On the skirts of Le Berry stands a town which, watered by the Loire,
infallibly attracts the traveler’s eye. Sancerre crowns the topmost
height of a chain of hills, the last of the range that gives variety to
the Nivernais. The Loire floods the flats at the foot of these slopes,
leaving a yellow alluvium that is extremely fertile, excepting in those
places where it has deluged them with sand and destroyed them forever,
by one of those terrible risings which are also incidental to the
Vistula--the Loire of the northern coast.
The hill on which the houses of Sancerre are grouped is so far from the
river that the little river-port of Saint-Thibault thrives on the life
of Sancerre. There wine is shipped and oak staves are landed, with all
the produce brought from the upper and lower Loire. At the period when
this story begins the suspension bridges at Cosne and at Saint-Thibault
were already built. Travelers from Paris to Sancerre by the
southern road were no longer ferried across the river from Cosne to
Saint-Thibault; and this of itself is enough to show that the great
cross-shuffle of 1830 was a thing of the past, for the House of Orleans
has always had a care for substantial improvements, though somewhat
after the fashion of a husband who makes his wife presents out of her
marriage portion.
Excepting that part of Sancerre which occupies the little plateau, the
streets are more or less steep, and the town is surrounded by slopes
known as the Great Ramparts, a name which shows that they are the
highroads of the place.
Outside the ramparts lies a belt of vineyards. Wine forms the chief
industry and the most important trade of the country, which yields
several vintages of high-class wine full of aroma, and so nearly
resembling the wines of Burgundy, that the vulgar palate is deceived. So
Sancerre finds in the wineshops of Paris the quick market indispensable
for liquor that will not keep for more than seven or eight years. Below
the town lie a few villages, Fontenoy and Saint-Satur, almost suburbs,
reminding us by their situation of the smiling vineyards about Neuchatel
in Switzerland.
The town still bears much of its ancient aspect; the streets are narrow
and paved with pebbles carted up from the Loire. Some old houses are to
be seen there. The citadel, a relic of military power and feudal times,
stood one of the most terrible sieges of our religious wars, when French
Calvinists far outdid the ferocious Cameronians of Walter Scott’s tales.
The town of Sancerre, rich in its greater past, but widowed now of its
military importance, is doomed to an even less glorious future, for the
course of trade lies on the right bank of the Loire. The sketch here
given shows that Sancerre will be left more and more lonely in spite of
the two bridges connecting it with Cosne.
Sancerre, the pride of the left bank, numbers three thousand five
hundred inhabitants at most, while at Cosne there are now more than
six thousand. Within half a century the part played by these two
towns standing opposite each other has been reversed. The advantage of
situation, however, remains with the historic town, whence the view on
every side is perfectly enchanting, where the air is deliciously pure,
the vegetation splendid, and the residents, in harmony with nature,
are friendly souls, good fellows, and devoid of Puritanism, though
two-thirds of the population are Calvinists. Under such conditions,
though there are the usual disadvantages of life in a small town, and
each one lives under the officious eye which makes private life almost
a public concern, on the other hand, the spirit of township--a sort
of patriotism, which cannot indeed take the place of a love of
home--flourishes triumphantly.
Thus the town of Sancerre is exceedingly proud of having given birth to
one of the glories of modern medicine, Horace Bianchon, and to an
author of secondary rank, Etienne Lousteau, one of our most successful
journalists. The district included under the municipality of Sancerre,
distressed at finding itself practically ruled by seven or eight large
landowners, the wire-pullers of the elections, tried to shake off the
electoral yoke of a creed which had reduced it to a rotten borough.
This little conspiracy, plotted by a handful of men whose vanity was
provoked, failed through the jealousy which the elevation of one of
them, as the inevitable result, roused in the breasts of the others.
This result showed the radical defect of the scheme, and the remedy then
suggested was to rally round a champion at the next election, in the
person of one of the two men who so gloriously represented Sancerre in
Paris circles.
This idea was extraordinarily advanced for the provinces, for since 1830
the nomination of parochial dignitaries has increased so greatly that
real statesmen are becoming rare indeed in the lower chamber.
In point of fact, this plan, of very doubtful outcome, was hatched in
the brain of the Superior Woman of the borough, _dux femina fasti_, but
with a view to personal interest. This idea was so widely rooted in this
lady’s past life, and so entirely comprehended her future prospects,
that it can scarcely be understood without some sketch of her antecedent
career.
