'Othmar _filant le parfait amour_ while he gathers wet violets under
his Valois woods, is a truly admirable idyl!' said the Princess
Napraxine, with her unkind little smile, a month later, while her eyes,
from under an umbrella covered with old point duchesse, went indolently
from the shining sea upon her right to the romantic gorge leading up
to distant peaks of snow, which could be seen on her left through
boughs of eucalyptus and mimosa. She was seated on the white terraces
of a famous villa, crowning a promontory which carried luxuriant and
fantastic gardens far out into the lazy blue water, across whose then
smiling plains of azure light it looked straight southward to the cloud
which was Corsica. It was the villa of another Russian magnate, Prince
Ezarhédine, with whom there was at that time staying a mighty statesman
at whose nod or frown Europe breathed lightly or held her breath; and
under the guise of a breakfast there was an informal conference of
diplomatists at his house that day.
Friederich Othmar was staying at S. Pharamond for two days to meet the
great Russian, and conduct, over a cigarette and a glass of kümmel,
one of those delicate and intricate negotiations in which finance and
diplomacy had equal parts, and which were the delight of his soul, and
made the special fame of the House of Othmar.
The great statesman was a charming person, Oriental in morals, Athenian
in mind, and French in manners; and Nadine Napraxine, who so seldom
could be persuaded to go anywhere, had deigned to come and breakfast
with him there and allow him to recall her childhood.
'You would never give me a smile,' he said to her. 'At five years
old you were as cruel as you are now. I remember taking you what I
thought an irresistible bribe; a gardener in Saxe driving a wheelbarrow
of bonbons. But you just looked at it--smileless--and said cruelly,
"_Merci, Monsieur--mais j'en ai tant!_" You were five years old then.'
'"_Tant_" and "_trop_" are the spoilers of our existence,' she replied.
'I remember as a child I never cared for bonbons; I used to say that if
they hung up where the church bells were, and one could not get them,
one would care----'
'My intention was good,' said the great man piteously; 'you might have
smiled on me for that.'
'That would have been very commonplace, everybody is amiable in that
kind of way; I am not amiable, they say, and yet I am never out of
temper--which seems to me the first requisite for amiability.'
'Serenity is unkind when it means indifference.'
'But indifference is so comfortable to the indifferent!' she had
replied, and the reply admitted of no refutation.
Now, when the _déjeuner_, which had been the pretext and cover of the
morning's informal but pregnant discussion, was over, and she was
about to go to her carriage, she had smiled with gentle condescension
on the Baron, and asked him the tidings of Amyôt. Friederich Othmar,
in his answers, had been incautiously and unusually enthusiastic in
the hearing of a person who to all enthusiasm was merciless; the more
merciless, because in a far-down and never-investigated corner of her
own nature she was a little conscious that she also could have been
enthusiastic--if it had been worth while.
She had laughed a little unkindly, and had made the remark about the
wet violets; the Baron, slightly irritated and considerably in earnest,
had replied, that to gather violets with your own wife was less
exciting, but perhaps sweeter, and certainly wiser, than to purchase
orchids for the wife of someone else.
'A most moral opinion, turned with classic elegance, and quite
indisputable,' said Madame Napraxine, with much amusement. 'And orchids
are so short-lived! Do you think home-grown violets live longer? Dear
Baron, I am so glad to see you so pleased, and so poetical; Napoleon's
desire for an heir made him quite brutal; your desire for your nephew's
heir makes you quite full of pretty sentiment. Pray go on, you interest
me! it is as if one heard Bismarck playing a guitar!'
'Like Napoleon, I dislike _les amours stériles_,' replied Friederich
Othmar, with a smile. 'My nephew was in danger of letting his life
drift away in a dream; I know no means of recalling a man to the
practical happiness of existence so efficacious as a young girl's
beauty.'
