One evening Daniel found the princess thoughtful, one elbow resting on
a little table, her beautiful blond head bathed in light from the lamp.
She was toying with a letter which lay on the table-cloth. When d’Arthez
had seen the paper distinctly, she folded it up, and stuck it in her
belt.
“What is the matter?” asked d’Arthez; “you seem distressed.”
“I have received a letter from Monsieur de Cadignan,” she replied.
“However great the wrongs he has done me, I cannot help thinking of his
exile--without family, without son--from his native land.”
These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility.
D’Arthez was deeply moved. The curiosity of the lover became, so to
speak, a psychological and literary curiosity. He wanted to know the
height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she thus
forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world, taxed with
frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such angels.
Remembering how the princess had already repulsed him when he first
tried to read that celestial heart, his voice, and he himself, trembled
as he took the transparent, slender hand of the beautiful Diane with its
curving finger-tips, and said,--
“Are we now such friends that you will tell me what you have suffered?”
“Yes,” she said, breathing forth the syllable like the most mellifluous
note that Tulou’s flute had ever sighed.
Then she fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled. Daniel remained
in a state of anxious expectation, impressed with the solemnity of the
occasion. His poetic imagination made him see, as it were, clouds slowly
dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary where the wounded lamb
was kneeling at the divine feet.
“Well?” he said, in a soft, still voice.
Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes slowly,
dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty. None but a
monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in the graceful
undulation of the neck with which the princess again lifted her charming
head, to look once more into the eager eyes of that great man.
“Can I? ought I?” she murmured, with a gesture of hesitation, gazing at
d’Arthez with a sublime expression of dreamy tenderness. “Men have so
little faith in things of this kind; they think themselves so little
bound to be discreet!”
“Ah! if you distrust me, why am I here?” cried d’Arthez.
“Oh, friend!” she said, giving to the exclamation the grace of an
involuntary avowal, “when a woman attaches herself for life, think you
she calculates? It is not question of refusal (how could I refuse you
anything?), but the idea of what you may think of me if I speak. I would
willingly confide to you the strange position in which I am at my age;
but what would you think of a woman who could reveal the secret wounds
of her married life? Turenne kept his word to robbers; do I not owe to
my torturers the honor of a Turenne?”
“Have you passed your word to say nothing?”
“Monsieur de Cadignan did not think it necessary to bind me to
secrecy--You are asking more than my soul! Tyrant! you want me to bury
my honor itself in your breast,” she said, casting upon d’Arthez a
look, by which she gave more value to her coming confidence than to her
personal self.
“You must think me a very ordinary man, if you fear any evil, no matter
what, from me,” he said, with ill-concealed bitterness.
“Forgive me, friend,” she replied, taking his hand in hers caressingly,
and letting her fingers wander gently over it. “I know your worth. You
have related to me your whole life; it is noble, it is beautiful, it is
sublime, and worthy of your name; perhaps, in return, I owe you mine.
But I fear to lower myself in your eyes by relating secrets which
are not wholly mine. How can you believe--you, a man of solitude and
poesy--the horrors of social life? Ah! you little think when you invent
your dramas that they are far surpassed by those that are played in
families apparently united. You are wholly ignorant of certain gilded
sorrows.”
“I know all!” he cried.
“No, you know nothing.”
D’Arthez felt like a man lost on the Alps of a dark night, who sees,
at the first gleam of dawn, a precipice at his feet. He looked at the
princess with a bewildered air, and felt a cold chill running down his
back. Diane thought for a moment that her man of genius was a weakling,
but a flash from his eyes reassured her.
“You have become to me almost my judge,” she said, with a desperate air.
“I must speak now, in virtue of the right that all calumniated beings
have to show their innocence. I have been, I am still (if a poor recluse
forced by the world to renounce the world is still remembered) accused
of such light conduct, and so many evil things, that it may be allowed
me to find in one strong heart a haven from which I cannot be driven.
Hitherto I have always considered self-justification an insult to
innocence; and that is why I have disdained to defend myself. Besides,
to whom could I appeal? Such cruel things can be confided to none but
God or to one who seems to us very near Him--a priest, or another self.
