“I promised you this tale of the past, and here it is,” said Camille.
“The person from whom I received that letter yesterday, and who may be
here to-morrow, is the Marquise de Rochefide. The old marquis (whose
family is not as old as yours), after marrying his eldest daughter to
a Portuguese grandee, was anxious to find an alliance among the higher
nobility for his son, in order to obtain for him the peerage he had
never been able to get for himself. The Comtesse de Montcornet told
him of a young lady in the department of the Orne, a Mademoiselle
Beatrix-Maximilienne-Rose de Casteran, the youngest daughter of the
Marquis de Casteran, who wished to marry his two daughters without
dowries in order to reserve his whole fortune for the Comte de Casteran,
his son. The Casterans are, it seems, of the bluest blood. Beatrix, born
and brought up at the chateau de Casteran, was twenty years old at
the time of her marriage in 1828. She was remarkable for what you
provincials call originality, which is simply independence of ideas,
enthusiasm, a feeling for the beautiful, and a certain impulse and ardor
toward the things of Art. You may believe a poor woman who has allowed
herself to be drawn along the same lines, there is nothing more
dangerous for a woman. If she follows them, they lead her where you see
me, and where the marquise came,--to the verge of abysses. Men alone
have the staff on which to lean as they skirt those precipices,--a force
which is lacking to most women, but which, if we do possess it, makes
abnormal beings of us. Her old grandmother, the dowager de Casteran, was
well pleased to see her marry a man to whom she was superior in every
way. The Rochefides were equally satisfied with the Casterans, who
connected them with the Verneuils, the d’Esgrignons, the Troisvilles,
and gave them a peerage for their son in that last big batch of peers
made by Charles X., but revoked by the revolution of July. The first
days of marriage are perilous for little minds as well as for great
loves. Rochefide, being a fool, mistook his wife’s ignorance for
coldness; he classed her among frigid, lymphatic women, and made that
an excuse to return to his bachelor life, relying on the coldness of the
marquise, her pride, and the thousand barriers that the life of a great
lady sets up about a woman in Paris. You’ll know what I mean when you go
there. People said to Rochefide: ‘You are very lucky to possess a cold
wife who will never have any but head passions. She will always be
content if she can shine; her fancies are purely artistic, her desires
will be satisfied if she can make a salon, and collect about her
distinguished minds; her debauches will be in music and her orgies
literary.’ Rochefide, however, is not an ordinary fool; he has as much
conceit and vanity as a clever man, which gives him a mean and squinting
jealousy, brutal when it comes to the surface, lurking and cowardly for
six months, and murderous the seventh. He thought he was deceiving his
wife, and yet he feared her,--two causes for tyranny when the day came
on which the marquise let him see that she was charitably assuming
indifference to his unfaithfulness. I analyze all this in order to
explain her conduct. Beatrix had the keenest admiration for me; there
is but one step, however, from admiration to jealousy. I have one of the
most remarkable salons in Paris; she wished to make herself another; and
in order to do so she attempted to draw away my circle. I don’t know how
to keep those who wish to leave me. She obtained the superficial people
who are friends with every one from mere want of occupation, and whose
object is to get out of a salon as soon as they have entered it; but
she did not have time to make herself a real society. In those days I
thought her consumed with a desire for celebrity of one kind or another.
Nevertheless, she has really much grandeur of soul, a regal pride,
distinct ideas, and a marvellous facility for apprehending and
understanding all things; she can talk metaphysics and music, theology
and painting. You will see her, as a mature woman, what the rest of us
saw her as a bride. And yet there is something of affectation about
her in all this. She has too much the air of knowing abstruse
things,--Chinese, Hebrew, hieroglyphics perhaps, or the papyrus that
they wrapped round mummies. Personally, Beatrix is one of those blondes
beside whom Eve the fair would seem a Negress. She is slender and
straight and white as a church taper; her face is long and pointed; the
skin is capricious, to-day like cambric, to-morrow darkened with little
speckles beneath its surface, as if her blood had left a deposit of
dust there during the night. Her forehead is magnificent, though rather
daring. The pupils of her eyes are pale sea-green, floating on their
white balls under thin lashes and lazy eyelids. Her eyes have dark rings
around them often; her nose, which describes one-quarter of a circle,
is pinched about the nostrils; very shrewd and clever, but supercilious.
She has an Austrian mouth; the upper lip has more character than the
lower, which drops disdainfully. Her pale cheeks have no color unless
some very keen emotion moves her. Her chin is rather fat; mine is not
thin, and perhaps I do wrong to tell you that women with fat chins are
exacting in love. She has one of the most exquisite waists I ever saw;
the shoulders are beautiful, but the bust has not developed as well, and
the arms are thin. She has, however, an easy carriage and manner, which
redeems all such defects and sets her beauties in full relief. Nature
has given her that princess air which can never be acquired; it becomes
her, and reveals at sudden moments the woman of high birth. Without
being faultlessly beautiful, or prettily pretty, she produces, when
she chooses, ineffaceable impressions. She has only to put on a gown of
cherry velvet with clouds of lace, and wreathe with roses that angelic
hair of hers, which resembles floods of light, and she becomes divine.
