France is the most womanly of all the nations. A man once possessed
her who caused her such misery that she adored him as a god. He wrung
the tears from her eyes, the blood from her veins, the gold from her
coffers. He slew her sons in hecatombs, and yet she gave, and gave. And
when a dwarfish being of devouring passions and colossal ambitions rose
up and said: “I bear the dead man’s name. Worship me, living, now that
he is no more!” she gave him all she had.
To these Imperialists, the exile who had returned was not Charles Louis
Bonaparte, Prince-Pretender to the Imperial Throne. He was the Emperor.
And as though he had been indeed the wearer of the little cocked hat
and the gray surtout, they greeted the news of his return with a joy
they themselves would barely have credited ten minutes before.
They laughed and wept tears of rapture that washed the paint from the
faces of elderly belles and ancient dandies, and rinsed the old lees
of vice and vanity and selfishness from their hearts. Friends and foes
embraced; strangers exchanged hand-clasps and congratulations. The
golden Age had come again. Napoleon was in Paris. And the hubbub of
voices grew overwhelming, in the ceaseless reiteration of two words:
“The Emperor!--the Emperor!”
Hugo said, raising his magnificent voice so as to be heard plainly
above the Babel:
“Messieurs the Representatives of the New Provisional Government,
Monsieur Bonaparte has at length returned from England. Let us who,
having confidence in his pledges, have voted in his favor, go and say
to him: ‘_How do you do?_’”
And, followed by his fellow-wearers of black coats and tricolored
scarfs, he went out quickly. Yet others pushed their way into the
anteroom, and began to rummage for hats, coats, and cloaks. As the
bustle of their departure reached its climax, Dunoisse was conscious of
a breath of familiar fragrance. A silken rustle came behind him, and a
soft voice reached his ear, saying:
“If only I dared follow them!”
It was Madame de Roux. And so bitter a spasm of jealousy clutched
Dunoisse’s heart that he was shocked and confounded by the revelation
of his own huge folly. Then, as the wood-flower’s perfume reached him
in a stronger gust of sweetness, a whisper that thrilled said:
“Are _you_ chivalrous?”
The voice added instantly:
“I overheard what you said just now.... Do not look round....”
Dunoisse stared straight before him. Rigid and immovable, he might
have been taken for the colored image of an officer of _piou-pious_.
Only his Algerian medals shook a little with the beating of his heart.
And the voice came again. It said:
“Think of me what you will!... I must speak to you! Remain after
the others have left.... Wait in the gray boudoir at the end of the
drawing-room beyond this. Raise those violets to your face if you
agree: drop them if you refuse!...”
His hand shook as he lifted the knot of drooping blossoms, pretending
to inhale their vanished scent. He heard her whisper:
“Thanks!” and the rustle of her silks and laces--distinguishable to him
through the swishing and billowing and crackling of a sea of feminine
fripperies--passed on. And footmen with baskets of champagne and silver
trays of glasses, light as bubbles, began to circulate through the
crowd; and the explosion of corks, the gurgling of the foamy wine,
the pledging of loyal toasts and the clinking of glasses heralded the
conversion of a festival of sentiment into a lively night.
Amidst the popping, clinking and toasting, Dunoisse passed from the
larger drawing-room into the smaller, less crowded salon beyond, and
presently found himself in the little boudoir.
It was a charming, cosy nest with purple-gray silken hangings, its
ebony furniture upholstered with velvet of the same shade, the black,
shining wood inlaid with silver wreaths, fillets and ribbons in the
unfashionable Empire style.
Lofty in proportion to its size, it boasted a painted ceiling of nymphs
and satyrs dancing in a woodland glade, exquisite enough to have been
the work of Boucher. A bright fire burned in the fireplace of steel and
bronze; tall double-doors left ajar gave a peep of a bedroom, perfumed
and pink as the heart of a moss-rose; the deep chairs and wide divan
suggested slumber. A black-and-tan King Charles’s spaniel of English
breed, all floss-silk curls and blue ribbon bow, slept in a basket
on the chinchilla hearthrug; there were books in ebony book-cases:
a volume of the plays of de Musset, bound in white vellum, lay open
upon an ottoman; the “Fleurs du Mal” of Baudelaire peeped from a
dainty work-basket from which a strip of ecclesiastically-patterned
embroidery trailed; and violets in bowls of Sèvres and groups of the
white narcissus in tall Venetian vases made the air heavily sweet.
It was a nest for confidences, a place for revelations and confessions.