Well! I do know this, if my secrets are not as safe there,” she said,
laying her hand on d’Arthez’s heart, “as they are here” (pressing the
upper end of her busk beneath her fingers), “then you are not the grand
d’Arthez I think you--I shall have been deceived.”
A tear moistened d’Arthez’s eyes, and Diane drank it in with a side
look, which, however, gave no motion either to the pupils or the lids of
her eyes. It was quick and neat, like the action of a cat pouncing on a
mouse.
D’Arthez, for the first time, after sixty days of protocols, ventured
to take that warm and perfumed hand, and press it to his lips with a
long-drawn kiss, extending from the wrist to the tip of the fingers,
which made the princess augur well of literature. She thought to herself
that men of genius must know how to love with more perfection than
conceited fops, men of the world, diplomatists, and even soldiers,
although such beings have nothing else to do. She was a connoisseur, and
knew very well that the capacity for love reveals itself chiefly in mere
nothings. A woman well informed in such matters can read her future in
a simple gesture; just as Cuvier could say from the fragment of a bone:
This belonged to an animal of such or such dimensions, with or without
horns, carnivorous, herbivorous, amphibious, etc., age, so many thousand
years. Sure now of finding in d’Arthez as much imagination in love as
there was in his written style, she thought it wise to bring him up at
once to the highest pitch of passion and belief.
She withdrew her hand hastily, with a magnificent movement full of
varied emotions. If she had said in words: “Stop, or I shall die,” she
could not have spoken more plainly. She remained for a moment with
her eyes in d’Arthez’s eyes, expressing in that one glance happiness,
prudery, fear, confidence, languor, a vague longing, and virgin modesty.
She was twenty years old! but remember, she had prepared for this hour
of comic falsehood by the choicest art of dress; she was there in her
armchair like a flower, ready to blossom at the first kiss of sunshine.
True or false, she intoxicated Daniel.
It if is permissible to risk a personal opinion we must avow that it
would be delightful to be thus deceived for a good long time. Certainly
Talma on the stage was often above and beyond nature, but the Princesse
de Cadignan is the greatest true comedian of our day. Nothing was
wanting to this woman but an attentive audience. Unfortunately, at
epochs perturbed by political storms, women disappear like water-lilies
which need a cloudless sky and balmy zephyrs to spread their bloom to
our enraptured eyes.
The hour had come; Diane was now to entangle that great man in the
inextricable meshes of a romance carefully prepared, to which he was
fated to listen as the neophyte of early Christian times listened to the
epistles of an apostle.
“My friend,” began Diane, “my mother, who still lives at Uxelles,
married me in 1814, when I was seventeen years old (you see how old I am
now!) to Monsieur de Maufrigneuse, not out of affection for me, but out
of regard for him. She discharged her debt to the only man she had ever
loved, for the happiness she had once received from him. Oh! you need
not be astonished at so horrible a conspiracy; it frequently takes
place. Many women are more lovers than mothers, though the majority
are more mothers than wives. The two sentiments, love and motherhood,
developed as they are by our manners and customs, often struggle
together in the hearts of women; one or other must succumb when they
are not of equal strength; when they are, they produce some exceptional
women, the glory of our sex. A man of your genius must surely comprehend
many things that bewilder fools but are none the less true; indeed I may
go further and call them justifiable through difference of characters,
temperaments, attachments, situations. I, for example, at this moment,
after twenty years of misfortunes, of deceptions, of calumnies endured,
and weary days and hollow pleasures, is it not natural that I should
incline to fall at the feet of a man who would love me sincerely and
forever? And yet, the world would condemn me. But twenty years of
suffering might well excuse a few brief years which may still remain to
me of youth given to a sacred and real love. This will not happen. I am
not so rash as to sacrifice my hopes of heaven. I have borne the burden
and heat of the day, I shall finish my course and win my recompense.”
“Angel!” thought d’Arthez.
“After all, I have never blamed my mother; she knew little of me.
Mothers who lead a life like that of the Duchesse d’Uxelles keep their
children at a distance. I saw and knew nothing of the world until my
marriage. You can judge of my innocence! I knew nothing; I was incapable
of understanding the causes of my marriage. I had a fine fortune; sixty
thousand francs a year in forests, which the Revolution overlooked (or
had not been able to sell) in the Nivernais, with the noble chateau of
d’Anzy. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was steeped in debt. Later I learned
what it was to have debts, but then I was too utterly ignorant of life
to suspect my position; the money saved out of my fortune went to pacify
my husband’s creditors. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was forty-eight years
of age when I married him; but those years were like military campaigns,
they ought to count for twice what they were. Ah! what a life I led for
ten years! If any one had known the suffering of this poor, calumniated
little woman! To be watched by a mother jealous of her daughter!