'You are very primitive in your ideas, dear Baron, for a person who has
lived all his life in Paris,' said the Princess Nadine, with her little
air of fatigue and of irony. She knew very well what had been implied
in his words, and she resented them.
'Nature is primitive, Madame,' said the Baron. 'But after all, we do
not improve on her, nor exclude her, do what we may.'
'You think not?' said Madame Napraxine, much amused. 'Well, for my
part, I have never been able to discover that Nature is very charming:
if we attended to her, she would make us eat with our fingers, fight
with our teeth, drink only water, and wear no clothes; she would
certainly, also, give Otho Othmar a score of wives instead of one
Sainte Mousseline. Do not take to admiring Nature, Baron; she will lead
you astray. It is too late for you to begin; no one after twenty can
eat green fruit with impunity.'
'Sainte Mousseline!' echoed the old man, with more temper than
prudence. 'Surely that epithet would not apply to Yseulte!'
'Of course not now,' said Nadine, serenely. 'Sainte Mousseline has
given way to the nuptial white satin. Only you spoke of Nature;--and if
I were you I would not wish for Nature to prevail too much at Amyôt,
for Nature has a sad trick of being soon satisfied, and dissatisfied,
and disposed to change. You know it is only the poets who invented
Constancy, at the same time that they created the Phoenix and the
Hippogriff.'
'If I thought he could be unfaithful to so much youth and so much
innocence----,' began the Baron, with some heat.
'He will not be so yet, at all events,' said Prince Ezarhédine. 'Men
are not quite so fickle as Madame Nadine thinks.'
'Men are what women make them,' she replied, with her most contemptuous
tranquillity. 'As a rule, they are always faithless to women who
love them. It is tiresome to be loved; "_ça vous donne des nerfs_."
You get out of temper and you go away; then silly people say you are
inconstant.'
'You will admit that at least it seems very like it,' said Baron Fritz.
The great statesman, standing near, looked a little wistfully at her.
He thought that he would not have found it tiresome to be loved by the
wife of Napraxine.
'The Countess Othmar will be too young to understand all that,'
continued Nadine. 'She will give too much of herself. She will not
have the first essential: _savoir se reprendre_. Love is like all
other fine arts--it should be treated scientifically. Do you remember
Sergius Veriatine? He was devoted to the Princess Platoff--my cousin
Sophie. All at once he broke with her. Some one asked him why he did
so. He answered honestly: "Un jour, elle faisait la faute de me prier
de rester quand je voulais m'en aller." Serge Veriatine put the whole
of male human nature into that sentence. Othmar's wife will be always
begging him to stay when he will want to go; she is so young. She is,
of course, in love with him; very much in love with him; and she is so
unhappily inexperienced that she will be sure to tell him so a hundred
times a day. Now, however pretty a story is, still when you hear it
very often it grows dull: you see she is beginning with an immense
mistake: Amyôt in the winter!'
'Amyôt is his choice as much as hers,' said Friederich Othmar. 'You
know he always liked solitude. They will be in Paris in the first days
of April----'
'Two months, or to speak precisely, seven weeks, of Amyôt in midwinter
is precisely the mistake that a very young girl would be sure to make,'
continued his tormentor. 'Amyôt is a delightful place in its way; it
is like a page of Brantôme. I remember the admirable hunting parties
he gave there for the Orleans princes. But all the same, seven whole
weeks of Amyôt in the rain of February and March would damp any ardour
that he might begin with--do you think he began with very much? What
a pity there was no one to tell her that a man is bored so soon! And
Othmar is like Chateaubriand; he is the _grand ennuyé_ just because
his ideals are so high that it is wholly impossible to find anything
like them anywhere. I am quite sure that he has imagined in this poor
child an angel and a goddess; a kind of Greek nymph and Christian
virgin blent in one. When he finds that she is only a child, who has
had the narrowest of all educations, and is not even a woman in her
comprehension or her sympathies, he will be intolerably wearied. If
they were in the world, the disillusion might be postponed; at Amyôt it
must come in two days.'