It contained no pictures beyond a few frames of miniatures, all
masculine portraits by famous hands, and one fine full-length,
life-sized oil-painting, within a massive carved and gilded frame of
the period of the Regency; representing a voluptuously-beautiful woman,
in the habit of a Cistercian nun, standing upon a daïs covered with
blue-and-gold tapestry in a pattern of _fleurs-de-lis_. Behind her rose
a marble altar, its Tabernacle, surmounted with a pointed arch and
the Cross, towered overhead, and one white, dimpled hand of the fair
woman grasped a Crucifix, and the other was outstretched in the act
of taking from the altar a Crown of Thorns.... And at her feet, bare,
ivory-white, daintily-small and pink-toed, were scattered kingly crowns
and jeweled orbs and scepters. And from her loosened coif streamed
golden tresses, and her proud uplifted eyes blazed, not with the
heavenly fires of Divine Love, but with the lurid flames of Hell....
And in her Satanic pride and imperial arrogance of beauty she seemed to
live; and send out subtle electric influences that dominated and swayed
those who dwelt within the reach of them, not for good but for evil and
misery, and the wreck of bodies and souls.
And Dunoisse looked at the portrait, and the red lips seemed to smile
at him. And while they appeared to whisper “Stay!” unseen hands plucked
at him, as though striving to drag him from the place; and a thin voice
of warning fluttered like a cobweb at his inner ear, urging him to
begone and lose no time about it. Perhaps wan Sister Thérèse de Saint
François was praying for him in her cell at the Carmel of Widinitz.
But all the champagne he had not tasted seemed boiling in his veins,
and he gave back the smile of the proud, voluptuous, painted lips, and
was drawing near to decipher an inscription on an ornamental scroll at
the bottom of the Regency frame, when there was a rustle and whisper
of silken draperies in the doorway, and he turned to meet the eyes of
Henriette.
* * * * *
She was radiant now with triumph--she sparkled like a starry night in
midwinter. She drew deep breaths as though she had been running, and
lovely tremulous smiles hovered about her mouth. She lifted her little
hands as the first bars of a waltz marvelously played upon a brilliant
instrument, rang out, and the rhythmical sound of dancing feet began to
mingle with the music and the gay din of chattering tongues, and said
with a sign that bade him listen:
“Do you hear?--they are dancing over the grave of the Monarchy. They
have turned my reception into a ball. What the Augustinian Sisters will
say to me I cannot imagine!... The outer gate closes at eleven.... They
may go on like this until day.... M. Chopin has volunteered to play for
them.... He is mad, like everybody else to-night. Decidedly it is as
well you came here without waiting.” She added, a little incoherently:
“What times we live in!--what events may not happen now! Oh! that
waltz, how it distracts me! How can he dare to play like that?”
She pressed her small white hands against her temples, lifting from
them the weight of hair, and sank down, panting a little still, upon
the gray velvet divan, saying:
“Ouf!--my head aches. What was it I wanted to say?--I have forgotten!
Do sit down! Here, beside me--you will not crush my dress.... We are
not likely to be disturbed.... M. de Roux has gone to the Hôtel du Rhin
with General Montguichet and a dozen other gentlemen--the rest are
engrossed with their partners. What I wished to say to you was--Take
this advice as from an elder sister. When you are summoned to answer
before the Court-Martial for that--affair of the Rue des Capucines----”
He had fixed his eyes on the beautiful mobile mouth. Was he deceived?
Did he really hear it say:
“Say that you gave the order for the men to fire. It will be the wisest
course. Oh!--I know what I am talking about! No harm will come to you!
You understand me, do you not? Only admit it--do not deny!”
Dunoisse rose up from the divan as pale under his red skin as when Hugo
had asked him to point out the modern parallel of the primal murderer,
and said in ice-cold tones:
“I have already had the honor to point out to you, Madame, that I did
not give the order!”
He vibrated with passionate resentment. What--under the guise of
sisterly kindness, was he advised to leap the cliff?
But a face brimming with sweet penitence was lifted to his. She said,
summoning her dimples to play by mere force of will, bidding her eyes
gleam through a soft veil of dewiness:
“Do not be angry!--it was a stupid joke. Must one always be so serious
with you? And--I am a little mad to-night, as I have told you. It is
excusable.... Pray forgive me!--sit down again!”
