overlooking the plain where the Charente winds away through the meadows.
The crag is an outlying spur on the Périgord side of a long, low ridge
of hill, which terminates abruptly just above the road from Paris to
Bordeaux, so that the Rock of Angoulême is a sort of promontory marking
out the line of three picturesque valleys. The ramparts and great
gateways and ruined fortress on the summit of the crag still remain to
bear witness to the importance of this stronghold during the Religious
Wars, when Angoulême was a military position coveted alike of Catholics
and Calvinists, but its old-world strength is a source of weakness in
modern days; Angoulême could not spread down to the Charente, and shut
in between its ramparts and the steep sides of the crag, the old town is
condemned to stagnation of the most fatal kind.
The Government made an attempt about this very time to extend the town
towards Périgord, building a Prefecture, a Naval School, and barracks
along the hillside, and opening up roads. But private enterprise had
been beforehand elsewhere. For some time past the suburb of L’Houmeau
had sprung up, a mushroom growth at the foot of the crag and along the
river-side, where the direct road runs from Paris to Bordeaux. Everybody
has heard of the great paper-mills of Angoulême, established perforce
three hundred years ago on the Charente and its branch streams, where
there was a sufficient fall of water. The largest State factory of
marine ordnance in France was established at Ruelle, some six miles
away. Carriers, wheelwrights, posthouses, and inns, every agency for
public conveyance, every industry that lives by road or river, was
crowded together in Lower Angoulême, to avoid the difficulty of the
ascent of the hill. Naturally, too, tanneries, laundries, and all such
waterside trades stood within reach of the Charente; and along the banks
of the river lay the stores of brandy and great warehouses full of the
water-borne raw material; all the carrying trade of the Charente, in
short, had lined the quays with buildings.
So the Faubourg of L’Houmeau grew into a busy and prosperous city, a
second Angoulême rivaling the upper town, the residence of the
powers that be, the lords spiritual and temporal of Angoulême; though
L’Houmeau, with all its business and increasing greatness, was still a
mere appendage of the city above. The _noblesse_ and officialdom dwelt
on the crag, trade and wealth remained below. No love is lost between
these two sections of the community all the world over, and in Angoulême
it would have been hard to say which of the two camps detested the
other the more cordially. Under the Empire the machinery worked fairly
smoothly, but the Restoration wrought both sides to the highest pitch of
exasperation.
Nearly every house in the upper town of Angoulême is inhabited by noble,
or at any rate by old burgher, families, who live independently on their
incomes--a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens to come
among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken residence, and
it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the primordial houses, a
family from some neighboring district may be adopted, but in the eyes of
the aboriginal race they are still newcomers of yesterday.
Prefects, receivers-general, and various administrations that have come
and gone during the last forty years, have tried to tame the ancient
families perched aloft like wary ravens on their crag; the said families
were always willing to accept invitations to dinners and dances; but as
to admitting the strangers to their own houses, they were inexorable.
Ready to scoff and disparage, jealous and niggardly, marrying only among
themselves, the families formed a serried phalanx to keep out intruders.
Of modern luxury they had no notion; and as for sending a boy to Paris,
it was sending him, they thought, to certain ruin. Such sagacity will
give a sufficient idea of the old-world manners and customs of this
society, suffering from thick-headed Royalism, infected with bigotry
rather than zeal, all stagnating together, motionless as their town
founded upon a rock. Yet Angoulême enjoyed a great reputation in the
provinces round about for its educational advantages, and neighboring
towns sent their daughters to its boarding schools and convents.
It is easy to imagine the influence of the class sentiment which held
Angoulême aloof from L’Houmeau. The merchant classes are rich, the
_noblesse_ are usually poor. Each side takes its revenge in scorn of the
other. The tradespeople in Angoulême espouse the quarrel. “He is a man
of L’Houmeau!” a shopkeeper of the upper town will tell you, speaking of
a merchant in the lower suburb, throwing an accent into the speech which
no words can describe. When the Restoration defined the position of
the French _noblesse_, holding out hopes to them which could only be
realized by a complete and general topsy-turvydom, the distance between
Angoulême and L’Houmeau, already more strongly marked than the distance
between the hill and plain, was widened yet further. The better
families, all devoted as one man to the Government, grew more exclusive
here than in any other part of France. “The man of L’Houmeau” became
little better than a pariah. Hence the deep, smothered hatred which
broke out everywhere with such ugly unanimity in the insurrection of
1830 and destroyed the elements of a durable social system in France. As
the overweening haughtiness of the Court nobles detached the provincial
_noblesse_ from the throne, so did these last alienate the _bourgeoisie_
from the royal cause by behavior that galled their vanity in every
possible way.
So “a man of L’Houmeau,” a druggist’s son, in Mme. de Bargeton’s house
was nothing less than a little revolution. Who was responsible for it?
Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne and Canalis, Béranger and
Chateaubriand. Villemain and M. Aignan, Sourmet and Tissot, Étienne and
Davrigny, Benjamin Constant and Lamennais, Cousin and Michaud,--all the
old and young illustrious names in literature in short, Liberals and
Royalists, alike must divide the blame among them. Mme. de Bargeton
loved art and letters, eccentric taste on her part, a craze deeply
deplored in Angoulême. In justice to the lady, it is necessary to give
a sketch of the previous history of a woman born to shine, and left by
unlucky circumstances in the shade, a woman whose influence decided
Lucien’s career.
M. de Bargeton was the great-grandson of an alderman of Bordeaux named
Mirault, ennobled under Louis XIII. for long tenure of office. His
son, bearing the name of Mirault de Bargeton, became an officer in the
household troops of Louis XIV., and married so great a fortune that in
the reign of Louis XV. his son dropped the Mirault and was called simply
M. de Bargeton. This M. de Bargeton, the alderman’s grandson, lived up
to his quality so strenuously that he ran through the family property
and checked the course of its fortunes. Two of his brothers indeed,
great-uncles of the present Bargeton, went into business again, for
which reason you will find the name of Mirault among Bordeaux merchants
at this day. The lands of Bargeton, in Angoumois in the barony of
Rochefoucauld, being entailed, and the house in Angoulême, called the
Hôtel Bargeton, likewise, the grandson of M. de Bargeton the Waster came
in for these hereditaments; though the year 1789 deprived him of all
seignorial rights save to the rents paid by his tenants, which amounted
to some ten thousand francs per annum. If his grandsire had but walked
in the ways of his illustrious progenitors, Bargeton I. and Bargeton
II., Bargeton V. (who may be dubbed Bargeton the Mute by way of
distinction) should by rights have been born to the title of Marquis of
Bargeton; he would have been connected with some great family or other,
and in due time he would have been a duke and a peer of France, like
many another; whereas, in 1805, he thought himself uncommonly lucky when
he married Mlle. Marie-Louise-Anaïs de Nègrepelisse, the daughter of a
noble long relegated to the obscurity of his manor-house, scion though
he was of the younger branch of one of the oldest families in the south
of France. There had been a Nègrepelisse among the hostages of St.
Louis. The head of the elder branch, however, had borne the illustrious
name of d’Espard since the reign of Henri Quatre, when the Nègrepelisse
of that day married an heiress of the d’Espard family. As for M. de
Nègrepelisse, the younger son of a younger son, he lived upon his wife’s
property, a small estate in the neighborhood of Barbezieux, farming
the land to admiration, selling his corn in the market himself, and
distilling his own brandy, laughing at those who ridiculed him, so
long as he could pile up silver crowns, and now and again round out his
estate with another bit of land.
