had pressed that dangerous hand respectfully to his lips.
“Yes, but there we must stop,” she said, smiling. She sat down,
and seemed very slow over putting on her gloves, trying to slip the
unstretched kid over all her fingers at once, while she watched M.
de Montriveau; and he was lost in admiration of the Duchess and those
repeated graceful movements of hers.
“Ah! you were punctual,” she said; “that is right. I like punctuality.
It is the courtesy of kings, His Majesty says; but to my thinking, from
you men it is the most respectful flattery of all. Now, is it not? Just
tell me.”
Again she gave him a side glance to express her insidious friendship,
for he was dumb with happiness sheer happiness through such nothings
as these! Oh, the Duchess understood _son metier de femme_--the art
and mystery of being a woman--most marvelously well; she knew, to
admiration, how to raise a man in his own esteem as he humbled himself
to her; how to reward every step of the descent to sentimental folly
with hollow flatteries.
“You will never forget to come at nine o’clock.”
“No; but are you going to a ball every night?”
“Do I know?” she answered, with a little childlike shrug of the
shoulders; the gesture was meant to say that she was nothing if not
capricious, and that a lover must take her as she was.--“Besides,” she
added, “what is that to you? You shall be my escort.”
“That would be difficult tonight,” he objected; “I am not properly
dressed.”
“It seems to me,” she returned loftily, “that if anyone has a right
to complain of your costume, it is I. Know, therefore, _monsieur le
voyageur_, that if I accept a man’s arm, he is forthwith above the laws
of fashion, nobody would venture to criticise him. You do not know the
world, I see; I like you the better for it.”
And even as she spoke she swept him into the pettiness of that world by
the attempt to initiate him into the vanities of a woman of fashion.
“If she chooses to do a foolish thing for me, I should be a simpleton to
prevent her,” said Armand to himself. “She has a liking for me beyond a
doubt; and as for the world, she cannot despise it more than I do. So,
now for the ball if she likes.”
The Duchess probably thought that if the General came with her and
appeared in a ballroom in boots and a black tie, nobody would hesitate
to believe that he was violently in love with her. And the General was
well pleased that the queen of fashion should think of compromising
herself for him; hope gave him wit. He had gained confidence, he brought
out his thoughts and views; he felt nothing of the restraint that
weighed on his spirits yesterday. His talk was interesting and animated,
and full of those first confidences so sweet to make and to receive.
Was Mme de Langeais really carried away by his talk, or had she
devised this charming piece of coquetry? At any rate, she looked up
mischievously as the clock struck twelve.
“Ah! you have made me too late for the ball!” she exclaimed, surprised
and vexed that she had forgotten how time was going.
The next moment she approved the exchange of pleasures with a smile that
made Armand’s heart give a sudden leap.
“I certainly promised Mme de Beauseant,” she added. “They are all
expecting me.”
“Very well--go.”
“No--go on. I will stay. Your Eastern adventures fascinate me. Tell
me the whole story of your life. I love to share in a brave man’s
hardships, and I feel them all, indeed I do!”
She was playing with her scarf, twisting it and pulling it to
pieces, with jerky, impatient movements that seemed to tell of inward
dissatisfaction and deep reflection.
“_We_ are fit for nothing,” she went on. “Ah! we are contemptible,
selfish, frivolous creatures. We can bore ourselves with amusements,
and that is all we can do. Not one of us that understands that she has
a part to play in life. In old days in France, women were beneficent
lights; they lived to comfort those that mourned, to encourage high
virtues, to reward artists and stir new life with noble thoughts. If the
world has grown so petty, ours is the fault. You make me loathe the ball
and this world in which I live. No, I am not giving up much for you.”
She had plucked her scarf to pieces, as a child plays with a flower,
pulling away all the petals one by one; and now she crushed it into a
ball, and flung it away. She could show her swan’s neck.
She rang the bell. “I shall not go out tonight,” she told the footman.
Her long, blue eyes turned timidly to Armand; and by the look of
misgiving in them, he knew that he was meant to take the order for a
confession, for a first and great favour. There was a pause, filled with
many thoughts, before she spoke with that tenderness which is often in
women’s voices, and not so often in their hearts. “You have had a hard
life,” she said.