Sancerre at that time could boast of a Superior Woman, long misprized
indeed, but now, about 1836, enjoying a pretty extensive local
reputation. This, too, was the period at which two Sancerrois in Paris
were attaining, each in his own line, to the highest degree of glory
for one, and of fashion for the other. Etienne Lousteau, a writer in
reviews, signed his name to contributions to a paper that had eight
thousand subscribers; and Bianchon, already chief physician to a
hospital, Officer of the Legion of Honor, and member of the Academy of
Sciences, had just been made a professor.
If it were not that the word would to many readers seem to imply a
degree of blame, it might be said that George Sand created _Sandism_, so
true is it that, morally speaking, all good has a reverse of evil. This
leprosy of sentimentality would have been charming. Still, _Sandism_ has
its good side, in that the woman attacked by it bases her assumption of
superiority on feelings scorned; she is a blue-stocking of sentiment;
and she is rather less of a bore, love to some extent neutralizing
literature. The most conspicuous result of George Sand’s celebrity
was to elicit the fact that France has a perfectly enormous number of
superior women, who have, however, till now been so generous as to leave
the field to the Marechal de Saxe’s granddaughter.
The Superior Woman of Sancerre lived at La Baudraye, a town-house
and country-house in one, within ten minutes of the town, and in the
village, or, if you will, the suburb of Saint-Satur. The La Baudrayes of
the present day have, as is frequently the case, thrust themselves in,
and are but a substitute for those La Baudrayes whose name, glorious in
the Crusades, figured in the chief events of the history of Le Berry.
The story must be told.
In the time of Louis XIV. a certain sheriff named Milaud, whose
forefathers had been furious Calvinists, was converted at the time of
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. To encourage this movement in
one of the strong-holds of Calvinism, the King gave said Milaud a good
appointment in the “Waters and Forests,” granted him arms and the title
of Sire (or Lord) de la Baudraye, with the fief of the old and genuine
La Baudrayes. The descendants of the famous Captain la Baudraye fell,
sad to say, into one of the snares laid for heretics by the new decrees,
and were hanged--an unworthy deed of the great King’s.
Under Louis XV. Milaud de la Baudraye, from being a mere squire,
was made Chevalier, and had influence enough to obtain for his son
a cornet’s commission in the Musketeers. This officer perished at
Fontenoy, leaving a child, to whom King Louis XVI. subsequently granted
the privileges, by patent, of a farmer-general, in remembrance of his
father’s death on the field of battle.
This financier, a fashionable wit, great at charades, capping verses,
and posies to Chlora, lived in society, was a hanger-on to the Duc
de Nivernais, and fancied himself obliged to follow the nobility into
exile; but he took care to carry his money with him. Thus the rich
_emigre_ was able to assist more than one family of high rank.
In 1800, tired of hoping, and perhaps tired of lending, he returned
to Sancerre, bought back La Baudraye out of a feeling of vanity and
imaginary pride, quite intelligible in a sheriff’s grandson, though
under the consulate his prospects were but slender; all the more so,
indeed, because the ex-farmer-general had small hopes of his heir’s
perpetuating the new race of La Baudraye.
Jean Athanase Polydore Milaud de la Baudraye, his only son, more than
delicate from his birth, was very evidently the child of a man whose
constitution had early been exhausted by the excesses in which rich men
indulge, who then marry at the first stage of premature old age, and
thus bring degeneracy into the highest circles of society. During the
years of the emigration Madame de la Baudraye, a girl of no fortune,
chosen for her noble birth, had patiently reared this sallow, sickly
boy, for whom she had the devoted love mothers feel for such changeling
creatures. Her death--she was a Casteran de la Tour--contributed to
bring about Monsieur de la Baudraye’s return to France.
This Lucullus of the Milauds, when he died, left his son the fief,
stripped indeed of its fines and dues, but graced with weathercocks
bearing his coat-of-arms, a thousand louis-d’or--in 1802 a considerable
sum of money--and certain receipts for claims on very distinguished
_emigres_ enclosed in a pocketbook full of verses, with this inscription
on the wrapper, _Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas_.
Young La Baudraye did not die, but he owed his life to habits of
monastic strictness; to the economy of action which Fontenelle preached
as the religion of the invalid; and, above all, to the air of Sancerre
and the influence of its fine elevation, whence a panorama over the
valley of the Loire may be seen extending for forty leagues.
