Climates by André Maurois Read Free Book Online Page B

decked in flowers, beside rivers and lakes, and spent our days lying in flat, varnished boats fitted with cushions in pale floral fabrics. Odile gave me the lovely scenery as a gift, meadows invaded by the blue of hyacinths, tulips rearing up from tall grass, supple close-cropped lawns, and weeping willows trailing their leaves in the water like women with unkempt hair. I came to know a different Odile, even more beautiful than the one in Florence. Watching her live was enchantment itself. The moment she stepped into a hotel room, she transformed it into a work of art. She had a naïve, touching attachment to certain childhood mementos she took everywhere with her: a small clock, a lace cushion, and a volume of Shakespeare bound in gray suede. When, much later, our marriage broke down, it was still with her lace cushion under her arm and her Shakespeare in her hand that Odile left. She skimmed over the top of life, more of a spirit than a woman. I wish I could paint her as she walked on the banks of the Thames or the Cam, her footsteps so light they might have been a dance.
    On our return, Paris seemed absurd. My parents and Odile’s assumed that our one desire would be to see them. Aunt Cora wanted to organize dinners in our honor. Odile’s friends complained they had been deprived of her company for two months and begged me to let them have her back some of the time, but all we wanted, Odile and I, was to carry on living alone. The first evening, when we took possession of our little home with its smell of paint and its carpets not yet laid, Odile, on a jubilant girlish impulse, went to the front door and cut the wire for the doorbell. It was her way of dismissing the world.
    We went all around our apartment and she asked me whether she could have a small study next to her bedroom: “It will be my little corner … You could only come in if I invited you; you know I have a fierce need for independence, Dickie. (She had been calling me Dickie since hearing a young lady in England hailing a young man by this name.) You don’t know me yet, you’ll see, I’m terrible.”
    She had brought champagne, cakes, and a bouquet of asters. With a low table, a couple of armchairs, and a crystal vase, she improvised a charming homely scene. We had the most cheerful,tender evening meal. We were alone and we loved each other. I do not regret those times, although they were fleeting. Their last chords still resonate within me, and if I listen very carefully and silence the noise of the present, I can make out their pure but already doomed sound.

. VI .
    Nevertheless, it was on the very morning after this supper that I have to register the first knock to send a fine crack through the transparent crystal of my love. An insignificant episode but one that prefigured everything to come. It was at the upholsterer’s, where we were ordering our furnishings. Odile had chosen curtains that I thought expensive. We discussed this briefly, very amicably, then she demurred. The salesman was a good-looking fellow who had energetically taken my wife’s part and had irritated me. As we were leaving, I caught sight in a looking glass of a glance of understanding and regret exchanged between this salesman and Odile. I cannotdescribe how I felt. Since my engagement I had subconsciously developed an absurd conviction that my wife’s mind was now linked to my own and that, by constant transfusion, my thoughts would always be hers. The concept of independence in a living being by my side was, I think, incomprehensible to me. Still more so the concept that this being might conspire against me with a stranger. Nothing could have been more fleeting or more innocent than that glance. I could make no comment, I was not even sure of what I had seen, and yet I feel it is to that moment that I can trace the revelation of jealousy.
    Before my marriage, not once had I thought of jealousy, other than as a theatrical emotion and one worthy of utmost contempt. I saw