“No,” returned Armand. “Until today I did not know what happiness was.”
“Then you know it now?” she asked, looking at him with a demure, keen
glance.
“What is happiness for me henceforth but this--to see you, to hear
you?... Until now I have only known privation; now I know that I can be
unhappy----”
“That will do, that will do,” she said. “You must go; it is past
midnight. Let us regard appearances. People must not talk about us. I
do not know quite what I shall say; but the headache is a good-natured
friend, and tells no tales.”
“Is there to be a ball tomorrow night?”
“You would grow accustomed to the life, I think. Very well. Yes, we will
go again tomorrow night.”
There was not a happier man in the world than Armand when he went out
from her. Every evening he came to Mme de Langeais’ at the hour kept for
him by a tacit understanding.
It would be tedious, and, for the many young men who carry a redundance
of such sweet memories in their hearts, it were superfluous to follow
the story step by step--the progress of a romance growing in those hours
spent together, a romance controlled entirely by a woman’s will. If
sentiment went too fast, she would raise a quarrel over a word, or when
words flagged behind her thoughts, she appealed to the feelings. Perhaps
the only way of following such Penelope’s progress is by marking its
outward and visible signs.
As, for instance, within a few days of their first meeting, the
assiduous General had won and kept the right to kiss his lady’s
insatiable hands. Wherever Mme de Langeais went, M. de Montriveau
was certain to be seen, till people jokingly called him “Her Grace’s
orderly.” And already he had made enemies; others were jealous, and
envied him his position. Mme de Langeais had attained her end. The
Marquis de Montriveau was among her numerous train of adorers, and a
means of humiliating those who boasted of their progress in her good
graces, for she publicly gave him preference over them all.
“Decidedly, M. de Montriveau is the man for whom the Duchess shows a
preference,” pronounced Mme de Serizy.
And who in Paris does not know what it means when a woman “shows a
preference?” All went on therefore according to prescribed rule. The
anecdotes which people were pleased to circulate concerning the General
put that warrior in so formidable a light, that the more adroit quietly
dropped their pretensions to the Duchess, and remained in her train
merely to turn the position to account, and to use her name and
personality to make better terms for themselves with certain stars of
the second magnitude. And those lesser powers were delighted to take a
lover away from Mme de Langeais. The Duchess was keen-sighted enough to
see these desertions and treaties with the enemy; and her pride would
not suffer her to be the dupe of them. As M. de Talleyrand, one of her
great admirers, said, she knew how to take a second edition of revenge,
laying the two-edged blade of a sarcasm between the pairs in these
“morganatic” unions. Her mocking disdain contributed not a little to
increase her reputation as an extremely clever woman and a person to
be feared. Her character for virtue was consolidated while she amused
herself with other people’s secrets, and kept her own to herself. Yet,
after two months of assiduities, she saw with a vague dread in the
depths of her soul that M. de Montriveau understood nothing of the
subtleties of flirtation after the manner of the Faubourg Saint-Germain;
he was taking a Parisienne’s coquetry in earnest.
“You will not tame _him_, dear Duchess,” the old Vidame de Pamiers had
said. “‘Tis a first cousin to the eagle; he will carry you off to his
eyrie if you do not take care.”
Then Mme de Langeais felt afraid. The shrewd old noble’s words sounded
like a prophecy. The next day she tried to turn love to hate. She was
harsh, exacting, irritable, unbearable; Montriveau disarmed her with
angelic sweetness. She so little knew the great generosity of a large
nature, that the kindly jests with which her first complaints were met
went to her heart. She sought a quarrel, and found proofs of affection.
She persisted.
“When a man idolizes you, how can he have vexed you?” asked Armand.
“You do not vex me,” she answered, suddenly grown gentle and submissive.
“But why do you wish to compromise me? For me you ought to be nothing
but a _friend_. Do you not know it? I wish I could see that you had the
instincts, the delicacy of real friendship, so that I might lose neither
your respect nor the pleasure that your presence gives me.”
“Nothing but your _friend_!” he cried out. The terrible word sent an
electric shock through his brain. “On the faith of these happy hours
that you grant me, I sleep and wake in your heart. And now today, for no
reason, you are pleased to destroy all the secret hopes by which I live.