Circumstances unusual enough in out-of-the-way places in the country had
inspired Mme. de Bargeton with a taste for music and reading. During
the Revolution one Abbé Niollant, the Abbé Roze’s best pupil, found a
hiding-place in the old manor-house of Escarbas, and brought with
him his baggage of musical compositions. The old country gentleman’s
hospitality was handsomely repaid, for the Abbé undertook his daughter’s
education. Anaïs, or Naïs, as she was called, must otherwise have been
left to herself, or, worse still, to some coarse-minded servant-maid.
The Abbé was not only a musician, he was well and widely read, and knew
both Italian and German; so Mlle. de Negrepelise received instruction
in those tongues, as well as in counterpoint. He explained the great
masterpieces of the French, German, and Italian literatures, and
deciphered with her the music of the great composers. Finally, as time
hung heavy on his hands in the seclusion enforced by political storms,
he taught his pupil Latin and Greek and some smatterings of natural
science. A mother might have modified the effects of a man’s education
upon a young girl, whose independent spirit had been fostered in the
first place by a country life. The Abbé Niollant, an enthusiast and a
poet, possessed the artistic temperament in a peculiarly high degree, a
temperament compatible with many estimable qualities, but prone to raise
itself above _bourgeois_ prejudices by the liberty of its judgments and
breadth of view. In society an intellect of this order wins pardon for
its boldness by its depth and originality; but in private life it would
seem to do positive mischief, by suggesting wanderings from the beaten
track. The Abbé was by no means wanting in goodness of heart, and his
ideas were therefore the more contagious for this high-spirited girl,
in whom they were confirmed by a lonely life. The Abbé Niollant’s pupil
learned to be fearless in criticism and ready in judgment; it
never occurred to her tutor that qualities so necessary in a man are
disadvantages in a woman destined for the homely life of a house-mother.
And though the Abbé constantly impressed it upon his pupil that it
behoved her to be the more modest and gracious with the extent of her
attainments, Mlle. de Nègrepelisse conceived an excellent opinion of
herself and a robust contempt for ordinary humanity. All those about her
were her inferiors, or persons who hastened to do her bidding, till
she grew to be as haughty as a great lady, with none of the charming
blandness and urbanity of a great lady. The instincts of vanity were
flattered by the pride that the poor Abbé took in his pupil, the pride
of an author who sees himself in his work, and for her misfortune she
met no one with whom she could measure herself. Isolation is one of
the greatest drawbacks of a country life. We lose the habit of putting
ourselves to any inconvenience for the sake of others when there is no
one for whom to make the trifling sacrifices of personal effort required
by dress and manner. And everything in us shares in the change for the
worse; the form and the spirit deteriorate together.
With no social intercourse to compel self-repression, Mlle. de
Nègrepelisse’s bold ideas passed into her manner and the expression of
her face. There was a cavalier air about her, a something that seems at
first original, but only suited to women of adventurous life. So this
education, and the consequent asperities of character, which would have
been softened down in a higher social sphere, could only serve to make
her ridiculous at Angoulême so soon as her adorers should cease to
worship eccentricities that charm only in youth.
As for M. de Nègrepelisse, he would have given all his daughter’s books
to save the life of a sick bullock; and so miserly was he, that he would
not have given her two farthings over and above the allowance to which
she had a right, even if it had been a question of some indispensable
trifle for her education.
In 1802 the Abbé died, before the marriage of his dear child, a marriage
which he, doubtless, would never have advised. The old father found
his daughter a great care now that the Abbé was gone. The high-spirited
girl, with nothing else to do, was sure to break into rebellion against
his niggardliness, and he felt quite unequal to the struggle. Like all
young women who leave the appointed track of woman’s life, Naïs had her
own opinions about marriage, and had no great inclination thereto.
She shrank from submitting herself, body and soul, to the feeble,
undignified specimens of mankind whom she had chanced to meet. She
wished to rule, marriage meant obedience; and between obedience to
coarse caprices and a mind without indulgence for her tastes, and flight
with a lover who should please her, she would not have hesitated for a
moment.
M. de Nègrepelisse maintained sufficient of the tradition of birth to
dread a _mésalliance_. Like many another parent, he resolved to marry
his daughter, not so much on her account as for his own peace of mind.
A noble or a country gentleman was the man for him, somebody not too
clever, incapable of haggling over the account of the trust; stupid
enough and easy enough to allow Naïs to have her own way, and
disinterested enough to take her without a dowry. But where to look for
a son-in-law to suit father and daughter equally well, was the problem.
Such a man would be the phoenix of sons-in-law.
To M. de Nègrepelisse pondering over the eligible bachelors of the
province with these double requirements in his mind, M. de Bargeton
seemed to be the only one who answered to this description. M. de
Bargeton, aged forty, considerably shattered by the amorous dissipations
of his youth, was generally held to be a man of remarkably feeble
intellect; but he had just the exact amount of commonsense required for
the management of his fortune, and breeding sufficient to enable him
to avoid blunders or blatant follies in society in Angoulême. In the
bluntest manner M. de Nègrepelisse pointed out the negative virtues of
the model husband designed for his daughter, and made her see the way to
manage him so as to secure her own happiness. So Naïs married the
bearer of arms, two hundred years old already, for the Bargeton arms
are blazoned thus: _the first or, three attires gules; the second, three
ox’s heads cabossed, two and one, sable; the third, barry of six, azure
and argent, in the first, six shells or, three, two, and one_. Provided
with a chaperon, Naïs could steer her fortunes as she chose under the
style of the firm, and with the help of such connections as her wit and
beauty would obtain for her in Paris. Naïs was enchanted by the prospect
of such liberty. M. de Bargeton was of the opinion that he was making
a brilliant marriage, for he expected that in no long while M. de
Nègrepelisse would leave him the estates which he was rounding out so
lovingly; but to an unprejudiced spectator it certainly seemed as though
the duty of writing the bridegroom’s epitaph might devolve upon his
father-in-law.
By this time Mme. de Bargeton was thirty-six years old and her husband
fifty-eight. The disparity in age was the more startling since M. de
Bargeton looked like a man of seventy, whereas his wife looked scarcely
half her age. She could still wear rose-color, and her hair hanging
loose upon her shoulders. Although their income did not exceed twelve
thousand francs, they ranked among the half-dozen largest fortunes
in the old city, merchants and officials excepted; for M. and Mme. de
Bargeton were obliged to live in Angoulême until such time as Mme.
de Bargeton’s inheritance should fall in and they could go to Paris.
Meanwhile they were bound to be attentive to old M. de Nègrepelisse (who
kept them waiting so long that his son-in-law in fact predeceased him),
and Naïs’ brilliant intellectual gifts, and the wealth that lay like
undiscovered ore in her nature, profited her nothing, underwent the
transforming operation of Time and changed to absurdities. For our
absurdities spring, in fact, for the most part, from the good in us,
from some faculty or quality abnormally developed. Pride, untempered by
intercourse with the great world becomes stiff and starched by contact
with petty things; in a loftier moral atmosphere it would have grown to
noble magnanimity. Enthusiasm, that virtue within a virtue, forming the
saint, inspiring the devotion hidden from all eyes and glowing out upon
the world in verse, turns to exaggeration, with the trifles of a narrow
existence for its object. Far away from the centres of light shed by
great minds, where the air is quick with thought, knowledge stands
still, taste is corrupted like stagnant water, and passion dwindles,
frittered away upon the infinitely small objects which it strives to
exalt. Herein lies the secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that
poison provincial life. The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness
affects the noblest natures; and in such ways as these, men born to be
great, and women who would have been charming if they had fallen under
the forming influence of greater minds, are balked of their lives.
