An Infinity of Mirrors Read Free Page A

management permitted a bird to awaken him at an ungodly hour; on both occasions he had had the bird shot.
    Paul-Alain Bernheim was dedicated to everything in life, but most of all to pretty women. If a woman was pretty he had to know her better. His method was direct. On the first day he would send a basket of flowers. On the second day he would send baskets of flowers every hour on the hour; florists had dueled over securing or retaining his account. If on the third day there was no response to the dozens of messages concealed beneath the blooms, he would send a fiacre filled with flowers. Then that night he would bribe his way into the woman’s house; crouching on the carpet outside her bedroom, he would scratch at the door until elemental curiosity forced her to leave her bed and open it.
    â€œFor God’s sake, what is it?” one whispered harshly, “who are you? my God, Bernheim! Are you crazy, Bernheim, my husband will kill you, your flowers have already driven him out of his mind why are you here you will ruin my marriage, Bernheim, for God’s sake leave, leave now before there is blood!”
    Using his stage voice which could break an electric light bulb at thirty feet, he would answer, “Why have you not telephoned me?”
    â€œSsssshhhh! My God, telephone you, I hardly know you! My God you must be totally insane, Bernheim, please, please go before he wakes up and turns into a raging tiger—no, oh no, stop that, Bernheim, no.”
    He was relentless with such women because they had pretended to ignore him and forced ultimate methods. He would reply, “If you do not want me, I prefer a scandal. I demand to see your husband now. I must have you. Let him run me through, but I must have you.”
    He was not young when he did these things, because it took some years of experience to develop such pragmatic psychology, but his own wives told Paule that the women always appeared the next morning at eight-thirty A.M. at the Hôtel de la Gouache, ready for duty.
    On the Friday evening that she was twenty-two, the evening before Paule’s life changed forever and a new age began, as on every other Friday evening before, in the third year of his sixth wife, Paule listened intently to her father saying, “The Jews, my dearest, understood the abstract concept of freedom before anyone. Until we evolved this, man was so captured by all of his humanized gods that it was impossible for him to be free. Our one God, an abstract, gives us freedom to do as we will. Our God is not for this Jew or against that Jew. When the time comes, our God is always free to ask for an accounting, for actions good or bad. When Martin Luther turned his back on Rome he made a profound change in the Christian religion by changing man-God relationships to almost the sort of relationship we Jews have with our God. In fact, Martin Luther invited the Jews to become Protestants with him, because he saw that there was no longer any separating chasm between Judaism and Christianity.” As her father talked on he gave Paule one more small reason for her serenity. The more human the world became, the higher her adoration soared.

Two
    From the time of her father’s second divorce Paule—who did not think of herself as being gallant—had developed a most gallant and simple basis for refusing to recognize that she might ever be unhappy. She knew that if her father would permit her to stay with him—if it did not come into his head, in some rage, to send her away to the Hôtel Meurice with the others—there could be nothing which might upset her calm or prevent her joy. All during her adolescence, she had been certain that she would never leave her father willingly, and she resigned herself to the fact that she could never marry unless her husband would agree to come and live with them at Cours Albert I. As the young men came to call, as she fell in and out of love, as she reached twenty and passed