You have required promises of such constancy in me, you have said so
much of your horror of women made up of nothing but caprice; and now do
you wish me to understand that, like other women here in Paris, you have
passions, and know nothing of love? If so, why did you ask my life of
me? why did you accept it?”
“I was wrong, my friend. Oh, it is wrong of a woman to yield to such
intoxication when she must not and cannot make any return.”
“I understand. You have merely been coquetting with me, and----”
“Coquetting?” she repeated. “I detest coquetry. A coquette Armand, makes
promises to many, and gives herself to none; and a woman who keeps such
promises is a libertine. This much I believed I had grasped of our code.
But to be melancholy with humorists, gay with the frivolous, and politic
with ambitious souls; to listen to a babbler with every appearance
of admiration, to talk of war with a soldier, wax enthusiastic with
philanthropists over the good of the nation, and to give to each one his
little dole of flattery--it seems to me that this is as much a matter of
necessity as dress, diamonds, and gloves, or flowers in one’s hair. Such
talk is the moral counterpart of the toilette. You take it up and lay it
aside with the plumed head-dress. Do you call this coquetry? Why, I have
never treated you as I treat everyone else. With you, my friend, I am
sincere. Have I not always shared your views, and when you convinced me
after a discussion, was I not always perfectly glad? In short, I love
you, but only as a devout and pure woman may love. I have thought it
over. I am a married woman, Armand. My way of life with M. de Langeais
gives me liberty to bestow my heart; but law and custom leave me no
right to dispose of my person. If a woman loses her honour, she is
an outcast in any rank of life; and I have yet to meet with a single
example of a man that realizes all that our sacrifices demand of him in
such a case. Quite otherwise. Anyone can foresee the rupture between Mme
de Beauseant and M. d’Ajuda (for he is going to marry Mlle de Rochefide,
it seems), that affair made it clear to my mind that these very
sacrifices on the woman’s part are almost always the cause of the man’s
desertion. If you had loved me sincerely, you would have kept away for a
time.--Now, I will lay aside all vanity for you; is not that something?
What will not people say of a woman to whom no man attaches himself?
Oh, she is heartless, brainless, soulless; and what is more, devoid
of charm! Coquettes will not spare me. They will rob me of the very
qualities that mortify them. So long as my reputation is safe, what do I
care if my rivals deny my merits? They certainly will not inherit them.
Come, my friend; give up something for her who sacrifices so much for
you. Do not come quite so often; I shall love you none the less.”
“Ah!” said Armand, with the profound irony of a wounded heart in his
words and tone. “Love, so the scribblers say, only feeds on illusions.
Nothing could be truer, I see; I am expected to imagine that I am loved.
But, there!--there are some thoughts like wounds, from which there is no
recovery. My belief in you was one of the last left to me, and now I see
that there is nothing left to believe in this earth.”
She began to smile.
“Yes,” Montriveau went on in an unsteady voice, “this Catholic faith to
which you wish to convert me is a lie that men make for themselves; hope
is a lie at the expense of the future; pride, a lie between us and our
fellows; and pity, and prudence, and terror are cunning lies. And now
my happiness is to be one more lying delusion; I am expected to delude
myself, to be willing to give gold coin for silver to the end. If you
can so easily dispense with my visits; if you can confess me neither
as your friend nor your lover, you do not care for me! And I, poor fool
that I am, tell myself this, and know it, and love you!”
“But, dear me, poor Armand, you are flying into a passion!”
“I flying into a passion?”
“Yes. You think that the whole question is opened because I ask you to
be careful.”
In her heart of hearts she was delighted with the anger that leapt out
in her lover’s eyes. Even as she tortured him, she was criticising
him, watching every slightest change that passed over his face. If
the General had been so unluckily inspired as to show himself generous
without discussion (as happens occasionally with some artless souls),
he would have been a banished man forever, accused and convicted of not
knowing how to love. Most women are not displeased to have their code of
right and wrong broken through. Do they not flatter themselves that they
never yield except to force? But Armand was not learned enough in this
kind of lore to see the snare ingeniously spread for him by the Duchess.
So much of the child was there in the strong man in love.
“If all you want is to preserve appearances,” he began in his
simplicity, “I am willing to----”
“Simply to preserve appearances!” the lady broke in; “why, what idea can
you have of me? Have I given you the slightest reason to suppose that I
can be yours?”
