the spell of her dazzling glances, with such a picture before him as
Madame la Marquise, in her azure silk and her point d'Angleterre, with
her diamond pendants shaking among her hair, and her arched eyebrows
lifted imperiously! But he did; his lips pressed closer, his eyes
gleaming brighter. She changed her tone; it was soft, seductive,
reproachful, and the smile on her lips was tender--as tender as it ever
could be with the mockery that always lay under it; and it broke at last
the spell that bound him, as she whispered, "Ah! Gaston, you love me no
longer!"
"Not love you? O God!"
They were but five words, but they told Madame la Marquise of a passion
such as she had never roused, despite all her fascinations and
intrigues, in the lovers that crowded round her in the salons within, or
at Versailles, over the trees yonder, where love was gallantry, and all
was light comedy, with nothing so foolish as tragedy known.
He clasped her hands so closely that the sharp points of the diamond
rings cut his own, though he felt them not.
"Not love you? Great Heaven! Not love you? Near you, I forget my oath,
my vows, my God!--I forget all, save you, whom I adore, as, till I met
you, I adored my Church. Torture endured with you were dearer than
Paradise won alone! Once with you, I have no strength, you bow me to
your will as the wind bows the lime-leaf. Oh! woman, woman! could you
have no mercy, that with crowds round you daily worshipping your
slightest smile, you must needs bow _me_ down before your glance, as you
bow those who have no oaths to bind them, no need to scourge themselves
in midnight solitude for the mere crime of Thought? Had you no mercy,
that with all hearts yours, you must have mine to sear it and destroy
it? Have you not lives enough vowed to you, that you seek to blast mine
for ever? I was content, untroubled, till I met you; no woman's glance
stirred my heart, no woman's eyes haunted my vigils, no woman's voice
came in memory between my soul and prayer! What devil tempted you to
throw your spells over me--could you not leave _one_ man in peace?"
"Ah bah! the tempted love the game of temptation generally full as well
as the tempters!" thought Madame la Marquise, with an inward laugh.
Why did she allow such language to go unrebuked? Why did she, to whom
none dared to breathe any but words the most polished, and love vows the
most honeyed, permit herself to be addressed in such a strain? Possibly
it was very new to her, such energy as this, and such an outbreak of
passion amused her. At any rate she only drew her hands away, and her
brilliant brown eyes filled with tears;--tears _were_ to be had at
Versailles when needed, even her friend Montespan knew how to use them
as the worst weapons against the artillery of the Eveque de Comdom--and
her heart heaved under the filmy lace.
"Ah, Gaston! what words! 'What devil tempted me?' I know scarcely
whether love be angel or devil; he seems either or both! But you love me
little, unless in that name you recognize a plea for every madness and
every thought!"
The scarlet blood flushed over his face, and his eyes shone and gleamed
like fire, while he clenched his hands in a mortal anguish.
"Angel or devil? Ay! which, indeed! The one when it comes to us, the
other when it leaves us! You have roused love in me I shall bear to my
grave; but what gage have I that you give it me back? How do I know but
that even now you are trifling with me, mocking at me, smiling at the
beardless priest who is unlearned in all the gay gallantries of
libertine churchmen and soldierly courtiers? My Heaven! how know, as I
stand beside you, whether you pity or disdain me, love or scorn me?"
The passionate words broke in a torrent from his lips, stirred the
stillness of the summer eve with a fiery anguish little akin to it.
"Do I not love you?"
Her answer was simple; but as Leontine de Rennecourt spoke it, leaning
her cheek against his breast, with her eyes dazzling as the diamonds in
her hair, looking up into his by the light of the stars, they had an
eloquence far more dangerous than speech, and delirious to the senses as
magician's perfumes. His lips lingered on hers, and felt the loud fast
throbs of the heart she had won as he bent over her, pressing her closer
and closer to him--vanquished and conquered, as men in all ages and of
all creeds have been vanquished and conquered by women, all other
thoughts fleeing away into oblivion, all fears dying out, all vows
forgotten in the warm, living life of passion and of joy, that, for the
first time in a brief life, flooded his heart with its golden voluptuous
light.
"You love me? So be it," he murmured; "but beware what you do, my life
lies in your hands, and you must be mine till death part us!"
