When the three black horses of the Princess Napraxine, with their manes
flying in the wind, their eyes flashing, and their nostrils breathing
fire, dashed down the Champs Elysées to make the tour du Bois, all
Paris looked after her, and multitudes who only knew her by repute took
off their hats to her as they had used to do in a bygone time to the
golden-haired empress.
'Ah, if I had been in that woman's place in 'seventy-one,' she thought
once, 'I would not have run away in a cab with Evans the dentist; I
would have put on a white gown and all my diamonds, and gone out before
them on to the terrace of the Tuileries--they would have forgotten
Sedan, and would have worshipped me! I cannot forgive people who have
the happiness of great opportunities for not rising to be equal to
them. One can but die once, and it must be essentially delightful to
die amidst a roll of drums, a blaze of sunset, a storm of welcome. The
death of Desaix at Marengo is the ideal death.'
There was at the bottom of her soul, despite her languor, ennui,
and pessimism, a certain heroic element; life seemed to her so poor
a thing, so stupid, so illogical, that if it went out in fire it
vindicated itself in a measure.
'Sometimes, do you know,' she said once to a sympathetic companion,
'I think I might have been something great if I had been born in the
time for it; all depends upon that. Mdlle. de Sombreuil would have
lived and died like ten thousand other Frenchwomen, in the monotony
of the _vie de château_, if she had not happened to be alive under
the Terror. What possibility of any greatness is there for a woman
who lives nowadays in what calls itself the great world? The very
men who have any genius in it are dwarfed by it. Modern life is so
trivial, yet so absorbing; it is such a bed of down and such a bed of
prickles; it is such a sleeping-potion and such a whip of nettles,
that we have no time to think about anything but itself. You must live
"à l'abri des hommes," if you want to be of higher stature than they
are. Bismarck is a colossus, because he shuts himself up in Varzin
so constantly. It is very hard even for men to resist the presence
of the world; even Tennyson leaves Farringford in the primrose month
to court a vulgar apotheosis in the London drawing-rooms; and for a
woman who finds herself from birth upward in that _milieu_ there is no
resistance possible. We are born to dress, to drive, to dine, to dance,
to set the fashion in all kinds of things,--and that is all. If we are
clever, we do mischief in meddling with the hidden cards of diplomacy
or statecraft, and if we are light-minded we do a different manner of
mischief in making all sorts of vices look pretty and distinguished
to those below us, who are always endeavouring to imitate us; but
more than that we cannot do. The morphine has been injected into our
veins; we cannot resist its influence; there is a kind of excitement
and somnolence, both at once, in the routine of our world which none
of us can resist. If we have any brains, perhaps we make resolutions
to resist, but we do not keep them; the world we live in is idiotic
but it is irresistible. When we wake, we see the heap of invitation
cards on our table; we yawn, but we yield, and we fill up our book
of engagements; the day is crowded, so is the year; and so life slips
away hurried, tired, thinking itself amused. Sometimes I think I should
like to live amongst the corn-fields and the larchwoods, and do good,
and I dare say I shall when I am old, or, what is still worse than old,
middle-aged. But you know one does not do good in that way; one always
gets imposed on, and the Jew money-lender in the centre of the village
would be really the person who would profit by one's charities. It is
quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables and
they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. But when you
have some intelligence, and have read something besides your breviary,
and have studied the philosophy of life a little, it is much more
difficult to content yourself. My friends who are putting on blisters
and bandages at the hospitals, fancy they are on the way to eternal
salvation, but a political economist would tell them that they were
only doing a vast deal of mischief, upsetting the nicely-balanced
arrangements of Nature. Myself, I think, Nature has very little to
do with the world as it is in the nineteenth century in Europe. I do
not think Nature, left to herself, would create either cripples or
cancers, any more than she would yoke bullocks or cut terriers' tails.'
She had accompanied her friends the Dames du Calvaire more than once to
those hospitals, where patrician hands touched the leper's sores and
the idiot's ulcers; but her delicate taste had been revolted, and her
intelligence, nurtured on shrewd and satiric philosophies, had rejected
the idea that any good was done by great ladies transforming themselves
into sick nurses of disease. She thought it must be infinitely
delightful to be able to delude yourself in that kind of way, to think
that you pleased Deity by putting on a poultice and averted a social
cataclysm by washing a cretin, but she did not believe in that kind of
thing herself. She did not see how any one could do so who had thought
about life, and the rest of it.
