himself for a moment, “for foreigners to perceive the differences by
which a connoisseur _emeritus_ distinguishes the two species,
for women are born comedians. But those differences strike the eye of
all Parisians: hooks are visible, tapes show their yellowish white
through a gap at the back of the gown; shoes are worn at heel, bonnet
strings have been ironed, the gown puffs out too much, the bustle is
flattened. You notice a sort of effort in the premeditated lowering
of the eyelids. The attitude is conventional. As for the bourgeoise,
it is impossible to confound her with the woman who is _comme il
faut_; she makes an admirable foil to her, she explains the charm
the unknown lady has cast upon you. The bourgeoise is busy; she is
out in all weathers; comes and goes and trots; is undecided whether
she will, or whether she will not enter a shop. Where the _comme
il faut_ woman knows perfectly well what she wants and what she
means to do, the bourgeoise is undecided, pulls up her gown to cross a
gutter, drags a child after her, and is forced to watch for carriages;
she is a mother in public and lectures her daughter; carries money
in a hand-bag and wears open-work stockings, a boa above a fur cape
in winter, and a shawl with a scarf in summer--the bourgeoise is an
adept at the superfluities of the toilet. As for your Beatrice, you
will find her in the evening at the Opera, or in a ballroom. She
then appears under an aspect so different that you fancy her two
different creations without relationship. The woman has issued from
her morning vestments like a butterfly from its larva. She serves,
as a dainty morsel to your raptured senses, the form which her shawl
scarce outlined in the morning. At the theater the woman of society
never goes higher than the second tier of boxes, unless at the Italian
opera. You can therefore study at your ease the precise slowness of
her movements. This adorable maneuverer uses all the little artifices
of woman’s manner with a natural ease that precludes the idea of art
and premeditation. Is her hand royally beautiful, the most suspicious
man would believe it absolutely necessary to roll, or fasten up, or
toss aside whichever ringlet or curl she may touch. Has she nobility of
profile, you will think she is merely giving irony or charm to what she
says to her neighbor, by turning her head in a manner to produce that
magic effect, so dear to great painters, which draws the light to the
cheek, defines the nose with a clear outline, illumines the pink of the
nostril, carves the forehead with sharp prominence, and leaves a touch
of high light on the chin. If she has a pretty foot she throws herself
on a sofa with the coquetry of a cat in the sunshine, her feet forward,
without your seeing anything more in that pretty pose than a charming
model of lassitude for a sculptor. No other woman but the woman
_comme il faut_ is ever perfectly at her ease in her clothes;
nothing disturbs her. You will never see her putting in place, like a
bourgeoise, a rebellious shoulder-knot, or looking to see if the lace
of her chemisette fulfills it purpose of unfaithful guardian to the
sparkling whiteness of her bosom; never will you find her looking in a
mirror to learn whether her coiffure is perfectly intact. Her toilet
is always in harmony with her character; she had had time to study
herself and to decide what suits her; she has long known what does not
suit her. You never see her when the audience of a theater disperses;
she departs before the end of the play. If by chance she is seen, calm
and sedate, upon the steps of the staircase, some strong sentiment
has prompted her. She is there to order; she has some look to give,
some promise to receive. Perhaps she is descending slowly to gratify
the vanity of a slave whom she occasionally obeys. If you meet her in
society, at a ball or a _soirée_, you will gather the honey, real
or affected, of her practised voice; you will be enchanted with her
idle talk, to which she contrives to impart the semblance of thought
with inimitable skill--”
“Then it isn’t necessary for the _comme il faut_ woman to have
intellect?” said the young Polish count.
“It is impossible to be that kind of woman without taste,” said the
Princesse de Cadignan.
“And to have taste is, in France, to have more than mind,” said the
Russian prince.
“The mind of this woman is the triumph of an art that is wholly
plastic,” replied Blondet. “You don’t know what she says, but you are
charmed. She has nodded her head or sweetly shrugged her handsome
shoulders, or gilded some meaningless phrase with a smile or a
charming pout, or put Voltaire’s epigram into an ‘Oh!’ an ‘Ah!’ an ‘Is
it possible?’ The turn of her head is an active interrogation; she
gives meaning of some kind to the movement with which she dances a
vinaigrette fastened by a chain to her finger. These are artificial
great effects obtained by very small ones: she lets her hand fall nobly
from the arm of her chair, and all is said; she has rendered judgment
without appeal, fit to move the most insensible. She has listened to
you, she has given you an opportunity to show your wit; and--I appeal
to your modesty--such moments in society are rare.”
The innocent air of the young Pole whom Blondet was addressing made
every one laugh heartily.
“You can’t talk half an hour with a bourgeoise before she brings to
light her husband under one form or another,” continued Blondet, whose
gravity was not shaken; “but if your _comme il faut_ woman is
married she has the tact to conceal her husband, and the perseverance
of a Christopher Columbus would hardly enable you to discover him. If
you have not been able to question others on this point, you will see
her toward the end of the evening fix her eyes steadily on a man of
middle age, who inclines his head and leaves the room; she has told her
husband to call up the carriage, and she departs. In her own house no
_comme il faut_ woman is ever seen before four o’clock, the hour
at which she receives. She is wise enough to make you wait even then.
