Calyste ran with the lightness of a young fawn to Les Touches and
reached the portico just as Camille and Beatrix were leaving the grand
salon after their dinner. He had the sense to offer his arm to Felicite.
“So you have abandoned your viscountess and her daughter for us,” she
said, pressing his arm; “we are able now to understand the full merit of
that sacrifice.”
“Are these Kergarouets related to the Portendueres, and to old Admiral
de Kergarouet, whose widow married Charles de Vandenesse?” asked Madame
de Rochefide.
“The viscountess is the admiral’s great-niece,” replied Camille.
“Well, she’s a charming girl,” said Beatrix, placing herself gracefully
in a Gothic chair. “She will just do for you, Monsieur du Guenic.”
“The marriage will never take place,” said Camille hastily.
Mortified by the cold, calm air with which the marquise seemed to
consider the Breton girl as the only creature fit to mate him, Calyste
remained speechless and even mindless.
“Why so, Camille?” asked Madame de Rochefide.
“Really, my dear,” said Camille, seeing Calyste’s despair, “you are not
generous; did I advise Conti to marry?”
Beatrix looked at her friend with a surprise that was mingled with
indefinable suspicions.
Calyste, unable to understand Camille’s motive, but feeling that she
came to his assistance and seeing in her cheeks that faint spot of color
which he knew to mean the presence of some violent emotion, went up
to her rather awkwardly and took her hand. But she left him and seated
herself carelessly at the piano, like a woman so sure of her friend and
lover that she can afford to leave him with another woman. She played
variations, improvising them as she played, on certain themes chosen,
unconsciously to herself, by the impulse of her mind; they were
melancholy in the extreme.
Beatrix seemed to listen to the music, but she was really observing
Calyste, who, much too young and artless for the part which Camille was
intending him to play, remained in rapt adoration before his real idol.
After about an hour, during which time Camille continued to play,
Beatrix rose and retired to her apartments. Camille at once took Calyste
into her chamber and closed the door, fearing to be overheard; for women
have an amazing instinct of distrust.
“My child,” she said, “if you want to succeed with Beatrix, you must
seem to love me still, or you will fail. You are a child; you know
nothing of women; all you know is how to love. Now loving and making
one’s self beloved are two very different things. If you go your own way
you will fall into horrible suffering, and I wish to see you happy. If
you rouse, not the pride, but the self-will, the obstinacy which is
a strong feature in her character, she is capable of going off at any
moment to Paris and rejoining Conti; and what will you do then?”
“I shall love her.”
“You won’t see her again.”
“Oh! yes, I shall,” he said.
“How?”
“I shall follow her.”
“Why, you are as poor as Job, my dear boy.”
“My father, Gasselin, and I lived for three months in Vendee on one
hundred and fifty francs, marching night and day.”
“Calyste,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, “now listen to me. I know that
you have too much candor to play a part, too much honesty to deceive;
and I don’t want to corrupt such a nature as yours. Yet deception is the
only way by which you can win Beatrix; I take it therefore upon myself.
In a week from now she shall love you.”
“Is it possible?” he said clasping his hands.
“Yes,” replied Camille, “but it will be necessary to overcome certain
pledges which she has made to herself. I will do that for you. You must
not interfere in the rather arduous task I shall undertake. The
marquise has a true aristocratic delicacy of perception; she is keenly
distrustful; no hunter could meet with game more wary or more difficult
to capture. You are wholly unable to cope with her; will you promise me
a blind obedience?”
“What must I do?” replied the youth.
“Very little,” said Camille. “Come here every day and devote yourself
to me. Come to my rooms; avoid Beatrix if you meet her. We will stay
together till four o’clock; you shall employ the time in study, and I in
smoking. It will be hard for you not to see her, but I will find you
a number of interesting books. You have read nothing as yet of George
Sand. I will send one of my people this very evening to Nantes to
buy her works and those of other authors whom you ought to know. The
evenings we will spend together, and I permit you to make love to me if
you can--it will be for the best.”