Here was Mme. de Bargeton, for instance, smiting the lyre for every
trifle, and publishing her emotions indiscriminately to her circle. As
a matter of fact, when sensations appeal to an audience of one, it is
better to keep them to ourselves. A sunset certainly is a glorious poem;
but if a woman describes it, in high-sounding words, for the benefit of
matter-of-fact people, is she not ridiculous? There are pleasures which
can only be felt to the full when two souls meet, poet and poet, heart
and heart. She had a trick of using high-sounding phrases, interlarded
with exaggerated expressions, the kind of stuff ingeniously nicknamed
_tartines_ by the French journalist, who furnishes a daily supply of
the commodity for a public that daily performs the difficult feat of
swallowing it. She squandered superlatives recklessly in her talk, and
the smallest things took giant proportions. It was at this period of her
career that she began to type-ize, individualize, synthesize, dramatize,
superiorize, analyze, poetize, angelize, neologize, tragedify, prosify,
and colossify--you must violate the laws of language to find words to
express the new-fangled whimsies in which even women here and there
indulge. The heat of her language communicated itself to the brain,
and the dithyrambs on her lips were spoken out of the abundance of her
heart. She palpitated, swooned, and went into ecstasies over anything
and everything, over the devotion of a sister of Charity, and the
execution of the brothers Fauchet, over M. d’Arlincourt’s _Ipsiboé_,
Lewis’ _Anaconda_, or the escape of La Valette, or the presence of mind
of a lady friend who put burglars to flight by imitating a man’s voice.
Everything was heroic, extraordinary, strange, wonderful, and divine.
She would work herself into a state of excitement, indignation, or
depression; she soared to heaven, and sank again, gazed at the sky,
or looked to earth; her eyes were always filled with tears. She wore
herself out with chronic admiration, and wasted her strength on curious
dislikes. Her mind ran on the Pasha of Janina; she would have liked
to try conclusions with him in his seraglio, and had a great notion
of being sewn in a sack and thrown into the water. She envied that
blue-stocking of the desert, Lady Hester Stanhope; she longed to be a
sister of Saint Camilla and tend the sick and die of yellow fever in
a hospital at Barcelona; ‘twas a high, a noble destiny! In short, she
thirsted for any draught but the clear spring water of her own life,
flowing hidden among green pastures. She adored Byron and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, or anybody else with a picturesque or dramatic career. Her
tears were ready to flow for every misfortune; she sang paeans for every
victory. She sympathized with the fallen Napoleon, and with Mehemet Ali,
massacring the foreign usurpers of Egypt. In short, any kind of genius
was accommodated with an aureole, and she was fully persuaded that
gifted immortals lived on incense and light.
A good many people looked upon her as a harmless lunatic, but in these
extravagances of hers a keener observer surely would have seen the
broken fragments of a magnificent edifice that had crumbled into ruin
before it was completed, the stones of a heavenly Jerusalem--love, in
short, without a lover. And this was indeed the fact.
The story of the first eighteen years of Mme. de Bargeton’s married life
can be summed up in a few words. For a long while she lived upon herself
and distant hopes. Then, when she began to see that their narrow income
put the longed-for life in Paris quite out of the question, she looked
about her at the people with whom her life must be spent, and shuddered
at her loneliness. There was not a single man who could inspire the
madness to which women are prone when they despair of a life become
stale and unprofitable in the present, and with no outlook for the
future. She had nothing to look for, nothing to expect from chance, for
there are lives in which chance plays no part. But when the Empire was
in the full noonday of glory, and Napoleon was sending the flower of
his troops to the Peninsula, her disappointed hopes revived. Natural
curiosity prompted her to make an effort to see the heroes who were
conquering Europe in obedience to a word from the Emperor in the order
of the day; the heroes of a modern time who outdid the mythical feats of
paladins of old. The cities of France, however avaricious or refractory,
must perforce do honor to the Imperial Guard, and mayors and prefects
went out to meet them with set speeches as if the conquerors had been
crowned kings. Mme. de Bargeton went to a _ridotto_ given to the town
by a regiment, and fell in love with an officer of a good family, a
sub-lieutenant, to whom the crafty Napoleon had given a glimpse of the
baton of a Marshal of France. Love, restrained, greater and nobler
than the ties that were made and unmade so easily in those days, was
consecrated coldly by the hands of death. On the battlefield of Wagram
a shell shattered the only record of Mme. de Bargeton’s young beauty,
a portrait worn on the heart of the Marquis of Cante-Croix. For long
afterwards she wept for the young soldier, the colonel in his second
campaign, for the heart hot with love and glory that set a letter from
Naïs above Imperial favor. The pain of those days cast a veil of sadness
over her face, a shadow that only vanished at the terrible age when a
woman first discovers with dismay that the best years of her life are
over, and she has had no joy of them; when she sees her roses wither,
and the longing for love is revived again with the desire to linger yet
for a little on the last smiles of youth. Her nobler qualities dealt
so many wounds to her soul at the moment when the cold of the provinces
seized upon her. She would have died of grief like the ermine if by
chance she had been sullied by contact with those men whose thoughts are
bent on winning a few sous nightly at cards after a good dinner; pride
saved her from the shabby love intrigues of the provinces. A woman so
much above the level of those about her, forced to decide between the
emptiness of the men whom she meets and the emptiness of her own life,
can make but one choice; marriage and society became a cloister for
Anaïs. She lived by poetry as the Carmelite lives by religion. All the
famous foreign books published in France for the first time between 1815
and 1821, the great essayists, M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre (those two
eagles of thought)--all the lighter French literature, in short, that
appeared during that sudden outburst of first vigorous growth might
bring delight into her solitary life, but not flexibility of mind
or body. She stood strong and straight like some forest tree,
lightning-blasted but still erect. Her dignity became a stilted
manner, her social supremacy led her into affectation and sentimental
over-refinements; she queened it with her foibles, after the usual
fashion of those who allow their courtiers to adore them.
This was Mme. de Bargeton’s past life, a dreary chronicle which must
be given if Lucien’s position with regard to the lady is to be
comprehensible. Lucien’s introduction came about oddly enough. In
the previous winter a newcomer had brought some interest into Mme.
de Bargeton’s monotonous life. The place of controller of excise fell
vacant, and M. de Barante appointed a man whose adventurous life was a
sufficient passport to the house of the sovereign lady who had her share
of feminine curiosity.
