When Nadège Fedorevna, Countess Platoff, known to all her friends by
the _petit nom_ of Nadine, had reached her sixteenth year she had the
look of a hothouse gardenia, so white was her skin and so spiritual
her aspect, whilst her slender form had all the grace of a flower
balancing itself on a fragile stalk in a south wind. That ethereality,
that exquisite delicacy, as of something far too fair and evanescent
for man's rude touch, fascinated into a timid and adoring passion a
heavily-built and clumsy cuirassier of the Imperial Guard, who was
also one of the greatest nobles written in the Velvet Book of
Russia--Platon Nicholaivitch, head of the mighty family of Napraxine.
He was eight-and-twenty years old, immeasurably rich, popular with his
sovereign, a good soldier, and an exceedingly amiable man. He laid his
heart and everything he possessed at the feet of this exquisite and
disdainful child when he saw her at her father's embassy in Vienna one
fateful April day.
She refused him without a moment of doubt; but he was persevering,
greatly enamoured, and had both her parents upon his side. She was
neither weak, nor very obedient; yet in time she allowed herself to be
persuaded that not to accept such an alliance would be to do something
supremely ridiculous. She resisted stubbornly for a while; but she was
inquisitive, independent, and a little heartless.
Her mother, a woman of the world, full of tact and of wisdom, answered
her objection that the Prince Napraxine was stupid, had a Kalmuck
face, and was inclined to be corpulent--in a word, displeased her
taste in every way--by frankly admitting these objections to be
incontestable facts, but added, with persuasive equanimity, 'All you
say is quite true, my child, but that sort of details does not matter,
I assure you, in a question of the kind we are discussing. It would
matter terribly to him if you were stupid or ugly, or inclined to be
fat; but in a man--in a husband--in three months' time you will not
even observe it. Indeed, in a fortnight you will be so used to him
that you will not think whether he is handsome or ugly. Familiarity is
a magician that is cruel to beauty, but kind to ugliness. As for being
inclined to corpulence, he is very tall, he will carry it off very
well; and as to gambling, he will never get to the bottom of his salt
mines and ruby mines: that is the chief question. And after all, my
dear Nadine, a man who will never interfere with you and never quarrel
with you is a pearl seldom found amongst the husks; and when the pearl
is set in gold---- I would not for worlds persuade you, my dear, to
marry merely for certain worldly considerations, such as the great
place and the great wealth of Platon Nicholaivitch; but I would
earnestly advise you to marry early and to marry for peace, and when
peace and a colossal fortune are to be found united, it seems to me a
great mistake to throw them both away. Somebody else will take them. I
suppose you dream of love as all young girls do; but----'
'Not at all; I know this is only a question of marriage,' said Nadine,
with that terrible sarcasm on her lovely young lips with which many
things she had seen in her mother's house had armed her for the
battle of life whilst she was still but a child.
She did not think about love at all; she was not romantic; she already
thought it _vieux jeu_; but she had a brain above the average, and she
fancied that she should like the man to whom she was given to be
something great in intellectual power, not merely in the sense of
millions and of rank. But a girl of sixteen, born and bred in an
embassy, reared in the most brilliant cities of the world, having seen
the great panorama of society pass before her eyes from her babyhood,
is, however innocent in other ways, not unsophisticated enough to
ignore the vast advantages of such a position and such wealth as the
Prince Napraxine offered to her. Besides, her father wished
passionately for the acceptance of Napraxine; he himself was deeply in
debt, and knew that his constitution had the germs of a mortal
disease.
'V'là, ma petite,' he said to her gravely one morning, 'je suis criblé
de dettes: je peux mourir demain. C'est mieux que tu le
prennes---- enfin, c'est un assez bon garçon.'