'I dare say I am quite useless,' she would reply to those who tried
to convince her, 'but then so many things are. Who has ever found
out the use of butterflies, or of daisies, or of a nautilus, or of
a nightingale, or of those charming rosy clouds which drift about
at sunset? I do not see the utility of prolonging the horrible and
miserable lives of lepers and of idiots in hospitals and asylums.
Humanity is not in the least served; it is much more often profoundly
noxious and disgusting. Even the people who talk about its sanctity,
do not believe in what they say, or war would become an impossibility,
and so would all the factories which, as Victor Hugo has said, take the
soul out of man to put it into machinery.'
When she spoke in this way she was very much in earnest, and her
arguments were very hard to refute; and even Melville went out of her
presence with an uncomfortable, though unacknowledged, sense that his
whole life had been a mistake based on a bubble which had all the hues
of the rainbow, indeed, but no more than a bubble's solidity. When
the men of science, with whom she sometimes amused herself by playing
the part of the great Catherine to the Encyclopædists, came into her
presence, they fared no better than the priests, and she did not
believe in them a whit the more.
'Five hundred years hence, your ideas and your discoveries will all
be refuted and ridiculed,' she said to them, 'as you now refute and
ridicule the physiology of the Greeks and Latins; you will not find the
key to the mystery of creation by torturing dogs or chaining horses on
a bed of agony.'
And she listened to them, but she laughed at them. To the satirical
clearness of her highly-trained intelligence the delirium of science
was quite as much a malady of the mind as were the rhapsodies of
religion.
'La science est la grande névrose du moment; ça passera,' she said once
to Claude Bernard.
In Paris, Nadine Napraxine was what the world had made her; she was
the _élégante_ of her period, a hothouse flower of fragile beauty,
of absolute indolence, of hypercritical taste, of utter and entire
uselessness. In her carriage or her sleigh, under her pile of silver
fox skins; on a Tuesday at the Français, and on a Saturday at the
Grand Opéra; on her Thursdays at her 'cinq heures,' when the most
exclusive of crowds gathered in her drawing-rooms; in the few great
assemblies and balls to which she deigned to carry her listless grace
and her marvellous jewels; throughout her self-absorbed day, which
began at noon and ended at dawn, she was a _cocodette_ of the most
exquisite grace and of the most incredible extravagance, such as Paris
had known her to be from the second year of her marriage. Her caprices
were unending, her changefulness was incalculable, her expenditure
was enormous; the most exaggerated tales were told of her hauteur and
of her exclusiveness, yet were not much beyond the truth; and men
worshipped her, and women intrigued for her notice, just because she
was so unapproachable and could be insolent. Fragile and white as the
narcissus flower, which she always took as her emblem, with a voice
ever sweet and low, and the most perfect manner in the world, she could
be as cruel in all the cruelties of society as ever her ancestors had
been with knout and steel in their frosty fastnesses. It amused her to
see the timid recoil, the presumptuous shrink, the confident wither
into humiliation, before the chillness of her smile, the terror of her
few cold softly-spoken words.
'I am the only scavenger that Europe has left,' she said once. 'All
the others have been frightened by the democracy, but I frighten the
democracy, or, at least, I keep it out of my drawing-rooms. It may get
into the "Almanac de Gotha," but it will not get past my _suisse_ and
up my staircase.'
Now and then she had been known to do exceedingly kind things, just
as in the midst of her worldly life she would go now and then to a
discourse at the Academy or to a séance at the Sorbonne. But they had
been always done to persons quite simple and frank, who never affronted
her with presumption or disgusted her with pretension. To a lie of any
sort she was inexorable.
The Hôtel Napraxine was one of the most delightful houses in Europe.
It stood near the entrance of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and was
withdrawn from every inquisitive glance which might be cast on it
from the road, within gardens large enough to contain groves of lime
trees and plane trees, fountains, lawns, pavilions, and terraces of
rose-coloured marbles. No disturbing echo of the traffic of Paris could
reach the sensitive ear of its sovereign lady when she sank to sleep
under the white satin of her shell-shaped ivory bed.
All the finest French artists living had been summoned to its adornment
within.