From 1802 to 1815 young La Baudraye added several plots to his
vineyards, and devoted himself to the culture of the vine. The
Restoration seemed to him at first so insecure that he dared not go to
Paris to claim his debts; but after Napoleon’s death he tried to
turn his father’s collection of autographs into money, though not
understanding the deep philosophy which had thus mixed up I O U’s and
copies of verses. But the winegrower lost so much time in impressing his
identity on the Duke of Navarreins “and others,” as he phrased it,
that he came back to Sancerre, to his beloved vintage, without having
obtained anything but offers of service.
The Restoration had raised the nobility to such a degree of lustre as
made La Baudraye wish to justify his ambitions by having an heir. This
happy result of matrimony he considered doubtful, or he would not so
long have postponed the step; however, finding himself still above
ground in 1823, at the age of forty-three, a length of years which no
doctor, astrologer, or midwife would have dared to promise him, he hoped
to earn the reward of his sober life. And yet his choice showed such a
lack of prudence in regard to his frail constitution, that the malicious
wit of a country town could not help thinking it must be the result of
some deep calculation.
Just at this time His Eminence, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Bourges,
had converted to the Catholic faith a young person, the daughter of one
of the citizen families, who were the first upholders of Calvinism, and
who, thanks to their obscurity or to some compromise with Heaven, had
escaped from the persecutions under Louis XIV. The Piedefers--a name
that was obviously one of the quaint nicknames assumed by the champions
of the Reformation--had set up as highly respectable cloth merchants.
But in the reign of Louis XVI., Abraham Piedefer fell into difficulties,
and at his death in 1786 left his two children in extreme poverty. One
of them, Tobie Piedefer, went out to the Indies, leaving the pittance
they had inherited to his elder brother. During the Revolution Moise
Piedefer bought up the nationalized land, pulled down abbeys and
churches with all the zeal of his ancestors, oddly enough, and married
a Catholic, the only daughter of a member of the Convention who had
perished on the scaffold. This ambitious Piedefer died in 1819, leaving
a little girl of remarkable beauty. This child, brought up in the
Calvinist faith, was named Dinah, in accordance with the custom in use
among the sect, of taking their Christian names from the Bible, so as to
have nothing in common with the Saints of the Roman Church.
Mademoiselle Dinah Piedefer was placed by her mother in one of the best
schools in Bourges, that kept by the Demoiselles Chamarolles, and was
soon as highly distinguished for the qualities of her mind as for her
beauty; but she found herself snubbed by girls of birth and fortune,
destined by-and-by to play a greater part in the world than a mere
plebeian, the daughter of a mother who was dependent on the settlement
of Piedefer’s estate. Dinah, having raised herself for the moment above
her companions, now aimed at remaining on a level with them for the rest
of her life. She determined, therefore, to renounce Calvinism, in the
hope that the Cardinal would extend his favor to his proselyte
and interest himself in her prospects. You may from this judge of
Mademoiselle Dinah’s superiority, since at the age of seventeen she was
a convert solely from ambition.
The Archbishop, possessed with the idea that Dinah Piedefer would adorn
society, was anxious to see her married. But every family to whom the
prelate made advances took fright at a damsel gifted with the looks of
a princess, who was reputed to be the cleverest of Mademoiselle
Chamarolles’ pupils and who, at the somewhat theatrical ceremonial of
prize-giving, always took a leading part. A thousand crowns a year,
which was as much as she could hope for from the estate of La Hautoy
when divided between the mother and daughter, would be a mere trifle in
comparison with the expenses into which a husband would be led by the
personal advantages of so brilliant a creature.
As soon as all these facts came to the ears of little Polydore de la
Baudraye--for they were the talk of every circle in the Department of
the Cher--he went to Bourges just when Madame Piedefer, a devotee at
high services, had almost made up her own mind and her daughter’s to
take the first comer with well-lined pockets--the first _chien coiffe_,
as they say in Le Berry. And if the Cardinal was delighted to receive
Monsieur de la Baudraye, Monsieur de la Baudraye was even better pleased
to receive a wife from the hands of the Cardinal. The little gentleman
only demanded of His Eminence a formal promise to support his claims
with the President of the Council to enable him to recover his debts
from the Duc de Navarreins “and others” by a lien on their indemnities.
This method, however, seemed to the able Minister then occupying the
Pavillon Marsan rather too sharp practice, and he gave the vine-owner to
understand that his business should be attended to all in good time.
