all three around the same fire and around the same lamp. One found it comfortable there; it had an air cozy and intimate. One felt a little cloistered there, it is true, but without melancholy, for the windows, draped with simple muslin curtains, looked out on to a sunny court, whose walls, 'way at this farther end, were adorned with honeysuckle and roses.

And already were they forgetting the comfort, the luxury of other times, happy in their modest salon, when one day a communication was brought to them which left them in mournful consternation: the neighbor was about to raise his apartment two stories; a wall was going to rise there, in front of their windows, to steal away the air, to hide the sun.

And no means, alas! to turn aside that misfortune, more intimately cruel to their spirits than all the preceding disasters of fortune. To buy that house from their neighbor, a thing that had been easy at the time of their past affluence, was no longer to be dreamed of! Nothing to do, in their poverty, but to bow their heads.

* * * * *

And so the stories began to mount, line upon line; with anxiety they watched them grow; a silence of grief reigned among them, in the little salon, the depth of their melancholy measured day by day by the height of that obscuring object. And to think that that thing there, higher and still higher, would soon replace the background of blue sky or golden clouds, against which in days gone by the wall of their court trailed off in its network of branches!

In one month the masons had achieved their work: it was a glazed surface in freestone, which was next painted a grayish white, resembling almost a twilight sky of November, perpetually opaque, unchangeable and dead; and in the summers following the rose trees, the bushes of the court, took on their green again more palely in its shadow.

Into the salon the warm suns of June and July still penetrated, but more laggardly in the morning, fleeing more hurriedly in the evening; the twilights of autumn fell one hour earlier, bringing abruptly down the dull, chill melancholy.

* * * * *

And the times, the months, the seasons, passed. Between daylight and darkness, at the undecided hours of evening, when the three women left off one after the other their work of embroidery or sewing before lighting the evening lamp, the young daughter--who would soon be no longer young--lifted her eyes ever toward the wall, set up there in place of her sky of yesterday; often, even, in a sort of melancholy childishness that constantly returned to her like the sick fancy of a prisoner, she amused herself in watching from a certain place the branches of the rose trees, the tops of the bushes detach themselves in relief against the grayish background of the painted stones, and sought to give herself the illusion that the background there was a sky, a sky lower and nearer than the real one--after the manner of those who at night hang upon the deformed visions of dreams.

* * * * *

They had in expectation a heritage of which they often spoke around their lamp and their work-table, as of a day-dream, as of a fairy tale, so far away it seemed.

But, as soon as they possess it, that accession from America, at no matter what price, the house of the neighbor shall be bought in order to pull down all that new part, to reestablish things as in times past, and to restore to their court, to restore to their cherished rose bushes of the high walls, the sun of other times. To throw it down, that wall, this had become their sole earthly desire, their continual obsession.

And the old aunt was accustomed to say at such times:

"My dear daughters, may God grant that I live long enough, even I, to see that happy day!"

* * * * *

It tarried long in coming, that heritage.

The rains, and time, had traced on that glazed surface a sort of blackish stripes, melancholy, melancholy to look at, formed like a V, or like the trembling silhouette of a hovering bird. And the young girl contemplated that wearily every day, every day.

* * * * *

Once, in a very warm springtime, which, in spite of the shadow of the wall, made the roses more advanced than usual, and more spreading, a young man appeared at the farther end of that court, took his place for several evenings at the table of the three ladies without fortune. Passing through the village, he had been recommended by some friends in common, not without _arrière-pensée_ of marriage. He was handsome, with a high-spirited face, browned by the great blowings of the seas.

But he judged it too chimerical, that heritage; he found her too poor, the young girl, in whom, besides, the color began to fade for lack of sunlight.

So he departed, without return, he who had represented there for a time the sun, energy, and life. And she who already looked upon herself as his fiancée received from that departure a dumb and secret feeling as of death.

* * * * *

And the monotonous years continued their march, like the impassive rivers; there passed five; there passed ten, fifteen, even twenty. The freshness of the young girl without fortune finished little by little by fading away, useless and disdained; the mother took on some gray hairs; the old aunt became infirm, shaking her head, octogenarian in a faded armchair, forever seated at the same place, near the darkened window, her venerable profile cut out against the foliage of the court below that background of glazed wall where the blackish marbling accentuated itself in the form of a bird, traced by the sluggish gutters.

In the presence of the wall, of the inexorable wall, they grew old all three. And the rose bushes, the shrubs, grew old, too, with the less ominous age of plants, with their airs of rejuvenation at each return of spring.

"Oh! my daughters, my poor daughters," said the aunt continually in her broken voice that no longer finished the phrase, "provided I live long enough, even I."

And her bony hand, with a movement of menace, indicated that oppressive thing of stone.

* * * * *

She had been dead a twelvemonth, leaving a dreadful void in that little salon of recluses, and they had wept over her as the most cherished of grandmothers, when at last the inheritance came, very upsetting, one day when they had ceased longer to think of it.

The aged daughter--forty years struck now--found herself quite young in her joy at entering into possession of the returned fortune.

They drove out the lodgers, you may be sure, they reestablished themselves as before; but by preference they kept themselves ordinarily in the little salon of the days of moderate means: in the first place it was now full of souvenirs, and then besides it was again taking on a sunny cheerfulness, since they were to throw down that imprisoning wall which was to-day no more than a vain scarecrow, so easy to destroy by touch of louis d'or.

* * * * *