They were again at Amyôt in the golden August weather, when no place
pleased its mistress better than the cool and stately palace set upon
its shining waters and stone piles, with the deep forests of France
drawn in an impenetrable screen of verdure around its majestic gardens.
She had a constant succession of guests, and a kaleidoscopic infinitude
of pastimes. Great singers came down and warbled by moonlight to
replace the nightingales grown mute; great actors came down also and
played on the stage which had been built and ornamented by Primaticcio;
every kind of ingenuity in novelty and diversion was exercised for her
by cunning intelligences and brilliant wits. The weeks of Amyôt were
likely to become as celebrated in social history as the _grandes nuits
de Sceaux_; everyone invited to them received the highest brevet of
fashion that the world could give. Other people were immensely pleased
and amused at Amyôt and at her other houses: she alone was not. Her
intelligence asked too much; the whole world was dull and finite for
her.
She had known the greatest triumphs, the highest heights of passion,
the most voluptuous ecstasies, the most brilliant of successes, and
they had all seemed to her rather tame, quickly exhausted. Faustina
appeared to her as absurd, and commanded her sympathies as little, as
Penelope.
Life's little round is all too short for satisfaction in it; it is so
soon over; it is so crowded and so transient; to have children who may
do less ill or do less well than we, to pursue aims or ambitions which
have no novelty in them and little wisdom, to love, to cease to love;
to dream and die; this is the whole of it, and the sweetest of all
things in it are its childhood which is ignorant that it is happy, and
its passion which is no sooner made happy than it pales and falls.
'If only life were like a play!' she thought. 'Any dramatist knows that
in his last act his movement must be accelerated, and his incidents
accumulated, till they culminate in a climax. But in life, on the
contrary, everything waxes slower and slower, everything grows duller
and duller, incidents become very scarce, and there is no _dénouement_
at all--unless we call the priests with their holy oil, and the journey
to the churchyard behind the mourning-coaches, a _dénouement_. But
it cannot be called a climax: the going out of a spent lamp is not a
climax.'
Her lamp was far from spent; and yet a sense of the dullness of life,
generally, often came to her. She had everything she had ever wished
for, and yet it left her with a vague sentiment of dissatisfaction.
'I wonder if he is really contented,' she thought sometimes doubtfully
of Othmar. It seemed to her quite impossible he should be. Why should
he be when she was not! And yet there was no one she would have liked
better or so well.
The sameness of human nature irritated her. Surveying history, it
seemed to her that character, like events, must have been much more
varied in other times than hers; say in the Fronde, in the Crusades, in
the time of the Italian Republics, even in the days of the Consulate,
when all Europe was drunk with war like wine.
Nowadays people are always saying the same thing; entertainments
resemble each other like peas; wherever the world gathers it takes
its own monotony and tedium with it, and repeats itself with the dull
perseverance of a cuckoo-clock.
She endeavoured to infuse some originality into her own society and her
own pleasures; but she did not consider that she succeeded. People were
too dull. Why was it? Nobody was dull in Charles the Second's time, or
in the days of Louis Quinze, or of Henri Quatre. At Amyôt, if anywhere,
she succeeded, but, though her invitations to the house parties there
were passionately coveted, and everyone else was so exceedingly
delighted with them, the utmost she could ever say was that she had not
been too greatly bored. Modern existence was not dramatic enough to
please her.
'And yet if it be ever dramatic you say it is melodramatic, and
ridicule it as _vieux jeu_,' said Othmar to her once.
'No doubt I do; one is not happily obliged to be consistent,' she
replied. 'We are too intellectual or too indifferent nowadays to have
a Guise slaughtered in our antechamber, or an Orloff assassinated by
our bedside, but the consequence is that life is dull. It is a journey
in a _wagon lit_, one is half asleep all the time; it has no longer
the picturesque incidents of a journey on horseback across moor and
mountain, with the chance of meeting Malatesta or the Balafré en route.'
'Yet men have died for you!'
