with point, for there are no yearling sales in that house in Lowndes
Square, whatever there be in the other domiciles of that fashionable
quarter. Lady Marabout has shaken that burden off her shoulders, and
moves in blissful solitude and tripled serenity through Belgravia,
relieved of responsibility, and wearing her years as lightly, losing the
odd trick at her whist as sunnily, and beaming on the world in general
as radiantly as any dowager in the English Peerage.
That she was fully reconciled to Carruthers's change of resolve was
shown in the fact that when Anne Hautton turned to her, on the evening
of his marriage-day, after the dinner to which Lady Marabout had bidden
all her friends, and a good many of her foes, with an amiable murmur:
"I am _so_ grieved for you, dearest Helena--I know what your
disappointment must be!--what should _I_ feel if Hautton----Your
_belle-fille_ is charming, certainly, very lovely; but then--such a
connection! You have my deepest sympathies! I always told you how wrong
you were when you fancied Goodwood admired little Montolieu--I beg her
pardon, I mean Lady Carruthers--but you _will_ give your imagination
such reins!"
Lady Marabout smiled, calmly and amusedly, felt no pang, and--thought of
Philip.
I take it things must be very rose-colored with us when we can smile
sincerely on our enemies, and defeat their stings simply because we feel
them not.
A STUDY A LA LOUIS QUINZE;
OR,
PENDANT TO A PASTEL BY LA TOUR.
I have, among others hanging on my wall, a pastel of La Tour's; of the
artist-lover of Julie Fel, of the monarch of pastellistes, the touch of
whose crayons was a "brevet of wit and of beauty," and on whose easel
bloomed afresh the laughing eyes, the brilliant tints, the rose-hued
lips of all the loveliest women of the "Regne Galant," from the
princesses of the Blood of the House of Bourbon to the princesses of the
green-room of the Comedie-Francaise. Painted in the days of Louis
Quinze, the light of more than a century having fallen on its soft
colors to fade and blot them with the icy brush of time, my pastel is
still fresh, still eloquent. The genius that created it is gone--gone
the beauty that inspired it--but the picture is deathless! It shows me
the face of a woman, of a beautiful woman, else, be sure she would not
have been honored by the crayons of La Tour; her full Southern lips are
parted with a smile of triumph; a chef-d'oeuvre of coquetry, a
head-dress of lace and pearls and little bouquets of roses is on her
unpowdered hair, which is arranged much like Julie Fel's herself in the
portrait that hangs, if I remember right, at the Musee de Saint Quentin;
and her large eyes are glancing at you with languor, malice, victory,
all commingled. At the back of the picture is written "Mlle. Thargelie
Dumarsais;" the letters are faded and yellow, but the pastel is living
and laughing yet, through the divine touch of the genius of La Tour.
With its perfume of dead glories, with its odor of the Beau Siecle, the
pastel hangs on my wall, living relic of a buried age, and sometimes in
my mournful moments the full laughing lips of my pastel will part, and
breathe, and speak to me of the distant past, when Thargelie Dumarsais
saw all Paris at her feet, and was not humbled then as now by being only
valued and remembered for the sake of the talent of La Tour. My
beautiful pastel gives me many confidences. I will betray one to you--a
single leaf from a life of the eighteenth century.
I.
THE FIRST MORNING.
In the heart of Lorraine, nestled down among its woods, stood an old
chateau that might have been the chateau of the Sleeping Beauty of fairy
fame, so sequestered it stood amidst its trees chained together by
fragrant fetters of honeysuckle and wild vine, so undisturbed slept the
morning shadows on the wild thyme that covered the turf, so unbroken was
the silence in which the leaves barely stirred, and the birds folded
their wings and hushed their song till the heat of the noonday should be
passed. Beyond the purple hills stretching up in the soft haze of
distance in the same province of laughing, luxurious, sunlit Lorraine,
was Luneville, the Luneville of Stanislaus, Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of
Henault, of Boufflers, a Versailles in miniature, even possessing a
perfect replica of Pompadour in its own pretty pagan of a Marquise.
Within a few leagues was Luneville, but the echo of its mots and
madrigals did not reach over the hills, did not profane the sunny air,
did not mingle with the vintage-song of the vine-dressers, the silver
babble of the woodland brook, the hushed chant of the Ave Maria, the
vesper bells chimed from the churches and monasteries, which made the
sole music known or heard in this little valley of Lorraine.