It was not an enthusiastic eulogy of his desired son-in-law, but he
never spoke enthusiastically, and his child knew very well that under
the negligent slight phrases there ran a keen and vivid desire,
perhaps even a carking and unacknowledged care. By the end of that
evening she had allowed herself to be persuaded, and in three months'
time was married to Prince Napraxine, not knowing in the least what
marriage was, but only regarding it as an entry into the world with
unlimited jewels and the power of going to any theatres she chose.
When she did know what it was, it filled her with an inexpressible
disgust and melancholy. She was very young, and her temperament was
composed of that mingled hauteur and spirituality in which the senses
sleep silent long, sometimes for ever.
She bore two sons in the first two years of her marriage, and then
considered herself free from further obligations to provide heirs for
the vast Napraxine properties. Her husband had been ardently but
timidly in love; when she intimated to him that their union should be
restricted to going to Courts together and being seen in the same
houses at discreet intervals, he suffered in his affections as well as
in his pride, but he did not dare to rebel.
This lovely young woman, who was like a gardenia or a narcissus, who
was not nineteen, and declared that all the caresses and obligations
of love were odious to her, could strike terror and submission into
the soul of the big Platon Napraxine, who stood six feet three inches,
and had been no unheroic soldier in the frosty Caucasus and on the
banks of Euphrates and Indus. She was unusually clever, clever by
nature and culture, by intellect and insight, keenly, delicately
clever, with both aptitude and appetite for learning and scholarship;
and within the first twenty-four hours of her marriage, she had taken
his measurement, moral and mental, with merciless accuracy, and had
decided to herself that she would never do but what she chose. He was
a big dog, a _bon enfant_, a good-natured, good-tempered cipher, but
he was a great bore. And she put him aside out of her life altogether,
except inasmuch as it was absolutely necessary to sit sometimes at the
same table with him, and have his orders blaze beside her diamonds at
State balls; and the friends of the Prince Napraxine envied her, of
all her valuable possessions, none so much as that of her husband,
whose revenues were inexhaustible, and whose good-nature and patience
were equally endless.
Looking back to her seventeenth year she always admitted that her
mother had judged rightly.
'Poor Platon!' she would say to herself sometimes when she thought so,
with a little passing flicker of something like compunction. What had
she given him in return for his great name, his enormous wealth, his
magnificent gifts of all kinds, his honest devotion, and his infinite
docility? Being very honest, when in self-communion of this sort, she
was obliged to confess to herself--nothing. Her own money was all
settled on herself; their rank had been quite equal; there were
hundreds as pretty as herself, and she could not now recollect that in
six years of marriage she had given him one affectionate word.
'The fault is not ours;' she would say, 'it is the institution that is
so stupid. People do not know how else to manage about property, and
so they invented the marriage state. But it is an altogether illogical
idea, binding down two strangers side by side for ever, and it cannot
be said to work well. It keeps property together, that is all; so I
suppose it is good for the world; but certainly individuals suffer for
it more than perhaps property is worth.'
Her two little boys were always left in the Krimea with the mother of
Napraxine; they were much better there, she thought, growing up robust
and healthy like two young bear cubs (which, to her eyes, they much
resembled) in the pure breezes from the Black Sea. When she did see
them she was always amiable to them, even thought she felt fond of
them, as she did of the steppes and the wolves; but like the steppes
and the wolves they were certainly most interesting in theory and at a
good long distance. They were too like their father to be welcome to
her. 'They have the Tartar face, and they will be just as big and just
as stupid,' she thought, whenever she saw them.
When Melville, who had been long intimate with her family, told her,
as he very often did, that it was her duty to have the children near
her, and to interest herself in their education, she always replied:
'They are exactly like Platon; nothing I could do would make them
different. They are perfectly well cared for by his mother, and
brought up much better than I could do it. I was expected to give him
an heir: I have given him two heirs. I do not see that anything more
is required of me.'
And when Melville would fain have insisted on the usual arguments as
to the obligations of maternity and education, she invariably
interrupted him, and once said at full length, 'If the children were
mine only and not Platon's, I could make something of them. But they
are formed in his image; exceedingly good, entirely uninteresting.