If, on some excuse or other, she could wear the costume of the time
when women had long, pointed bodices, rising, slim and slender, from
voluminous brocaded skirts with folds so heavy that they stood alone,
and could hide her arms in those wadded sleeves with ruffles, from which
the hand comes out like a pistil from a calyx, and could fling back the
curls of her head into the jewelled knot behind her head, Beatrix would
hold her own victoriously with ideal beauties like _that_--”
And Felicite showed Calyste a fine copy of a picture by Mieris, in which
was a woman robed in white satin, standing with a paper in her hand,
and singing with a Brabancon seigneur, while a Negro beside them poured
golden Spanish wine into a goblet, and the old housekeeper in the
background arranged some biscuits.
“Fair women, blonds,” said Camille, “have the advantage over us poor
brown things of a precious diversity; there are a hundred ways for a
blonde to charm, and only one for a brunette. Besides, blondes are more
womanly; we are too like men, we French brunettes--Well, well!” she
cried, “pray don’t fall in love with Beatrix from the portrait I am
making of her, like that prince, I forget his name, in the Arabian
Nights. You would be too late, my dear boy.”
These words were said pointedly. The admiration depicted on the young
man’s face was more for the picture than for the painter whose _faire_
was failing of its purpose. As she spoke, Felicite was employing all the
resources of her eloquent physiognomy.
“Blond as she is, however,” she went on, “Beatrix has not the grace of
her color; her lines are severe; she is elegant, but hard; her face
has a harsh contour, though at times it reveals a soul with Southern
passions; an angel flashes out and then expires. Her eyes are thirsty.
She looks best when seen full face; the profile has an air of being
squeezed between two doors. You will see if I am mistaken. I will tell
you now what made us intimate friends. For three years, from 1828 to
1831, Beatrix, while enjoying the last fetes of the Restoration, making
the round of the salons, going to court, taking part in the fancy-balls
of the Elysee-Bourbon, was all the while judging men, and things,
events, and life itself, from the height of her own thought. Her mind
was busy. These first years of the bewilderment the world caused her
prevented her heart from waking up. From 1830 to 1831 she spent the time
of the revolutionary disturbance at her husband’s country-place, where
she was bored like a saint in paradise. On her return to Paris she
became convinced, perhaps justly, that the revolution of July, in
the minds of some persons purely political, would prove to be a moral
revolution. The social class to which she belonged, not being able,
during its unhoped-for triumph in the fifteen years of the Restoration
to reconstruct itself, was about to go to pieces, bit by bit, under the
battering-ram of the bourgeoisie. She heard the famous words of Monsieur
Laine: ‘Kings are departing!’ This conviction, I believe was not without
its influence on her conduct. She took an intellectual part in the new
doctrines, which swarmed, during the three years succeeding July, 1830,
like gnats in the sunshine, and turned some female heads. But, like all
nobles, Beatrix, while thinking these novel ideals superb, wanted always
to protect the nobility. Finding before long that there was no place
in this new regime for individual superiority, seeing that the higher
nobility were beginning once more the mute opposition it had formerly
made to Napoleon,--which was, in truth, its wisest course under an
empire of deeds and facts, but which in an epoch of moral causes was
equivalent to abdication,--she chose personal happiness rather than such
eclipse. About the time we were all beginning to breathe again, Beatrix
met at my house a man with whom I had expected to end my days,--Gennaro
Conti, the great composer, a man of Neapolitan origin, though born in
Marseilles. Conti has a brilliant mind; as a composer he has talent,
though he will never attain to the first rank. Without Rossini, without
Meyerbeer, he might perhaps have been taken for a man of genius. He has
one advantage over those men,--he is in vocal music what Paganini is
on the violin, Liszt on the piano, Taglioni in the ballet, and what the
famous Garat was; at any rate he recalls that great singer to those who
knew him. His is not a voice, my friend, it is a soul. When its song
replies to certain ideas, certain states of feeling difficult to
describe in which a woman sometimes finds herself, that woman is lost.
The marquise conceived the maddest passion for him, and took him from
me. The act was provincial, I allow, but it was all fair play. She won
my esteem and friendship by the way she behaved to me. She thought me a
woman who was likely to defend her own; she did not know that to me the
most ridiculous thing in the world is such a struggle. She came to see
me. That woman, proud as she is, was so in love that she told me her
secret and made me the arbiter of her destiny. She was really adorable,
and she kept her place as woman and as marquise in my eyes. I must tell
you, dear friend, that while women are sometimes bad, they have hidden
grandeurs in their souls that men can never appreciate. Well, as I seem
to be making my last will and testament like a woman on the verge of old
age, I shall tell you that I was ever faithful to Conti, and should
have been till death, and yet I _know him_. His nature is charming,
apparently, and detestable beneath its surface. He is a charlatan in
matters of the heart. There are some men, like Nathan, of whom I have
already spoken to you, who are charlatans externally, and yet honest.
Such men lie to themselves. Mounted on their stilts, they think they
are on their feet, and perform their jugglery with a sort of innocence;
their humbuggery is in their blood; they are born comedians, braggarts;
extravagant in form as a Chinese vase; perhaps they even laugh at
themselves. Their personality is generous; like Murat’s kingly garments,
it attracts danger. But Conti’s duplicity will be known only to the
women who love him. In his art he has that deep Italian jealousy which
led the Carlone to murder Piola, and stuck a stiletto into Paesiello.