'All modern rooms are only like so many bonbon-boxes,' she had said.
'At least my bonbon-boxes shall be well-painted.'
And Meissonier, Duran, Baudry, Cabanel, Henner, Legros, had all signed
some panel, some ceiling, some staircase, chimney-piece, or salon-wall
in this most exquisite of houses.
'It is really charming,' she said to herself, when she reached it on
that first grey, chill, misty morning of her arrival, and its delicious
colour and warm air and flower-filled twilight welcomed her after the
long dull journey across Europe. It was especially perfect to her
this day because for some fifty hours at least her husband would not
come thither. There was only one thing ever discordant in its perfect
harmonies. When Platon Napraxine came up the staircase--with its
black-and-white marbles, its pale-blue velvet carpets, its sculptures
by Clésinger, and its wall-paintings by Baudry,--when he came up under
the leaves of the bananas and the palms, and entered her own sanctuary,
his broad tall form, his heavy step, his Kalmuck face were dissonant
and absurd in it all, and irritated her sense of fitness, and annoyed
her like a false note in the middle of a classic symphony.
'Poor Platon!' she thought more than once; 'I have certainly been the
most expensive whim that he has ever had; and he has never got the
slightest entertainment out of me. I am very disagreeable to him; I
have always been disagreeable to him. I was so at first because I could
not help it, and I am so now because I like to be so. But I grant
that it has never been quite fair to him. He might just as well have
been all alone to amuse himself with his dancers, and comic singers,
and people; I have been a white elephant to him. Certainly he has a
kind of triumph in possessing the white elephant; he likes to feel I
am here; when they all look after me in the Bois, or at the Opéra, he
likes to think I belong to him. As somebody said, when people admire
what is ours, it is as if they admired us. I am very much to him what
the _bleu ciel_ Sèvres for which he gave ten thousand pounds must be
to Lord Dudley. The Sèvres is of no earthly use to him, and he would
scarcely dare to touch it, and he would certainly never eat his cutlet
or have his venison served on it; but it is something that everybody
envies him, that nobody else has. When Platon gives great dinners to
sovereigns and all kinds of _gros bonnets_, and I am opposite to him,
I am sure he has the sort of feeling that Lord Dudley has about that
_bleu ciel_ service. After all, that is something; though, as the
service was incomplete in quantity, so I am incomplete in sentiment.
And then, when I meet him driving Mdlle. Chose in the Champs Elysées, I
seem as if I did not see him; and I never say a syllable of objection
if there are a hundred paragraphs in the _petits journaux_ about
himself and any number of Mdlles. Chose. If I had ever liked him, I
should be angry and make a fuss. After all, he ought to know that, if
indifference be not flattery, it is peace.'
So she soothed her conscience, but not always successfully; she had
occasionally a passing touch of self-reproach, when she remembered how
very little she had given her husband in return for the magnificent
fortune, the boundless admiration, and the perfect independence,
which she owed to him. She had at the bottom of her heart, though
stifled and indistinct, a more sensitive and a higher-toned honour
than most women; that instinct of honour told her that she had been,
at all times, unjust and ungrateful to a man whose good qualities she
refused to see, and even did her best to destroy, because his relation
to her irritated her taste and temper, and his ugliness and want of
intelligence filled her with disdain.
'If I had a daughter,' she thought, in those moments of candour and
compunction, 'I think I should say to her, "Commit any sin and incur
any sorrow you like rather than make a marriage without sympathy; it is
the one crime which society has agreed to applaud as an act of wisdom
and of virtue; but it is a crime nevertheless. One is so young, one
does not know; one listens to people who urge all the advantages of it,
and when one does know it is too late." However,' she added in her own
musings, 'I dare say, if I had daughters, when they were old enough, I
should do just the same as everybody else does; I should want them to
make a _beau mariage_, and I should tell them to do it. It is the world
which makes one like that. At the fair of Novgorod I once saw a little
Simbirsh peasant arrested for stealing a necklace of blue and yellow
beads; she burst out sobbing, and said she would not have taken it, but
all the girls of her village had all their big beads, and she had none!
In the big world we do the same. We want the big beads because other
people have theirs. It is paltry; but then society is paltry at its
best. They say, when you have entered an opium house, you may have made
all the resolutions you will against smoking, you cannot keep them, the
atmosphere gains on you, you yield, and smoke, and sink, like all the
rest. The world is an opium house.'