She stretched out a little hand, its delicate fingers curling like
tendrils. They touched his--his heart leaped as they clung. He sat
down again. And the waltz, played by the master-hand, ebbed away,
dying in waves of sensuous sweetness, and a Polish mazurka, after a
peal of crescendo chords that shrieked with frantic merriment, sprang
short-skirted and flourishing belled scarlet heels, from the bewitched
instrument, to take its place. And Dunoisse, with throbbing senses,
tore his eyes from the enthralling face, and raised them to meet the
proud, voluptuous, defiant glance of the nun in the portrait. And her
red lips seemed to say: “_Why not?_” He asked involuntarily:
“Who is she?”
Henriette’s soft voice answered, with a curious tone in it:
“Everyone who asks says ‘Who _is_ she?’ as though she lived. But she
died in 1743. The portrait used to hang over the fireplace in the
Community Hall. I will not tell you how it comes to be where it is
now--it is a secret. She who tramples upon those crowns and scepters
was Louise Adelaide de Chartres, second daughter of the Regent Philippe
d’Orléans. She became Abbess here when eighteen, and died Abbess of
Chelles. She was divinely beautiful and of ungovernable passions....
The suite of immense rooms that were hers in the main building of the
Abbaye are never used. They are always shut up, and no one ever goes
into them alone.”
She added, with a strange laugh:
“It is considered dangerous, even in the daytime, to enter without a
companion. The Sisters say that shrieks and the rattling of chains are
heard there on certain nights in the year, and that the floors are
found to be stained with new-shed blood. They think that her soul
comes back there to expiate the acts of cruelty she perpetrated upon
her nuns; and her terrible excesses, in frightful scourgings, and
tortures such as cannot be conceived.”
Seeing Dunoisse’s look still fixed upon the portrait, she went on:
“She was a witch. She bewitched her lovers,--she has bewitched you--you
cannot take away your eyes. Ah! if you do not recoil from the sight
of her, knowing her to be so wicked, there should be hope for me! For
I--oh!--how can I tell you?...”
She was weeping,--the shining tears were making their way between the
fingers of the little hands she clasped over her eyes. Her white bosom
heaved with sobs. And the mazurka, played by the mighty master, jerked
and shrilled and leaped in spasms of frantic merriment, and men and
women, intoxicated with pleasure and heated by wine, yielded themselves
to the furious excitement of the dance. And Dunoisse was at the side
of Henriette, pleading with her in a voice that shook with emotion,
to be calmer!--and presently found himself possessed of one of the
little hands. He won a glance, too, of eyes that shone out of a pale,
tear-drenched face, like moss-agates seen through running water, and
another by-and-by....
* * * * *
To shed real tears and be lovely still--what a gift of the fairies!
They have it as a birthright, the Henriettes. My Aunt Julietta, crying
her poor eyes out in the shadow of a four-post mahogany bedstead of
British manufacture, with cabbage-rose-patterned chintz curtains,
over a masculine profile discovered in the background of a colored
fashion-plate in the month’s issue of _The Lady’s Mentor_, and supposed
to bear a soul-rending resemblance to one who was to be for ever
nameless, inspirer of an early love that had bloomed in a railway
carriage, and shed its leaves as the train snorted its way out of
Dullingstoke Junction--was not a pretty or pathetic spectacle. With her
tip-tilted nose thickened by the false catarrh of tears--her slender
frame convulsed with the recurrent hiccough of hysteria--what masculine
eye would have lingered upon my aunt?
But Henriette and her sisters can ride on the whirlwind of the
emotions, without disarranging a fold of their draperies,--go through
whole tragedies of despair without reddening an eyelid,--sorrow
beautifully without spoiling the romance of a situation with one
grotesque blast upon the nose. This Henriette said, lifting a sweet
quivering face and drowned eyes to Dunoisse’s agitated countenance:
“Oh! let me cry,--it eases the heart!--and listen, for you must believe
me!...”
Voices sounded beyond the threshold, the door-handle was rattled
loudly. As the door opened, Henriette turned with a rapid, supple
movement, and said, indicating the portrait above the fireplace with a
steady hand:
“As you remark, Monsieur, Madame d’Orléans did not pass her time in
saying Paternosters.... But it is said that she repented, and died in a
state of grace.”
She added:
“Perhaps she bewitched the priest who confessed her into granting
absolution?... But no!... One cannot be irresistible on one’s dying
bed.... And Death is frightful.... I have always dreaded it!... Could
you kiss lips that are turning into clay?... For me, I should never
muster courage!...” A real shudder went through her. She said, as
though to herself: “Oh, no, no, no! However much I had loved him, I
could not touch him then!”