You will find good taste throughout her house; her luxury is intended
for use, and is renewed when needful; you will see nothing there under
glass cases, nor any swathings of protective gauze. The staircase is
warm; flowers gladden you everywhere; flowers are the only presents
she accepts, and those from a few persons only; bouquets give pleasure
and live for a single day and are then renewed. To her they are, as in
the East, a symbol and a promise. The costly trifles of fashion are
spread about, but her salons are not turned into a museum or an old
curiosity shop. You will find her seated on a sofa at the corner of the
fireplace, whence she will bow to you without rising. Her conversation
is no longer that of the ballroom; in her own house she is bound to
entertain you. The _comme il faut_ woman possesses all these
shades of behavior in perfection. She welcomes in you a man who will
swell the circle of her society, the great object of the cares and
anxieties of all women of the world. Consequently, to attach you to
her salon she will make herself charmingly coquettish. You will feel
above all, in that salon, how isolated women are in the present day and
why they endeavor to have a little society about them in which they
can shine as constellations. But this is the death of conversation;
conversation is impossible without generalities.”
“Yes,” said de Marsay, “you have seized upon the great defect of
our epoch. Epigram, that book in a word, no longer falls, as in the
eighteenth century, on persons and on things, but on petty events and
dies with the day.”
“The wit of the _comme il faut_ woman, when she has any,”
resumed Blondet, “consists in putting a doubt on everything, while
the bourgeoise uses hers to affirm everything. There lies a great
difference between the two women. The bourgeoise is certain of her
virtue; the _comme il faut_ woman is not sure whether she has any
yet, or whether she has always had it. This hesitation about everything
is one of the last graces our horrible epoch has granted her. She
seldom goes to church, but she will talk religion to you and try to
convert you, if you have the good sense to play the freethinker, for
that will open the way to the stereotyped phrases, the motions of the
head and the gestures which belong to such women: ‘Ah, fie! I thought
you had more intelligence than to attack religion. Society is crumbling
already and you remove its prop. But religion at this moment is you and
I, it is property, it is the future of our children! Ah! let us not
be egotists. Individualism is the disease of our epoch, and religion
is the sole remedy; it unites the families that your laws disunite,’
etc., etc. She begins in this way a neo-Christian sermon sprinkled with
political ideas, which is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but moral
(oh! devilishly moral), in which you will find echoes of every protest
that modern doctrines driven to bay have given voice to.”
The women present could not help laughing at the mincing affectations
of their sex with which Emile Blondet illustrated his sarcasms.
“Those remarks, my dear Comte Adam,” said Blondet, looking at the
young Pole, “will show you that the _comme il faut_ woman
represents intellectual hodge-podge as well as political jumble; just
as she lives surrounded by the brilliant but not lasting products of
modern industry, which aims at the destruction of its work in order
to replace it. You will leave her house saying to yourself, ‘She
has, decidedly, very superior ideas’; and you think so all the more
because she has sounded your heart and mind with a delicate hand; she
has sought your secrets--for the _comme il faut_ woman feigns
ignorance of everything, in order to discover everything; but she is
discreet; there are things she never admits knowing, however well she
may know them. Nevertheless you will feel uneasy, you are ignorant of
the real state of her heart. Formerly the great ladies loved openly,
banners displayed; now the woman _comme il faut_ has her little
passion ruled like a sheet of music paper with its signs and notes,
its minims, rests, and sharps and flats. Always weak, she will neither
sacrifice her love, her husband, or the future of her children.
She’s a woman of ambiguous middle-paths, of squint-eyed temporizing
with conventions, of unavowed passions carried along between two
breakwaters. She fears her servants like an Englishwoman who sees
before her the perspective of a divorce suit. This woman, so apparently
at her ease in a ballroom, so charming on the street, is a slave at
home. She has no independence, unless locked in with her own ideas.
She is determined to remain outwardly the woman _comme il faut_.
That’s her theory of life. A woman separated from her husband, reduced
to a pittance, without carriage or luxury or opera-box, is today
neither wife, maid, nor bourgeoise; she dissolves, she becomes a
thing. What is to become of her? The Carmelites won’t take married
women. Will her lover always want her? That’s a question. Therefore
the _comme il faut_ woman may sometimes cause calumny, but never
condemnation.”
“That is all true, horribly true,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.
“Consequently, the _comme il faut_ woman,” continued Blondet,
“lives between English hypocrisy and the frankness of the eighteenth
century--a bastard system emblematic of a period when nothing that
comes is like that which goes, when transitions lead nowhere, when
the great figures of the past are blotted out, and distinctions are
purely personal. In my opinion it is impossible for a woman, even
though she be born on the steps of a throne, to acquire before the
age of twenty-five, the encyclopedic science of nothings, the art of
maneuvering, the various great little things--music of the voice,
harmonies of color, angelic deviltries and innocent wickedness, the
language and the silence, the gravity and the folly, the wit and the
stupidity, the diplomacy and the ignorance which constitute the woman
_comme il faut_.”