M. de Châtelet--he began life as plain Sixte Châtelet, but since
1806 had the wit to adopt the particle--M. du Châtelet was one of the
agreeable young men who escaped conscription after conscription by
keeping very close to the Imperial sun. He had begun his career as
private secretary to an Imperial Highness, a post for which he
possessed every qualification. Personable and of a good figure, a clever
billiard-player, a passable amateur actor, he danced well, and excelled
in most physical exercises; he could, moreover, sing a ballad and
applaud a witticism. Supple, envious, never at a loss, there was nothing
that he did not know--nothing that he really knew. He knew nothing, for
instance, of music, but he could sit down to the piano and accompany,
after a fashion, a woman who consented after much pressing to sing a
ballad learned by heart in a month of hard practice. Incapable though he
was of any feeling for poetry, he would boldly ask permission to retire
for ten minutes to compose an impromptu, and return with a quatrain,
flat as a pancake, wherein rhyme did duty for reason. M. du Châtelet had
besides a very pretty talent for filling in the ground of the Princess’
worsted work after the flowers had been begun; he held her skeins of
silk with infinite grace, entertained her with dubious nothings more
or less transparently veiled. He was ignorant of painting, but he could
copy a landscape, sketch a head in profile, or design a costume and
color it. He had, in short, all the little talents that a man could turn
to such useful account in times when women exercised more influence in
public life than most people imagine. Diplomacy he claimed to be his
strong point; it usually is with those who have no knowledge, and are
profound by reason of their emptiness; and, indeed, this kind of skill
possesses one signal advantage, for it can only be displayed in the
conduct of the affairs of the great, and when discretion is the quality
required, a man who knows nothing can safely say nothing, and take
refuge in a mysterious shake of the head; in fact; the cleverest
practitioner is he who can swim with the current and keep his head well
above the stream of events which he appears to control, a man’s fitness
for this business varying inversely as his specific gravity. But in this
particular art or craft, as in all others, you shall find a thousand
mediocrities for one man of genius; and in spite of Châtelet’s services,
ordinary and extraordinary, Her Imperial Highness could not procure a
seat in the Privy Council for her private secretary; not that he would
not have made a delightful Master of Requests, like many another, but
the Princess was of the opinion that her secretary was better placed
with her than anywhere else in the world. He was made a Baron, however,
and went to Cassel as envoy-extraordinary, no empty form of words,
for he cut a very extraordinary figure there--Napoleon used him as a
diplomatic courier in the thick of a European crisis. Just as he had
been promised the post of minister to Jérôme in Westphalia, the Empire
fell to pieces; and balked of his _ambassade de famille_ as he called
it, he went off in despair to Egypt with General de Montriveau. A
strange chapter of accidents separated him from his traveling companion,
and for two long years Sixte du Châtelet led a wandering life among
the Arab tribes of the desert, who sold and resold their captive--his
talents being not of the slightest use to the nomad tribes. At length,
about the time that Montriveau reached Tangier, Châtelet found himself
in the territory of the Imam of Muscat, had the luck to find an English
vessel just about to set sail, and so came back to Paris a year sooner
than his sometime companion. Once in Paris, his recent misfortunes, and
certain connections of long standing, together with services rendered
to great persons now in power, recommended him to the President of the
Council, who put him in M. de Barante’s department until such time as a
controllership should fall vacant. So the part that M. du Châtelet once
had played in the history of the Imperial Princess, his reputation for
success with women, the strange story of his travels and sufferings, all
awakened the interest of the ladies of Angoulême.
M. le Baron Sixte du Châtelet informed himself as to the manners and
customs of the upper town, and took his cue accordingly. He appeared on
the scene as a jaded man of the world, broken in health, and weary in
spirit. He would raise his hand to his forehead at all seasons, as
if pain never gave him a moment’s respite, a habit that recalled his
travels and made him interesting. He was on visiting terms with the
authorities--the general in command, the prefect, the receiver-general,
and the bishop; but in every house he was frigid, polite, and slightly
supercilious, like a man out of his proper place awaiting the favors
of power. His social talents he left to conjecture, nor did they lose
anything in reputation on that account; then when people began to talk
about him and wish to know him, and curiosity was still lively; when he
had reconnoitred the men and found them nought, and studied the women
with the eyes of experience in the cathedral for several Sundays, he saw
that Mme. de. Bargeton was the person with whom it would be best to be
on intimate terms. Music, he thought, should open the doors of a house
where strangers were never received. Surreptitiously he procured one of
Miroir’s Masses, learned it upon the piano; and one fine Sunday when
all Angoulême went to the cathedral, he played the organ, sent those who
knew no better into ecstasies over the performance, and stimulated
the interest felt in him by allowing his name to slip out through the
attendants. As he came out after mass, Mme. de Bargeton complimented
him, regretting that she had no opportunity of playing duets with such
a musician; and naturally, during an interview of her own seeking, he
received the passport, which he could not have obtained if he had asked
for it.
So the adroit Baron was admitted to the circle of the queen of
Angoulême, and paid her marked attention. The elderly beau--he was
forty-five years old--saw that all her youth lay dormant and ready to
revive, saw treasures to be turned to account, and possibly a rich widow
to wed, to say nothing of expectations; it would be a marriage into the
family of Nègrepelisse, and for him this meant a family connection with
the Marquise d’Espard, and a political career in Paris. Here was a fair
tree to cultivate in spite of the ill-omened, unsightly mistletoe that
grew thick upon it; he would hang his fortunes upon it, and prune it,
and wait till he could gather its golden fruit.
High-born Angoulême shrieked against the introduction of a Giaour into
the sanctuary, for Mme. de Bargeton’s salon was a kind of holy of
holies in a society that kept itself unspotted from the world. The only
outsider intimate there was the bishop; the prefect was admitted twice
or thrice in a year, the receiver-general was never received at all;
Mme. de Bargeton would go to concerts and “at homes” at his house, but
she never accepted invitations to dinner. And now, she who had declined
to open her doors to the receiver-general, welcomed a mere controller of
excise! Here was a novel order of precedence for snubbed authority; such
a thing it had never entered their minds to conceive.
Those who by dint of mental effort can understand a kind of pettiness
which, for that matter, can be found on any and every social level, will
realize the awe with which the _bourgeoisie_ of Angoulême regarded the
Hôtel de Bargeton. The inhabitant of L’Houmeau beheld the grandeur
of that miniature Louvre, the glory of the Angoumoisin Hôtel de
Rambouillet, shining at a solar distance; and yet, within it there was
gathered together all the direst intellectual poverty, all the decayed
gentility from twenty leagues round about.
Political opinion expanded itself in wordy commonplaces vociferated with
emphasis; the _Quotidienne_ was comparatively Laodicean in its loyalty,
and Louis XVIII. a Jacobin. The women, for the most part, were awkward,
silly, insipid, and ill dressed; there was always something amiss that
spoiled the whole; nothing in them was complete, toilette or talk, flesh
or spirit. But for his designs on Mme. de Bargeton, Châtelet could not
have endured the society. And yet the manners and spirit of the noble
in his ruined manor-house, the knowledge of the traditions of good
breeding,--these things covered a multitude of deficiencies. Nobility
of feeling was far more real here than in the lofty world of Paris. You
might compare these country Royalists, if the metaphor may be allowed,
to old-fashioned silver plate, antiquated and tarnished, but weighty;
their attachment to the House of Bourbon as the House of Bourbon did
them honor. The very fixity of their political opinions was a sort of
faithfulness. The distance that they set between themselves and the
_bourgeoisie_, their very exclusiveness, gave them a certain elevation,
and enhanced their value. Each noble represented a certain price for
the townsmen, as Bambara Negroes, we are told, attach a money value to
cowrie shells.
Some of the women, flattered by M. du Châtelet, discerned in him
the superior qualities lacking in the men of their own sect, and the
insurrection of self-love was pacified. These ladies all hoped to
succeed to the Imperial Highness. Purists were of the opinion that you
might see the intruder in Mme. de Bargeton’s house, but not elsewhere.
