the ceremonies--“to return home, or to go back to Mme de Serizy’s
ball? I have done all in my power to prevent any scandal. Neither your
servants nor anyone else can possibly know what has passed between us
in the last quarter of an hour. Your servants have no idea that you have
left the ballroom; your carriage never left Mme de Serizy’s courtyard;
your brougham may likewise be found in the court of your own hotel.
Where do you wish to be?”
“What do you counsel, Armand?”
“There is no Armand now, Mme la Duchesse. We are strangers to each
other.”
“Then take me to the ball,” she said, still curious to put Armand’s
power to the test. “Thrust a soul that suffered in the world, and must
always suffer there, if there is no happiness for her now, down into
hell again. And yet, oh my friend, I love you as your bourgeoises love;
I love you so that I could come to you and fling my arms about your neck
before all the world if you asked it off me. The hateful world has not
corrupted me. I am young at least, and I have grown younger still. I am
a child, yes, your child, your new creature. Ah! do not drive me forth
out of my Eden!”
Armand shook his head.
“Ah! let me take something with me, if I go, some little thing to wear
tonight on my heart,” she said, taking possession of Armand’s glove,
which she twisted into her handkerchief.
“No, I am _not_ like all those depraved women. You do not know the
world, and so you cannot know my worth. You shall know it now! There are
women who sell themselves for money; there are others to be gained by
gifts, it is a vile world! Oh, I wish I were a simple bourgeoise, a
working girl, if you would rather have a woman beneath you than a woman
whose devotion is accompanied by high rank, as men count it. Oh, my
Armand, there are noble, high, and chaste and pure natures among us;
and then they are lovely indeed. I would have all nobleness that I might
offer it all up to you. Misfortune willed that I should be a duchess;
I would I were a royal princess, that my offering might be complete. I
would be a grisette for you, and a queen for everyone besides.”
He listened, damping his cigars with his lips.
“You will let me know when you wish to go,” he said.
“But I should like to stay----”
“That is another matter!”
“Stay, that was badly rolled,” she cried, seizing on a cigar and
devouring all that Armand’s lips had touched.
“Do you smoke?”
“Oh, what would I not do to please you?”
“Very well. Go, madame.”
“I will obey you,” she answered, with tears in her eyes.
“You must be blindfolded; you must not see a glimpse of the way.”
“I am ready, Armand,” she said, bandaging her eyes.
“Can you see?”
“No.”
Noiselessly he knelt before her.
“Ah! I can hear you!” she cried, with a little fond gesture, thinking
that the pretence of harshness was over.
He made as if he would kiss her lips; she held up her face.
“You can see, madame.”
“I am just a little bit curious.”
“So you always deceive me?”
“Ah! take off this handkerchief, sir,” she cried out, with the passion
of a great generosity repelled with scorn, “lead me; I will not open my
eyes.”
Armand felt sure of her after that cry. He led the way; the Duchess
nobly true to her word, was blind. But while Montriveau held her hand
as a father might, and led her up and down flights of stairs, he was
studying the throbbing pulses of this woman’s heart so suddenly invaded
by Love. Mme de Langeais, rejoicing in this power of speech, was glad to
let him know all; but he was inflexible; his hand was passive in reply
to the questionings of her hand.
At length, after some journey made together, Armand bade her go forward;
the opening was doubtless narrow, for as she went she felt that his hand
protected her dress. His care touched her; it was a revelation surely
that there was a little love still left; yet it was in some sort a
farewell, for Montriveau left her without a word. The air was warm; the
Duchess, feeling the heat, opened her eyes, and found herself standing
by the fire in the Comtesse de Serizy’s boudoir.
She was alone. Her first thought was for her disordered toilette; in a
moment she had adjusted her dress and restored her picturesque coiffure.
“Well, dear Antoinette, we have been looking for you everywhere.” It was
the Comtesse de Serizy who spoke as she opened the door.
“I came here to breathe,” said the Duchess; “it is unbearably hot in the
rooms.”
“People thought that you had gone; but my brother Ronquerolles told me
that your servants were waiting for you.”
“I am tired out, dear, let me stay and rest here for a minute,” and the
Duchess sat down on the sofa.