That terrible envy lurks beneath the warmest comradeship. Conti has not
the courage of his vice; he smiles at Meyerbeer and flatters him, when
he fain would tear him to bits. He knows his weakness, and cultivates an
appearance of sincerity; his vanity still further leads him to play
at sentiments which are far indeed from his real heart. He represents
himself as an artist who receives his inspirations from heaven; Art is
something saintly and sacred to him; he is fanatic; he is sublime in his
contempt for worldliness; his eloquence seems to come from the deepest
convictions. He is a seer, a demon, a god, an angel. Calyste, although
I warn you about him, you will be his dupe. That Southern nature, that
impassioned artist is cold as a well-rope. Listen to him: the artist is
a missionary. Art is a religion, which has its priests and ought to
have its martyrs. Once started on that theme, Gennaro reaches the
most dishevelled pathos that any German professor of philosophy ever
spluttered to his audience. You admire his convictions, but he hasn’t
any. Bearing his hearers to heaven on a song which seems a mysterious
fluid shedding love, he casts an ecstatic glance upon them; he is
examining their enthusiasm; he is asking himself: ‘Am I really a god to
them?’ and he is also thinking: ‘I ate too much macaroni to-day.’ He is
insatiable of applause, and he wins it. He delights, he is beloved; he
is admired whensoever he will. He owes his success more to his voice
than to his talent as a composer, though he would rather be a man of
genius like Rossini than a performer like Rubini. I had committed the
folly of attaching myself to him, and I was determined and resigned to
deck this idol to the end. Conti, like a great many artists, is dainty
in all his ways; he likes his ease, his enjoyments; he is always
carefully, even elegantly dressed. I do respect his courage; he is
brave; bravery, they say, is the only virtue into which hypocrisy cannot
enter. While we were travelling I saw his courage tested; he risked
the life he loved; and yet, strange contradiction! I have seen him, in
Paris, commit what I call the cowardice of thought. My friend, all this
was known to me. I said to the poor marquise: ‘You don’t know into what
a gulf you are plunging. You are the Perseus of a poor Andromeda; you
release me from my rock. If he loves you, so much the better! but I
doubt it; he loves no one but himself.’ Gennaro was transported to
the seventh heaven of pride. I was not a marquise, I was not born a
Casteran, and he forgot me in a day. I then gave myself the savage
pleasure of probing that nature to the bottom. Certain of the result,
I wanted to see the twistings and turnings Conti would perform. My dear
child, I saw in one week actual horrors of sham sentiment, infamous
buffooneries of feeling. I will not tell you about them; you shall see
the man here in a day or two. He now knows that I know him, and he hates
me accordingly. If he could stab me with safety to himself I shouldn’t
be alive two seconds. I have never said one word of all this to Beatrix.
The last and constant insult Geranno offers me is to suppose that I am
capable of communicating my sad knowledge of him to her; but he has no
belief in the good feeling of any human being. Even now he is playing a
part with me; he is posing as a man who is wretched at having left me.
You will find what I may call the most penetrating cordiality about him;
he is winning; he is chivalrous. To him, all women are madonnas. One
must live with him long before we get behind the veil of this false
chivalry and learn the invisible signs of his humbug. His tone of
conviction about himself might almost deceive the Deity. You will be
entrapped, my dear child, by his catlike manners, and you will never
believe in the profound and rapid arithmetic of his inmost thought. But
enough; let us leave him. I pushed indifference so far as to
receive them together in my house. This circumstance kept that most
perspicacious of all societies, the great world of Paris, ignorant of
the affair. Though intoxicated with pride, Gennaro was compelled to
dissimulate; and he did it admirably. But violent passions will have
their freedom at any cost. Before the end of the year, Beatrix whispered
in my ear one evening: ‘My dear Felicite, I start to-morrow for Italy
with Conti.’ I was not surprised; she regarded herself as united for
life to Gennaro, and she suffered from the restraints imposed upon her;
she escaped one evil by rushing into a greater. Conti was wild with
happiness,--the happiness of vanity alone. ‘That’s what it is to love
truly,’ he said to me. ‘How many women are there who would sacrifice
their lives, their fortune, their reputation?’--‘Yes, she loves you,’ I
replied, ‘but you do not love her.’ He was furious, and made me a scene;
he stormed, he declaimed, he depicted his love, declaring that he had
never supposed it possible to love as much. I remained impassible,
and lent him money for his journey, which, being unexpected, found him
unprepared. Beatrix left a letter for her husband and started the next
day for Italy. There she has remained two years; she has written to me
several times, and her letters are enchanting. The poor child attaches
herself to me as the only woman who will comprehend her. She says she
adores me. Want of money has compelled Gennaro to accept an offer to
write a French opera; he does not find in Italy the pecuniary gains
which composers obtain in Paris. Here’s the letter I received yesterday
from Beatrix. Take it and read it; you can now understand it,--that is,
if it is possible, at your age, to analyze the things of the heart.”