Du Châtelet was fain to put up with a good deal of insolence, but he
held his ground by cultivating the clergy. He encouraged the queen of
Angoulême in foibles bred of the soil; he brought her all the newest
books; he read aloud the poetry that appeared. Together they went into
ecstasies over these poets; she in all sincerity, he with suppressed
yawns; but he bore with the Romantics with a patience hardly to be
expected of a man of the Imperial school, who scarcely could make
out what the young writers meant. Not so Mme. de Bargeton; she waxed
enthusiastic over the renaissance, due to the return of the Bourbon
Lilies; she loved M. de Chateaubriand for calling Victor Hugo “a sublime
child.” It depressed her that she could only know genius from afar, she
sighed for Paris, where great men live. For these reasons M. du Châtelet
thought he had done a wonderfully clever thing when he told the lady
that at that moment in Angoulême there was “another sublime child,”
a young poet, a rising star whose glory surpassed the whole Parisian
galaxy, though he knew it not. A great man of the future had been born
in L’Houmeau! The headmaster of the school had shown the Baron some
admirable verses. The poor and humble lad was a second Chatterton, with
none of the political baseness and ferocious hatred of the great ones of
earth that led his English prototype to turn pamphleteer and revile
his benefactors. Mme. de Bargeton in her little circle of five or six
persons, who were supposed to share her tastes for art and letters,
because this one scraped a fiddle, and that splashed sheets of white
paper, more or less, with sepia, and the other was president of a local
agricultural society, or was gifted with a bass voice that rendered _Se
fiato in corpo_ like a war whoop--Mme. de Bargeton amid these grotesque
figures was like a famished actor set down to a stage dinner of
pasteboard. No words, therefore, can describe her joy at these tidings.
She must see this poet, this angel! She raved about him, went into
raptures, talked of him for whole hours together. Before two days
were out the sometime diplomatic courier had negotiated (through the
headmaster) for Lucien’s appearance in the Hôtel de Bargeton.
Poor helots of the provinces, for whom the distances between class and
class are so far greater than for the Parisian (for whom, indeed, these
distances visibly lessen day by day); souls so grievously oppressed by
the social barriers behind which all sorts and conditions of men sit
crying _Raca_! with mutual anathemas--you, and you alone, will
fully comprehend the ferment in Lucien’s heart and brain, when his
awe-inspiring headmaster told him that the great gates of the Hôtel
de Bargeton would shortly open and turn upon their hinges at his fame!
Lucien and David, walking together of an evening in the Promenade de
Beaulieu, had looked up at the house with the old-fashioned gables, and
wondered whether their names would ever so much as reach ears inexorably
deaf to knowledge that came from a lowly origin; and now he (Lucien) was
to be made welcome there!
No one except his sister was in the secret. Eve, like the thrifty
housekeeper and divine magician that she was, conjured up a few louis
d’or from her savings to buy thin shoes for Lucien of the best shoemaker
in Angoulême, and an entirely new suit of clothes from the most renowned
tailor. She made a frill for his best shirt, and washed and pleated it
with her own hands. And how pleased she was to see him so dressed! How
proud she felt of her brother, and what quantities of advice she gave
him! Her intuition foresaw countless foolish fears. Lucien had a habit
of resting his elbows on the table when he was in deep thought; he would
even go so far as to draw a table nearer to lean upon it; Eve told him
that he must not forget himself in those aristocratic precincts.
She went with him as far as St. Peter’s Gate, and when they were almost
opposite the cathedral she stopped, and watched him pass down the Rue de
Beaulieu to the Promenade, where M. du Châtelet was waiting for him. And
after he was out of sight, she still stood there, poor girl! in a great
tremor of emotion, as though some great thing had happened to them.
Lucien in Mme. de Bargeton’s house!--for Eve it meant the dawn of
success. The innocent creature did not suspect that where ambition
begins, ingenuous feeling ends.
Externals in the Rue du Minage gave Lucien no sense of surprise. This
palace, that loomed so large in his imagination, was a house built of
the soft stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal enough
from the street, and inside it was extremely plain; there was the usual
provincial courtyard--chilly, prim, and neat; and the house itself was
sober, almost convent-like, but in good repair.
Lucien went up the old staircase with the balustrade of chestnut wood
(the stone steps ceased after the second floor), crossed a shabby
antechamber, and came into the presence in a little wainscoted
drawing-room, beyond a dimly-lit salon. The carved woodwork, in the
taste of the eighteenth century, had been painted gray. There were
monochrome paintings on the frieze panels, and the walls were adorned
with crimson damask with a meagre border. The old-fashioned furniture
shrank piteously from sight under covers of a red-and-white check
pattern. On the sofa, covered with thin mattressed cushions, sat Mme.
de Bargeton; the poet beheld her by the light of two wax candles on
a sconce with a screen fitted to it, that stood before her on a round
table with a green cloth.
The queen did not attempt to rise, but she twisted very gracefully on
her seat, smiling on the poet, who was not a little fluttered by the
serpentine quiverings; her manner was distinguished, he thought. For
Mme. de Bargeton, she was impressed with Lucien’s extreme beauty, with
his diffidence, with everything about him; for her the poet already
was poetry incarnate. Lucien scrutinized his hostess with discreet side
glances; she disappointed none of his expectations of a great lady.
Mme. de Bargeton, following a new fashion, wore a coif of slashed black
velvet, a head-dress that recalls memories of mediaeval legend to a
young imagination, to amplify, as it were, the dignity of womanhood. Her
red-gold hair, escaping from under her cap, hung loose; bright golden
color in the light, red in the rounded shadow of the curls that only
partially hid her neck. Beneath a massive white brow, clean cut and
strongly outlined, shone a pair of bright gray eyes encircled by a
margin of mother-of-pearl, two blue veins on each side of the nose
bringing out the whiteness of that delicate setting. The Bourbon curve
of the nose added to the ardent expression of an oval face; it was as
if the royal temper of the House of Condé shone conspicuous in this
feature. The careless cross-folds of the bodice left a white throat
bare, and half revealed the outlines of a still youthful figure and
shapely, well placed contours beneath.
With fingers tapering and well-kept, though somewhat too thin, Mme. de
Bargeton amiably pointed to a seat by her side, M. du Châtelet ensconced
himself in an easy-chair, and Lucien then became aware that there was no
one else in the room.
Mme. de Bargeton’s words intoxicated the young poet from L’Houmeau. For
Lucien those three hours spent in her presence went by like a dream that
we would fain have last forever. She was not thin, he thought; she was
slender; in love with love, and loverless; and delicate in spite of her
strength. Her foibles, exaggerated by her manner, took his fancy; for
youth sets out with a love of hyperbole, that infirmity of noble souls.
He did not so much as see that her cheeks were faded, that the patches
of color on the cheek-bone were faded and hardened to a brick-red by
listless days and a certain amount of ailing health. His imagination
fastened at once on the glowing eyes, on the dainty curls rippling with
light, on the dazzling fairness of her skin, and hovered about those
bright points as the moth hovers about the candle flame. For her spirit
made such appeal to his that he could no longer see the woman as she
was. Her feminine exaltation had carried him away, the energy of her
expressions, a little staled in truth by pretty hard and constant wear,
but new to Lucien, fascinated him so much the more easily because he was
determined to be pleased. He had brought none of his own verses to read,
but nothing was said of them; he had purposely left them behind because
he meant to return; and Mme. de Bargeton did not ask for them, because
she meant that he should come back some future day to read them to her.