“I know, Camille, that your affection for me is great and so rare that
it makes me wish I had never met Beatrix,” he replied with simple good
faith; “but I don’t see what you hope from all this.”
“I hope to make her love you.”
“Good heavens! it cannot be possible!” he cried, again clasping his
hands toward Camille, who was greatly moved on seeing the joy that she
gave him at her own expense.
“Now listen to me carefully,” she said. “If you break the agreement
between us, if you have--not a long conversation--but a mere exchange of
words with the marquise in private, if you let her question you, if you
fail in the silent part I ask you to play, which is certainly not a very
difficult one, I do assure you,” she said in a serious tone, “you will
lose her forever.”
“I don’t understand the meaning of what you are saying to me,” cried
Calyste, looking at Camille with adorable naivete.
“If you did understand it, you wouldn’t be the noble and beautiful
Calyste that you are,” she replied, taking his hand and kissing it.
Calyste then did what he had never before done; he took Camille round
the waist and kissed her gently, not with love but with tenderness,
as he kissed his mother. Mademoiselle des Touches did not restrain her
tears.
“Go now,” she said, “my child; and tell your viscountess that my
carriage is at her command.”
Calyste wanted to stay longer, but he was forced to obey her imperious
and imperative gesture.
He went home gaily; he believed that in a week the beautiful Beatrix
would love him. The players at _mouche_ found him once more the Calyste
they had missed for the last two months. Charlotte attributed this
change to herself. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel was charming to him. The
Abbe Grimont endeavored to make out what was passing in the mother’s
mind. The Chevalier du Halga rubbed his hands. The two old maids were as
lively as lizards. The viscountess lost one hundred sous by accumulated
_mouches_, which so excited the cupidity of Zephirine that she
regretted not being able to see the cards, and even spoke sharply to her
sister-in-law, who acted as the proxy of her eyes.
The party lasted till eleven o’clock. There were two defections, the
baron and the chevalier, who went to sleep in their respective chairs.
Mariotte had made galettes of buckwheat, the baroness produced a
tea-caddy. The illustrious house of du Guenic served a little supper
before the departure of its guests, consisting of fresh butter, fruits,
and cream, in addition to Mariotte’s cakes; for which festal event
issued from their wrappings a silver teapot and some beautiful old
English china sent to the baroness by her aunts. This appearance of
modern splendor in the ancient hall, together with the exquisite grace
of its mistress, brought up like a true Irish lady to make and pour out
tea (that mighty affair to Englishwomen), had something charming about
them. The most exquisite luxury could never have attained to the simple,
modest, noble effect produced by this sentiment of joyful hospitality.
A few moments after Calyste’s departure from Les Touches, Beatrix, who
had heard him go, returned to Camille, whom she found with humid eyes
lying back on her sofa.
“What is it, Felicite?” asked the marquise.
“I am forty years old, and I love him!” said Mademoiselle des Touches,
with dreadful tones of agony in her voice, her eyes becoming hard and
brilliant. “If you knew, Beatrix, the tears I have shed over the lost
years of my youth! To be loved out of pity! to know that one owes one’s
happiness only to perpetual care, to the slyness of cats, to traps laid
for innocence and all the youthful virtues--oh, it is infamous! If it
were not that one finds absolution in the magnitude of love, in the
power of happiness, in the certainty of being forever above all
other women in his memory, the first to carve on that young heart the
ineffaceable happiness of an absolute devotion, I would--yes, if he
asked it,--I would fling myself into the sea. Sometimes I find myself
wishing that he would ask it; it would then be an oblation, not a
suicide. Ah, Beatrix, by coming here you have, unconsciously, set me a
hard task. I know it will be difficult to keep him against you; but you
love Conti, you are noble and generous, you will not deceive me; on the
contrary, you will help me to retain my Calyste’s love. I expected the
impression you would make upon him, but I have not committed the mistake
of seeming jealous; that would only have added fuel to the flame. On the
contrary, before you came, I described you in such glowing colors that
you hardly realize the portrait, although you are, it seems to me, more
beautiful than ever.”
