where that weathercock may have veered to-morrow, as to predict where la
Dumarsais's love may have lighted ere a month! Where are you going, may
I ask?"
"To see Lucille de Verdreuil. I knew her at Luneville; she and Madame de
Boufflers were warm friends till Stanislaus, I believe, found Lucille's
eyes lovelier than Madame la Marquise deemed fit, and then they
quarrelled, as women ever do, with virulence in exact proportion to the
ardor of their friendship."
"As the women quarrel at Choisy for _notre maitre_! They will be friends
again when both have lost the game, like Louise de Mailly and the
Duchesse de Chateauroux. The poor Duchess! Fitz-James and Maurepas,
Chatillon and Bouillon, Rochefoucauld and le Pere Perussot, all
together, were too strong for her. All the gossip of that Metz affair
reached you across the water, I suppose? Those pests of Jesuits! if they
want him to be their Very Christian King, and to cure him of his worship
of Cupidon, they will have to pull down all the stones of La Muette and
the Parc aux Cerfs! What good is it to kill _one_ poor woman when women
are as plentiful as roses at Versailles? And now let me drive you to
Madame de Vaudreuil; if _she_ do not convert you from your fancy for
Lorraine this morning, Thargelie Dumarsais will to-night."
"_Mon zer zevalier, Paris at ado'able! Vous n'etes pas se'ieux en
voulant le quitter, z'en suis sure!_" cried the Comtesse de Vaudreuil,
in the pretty lisp of the day, a charming little blonde, patched and
powdered, nestled in a chair before a fire of perfumed wood, teasing her
monkey Zulme with a fan of Pater's, and giving a pretty little sign of
contempt and disbelief with some sprays of jessamine employed in the
chastisement of offenders more responsible and quite as audacious as
Zulme.
Her companion, her "zer zevalier," was a young man of seven-and-twenty,
with a countenance frank, engaging, nobly cast, far more serious, far
more thoughtful in its expression, than was often seen in that laughing
and mocking age. Exiled when a mere boy for a satirical pamphlet which
had provoked the wrath of the Censeur Royal, and might have cost him the
Bastille but for intercession from Luneville, he had passed his youth
less in pleasure than in those philosophical and political problems then
beginning to agitate a few minds; which were developed later on in the
"Encyclopedie," later still in the Assemblee Nationale. Voltaire and
Helvetius had spoken well of him at Madame de Geoffrin's; Claudine de
Tencin had introduced him the night before in her brilliant salons; the
veteran Fontenelle had said to him, "_Monsieur, comme censeur royal je
refusai mon approbation a votre brochure; comme homme libre je vous en
felicite_"--all that circle was prepared to receive him well, the young
Chevalier de Tallemont might make a felicitous season in Paris if he
chose, with the romance of his exile about him, and Madame de Vaudreuil
smiling kindly on him.
"The country!" she cried; "the country is all very charming in eclogues
and pastorals, but out of them it is a desert of ennui! What _can_ you
mean, Leon, by leaving Paris to-morrow? Ah, mechant, there must be
something we do not see, some love besides that of the Lorraine woods!"
"Madame, is there not my father?"
"_Bien zoli!_ But at your age men are not so filial. There is some other
reason--but what? Any love you had there five years ago has hardly any
attractions now. Five years! Ma foi, five months is an eternity that
kills the warmest passion!"
"May there not be some love, madame, that time only strengthens?"
"I never heard of it if there be. It would be a very dreary affair, I
should fancy, smouldering, smouldering on and on like an ill-lit fire.
Nobody would thank you for it, mon cher, _here_! Come, what is your
secret? Tell it me."
Leon de Tallemont smiled; the smile of a man who has happy thoughts, and
is indifferent to ridicule.
"Madame, one can refuse you nothing! My secret? It is a very simple one.
The greatest pang of my enforced exile was the parting from one I loved;
the greatest joy of my return is that I return to her."
"_Bon Dieu! comme c'est drole!_ Here is a man talking to me of love, and
of a love not felt for _me_!" thought Madame la Comtesse, giving him a
soft glance of her beautiful blue eyes. "You are a very strange man.
You have lived out of France till you have grown wretchedly serious and
eccentric. Loved this woman for five years? Leon! Leon! you are telling
me a fairy tale. Who is she, this enchantress? She must have some
mysterious magic. Tell me--quick!"