“Why, what is the matter with you? You are shaking from head to foot!”
The Marquis de Ronquerolles came in.
“Mme la Duchesse, I was afraid that something might have happened. I
have just come across your coachman, the man is as tipsy as all the
Swiss in Switzerland.”
The Duchess made no answer; she was looking round the room, at the
chimney-piece and the tall mirrors, seeking the trace of an opening.
Then with an extraordinary sensation she recollected that she was again
in the midst of the gaiety of the ballroom after that terrific scene
which had changed the whole course of her life. She began to shiver
violently.
“M. de Montriveau’s prophecy has shaken my nerves,” she said. “It was
a joke, but still I will see whether his axe from London will haunt me
even in my sleep. So good-bye, dear.--Good-bye, M. le Marquis.”
As she went through the rooms she was beset with inquiries and regrets.
Her world seemed to have dwindled now that she, its queen, had fallen so
low, was so diminished. And what, moreover, were these men compared with
him whom she loved with all her heart; with the man grown great by all
that she had lost in stature? The giant had regained the height that he
had lost for a while, and she exaggerated it perhaps beyond measure. She
looked, in spite of herself, at the servant who had attended her to the
ball. He was fast asleep.
“Have you been here all the time?” she asked.
“Yes, madame.”
As she took her seat in her carriage she saw, in fact, that her coachman
was drunk--so drunk, that at any other time she would have been afraid;
but after a great crisis in life, fear loses its appetite for common
food. She reached home, at any rate, without accident; but even there
she felt a change in herself, a new feeling that she could not shake
off. For her, there was now but one man in the world; which is to say
that henceforth she cared to shine for his sake alone.
While the physiologist can define love promptly by following out natural
laws, the moralist finds a far more perplexing problem before him if
he attempts to consider love in all its developments due to social
conditions. Still, in spite of the heresies of the endless sects that
divide the church of Love, there is one broad and trenchant line of
difference in doctrine, a line that all the discussion in the world can
never deflect. A rigid application of this line explains the nature
of the crisis through which the Duchess, like most women, was to pass.
Passion she knew, but she did not love as yet.
Love and passion are two different conditions which poets and men of the
world, philosophers and fools, alike continually confound. Love implies
a give and take, a certainty of bliss that nothing can change; it
means so close a clinging of the heart, and an exchange of happiness so
constant, that there is no room left for jealousy. Then possession is a
means and not an end; unfaithfulness may give pain, but the bond is not
less close; the soul is neither more nor less ardent or troubled, but
happy at every moment; in short, the divine breath of desire spreading
from end to end of the immensity of Time steeps it all for us in the
selfsame hue; life takes the tint of the unclouded heaven. But Passion
is the foreshadowing of Love, and of that Infinite to which all
suffering souls aspire. Passion is a hope that may be cheated. Passion
means both suffering and transition. Passion dies out when hope is
dead. Men and women may pass through this experience many times without
dishonor, for it is so natural to spring towards happiness; but there is
only one love in a lifetime. All discussions of sentiment ever
conducted on paper or by word of mouth may therefore be resumed by
two questions--“Is it passion? Is it love?” So, since love comes into
existence only through the intimate experience of the bliss which gives
it lasting life, the Duchess was beneath the yoke of passion as yet; and
as she knew the fierce tumult, the unconscious calculations, the fevered
cravings, and all that is meant by that word _passion_--she suffered.
Through all the trouble of her soul there rose eddying gusts of tempest,
raised by vanity or self-love, or pride or a high spirit; for all these
forms of egoism make common cause together.
She had said to this man, “I love you; I am yours!” Was it possible that
the Duchesse de Langeais should have uttered those words--in vain? She
must either be loved now or play her part of queen no longer. And then
she felt the loneliness of the luxurious couch where pleasure had never
yet set his glowing feet; and over and over again, while she tossed and
writhed there, she said, “I want to be loved.”
But the belief that she still had in herself gave her hope of success.