Nature had designed her for something better than the opium house.
Her intellect, her courage, and her chastity were all of great and
fine quality, like the burnished blade of a sword, that is at once
delicate and strong. But the world had absorbed her, and left little
scope to those higher and nobler instincts. She was in her habits and
her tastes a mere _élégante_, indolent, hard to please, hypercritical,
of languid constitution, of infinite egotism. Given the impetus, this
languor could alter, as by magic, into ardour, force, and energy; but
the motive power could rarely be found which could rouse her, and she
remained for the most part of her time a mere _mondaine_, of exquisite
taste, of irresistible seduction, but useless, idle, contemptuous,
cynical, vaguely disappointed, though all were at her feet, wanting,
petulantly, like Alexander, more worlds to conquer. Sometimes in the
ennui of the whole thing, and her dissatisfaction in it, she was only
restrained from absolute evil by the consciousness of its vulgarity,
and her own aversion to those indulgences in which most find their
strongest temptation, but in which she only saw a humiliating and a
grotesque affinity to the brutes.
As at four years old she had shrugged her small shoulders, with a
sigh, before the bonbon boxes--'J'en ai tant!'--so at four-and-twenty
years old she was supercilious to the whole world because it had
given her so much, and yet had nothing better than that to give. And
incredulous that there was anywhere anything better, she lived in her
calorifère-heated rooms, like an orchid in a hothouse, and amused
herself as with a game by the desires, the pains, the reproaches, the
solicitations, the jealousies, which fretted and fumed themselves in
that arena of her salon, whilst she remained as tranquil, as pitiless,
and as indifferent as fate.
No woman had the world more completely beneath her feet, yet she,
like Othmar, was consumed by that eternal ennui which is the penalty
of those who possess too much, have seen and heard too much too
early, and have been from childhood the objects of adulation and of
speculation;--of all those, indeed, who have mind and heart enough not
to find all their interests in society, and yet have not that poetic
temper which would give them a sure consolation and a safe refuge in
the uncloying loveliness of nature.
Ennui is unjustly looked upon as the characteristic of the frivolous
type of humanity; on the contrary, the frivolous character is perfectly
content with frivolity, and never tires of it. Ennui is rather the mark
of those whose taste is too fine and whose instincts are too high to
let them be satisfied with the excitement of, and the victories of,
society, and yet who have too little of that simplicity, or of that
impersonality, which makes the artistic temperament capable of entirely
withdrawing from the world and living its own life, self-sustained.
This delicate patrician had the seed in her of great _roués_, of
dauntless conspirators, of haughty territorial tyrants, of men and
of women who had emptied thrones and filled them, and given law for
life and death to multitudes of vassals; she could not be altogether
content with the rosewater politics of modern drawing-rooms, with the
harmless rivalry of toilettes and equipages, with the trivial pastimes
and as trivial passions of society. She was a woman of the world to the
tips of her fingers, yet she could not be altogether content with an
existence of Courts, _chiffons_, flirtations, endless entertainments,
and unlimited expenditure.
'They find us eccentric, capricious, autocratic, us Russians,' she said
one day. 'I dare say we are so; they forget that, not a century ago,
our great-grandparents were slaying Paul and Peter in their palaces,
and could knout to death whole villages of men, women, and children, at
their mere freak and fancy. I think it is very creditable to us not to
be a thousand times worse than we are; our blood is made up of arack
and of ice; we are the rude pines of the north French-polished!'
It was three o'clock in the day; she had given orders to be
undisturbed. She had slept admirably for eight hours without any
morphine. She had bathed twice, on her arrival and on her awaking,
in warm water, opaque with otto of rose; she had breakfasted off her
usual cup of cream and rolls made of milk. She was in a dreamy, drowsy,
amused state of thought; and, as she lay on her couch in the boudoir,
which was placed between her library and her dressing-chamber, her
thoughts drifted persistently to the meeting of the dawn.
She felt very like Fate now, as she thought how odd it was that the
first person she had met in Paris had been Othmar.
'He is very much changed for so short a time. He is not a whit more
content,' she reflected, with pleasure.