'Oh, my dear! they never did it with any picturesqueness at all! What
picturesqueness can there be? A man falls in a duel; he is put in a cab
with a doctor! A man kills himself with a revolver; there is again a
doctor, and also, probably, a policeman!'
'Which does not prevent the emotions which lead to those incidents from
being as genuine as they used to be.'
'I know that is your theory. It is not mine. The passions are nowadays
all crusted with conventionality, like life. Look at ourselves, as I
have said to you before.'
'Well? What of ourselves?'
'You and I think ourselves very original, but in reality we are the
servants of conventionality. I told you so last winter. When we were
free and had the world before us, we could think of nothing more
original than to marry each other like Annette and Lubin, like John and
Mary. We had no imagination. We thought we should do all sorts of fine
things, but we have not done them. We have merely just dropped back
into the routine of the world like all other people.'
'I do not see what else we could have done,' replied Othmar, somewhat
feebly as he was aware.
'What a conventional reply!' she said impatiently. 'That is just what I
am saying. Neither of us had imagination, or perhaps courage, enough to
strike out any new path, though we thought we were so much above other
people. Both you and I have enough of originality to be dissatisfied
with the world as it is, but we have not originality enough to create
another one. People who have the perception which belongs to the poetic
temperament, as you and I have, without its creative power, are greatly
to be pitied. Both you and I have something of poetry--something of
heroism--in us, but it never comes to anything. We remain in the world,
and conform to it.'
'I would lead any life you suggested--out of the world if you pleased.'
'Ah, but I do not please,' she said, with a little sigh. 'That is just
the mischief. You remember when we went to your Dalmatian castle the
first year; the solitude was enchanting, the loneliness of the sea and
the shore was exquisite, the mountains seemed drawn behind us like a
curtain, shutting out all noise and commonness and only enclosing our
own dreams; but after a little time you looked at me, I looked at you,
and we both tried to hide from each other that we yawned. One morning
when there was a rough wind on the sea and the first snow on the
hills, I said to you, "What if we go to Paris?" and you were relieved
beyond expression, only you would not say so. Now, if we had been
poets--really poets, you and I--we should never have quitted Zama for
Paris. We should have let the whole world go.'
Othmar did not well know what to reply, because he was conscious of a
certain truth in her words.
'I am not a poet, you have often told me so,' he said with some
bitterness. 'The atmosphere I was born in was too thick and yellow with
gold for the Parnassian bees to fly to my cradle. The supreme privilege
of the poet is an imperishable youth, and I do not think that I was
ever young; they did not let me be so.'
'You were so for a little while when you first loved me,' she said
with a smile; 'that is why I wonder we had not more imagination at
that time. Anybody could live the life we live now. It shows what a
stifling, cramping thing the world is; we who used to meditate on every
possible idealic and idyllic kind of existence have found that there is
nothing for us to do but to open our houses, surround ourselves with
a crowd, spend quantities of money in all commonplace fashions, and
be hated by envy and envied by stupidity. Do you remember our sunlit
kingdom in Persia that we were to have gone to together? Well, we are
as far off it as though we were not together.'
'Do you mean then,' said Othmar impatiently, 'that you think our life
together a mistake?'
'No, not quite that; because we are more intelligent than most people,
only we have been unable to rise above the commonplace; unable to keep
our iron at a white heat. Our existence looks very brilliant, no doubt,
to those outside it, but in real truth there is a poverty of invention
about it which makes me feel ashamed of my own want of originality.'
She laughed a little; her old laugh, which always chilled the hearts of
men.
She had always foreseen the termination of their pilgrimage of joy in
that mortuary chapel of lifeless bones and motionless dust to which the
lovers' path through the roses and raptures was so sure to lead. But
he, man like, had been so certain that the roses would never fade, that
the raptures would never diminish!