It is easy to imagine the excitement produced in the Sancerre district
by the news of Monsieur de la Baudraye’s imprudent marriage.
“It is quite intelligible,” said President Boirouge; “the little man was
very much startled, as I am told, at hearing that handsome young Milaud,
the Attorney-General’s deputy at Nevers, say to Monsieur de Clagny as
they were looking at the turrets of La Baudraye, ‘That will be
mine some day.’--‘But,’ says Clagny, ‘he may marry and have
children.’--‘Impossible!’--So you may imagine how such a changeling as
little La Baudraye must hate that colossal Milaud.”
There was at Nevers a plebeian branch of the Milauds, which had grown so
rich in the cutlery trade that the present representative of that branch
had been brought up to the civil service, in which he had enjoyed the
patronage of Marchangy, now dead.
It will be as well to eliminate from this story, in which moral
developments play the principal part, the baser material interests which
alone occupied Monsieur de la Baudraye, by briefly relating the results
of his negotiations in Paris. This will also throw light on certain
mysterious phenomena of contemporary history, and the underground
difficulties in matters of politics which hampered the Ministry at the
time of the Restoration.
The promises of Ministers were so illusory that Monsieur de la Baudraye
determined on going to Paris at the time when the Cardinal’s presence
was required there by the sitting of the Chambers.
This is how the Duc de Navarreins, the principal debtor threatened by
Monsieur de la Baudraye, got out of the scrape.
The country gentleman, lodging at the Hotel de Mayence, Rue
Saint-Honore, near the Place Vendome, one morning received a visit from
a confidential agent of the Ministry, who was an expert in “winding up”
business. This elegant personage, who stepped out of an elegant cab, and
was dressed in the most elegant style, was requested to walk up to No.
3--that is to say, to the third floor, to a small room where he found
his provincial concocting a cup of coffee over his bedroom fire.
“Is it to Monsieur Milaud de la Baudraye that I have the honor--”
“Yes,” said the little man, draping himself in his dressing-gown.
After examining this garment, the illicit offspring of an old chine
wrapper of Madame Piedefer’s and a gown of the late lamented Madame de
la Baudraye, the emissary considered the man, the dressing-gown, and
the little stove on which the milk was boiling in a tin saucepan, as so
homogeneous and characteristic, that he deemed it needless to beat about
the bush.
“I will lay a wager, monsieur,” said he, audaciously, “that you dine for
forty sous at Hurbain’s in the Palais Royal.”
“Pray, why?”
“Oh, I know you, having seen you there,” replied the Parisian with
perfect gravity. “All the princes’ creditors dine there. You know that
you recover scarcely ten per cent on debts from these fine gentlemen.
I would not give you five per cent on a debt to be recovered from
the estate of the late Duc d’Orleans--nor even,” he added in a low
voice--“from MONSIEUR.”
“So you have come to buy up the bills?” said La Baudraye, thinking
himself very clever.
“Buy them!” said his visitor. “Why, what do you take me for? I am
Monsieur des Lupeaulx, Master of Appeals, Secretary-General to the
Ministry, and I have come to propose an arrangement.”
“What is that?”
“Of course, monsieur, you know the position of your debtor--”
“Of my debtors--”
“Well, monsieur, you understand the position of your debtors; they stand
high in the King’s good graces, but they have no money, and are obliged
to make a good show.--Again, you know the difficulties of the political
situation. The aristocracy has to be rehabilitated in the face of a very
strong force of the third estate. The King’s idea--and France does
him scant justice--is to create a peerage as a national institution
analogous to the English peerage. To realize this grand idea we need
years--and millions.--_Noblesse oblige_. The Duc de Navarreins, who is,
as you know, first gentleman of the Bedchamber to the King, does not
repudiate his debt; but he cannot--Now, be reasonable.--Consider the
state of politics. We are emerging from the pit of the Revolution.--and
you yourself are noble--He simply cannot pay--”
“Monsieur--”
“You are hasty,” said des Lupeaulx. “Listen. He cannot pay in money.
Well, then; you, a clever man, can take payment in favors--Royal or
Ministerial.”
“What! When in 1793 my father put down one hundred thousand--”
“My dear sir, recrimination is useless. Listen to a simple statement in
political arithmetic: The collectorship at Sancerre is vacant; a certain
paymaster-general of the forces has a claim on it, but he has no chance
of getting it; you have the chance--and no claim. You will get the
place. You will hold it for three months, you will then resign, and
Monsieur Gravier will give twenty thousand francs for it. In addition,
the Order of the Legion of Honor will be conferred on you.”