This vehement elegy, in which truth was mingled with deception,
completely duped the marquise. Claude Vignon had told Conti the reasons
for his departure, and Beatrix was, of course, informed of them.
She determined therefore to behave with generosity and give the cold
shoulder to Calyste; but at the same instant there came into her soul
that quiver of joy which vibrates in the heart of every woman when she
finds herself beloved. The love a woman inspires in any man’s heart
is flattery without hypocrisy, and it is impossible for some women to
forego it; but when that man belongs to a friend, his homage gives more
than pleasure,--it gives delight. Beatrix sat down beside her friend and
began to coax her prettily.
“You have not a white hair,” she said; “you haven’t even a wrinkle; your
temples are just as fresh as ever; whereas I know more than one woman of
thirty who is obliged to cover hers. Look, dear,” she added, lifting her
curls, “see what that journey to Italy has cost me.”
Her temples showed an almost imperceptible withering of the texture of
the delicate skin. She raised her sleeves and showed Camille the same
slight withering of the wrists, where the transparent tissue suffered
the blue network of swollen veins to be visible, and three deep lines
made a bracelet of wrinkles.
“There, my dear, are two spots which--as a certain writer ferreting for
the miseries of women, has said--never lie,” she continued. “One must
needs have suffered to know the truth of his observation. Happily
for us, most men know nothing about it; they don’t read us like that
dreadful author.”
“Your letter told me all,” replied Camille; “happiness ignores
everything but itself. You boasted too much of yours to be really happy.
Truth is deaf, dumb, and blind where love really is. Consequently,
seeing very plainly that you have your reasons for abandoning Conti,
I have feared to have you here. My dear, Calyste is an angel; he is as
good as he is beautiful; his innocent heart will not resist your
eyes; already he admires you too much not to love you at the first
encouragement; your coldness can alone preserve him to me. I confess to
you, with the cowardice of true passion, that if he were taken from me I
should die. That dreadful book of Benjamin Constant, ‘Adolphe,’ tells us
only of Adolphe’s sorrows; but what about those of the woman, hey? The
man did not observe them enough to describe them; and what woman would
have dared to reveal them? They would dishonor her sex, humiliate its
virtues, and pass into vice. Ah! I measure the abyss before me by my
fears, by these sufferings that are those of hell. But, Beatrix, I will
tell you this: in case I am abandoned, my choice is made.”
“What is it?” cried Beatrix, with an eagerness that made Camille
shudder.
The two friends looked at each other with the keen attention of Venetian
inquisitors; their souls clashed in that rapid glance, and struck fire
like flints. The marquise lowered her eyes.
“After man, there is nought but God,” said the celebrated woman. “God
is the Unknown. I shall fling myself into that as into some vast abyss.
Calyste has sworn to me that he admires you only as he would a picture;
but alas! you are but twenty-eight, in the full magnificence of your
beauty. The struggle thus begins between him and me by falsehood. But I
have one support; happily I know a means to keep him true to me, and I
shall triumph.”
“What means?”
“That is my secret, dear. Let me have the benefits of my age. If Claude
Vignon, as Conti has doubtless told you, flings me back into the gulf,
I, who had climbed to a rock which I thought inaccessible,--I will at
least gather the pale and fragile, but delightful flowers that grow in
its depths.”
Madame de Rochefide was moulded like wax in those able hands. Camille
felt an almost savage pleasure in thus entrapping her rival in her
toils. She sent her to bed that night piqued by curiosity, floating
between jealousy and generosity, but most assuredly with her mind full
of the beautiful Calyste.
“She will be enchanted to deceive me,” thought Camille, as she kissed
her good-night.
Then, when she was alone, the author, the constructor of dramas, gave
place to the woman, and she burst into tears. Filling her hookah with
tobacco soaked in opium, she spent the greater part of the night in
smoking, dulling thus the sufferings of her soul, and seeing through the
clouds about her the beautiful young head of her late lover.
