He had been working like twenty Trojans for about a twelvemonth, when he got the news of her marriage to the other man.
It chanced to reach him (in a letter from a friend, saying it would be celebrated in a fortnight) on the very day of its occurrence; and that, by a pleasant coincidence, was his birthday. In a fit of cynical despair he asked a lot of his schoolfellows, and a few, ladies of the neighbourhood, to dine with him; and they feasted and made merry till well into the following morning, when, for the first and almost the only time in his life, he had to be helped home, drunk. His drunkenness, though, was perhaps not altogether to be regretted. It kept him from thinking; and for that particular night it was conceivably better, on the whole, that he should not think.
His mood of cynical recklessness lasted for a month or two. He celebrated the wedding—faisait la noce, as the local idiom runs—in a double sense, and with feverish diligence. For a moment it seemed a toss-up what would become of him: whether he would sink into the condition of a chronic noceur, or return to the former decent tenor of his way. It happened, however, that he had no appetite for alcohol, and that bad music, bad air, evil communications, gaslight, and late hours failed to afford him any permanent satisfaction: whilst, as for other women,—who that has savoured nectar can care for milk and water?—who that has lost a rose can be consoled with an artificial flower? This was how he put it to himself All the women he knew on the right bank of the Seine were, to his taste, mortally insipid; those whom he knew on the left were stuffed with sawdust.
And the consequence was that one morning he went to work again; and in spite of the dull pain in his heart, he worked steadily, doggedly, from day to day, from year to year, scarcely noting the progress of time, in the absorbed and methodical nature of his life, till presently he had turned forty, and was what they call a successful man. Of course the dull pain in his heart had softened gradually into something that was not entirely painful; into something whose sadness was mixed with sweetness, like plaintive music; but her image remained enshrined as an idol in his memory, and I doubt if ever a day passed without his spending some portion thereof in worship before it. He never walked abroad, either, through the Paris streets, without thinking, “What if I should meet her!” (It would be almost inevitable that she should some time come to Paris.) And at this prospect his heart would leap and his pulses quicken like a boy’s. For art and love between them had kept him young; it had indeed never struck him to count his lustres, or to reflect that in point of them he was middle-aged. Besides, he lived in a country whose amiable custom it is to call every man a lad until he marries. Regularly once a year, in the autumn, he had sent a picture to be exhibited at New York, in the hope that she might see it.