They will be Princes Napraxine, and so the world will adore them,
though they be as stupid as mules and as ugly as hedgehogs. They do
not interest me. Oh, you are shocked! Even you, the most original of
Churchmen, cannot get over your prejudices. Believe me, _la voix de la
Nature_ does not speak to everybody. It does not say anything at all
to me.'
'I will be an honest woman; it is much more _chic_,' she had said to
herself in the first year of her marriage in the height of a Paris
winter, as she had looked around her on society, with her brilliant
indolent eyes, which saw so clearly and so far, and surveyed and
appraised her contemporaries.
It would be eccentric, but distinguished. To her delicate, satirical,
fastidious taste, there was a sort of vulgarity in being compromised.
She did not go farther than that, or higher than that. The thing was
common, was low; that was quite enough against it. Something that was
half spirituality, half hauteur, made the decision easy to her. A
certain chillness of temper aiding, her resolve had been kept. She had
been as loyal a wife to Prince Napraxine as though she had loved him.
Men did not obtain any hold on her. She flirted desperately sometimes,
amused herself always, but that was all. When they tried to pass from
courtiers into lovers, they found a barrier, impalpable but
impassable, compounded of her indifference and her raillery, ever set
between her and them. She fancied that it would be quite intolerable
to her for any living being to believe himself necessary to her
happiness; besides, she did not much believe in happiness. The world
was pleasant enough; like a well-cushioned saloon carriage on a
well-ordered line of rail; nothing more. You travelled onward,
_malgré vous_, and you slept comfortably, and your ultimate
destination you could not avoid; but if you escaped any great disaster
by the way, and if nobody woke you with a shock, it was all you
wanted. She did not believe in the possibility of any great beatitude
coming to you on that very monotonous route.
She had that admirable tact coupled with that refined but unsparing
insolence which daunts the world in general to silence and respect.
The greatest _blagueur_ on the Boulevards never dared to hint at a
weakness or a concession on the part of the Princess Napraxine. And
women, though they envied her bitterly, reviled her unsparingly, and
shivered under the sting of her delicate impertinence or her pregnant
epigram, yet were perfectly conscious that she had never shared their
follies. Passion had as yet no place in her complex and delicate
organism. She could not, or would not, understand why passion should
not be content to amuse and worship her, just as a furnace fire may
only bake a porcelain cup or call to life a gardenia blossom.
Now and then this refusal of hers to comprehend what she inspired
ended in dire tragedy. Now and then some one killed himself because
she had laughed. Now and then two people were silly enough to fight a
duel about a glove she had dropped, or the right to take her down the
stairs at the opera. But this was always lamentable and foolish in her
sight; only its consequences, though she regretted them, did not alter
her. If she had loved her husband her victims would have been less
mortified; but they all knew very well that Platon Napraxine was no
more to her than one of the chairs in her drawing-room. If she had
even loved the world she lived in, her coldness would have been more
intelligible; but she did not. Her magnificent jewels, her marvellous
toilettes, her many beautiful houses, her power of gratifying any whim
as it formed itself, the way people looked after her postillions in
their blue velvet jackets, the perpetual fête of which society was
made up for her, all diverted her but moderately. She was _mondaine_
to the tips of her fingers, but not enthusiastically so, only so from
habit--as she wore silk stockings or had rose-water in her bath.
'I have seen the whole thing since I was sixteen; how can it
entertain me much?' she said to those who marvelled at her
indifference. When it was objected to her that there were many who had
seen it from sixteen to sixty, and yet thought nothing else worth
seeing, she shrugged her shoulders. On the whole she understood the
sect of the Skoptzi better; they had an ideal. What ideal had her
world?