"Till my fancy change rather!" thought Madame la Marquise, as she put
her jewelled hand on his lips, her hair softly brushing his cheek, with
a touch as soft, and an odor as sweet, as the leaves of one of the roses
twining below.
Two men strolling below under the limes of Petite Foret--discussing the
last scandals of Versailles, talking of the ascendency of La Fontanges,
of the Spanish dress his Majesty had reassumed to please her, of the
Brinvilliers' Poudre de Succession, of the new chateau given to Pere de
la Chaise, of D'Aubigny's last extravagance and Lauzun's last mot, and
the last gossip about Bossuet and Mademoiselle de Mauleon, and all the
chit-chat of that varied day, glittering with wit and prolific of
poison--glanced up to the balcony by the light of the stars.
"That cursed priest!" muttered the younger, le Vicomte de Saint-Elix, as
he struck the head off a lily with his delicate cane.
"In a fool's paradise! Ah-ha! Madame la Marquise!" laughed the
other--the old Duc de Clos-Vougeot--taking a chocolate sweetmeat out of
his emerald-studded bonbonniere as they walked on, while the
lime-blossoms shook off in the summer night wind and dropped dead on the
grass beneath, laughing at the story of the box D'Artagnan had found in
Lauzun's rooms when he seized his papers, containing the portraits of
sixty women of high degree who had worshipped the resistless Captain of
the Guard, with critical and historical notices penned under each;
notices D'Artagnan and his aide could not help indiscreetly retailing,
in despite of the Bourbon command of secrecy--secrecy so necessary where
sixty beauties and saints were involved!
"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc de Clos-Vougeot, tapping his
bonbonniere, enamelled by Petitot: the Duc was old, and knew women well,
and knew the value and length of a paradise dependent on that most
fickle of butterflies--female fidelity; he had heard Ninon de Lenclos
try to persuade Scarron's wife to become a coquette, and Scarron's wife
in turn beseech Ninon to discontinue her coquetteries; had seen that,
however different their theories and practice, the result was the same;
and already guessed right, that if Paris had been universally won by the
one, its monarch would eventually be won by the other.
"A fool's paradise!"
The courtier was right, but the priest, had he heard him, would never
have believed; _his_ heaven shone in those dazzling eyes: till the eyes
closed in death, his heaven was safe! He had never loved, he had seen
nothing of women; he had come straight from the monastic gloom of a
Dominican abbey, in the very heart of the South, down in Languedoc,
where costly missals were his only idol, and rigid pietists, profoundly
ignorant of the ways and thoughts of their brethren of Paris, had reared
him up in anchorite rigidity, and scourged his mind with iron
philosophies and stoic-like doctrines of self-mortification that would
have repudiated the sophistries and ingenuities of Sanchez, Escobar, and
Mascarenhas, as suggestions of the very Master of Evil himself. From the
ascetic gloom of that Languedoc convent he had been brought straight, by
superior will, into the glare of the life at Versailles, that brilliant,
gorgeous, sparkling, bizarre life, scintillating with wit, brimful of
intrigue, crowded with the men and women who formed the Court of that
age and the History of the next; where he found every churchman an _abbe
galant_, and heard those who performed the mass jest at it with those
who attended it; where he found no lines marked of right and wrong, but
saw them all fused in a gay, tangled web of two court colors--Expediency
and Pleasure. A life that dazzled and tired his eyes, as the glitter of
lights in a room dazzles and tires the eyes of a man who comes suddenly
in from the dark night air, till he grew giddy and sick, and in the
midst of the gilded salons, or soft confessions of titled sinners, would
ask himself if indeed he could be the same man who had sat calm and
grave with the mellow sun streaming in on his missal-page in the
monastic gloom of the Languedoc abbey but so few brief months before,
when all this world of Versailles was unknown? The same man? Truly
not--never again the same, since Madame la Marquise had bent her brown
eyes upon him, been amused with his singular difference from all those
around her, had loved him as women loved at Versailles, and bowed him
down to her feet, before he guessed the name of the forbidden language
that stirred in his heart and rushed to his lips, untaught and unbidden.
"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc, sagaciously tapping his gold
bonbonniere. But many a paradise like it has dawned and faded, before
and since the Versailles of Louis Quatorze.