Was not this a beginning of an understanding?
As for M. Sixte du Châtelet, he was not over well pleased with all this.
He perceived rather too late in the day that he had a rival in this
handsome young fellow. He went with him as far as the first flight of
steps below Beaulieu to try the effect of a little diplomacy; and Lucien
was not a little astonished when he heard the controller of excise
pluming himself on having effected the introduction, and proceeding in
this character to give him (Lucien) the benefit of his advice.
“Heaven send that Lucien might meet with better treatment than he had
done,” such was the matter of M. du Châtelet’s discourse. “The Court was
less insolent that this pack of dolts in Angoulême. You were expected to
endure deadly insults; the superciliousness you had to put up with was
something abominable. If this kind of folk did not alter their behavior,
there would be another Revolution of ‘89. As for himself, if he
continued to go to the house, it was because he had found Mme. de
Bargeton to his taste; she was the only woman worth troubling about in
Angoulême; he had been paying court to her for want of anything better
to do, and now he was desperately in love with her. She would be his
before very long, she loved him, everything pointed that way. The
conquest of this haughty queen of the society would be his one revenge
on the whole houseful of booby clodpates.”
Châtelet talked of his passion in the tone of a man who would have a
rival’s life if he crossed his path. The elderly butterfly of the Empire
came down with his whole weight on the poor poet, and tried to frighten
and crush him by his self-importance. He grew taller as he gave an
embellished account of his perilous wanderings; but while he impressed
the poet’s imagination, the lover was by no means afraid of him.
In spite of the elderly coxcomb, and regardless of his threats and
airs of a _bourgeois_ bravo, Lucien went back again and again to the
house--not too often at first, as became a man of L’Houmeau; but before
very long he grew accustomed to the vast condescension, as it had seemed
to him at the outset, and came more and more frequently. The druggist’s
son was a completely insignificant being. If any of the _noblesse_, men
or women, calling upon Naïs, found Lucien in the room, they met him with
the overwhelming graciousness that well-bred people use towards their
inferiors. Lucien thought them very kind for a time, and later found out
the real reason for their specious amiability. It was not long before he
detected a patronizing tone that stirred his gall and confirmed him
in his bitter Republicanism, a phase of opinion through which many
a would-be patrician passes by way of prelude to his introduction to
polite society.
But was there anything that he would not have endured for Naïs?--for
so he heard her named by the clan. Like Spanish grandees and the old
Austrian nobility at Vienna, these folk, men and women alike, called
each other by their Christian names, a final shade of distinction in the
inmost ring of Angoumoisin aristocracy.
Lucien loved Naïs as a young man loves the first woman who flatters him,
for Naïs prophesied great things and boundless fame for Lucien. She used
all her skill to secure her hold upon her poet; not merely did she
exalt him beyond measure, but she represented him to himself as a child
without fortune whom she meant to start in life; she treated him like a
child, to keep him near her; she made him her reader, her secretary,
and cared more for him than she would have thought possible after the
dreadful calamity that had befallen her.
She was very cruel to herself in those days, telling herself that it
would be folly to love a young man of twenty, so far apart from her
socially in the first place; and her behavior to him was a bewildering
mixture of familiarity and capricious fits of pride arising from her
fears and scruples. She was sometimes a lofty patroness, sometimes she
was tender and flattered him. At first, while he was overawed by her
rank, Lucien experienced the extremes of dread, hope, and despair, the
torture of a first love, that is beaten deep into the heart with the
hammer strokes of alternate bliss and anguish. For two months Mme. de
Bargeton was for him a benefactress who would take a mother’s interest
in him; but confidences came next. Mme. de Bargeton began to address
her poet as “dear Lucien,” and then as “dear,” without more ado. The
poet grew bolder, and addressed the great lady as Naïs, and there
followed a flash of the anger that captivates a boy; she reproached
him for calling her by a name in everybody’s mouth. The haughty and
high-born Nègrepelisse offered the fair angel youth that one of her
appellations which was unsoiled by use; for him she would be “Louise.”
Lucien was in the third heaven.
One evening when Lucien came in, he found Mme. de Bargeton looking at a
portrait, which she promptly put away. He wished to see it, and to quiet
the despair of a first fit of jealousy Louise showed him Cante-Croix’s
picture, and told with tears the piteous story of a love so stainless,
so cruelly cut short. Was she experimenting with herself? Was she trying
a first unfaithfulness to the memory of the dead? Or had she taken it
into her head to raise up a rival to Lucien in the portrait? Lucien was
too much of a boy to analyze his lady-love; he gave way to unfeigned
despair when she opened the campaign by entrenching herself behind the
more or less skilfully devised scruples which women raise to have them
battered down. When a woman begins to talk about her duty, regard for
appearances or religion, the objections she raises are so many redoubts
which she loves to have carried by storm. But on the guileless Lucien
these coquetries were thrown away; he would have advanced of his own
accord.
“_I_ shall not die for you, I will live for you,” he cried audaciously
one evening; he meant to have no more of M. de Cante-Croix, and gave
Louise a glance which told plainly that a crisis was at hand.
Startled at the progress of this new love in herself and her poet,
Louise demanded some verses promised for the first page of her album,
looking for a pretext for a quarrel in his tardiness. But what became
of her when she read the following stanzas, which, naturally, she
considered finer than the finest work of Canalis, the poet of the
aristocracy?--
The magic brush, light flying flights of song--
To these, but not to these alone, belong
My pages fair;
Often to me, my mistress’ pencil steals
To tell the secret gladness that she feels,
The hidden care.
And when her fingers, slowlier at the last,
Of a rich Future, now become the Past,
Seek count of me,
Oh Love, when swift, thick-coming memories rise,
I pray of Thee.
May they bring visions fair as cloudless skies
Of happy voyage o’er a summer sea!
“Was it really I who inspired those lines?” she asked.
The doubt suggested by coquetry to a woman who amused herself by playing
with fire brought tears to Lucien’s eyes; but her first kiss upon his
forehead calmed the storm. Decidedly Lucien was a great man, and she
meant to form him; she thought of teaching him Italian and German and
perfecting his manners. That would be pretext sufficient for having him
constantly with her under the very eyes of her tiresome courtiers. What
an interest in her life! She took up music again for her poet’s sake,
and revealed the world of sound to him, playing grand fragments of
Beethoven till she sent him into ecstasy; and, happy in his delight,
turned to the half-swooning poet.
“Is not such happiness as this enough?” she asked hypocritically; and
poor Lucien was stupid enough to answer, “Yes.”
In the previous week things had reached such a point, that Louise had
judged it expedient to ask Lucien to dine with M. de Bargeton as a
third. But in spite of this precaution, the whole town knew the state of
affairs; and so extraordinary did it appear, that no one would believe
the truth. The outcry was terrific. Some were of the opinion that
society was on the eve of cataclysm. “See what comes of Liberal
doctrines!” cried others.
Then it was that the jealous du Châtelet discovered that Madame
Charlotte, the monthly nurse, was no other than Mme. Chardon, “the
mother of the Chateaubriand of L’Houmeau,” as he put it. The remark
passed muster as a joke. Mme. de Chandour was the first to hurry to Mme.
de Bargeton.
“Naïs, dear,” she said, “do you know what everybody is talking about
in Angoulême? This little rhymster’s mother is the Madame Charlotte who
nursed my sister-in-law through her confinement two months ago.”