Heavens! You who make dramas, you will never invent anything as direful
as that. Ordinarily, according to the little that I know of literature,
a drama is a suite of actions, speeches, movements which hurry to a
catastrophe; but what I speak of was a catastrophe in action. It was an
avalanche fallen in the morning and falling again at night only to
fall again the next day. I am cold now as I speak to you of that cavern
without an opening, cold, sombre, in which I lived. I, poor little thing
that I was! brought up in a convent like a mystic rose, knowing nothing
of marriage, developing late, I was happy at first; I enjoyed the
goodwill and harmony of our family. The birth of my poor boy, who is
all me--you must have been struck by the likeness? my hair, my eyes, the
shape of my face, my mouth, my smile, my teeth!--well, his birth was a
relief to me; my thoughts were diverted by the first joys of maternity
from my husband, who gave me no pleasure and did nothing for me that
was kind or amiable; those joys were all the keener because I knew no
others. It had been so often rung into my ears that a mother should
respect herself. Besides, a young girl loves to play the mother. I was
so proud of my flower--for Georges was beautiful, a miracle, I thought!
I saw and thought of nothing but my son, I lived with my son. I never
let his nurse dress or undress him. Such cares, so wearing to mothers
who have a regiment of children, were all my pleasure. But after three
or four years, as I was not an actual fool, light came to my eyes in
spite of the pains taken to blindfold me. Can you see me at that
final awakening, in 1819? The drama of ‘The Brothers at enmity’ is a
rose-water tragedy beside that of a mother and daughter placed as we
then were. But I braved them all, my mother, my husband, the world,
by public coquetries which society talked of,--and heaven knows how it
talked! You can see, my friend, how the men with whom I was accused of
folly were to me the dagger with which to stab my enemies. Thinking only
of my vengeance, I did not see or feel the wounds I was inflicting on
myself. Innocent as a child, I was thought a wicked woman, the worst of
women, and I knew nothing of it! The world is very foolish, very blind,
very ignorant; it can penetrate no secrets but those which amuse it and
serve its malice: noble things, great things, it puts its hand before
its eyes to avoid seeing. But, as I look back, it seems to me that I had
an attitude and aspect of indignant innocence, with movements of pride,
which a great painter would have recognized. I must have enlivened many
a ball with my tempests of anger and disdain. Lost poesy! such sublime
poems are only made in the glowing indignation which seizes us at
twenty. Later, we are wrathful no longer, we are too weary, vice no
longer amazes us, we are cowards, we fear. But then--oh! I kept a great
pace! For all that I played the silliest personage in the world; I was
charged with crimes by which I never benefited. But I had such pleasure
in compromising myself. That was my revenge! Ah! I have played many
childish tricks! I went to Italy with a thoughtless youth, whom I
crushed when he spoke to me of love, but later, when I herd that he was
compromised on my account (he had committed a forgery to get money) I
rushed to save him. My mother and husband kept me almost without means;
but, this time, I went to the king. Louis XVIII., that man without a
heart, was touched; he gave me a hundred thousand francs from his privy
purse. The Marquis d’Esgrignon--you must have seen him in society for he
ended by making a rich marriage--was saved from the abyss into which he
had plunged for my sake. That adventure, caused by my own folly, led me
to reflect. I saw that I myself was the first victim of my vengeance.
My mother, who knew I was too proud, too d’Uxelles, to conduct
myself really ill, began to see the harm that she had done me and was
frightened by it. She was then fifty-two years of age; she left Paris
and went to live at Uxelles. There she expiates her wrong-doing by a
life of devotion and expresses the utmost affection for me. After her
departure I was face to face, alone, with Monsieur de Maufrigneuse. Oh!
my friend, you men can never know what an old man of gallantry can be.