“What a glorious book to write, if I were only to express my pain!” she
said to herself. “But it is written already; Sappho lived before me. And
Sappho was young. A fine and touching heroine truly, a woman of forty!
Ah! my poor Camille, smoke your hookah; you haven’t even the resource
of making a poem of your misery--that’s the last drop of anguish in your
cup!”
The next morning Calyste came before mid-day and slipped upstairs, as
he was told, into Camille’s own room, where he found the books. Felicite
sat before the window, smoking, contemplating in turn the marshes,
the sea, and Calyste, to whom she now and then said a few words about
Beatrix. At one time, seeing the marquise strolling about the garden,
she raised a curtain in a way to attract her attention, and also to
throw a band of light across Calyste’s book.
“To-day, my child, I shall ask you to stay to dinner; but you must
refuse, with a glance at the marquise, which will show her how much you
regret not staying.”
When the three actors met in the salon, and this comedy was played,
Calyste felt for a moment his equivocal position, and the glance that he
cast on Beatrix was far more expressive than Felicite expected. Beatrix
had dressed herself charmingly.
“What a bewitching toilet, my dearest!” said Camille, when Calyste had
departed.
These manoeuvres lasted six days, during which time many conversations,
into which Camille Maupin put all her ability, took place, unknown
to Calyste, between herself and the marquise. They were like the
preliminaries of a duel between two women,--a duel without truce, in
which the assault was made on both sides with snares, feints, false
generosities, deceitful confessions, crafty confidences, by which
one hid and the other bared her love; and in which the sharp steel of
Camille’s treacherous words entered the heart of her friend, and left
its poison there. Beatrix at last took offence at what she thought
Camille’s distrust; she considered it out of place between them. At the
same time she was enchanted to find the great writer a victim to the
pettiness of her sex, and she resolved to enjoy the pleasure of showing
her where her greatness ended, and how even she could be humiliated.
“My dear, what is to be the excuse to-day for Monsieur du Guenic’s not
dining with us?” she asked, looking maliciously at her friend. “Monday
you said we had engagements; Tuesday the dinner was poor; Wednesday you
were afraid his mother would be angry; Thursday you wanted to take a
walk with me; and yesterday you simply dismissed him without a reason.
To-day I shall have my way, and I mean that he shall stay.”
“Already, my dear!” said Camille, with cutting irony. The marquise
blushed. “Stay, Monsieur du Guenic,” said Camille, in the tone of a
queen.
Beatrix became cold and hard, contradictory in tone, epigrammatic, and
almost rude to Calyste, whom Felicite sent home to play _mouche_ with
Charlotte de Kergarouet.
“_She_ is not dangerous at any rate,” said Beatrix, sarcastically.
Young lovers are like hungry men; kitchen odors will not appease their
hunger; they think too much of what is coming to care for the means
that bring it. As Calyste walked back to Guerande, his soul was full
of Beatrix; he paid no heed to the profound feminine cleverness which
Felicite was displaying on his behalf. During this week the marquise
had only written once to Conti, a symptom of indifference which had not
escaped the watchful eyes of Camille, who imparted it to Calyste. All
Calyste’s life was concentrated in the short moment of the day during
which he was allowed to see the marquise. This drop of water, far from
allaying his thirst, only redoubled it. The magic promise, “Beatrix
shall love you,” made by Camille, was the talisman with which he strove
to restrain the fiery ardor of his passion. But he knew not how to
consume the time; he could not sleep, and spent the hours of the
night in reading; every evening he brought back with him, as Mariotte
remarked, cartloads of books.
His aunt called down maledictions on the head of Mademoiselle des
Touches; but his mother, who had gone on several occasions to his room
on seeing his light burning far into the night, knew by this time the
secret of his conduct. Though for her love was a sealed book, and she
was even unaware of her own ignorance, Fanny rose through maternal
tenderness into certain ideas of it; but the depths of such sentiment
being dark and obscured by clouds to her mind, she was shocked at the
state in which she saw him; the solitary uncomprehended desire of his
soul, which was evidently consuming him, simply terrified her. Calyste
had but one thought; Beatrix was always before him. In the evenings,
while cards were being played, his abstraction resembled his father’s
somnolence. Finding him so different from what he was when he loved
Camille, the baroness became aware, with a sort of horror, of the
symptoms of real love,--a species of possession which had seized upon
her son,--a love unknown within the walls of that old mansion.