“What is there extraordinary in that, my dear?” asked Mme. de Bargeton
with her most regal air. “She is a druggist’s widow, is she not? A
poor fate for a Rubempré. Suppose that you and I had not a penny in the
world, what should either of us do for a living? How would you support
your children?”
Mme. de Bargeton’s presence of mind put an end to the jeremiads of the
_noblesse_. Great natures are prone to make a virtue of misfortune;
and there is something irresistibly attractive about well-doing when
persisted in through evil report; innocence has the piquancy of the
forbidden.
Mme. de Bargeton’s rooms were crowded that evening with friends who came
to remonstrate with her. She brought her most caustic wit into play.
She said that as noble families could not produce a Molière, a Racine, a
Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a Beaumarchais, or a Diderot, people
must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact that great men had
upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their fathers. She
said that genius was always noble. She railed at boorish squires for
understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In short, she talked
a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the light into heads less
dense, but left her audience agape at her eccentricity. And in these
ways she conjured away the storm with her heavy artillery.
When Lucien, obedient to her request, appeared for the first time in
the faded great drawing-room, where the whist-tables were set out, she
welcomed him graciously, and brought him forward, like a queen who means
to be obeyed. She addressed the controller of excise as “M. Châtelet,”
and left that gentleman thunderstruck by the discovery that she knew
about the illegal superfetation of the particle. Lucien was forced upon
her circle, and was received as a poisonous element, which every person
in it vowed to expel with the antidote of insolence.
Naïs had won a victory, but she had lost her supremacy of empire.
There was a rumor of insurrection. Amélie, otherwise Mme. de Chandour,
harkening to “M. Châtelet’s” counsels, determined to erect a rival altar
by receiving on Wednesdays. Now Mme. de Bargeton’s salon was open every
evening; and those who frequented it were so wedded to their ways, so
accustomed to meet about the same tables, to play the familiar game
of backgammon, to see the same faces and the same candle sconces night
after night; and afterwards to cloak and shawl, and put on overshoes and
hats in the old corridor, that they were quite as much attached to the
steps of the staircase as to the mistress of the house.
“All resigned themselves to endure the songster” (_chardonneret_) “of
the sacred grove,” said Alexandre de Brébian, which was witticism number
two. Finally, the president of the agricultural society put an end to
the sedition by remarking judicially that “before the Revolution the
greatest nobles admitted men like Dulcos and Grimm and Crébillon
to their society--men who were nobodies, like this little poet
of L’Houmeau; but one thing they never did, they never received
tax-collectors, and, after all, Châtelet is only a tax-collector.”
Du Châtelet suffered for Chardon. Every one turned the cold shoulder
upon him; and Châtelet was conscious that he was attacked. When Mme.
de Bargeton called him “M. Châtelet,” he swore to himself that he would
possess her; and now he entered into the views of the mistress of the
house, came to the support of the young poet, and declared himself
Lucien’s friend. The great diplomatist, overlooked by the shortsighted
Emperor, made much of Lucien, and declared himself his friend! To launch
the poet into society, he gave a dinner, and asked all the authorities
to meet him--the prefect, the receiver-general, the colonel in command
of the garrison, the head of the Naval School, the president of the
Court, and so forth. The poet, poor fellow, was fêted so magnificently,
and so belauded, that anybody but a young man of two-and-twenty would
have shrewdly suspected a hoax. After dinner, Châtelet drew his rival on
to recite _The Dying Sardanapalus_, the masterpiece of the hour; and the
headmaster of the school, a man of a phlegmatic temperament, applauded
with both hands, and vowed that Jean-Baptiste Rousseau had done nothing
finer. Sixte, Baron du Châtelet, thought in his heart that this slip
of a rhymster would wither incontinently in a hothouse of adulation;
perhaps he hoped that when the poet’s head was turned with brilliant
dreams, he would indulge in some impertinence that would promptly
consign him to the obscurity from which he had emerged. Pending
the decease of genius, Châtelet appeared to offer up his hopes as a
sacrifice at Mme. de Bargeton’s feet; but with the ingenuity of a rake,
he kept his own plan in abeyance, watching the lovers’ movements with
keenly critical eyes, and waiting for the opportunity of ruining Lucien.
From this time forward, vague rumors reported the existence of a great
man in Angoumois. Mme. de Bargeton was praised on all sides for the
interest which she took in this young eagle. No sooner was her conduct
approved than she tried to win a general sanction. She announced a
soirée, with ices, tea, and cakes, a great innovation in a city where
tea, as yet, was sold only by druggists as a remedy for indigestion. The
flower of Angoumoisin aristocracy was summoned to hear Lucien read his
great work. Louise had hidden all the difficulties from her friend, but
she let fall a few words touching the social cabal formed against him;
she would not have him ignorant of the perils besetting his career as
a man of genius, nor of the obstacles insurmountable to weaklings. She
drew a lesson from the recent victory. Her white hands pointed him to
glory that lay beyond a prolonged martyrdom; she spoke of stakes
and flaming pyres; she spread the adjectives thickly on her finest
_tartines_, and decorated them with a variety of her most pompous
epithets. It was an infringement of the copyright of the passages
of declamation that disfigure _Corinne_; but Louise grew so much the
greater in her own eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who
inspired her eloquence the more for it. She counseled him to take a bold
step and renounce his patronymic for the noble name of Rubempré; he need
not mind the little tittle-tattle over a change which the King, for
that matter, would authorize. Mme. de Bargeton undertook to procure
this favor; she was related to the Marquise d’Espard, who was a
Blamont-Chauvry before her marriage, and a _persona grata_ at Court. The
words “King,” “Marquise d’Espard,” and “the Court” dazzled Lucien like a
blaze of fireworks, and the necessity of the baptism was plain to him.
“Dear child,” said Louise, with tender mockery in her tones, “the sooner
it is done, the sooner it will be sanctioned.”
She went through social strata and showed the poet that this step would
raise him many rungs higher in the ladder. Seizing the moment, she
persuaded Lucien to forswear the chimerical notions of ‘89 as to
equality; she roused a thirst for social distinction allayed by David’s
cool commonsense; she pointed out fashionable society as the goal and
the only stage for such a talent as his. The rabid Liberal became a
Monarchist _in petto_; Lucien set his teeth in the apple of desire of
rank, luxury, and fame. He swore to win a crown to lay at his lady’s
feet, even if there should be blood-stains on the bays. He would conquer
at any cost, _quibuscumque viis_. To prove his courage, he told her of
his present way of life; Louise had known nothing of its hardships,
for there is an indefinable pudency inseparable from strong feeling in
youth, a delicacy which shrinks from a display of great qualities; and a
young man loves to have the real quality of his nature discerned through
the incognito. He described that life, the shackles of poverty borne
with pride, his days of work for David, his nights of study. His young
ardor recalled memories of the colonel of six-and-twenty; Mme. de
Bargeton’s eyes grew soft; and Lucien, seeing this weakness in his
awe-inspiring mistress, seized a hand that she had abandoned to him,
and kissed it with the frenzy of a lover and a poet in his youth. Louise
even allowed him to set his eager, quivering lips upon her forehead.
“Oh, child! child! if any one should see us, I should look very
ridiculous,” she said, shaking off the ecstatic torpor.