The chateau of Grande Charmille stood nestled in its woods, gray,
lonely, still, silent as death, yet not gloomy, for white pigeons
circled above its pointed towers, brilliant dragon-flies fluttered above
the broken basin of the fountain that sang as gayly as it rippled among
the thyme as though it fell into a marble cup, and bees hummed their
busy happy buzz among the jessamine that clung to its ivy-covered
walls--walls built long before Lorraine had ceased to be a kingdom and a
power, long before a craven and effeminated Valois had dared to kick the
dead body of a slaughtered Guise. Not gloomy with the golden light of a
summer noon playing amidst the tangled boughs and on the silvered
lichens; not gloomy, for under the elm-boughs on the broken stone steps
that led to the fountain, her feet half buried in violet-roots and wild
thyme, leaning her head on her hand, as she looked into the water, where
the birds flew down to drink, and fluttered their wings fearless of her
presence, was a young girl of sixteen--and if women sometimes darken
lives, it must be allowed that they always illumine landscapes!
Aline, when Boufflers saw her in the spring morning, in all the grace of
youth and beauty, unconscious of themselves, made not a prettier picture
than this young dreamer under the elm-boughs of the Lorraine woods, as
she bent over the water, watching it bubble and splash from the
fountain-spout, and hide itself with a rippling murmur under the broad
green reeds and the leaves of the water-lily. She was a charming
picture: a brunette with long ebon tresses, with her lashes drooping
over her black, languid, almond-shaped eyes, a smile on her half-pouted
lips, and all the innocence and dawning beauty of her sixteen years
about her, while she sat on the broken steps, now brushing the
water-drops off the violets, now weaving the reeds into a pretty,
useless toy, now beckoning the birds that came to peck on the
rose-sprays beside her.
"Favette! where are your dreams?"
Favette, the young naiad of the Lorraine elm-woods, looked up, the plait
of rushes dropping from her hands, and a warm sudden blush tinging her
cheeks and brow with a tint like that on the damask rose-leaves that had
fallen into the water, and floated there like delicate shells.
"Mon Dieu, Monsieur Leon! how you frightened me!"
And like a startled fawn, or a young bird glancing round at a rustle
amidst the leaves, Favette sprang up, half shy, half smiling, all her
treasures gathered from the woods--of flowers, of mosses, of berries, of
feathery grasses, of long ivy-sprays--falling from her lap on to the
turf in unheeded disorder.
"_I_ frightened you, Favette? Surely not. Are you sorry to see me,
then?"
"Sorry? Oh no, Monsieur Leon!" and Favette glanced through her thick
curled lashes, slyly yet archly, and began to braid again her plait of
rushes.
"Come, tell me, then, what and whom were you dreaming of, ma mie, as you
looked down into the water? Tell me, Favette. You have no secrets from
your playmate, your friend, your brother?"
Favette shook her head, smiling, and plaited her rushes all wrong, the
blush on her cheeks as bright as that on the cups of the rose-leaves
that the wind shook down in a fresh shower into the brook.
"Come, tell me, mignonne. Was it--of me?"
"Of you? Well, perhaps--yes!"
It was first love that whispered in Favette's pretty voice those three
little words; it was first love that answered in his, as he threw
himself down on the violet-tufted turf at her feet, as Boufflers at
Aline's.
"Ah, Favette, so should it be! for every hope, every dream, every
thought of _mine_, is centred in and colored by you."
"Yet you can leave me to-day," pouted Favette, with a sigh and a _moue
mutine_, and gathering tears in her large gazelle eyes.
"Leave you? Would to Heaven I were not forced! But against a king's will
what power has a subject? None are too great, none are too lowly, to be
touched by that iron hand if they provoke its grasp. Vincennes yawns for
those who dare to think, For-l'Eveque for those who dare to jest.
Monsieur de Voltaire was sent to the Bastille for merely defending a
truth and his own honor against De Rohan-Chabot. Who am I, that I should
look for better grace?"
Favette struck him, with her plaited rushes, a reproachful little blow.
"Monsieur Vincennes--Monsieur Voltaire--who are they? I know nothing of
those stupid people!"
He smiled, and fondly stroked her hair:
"Little darling! The one is a prison that manacles the deadly crimes of
Free Speech and Free Thought; the other, a man who has suffered for
both, but loves both still, and will, sooner or later, help to give both
to the world----"
"Ah, you think of your studies, of your ambitions, of your great heroes!
You think nothing of me, save to call me a little darling. You are
cruel, Monsieur Leon!"
And Favette twisted her hand from his grasp with petulant sorrow, and
dashed away her tears--the tears of sixteen--as bright and free from
bitterness as the water-drops on the violet-bells.