He loved, and Madame la Marquise loved him. Through one brief tumult of
struggle he passed: struggle between the creed of the Dominican abbey,
where no sin would have been held so thrice accursed, so unpardonable,
so deserving of the scourge and the stake as this--and the creed of the
Bourbon Court, where churchmen's gallantries were every-day gossip;
where the Abbe de Rance, ere he founded the saintly gloom of La Trappe,
scandalized town and court as much as Lauzun; where the Pere de la
Chaise smiled complacently on La Fontanges' ascendancy; where three
nobles rushed to pick up the handkerchief of that royal confessor, who
washed out with holy water the royal indiscretions, as you wash off
grains of dust with perfumed water; where the great and saintly Bishop
of Condom could be checked in a rebuking harangue, and have the tables
turned on him by a mischievous reference to Mademoiselle de Mauleon;
where life was intrigue for churchmen and laymen alike, and where the
abbe's rochet and the cardinal's scarlet covered the same vices as were
openly blazoned on the gold aiglettes of the Garde du Corps and the
costly lace of the Chambellan du Roi. A storm, brief and violent as the
summer storms that raged over Versailles, was roused between the
conflicting thoughts at war within him, between the principles deeply
rooted from long habit and stern belief, and the passions sprung up
unbidden with the sudden growth and gorgeous glow of a tropical
flower--a storm, brief and violent, a struggle, ended that night, when
he stood on the balcony with the woman he loved, felt her lips upon
his, and bowed down to her feet delirious and strengthless.
"I have won my wager with Adeline; I have vanquished _mon beau_ De
Launay," thought Madame la Marquise, smiling, two days after, as she
sat, en neglige, in her broidered chair, pulling Osmin's ears, and
stirring the frothy chocolate handed to her by her negro, Azor, brought
over in the suite of the African embassy from Ardra, full of monkeyish
espieglerie, and covered with gems--a priceless dwarf, black as ink, and
but two feet high, who could match any day with the Queen's little Moor.
"He amuses me with his vows of eternal love. Eternal love?--how _de
trop_ we should find it, here in Versailles! But it is amusing enough to
play at for a season. No, that is not half enough--he adores! This poor
Gaston!"
So in the salons of Versailles, and in the world, where Ninon reigned,
by the Court ladies, while they loitered in the new-made gardens of
Marly, among other similar things jested of was this new amour of Madame
de la Riviere for the young Pere de Launay. "She was always eccentric,
and he _was_ very handsome, and would have charming manners if he were
not so grave and so silent," the women averred; while the young nobles
swore that these meddling churchmen had always the best luck, whether in
amatory conquest, or on fat lands and rich revenues. What the Priest of
Languedoc thought a love that would outlast life, and repay him for
peace of conscience and heaven both lost, was only one of the passing
bubbles of gossip and scandal floating for an hour, amidst myriads like
it, on the glittering, fast-rushing, diamond-bright waters of life at
Versailles!
A new existence had dawned for him; far away in the dim dusky vista of
forgotten things, though in reality barely distant a few short months,
lay the old life in Languedoc, vague and unremembered as a passed
dream; with its calm routine, its monastic silence, its unvarying
alternations of study and prayer, its iron-bound thoughts, its rigid
creed. It had sunk away as the peaceful gray twilight of a summer's
night sinks away before the fiery burst of an artificial illumination,
and a new life had dawned for him, radiant, tumultuous, conflicting,
delicious--that dazzled his eyes with the magnificence of boundless
riches and unrestricted extravagance; that charmed his intellect with
the witty coruscations, the polished esprit, of an age unsurpassed for
genius, grace, and wit; and that swayed alike his heart, his
imagination, and his passions with the subtle intoxication of this syren
of Love, whose forbidden song had never before, in faintest echo, fallen
on his ear.
Far away in the dim, lifeless, pulseless past, sank the memory of the
old Dominican abbey, of all it had taught him, of all it had exacted, in
its iron, stoical, merciless creed. A new life had arisen for him, and
Gaston de Launay, waking from the semi-slumber of the living death he
had endured in Languedoc, and liked because he knew no other, was
happy--happy as a prisoner is in the wild delight with which he welcomes
the sunlight after lengthened imprisonment, happy as an opium-eater is
in the delicious delirium that succeeds the lulling softness of the
opiate.