Othmar was sensible that he had in some manner failed to fulfil her
expectations, and the sense of such a fact stings the self-love of
the least vain and least selfish of men. Her life possessed all that
any woman could in her uttermost exactness require. All the perfect
self-indulgence and continual pageantry of life which an immense
fortune can command were always hers; her children by him were
beautiful and of great promise, physical and mental; her world still
obeyed her slightest sign, and her slightest whim was gratified; men
still found the most fatal sorcery in her careless glance, and society
offered to her all that it possessed. If this sense of disappointment,
of disillusion, of dissatisfaction were really with her, it could only
be so because he himself, as the companion of her life, failed to
realise what she had expected in him--was unhappy enough to weary her,
as all others before him had done.
A vainer man would have laid the blame on her, and have arrived,
through vanity, at the perception that it was her temperament and not
his character which was at fault. But all the flattery which every rich
and powerful man daily receives had failed to make Othmar vain. His
self-esteem was very modest in its proportions, and he attributed the
fact of his wife's apparent indifference to him humbly enough to his
own demerits.
'I have not the talent of amusing her,' he thought. 'I have been
always too grave--have taken life too sadly to be the companion of a
woman of her wit. I have never done anything of which she can be very
proud with that sort of pride which would be the sweetest flattery to
her; the years slip away with me and bring me no occasion, at least
no capability, of the kind of distinction which she would appreciate.
I cannot be a Skobeleff or a Gortschakoff; I cannot make that renown
which might arrest her fancy and please her _amour propre_; she has
loved me possibly as much as she can love, but as she finds that I am
made of the common clay of ordinary humanity, I become not much more to
her than all those dead men whom she has tired of and forgotten.'
But whilst his reason told him this, his heart yearned to disbelieve
it, and his pride refused a meek submission to it. There was something
in her fugitive, delicately disdainful, capriciously insecure, which
was certain to sustain the passion of man, because it constantly
stimulated it; her concessions were made to his desires not her own;
she never shared his weakness even whilst she was indulgent to it.
'I have absolutely never known yet whether you have ever loved me!'
he said to her once, and she replied, with her little indulgent,
mysterious smile:
'How should you know what I do not know myself?'
It was a part, and no small part, of the ascendency she had over him;
it stimulated his affections, because it perpetually stinted them; it
made satiety impossible with her.
Yet all which excited his passions and secured the continuance of her
influence over him, left him more and more conscious of a void at
his heart which she would never fill, because a nature cannot bestow
more than it possesses. All the intellectual charm she had for him
had a certain coldness in it; her incorrigible irony, her inveterate
analysis, her natural attitude of observation and of mockery before the
foibles and follies and affections of mankind, enchanting as they were,
were without warmth as they were without pity. It was the brilliant
play of electric light on polished steel. Sometimes, with the wayward
inconsistency of human wishes, he would have preferred the glow from
some simple fire of the hearth.
There were times when the feeling which met his own left his heart
cold. He had never wholly ceased to feel that he was always in a
measure outside her life. He would have been ashamed to confess to her
many youthful weaknesses, many romantic impulses which often moved
him; there were many lover-like follies which would have been natural
and sweet to him, which he had early learned to control and dismiss,
unyielded to because he was afraid of that slight ironical smile, and
that contemptuous little word with which she had the power to arrest
the quick tide of any impetuous emotion.
The excesses of passion and the force of emotion always seemed to her
slightly absurd; she had yielded to both for his sake more than she
had ever thought to do; but her intelligence always held reign over
her with much greater dominance than her feelings ever obtained. There
were moments when he felt as if he asked her for bread, and she gave
him a stone; a most polished stone of magical charm, of exquisite
transparency, of occult power, but still a stone, when he merely wished
for the plain sweet bread of simple sympathy.
Once, in riding alone through the forests of Amyôt, his horse put its
foot in a rabbit's hole and threw him. He was unhurt, and rose and
remounted. But he thought as he rode onward: 'If I had been disfigured,
crippled, made an invalid for life, how would she have regarded me?'