The little room was the prettiest thing in all Paris. 'It is a casket
for a pearl,' one of her adorers had said, and it seemed really a pity
that for eight months out of the year the casket should be closed, and
no ray of light ever enter it. Its furniture was of ivory, like that of
the adjoining library, bed-room, and bathroom, and its hangings were of
silvery satin embroidered with pale roses and apple-blossoms; Baudry
had painted the ceiling with the story of Ædon and Procris: the glass
in the windows was milk white, and the floor was covered with white
bearskins: the atmosphere was like that of a hothouse, and as odorous;
there were always a perfect seclusion and silence in it; the only sound
which ever came there was the splash of a fountain in the garden below;
it might have been set in the heart of the island of Alcina rather than
in one of the great avenues of Paris. Here, lying back on one of her
low couches with the air around her tropical, vaporous, dreamy, she
mused within herself as to how she would deal with Othmar, a smile in
her eyes and a doubt in her mind.
'Let him alone,' said her conscience.
'No,' said her vanity, and perhaps some other emotion also.
'He never harmed you; he only loved you, and obeyed you, and went
away,' her conscience urged on her. But her vanity replied: 'That
was the worst offence. There are commands which are most honoured
by disobedience. There are wounds which ought to be cherished, not
healed.'
Unless she chose that it should be otherwise, Othmar, she knew, would
be a stranger to her all his life. They would meet, perhaps, in the
world very often, but they would exchange commonplace courtesy, and
remain as far asunder as two ships that pass each other on the same
ocean course, unless she chose. Her better self said to her, 'Let him
alone; he has tried to make another life for himself; he has failed, no
doubt, but he has probably found a sort of peace, a kind of affection;
if it can console him, do not disturb it.' But the habits of supremacy
and of intrigue, the love of dominion, the intolerance of opposition,
which were instinctive in her, and which all her many triumphs and her
permitted egotism had fostered and confirmed, forbade her to resign
herself to such passivity, and urged her to take up her empire over his
life.
And she had a vague wish to see him there again beside her, a wish not
very strong, but strong enough to move her. It was here, in this room,
that he had first of all told her that he loved her, with words more
daring and more imperious than any other had ventured to use in her
presence; he was never like other people; he was probably no better,
certainly no worse, than other men, but he was different: he pleased
her imagination, he touched her sympathy; he was the only man with
whom it had ever seemed to her that her life might have been lived
harmoniously, with whom she might have understood something of that
mystery of love in which she had never believed. To her temper it was
the intrigue and intricacy of life which alone made it endurable, the
unrolling of the ribbon of fate, the watching and controlling of the
comedy of circumstances, which alone made it worth while to rise in the
morning to the tedium of its routine.
'Is life worth living?' she said once, hearing of the title of a book
of drawing-room philosophy. 'Yes, I think it is, if you are the cat,
if you are the spider, if you are the eagle, if you are the dog; not
if you are the mouse, or the fly, or the lamb, or the hare. Life
is certainly worth living, too, if you regard it as what it is, a
dramatic entertainment, diversion. This is the true use of riches,
that it enables you to give yourself up to watching and controlling
circumstances as if men and women were marionettes; it enables you
to sit in your fauteuil and look on without moving unless you wish.
I think that life must be always rather tiresome to anybody over ten
years old, but the only possible way to endure it is to regard it as
a spectacle, as a comedy, or, as Manteuffel has said, that a general
sitting in his saddle regards the battlefield he governs.'
This was what she said and felt in her cynical moods, and she was
cynical now on her return to Paris; she had left her better self behind
her in the snow-drifts of her own country. The woman who had spoken so
tenderly of Boganof scarcely existed in her; she lived in an atmosphere
of adulation, excitation, ennui, and frivolous occupations. The heroic
protectress of the Siberian exile had scarcely a trait in common with
her; she spent half the day in the discussion of new costumes with her
tailors, and the other half surrounded by flatterers and courtiers in
the pursuit of new distractions.
Analysis was so natural to her that it seemed to her in no situation
or even crisis of her life would she have abandoned it. There is a
well-known physiologist, now head of a famous laboratory, who, when
his son died, a boy of twelve, scarcely waited for the child's last
breath to plunge his scalpel into the still warm body in hopes of some
discovery of the law of life.[1] If she had had any emotions she would
have done a similar thing; she would have dissected them even if they
had sprung from her own life blood.
[1] A fact.