"_I_ cruel--and to you! My heart must indeed be badly echoed by my lips,
if you have cause to fancy so a single moment. Cruel to you? Favette,
Favette! is a man ever cruel to the dearest thing in his life, the
dearest name in his thoughts? If I smiled I meant no sneer; I love you
as you are, mignonne; the picture is so fair, one touch added, or one
touch effaced, would mar the whole in _my_ eyes. I love you as you are!
with no knowledge but what the good sisters teach you in their convent
solitude, and what the songs of the birds, the voices of the flowers,
whisper to you of their woodland lore. I love you as you are! Every
morning when I am far away from you, and from Lorraine, I shall think of
you gathering the summer roses, calling the birds about you, bending
over the fountain to see it mirror your own beauty; every evening I
shall think of you leaning from the window, chanting softly to yourself
the Ora pro nobis, while the shadows deepen, and the stars we have so
often watched together come out above the pine-hills. Favette, Favette!
exile will have the bitterness of death to me; to give me strength to
bear it, tell me that you love me more dearly than as the brother you
have always called me; that you will so love me when I shall be no
longer here beside you, but shall have to trust to memory and fidelity
to guard for me in absence the priceless treasure of your heart?"
Favette's head drooped, and her hands played nervously with the now torn
and twisted braid of rushes: he saw her heart beat under its muslin
corsage, like a bee caught and caged in the white leaves of a lily; and
she glanced at him under her lashes with a touch of naive coquetry.
"If I tell you so, what gage have I, Monsieur Leon, that, a few months
gone by, you will even remember it? In those magnificent cities you will
soon forget Lorraine; with the _grandes dames_ of the courts you will
soon cease to care for Favette?"
"Look in my eyes, Favette, they alone can answer you as I would answer!
Till we meet again none shall supplant you for an hour, none rob you of
one thought; you have my first love, you will have my last. Favette, you
believe me?"
"Yes--I believe!" murmured Favette, resting her large eyes fondly on
him. "We will meet as we part, though you are the swallow, free to take
flight over the seas to foreign lands, and I am the violet, that must
stay where it is rooted in the Lorraine woods!"
"Accept the augury," he whispered, resting his lips upon her low smooth
brow. "Does not the swallow ever return to the violet, holding it fairer
than all the gaudy tropical flowers that may have tempted him to rest on
the wing and delay his homeward flight? Does not the violet ever welcome
him the same, in its timid winning spring-tide loveliness, when he
returns to, as when he quitted, the only home he loves? Believe the
augury, Favette; we shall meet as we part!"
And they believed the augury, as they believed in life, in love, in
faith; they who were beginning all, and had proved none of the
treacherous triad!
What had he dreamed of in his solitary ancestral woods fairer than this
Lorraine violet, that had grown up with him, side by side, since he, a
boy of twelve, gathered heaths from the clefts of the rocks that the
little child of six years old cried for and could not reach? What had
she seen that she loved half so well as M. le Chevalier from the Castle,
whom her uncle, the Cure, held as his dearest and most brilliant pupil,
whose eyes always looked so lovingly into hers, and whose voice was
always lavishing fond names on his petite Favette?
They believed the augury, and were happy even in the sweet sorrow of
parting--sorrow that they had never known before--as they sat together
in the morning sunlight, while the water bubbled among the violet tufts,
among the grasses and wild thyme, and the dragon-flies fluttered their
green and gold and purple wings amidst the tendrils of the vines, and
the rose-leaves, drifted gently by the wind, floated down the brook,
till they were lost in deepening shadow under the drooping boughs.
II.
THE SECOND MORNING.
"Savez-vous que Favart va ecrire une nouvelle comedie--La Chercheuse
d'Esprit?"
"Vraiment? Il doit bien ecrire cela, car il s'occupe toujours a le
_chercher_, et n'arrive jamais a le trouver!"
The mot had true feminine malice, but the lips that spoke it were so
handsome, that had even poor Favart himself, the poet-pastrycook who
composed operas and comedies while he made meringues and fanfreluches,
and dreamed of libretti while he whisked the cream for a supper, been
within hearing, they would have taken the smart from the sting; and, as
it was, the hit only caused echoes of softly-tuned laughter, for the
slightest word of those lips it was the fashion through Paris just then
to bow to, applaud, and re-echo.
Before her Psyche, shrouded in cobweb lace, powdered by Martini,
gleaming with pearls and emeralds, scented with most delicate amber,
making her morning toilette, and receiving her morning levee according
to the fashion of the day, sat the brilliant satirist of poor Favart.