The Duchess might be piqued, the vain Parisienne might be humiliated;
but the woman saw glimpses of wedded happiness, and imagination,
avenging the time lost for nature, took a delight in kindling the
inextinguishable fire in her veins. She all but attained to the
sensations of love; for amid her poignant doubt whether she was loved in
return, she felt glad at heart to say to herself, “I love him!” As for
her scruples, religion, and the world she could trample them under foot!
Montriveau was her religion now. She spent the next day in a state
of moral torpor, troubled by a physical unrest, which no words could
express. She wrote letters and tore them all up, and invented a thousand
impossible fancies.
When M. de Montriveau’s usual hour arrived, she tried to think that he
would come, and enjoyed the feeling of expectation. Her whole life was
concentrated in the single sense of hearing. Sometimes she shut her
eyes, straining her ears to listen through space, wishing that she
could annihilate everything that lay between her and her lover, and so
establish that perfect silence which sounds may traverse from afar. In
her tense self-concentration, the ticking of the clock grew hateful
to her; she stopped its ill-omened garrulity. The twelve strokes of
midnight sounded from the drawing-room.
“Ah, God!” she cried, “to see him here would be happiness. And yet, it
is not so very long since he came here, brought by desire, and the tones
of his voice filled this boudoir. And now there is nothing.”
She remembered the times that she had played the coquette with him, and
how that her coquetry had cost her her lover, and the despairing tears
flowed for long.
Her woman came at length with, “Mme la Duchesse does not know, perhaps,
that it is two o’clock in the morning; I thought that madame was not
feeling well.”
“Yes, I am going to bed,” said the Duchess, drying her eyes. “But
remember, Suzanne, never to come in again without orders; I tell you
this for the last time.”
For a week, Mme de Langeais went to every house where there was a hope
of meeting M. de Montriveau. Contrary to her usual habits, she came
early and went late; gave up dancing, and went to the card-tables. Her
experiments were fruitless. She did not succeed in getting a glimpse of
Armand. She did not dare to utter his name now. One evening, however, in
a fit of despair, she spoke to Mme de Serizy, and asked as carelessly as
she could, “You must have quarreled with M. de Montriveau? He is not to
be seen at your house now.”
The Countess laughed. “So he does not come here either?” she returned.
“He is not to be seen anywhere, for that matter. He is interested in
some woman, no doubt.”
“I used to think that the Marquis de Ronquerolles was one of his
friends----” the Duchess began sweetly.
“I have never heard my brother say that he was acquainted with him.”
Mme de Langeais did not reply. Mme de Serizy concluded from the
Duchess’s silence that she might apply the scourge with impunity to a
discreet friendship which she had seen, with bitterness of soul, for a
long time past.
“So you miss that melancholy personage, do you? I have heard most
extraordinary things of him. Wound his feelings, he never comes back,
he forgives nothing; and, if you love him, he keeps you in chains. To
everything that I said of him, one of those that praise him sky-high
would always answer, ‘He knows how to love!’ People are always telling
me that Montriveau would give up all for his friend; that his is a great
nature. Pooh! society does not want such tremendous natures. Men of that
stamp are all very well at home; let them stay there and leave us to our
pleasant littlenesses. What do you say, Antoinette?”
Woman of the world though she was, the Duchess seemed agitated, yet she
replied in a natural voice that deceived her fair friend:
“I am sorry to miss him. I took a great interest in him, and promised
to myself to be his sincere friend. I like great natures, dear friend,
ridiculous though you may think it. To give oneself to a fool is a clear
confession, is it not, that one is governed wholly by one’s senses?”
Mme de Serizy’s “preferences” had always been for commonplace men; her
lover at the moment, the Marquis d’Aiglemont, was a fine, tall man.
After this, the Countess soon took her departure, you may be sure Mme
de Langeais saw hope in Armand’s withdrawal from the world; she wrote to
him at once; it was a humble, gentle letter, surely it would bring him
if he loved her still. She sent her footman with it next day. On the
servant’s return, she asked whether he had given the letter to M. de
Montriveau himself, and could not restrain the movement of joy at the
affirmative answer. Armand was in Paris! He stayed alone in his house;
he did not go out into society! So she was loved! All day long she
waited for an answer that never came. Again and again, when impatience
grew unbearable, Antoinette found reasons for his delay. Armand felt
embarrassed; the reply would come by post; but night came, and she could
not deceive herself any longer. It was a dreadful day, a day of pain
grown sweet, of intolerable heart-throbs, a day when the heart squanders
the very forces of life in riot.
