“Monsieur Dechartre, that black spot over there is the Boboli Gardens, is it not?  I saw the gardens three years ago.  There were not many flowers in them.  Nevertheless, I liked their tall, sombre trees.”

It astonished him that she talked, that she thought.  The clear sound of her voice amazed him, as if he never had heard it.

He replied at random.  He was awkward.  She feigned not to notice it, but felt a deep inward joy.  His low voice, which was veiled and softened, seemed to caress her.  She said ordinary things: 

“That view is beautiful, The weather is fine.”

CHAPTER XII

HEARTS AWAKENED

In the morning, her head on the embroidered pillow, Therese was thinking of the walks of the day before; of the Virgins, framed with angels; of the innumerable children, painted or carved, all beautiful, all happy, who sing ingenuously the Alleluia of grace and of beauty.  In the illustrious chapel of the Brancacci, before those frescoes, pale and resplendent as a divine dawn, he had talked to her of Masaccio, in language so vivid that it had seemed to her as if she had seen him, the adolescent master of the masters, his mouth half open, his eyes dark and blue, dying, enchanted.  And she had liked these marvels of a morning more charming than a day.  Dechartre was for her the soul of those magnificent forms, the mind of those noble things.  It was by him, it was through him, that she understood art and life.  She took no interest in things that did not interest him.  How had this affection come to her?  She had no precise remembrance of it.  In the first place, when Paul Vence wished to introduce him to her, she had no desire to know him, no presentiment that he would please her.  She recalled elegant bronze statuettes, fine waxworks signed with his name, that she had remarked at the Champ de Mars salon or at Durand-Ruel’s.  But she did not imagine that he could be agreeable to her, or more seductive than many artists and lovers of art at whom she laughed with her friends.  When she saw him, he pleased her; she had a desire to attract him, to see him often.  The night he dined at her house she realized that she had for him a noble and elevating affection.  But soon after he irritated her a little; it made her impatient to see him closeted within himself and too little preoccupied by her.  She would have liked to disturb him.  She was in that state of impatience when she met him one evening, in front of the grille of the Musee des Religions, and he talked to her of Ravenna and of the Empress seated on a gold chair in her tomb.  She had found him serious and charming, his voice warm, his eyes soft in the shadow of the night, but too much a stranger, too far from her, too unknown.  She had felt a sort of uneasiness, and she did not know, when she walked along the boxwood bordering the terrace, whether she desired to see him every day or never to see him again.