With pity, no doubt, but probably with aversion; certainly with
indifference. She would have brought her exquisite grace, her cool
nonchalant smile, her delicate fragrant presence to his bedside, and
would have come there every day, no doubt, and have been careful that
he should want for nothing; but would there have been the blinding
tears of a passionate sorrow in her eyes, would her cheek have grown
hollow and her hair white with long vigil, would her whole world have
been found within the four walls of his sick room?
He thought not.
He sighed as he rode through the green glades of the great woods where
she had held her Court of Love.
Of love no one could speak with such science and surety as she. She had
known it in all its phases, studied it in all its madness, accepted
it in all its sacrifices; on no theme would her silver speech be more
eloquent; and love had been given to her as the widest of all her
kingdoms. But had she really known it ever? Had not that which her own
breast had harboured always been the mere impulse of curiosity, the
mere exercise of power, the mere chillness of analysis such as that
with which the physiologist gazes on the bared nerves of the living
organism? After all, why had men cared so much for her? Only because
she had been as unmoved as the moon. Men are children; they long for
what they cannot clasp. He himself had only loved her so long, despite
the chilling and dulling effect of marriage, because he had always felt
that he possessed so little real hold upon her that any day she might
take it into her fancy to leave him, not out of unkindness but out of
_ennui_.
Sometimes he thought with a curious compassion of Napraxine. He thought
of him now, and for a moment his own heart grew hard against her as he
rode through the beautiful summer world of his woods; hard as had grown
the hearts of men who, dying for her sake, had felt that they had given
their life for a smile, for a jest, for a chimera, for a caprice--given
it away unthanked.
But then, when he entered his house again and saw her, he forgave her
and loved her; he cared more still for one touch of her cool white
hand, the favour of one careless smile cast to him, than he cared for
the whole world of women--women who would willingly have seen him
forget his allegiance to her, and have consoled him for all her defects.
'Otho is uxorious, like Belisarius, like Bismarck,' said Friedrich
Othmar, with an unpleasant smile. 'And alas! he is neither a great
soldier nor a great statesman, to make the weakness respected either by
the world or by his wife.'
Othmar had overheard the speech, and it had made him irritated, and
afraid lest he ever looked absurd.
'Yet,' he thought bitterly, 'if she were still the wife of Napraxine,
no one would ever see anything singular in any weakness or madness that
I might commit for her!'
Between his uncle and himself few intimate words ever passed. After the
death of Yseulte a tacit understanding had been come to between them
that neither should ever name those causes, whether great or small,
which she had had for pain and jealous sorrow in her brief life's
space. It was a subject on which they could never have touched without
a breach irrevocable and eternal in their friendship.
Friedrich Othmar visited at their houses, caressed their children,
preserved all outward amity with both of them, and devoted all the
energies of his last years and of his immense experience to the
interests of the house which he had honoured, served, and loved so
long, but with neither his nephew nor his nephew's wife did he ever
pass the limits of a conventional and courteous intercourse, which had
neither affection in it nor any exchange of confidence.
Once or twice the worldly-wise and harsh old man did a thing which a
few years before, in anyone else, he would have regarded as the most
flimsy and foolish of sentimentalities. He took the little Xenia with
him into the gardens of St. Pharamond, and made her gather with her
own small hands a quantity of violets; then he led her to the tomb of
Yseulte, and bade her lay them on it. She had been buried there, though
a sepulchre sculptured by Mercier had been raised to her memory at
Amyôt.
'Why are you not her child?' he said to her. 'Why are you not? She
would have loved you better than your own mother can.'
The child scattered her violets, then came and leaned her arms upon his
knee and looked up at him with serious eyes.
'You are crying!' she said, touching softly two great tears which had
fallen on his cheeks. Then she added gravely: 'I thought you were too
old!'
'I too should have thought so,' said Friedrich Othmar bitterly. 'It is
a sign that my end is near.'
And he envied those credulous, unintellectual, happy imbeciles who
could believe that that 'end' was only the opening of the portals of
a wider, fairer, greater life; he whose reason told him that for his
own strong keen brain and multiform knowledge and accumulated wisdom
and fierce love of life, as for the youthful limbs and the fair soul
and the pure body of the dead girl there, that end was only the 'end'
of all things: cruel corruption, hideous putridity, blank nothingness,
eternal silence.