She kept her exquisite tint and her lovely eyes unspoiled by the
endless late hours and the incessant excitations in which women of the
_monde où l'on s'amuse_ lose their youth in a year or two. She ate
very simply, drank little but water, rode or drove no matter what
weather, refused forty-nine out of fifty of all the invitations she
received, seldom or never made any house visits, and spent many hours
in perfect repose.
'Why should you go and stay in other people's houses?' she always said
to her English friends, in whom this mania is more rampant than
amongst any other nationality. 'Another person's house is hardly
better than an hotel; indeed, very often it is worse. If you don't
like the dinner-hour, you cannot change it; if you are given slow
horses, you cannot complain; if you dislike your rooms, you cannot
alter them; if you think the _chef_ a bad one, you cannot say so; if
you find all the house party bore you, you cannot get rid of them. You
must pretend to eat all day long; you must pretend to feel amiable
from noon to midnight; you must have all kinds of plans made for you,
and submit to them; you can never read but in your own room, and,
generally speaking, there is nothing in the library--if it be an
English library--except Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Mr. Darwin. I cannot
imagine how any reasonable being subjects herself to such a martyrdom
only because somebody else finds their country place dull without
people.'
She had also ingeniously established a reputation for very delicate
health, which she found beyond anything useful to spare her from being
bored, and to excuse her absence from any gathering which did not
specially attract her.
'I have a _santé de fer_,' she said once to a friend, 'but happily I
look very fragile, and physicians, if they think you wish it, will
always promise you angina pectoris or tubercles on your lungs. I have
an enchanting doctor in Paris--you know him, de Thiviers--he is very
famous; he will shake his head over me as if I were doomed to die in
ten minutes, and he frightens Platon out of his wits--he gets a great
many rouleaux at the end of the season--and he and I look as grave as
the two augurs, though, like the augurs, we are both longing to laugh.
It is so useful to be thought very delicate, you have an excuse for
everything. If at the last moment you don't wish to go anywhere,
nobody can say anything if it be your health that gives way. They
would never forgive me my continual absence from the Court at
Petersburg, and I certainly should not receive my perpetual passport,
if they did not sincerely believe in the tubercles which de Thiviers
has so obligingly found for me. Do go to de Thiviers if you are quite
well and want to be ill; he understands all that sort of thing so
well, and he never betrays you. He has convinced Platon that I am
_poitrinaire_.'
And between her reputation for a dangerous disease in her system, and
her really intelligent care of her health, she had the paths of life
made very smooth to her, and was infinitely freer from any genuine
indisposition than might have been expected from the fragility of her
aspect, and her Russian love of hot rooms and yellow tea. Still, as a
great comedian will so identify himself with his part that he at times
believes himself the thing which he represents, she did at times
almost persuade herself, as she completely persuaded others, that she
had some great constitutional delicacy to contend with, and she would
play at medicine with little needles for morphia, or a few glasses of
water at Baden-Baden or Ems, as she would play now and then at
baccarat or roulette in her drawing-rooms.
'Nothing is so useful,' she would say in moments of confidence. 'Look
at the quantity of weariness that there is in the world from which no
other possible plan will set you free. Palace dinners, diplomatic
banquets, great marriages, country house visits, self-invited princes,
imperial coronations, royal baptisms,--you cannot refuse them; the
laws of society forbid; but if you are known to be in delicate health,
no one can be offended if, at the last moment, quite unexpectedly, you
get a chill and must not stir out of your own room. When there is some
unutterable social tedium looming on the horizon, I always telegraph
for de Thiviers, and he is always equal to the occasion.'