So saying, she held out the letter to him.
At this moment Claude Vignon entered the room. At his unexpected
apparition Calyste and Felicite were both silent for a moment,--she from
surprise, he from a vague uneasiness. The vast forehead, broad and high,
of the new-comer, who was bald at the age of thirty-seven, now seemed
darkened by annoyance. His firm, judicial mouth expressed a habit of
chilling sarcasm. Claude Vignon is imposing, in spite of the precocious
deteriorations of a face once magnificent, and now grown haggard.
Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five he strongly resembled the
divine Raffaelle. But his nose, that feature of the human face that
changes most, is growing to a point; the countenance is sinking into
mysterious depressions, the outlines are thickening; leaden tones
predominate in the complexion, giving tokens of weariness, although
the fatigues of this young man are not apparent; perhaps some bitter
solitude has aged him, or the abuse of his gift of comprehension.
He scrutinizes the thought of every one, yet without definite aim or
system. The pickaxe of his criticism demolishes, it never constructs.
Thus his lassitude is that of a mechanic, not of an architect. The eyes,
of a pale blue, once brilliant, are clouded now by some hidden pain,
or dulled by gloomy sadness. Excesses have laid dark tints above
the eyelids; the temples have lost their freshness. The chin, of
incomparable distinction, is getting doubled, but without dignity. His
voice, never sonorous, is weakening; without being either hoarse or
extinct, it touches the confines of hoarseness and extinction. The
impassibility of that fine head, the fixity of that glance, cover
irresolution and weakness, which the keenly intelligent and sarcastic
smile belies. The weakness lies wholly in action, not in thought; there
are traces of an encyclopedic comprehension on that brow, and in the
habitual movement of a face that is childlike and splendid both. The man
is tall, slightly bent already, like all those who bear the weight of
a world of thought. Such long, tall bodies are never remarkable for
continuous effort or creative activity. Charlemagne, Belisarious, and
Constantine are noted exceptions to this rule.
Certainly Claude Vignon presents a variety of mysteries to be solved. In
the first place, he is very simple and very wily. Though he falls into
excesses with the readiness of a courtesan, his powers of thought remain
untouched. Yet his intellect, which is competent to criticise art,
science, literature, and politics, is incompetent to guide his external
life. Claude contemplates himself within the domain of his intellectual
kingdom, and abandons his outer man with Diogenic indifference.
Satisfied to penetrate all, to comprehend all by thought, he despises
materialities; and yet, if it becomes a question of creating, doubt
assails him; he sees obstacles, he is not inspired by beauties, and
while he is debating means, he sits with his arms pendant, accomplishing
nothing. He is the Turk of the intellect made somnolent by meditation.
Criticism is his opium; his harem of books to read disgusts him with
real work. Indifferent to small things as well as great things, he is
sometimes compelled, by the very weight of his head, to fall into a
debauch, and abdicate for a few hours the fatal power of omnipotent
analysis. He is far too preoccupied with the wrong side of genius, and
Camille Maupin’s desire to put him back on the right side is easily
conceivable. The task was an attractive one. Claude Vignon thinks
himself a great politician as well as a great writer; but this
unpublished Machiavelli laughs within himself at all ambitions; he knows
what he can do; he has instinctively taken the measure of his future on
his faculties; he sees his greatness, but he also sees obstacles, grows
alarmed or disgusted, lets the time roll by, and does not go to work.
Like Etienne Lousteau the feuilletonist, like Nathan the dramatic
author, like Blondet, another journalist, he came from the ranks of the
bourgeoisie, to which we owe the greater number of our writers.
“Which way did you come?” asked Mademoiselle des Touches, coloring with
either pleasure or surprise.’
“By the door,” replied Claude Vignon, dryly.
“Oh,” she cried, shrugging her shoulders, “I am aware that you are not a
man to climb in by a window.”
“Scaling a window is a badge of honor for a beloved woman.”
“Enough!” said Felicite.
“Am I in the way?” asked Claude.
“Monsieur,” said Calyste, artlessly, “this letter--”
“Pray keep it; I ask no questions; at our age we understand such
affairs,” he answered, interrupting Calyste with a sardonic air.
“But, monsieur,” began Calyste, much provoked.
“Calm yourself, young man; I have the utmost indulgence for sentiments.”
“My dear Calyste,” said Camille, wishing to speak.
“‘Dear’?” said Vignon, interrupting her.
“Claude is joking,” said Camille, continuing her remarks to Calyste. “He
is wrong to do it with you, who know nothing of Parisian ways.”
“I did not know that I was joking,” said Claude Vignon, very gravely.
“Which way did you come?” asked Felicite again. “I have been watching
the road to Croisic for the last two hours.”
“Not all the time,” replied Vignon.
“You are too bad to jest in this way.”
“Am I jesting?”
Calyste rose.
“Why should you go so soon? You are certainly at your ease here,” said
Vignon.
“Quite the contrary,” replied the angry young Breton, to whom Camille
Maupin stretched out a hand, which he took and kissed, dropping a tear
upon it, after which he took his leave.
“I should like to be that little young man,” said the critic, sitting
down, and taking one end of the hookah. “How he will love!”