'What is the use of it all? What is the use?' he said to the startled
child, as he took her hand and led her from the tomb. What was the use
of any life or any death? What had been the use of Yseulte's?
One day he found before her mausoleum at Amyôt the most _mondaine_ of
women: Blanche Princesse de Laon, who, in her childish days, had been
Blanchette de Vannes.
'You, too, remember her?' he said in surprise.
Blanche de Laon replied roughly:
'I loved her;--_tout le monde est bête une fois_!'
She stood before the marble sepulchre where Mercier had made the angels
of Pity and of Youth weeping. She was not twenty years of age, but
she knew the world like her glove. She was cruel, cold, avaricious,
sensual, steeped in frivolity and intrigue as in a bath of wine, but
underneath all that there was one little spot of memory, of regret, of
tenderness in her nature; as far as she had been capable of affection
she had loved Yseulte.
'_Tiens!_' she said, as she stood beside the sepulchre. 'Do you think
it has succeeded--your nephew's last marriage?'
'I believe so,' replied Friedrich Othmar with surprise. 'Yes,
certainly, I should say so; they seem quite in accord; he is devoted to
her still.'
'_Tiens!_' she said again, and she struck the marble of the tomb
sharply with the long ivory stick of her sun umbrella. 'I watch them
like a cat a mouse. I will be even with her still; the first time
there is a little crack in what you call their happiness, I shall be
there--and I will widen it. Have you seen the drivers of Monte Carlo
make an open wound in their horses' flank on purpose? Well, this is
how they do it. A fly settles and leaves a little piece of braised
skin, the men rub that little place with sand, it widens and widens,
they rub in more sand, the sun and the flies do the rest.'
Then she struck her ivory stick once more on the marble parapet of the
great tomb.
'She died for them! She was so foolish always. But there was something
great in it. We are not great like that. If he only remembered, I would
forgive him for her sake. But he never remembers. He does not care. A
dog might be buried instead of her.'
'You cannot be sure of that.'
'Bah! I am perfectly sure. He has never even understood that she did
die for him. He thought it was an accident!'
'Hush!' said Friedrich Othmar harshly, but with great emotion. 'She
wished that he should think it so; what right have you or have I or has
anyone in the wide world to betray her last secret if we guess it? It
has gone to the grave with her, like her dead children.'
'I betray it no more than you!' she replied with asperity. 'I have
given no hint of it to any living soul; when Toinon said it was a
suicide I struck her, I made her hold her peace. I was a child then,
and all these years since I have never said a word; but you, you know;
you know as well as I.'
'It was not a suicide, it was a heroism. If there were a God, a great
God, He would have honoured it.'
'But there are only priests!' said Blanchette, with her bitterest smile.
They turned away together from the mausoleum, where the marble figure
of Yseulte seemed to lie in the peace of a dreamless sleep beneath
the shadowing wings of the two angels. Gates of metal scroll-work let
in the sunlight to this house of death; there was no darkness in it,
no terror, no melancholy; white doves flew around its roof, and white
roses blossomed at its portals.
'Madame la Princesse de Laon,' said Friedrich Othmar gravely, as they
passed across the turf, 'whenever the fly begins that little wound in
the skin that you talked of, forbear to widen it for the sake of your
cousin who sleeps there; do not make her sacrifice wholly useless. What
is done is done. We cannot bring her back to life, and if we could
she would not be happy in it. There are souls too delicate and too
spiritual for earth. Hers was so.'
Blanche de Laon gave him no promise. She walked on over the smooth
sward through the labyrinths of blossom, and crossed the gardens where
her courtiers met her, with outcries of welcome and of homage.
She was at the supreme height of coquetry and triumph and fashion.