What a home is that of a man accustomed to the adulation of women of the
world, when he finds neither incense nor censer in his own house! dead
to all! and yet, perhaps for that very reason, jealous. I wished--when
Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was wholly mine--I wished to be a good wife,
but I found myself repulsed with the harshness of a soured spirit by
a man who treated me like a child and took pleasure in humiliating
my self-respect at every turn, in crushing me under the scorn of his
experience, and in convicting me of total ignorance. He wounded me on
all occasions. He did everything to make me detest him and to give me
the right to betray him; but I was still the dupe of my own hope and of
my desire to do right through several years. Shall I tell you the cruel
saying that drove me to further follies? ‘The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse
has gone back to her husband,’ said the world. ‘Bah! it is always a
triumph to bring the dead to life; it is all she can now do,’ replied my
best friend, a relation, she, at whose house I met you--”
“Madame d’Espard!” cried Daniel, with a gesture of horror.
“Oh! I have forgiven her. Besides, it was very witty; and I have myself
made just as cruel epigrams on other poor women as innocent as myself.”
D’Arthez again kissed the hand of that saintly woman who, having hacked
her mother in pieces, and turned the Prince de Cadignan into an Othello,
now proceeded to accuse herself in order to appear in the eyes of that
innocent great man as immaculate as the silliest or the wisest of women
desire to seem at all costs to their lovers.
“You will readily understand, my friend, that I returned to society for
the purpose of excitement and I may say of notoriety. I felt that I must
conquer my independence. I led a life of dissipation. To divert my mind,
to forget my real life in fictitious enjoyments I was gay, I shone, I
gave fetes, I played the princess, and I ran in debt. At home I could
forget myself in the sleep of weariness, able to rise the next day gay,
and frivolous for the world; but in that sad struggle to escape my real
life I wasted my fortune. The revolution of 1830 came; it came at the
very moment when I had met, at the end of that _Arabian Nights’_ life, a
pure and sacred love which (I desire to be honest) I had longed to know.
Was it not natural in a woman whose heart, repressed by many causes and
accidents, was awakening at an age when a woman feels herself cheated
if she has never known, like the women she sees about her, a happy love?
Ah! why was Michel Chrestien so respectful? Why did he not seek to meet
me? There again was another mockery! But what of that? in falling, I
have lost everything; I have no illusions left; I had tasted of all
things except the one fruit for which I have no longer teeth. Yes, I
found myself disenchanted with the world at the very moment when I was
forced to leave it. Providential, was it not? like all those strange
insensibilities which prepare us for death” (she made a gesture full
of pious unction). “All things served me then,” she continued; “the
disasters of the monarchy and its ruin helped me to bury myself. My son
consoles me for much. Maternal love takes the place of all frustrated
feelings. The world is surprised at my retirement, but to me it has
brought peace. Ah! if you knew how happy the poor creature before you is
in this little place. In sacrificing all to my son I forget to think of
joys of which I am and ever must be ignorant. Yes, hope has flown, I
now fear everything; no doubt I should repulse the truest sentiment,
the purest and most veritable love, in memory of the deceptions and the
miseries of my life. It is all horrible, is it not? and yet, what I have
told you is the history of many women.”
The last few words were said in a tone of easy pleasantry which recalled
the presence of the woman of the world. D’Arthez was dumbfounded. In his
eyes convicts sent to the galleys for murder, or aggravated robbery, or
for putting a wrong name to checks, were saints compared to the men and
women of society. This atrocious elegy, forged in the arsenal of lies,
and steeped in the waters of the Parisian Styx, had been poured into his
ears with the inimitable accent of truth. The grave author contemplated
for a moment that adorable woman lying back in her easy-chair, her two
hands pendant from its arms like dewdrops from a rose-leaf, overcome
by her own revelation, living over again the sorrows of her life as she
told them--in short an angel of melancholy.
“And judge,” she cried, suddenly lifting herself with a spring and
raising her hand, while lightning flashed from eyes where twenty chaste
years shone--“judge of the impression the love of a man like Michel
must have made upon me. But by some irony of fate--or was it the hand of
God?--well, he died; died in saving the life of, whom do you suppose? of
Monsieur de Cadignan. Are you now surprised to find me thoughtful?”