The _ruelle_ was crowded; three marshals, De Richelieu, Lowendal, and
Maurice de Saxe; a prince, De Soubise; a poet, Claude Dorat; an abbe,
Voisenon; a centenarian, Saint-Aulaire; peers uncounted, De Bievre, De
Caylus, De Villars, D'Etissac, Duras, D'Argenson--a crowd of
others--surrounded and superintended her toilette, in a glittering troop
of courtiers and gentlemen. Dames d'atours (for she had her maids of
honor as well as Marie Leczinska) handed her her flacons of perfume, or
her numberless notes, on gold salvers, chased by Reveil; the ermine
beneath her feet, humbly sent by the Russian ambassador--far superior to
what the Czarina sent to Madame de Mailly--had cost two thousand louis;
her bedroom outshone in luxury any at Versailles, Choisy, or La Muette,
with its Venetian glass, its medallions of Fragonard, its plaques of
Sevres, its landscapes of Watteau, framed in the carved and gilded
wainscoting, its Chinese lamps, swinging by garlands of roses, its
laughing Cupids, buried under flowers, painted in fresco above the
alcove, its hangings of velvet, of silk, of lace; and its cabinets, its
screens, its bonbonnieres, its jewel-boxes, were costly as those of the
Marquises de Pompadour or De Prie.
Who was she?--a Princess of the Blood, a Duchess of France, a mistress
of the King?
Lords of the chamber obeyed her wishes, ministers signed lettres de
cachet at her instance; "_ces messieurs_," la Queue de la Regence, had
their rendezvous at her suppers; she had a country villa that eclipsed
Trianon; she had fetes that outshone the fetes at Versailles; she had a
"_droit de chasse_" in one of the royal districts; she had the first
place on the easels of Coypel, Lancret, Pater, Vanloo, La Tour; the
first place in the butterfly odes of Crebillon le Gai, Claude Dorat;
Voisenon.
Who was she?--the Queen of France? No; much more--the Queen of Paris!
She was Thargelie Dumarsais; matchless as Claire Clairon, beautiful as
Madeleine Gaussin, resistless as Sophie Arnould, great as Adrienne
Lecouvreur. She was a Power in France--for was she not the Empress of
the Comedie? If Madame Lenormand d'Etioles ruled the government at
Versailles, Mademoiselle Thargelie Dumarsais ruled the world at Paris;
and if the King's favorite could sign her enemies, by a smile, to the
Bastille, the Court's favorite could sign hers, by a frown, to
For-l'Eveque.
The foyer was nightly filled while she played in _Zaire_, or
_Polyeucte_, or _Les Folies Amoureuses_, with a court of princes and
poets, marshals and marquises, beaux esprits and abbes galants; and
mighty nobles strewed with bouquets the path from her carriage to the
coulisses; bouquets she trod on with nonchalant dignity, as though
flowers only bloomed to have the honor of dying under her foot. Louis
Quinze smilingly humored her caprices, content to wait until it was her
pleasure to play at his private theatre; dukes, marquises, viscounts,
chevaliers, vied who should ruin himself most magnificently and most
utterly for her; and lovers the most brilliant and the most flattering,
from Richelieu, Roi de Ruelles, to Dorat, poet of boudoir-graces and
court-Sapphos, left the titled beauties of Versailles for the
self-crowned Empress of the Francais. She had all Paris for her
chentela, from Versailles to the Caveau; for even the women she deposed,
the actors she braved, the journalists she consigned to For-l'Eveque,
dared not raise their voice against the idol of the hour. A Queen of
France? Bah! Pray what could Marie Leczinska, the pale, dull pietist,
singing canticles in her private chapel, compare for power, for sway,
for courtiers, for brilliant sovereignty, for unrivalled triumph, with
Thargelie Dumarsais, the Queen of the Theatre?
Ravishingly beautiful looked the matchless actress as she sat before her
Psyche, flashing _oeillades_ on the brilliant group who made every added
aigrette, every additional bouquet of the coiffure, every little
_mouche_, every touch to the already perfect toilette, occasion for
flattering simile and soft-breathed compliment; ravishingly beautiful,
as she laughed at Maurice de Saxe, or made a disdainful _moue_ at an
impromptu couplet of Dorat's, or gave a blow of her fan to Richelieu, or
asked Saint-Aulaire what he thought of Vanloo's portrait of her as
_Rodugune_; ravishingly beautiful, with her charms that disdained alike
rouge and marechale powder, and were matchless by force of their own
coloring, form, and voluptuous languor, when, her toilette finished,
followed by her glittering crowd, she let Richelieu lead her to his
carriage.