She was not beautiful in feature, but she was dazzling fair, had a
marvellously perfect figure, _une crânerie inouie_, and the advantage
and fascination conferred by an absolute indifference to all laws,
hesitations and principles. She was hard as her own diamonds, plundered
her lovers with a greed and ruthlessness which rivalled any cocotte's,
kept her splendid position by sheer force of audacity as high above
the world as though she were the most pure of women, and before she
had completed her twenty-first year knew all that was to be known of
the refinements of vice, the exaggerations of self-indulgence, and
the eccentricities of unbridled levity. She had supreme scorn for her
sister Toinon, who had espoused the Duc de Yprès, a hunting-noble of
the Ardennes, and who spent most of her time in the provinces chasing
wolves, bears, and wild deer, and could give the death-blow with her
knife to an old tusked monarch of the woods or a king-stag of eleven
points, as surely as any huntsman in French Flanders or the Luxembourg.
The Princesse de Laon came as a guest to Amyôt with most summers or
autumns. She knew that her host disliked her, and would willingly, had
it been possible, never have seen her face; she knew that his wife
disliked her scarcely less, but that knowledge increased her whim to
be often at their houses, and she never gave them any possible pretext
to break with or to slight her. Her name was included, as a matter of
course, in their first series of guests every season, and usually she
was accompanied by Laon himself; a man of small brains and admirable
manners, who adored her, and would no more have dared resent the
liberties she took with his honour than he would have dared to enter
her presence uninvited.
'_J'ai étudié vos moyens de punir votre meute_,' she said once to the
châtelaine of Amyôt, with a malice equal to her own. '_Et je les ai
imités; tant bien que mal!_'
She was the only person in whom Nadine had ever found her equal in
high-bred insolence, in merciless raillery, in unsparing allusions,
couched in the subtilties of drawing-room banter or of drawing-room
compliment. Blanche de Laon was the only one who could fence with those
slender foils of her own, which could strike so surely and wound so
profoundly. Blanche de Laon, outwardly her devoted admirer and friend,
was the sole living being who could irritate her, could annoy her, and
could make her feel that Time, to use the words of Madame de Grignan,
robbed her every day of something which she would never recover and
could ill afford to lose.
Before this insolent youth of Blanchette she, who had been Nadège
Napraxine, felt almost old.
She was not old; she was still at the height of her own powers to
charm. She proved it every day that she drove through the streets,
every night that she passed down a ball-room. Still Blanchette, twelve
years younger than she, reigning in her own world, repeating her own
triumphs, awarding the cotillion to her own lovers, made a certain
sense of coming age approach her. Age was not at her elbow yet, but she
saw his shadow in the doorway. She forgot that approaching shadow at
every other time, but Blanchette had the power to point it out to her
in a thousand ways imperceptible to all spectators. Hundreds of other
young beauties grew up and entered her society, and met her daily and
nightly, and she never thought once about them, except when she wanted
them for a costume quadrille at her ball in Paris or tableaux vivants
at Amyôt. But Blanchette forced her to think of her; forced her to see
in her a rival, perhaps an equal, in those kingdoms where she was wont
to reign alone. Blanchette, when she let her myosotis-coloured eyes
gaze at her, said to her with cruel pertinacity and candour:
'You are a beautiful woman still, but you owe something to art now; you
will have to owe more and more every year; you would not dare be seen
at sunrise after the cotillion now; soon you will dance the cotillions
no longer, but your daughter will dance them instead of you. How will
you like it? You have too much _esprit_ to be Cleopatra. You will not
give and take love philtres at forty. You will have too much wit. But
when your empire passes you will be wretched.'
All this the blue keen eyes of Blanche de Laon alone of all women said
to her, anticipating the years that were to come, asking in irony--
'How wilt thou bear from pity to implore
What once thy power from rapture could command?'