"She is no enchantress, madame, and she has no magic save the simple one
of having ever been very dear to me. We grew up together at Grande
Charmille; she was the orphan niece of the Priest, a fond, innocent,
laughing child, fresh and fair, and as untouched by a breath of impure
air as any of the violets in the valley. She was scarcely out of the
years of childhood when I left her, with beauty whose sweetest grace of
all was its own unconsciousness. Through my five long years of exile I
have remembered Favette as I saw her last under the elm-boughs in the
summer light, her eyes dim with the tears of our parting, her young
heart heaving with its first grief. I have loved her too well for others
to have power to efface or to supplant her; of her only have I thought,
of her only have I dreamed, holding her but the dearer as the years grew
further from the hour of our separation, nearer to the hour of our
reunion. I have heard no word of her since we parted; but of what value
is love without trust and fidelity in trial? The beauty of her childhood
may have merged into the beauty of womanhood, but I fear no other change
in Favette. As we parted so we vowed to meet, and I believe in her love
as in my own. I know that I shall find my Lorraine violet without stain
or soil. Madame, Favette is still dearer to me now, Heaven help me, than
five years ago. Five years--five years--true! it _is_ an eternity! Yet
the bitterness of the past has faded for ever from me _now_, and I only
see--the future!"
Madame de Vaudreuil listened in silence; his words stirred in her chords
long untouched, never heard amidst the mots, the madrigals, the
laughter of her world of Paris, Versailles, and Choisy. She struck him a
little blow with her jessamine-sprays, with a mist gathering over her
lovely blue eyes.
"Hush, hush, Leon! you speak in a tongue unknown here. A word
of the heart amongst us sounds a word of a _Gaulois_ out of
fashion--forbidden!"
III.
MIDNIGHT.
The Francais was crowded. Thargelie Dumarsais, great in _Electre_,
_Chimene_, _Ines_, as in "_Ninette a la Cour_," "_Les Moissonneurs_," or
"_Annette et Lubin_," was playing in "_Phedre_." Louis Quinze was
present, with all the powdered marquises, the titled wits, the
glittering gentlemen of the Court of Versailles; but no presence stayed
the shout of adoration with which the parterre welcomed the idol of the
hour, and Louis le Bien-aime (des femmes!) himself added his royal quota
to the ovation, and threw at her feet a diamond, superb as any in his
regalia. It was whispered that the Most Christian King was growing
envious of his favorite's favor with la Dumarsais, and would, ere long,
supersede him.
The foyer was filled with princes of the blood, marshals of France,
dukes, marquises, the elite of her troop of lovers; lords and gentlemen
crowded the passages, flinging their bouquets for her carpet as she
passed; and poor scholars, young poets, youths without a sou--amongst
them Diderot, Gilbert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau--pressed forward to catch a
glimpse, by the light of the links, of this beauty, on which only the
eyes of grands seigneurs who could dress Cupidon in a court habit
_parfile d'or_ were allowed to gaze closely, as she left the Francais,
after her unmatched and uninterrupted triumphs, and went to her
carriage with Richelieu. The suppers of Thargelie Dumarsais were
renowned through Paris; they equalled in magnificence the suppers of the
Regency, rivalled them for license, and surpassed them for wit. All the
world might flock to her fetes where she undisguisedly sought to surpass
the lavishness of Versailles, even by having showers of silver flung
from her windows to the people in the streets below; but to her _soupers
a huis clos_ only a chosen few were admitted, and men would speak of
having supped with la Dumarsais as boastfully as women of having supped
with the King at Choisy.
"What you have lost in not seeing her play _Phedre_! Helvetius would
have excused you; all the talk of his salons is not worth one glance at
la Dumarsais. Mon ami! you will be converted to Paris when once you have
seen her," said the Marquis de la Thorilliere, as his carriage stopped
in the Chaussee d'Antin.
Leon de Tallemont laughed, and thought of the eyes that would brighten
at his glance, and the heart that would beat against his once more under
the vine shadows of Lorraine. No new magic, however seductive, should
have strength to shake his allegiance to that Memory, and, true to his
violet in Lorraine, he defied the Queen of the Foyer.