Next day she sent for an answer.
“M. le Marquis sent word that he would call on Mme la Duchesse,”
reported Julien.
She fled lest her happiness should be seen in her face, and flung
herself on her couch to devour her first sensations.
“He is coming!”
The thought rent her soul. And, in truth, woe unto those for whom
suspense is not the most horrible time of tempest, while it increases
and multiplies the sweetest joys; for they have nothing in them of
that flame which quickens the images of things, giving to them a second
existence, so that we cling as closely to the pure essence as to its
outward and visible manifestation. What is suspense in love but a
constant drawing upon an unfailing hope?--a submission to the terrible
scourging of passion, while passion is yet happy, and the disenchantment
of reality has not set in. The constant putting forth of strength and
longing, called suspense, is surely, to the human soul, as fragrance
to the flower that breathes it forth. We soon leave the brilliant,
unsatisfying colours of tulips and coreopsis, but we turn again and
again to drink in the sweetness of orange-blossoms or volkameria-flowers
compared separately, each in its own land, to a betrothed bride, full of
love, made fair by the past and future.
The Duchess learned the joys of this new life of hers through the
rapture with which she received the scourgings of love. As this change
wrought in her, she saw other destinies before her, and a better
meaning in the things of life. As she hurried to her dressing-room, she
understood what studied adornment and the most minute attention to
her toilet mean when these are undertaken for love’s sake and not for
vanity. Even now this making ready helped her to bear the long time of
waiting. A relapse of intense agitation set in when she was dressed; she
passed through nervous paroxysms brought on by the dreadful power which
sets the whole mind in ferment. Perhaps that power is only a disease,
though the pain of it is sweet. The Duchess was dressed and waiting
at two o clock in the afternoon. At half-past eleven that night M.
de Montriveau had not arrived. To try to give an idea of the anguish
endured by a woman who might be said to be the spoilt child of
civilization, would be to attempt to say how many imaginings the heart
can condense into one thought. As well endeavour to measure the forces
expended by the soul in a sigh whenever the bell rang; to estimate the
drain of life when a carriage rolled past without stopping, and left her
prostrate.
“Can he be playing with me?” she said, as the clocks struck midnight.
She grew white; her teeth chattered; she struck her hands together and
leapt up and crossed the boudoir, recollecting as she did so how often
he had come thither without a summons. But she resigned herself. Had she
not seen him grow pale, and start up under the stinging barbs of irony?
Then Mme de Langeais felt the horror of the woman’s appointed lot; a
man’s is the active part, a woman must wait passively when she loves. If
a woman goes beyond her beloved, she makes a mistake which few men can
forgive; almost every man would feel that a woman lowers herself by this
piece of angelic flattery. But Armand’s was a great nature; he surely
must be one of the very few who can repay such exceeding love by love
that lasts forever.
“Well, I will make the advance,” she told herself, as she tossed on her
bed and found no sleep there; “I will go to him. I will not weary myself
with holding out a hand to him, but I will hold it out. A man of a
thousand will see a promise of love and constancy in every step that a
woman takes towards him. Yes, the angels must come down from heaven to
reach men; and I wish to be an angel for him.”
Next day she wrote. It was a billet of the kind in which the intellects
of the ten thousand Sevignes that Paris now can number particularly
excel. And yet only a Duchesse de Langeais, brought up by Mme la
Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, could have written that delicious note; no
other woman could complain without lowering herself; could spread wings
in such a flight without draggling her pinions in humiliation; rise
gracefully in revolt; scold without giving offence; and pardon without
compromising her personal dignity.
Julien went with the note. Julien, like his kind, was the victim of
love’s marches and countermarches.
“What did M. de Montriveau reply?” she asked, as indifferently as she
could, when the man came back to report himself.
“M. le Marquis requested me to tell Mme la Duchesse that it was all
right.”
Oh the dreadful reaction of the soul upon herself! To have her heart
stretched on the rack before curious witnesses; yet not to utter a
sound, to be forced to keep silence! One of the countless miseries of
the rich!