"He loves me, poor Gaston! Bah! But how strangely he talks! If love were
this fiery, changeless, earnest thing with us that it is with him, what
in the world should we do with it? We should have to get a lettre de
cachet for it, and forbid it the Court; send it in exile to Pignerol, as
they have just done Lauzun. Love in earnest? We should lose the best
spice for our wine, the best toy for our games, and, mon Dieu! what
embroilments there would be! Love in earnest? Bagatell! Louise de la
Valliere shows us the folly of that; but for its Quixotisms she would
now be at Vaujours, instead of buried alive in that Rue St. Jacques,
with nothing to do but to weep for 'Louison,' count her beads, and
listen to M. de Condom's merciless eloquence! Like the king,
J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit.
People have no right to reproach each other with inconstancy; one's
caprices are not in one's own keeping; and one can no more help where
one's fancy blows, than that lime-leaf can help where the breeze chooses
to waft it. But poor Gaston! how make _him_ comprehend that?" thought
Madame la Marquise, as she turned, and smiled, and held out her warm,
jewelled hands, and listened once again to the words of the man who was
in her power as utterly as the bird in the power of the snake when it
has once looked up into the fatal eyes that lure it on to its doom.
"You will love me ever?" he would ask, resting his lips on her white low
brow.
"Ever!" would softly answer Madame la Marquise.
And her lover believed her: should his deity lie? He believed her! What
did he, fresh from the solitude of his monastery, gloomy and severe as
that of the Trappist abbey, with its perpetual silence, its lowered
glances, its shrouded faces, its ever-present "memento mori," know of
women's faith, of women's love, of the sense in which _they_ meant that
vow "for ever"? He believed her, and never asked what would be at the
end of a path strewn with such odorous flowers. Alone, it is true, in
moments when he paused to think, he stood aghast at the abyss into which
he had fallen, at the sin into which, a few months before, haughty and
stern in virtue against the temptation that had never entered his path,
he would have defied devils in legion to have lured him, yet into which
he had now plunged at the mere smile of a woman! Out of her presence,
out of her spells, standing by himself under the same skies that had
blooded over his days of peace in Languedoc, back on his heart, with a
sickening anguish, would come the weight of his sin; the burden of his
broken oaths, the scorch of that curse eternal which, by his creed, he
held drawn down on him here and hereafter; and Gaston de Launay would
struggle again against this idolatrous passion, which had come with its
fell delusion betwixt him and his God; struggle--vainly, idly--struggle,
only to hug closer the sin he loved while he loathed; only to drink
deeper of the draught whose voluptuous perfume was poison; only to
forget all, forsake all, dare all, at one whisper of her voice, one
glance of her eyes, one touch of the lips whose caress he held would be
bought by a curse through eternity.
Few women love aught "for ever," save, perchance, diamonds, lace, and
their own beauty, and Madame la Marquise was not one of those few;
certainly not--she had no desire to make herself singular in her
generation, and could set fashions much more likely to find disciples,
without reverting to anything so eccentric, plebeian, and out of date.
Love _one_ for ever! She would have thought it as terrible waste of her
fascinations, as for a jewel to shine in the solitude of its case,
looked on by only one pair of eyes, or for a priceless enamel, by
Petitot, to be only worn next the heart, shrouded away from the light of
day, hidden under the folds of linen and lace.
"Love one for ever?"--Madame la Marquise laughed at the thought, as she
stood dressed for a ball, after assisting at the representation of a
certain tragedy, called "Berenice" (in which Mesdames Deshoulieres and
De Sevigne, despite their esprit, alone of all Paris and the Court could
see no beauty), and glanced in the mirror at her radiant face, her
delicate skin, her raven curls, with their pendants shaking, her
snow-white arms, and her costly dress of the newest mode, its stomacher
gleaming one mass of gems. "Love one for ever? The droll idea! Is it
not enough that I have loved him once?"