"We are late, but that is always a more pardonable fault than to be too
early," said the Marquis, as they were ushered across the vestibule,
through several salons, into the supper-room, hung with rich tapestries
of "Les Nymphes au Bain," "Diane Chasseresse," and "Apollon et Daphne;"
with gilded consoles, and rosewood buffets, enamelled with medallion
groups, and crowded with Sevres and porcelaine de Saxe, while Venetian
mirrors at each end of the salle reflected the table, with its wines,
and fruits, and flowers, its gold dishes and Bohemian glass. The air was
heavily perfumed, and vibrating with laughter. The guests were
Richelieu, Bievre, Saxe, D'Etissac, Montcrif, and lovely Marie Camargo,
the queen of the coulisses who introduced the "short skirts" of the
ballet, and upheld her innovation so stanchly amidst the outcries of
scandalized Jansenists and journalists. But even Marie Camargo herself
paled--and would have paled even had she been, what she was not, in the
first flush of her youth--before the superb beauty, the languid
voluptuousness, the sensuous grace, the southern eyes, the full lips,
like the open leaves of a damask rose, melting yet mocking, of the most
beautiful and most notorious woman of a day in which beauty and
notoriety were rife, the woman with the diamond of Louis Quinze
sparkling in the light upon her bosom, whom Versailles and Paris hailed
as Thargelie Dumarsais.
The air, scented with amber, rang with the gay echoes of a stanza of
Dorat's, chanted by Marie Camargo; the "Cupids and Bacchantes," painted
in the panels of Sevres, seemed to laugh in sympathy with the revel over
which they presided; the light flashed on the King's diamond, to which
Richelieu pointed, with a wicked whisper; for the Marshal was getting
tired of his own reign, and his master might pay his court when he
would. Thargelie Dumarsais, more beautiful still at her _petit souper_
than at her _petit lever_, with her hair crowned with roses, true
flowers of Venus that might have crowned Aspasia, looked up laughingly
as her lacqueys ushered in le Marquis de la Thorilliere and le Chevalier
de Tallemont.
"M. le Marquis," cried the actress, "you are late! It is an impertinence
forbidden at my court. I shall sup in future with barred doors, like M.
d'Orleans; then all you late-comers----"
Through the scented air, through the echoing laughter, stopping her own
words, broke a startled bitter cry:
"_Mon Dieu, c'est Favette!_"
Thargelie Dumarsais shrank back in her rose velvet fauteuil as though
the blow of a dagger had struck her; the color fled from her lips, and
underneath the delicate rouge on her cheeks; her hand trembled as it
grasped the King's aigrette.
"Favette--Favette! Who calls me that?"
It was a forgotten name, the name of a bygone life that fell on her ear
with a strange familiar chime, breaking in on the wit, the license, the
laughter of her midnight supper, as the subdued and mournful sound of
vesper bells might fall upon the wild refrains and noisy drinking-songs
of bacchanalian melody.
A surprised silence fell upon the group, the laughter hushed, the voices
stopped; it was a strange interruption for a midnight supper. Thargelie
Dumarsais involuntarily rose, her lips white, her eyes fixed, her hand
clasped convulsively on the King's diamond. A vague, speechless terror
held mastery over her, an awe she could not shake off had fastened upon
her, as though the dead had risen from their graves, and come thither to
rebuke her for the past forgotten, the innocence lost. The roses in her
hair, the flowers of revel, touched a cheek blanched as though she
beheld some unearthly thing, and the hand that lay on the royal jewel
shook and trembled.
"Favette? Favette?" she echoed again. "It is so many years since I heard
that name!"
Her guests sat silent still, comprehending nothing of this single name
which had such power to move and startle her. Richelieu alone, leaning
back in his chair, leisurely picked out one of his brandy-cherries, and
waited as a man waits for the next scene at a theatre:
"Is it an unexpected tragedy, or an arranged comedy, ma chere? Ought one
to cry or to laugh? Give me the _mot d'ordre_!"
His words broke the spell, and called Thargelie Dumarsais back to the
world about her. Actress by profession and by nature, she rallied with a
laugh, putting out her jewelled hand with a languid glance from her long
almond-shaped eyes.
"A friend of early years, my dear Duc, that is all. Ah, Monsieur de
Tallemont what a strange rencontre! When did you come to Paris? I
scarcely knew you at the first moment; you have so long been an exile,
one may pardonably be startled by your apparition, and take you for a
ghost! I suppose you never dreamed of meeting Favette Fontanie under my
_nom de theatre_? Ah! how we change, do we not, Leon? Time is so short,
we have no time to stand still! Marie, ma chere, give Monsieur le
Chevalier a seat beside you--he cannot be happier placed!"
Leon de Tallemont heard not a word that she spoke; he stood like a man
stunned and paralyzed by a sudden and violent blow, his head bowed, a
mortal pallor changing his face to the hues of death, the features that
were a moment before bright, laughing, and careless, now set in mute and
rigid anguish.
