This woman he loved was a Parisian, he told me. He described her beauty to me, as if in order to excuse himself for having become the slave to her he was. I suppose she was very beautiful. He said that she had a physical charm so intense that few men could resist it, that she was famous throughout Europe for it. He told me that she was not a good woman. I gathered that she lived for pleasure, admiration, that she had allowed many men to love her before he knew her. But she had loved him genuinely. She was not a very young woman, and she was not a married woman. He said that she was a woman men loved but did not marry, a woman who was loved by the husbands of married women, a woman to marry whom would exclude a man from the society of good women. She had never lived, or thought of living, for one man till he came into her life. Nor had he ever dreamed of living for one woman. He had lived to gain experience; she too. But when he met her--knowing thoroughly all she was--all other women ceased to exist for him. He became her slave. Then jealousy awoke in him, jealousy of all the men who had been in her life, who might be in her life again. He was tortured by loving such a woman--a woman who had belonged to many, who would no doubt in the future belong to others. For despite the fact that she loved him he told me that at first he had no illusions about her. He knew the world too well for that, and he cursed the fate that had bound him body and soul to what he called a courtesan. Even the fact that she loved him at first did not blind him to the effect upon character that her life must inevitably have had. She had dwelt in an atmosphere of lies, he said, and to lie was nothing to her. Any original refinement of feeling as regards human relations that she might have had had become dulled, if it had not been destroyed. At first he blindly, miserably, resigned himself to this. He said to himself, 'Fate has led me to love this sort of woman. I must accept her as she is, with all her defects, with her instinct for treachery, with her passion for the admiration of the world, with her incapability for being true to an ideal, or for isolating herself in the adoration of one man. I cannot get away from her. She has me fast.
I cannot live without her. Then I must bear the torture that jealousy of her will certainly bring me in silence. I must conceal it. I must try to kill it. I must make the best of whatever she will give me, knowing that she can never, with her nature and her training, be exclusively mine as a good woman might be.' This he said to himself.
This plan of conduct he traced for himself. But he soon found that he was not strong enough to keep to it. His jealousy was a devouring fire, and he could not conceal it. Domini, he described to me minutely the effect of jealousy in a human heart. I had never imagined what it was, and, when he described it, I felt as if I looked down into a bottomless pit lined with the flames of hell. By the depth of that pit I measured the depth of his passion for this woman, and I gained an idea of what human love--not the best sort of human love, but still genuine, intense love of some kind--could be. Of this human love I thought at night, putting it in comparison with the love God's creature can have for God. And my sense of loneliness increased, and I felt as if I had always been lonely. Does this seem strange to you? In the love of God was calm, peace, rest, a lying down of the soul in the Almighty arms. In the other love described to me was restlessness, agitation, torture, the soul spinning like an atom driven by winds, the heart devoured as by a disease, a cancer. On the one hand was a beautiful trust, on the other a ceaseless agony of doubt and terror.
And yet I came to feel as if the one were unreal in comparison with the other, as if in the one were a loneliness, in the other fierce companionship. I thought of the Almighty arms, Domini, and of the arms of a woman, and--Domini, I longed to have known, if only once, the pressure of a woman's arms about my neck, about my breast, the touch of a woman's hand upon my heart.
"And of all this I never spoke at confession. I committed the deadly sin of keeping back at confession all that." He stopped. Then he said, "Till the end my confessions were incomplete, were false.
"The stranger told me that as his love for this woman grew he found it impossible to follow the plan he had traced for himself of shutting his eyes to the sight of other eyes admiring, desiring her, of shutting his ears to the voices that whispered, 'This it will always be, for others as well as for you.' He found it impossible. His jealousy was too importunate, and he resolved to make any effort to keep her for himself alone. He knew she had love for him, but he knew that love would not necessarily, or even probably, keep her entirely faithful to him. She thought too little of passing intrigues. To her they seemed trifles, meaningless, unimportant. She told him so, when he spoke his jealousy. She said, 'I love you. I do not love these other men. They are in my life for a moment only.'
"'And that moment plunges me into hell!' he said.