In this, as in other matters, she arranged her life to her own
satisfaction, without any kind of misgiving that this self-absorption
was egotistical. Everything had combined to make her an egotist. An
only child, adored by her father, admired and a little feared by her
mother, whose most intimate secrets she had divined with all the keen
intuition of her natural intelligence; surrounded from her earliest
years by a court of dependents and servants who seemed only to live to
minister to her caprices, flattered from her babyhood by all her
father's friends, secretaries, and attachés, she had imbibed
selfishness as inevitably as a young willow sucks in the moisture from
the stream by which it grows. There was nothing in a loveless marriage
and in the clumsy and irritating devotion of a man who was ardently in
love with her, whilst she only viewed him with contempt and dislike,
to counteract the influences of her earlier years. The whole world
conspired to induce the Princess Napraxine to live only for herself.
That she occasionally had moments of supreme generosity, and a
capacity seldom or never called out for heroic courage, did not alter
the main fact that her life was essentially selfish. She never did
anything that she did not wish to do; the great want in her existence,
to herself, was that she so very seldom felt any wish for anything.
When she did, she gratified it without any scruple or hesitation.
Her mind was too clear and logical for any creed to obtain any hold
upon her; nominally, of course, she was of the Greek Church, and had
too much good taste to create any scandal by openly separating herself
from it; but her intelligence, as critical and as subtle as Voltaire's
or Bolingbroke's, would no more have submitted to the bondage of
religious superstition and tradition than she would have clothed her
graceful person in one of the 'Décrochez-moi-ça' that hung in the
windows of Paris clothes-shops. In morality, also, she did not much
believe; she read Stuart Mill's plea for the utility of virtue once,
and smiled as she closed the book with a mental verdict of
'non-proven.'
Pride (that pride which has been happily defined by a French writer as
_pas d'orgueil, mais de la fierté_), and the delicacy of her taste,
with her profound indifference, supplied the place in her of moral
laws, and probably acted on her much more effectively than they would
have done. Principle is but a palisade; temperament is a stone
bastion.
'Les honnêtes gens m'ennuient et les mauvaises gens me déplaisent,'
she was wont to say, with a frank confession of what many others have
felt, and have not had the courage to say. She had no more rigidity of
principle than any other person who has been reared in the midst of a
witty, elegant, and corrupt society; but her perfect taste supplied
the place of moral convictions, the grossness of vice offended her
like a bad odour, or a staring colour; and everything loose or coarse
seemed to her an affront to intelligence and to refinement.
Sometimes she almost envied the women who could plunge themselves into
the hot springs of a passion, only it seemed to her vulgar; the same
sort of vulgarity as swimming in public in a rose-coloured _maillot_.
She could swim like an otter, but she never swam in public. The noisy
and ungrateful pleasures which delight modern society seemed to her
sheer imbecilities, whilst she would as soon have descended to an
intrigue with her cook or her coachman as have made an amorous
appointment in a private room at a café, or have mounted the stairs of
a hired house to meet a Lovelace of the clubs. '_Peut-on être plus
bête!_' she would say, with supreme disdain, whenever she heard of the
vulgarities which usually accompany Apate and Philotes in these the
waning years of the nineteenth century. She quite understood the
Parisienne in 'Frou-frou' who, tempted to make an assignation, awakes
to a sense of its coarseness and commonness when she finds that the
temple of love is upon the third floor in the Rue du Petit Hurleur,
and that the wall-paper has five-and-twenty Poniatowskys jumping into
the Elster repeated on every length of it.
'In that sort of affair,' she said once, 'you must have either secrecy
or a scandal; both to me seem in bad taste. And then, with the one you
are at the mercy of your maid, and with the other you are at the mercy
of the newspapers. To be sure,' she added, 'I cannot, perhaps, measure
the force of the temptation, for I have never in my life seen any
human being to meet whom I should have ever thought it worth while
even to order out my _coupé_.'
Innumerable lives had done their uttermost to entwine themselves in
hers and had only broken themselves helplessly on the rock of her
supreme indifference, like so many ships upon icebergs. She was a
_charmeresse_ in the uttermost sense of that expressive word, but she
was scarcely a coquette, though the most merciless coquetry might have
done much less harm than she did. A coquette desires and strives to
please; Nadine Napraxine fascinated other lives to hers without effort
if without pity. She had one supreme end--to endeavour to amuse
herself; and she had one unending appetite--that of the study of
character. She so seldom succeeded in amusing herself that she came
naturally to the conclusion that most characters contained no amusing
elements.