"Favette! Favette!" he murmured, hoarsely, in the vague dreamy agony
with which a man calls wildly and futilely on the beloved dead to come
back to him from the silence and horror of the grave.
"Peste!" laughed Richelieu. "This cast-off lover seems a strange fellow!
Does he not know that absent people have never the presumption to dream
of keeping their places, but learn to give them graciously up!--shall I
teach him the lesson? If he have his sixteen quarterings, a prick of my
sword will soon punish his impudence!"
The jeer fell unheeded on Leon de Tallemont's ear; had he heard it, the
flippant sneer would have had no power to sting him then. Regardless of
the men around the supper-table, he grasped Thargelie Dumarsais's hands
in his:
"This is how we meet!"
She shrank away from his glance, terrified, she scarce knew why, at the
mute anguish upon his face.
Perhaps for a moment she realized how utterly she had abused the love
and wrecked the life of this man; perhaps with his voice came back to
her thronging thoughts of guileless days, memories ringing through the
haze of years, as distant chimes ring over the water from lands we have
quitted, reaching us when we have floated far away out to sea--memories
of an innocent and untroubled life, when she had watched the woodland
flowers open to the morning sun, and listened to the song of the brooks
murmuring over the violet roots, and heard the sweet evening song of the
birds rise to heaven under the deep vine shadows of Lorraine.
One moment she was silent, her eyes falling, troubled and guilty,
beneath his gaze; then she looked up, laughing gayly, and flashing on
him her languid lustrous glance.
"You look like a somnambulist, _mon ami_! Did nobody ever tell you,
then, how Mme. de la Vrilliere carried me off from Lorraine, and brought
me in her train to Paris, till, when Favette Fontanie was tired of being
petted like the spaniel, the monkey, and the parrot, she broke away from
Madame la Marquise, and made, after a little probation at the Foire St.
Laurent, her appearance at the Francais as Thargelie Dumarsais? _Allons
donc!_ have I lost my beauty, that you look at me thus? You should be
reminding me of the proverb, '_On revient toujours a ses premiers
amours!_' Surely, Thargelie Dumarsais will be as attractive to teach
such a lesson as that little peasant girl, Favette, used to be? Bah,
Leon! Can I not love you as well again in Paris as I once loved you at
Grande Charmille? And--who knows?--perhaps I will!"
She leaned towards him; her breath fanning his cheek, her scented hair
brushing his lips, her lustrous eyes meeting his with eloquent meaning,
her lips parted with the resistless witchery of that melting and
seductive _sourire d'amour_ to which they were so admirably trained. He
gazed down on her, breathless, silence-stricken--gazed down on the
sorceress beauty to which the innocent loveliness of his Lorraine flower
had changed. Was this woman, with the rouge upon her cheeks, the crimson
roses in her hair, the mocking light in her eyes, the wicked laugh on
her lips, the diamond glittering like a serpent's eye in her bosom--was
she the guileless child he had left weeping, on the broken steps of the
fountain, tears as pure as the dew in the violet-bells, with the summer
sunlight streaming round her, and no shade on her young brow darker than
the fleeting shadow flung from above by the vine-leaves? A cry broke
once more from his lips:
"Would to God I had died before to-night!"
Then he lifted his head, with a smile upon his face--a smile that
touched and vaguely terrified all those who saw it--the smile of a
breaking heart.
"I thank you for your proffered embraces, but _I_ am faithful. I love
but one, and I have lost her; Favette is dead! I know nothing of
Thargelie Dumarsais, the Courtesan."
He bowed low to her and left her--never to see her face again.
A silence fell on those he had quitted, even upon Richelieu; perhaps
even he realized that all beauty, faith, and joy were stricken from this
man's life; and--reality of feeling was an exile so universally banished
from the gay salons of the Dix-huitieme Siecle, that its intrusion awed
them as by the unwonted presence of some ghostly visitant.
Thargelie Dumarsais sat silent--her thoughts had flown away once more
from her brilliant supper-chamber to the fountain at Grande Charmille:
she was seeing the dragon-flies flutter among the elm-boughs, and the
water ripple over the wild thyme; she was feeling the old priest's
good-night kiss upon her brow, and her own hymn rise and mingle with the
chant of the vesper choir; she was hearing the song of the forest-birds
echo in the Lorraine woods, and a fond voice whisper to her, "Fear not,
Favette!--we shall meet as we part!"