Feverish irritability, a constant absorption in thought, made Calyste
almost doltish. Often he would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on some
figure in the tapestry. One morning his mother implored him to give up
Les Touches, and leave the two women forever.
“Not go to Les Touches!” he cried.
“Oh! yes, yes, go! do not look so, my darling!” she cried, kissing him
on the eyes that had flashed such flames.
Under these circumstances Calyste often came near losing the fruit of
Camille’s plot through the Breton fury of his love, of which he was
ceasing to be the master. Finally, he swore to himself, in spite of his
promise to Felicite, to see Beatrix, and speak to her. He wanted to read
her eyes, to bathe in their light, to examine every detail of her
dress, breathe its perfume, listen to the music of her voice, watch the
graceful composition of her movements, embrace at a glance the whole
figure, and study her as a general studies the field where he means
to win a decisive battle. He willed as lovers will; he was grasped by
desires which closed his ears and darkened his intellect, and threw him
into an unnatural state in which he was conscious of neither obstacles,
nor distances, nor the existence even of his own body.
One morning he resolved to go to Les Touches at an earlier hour than
that agreed upon, and endeavor to meet Beatrix in the garden. He knew
she walked there daily before breakfast.
Mademoiselle des Touches and the marquise had gone, as it happened, to
see the marshes and the little bay with its margin of fine sand, where
the sea penetrates and lies like a lake in the midst of the dunes. They
had just returned, and were walking up a garden path beside the lawn,
conversing as they walked.
“If the scenery pleases you,” said Camille, “we must take Calyste and
make a trip to Croisic. There are splendid rocks there, cascades of
granite, little bays with natural basins, charmingly unexpected and
capricious things, besides the sea itself, with its store of marble
fragments,--a world of amusement. Also you will see women making fuel
with cow-dung, which they nail against the walls of their houses to dry
in the sun, after which they pile it up as we do peat in Paris.”
“What! will you really risk Calyste?” cried the marquise, laughing, in a
tone which proved that Camille’s ruse had answered its purpose.
“Ah, my dear,” she replied, “if you did but know the angelic soul
of that dear child, you would understand me. In him, mere beauty is
nothing; one must enter that pure heart, which is amazed at every
step it takes into the kingdom of love. What faith! what grace! what
innocence! The ancients were right enough in the worship they paid to
sacred beauty. Some traveller, I forget who, relates that when wild
horses lose their leader they choose the handsomest horse in the herd
for his successor. Beauty, my dear, is the genius of things; it is the
ensign which Nature hoists over her most precious creations; it is the
truest of symbols as it is the greatest of accidents. Did any one ever
suppose that angels could be deformed? are they not necessarily a
combination of grace and strength? What is it that makes us stand for
hours before some picture in Italy, where genius has striven through
years of toil to realize but one of those accidents of Nature? Come,
call up your sense of the truth of things and answer me; is it not the
Idea of Beauty which our souls associate with moral grandeur? Well,
Calyste is one of those dreams, those visions, realized. He has the
regal power of a lion, tranquilly unsuspicious of its royalty. When he
feels at his ease, he is witty; and I love his girlish timidity. My soul
rests in his heart away from all corruptions, all ideas of knowledge,
literature, the world, society, politics,--those useless accessories
under which we stifle happiness. I am what I have never been,--a child!
I am sure of him, but I like to play at jealousy; he likes it too.
Besides, that is part of my secret.”
Beatrix walked on pensively, in silence. Camille endured unspeakable
martyrdom, and she cast a sidelong look at her companion which looked
like flame.
“Ah, my dear; but _you_ are happy,” said Beatrix presently, laying
her hand on Camille’s arm like a woman wearied out with some inward
struggle.