“Well, that is something,” said the wine-grower, tempted by the money
rather than by the red ribbon.
“But then,” said des Lupeaulx, “you must show your gratitude to His
Excellency by restoring to Monseigneur the Duc de Navarreins all your
claims on him.”
La Baudraye returned to Sancerre as Collector of Taxes. Six months
later he was superseded by Monsieur Gravier, regarded as one of the most
agreeable financiers who had served under the Empire, and who was of
course presented by Monsieur de la Baudraye to his wife.
As soon as he was released from his functions, Monsieur de la Baudraye
returned to Paris to come to an understanding with some other debtors.
This time he was made a Referendary under the Great Seal, Baron, and
Officer of the Legion of Honor. He sold the appointment as Referendary;
and then the Baron de la Baudraye called on his last remaining debtors,
and reappeared at Sancerre as Master of Appeals, with an appointment
as Royal Commissioner to a commercial association established in the
Nivernais, at a salary of six thousand francs, an absolute sinecure. So
the worthy La Baudraye, who was supposed to have committed a financial
blunder, had, in fact, done very good business in the choice of a wife.
Thanks to sordid economy and an indemnity paid him for the estate
belonging to his father, nationalized and sold in 1793, by the year 1827
the little man could realize the dream of his whole life. By paying
four hundred thousand francs down, and binding himself to further
instalments, which compelled him to live for six years on the air as it
came, to use his own expression, he was able to purchase the estate of
Anzy on the banks of the Loire, about two leagues above Sancerre, and
its magnificent castle built by Philibert de l’Orme, the admiration of
every connoisseur, and for five centuries the property of the Uxelles
family. At last he was one of the great landowners of the province!
It is not absolutely certain that the satisfaction of knowing that an
entail had been created, by letters patent dated back to December 1820,
including the estates of Anzy, of La Baudraye, and of La Hautoy, was
any compensation to Dinah on finding herself reduced to unconfessed
penuriousness till 1835.
This sketch of the financial policy of the first Baron de la Baudraye
explains the man completely. Those who are familiar with the manias of
country folks will recognize in him the _land-hunger_ which becomes such
a consuming passion to the exclusion of every other; a sort of avarice
displayed in the sight of the sun, which often leads to ruin by a want
of balance between the interest on mortgages and the products of the
soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely laughed at the little
man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault and attending to his
business, like a merchant living on his vineyards, found the answer to
the riddle when the ant-lion seized his prey, after waiting for the day
when the extravagance of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse culminated in the
sale of that splendid property.
Madame Piedefer came to live with her daughter. The combined fortunes of
Monsieur de la Baudraye and his mother-in-law, who had been content to
accept an annuity of twelve hundred francs on the lands of La Hautoy
which she handed over to him, amounted to an acknowledged income of
about fifteen thousand francs.
During the early days of her married life, Dinah had effected some
alterations which had made the house at La Baudraye a very pleasant
residence. She turned a spacious forecourt into a formal garden, pulling
down wine-stores, presses, and shabby outhouses. Behind the manor-house,
which, though small, did not lack style with its turrets and gables,
she laid out a second garden with shrubs, flower-beds, and lawns, and
divided it from the vineyards by a wall hidden under creepers. She
also made everything within doors as comfortable as their narrow
circumstances allowed.
In order not to be ruined by a young lady so very superior as Dinah
seemed to be, Monsieur de la Baudraye was shrewd enough to say nothing
as to the recovery of debts in Paris. This dead secrecy as to his money
matters gave a touch of mystery to his character, and lent him dignity
in his wife’s eyes during the first years of their married life--so
majestic is silence!