Richelieu took up his Dresden saucer of cherries once more with a burst
of laughter.
"_Voila un drole!_--this fellow takes things seriously. What fools there
are in this world! It will be a charming little story for Versailles.
Dieu! how Louis will laugh when I tell it him! I fear though, ma cherie,
that the 'friend of your childhood' will make you lose your reputation
by his impolite epithets!"
"When one has nothing, one can lose nothing--eh, ma chere?" laughed
Marie Camargo. "Monsieur le Duc, she does not hear us----"
"No, _l'infidele_!" cried Richelieu. "Mademoiselle! I see plainly you
love this rude lover of bygone days better than you do us!--is it not
the truth?"
"Chut! nobody asks for truths in a polite age!" laughed Thargelie
Dumarsais, shaking off unwelcome memories once for all, and looking down
at the King's diamond gleaming in the light--the diamond that prophesied
to her the triumph of the King's love.
"Naturally," added La Camargo. "My friend, I shall die with envy of your
glorious jewel. _Dieu! comme il brille!_"
"DEADLY DASH."
A STORY TOLD ON THE OFF DAY.
On the off-day after the Derby everybody, except the great winners, is,
it will be generally admitted, the resigned prey to a certain gentle
sadness, not to say melancholy, that will only dissipate itself under a
prolonged regimen of S. and B., seidlitz well dashed with Amontillado,
or certain heavenly West Indian decoctions;--this indisposition, I would
suggest, we should call, delicately and dubiously, Epsomitis. It will
serve to describe innumerable forms and degrees of the reactionary
malady.
There is the severest shape of all, "dead money," that covers four
figures, dropped irretrievably, and lost to the "milkers;" lost always
_you_ say because of a cough, or because of a close finish, or because
of something dark, or because of a strain in the practising gallops, or
because of a couple of brutes that cannoned just at the start; and
never, of course, because the horse you had fancied was sheerly and
simply only fit for a plater. There is the second severe form, when you
awake with a cheerful expectation of a summons for driving "at twelve
miles an hour" (as if that wasn't moderate and discreet!), and for
thereby smashing a greengrocer's cart into the middle of next week, and
running a waggonette into an omnibus, as you came back from the Downs,
of which you have no more remembrance than that there was a crash, and
a smash, and a woman's screams, and a man's "d--n the swells!" and a
_tintamarre_ of roaring conductor and bellowing greengrocer, and
infuriated females, through which you dashed somehow with a cheer--more
shame for you--and a most inappropriate _l'Africaine_ chorus from the
men on your drag. There is the milder form, which is only the rueful
recollection of seeing, in a wild ecstasy, the chestnut with the white
blaze sweep with his superb stride to the front, and of having, in your
moment of rapturous gratitude to the red and blue, rushed,
unintentionally, during the discussion of Fortnum and Mason's hamper,
into a promise to take Euphrosyne Brown to Baden in August, where you
know very well she will cost you more than all your sums netted through
Gladiateur. There are the slenderer touches of the malady, which give
you, over your breakfast coffee, a certain dolorous meditation as to how
you could have been such a fool as to have placed all your trust in
Danebury, or to have put in a hole through Spring Cottage just what your
yacht costs for three months; which makes you wonder why on earth you
took that lot of actresses on to the hill, and threw money enough away
on them in those wages of idiotcy (or wages of sin, as your uncle the
dean would translate it), of cashmeres, eau de Cologne, gloves, and
bracelets, to have purchased those two weight-carriers offered you at
L600 the pair, and dirt-cheap at that; or which makes you only dully and
headachily conscious that you drank champagne up on the box-seat as if
you were a young fellow from Eton, and now pay for the juvenile folly,
as you know you deserve to do, when that beautiful white Burgundy at
your club, or your own cool perfect claret at home, seems to stare you
in the face and ask, "Why did you crack all those bottles of Dry on the
Downs?"
There are symptoms and varieties innumerable of the malady that I
propose shall be known henceforward as Epsomitis; therefore, the off-day
finds everybody more or less slightly done-up and mournful. Twenty-four
hours and the Oaks, if properly prepared for by a strictly medicinal
course of _brules-gueules_, as the Chasseurs say, smoked perseveringly,
will bring all patients round on the Friday; but during the twenty-four
hours a sense that all on and off the course is vanity and vexation of
spirit will generally and somnolently predominate in the universal and
fashionable disease of Epsomitis.