It was more than enough for his rivals, who bitterly envied him; courtly
abbes, with polished smiles, and young chanoines, with scented curls and
velvet toques, courtiers, who piqued themselves on reputations only
second to Lauzun's, and men of the world, who laughed at this new
caprice of Madame la Marquise, alike bore no good will to this Languedoc
priest, and gave him a significant sneer, or a compliment that roused
his blood to fire, and stung him far worse than more open insult, when
they met in the salons, or crossed in the corridors, at Versailles or
Petite Foret.
"Those men! those men! Should he ever lose her to any one of them?" he
would think over and over again, clenching his hand, in impotent agony
of passion that he had not the sword and the license of a soldier to
strike them on the lips with his glove for the smile with which they
dared to speak her name; to make them wash out in blood under the trees,
before the sun was up, the laugh, the mot, the delicate satire, which
were worse to bear than a blow to the man who could not avenge them.
"Pardieu! Madame must be very unusually faithful to her handsome Priest;
she has smiled on no other for two months! What unparalleled fidelity!"
said the Vicomte de Saint-Elix, with petulant irritation.
"Jealous, Leonce?" laughed the old Duc, whom he spoke to, tapping the
medallion portrait on his bonbonniere. "Take comfort: when the weather
has been so long fixed, it is always near a change. Ah! M. de Launay
overhears! He looks as if he would slay us. Very unchristian in a
priest!"
Gaston de Launay overheard, as he stood by a _croisee_ at Petite Foret,
playing with Osmin--he liked even the dog, since the hand he loved so
often lay on its slender neck, and toyed with its silver chain. And,
sworn as he was to the service of his Church, sole mistress as his
Church had been, till Leontine de Rennecourt's eyes had lured him to his
desertion of her, apostate in his own eyes as such a thought confessed
him to have grown, he now loathed the garb of a priest, that bound his
hands from vengeance, and made him powerless before insult as a woman.
Fierce, ruthless longing for revenge upon these men seized on him;
devilish desires, the germ of which till that hour he never dreamt
slumbered within him, woke up into dangerous, vigorous life. Had he
lived in the world, its politic reserve, its courtly sneer, its light
gallantries, that passed the time and flattered amour-propre, its
dissimulated hate that smiled while plotting, and killed with poisoned
bonbons, would never have been learnt by him; and having long lived out
of it, having been suddenly plunged into its whirl, not guessing its
springs, ignorant of its diplomacies, its suave lies, termed good
breeding, its legeres philosophies, he knew nothing of the wisdom with
which its wise men forsook their loves and concealed their hatreds. Both
passions now sprung up in him at one birth, both the stronger for the
long years in which a chill, artificial, but unbroken calm, had chained
his very nature down, and fettered into an iron monotony, an unnatural
and colorless tranquillity, a character originally impetuous and vivid,
as the frosts of a winter chill into one cold, even, glassy surface, the
rapids of a tumultuous river. With the same force and strength with
which, in the old days in Languedoc, he had idolized and served his
Church, sparing himself no mortification, believing every iota of her
creed, carrying out her slightest rule with merciless self-examination,
so--the tide once turned the other way--so the priest now loved, so he
now hated.
"He is growing exigeant, jealous, presuming; he amuses me no longer--he
wearies. I must give him his conge," thought Madame la Marquise. "This
play at eternal passion is very amusing for a while, but, like all
things, gets tiresome when it has lasted some time. What does not? Poor
Gaston, it is his provincial ideas, but he will soon rub such off, and
find, like us all, that sincerity is troublesome, ever de trop, and
never profitable. He loves me--but bah! so does Saint-Elix, so do they
all, and a jealous husband like M. de Nesmond, _le drole!_ could
scarcely be worse than my young De Launay is growing!"
And Madame la Marquise glanced at her face in the mirror, and wished she
knew Madame de Maintenon's secret for the Breuvage Indien; wished she
had one of the _clefs de faveur_ to admit her to the Grande Salle du
Parlement; wished she had the _couronne d'Agrippine_ her friend Athenais
had just shown her; wished Le Brun were not now occupied on the ceiling
of the King's Grande Galerie, and were free to paint the frescoes of her
own new-built chapel; wished a thousand unattainable things, as spoilt
children of fortune will do, and swept down her chateau staircase a
little out of temper--she could not have told why--to receive her guests
at a fete given in honor of the marriage of Mademoiselle de Blois and
the Prince de Conti.