More than three weeks went by. Mme de Langeais wrote again and again,
and no answer came from Montriveau. At last she gave out that she was
ill, to gain a dispensation from attendance on the Princess and from
social duties. She was only at home to her father the Duc de Navarreins,
her aunt the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, the old Vidame de Pamiers
(her maternal great-uncle), and to her husband’s uncle, the Duc de
Grandlieu. These persons found no difficulty in believing that the
Duchess was ill, seeing that she grew thinner and paler and more
dejected every day. The vague ardour of love, the smart of wounded
pride, the continual prick of the only scorn that could touch her,
the yearnings towards joys that she craved with a vain continual
longing--all these things told upon her, mind and body; all the forces
of her nature were stimulated to no purpose. She was paying the arrears
of her life of make-believe.
She went out at last to a review. M. de Montriveau was to be there. For
the Duchess, on the balcony of the Tuileries with the Royal Family,
it was one of those festival days that are long remembered. She looked
supremely beautiful in her languor; she was greeted with admiration in
all eyes. It was Montriveau’s presence that made her so fair.
Once or twice they exchanged glances. The General came almost to her
feet in all the glory of that soldier’s uniform, which produces an
effect upon the feminine imagination to which the most prudish will
confess. When a woman is very much in love, and has not seen her lover
for two months, such a swift moment must be something like the phase of
a dream when the eyes embrace a world that stretches away forever.
Only women or young men can imagine the dull, frenzied hunger in the
Duchess’s eyes. As for older men, if during the paroxysms of early
passion in youth they had experience of such phenomena of nervous power;
at a later day it is so completely forgotten that they deny the very
existence of the luxuriant ecstasy--the only name that can be given to
these wonderful intuitions. Religious ecstasy is the aberration of a
soul that has shaken off its bonds of flesh; whereas in amorous ecstasy
all the forces of soul and body are embraced and blended in one. If
a woman falls a victim to the tyrannous frenzy before which Mme de
Langeais was forced to bend, she will take one decisive resolution
after another so swiftly that it is impossible to give account of them.
Thought after thought rises and flits across her brain, as clouds are
whirled by the wind across the grey veil of mist that shuts out the sun.
Thenceforth the facts reveal all. And the facts are these.
The day after the review, Mme de Langeais sent her carriage and liveried
servants to wait at the Marquis de Montriveau’s door from eight o’clock
in the morning till three in the afternoon. Armand lived in the Rue de
Tournon, a few steps away from the Chamber of Peers, and that very
day the House was sitting; but long before the peers returned to their
palaces, several people had recognised the Duchess’s carriage and
liveries. The first of these was the Baron de Maulincour. That young
officer had met with disdain from Mme de Langeais and a better reception
from Mme de Serizy; he betook himself at once therefore to his mistress,
and under seal of secrecy told her of this strange freak.
In a moment the news was spread with telegraphic speed through all the
coteries in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; it reached the Tuileries and the
Elysee-Bourbon; it was the sensation of the day, the matter of all the
talk from noon till night. Almost everywhere the women denied the facts,
but in such a manner that the report was confirmed; the men one and
all believed it, and manifested a most indulgent interest in Mme de
Langeais. Some among them threw the blame on Armand.
“That savage of a Montriveau is a man of bronze,” said they; “he
insisted on making this scandal, no doubt.”
“Very well, then,” others replied, “Mme de Langeais has been guilty of
a most generous piece of imprudence. To renounce the world and rank, and
fortune, and consideration for her lover’s sake, and that in the face
of all Paris, is as fine a _coup d’etat_ for a woman as that barber’s
knife-thrust, which so affected Canning in a court of assize. Not one
of the women who blame the Duchess would make a declaration worthy of
ancient times. It is heroic of Mme de Langeais to proclaim herself so
frankly. Now there is nothing left to her but to love Montriveau. There
must be something great about a woman if she says, ‘I will have but one
passion.’”
“But what is to become of society, monsieur, if you honour vice in this
way without respect for virtue?” asked the Comtesse de Granville, the
attorney-general’s wife.