“Why, what else are we talking about?” demanded Montriveau.
“Monsieur, you frighten me!... No, pardon me. Thank you,” she added,
coldly; “thank you, Armand. You have given me timely warning of
imprudence; committed quite unconsciously, believe it, my friend. You
know how to endure, you say. I also know how to endure. We will not
see each other for a time; and then, when both of us have contrived to
recover calmness to some extent, we will think about arrangements for
a happiness sanctioned by the world. I am young, Armand; a man with no
delicacy might tempt a woman of four-and-twenty to do many foolish, wild
things for his sake. But _you_! You will be my friend, promise me that
you will?”
“The woman of four-and-twenty,” returned he, “knows what she is about.”
He sat down on the sofa in the boudoir, and leant his head on his hands.
“Do you love me, madame?” he asked at length, raising his head, and
turning a face full of resolution upon her. “Say it straight out; Yes or
No!”
His direct question dismayed the Duchess more than a threat of suicide
could have done; indeed, the woman of the nineteenth century is not to
be frightened by that stale stratagem, the sword has ceased to be part
of the masculine costume. But in the effect of eyelids and lashes, in
the contraction of the gaze, in the twitching of the lips, is there not
some influence that communicates the terror which they express with such
vivid magnetic power?
“Ah, if I were free, if----”
“Oh! is it only your husband that stands in the way?” the General
exclaimed joyfully, as he strode to and fro in the boudoir. “Dear
Antoinette, I wield a more absolute power than the Autocrat of all the
Russias. I have a compact with Fate; I can advance or retard destiny,
so far as men are concerned, at my fancy, as you alter the hands of a
watch. If you can direct the course of fate in our political machinery,
it simply means (does it not?) that you understand the ins and outs of
it. You shall be free before very long, and then you must remember your
promise.”
“Armand!” she cried. “What do you mean? Great heavens! Can you imagine
that I am to be the prize of a crime? Do you want to kill me? Why! you
cannot have any religion in you! For my own part, I fear God. M. de
Langeais may have given me reason to hate him, but I wish him no manner
of harm.”
M. de Montriveau beat a tattoo on the marble chimney-piece, and only
looked composedly at the lady.
“Dear,” continued she, “respect him. He does not love me, he is not kind
to me, but I have duties to fulfil with regard to him. What would I not
do to avert the calamities with which you threaten him?--Listen,” she
continued after a pause, “I will not say another word about separation;
you shall come here as in the past, and I will still give you my
forehead to kiss. If I refused once or twice, it was pure coquetry,
indeed it was. But let us understand each other,” she added as he came
closer. “You will permit me to add to the number of my satellites; to
receive even more visitors in the morning than heretofore; I mean to be
twice as frivolous; I mean to use you to all appearance very badly;
to feign a rupture; you must come not quite so often, and then,
afterwards----”
While she spoke, she had allowed him to put an arm about her waist,
Montriveau was holding her tightly to him, and she seemed to feel the
exceeding pleasure that women usually feel in that close contact, an
earnest of the bliss of a closer union. And then, doubtless she meant to
elicit some confidence, for she raised herself on tiptoe, and laid her
forehead against Armand’s burning lips.
“And then,” Montriveau finished her sentence for her, “you shall not
speak to me of your husband. You ought not to think of him again.”
Mme de Langeais was silent awhile.
“At least,” she said, after a significant pause, “at least you will do
all that I wish without grumbling, you will not be naughty; tell me so,
my friend? You wanted to frighten me, did you not? Come, now, confess
it?... You are too good ever to think of crimes. But is it possible that
you can have secrets that I do not know? How can you control Fate?”
“Now, when you confirm the gift of the heart that you have already given
me, I am far too happy to know exactly how to answer you. I can trust
you, Antoinette; I shall have no suspicion, no unfounded jealousy of
you. But if accident should set you free, we shall be one----”
“Accident, Armand?” (With that little dainty turn of the head that seems
to say so many things, a gesture that such women as the Duchess can use
on light occasions, as a great singer can act with her voice.) “Pure
accident,” she repeated. “Mind that. If anything should happen to M. de
Langeais by your fault, I should never be yours.”