This was the last drop; poor d’Arthez could bear no more. He fell upon
his knees, and laid his head on Diane’s hand, weeping soft tears such
as the angels shed,--if angels weep. As Daniel was in that bent posture,
Madame de Cadignan could safely let a malicious smile of triumph flicker
on her lips, a smile such as the monkeys wear after playing a sly
trick--if monkeys smile.
“Ah! I have him,” thought she; and, indeed, she had him fast.
“But you are--” he said, raising his fine head and looking at her with
eyes of love.
“Virgin and martyr,” she replied, smiling at the commonness of that
hackneyed expression, but giving it a freshness of meaning by her smile,
so full of painful gayety. “If I laugh,” she continued, “it is that I am
thinking of that princess whom the world thinks it knows, that Duchesse
de Maufrigneuse to whom it gives as lovers de Marsay, that infamous de
Trailles (a political cutthroat), and that little fool of a d’Esgrignon,
and Rastignac, Rubempre, ambassadors, ministers, Russian generals,
heaven knows who! all Europe! They have gossiped about that album which
I ordered made, believing that those who admired me were my friends. Ah!
it is frightful! I wonder that I allow a man at my feet! Despise them
all, THAT should be my religion.”
She rose and went to the window with a gait and bearing magnificent in
motifs.
D’Arthez remained on the low seat to which he had returned not daring
to follow the princess; but he looked at her; he heard her blowing her
nose. Was there ever a princess who blew her nose? but Diane attempted
the impossible to convey an idea of her sensibility. D’Arthez believed
his angel was in tears; he rushed to her side, took her round the waist,
and pressed her to his heart.
“No, no, leave me!” she murmured in a feeble voice. “I have too many
doubts to be good for anything. To reconcile me with life is a task
beyond the powers of any man.”
“Diane! I will love you for your whole lost life.”
“No; don’t speak to me thus,” she answered. “At this moment I tremble, I
am ashamed as though I had committed the greatest sins.”
She was now entirely restored to the innocence of little girls, and
yet her bearing was august, grand, noble as that of a queen. It is
impossible to describe the effect of these manoeuvres, so clever that
they acted like the purest truth on a soul as fresh and honest as that
of d’Arthez. The great author remained dumb with admiration, passive
beside her in the recess of that window awaiting a word, while the
princess awaited a kiss; but she was far too sacred to him for that.
Feeling cold, the princess returned to her easy-chair; her feet were
frozen.
“It will take a long time,” she said to herself, looking at Daniel’s
noble brow and head.
“Is this a woman?” thought that profound observer of human nature. “How
ought I to treat her?”
Until two o’clock in the morning they spent their time in saying to each
other the silly things that women of genius, like the princess, know how
to make adorable. Diane pretended to be too worn, too old, too faded;
D’Arthez proved to her (facts of which she was well convinced) that her
skin was the most delicate, the softest to the touch, the whitest to the
eye, the most fragrant; she was young and in her bloom, how could she
think otherwise? Thus they disputed, beauty by beauty, detail by detail
with many: “Oh! do you think so?”--“You are beside yourself!”--“It is
hope, it is fancy!”--“You will soon see me as I am.--I am almost forty
years of age. Can a man love so old a woman?”
D’Arthez responded with impetuous and school-boy eloquence, larded with
exaggerated epithets. When the princess heard this wise and witty writer
talking the nonsense of an amorous sub-lieutenant she listened with an
absorbed air and much sensibility; but she laughed in her sleeve.
When d’Arthez was in the street, he asked himself whether he might not
have been rather less respectful. He went over in memory those strange
confidences--which have, naturally, been much abridged here, for they
needed a volume to convey their mellifluous abundance and the graces
which accompanied them. The retrospective perspicacity of this man, so
natural, so profound, was baffled by the candor of that tale and its
poignancy, and by the tones of the princess.
“It is true,” he said to himself, being unable to sleep, “there are such
dramas as that in society. Society covers great horrors with the flowers
of its elegance, the embroidery of its gossip, the wit of its lies. We
writers invent no more than the truth. Poor Diane! Michel had penetrated
that enigma; he said that beneath her covering of ice there lay
volcanoes! Bianchon and Rastignac were right; when a man can join the
grandeurs of the ideal and the enjoyments of human passion in loving
a woman of perfect manners, of intellect, of delicacy, it must be
happiness beyond words.”
So thinking, he sounded the love that was in him and found it infinite.