This is the question which every woman has to ask herself in the latter
half of her life. A woman is like a carriage horse; all her _beaux
jours_ are crowded into the first years of her life; afterwards every
year is a descent more or less rapid or gradual; after being made into
an idol, after living on velvet, after knowing only the gilded oats
and the rosewood stall and the days of delight, she and the horse both
drift to neglect, and hunger, and rainy weather, and the dull plodding
world between the shafts. The horse comes to the cab and the cart;
the woman comes to middle age and old age; he is ungroomed, she is
unsought; he stands in the streets dumbly wondering why his fate is so
changed; she sits in the ball-room chaperons' seat silently chafing
against the lot which has become hers.
Men are so fortunate there. The very best of their life often comes in
its later years. If a man be a poet, a soldier, a statesman, all the
gilded laurels of fame are reserved for his later years; honours crowd
on him in his autumn as fast as the leaves can fall in the woods. Even
as a lover it is often in his later years that his greatest successes
and his happiest passions come to him. This is always what creates the
immense disparity between men and women. For men age may become an
apotheosis. For women it is only a _débâcle_.
This will always cause disparity and discord between them. When love
has said its last word to her, it is still weaving all kinds of first
chapters to new stories for him. Nobody can help it. It is nature. The
fault lies in the ordinances of modern civilisation, which have made
their laws without any recognition of this fact, and indeed affects
altogether to ignore its existence.
She said such things as these in jest very often; but beneath the jest
there was a sorrowful and impatient foreboding. The days of darkness
had not come to her, but they would certainly come. Having been in
her way omnipotent as any Cæsar, she would see her laurels drop, her
sceptre fall, her empire diminish. A woman holds her power to charm as
Balzac's hero held the _peau de chagrin_; little by little, at first
imperceptibly, then faster with each hour, it shrinks and shrinks until
one day there is nothing left--and life is over.
Life is over: though the automatic joyless mechanism of living may go
on for half a century more.
It is useless to say that the affections will compensate for this
decadence. They will do no such thing. As intelligence is more and more
highly cultured, and taste made more fastidious, the power to console
of the ties of family grows less and less; the mind becomes too subtle,
the sympathies become too exacting and refined, to accept blindly such
companionship or compensation as these ties may afford.
Every woman who has had the power to make herself beloved has known
a height of ecstasy beside which all the rest of life must for ever
look pale and dull. You say to a woman, 'When your lovers fall away
from you, console yourself with your children.' It is as though you
said to her, 'As you can no longer have the passion-music of the great
orchestras, listen to the little airs of the chamber harmonium.'
While your lover loves you he is all yours; you are his sun and moon,
his dawn and darkness, his idol, his lawgiver, his ecstasy--what can
compensate to you for the loss of that power? Whether time or marriage
or other women kill that for you, whenever it goes utterly, you are
more beggared than any queen driven from her kingdom naked in winter
snows, like Elizabeth of Hungary. And it always goes; always, always!
We reach the height, but we cannot stay at it. We live for a few
instants with the stars, then down we drop like stones.
So she would think at times; and the presence of Blanche de Laon had
power to recall and emphasise such thoughts more irritatingly than had
that of any other woman. In a thousand hinted insolences, couched in
bland phrase, Blanchette again and again reminded her that '_le jour
est aux jeunes_.'
The day was indeed still her own, but twilight was near.
It was the Princesse de Laon's fashion of vengeance--pending any other.
Blanchette had known very little emotion in her twenty years of
existence, hardly any pain except that of some ruffled egotism or some
denied caprice. She had been a woman of the world to her finger tips,
from the time of her infancy, when she had been curled and frizzed and
dressed in the latest mode to show her small person in the children's
balls at Deauville or at Aix; but when she had heard of the death of
her cousin, and realised that she would never hear the voice of Yseulte
again on earth, she had known a grief more violent, a regret more
sudden and sincere, than her vain and self-absorbed little life could
have been supposed capable of in its inflated frivolity and egotism.
With her intuitive knowledge of human nature, she had divined the true
cause of that death, and into her small cold soul there had entered two
sentiments which were not of self: the one an imperishable regret for
her cousin, the other an imperishable hatred of Nadine Napraxine.
Others forgot: she did not.