'You are very clever, Madame,' said the Baron with some irritation,
'but even you may perhaps for once be mistaken. She is very young, as
you say; but for that very reason she will be like clay in his hands
which he can mould as he will.'
'If he take the trouble to model it at all,' said Nadine Napraxine.
'If the sculptor do not touch the clay, it lies in a lump neglected
till somebody else comes. She will not know, I fear, how to tempt him
to make anything of her. Do you suppose they have taught her the art
of provocation in her Breton convent? She will only sob aloud if he go
away for an hour, and be plunged into despair if his kisses be one less
in number. My dear Baron, you lost all your wisdom when you failed to
persuade them to leave Amyôt. They say there is no living woman who can
be seen at sunrise after a ball and keep her lover; I am sure there is
not one who can be shut up with a man for two months in the country, in
winter, and retain his belief in her.'
'You are very learned in these matters,' said the Baron, more and more
irritated, 'and yet everyone knows that the Princess Napraxine has
always herself despised all human affections!'
'It is not necessary to have sat in the midst of a maelstrom to have
studied the laws of whirlpools,' said his tormentor. 'And what have
human affections to do with it? You know as well as I do that humanity
has only caprices and passions, with their natural issue, disillusions.'
Friederich Othmar thought of the terrace at Amyôt and the face of
Yseulte.
Walking with her a moment, alone, in the afternoon sunshine, he had
ventured on a word of counsel.
'My dear child, you are very young. Let an old man tell you something.
Otho has one serious malady; nay, do not look so alarmed, it is only
the malady of his generation--caprice and ennui. He has not an idea
that he is capricious, but he is so. Do not let his caprices pain you;
but, as far as you can, vary with his varying moods; I think that is
the secret of sympathy. Just now it is high noon with you; so there are
no shadows; but shadows will fall. I want you to understand that. Otho
is not perfect; in a way, he is very weak, though he has more intellect
than most men. Do not make a god of him. You will only spoil him and
blind yourself.'
And then she had looked at him with that look which he recalled now as
he sat by Nadine Napraxine, and had said with a dignity of reproach
which had sat very prettily on her youthfulness: 'If he have faults, I
shall never see them--you maybe sure of that; and if you will tell me
how to please him, I will never think of myself.'
Remembering this, the Baron, who had never in his life cared greatly
for any woman or believed much in one, felt a restless anger against
the prophetess of woe.
'When they predict fire they have already laid the powder,' he thought,
impatiently.
Friederich Othmar was surprised himself at the feeling of affection and
of anxiety which Yseulte had aroused in him. He had wished Othmar to
marry that the race might be continued, but he had never supposed that
any young girl would fill him with the solicitude for her own welfare
which she made him feel for hers.
Women had always been _la femelle de l'homme_ with him; no more; he was
astonished at himself for being moved by a genuine desire to secure for
her those more subtle joys of the soul which he had always derided.
Before her he felt ashamed of his own grosser convictions (which a
month before would have been so confident) that she could want nothing
more than the riches her marriage conferred on her. Though he had been
a man of little feeling he was not altogether without kindliness,
and his keen penetration told him that hers was a nature which the
glories and gewgaws of the world would do very little to console if its
affections were starved or its higher instincts humiliated, and the
prophecies of Nadine Napraxine but irritated him more because he knew
that her merciless intelligence was as a seismographic pendulum which
foretold truly the convulsions of the future.
'Surely,' she continued, 'S. Pharamond would have been a more natural
place to select at this season. Amyôt is superb, but it must be sunk
fathoms deep in snow.'
'There is no snow; it was open weather, and even mild,' replied the
Baron, who was ready to declare that roses were blossoming in the
ditches of the Orleannais.
'But why did he not come to S. Pharamond? It is a paradise of azaleas
and tulips at the present moment.'