“Too much; for then he will not be loved in return,” replied
Mademoiselle des Touches. “Madame de Rochefide is coming here,” she
added.
“You don’t say so!” exclaimed Claude. “With Conti?”
“She will stay here alone, but he accompanies her.”
“Have they quarrelled?”
“No.”
“Play me a sonata of Beethoven’s; I know nothing of the music he wrote
for the piano.”
Claude began to fill the tube of the hookah with Turkish tobacco, all
the while examining Camille much more attentively than she observed. A
dreadful thought oppressed him; he fancied he was being used for a blind
by this woman. The situation was a novel one.
Calyste went home thinking no longer of Beatrix de Rochefide and her
letter; he was furious against Claude Vignon for what he considered the
utmost indelicacy, and he pitied poor Felicite. How was it possible to
be beloved by that sublime creature and not adore her on his knees, not
believe her on the faith of a glance or a smile? He felt a desire to
turn and rend that cold, pale spectre of a man. Ignorant he might be,
as Felicite had told him, of the tricks of thought of the jesters of the
press, but one thing he knew--Love was the human religion.
When his mother saw him entering the court-yard she uttered an
exclamation of joy, and Zephirine whistled for Mariotte.
“Mariotte, the boy is coming! cook the fish!”
“I see him, mademoiselle,” replied the woman.
Fanny, uneasy at the sadness she saw on her son’s brow, picked up her
worsted-work; the old aunt took out her knitting. The baron gave his
arm-chair to his son and walked about the room, as if to stretch his
legs before going out to take a turn in the garden. No Flemish or Dutch
picture ever presented an interior in tones more mellow, peopled with
faces and forms so harmoniously blending. The handsome young man in his
black velvet coat, the mother, still so beautiful, and the aged brother
and sister framed by that ancient hall, were a moving domestic harmony.
Fanny would fain have questioned Calyste, but he had already pulled a
letter from his pocket,--that letter of the Marquise Beatrix, which was,
perhaps, destined to destroy the happiness of this noble family. As
he unfolded it, Calyste’s awakened imagination showed him the marquise
dressed as Camille Maupin had fancifully depicted her.
From the Marquise de Rochefide to Mademoiselle des Touches.
Genoa, July 2.
I have not written to you since our stay in Florence, my dear
friend, for Venice and Rome have absorbed my time, and, as you
know, happiness occupies a large part of life; so far, we have
neither of us dropped from its first level. I am a little
fatigued; for when one has a soul not easy to _blaser_, the
constant succession of enjoyments naturally causes lassitude.
Our friend has had a magnificent triumph at the Scala and the
Fenice, and now at the San Carlo. Three Italian operas in two
years! You cannot say that love has made him idle. We have been
warmly received everywhere,--though I myself would have preferred
solitude and silence. Surely that is the only suitable manner of
life for women who have placed themselves in direct opposition to
society? I expected such a life; but love, my dear friend, is a
more exacting master than marriage,--however, it is sweet to obey
him; though I did not think I should have to see the world again,
even by snatches, and the attentions I receive are so many stabs.
I am no longer on a footing of equality with the highest rank of
women; and the more attentions are paid to me, the more my
inferiority is made apparent.
Gennaro could not comprehend this sensitiveness; but he has been
so happy that it would ill become me not to have sacrificed my
petty vanity to that great and noble thing,--the life of an
artist. We women live by love, whereas men live by love and
action; otherwise they would not be men. Still, there are great
disadvantages for a woman in the position in which I have put
myself. You have escaped them; you continue to be a person in the
eyes of the world, which has no rights over you; you have your own
free will, and I have lost mine. I am speaking now of the things
of the heart, not those of social life, which I have utterly
renounced. You can be coquettish and self-willed, and have all the
graces of a woman who loves, a woman who can give or refuse her
love as she pleases; you have kept the right to have caprices, in
the interests even of your love. In short, to-day you still
possess your right of feeling, while I, I have no longer any
liberty of heart, which I think precious to exercise in love, even
though the love itself may be eternal. I have no right now to that
privilege of quarrelling in jest to which so many women cling, and
justly; for is it not the plummet line with which to sound the
hearts of men? I have no threat at my command. I must draw my
power henceforth from obedience, from unlimited gentleness; I must
make myself imposing by the greatness of my love. I would rather
die than leave Gennaro, and my pardon lies in the sanctity of my
love. Between social dignity and my petty personal dignity, I did
right not to hesitate. If at times I have a few melancholy
feelings, like clouds that pass through a clear blue sky, and to
which all women like to yield themselves, I keep silence about
them; they might seem like regrets. Ah me! I have so fully
understood the obligations of my position that I have armed myself
with the utmost indulgence; but so far, Gennaro has not alarmed my
susceptible jealousy. I don’t as yet see where that dear great
genius may fail.
Dear angel, I am like those pious souls who argue with their God,
for are not you my Providence? do I not owe my happiness to you?
You must never doubt, therefore, that you are constantly in my
thoughts.