The alterations effected at La Baudraye made everybody eager to see the
young mistress, all the more so because Dinah would never show herself,
nor receive any company, before she felt quite settled in her home and
had thoroughly studied the inhabitants, and, above all, her taciturn
husband. When, one spring morning in 1825, pretty Madame de la Baudraye
was first seen walking on the Mall in a blue velvet dress, with her
mother in black velvet, there was quite an excitement in Sancerre. This
dress confirmed the young woman’s reputation for superiority, brought
up, as she had been, in the capital of Le Berry. Every one was afraid
lest in entertaining this phoenix of the Department, the conversation
should not be clever enough; and, of course, everybody was constrained
in the presence of Madame de la Baudraye, who produced a sort of terror
among the woman-folk. As they admired a carpet of Indian shawl-pattern
in the La Baudraye drawing-room, a Pompadour writing-table carved and
gilt, brocade window curtains, and a Japanese bowl full of flowers on
the round table among a selection of the newest books; when they heard
the fair Dinah playing at sight, without making the smallest demur
before seating herself at the piano, the idea they conceived of her
superiority assumed vast proportions. That she might never allow herself
to become careless or the victim of bad taste, Dinah had determined to
keep herself up to the mark as to the fashions and latest developments
of luxury by an active correspondence with Anna Grossetete, her bosom
friend at Mademoiselle Chamarolles’ school.
Anna, thanks to a fine fortune, had married the Comte de Fontaine’s
third son. Thus those ladies who visited at La Baudraye were perpetually
piqued by Dinah’s success in leading the fashion; do what they would,
they were always behind, or, as they say on the turf, distanced.
While all these trifles gave rise to malignant envy in the ladies of
Sancerre, Dinah’s conversation and wit engendered absolute aversion.
In her ambition to keep her mind on the level of Parisian brilliancy,
Madame de la Baudraye allowed no vacuous small talk in her presence, no
old-fashioned compliments, no pointless remarks; she would never endure
the yelping of tittle-tattle, the backstairs slander which forms the
staple of talk in the country. She liked to hear of discoveries in
science or art, or the latest pieces at the theatres, the newest poems,
and by airing the cant words of the day she made a show of uttering
thoughts.
The Abbe Duret, Cure of Sancerre, an old man of a lost type of clergy
in France, a man of the world with a liking for cards, had not dared to
indulge this taste in so liberal a district as Sancerre; he, therefore,
was delighted at Madame de la Baudraye’s coming, and they got on
together to admiration. The _sous-prefet_, one Vicomte de Chargeboeuf,
was delighted to find in Madame de la Baudraye’s drawing-room a sort
of oasis where there was a truce to provincial life. As to Monsieur de
Clagny, the Public Prosecutor, his admiration for the fair Dinah kept
him bound to Sancerre. The enthusiastic lawyer refused all promotion,
and became a quite pious adorer of this angel of grace and beauty. He
was a tall, lean man, with a minatory countenance set off by terrible
eyes in deep black circles, under enormous eyebrows; and his eloquence,
very unlike his love-making, could be incisive.
Monsieur Gravier was a little, round man, who in the days of the Empire
had been a charming ballad-singer; it was this accomplishment that had
won him the high position of Paymaster-General of the forces. Having
mixed himself up in certain important matters in Spain with generals at
that time in opposition, he had made the most of these connections to
the Minister, who, in consideration of the place he had lost, promised
him the Receivership at Sancerre, and then allowed him to pay for the
appointment. The frivolous spirit and light tone of the Empire had
become ponderous in Monsieur Gravier; he did not, or would not,
understand the wide difference between manners under the Restoration
and under the Empire. Still, he conceived of himself as far superior
to Monsieur de Clagny; his style was in better taste; he followed the
fashion, was to be seen in a buff waistcoat, gray trousers, and neat,
tightly-fitting coats; he wore a fashionable silk tie slipped through
a diamond ring, while the lawyer never dressed in anything but
black--coat, trousers, and waistcoat alike, and those often shabby.
These four men were the first to go into ecstasies over Dinah’s
cultivation, good taste, and refinement, and pronounced her a woman of
most superior mind. Then the women said to each other, “Madame de la
Baudraye must laugh at us behind our back.”
This view, which was more or less correct, kept them from visiting at La
Baudraye. Dinah, attainted and convicted of pedantry, because she
spoke grammatically, was nicknamed the Sappho of Saint-Satur. At last
everybody made insolent game of the great qualities of the woman who
had thus roused the enmity of the ladies of Sancerre. And they ended by
denying a superiority--after all, merely comparative!--which emphasized
their ignorance, and did not forgive it. Where the whole population is
hunch-backed, a straight shape is the monstrosity; Dinah was regarded as
monstrous and dangerous, and she found herself in a desert.
Astonished at seeing the women of the neighborhood only at long
intervals, and for visits of a few minutes, Dinah asked Monsieur de
Clagny the reason of this state of things.
“You are too superior a woman to be liked by other women,” said the
lawyer.