'It is a pretty place,' he answered; 'but perhaps more suggestive of
Apates and Philotes than of the true Eros.'
'The vicinity of the _tripots_ hardly accords with the solemnity
of Hymen? Do you mean that?' she said, with her enigmatical little
smile. 'Who would ever have thought to live to hear Baron Friederich
mention Eros! Well, we will hope that the god for once will be like
the Salamander which is emblazoned, and carved so liberally, all over
Amyôt. We will hope the fire that feeds him may not go out; but I am
afraid the motto really means that what nourishes extinguishes.'
With that she rose and took herself and her sunshade, with its point
duchesse, and her marvellous gown with its cascades of lace and soft
pale hues, like tea roses, her provocative languor, and her admirable
grace, from the terraces of the Prince Ezarhédine. She was followed
by longing eyes and a silence which was the truest of compliments. To
more than one there, the sun had set whenever she had passed from their
sight.
'What makes the world of men so fanatic about that woman?' asked
Friederich Othmar, exhaling all the unspoken grievances of his own soul
in a rude grumble, as the sound of the whirling wheels of her carriage
died away. 'Why? Why? There are numbers more beautiful; few, perhaps,
with so perfect a form, yet there are some who equal her even in that.
She is as cruel as death, as cold as frost; no one ever saw a flush on
her cheek or a tear in her eyes, and when she smiles it is like the
sirocco and the north wind blent together; and yet there is no woman so
blindly loved.'
'Yet!' echoed Prince Ezarhédine. 'Surely, you should say "therefore."
The sirocco and the north wind blent together are electric shocks to
the most sated senses.'
'Yes,' added the great statesman who was his guest, 'and if it will
not sound too pedantic, I will add also why it is. She is to her lovers
very much what the worship of Isis became to the Latins. She blends an
infinite subtlety of sentiment with an infinite potentiality of sensual
delight.'
'Sensual! She is as cold as snow----'
'I know; she has that sobriquet. But every one feels what a paradise
would lie within if the snow were melted. Every one hopes--more or less
conscious or unconscious of his hope--to pass that frosty barrier. I
think if Madame Napraxine ever loved any man, she would make such a
heaven for him that he would be the most enviable of all human beings.
But it would only last a month; perhaps six weeks. Although,' he added,
with a faint sigh, 'it would be worth losing all the rest of life to be
the companion of those six weeks.'
'If I may differ with you, Prince, I would say that, on the contrary,
if ever Madame Nadine can be touched to love she will be most tenacious
and most constant,' said Ezarhédine.
'Perhaps too much so for the felicity of the person whom she might
honour,' added the Baron with a smile that was a little impertinent.
He had always disliked and dreaded her; she had wasted two years of
his nephew's life, and he shrewdly suspected that she was the cause of
Othmar's too slight ardour towards his young wife.
Meanwhile, the subject of their meditations and desires was borne by
her fleet horses over the sea-road homeward to La Jacquemerille. She
felt astonished, irritated, offended at the idyl of Amyôt. To have
loved herself, and then to be content shut up within the stone walls of
a country-house with a girl taken from a convent!
'He is like Gilles de Retz,' she thought, with bitter disdain. 'He
takes the white flesh of a child to try and cure his malady.'
It seemed to her cowardly, sensual, contemptible.
She drove homeward through the olives and the lemon-yards and the green
fields that were full of anemones and narcissus and of the bright gold
and sea-shell hues of the crocus. The grey towers of S. Pharamond were
on her left as she went, and beyond them the fantastic pinnacles and
gilded crockets of Millo. She looked at them with an anger foreign to
her character.