I have seen Italy at last; seen it as you saw it, and as it ought
to be seen,--lighted to our souls by love, as it is by its own
bright sun and its masterpieces. I pity those who, being moved to
adoration at every step, have no hand to press, no heart in which
to shed the exuberance of emotions which calm themselves when
shared. These two years have been to me a lifetime, in which my
memory has stored rich harvests. Have you made plans, as I do,
to stay forever at Chiavari, to buy a palazzo in Venice, a
summer-house at Sorrento, a villa in Florence? All loving women
dread society; but I, who am cast forever outside of it, ought I not
to bury myself in some beautiful landscape, on flowery slopes,
facing the sea, or in a valley that equals a sea, like that of
Fiesole?
But alas! we are only poor artists, and want of money is bringing
these two bohemians back to Paris. Gennaro does not want me to
feel that I have lost my luxury, and he wishes to put his new
work, a grand opera, into rehearsal at once. You will understand,
of course, my dearest, that I cannot set foot in Paris. I could
not, I would not, even if it costs me my love, meet one of those
glances of women, or of men, which would make me think of murder
or suicide. Yes, I could hack in pieces whoever insulted me with
pity; like Chateauneuf, who, in the time of Henri III., I think,
rode his horse at the Provost of Paris for a wrong of that kind,
and trampled him under hoof.
I write, therefore, to say that I shall soon pay you a visit at
Les Touches. I want to stay there, in that Chartreuse, while
awaiting the success of our Gennaro’s opera. You will see that I
am bold with my benefactress, my sister; but I prove, at any rate,
that the greatness of obligations laid upon me has not led me, as
it does so many people, to ingratitude. You have told me so much
of the difficulties of the land journey that I shall go to Croisic
by water. This idea came to me on finding that there is a little
Danish vessel now here, laden with marble, which is to touch at
Croisic for a cargo of salt on its way back to the Baltic. I shall
thus escape the fatigue and the cost of the land journey. Dear
Felicite, you are the only person with whom I could be alone
without Conti. Will it not be some pleasure to have a woman with
you who understands your heart as fully as you do hers?
Adieu, _a bientot_. The wind is favorable, and I set sail, wafting
you a kiss.
Beatrix.
“Ah! she loves, too!” thought Calyste, folding the letter sadly.
That sadness flowed to the heart of the mother as if some gleam had
lighted up a gulf to her. The baron had gone out; Fanny went to the door
of the tower and pushed the bolt, then she returned, and leaned upon the
back of her boy’s chair, like the sister of Dido in Guerin’s picture,
and said,--
“What is it, my Calyste? what makes you so sad? You promised to explain
to me these visits to Les Touches; I am to bless its mistress,--at
least, you said so.”
“Yes, indeed you will, dear mother,” he replied. “She has shown me
the insufficiency of my education at an epoch when the nobles ought to
possess a personal value in order to give life to their rank. I was as
far from the age we live in as Guerande is from Paris. She has been, as
it were, the mother of my intellect.”
“I cannot bless her for that,” said the baroness, with tears in her
eyes.
“Mamma!” cried Calyste, on whose forehead those hot tears fell, two
pearls of sorrowful motherhood, “mamma, don’t weep! Just now, when I
wanted to do her a service, and search the country round, she said, ‘It
will make your mother so uneasy.’”
“Did she say that? Then I can forgive her many things,” replied Fanny.
“Felicite thinks only of my good,” continued Calyste. “She often checks
the lively, venturesome language of artists so as not to shake me in a
faith which is, though she knows it not, unshakable. She has told me of
the life in Paris of several young men of the highest nobility coming
from their provinces, as I might do,--leaving families without fortune,
but obtaining in Paris, by the power of their will and their intellect,
a great career. I can do what the Baron de Rastignac, now a minister of
State, has done. Felicite has taught me; I read with her; she gives me
lessons on the piano; she is teaching me Italian; she has initiated me
into a thousand social secrets, about which no one in Guerande knows
anything at all. She could not give me the treasures of her love, but
she has given me those of her vast intellect, her mind, her genius. She
does not want to be a pleasure, but a light to me; she lessens not one
of my faiths; she herself has faith in the nobility, she loves Brittany,
she--”
“She has changed our Calyste,” said his blind old aunt, interrupting
him. “I do not understand one word he has been saying. You have a solid
roof over your head, my good nephew; you have parents and relations who
adore you, and faithful servants; you can marry some good little Breton
girl, religious and accomplished, who will make you happy. Reserve your
ambitions for your eldest son, who may be four times as rich as you,
if you choose to live tranquilly, thriftily, in obscurity,--but in the
peace of God,--in order to release the burdens on your estate. It is all
as simple as a Breton heart. You will be, not so rapidly perhaps, but
more solidly, a rich nobleman.”
“Your aunt is right, my darling; she plans for your happiness with as
much anxiety as I do myself. If I do not succeed in marrying you to my
niece, Margaret, the daughter of your uncle, Lord Fitzwilliam, it is
almost certain that Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel will leave her fortune to
whichever of her nieces you may choose.”
“And besides, there’s a little gold to be found here,” added the old
aunt in a low voice, with a mysterious glance about her.