There was a review of Guards on the plain at Sablons that morning, a
fete afterwards, at which she would be surrounded by the most brilliant
staff of an army of Noblesse, and Richelieu was at that moment the most
favored of her troop of lovers. M. le Duc, as every one knows, never
sued at court or coulisse in vain, and the love of Thargelie Dumarsais,
though perhaps with a stronger touch of romance in it than was often
found in the atmosphere of the foyer, was, like the love of her time and
her class, as inconstant and vivacious, now settling here, now lighting
there, as any butterfly that fluttered among the limes at Trianon. Did
not the jest-loving _parterre_ ever salute with gay laughter two lines
in a bagatelle-comedy of the hour--
Oui l'Amour papillonne, sans entraves, a son gre;
Charge longtemps de fers, de soie meme, il mourrait!--
when spoken by Thargelie Dumarsais--laughter that hailed her as
head-priestess of her pleasant creed, in a city and a century where the
creed was universal?
"Ah, bonjour! You have not seen her before, have you, semi-Englishman?
You have found nothing like her in the foggy isles, I wager you fifty
louis!" cried one of Thargelie Dumarsais's court, the Marquis de la
Thorilliere, meeting a friend of his who had arrived in Paris only the
day before, M. le Chevalier de Tallemont des Reaux, as Richelieu's
cortege rolled away, and the Marquis crossed to his own carriage.
"Her? Whom? I have not been in Paris for six years, you know. What can I
tell of its idols, as I remember of old that they change every hour?"
"True! but, bon Dieu! not to know la Dumarsais! What it must be to have
been buried in those benighted Britannic Isles! Did you not see her in
Richelieu's carriage?"
"No. I saw a carriage driving off with such an escort and such fracas,
that I thought it could belong to nobody less than to Madame Lenormand
d'Etioles; but I did not observe it any further. Who is this beauty I
ought to have seen?"
"Thargelie Dumarsais, for whom we are all ruining ourselves with the
prettiest grace in the world, and for whom you will do the same when you
have been once to the Francais; that is, if you have the good fortune to
attract her eyes and please her fancy, which you may do, for the fogs
have agreed with you, Leon!--I should not wonder if you become the
fashion, and set the women raving of you as 'leur zer zevalier!'"
"Thanks for the prophecy, but I shall not stay long enough to fulfil it,
and steal your myrtle crowns. I leave again to-morrow."
"_Leave?_ Sapristi! See what it is to have become half English, and
imbibed a taste for spleen and solitude! Have you written another
satire, or have you learned such barbarism as to dislike Paris?"
"Neither; but I leave for Lorraine to-morrow. It is five years since I
saw my old pine-woods."
"Dame! it is ten years since _I_ saw the wilds of Bretagne, and I will
take good care it shall be a hundred before I see them again. _Hors de
Paris, c'est hors du monde._ Come with me to La Dumarsais's _petit
souper_ to-night, and you will soon change your mind."
"My good Armand, you have not been an exile, as I have; you little know
how I long for the very scent of the leaves, the very smell of the earth
at Grande Charmille! But bah! I talk in Hebrew to you. You have been
lounging away your days in titled beauties, _petits salons_, making
butterfly verses, learning their broidery, their lisp, and their
perfumes, talking to their parrots, and using their cosmetiques, till
you care for no air but what is musk-scented! But what of this
Dumarsais of yours--does she equal Lecouvreur?"
"Eclipses her!--with Paris as with Maurice de Saxe. Thargelie Dumarsais
is superb, mon cher--unequalled, unrivalled! We have had nothing like
her for beauty, for grace, for talent, nor, pardieu! for extravagance!
She ruined _me_ last year in a couple of months. Richelieu is in favor
just now--with what woman is he not? Thargelie is very fond of the
Marshals of France! Saxe is fettered to her hand and foot, and the
Duchesse de Bouillon hates her as rancorously as she does Adrienne. Come
and see her play _Phedre_ to-night, and you will renounce Lorraine. I
will take you to supper with her afterwards; she will permit any friend
of mine entry, and then, generous man that I am, I shall have put you
_en chemin_ to sun yourself in her smiles and ingratiate yourself in her
favor. Don't give me too much credit for the virtue though, for I
confess I should like to see Richelieu supplanted."
"Does his reign threaten to last long, then?"
The Marquis shrugged his shoulders, and gave his badine an expressive
whisk.