“Accepting the description you have just given of her,” said
Mademoiselle des Touches to Emile Blondet, “where do you class the
authoress? Is _she_ a woman _comme il faut_!”
“When she is not gifted with genius, she is a woman _comme il n’en
faut pas_,”[3] replied Emile Blondet, accompanying his answer with a
glance which might pass for a frank compliment to Camille Maupin. “But
that is not my own saying; it belongs to Napoleon, who hated women of
genius,” he added.
“Don’t be too hard on Napoleon,” said Canalis, with an emphatic tone
and gesture, “It was one of his littlenesses--for he had them--to be
jealous of literary fame. Who can explain, or describe, or comprehend
Napoleon?--a man represented always with folded arms, yet who did all
things; who was the greatest known Power, the most concentrated power,
the most corrosive and acid of all powers; a strong genius which led
an armed civilization throughout the world and fixed it nowhere; a
man who could do all because he willed all; prodigious phenomenon of
Will!--subduing disease by a battle, yet doomed to die of disease
in his bed after living unscathed amid cannon-balls and bullets;
a man who had in his head a Code and a Sword, word and action; a
clear-sighted mind which divined all except his own fall; a capricious
politician who played his soldiers like pawns and yet respected three
heads--Talleyrand, Pozzo di Borgo, and Metternich, diplomatists whose
death would have saved the French Empire, but whose life seemed to him
of more value than that of thousands of soldiers; a man to whom, by
some rare privilege, nature had left a heart in his iron body; a man
at midnight kind and laughing among women, and the next day handling
Europe without gloves; hypocritical and generous; loving vulgarity and
simplicity; without taste, but protecting Art; and, in spite of these
antitheses, grand in all things by instinct or by organization; Caesar
at twenty-five years of age, Cromwell at thirty, but a good husband and
a good father like any bourgeois of Père Lachaise; a man who created
great public buildings, empires, kings, codes, poems, and one romance,
and all with greater range than accuracy. Did he not attempt to make
Europe France; and after bearing our weight upon the earth until it
changed the laws of gravitation, has he not left us poorer than the day
he put his hand upon us? He who made an empire with his name, lost that
name on the borders of his empire in a sea of blood and slaughtered
men. A man all thought and action, who was able to comprehend both
Desaix and Fouché.”
“Despotic power and legal justice, each in due season, makes the true
ruler,” said de Marsay.
“But,” said the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the other women with
a smile both dubious and satirical, “have we women really deteriorated
as these gentlemen seem to think? Because today, under a system which
belittles everything, you men like little dishes, little apartments,
little paintings, little journals, little books, is that any reason why
women should be less grand than they have been? Does the human heart
change because you change your habits? In all epochs passions remain
the same. I know splendid devotions, sublime endurances which lack
publicity--fame, if you prefer to call it so. Many a woman is not less
an Agnes Sorel because she never saved a king of France. Do you think
our Marquise d’Espard worth less than Madame Doublet or Madame du
Deffand, in whose salon so much harm was said and done? Isn’t Taglioni
the equal of Camargo? and Malibran of Saint-Huberti? Are not our poets
superior to those of the eighteenth century? If, at this moment, thanks
to the grocers who govern us, we have no style of our own, didn’t the
Empire have a style as fully its own as that of Louis XV? And its
splendor was surely fabulous. Have the arts and sciences lost ground?”
“I agree with you, madame,” said Général de Montriveau. “In my opinion
the women of this epoch are truly great. When posterity gives a
verdict upon us will not Madame Recamier’s fame be equal to that of
the loveliest women of past ages? We have made history so fast that
we lack historians to write it down. The reign of Louis XIV had but
one Madame de Sévigné, while we have a thousand today in Paris who
can write better letters, but do not publish them. Whether the French
woman calls herself _femme comme il faut_ or great lady, she will
always be the pre-eminent woman. Emile Blondet has made us a picture of
the manners and charms of a woman of the present day; but, if occasion
offered, this mincing, affected being, who plays a part and warbles out
the ideas of Monsieur this, that, and the other, would show herself
heroic! Even your faults, mesdames, seem the more poetic because they
are and always will be hedged about with great dangers. I have seen
much of the world, perhaps I have studied it too late; but, under
circumstances in which the illegality of your sentiments might find
excuse, I have always observed the effects of some chance--you may
call it Providence if you like--which fatally overtake those women whom
we call frail.”
“I hope,” said Madame de Camps, “that we are able to be great in other
ways.”
“Oh, let the Marquis de Montriveau preach to us!” cried Madame de
Sérizy.
“All the more because he has preached by example,” said the Baronne de
Nucingen.
“Alas!” said Général de Montriveau, “of the many dramas--that’s a word
you are constantly using,” he said with a nod to Blondet, “in which to
my knowledge the hand of God has showed itself, the most terrible was
one that was partly my own doing.”
“Oh, tell it to us!” cried Lady Barimore. “I love to shudder.”
“The taste of a virtuous woman,” said de Marsay replying to the
charming daughter of Lord Dudley.