“Marry! at my age!” he said, casting on his mother one of those looks
which melt the arguments of mothers. “Am I to live without my beautiful
fond loves? Must I never tremble or throb or fear or gasp, or lie
beneath implacable looks and soften them? Am I never to know beauty in
its freedom, the fantasy of the soul, the clouds that course through the
azure of happiness, which the breath of pleasure dissipates? Ah! shall I
never wander in those sweet by-paths moist with dew; never stand beneath
the drenching of a gutter and not know it rains, like those lovers seen
by Diderot; never take, like the Duc de Lorraine, a live coal in my
hand? Are there no silken ladders for me, no rotten trellises to cling
to and not fall? Shall I know nothing of woman but conjugal submission;
nothing of love but the flame of its lamp-wick? Are my longings to be
satisfied before they are roused? Must I live out my days deprived of
that madness of the heart that makes a man and his power? Would you
make me a married monk? No! I have eaten of the fruit of Parisian
civilization. Do you not see that you have, by the ignorant morals of
this family, prepared the fire that consumes me, that _will_ consume me
utterly, unless I can adore the divineness I see everywhere,--in those
sands gleaming in the sun, in the green foliage, in all the women,
beautiful, noble, elegant, pictured in the books and in the poems I have
read with Camille? Alas! there is but one such woman in Guerande, and
it is you, my mother! The birds of my beautiful dream, they come from
Paris, they fly from the pages of Scott, of Byron,--Parisina, Effie,
Minna! yes, and that royal duchess, whom I saw on the moors among the
furze and the ferns, whose very aspect sent the blood to my heart.”
The baroness saw these thoughts flaming in the eyes of her son, clearer,
more beautiful, more living than art can tell to those who read them.
She grasped them rapidly, flung to her as they were in glances like
arrows from an upset quiver. Without having read Beaumarchais, she
felt, as other women would have felt, that it would be a crime to marry
Calyste.
“Oh! my child!” she said, taking him in her arms, and kissing the
beautiful hair that was still hers, “marry whom you will, and when you
will, but be happy! My part in life is not to hamper you.”
Mariotte came to lay the table. Gasselin was out exercising Calyste’s
horse, which the youth had not mounted for two months. The three women,
mother, aunt, and Mariotte, shared in the tender feminine wiliness,
which taught them to make much of Calyste when he dined at home. Breton
plainness fought against Parisian luxury, now brought to the very doors
of Guerande. Mariotte endeavored to wean her young master from the
accomplished service of Camille Maupin’s kitchen, just as his mother and
aunt strove to hold him in the net of their tenderness and render all
comparison impossible.
“There’s a salmon-trout for dinner, Monsieur Calyste, and snipe, and
pancakes such as I know you can’t get anywhere but here,” said Mariotte,
with a sly, triumphant look as she smoothed the cloth, a cascade of
snow.
After dinner, when the old aunt had taken up her knitting, and the
rector and Monsieur du Halga had arrived, allured by their precious
_mouche_, Calyste went back to Les Touches on the pretext of returning
the letter.
Claude Vignon and Felicite were still at table. The great critic was
something of a gourmand, and Felicite pampered the vice, knowing how
indispensable a woman makes herself by such compliance. The dinner-table
presented that rich and brilliant aspect which modern luxury, aided by
the perfecting of handicrafts, now gives to its service. The poor
and noble house of Guenic little knew with what an adversary it was
attempting to compete, or what amount of fortune was necessary to enter
the lists against the silverware, the delicate porcelain, the beautiful
linen, the silver-gilt service brought from Paris by Mademoiselle des
Touches, and the science of her cook. Calyste declined the liqueurs
contained in one of those superb cases of precious woods, which are
something like tabernacles.
“Here’s the letter,” he said, with innocent ostentation, looking at
Claude, who was slowly sipping a glass of _liqueur-des-iles_.
“Well, what did you think of it?” asked Mademoiselle des Touches,
throwing the letter across the table to Vignon, who began to read it,
taking up and putting down at intervals his little glass.
“I thought--well, that Parisian women were very fortunate to have men of
genius to adore who adore them.”
“Ah! you are still in your village,” said Felicite, laughing. “What! did
you not see that she loves him less, and--”
“That is evident,” said Claude Vignon, who had only read the first page.
“Do people reason on their situation when they really love; are they
as shrewd as the marquise, as observing, as discriminating? Your dear
Beatrix is held to Conti now by pride only; she is condemned to love him
_quand meme_.”
“Poor woman!” said Camille.
Calyste’s eyes were fixed on the table; he saw nothing about him. The
beautiful woman in the fanciful dress described that morning by Felicite
appeared to him crowned with light; she smiled to him, she waved her
fan; the other hand, issuing from its ruffle of lace, fell white and
pure on the heavy folds of her crimson velvet robe.
“She is just the thing for you,” said Claude Vignon, smiling
sardonically at Calyste.
The young man was deeply wounded by the words, and by the manner in
which they were said.
“Don’t put such ideas into Calyste’s mind; you don’t know how dangerous
such jokes may prove to be,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, hastily.
“I know Beatrix, and there is something too grandiose in her nature to
allow her to change. Besides, Conti will be here.”
“Ha!” said Claude Vignon, satirically, “a slight touch of jealousy, eh?”
“Can you really think so?” said Camille, haughtily.