'Who could have dreamed he would have done so absurd a thing?' she
thought, irritated against him and against herself. Never before in
her life had the actions of any other person had the slightest effect
upon her own feelings. She had not lived very long, it is true, but
to herself she seemed to have an illimitable experience; and within
her memory there was no record of any time in which she had cared one
straw what another did. That she should care now, ever so slightly,
irritated her pride and wounded her delicacy. She was a woman at all
times truthful with herself, however it might be her amusement to
mislead others. She was quite as cruel to herself as to anyone else
in her unrelenting and inquisitive mental dissection. She pursued her
self-analysis with a mercilessness which, had she been less witty and
less worldly, might have been morbid; and she did not disguise from
herself now that the tidings of Amyôt were an irritation if not a pain
to her. She did full justice to the loveliness with which Othmar had
sought to find oblivion of her own; and she knew that it might very
well be that, as the Baron had said, he had become the girl's lover as
well as her husband.
'Men are such poor creatures,' she thought with scorn. 'They are all
the slaves of their senses; they have no character; they are only
animals. They talk of their souls, but they have got none; and of their
constancy, but they are only constant to their own self-indulgence.'
The contempt of a woman, in whom the senses have never awakened, and
for whom all the grosser appetites have no attraction, for those easy
consolations which men can find in the mere gratification of those
appetites, is very real and very unforgiving.
Her scorn for Othmar, seeking forgetfulness of herself in the fresh
and budding life of a child of sixteen, was equal to that which she
felt for Napraxine finding solace for her own indifference in the
purchasable charms of the _belles petites_; the one seemed as trivial
to her as the other. When men spoke of their devotion, they only meant
their own passions; if these were denied, they sought refuge in mere
physical pleasures, which at all events partially consoled them.
She thought of him with increasing intolerance. She answered only by
monosyllables to the remarks of her companions, and her mind wandered
away to that stately place where life might well seem a love-lay of the
Renaissance.
'He will soon be tired,' she mused, with cruel wisdom. 'In a week the
child will have become a romance read through; a peach with its bloom
rubbed off; a poor little bird which has only one note, and has sung
that one till its master is ready to wring its throat. It is always
so. I never see a baby run through the fields gathering daisies and
throwing them down but what I think of men with their loves. The only
passion that lasts with them is one which is denied, and even that is
a poor affair. To be sure, sometimes they kill themselves, but that
is rather out of rage than out of any higher despair. And for one who
kills himself for us there are a hundred who kill themselves for their
debts. Othmar never can have any debts, so he invents woes for himself,
and captivity for himself, and he will die of neither.'
Yet, contemptuous of him for what seemed to her his weakness and his
unreason as she was, her thoughts attached themselves persistently to
him. He was the only living being who had never wearied her, who had
always perforce interested her, who had seemed to her unlike the rest
of the world, and capable of a master-passion, which might have risen
beyond mediocrity. How would it have been with them if he had stood in
the stead of Napraxine, whilst she was vaguely open to dim and noble
ideals, to spiritual emotions, to human affections?
'Pooh!' she thought. 'It would have been just the same thing. Love is
gross and absurd in its intimacies; it is like the hero to his valet.
Maternity is first a malady, and then an ennui; that _biche blanche_
at Amyôt will learn that as I learned it. He would have been much more
poetic than Platon, and much more agreeable; but I dare say he would
have been much more exacting, and much more jealous.'
Yet the remembrance of Amyôt pursued her, and made her restless; with
her lips she had ridiculed the idea of nuptial joys enshrouded in the
wet woods and falling mists of the Orleannais; but in her heart she did
not laugh; almost--almost--she envied that child, with the innocent,
serious eyes, whom she called contemptuously _la biche blanche_, who
was learning the language of love in the earliest dawn of womanhood.
'Only he does not love her!' she reflected, with pity, disdain, and
satisfaction, all commingled. No! He loved herself. She believed in few
things, and in few emotions; but she believed that so long as Othmar
lived he would love her alone.
'_Quand on tient la dragée haute!_' she thought, with her unkindest
smile at the fractiousness and ingratitude of men, as she descended at
the doors of La Jacquemerille, and with displeasure heard her servants
say, 'M. le Comte Seliedoff awaits Madame la Princesse.'