“Yes, happy indeed!” replied Felicite, with savage bitterness.
The two women dropped upon a bench from a sense of exhaustion. No
creature of her sex was ever played upon like an instrument with more
Machiavellian penetration than the marquise throughout this week.
“Yes, you are happy, but I!” she said,--“to know of Conti’s
infidelities, and have to bear them!”
“Why not leave him?” said Camille, seeing the hour had come to strike a
decisive blow.
“Can I?”
“Oh! poor boy!”
Both were gazing into a clump of trees with a stupefied air.
Camille rose.
“I will go and hasten breakfast; my walk has given me an appetite,” she
said.
“Our conversation has taken away mine,” remarked Beatrix.
The marquise in her morning dress was outlined in white against the dark
greens of the foliage. Calyste, who had slipped through the salon into
the garden, took a path, along which he sauntered as though he were
meeting her by accident. Beatrix could not restrain a quiver as he
approached her.
“Madame, in what way did I displease you yesterday?” he said, after the
first commonplace sentences had been exchanged.
“But you have neither pleased me nor displeased me,” she said, in a
gentle voice.
The tone, air, and manner in which the marquise said these words
encouraged Calyste.
“Am I so indifferent to you?” he said in a troubled voice, as the tears
came into his eyes.
“Ought we not to be indifferent to each other?” replied the marquise.
“Have we not, each of us, another, and a binding attachment?”
“Oh!” cried Calyste, “if you mean Camille, I did love her, but I love
her no longer.”
“Then why are you shut up together every morning?” she said, with
a treacherous smile. “I don’t suppose that Camille, in spite of her
passion for tobacco, prefers her cigar to you, or that you, in your
admiration for female authors, spend four hours a day in reading their
romances.”
“So then you know--” began the guileless young Breton, his face glowing
with the happiness of being face to face with his idol.
“Calyste!” cried Camille, angrily, suddenly appearing and interrupting
him. She took his arm and drew him away to some distance. “Calyste, is
this what you promised me?”
Beatrix heard these words of reproach as Mademoiselle des Touches
disappeared toward the house, taking Calyste with her. She was stupefied
by the young man’s assertion, and could not comprehend it; she was not
as strong as Claude Vignon. In truth, the part being played by Camille
Maupin, as shocking as it was grand, is one of those wicked grandeurs
which women only practise when driven to extremity. By it their hearts
are broken; in it the feelings of their sex are lost to them; it begins
an abnegation which ends by either plunging them to hell, or lifting
them to heaven.
During breakfast, which Calyste was invited to share, the marquise,
whose sentiments could be noble and generous, made a sudden return upon
herself, resolving to stifle the germs of love which were rising in
her heart. She was neither cold nor hard to Calyste, but gently
indifferent,--a course which tortured him. Felicite brought forward a
proposition that they should make, on the next day but one, an excursion
into the curious and interesting country lying between Les Touches,
Croisic, and the village of Batz. She begged Calyste to employ himself
on the morrow in hiring a boat and sailors to take them across the
little bay, undertaking herself to provide horses and provisions, and
all else that was necessary for a party of pleasure, in which there was
to be no fatigue. Beatrix stopped the matter short, however, by saying
that she did not wish to make excursions round the country. Calyste’s
face, which had beamed with delight at the prospect, was suddenly
overclouded.
“What are you afraid of, my dear?” asked Camille.
“My position is so delicate I do not wish to compromise--I will not say
my reputation, but my happiness,” she said, meaningly, with a glance at
the young Breton. “You know very well how suspicious Conti can be; if he
knew--”
“Who will tell him?”
“He is coming back here to fetch me,” said Beatrix.
Calyste turned pale. In spite of all that Camille could urge, in spite
of Calyste’s entreaties, Madame de Rochefide remained inflexible, and
showed what Camille had called her obstinacy. Calyste left Les Touches
the victim of one of those depressions of love which threaten, in
certain men, to turn into madness. He began to revolve in his mind some
decided means of coming to an explanation with Beatrix.