“You are more perspicacious than a mother,” replied Claude Vignon, still
sarcastically.
“But it would be impossible,” said Camille, looking at Calyste.
“They are very well matched,” remarked Vignon. “She is ten years older
than he; and it is he who appears to be the girl--”
“A girl, monsieur,” said Calyste, waking from his reverie, “who has been
twice under fire in La Vendee! If the Cause had had twenty thousand more
such girls--”
“I was giving you some well-deserved praise, and that is easier than to
give you a beard,” remarked Vignon.
“I have a sword for those who wear their beards too long,” cried
Calyste.
“And I am very good at an epigram,” said the other, smiling. “We are
Frenchmen; the affair can easily be arranged.”
Mademoiselle des Touches cast a supplicating look on Calyste, which
calmed him instantly.
“Why,” said Felicite, as if to break up the discussion, “do young men
like my Calyste, begin by loving women of a certain age?”
“I don’t know any sentiment more artless or more generous,” replied
Vignon. “It is the natural consequence of the adorable qualities of
youth. Besides, how would old women end if it were not for such love?
You are young and beautiful, and will be for twenty years to come, so
I can speak of this matter before you,” he added, with a keen look at
Mademoiselle des Touches. “In the first place the semi-dowagers, to whom
young men pay their first court, know much better how to make love than
younger women. An adolescent youth is too like a young woman himself
for a young woman to please him. Such a passion trenches on the fable of
Narcissus. Besides that feeling of repugnance, there is, as I think, a
mutual sense of inexperience which separates them. The reason why the
hearts of young women are only understood by mature men, who conceal
their cleverness under a passion real or feigned, is precisely the same
(allowing for the difference of minds) as that which renders a woman of
a certain age more adroit in attracting youth. A young man feels that he
is sure to succeed with her, and the vanities of the woman are flattered
by his suit. Besides, isn’t it natural for youth to fling itself
on fruits? The autumn of a woman’s life offers many that are very
toothsome,--those looks, for instance, bold, and yet reserved, bathed
with the last rays of love, so warm, so sweet; that all-wise elegance
of speech, those magnificent shoulders, so nobly developed, the full
and undulating outline, the dimpled hands, the hair so well arranged,
so cared for, that charming nape of the neck, where all the resources
of art are displayed to exhibit the contrast between the hair and the
flesh-tones, and to set in full relief the exuberance of life and love.
Brunettes themselves are fair at such times, with the amber colors of
maturity. Besides, such women reveal in their smiles and display in
their words a knowledge of the world; they know how to converse; they
can call up the whole of social life to make a lover laugh; their
dignity and their pride are stupendous; or, in other moods, they can
utter despairing cries which touch his soul, farewells of love which
they take care to render useless, and only make to intensify his
passion. Their devotions are absolute; they listen to us; they love us;
they catch, they cling to love as a man condemned to death clings to the
veriest trifles of existence,--in short, love, absolute love, is known
only through them. I think such women can never be forgotten by a man,
any more than he can forget what is grand and sublime. A young woman
has a thousand distractions; these women have none. No longer have they
self-love, pettiness, or vanity; their love--it is the Loire at its
mouth, it is vast, it is swelled by all the illusions, all the affluents
of life, and this is why--but my muse is dumb,” he added, observing
the ecstatic attitude of Mademoiselle des Touches, who was pressing
Calyste’s hand with all her strength, perhaps to thank him for having
been the occasion of such a moment, of such an eulogy, so lofty that she
did not see the trap that it laid for her.
During the rest of the evening Claude Vignon and Felicite sparkled with
wit and happy sayings; they told anecdotes, and described Parisian life
to Calyste, who was charmed with Claude, for mind has immense seductions
for persons who are all heart.
“I shouldn’t be surprised to see the Marquise de Rochefide and Conti,
who, of course, will accompany her, at the landing-place to-morrow,”
said Claude Vignon, as the evening ended. “When I was at Croisic this
afternoon, the fishermen were saying that they had seen a little vessel,
Danish, Swedish, or Norwegian, in the offing.”
This speech brought a flush to the cheeks of the impassible Camille.
Again Madame du Guenic sat up till one o’clock that night, waiting for
her son, unable to imagine why he should stay so late if Mademoiselle
des Touches did not love him.
“He must be in their way,” said this adorable mother. “What were you
talking about?” she asked, when at last he came in.
“Oh, mother, I have never before spent such a delightful evening. Genius
is a great, a sublime thing! Why didn’t you give me genius? With genius
we can make our lives, we can choose among all women the woman to love,
and she must be ours.”
“How handsome you are, my Calyste!”
“Claude Vignon is handsome. Men of genius have luminous foreheads
and eyes, through which the lightnings flash--but I, alas! I know
nothing--only to love.”
“They say that suffices, my angel,” she said, kissing him on the
forehead.
“Do you believe it?”
“They say so, but I have never known it.”
Calyste kissed his mother’s hand as if it was a sacred thing.
“I will love you for all those that would have adored you,” he said.
“Dear child! perhaps it is a little bit your duty to do so, for you
inherit my nature. But, Calyste, do not be unwise, imprudent; try to
love only noble women, if love you must.”