In the course of that evening, Mme. de Bargeton’s wit made havoc of
Lucien’s prejudices, as she styled them. Men of genius, according to her
doctrine, had neither brothers nor sisters nor father nor mother;
the great tasks laid upon them required that they should sacrifice
everything that they might grow to their full stature. Perhaps their
families might suffer at first from the all-absorbing exactions of
a giant brain, but at a later day they were repaid a hundredfold for
self-denial of every kind during the early struggles of the kingly
intellect with adverse fate; they shared the spoils of victory. Genius
was answerable to no man. Genius alone could judge of the means used to
an end which no one else could know. It was the duty of a man of genius,
therefore, to set himself above law; it was his mission to reconstruct
law; the man who is master of his age may take all that he needs, run
any risks, for all is his. She quoted instances. Bernard Palissy, Louis
XI., Fox, Napoleon, Christopher Columbus, and Julius Caesar,--all these
world-famous gamblers had begun life hampered with debt, or as poor men;
all of them had been misunderstood, taken for madmen, reviled for bad
sons, bad brothers, bad fathers; and yet in after life each one had come
to be the pride of his family, of his country, of the civilized world.
Her arguments fell upon fertile soil in the worst of Lucien’s nature,
and spread corruption in his heart; for him, when his desires were hot,
all means were admissible. But--failure is high treason against society;
and when the fallen conqueror has run amuck through _bourgeois_ virtues,
and pulled down the pillars of society, small wonder that society,
finding Marius seated among the ruins, should drive him forth in
abhorrence. All unconsciously Lucien stood with the palm of genius on
the one hand and a shameful ending in the hulks upon the other; and,
on high upon the Sinai of the prophets, beheld no Dead Sea covering the
cities of the plain--the hideous winding-sheet of Gomorrah.
So well did Louise loosen the swaddling-bands of provincial life that
confined the heart and brain of her poet that the said poet determined
to try an experiment upon her. He wished to feel certain that this proud
conquest was his without laying himself open to the mortification of
a rebuff. The forthcoming soirée gave him his opportunity. Ambition
blended with his love. He loved, and he meant to rise, a double desire
not unnatural in young men with a heart to satisfy and the battle of
life to fight. Society, summoning all her children to one banquet,
arouses ambition in the very morning of life. Youth is robbed of its
charm, and generous thoughts are corrupted by mercenary scheming. The
idealist would fain have it otherwise, but intrusive fact too often
gives the lie to the fiction which we should like to believe, making it
impossible to paint the young man of the nineteenth century other than
he is. Lucien imagined that his scheming was entirely prompted by good
feeling, and persuaded himself that it was done solely for his friend
David’s sake.
He wrote a long letter to his Louise; he felt bolder, pen in hand, than
face to face. In a dozen sheets, copied out three several times, he
told her of his father’s genius and blighted hopes and of his grinding
poverty. He described his beloved sister as an angel, and David as
another Cuvier, a great man of the future, and a father, friend, and
brother to him in the present. He should feel himself unworthy of his
Louise’s love (his proudest distinction) if he did not ask her to do for
David all that she had done for him. He would give up everything rather
than desert David Séchard; David must witness his success. It was one
of those wild letters in which a young man points a pistol at a refusal,
letters full of boyish casuistry and the incoherent reasoning of an
idealist; a delicious tissue of words embroidered here and there by the
naive utterances that women love so well--unconscious revelations of the
writer’s heart.
Lucien left the letter with the housemaid, went to the office, and spent
the day in reading proofs, superintending the execution of orders, and
looking after the affairs of the printing-house. He said not a word
to David. While youth bears a child’s heart, it is capable of sublime
reticence. Perhaps, too, Lucien began to dread the Phocion’s axe which
David could wield when he chose, perhaps he was afraid to meet those
clear-sighted eyes that read the depths of his soul. But when he read
Chénier’s poems with David, his secret rose from his heart to his lips
at the sting of a reproach that he felt as the patient feels the probing
of a wound.
And now try to understand the thoughts that troubled Lucien’s mind as he
went down from Angoulême. Was the great lady angry with him? Would she
receive David? Had he, Lucien, in his ambition, flung himself headlong
back into the depths of L’Houmeau? Before he set that kiss on Louise’s
forehead, he had had time to measure the distance between a queen and
her favorite, so far had he come in five months, and he did not tell
himself that David could cross over the same ground in a moment. Yet
he did not know how completely the lower orders were excluded from this
upper world; he did not so much as suspect that a second experiment
of this kind meant ruin for Mme. de Bargeton. Once accused and fairly
convicted of a liking for _canaille_, Louise would be driven from the
place, her caste would shun her as men shunned a leper in the Middle
Ages. Naïs might have broken the moral law, and her whole circle,
the clergy and the flower of the aristocracy, would have defended her
against the world through thick and thin; but a breach of another law,
the offence of admitting all sorts of people to her house--this was
sin without remission. The sins of those in power are always
overlooked--once let them abdicate, and they shall pay the penalty. And
what was it but abdication to receive David?
But if Lucien did not see these aspects of the question, his
aristocratic instinct discerned plenty of difficulties of another kind,
and he took alarm. A fine manner is not the invariable outcome of
noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine,
Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might
have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brède,
meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his
shoulder, mistook him for a gardener. A knowledge of the world, when
it is not sucked in with mother’s milk and part of the inheritance of
descent, is only acquired by education, supplemented by certain gifts of
chance--a graceful figure, distinction of feature, a certain ring in the
voice. All these, so important trifles, David lacked, while Nature had
bestowed them upon his friend. Of gentle blood on the mother’s side,
Lucien was a Frank, even down to the high-arched instep. David had
inherited the physique of his father the pressman and the flat foot of
the Gael. Lucien could hear the shower of jokes at David’s expense; he
could see Mme. de Bargeton’s repressed smile; and at length, without
being exactly ashamed of his brother, he made up his mind to disregard
his first impulse and to think twice before yielding to it in future.
So, after the hour of poetry and self-sacrifice, after the reading of
verse that opened out before the friends the fields of literature in the
light of a newly-risen sun, the hour of worldly wisdom and of scheming
struck for Lucien.
Down once more in L’Houmeau he wished that he had not written that
letter; he wished he could have it back again; for down the vista of
the future he caught a glimpse of the inexorable laws of the world. He
guessed that nothing succeeds like success, and it cost him something to
step down from the first rung of the scaling ladder by which he meant to
reach and storm the heights above. Pictures of his quiet and simple life
rose before him, pictures fair with the brightest colors of blossoming
love. There was David; what a genius David had--David who had helped him
so generously, and would die for him at need; he thought of his mother,
of how great a lady she was in her lowly lot, and how she thought that
he was as good as he was clever; then of his sister so gracious in
submission to her fate, of his own innocent childhood and conscience as
yet unstained, of budding hopes undespoiled by rough winds, and at these
thoughts the past broke into flowers once more for his memory.
Then he told himself that it was a far finer thing to hew his own way
through serried hostile mobs of aristocrats or philistines by repeated
successful strokes, than to reach the goal through a woman’s favor.
Sooner or later his genius should shine out; it had been so with the
others, his predecessors; they had tamed society. Women would love him
when that day came! The example of Napoleon, which, unluckily for this
nineteenth century of ours, has filled a great many ordinary persons
with aspirations after extraordinary destinies,--the example of Napoleon
occurred to Lucien’s mind. He flung his schemes to the winds and blamed
himself for thinking of them. For Lucien was so made that he went from
evil to good, or from good to evil, with the same facility.
Lucien had none of the scholar’s love for his retreat; for the past
month indeed he had felt something like shame at the sight of the shop
front, where you could read--