And so they parted, mutually content. The Duchess had made a pact
that left her free to prove to the world by words and deeds that M. de
Montriveau was no lover of hers. And as for him, the wily Duchess
vowed to tire him out. He should have nothing of her beyond the little
concessions snatched in the course of contests that she could stop
at her pleasure. She had so pretty an art of revoking the grant
of yesterday, she was so much in earnest in her purpose to remain
technically virtuous, that she felt that there was not the slightest
danger for her in preliminaries fraught with peril for a woman less sure
of her self-command. After all, the Duchess was practically separated
from her husband; a marriage long since annulled was no great sacrifice
to make to her love.
Montriveau on his side was quite happy to win the vaguest promise, glad
once for all to sweep aside, with all scruples of conjugal fidelity, her
stock of excuses for refusing herself to his love. He had gained ground
a little, and congratulated himself. And so for a time he took unfair
advantage of the rights so hardly won. More a boy than he had ever been
in his life, he gave himself up to all the childishness that makes first
love the flower of life. He was a child again as he poured out all
his soul, all the thwarted forces that passion had given him, upon her
hands, upon the dazzling forehead that looked so pure to his eyes; upon
her fair hair; on the tufted curls where his lips were pressed. And the
Duchess, on whom his love was poured like a flood, was vanquished by
the magnetic influence of her lover’s warmth; she hesitated to begin
the quarrel that must part them forever. She was more a woman than she
thought, this slight creature, in her effort to reconcile the demands
of religion with the ever-new sensations of vanity, the semblance of
pleasure which turns a Parisienne’s head. Every Sunday she went to Mass;
she never missed a service; then, when evening came, she was steeped in
the intoxicating bliss of repressed desire. Armand and Mme de Langeais,
like Hindoo fakirs, found the reward of their continence in the
temptations to which it gave rise. Possibly, the Duchess had ended by
resolving love into fraternal caresses, harmless enough, as it might
have seemed to the rest of the world, while they borrowed extremes
of degradation from the license of her thoughts. How else explain the
incomprehensible mystery of her continual fluctuations? Every morning
she proposed to herself to shut her door on the Marquis de Montriveau;
every evening, at the appointed hour, she fell under the charm of his
presence. There was a languid defence; then she grew less unkind. Her
words were sweet and soothing. They were lovers--lovers only could have
been thus. For him the Duchess would display her most sparkling wit, her
most captivating wiles; and when at last she had wrought upon his senses
and his soul, she might submit herself passively to his fierce caresses,
but she had her _nec plus ultra_ of passion; and when once it was
reached, she grew angry if he lost the mastery of himself and made
as though he would pass beyond. No woman on earth can brave the
consequences of refusal without some motive; nothing is more natural
than to yield to love; wherefore Mme de Langeais promptly raised a
second line of fortification, a stronghold less easy to carry than
the first. She evoked the terrors of religion. Never did Father of
the Church, however eloquent, plead the cause of God better than the
Duchess. Never was the wrath of the Most High better justified than
by her voice. She used no preacher’s commonplaces, no rhetorical
amplifications. No. She had a “pulpit-tremor” of her own. To Armand’s
most passionate entreaty, she replied with a tearful gaze, and a gesture
in which a terrible plenitude of emotion found expression. She stopped
his mouth with an appeal for mercy. She would not hear another word; if
she did, she must succumb; and better death than criminal happiness.
“Is it nothing to disobey God?” she asked him, recovering a voice grown
faint in the crises of inward struggles, through which the fair
actress appeared to find it hard to preserve her self-control. “I would
sacrifice society, I would give up the whole world for you, gladly; but
it is very selfish of you to ask my whole after-life of me for a moment
of pleasure. Come, now! are you not happy?” she added, holding out her
hand; and certainly in her careless toilette the sight of her afforded
consolations to her lover, who made the most of them.
Sometimes from policy, to keep her hold on a man whose ardent passion
gave her emotions unknown before, sometimes in weakness, she suffered
him to snatch a swift kiss; and immediately, in feigned terror, she
flushed red and exiled Armand from the sofa so soon as the sofa became
dangerous ground.
“Your joys are sins for me to expiate, Armand; they are paid for by
penitence and remorse,” she cried.