'_Vous m'ennuyez!_' was her single word of explication to those whose
homage she had permitted for a while only to send them adrift without
a sign of compassion or contrition. To her the three words seemed
entirely comprehensive. When some one more daring than the others had
once ventured to remind her that he had not been quite so hateful to
her only a brief while before, she had said, with some impatience,
'Can one know that a book is dull unless one looks at a few pages? It
is not one's fault if it be ill-written. I cannot say why you all
weary me, but if you do, it is not my fault either.'
When once they wearied her it was of no use for them by any ingenuity,
subserviency, or despair, to attempt to regain her favour. Her path,
like that of all great victors, was strewn with unregarded victims.
Now and then her composure had been ruffled, when the fate of someone
of these had roused the adverse comments of the world, and the issue
of some duel or the fact of some suicide had had her name, by common
consent, coupled with it. She disliked that kind of notoriety;
sincerely disliked it with all the hauteur and disgust of a very proud
and sensitive refinement; but it never made her change the tenor of
her ways.
'If you do not like _du potin_, would it not be better--to--to--not to
give rise to it?' Napraxine himself had once humbly ventured to
suggest when she was excessively angered because the journals of the
hour had ventured to introduce her name into their narratives of a
duel ending in the death of the young Principe d'Ivrea, who had been
very popular and beloved in French and Italian society.
'_Du potin!_' she had echoed. 'Why cannot you say scandal? What sense
is there in slang? Give rise to it? Ivrea was a nice boy, but
irascible like all Italians, and intensely vain; the least word
irritated him. He chose to provoke de Prangins because de Prangins
teased him, and the old man has been too strong for the young one. It
is a great pity! he had a pretty face and a pretty manner, but I have
no more to do with his death than the gilt arrow on the top of the
house. Myself, I would much rather he had killed de Prangins.'
Napraxine had preserved a reverential silence; he knew that there was
another side to the story, but he did not venture to say so.
When the jealousies, feuds, and quarrels which it amused her to excite
and foment arrived at any such tragical conclusion as this with which
the Duc de Prangins had disembarrassed her salons of a youth who of
late had grown too presuming, she was always entirely innocent of
being the cause of it. 'I always tell them to like each other,' she
would say placidly; but therein they did not obey her.
She valued her power of destruction as the only possible means of her
own amusement. It reconciled her to herself when she was most disposed
to be discontented. Her delicate lips smiled with ineffable disdain
when she saw other women _se tordant comme des folles_, as she
expressed it, in their effort to secure the admiration or retain the
passions of men, while she, merely lifting the cloud of her black
lashes in the sunshine by the lake, or sitting still as marble in the
shadow of her box at the 'Français,' could anchor down by her for ever
the thoughts, the desires, the regrets, the destinies of young and
old, of friend and enemy, of stranger and familiar, merely by the
passive magnetism of that charm which Nature had given her.
'Marie Stuart,' she said once when she closed _Chastelard_, 'a
sorceress! Pooh! They make much too much of her. She had a charm, I
suppose, but she could not have known how to use it, or she would
never have married either Darnley or Bothwell, and she would never
have allowed herself to be beaten by Elizabeth--a grey-haired virgin
and a _maîtresse femme_!'
All women seemed to her to have been very weak: Josephine humiliated
at Malmaison; Marie Antoinette, on the tumbril of death; Heloise, in
her cell of Paraclete; Lady Hamilton, dying of want in Calais; Lady
Blessington, poor and miserable in Paris:--what was the use of 'charm'
if it ended like that?
'I shall reign as long as I live,' she said to herself. 'And if I live
to eighty men will be still eager to hear me talk.'