Monsieur Gravier, when questioned by the forlorn fair, only, after much
entreaty, replied:
“Well, lady fair, you are not satisfied to be merely charming. You are
clever and well educated, you know every book that comes out, you love
poetry, you are a musician, and you talk delightfully. Women cannot
forgive so much superiority.”
Men said to Monsieur de la Baudraye:
“You who have such a Superior Woman for a wife are very fortunate----”
And at last he himself would say:
“I who have a Superior Woman for a wife, am very fortunate,” etc.
Madame Piedefer, flattered through her daughter, also allowed herself to
say such things--“My daughter, who is a very Superior Woman, was writing
yesterday to Madame de Fontaine such and such a thing.”
Those who know the world--France, Paris--know how true it is that many
celebrities are thus created.
Two years later, by the end of the year 1825, Dinah de la Baudraye was
accused of not choosing to have any visitors but men; then it was said
that she did not care for women--and that was a crime. Not a thing
could she do, not her most trifling action, could escape criticism and
misrepresentation. After making every sacrifice that a well-bred woman
can make, and placing herself entirely in the right, Madame de la
Baudraye was so rash as to say to a false friend who condoled with her
on her isolation:
“I would rather have my bowl empty than with anything in it!”
This speech produced a terrible effect on Sancerre, and was cruelly
retorted on the Sappho of Saint-Satur when, seeing her childless after
five years of married life, _little_ de la Baudraye became a byword
for laughter. To understand this provincial witticism, readers may be
reminded of the Bailli de Ferrette--some, no doubt, having known him--of
whom it was said that he was the bravest man in Europe for daring to
walk on his legs, and who was accused of putting lead in his shoes to
save himself from being blown away. Monsieur de la Baudraye, a sallow
and almost diaphanous creature, would have been engaged by the Bailli de
Ferrette as first gentleman-in-waiting if that diplomatist had been the
Grand Duke of Baden instead of being merely his envoy.
Monsieur de la Baudraye, whose legs were so thin that, for mere decency,
he wore false calves, whose thighs were like the arms of an average
man, whose body was not unlike that of a cockchafer, would have been an
advantageous foil to the Bailli de Ferrette. As he walked, the little
vine-owner’s leg-pads often twisted round on to his shins, so little did
he make a secret of them, and he would thank any one who warned him of
this little mishap. He wore knee-breeches, black silk stockings, and a
white waistcoat till 1824. After his marriage he adopted blue trousers
and boots with heels, which made Sancerre declare that he had added two
inches to his stature that he might come up to his wife’s chin. For ten
years he was always seen in the same little bottle-green coat with large
white-metal buttons, and a black stock that accentuated his cold stingy
face, lighted up by gray-blue eyes as keen and passionless as a cat’s.
Being very gentle, as men are who act on a fixed plan of conduct, he
seemed to make his wife happy by never contradicting her; he allowed
her to do the talking, and was satisfied to move with the deliberate
tenacity of an insect.
Dinah, adored for her beauty, in which she had no rival, and admired
for her cleverness by the most gentlemanly men of the place, encouraged
their admiration by conversations, for which it was subsequently
asserted, she prepared herself beforehand. Finding herself listened to
with rapture, she soon began to listen to herself, enjoyed haranguing
her audience, and at last regarded her friends as the chorus in a
tragedy, there only to give her her cues. In fact, she had a very
fine collection of phrases and ideas, derived either from books or by
assimilating the opinions of her companions, and thus became a sort of
mechanical instrument, going off on a round of phrases as soon as some
chance remark released the spring. To do her justice, Dinah was choke
full of knowledge, and read everything, even medical books, statistics,
science, and jurisprudence; for she did not know how to spend her
days when she had reviewed her flower-beds and given her orders to the
gardener. Gifted with an excellent memory, and the talent which some
women have for hitting on the right word, she could talk on any subject
with the lucidity of a studied style. And so men came from Cosne, from
la Charite, and from Nevers, on the right bank; from Lere, Vailly,
Argent, Blancafort, and Aubigny, on the left bank, to be introduced to
Madame de la Baudraye, as they used in Switzerland, to be introduced to
Madame de Stael. Those who only once heard the round of tunes emitted by
this musical snuff-box went away amazed, and told such wonders of Dinah
as made all the women jealous for ten leagues round.
There is an indescribable mental headiness in the admiration we inspire,
or in the effect of playing a part, which fends off criticism from
reaching the idol. An atmosphere, produced perhaps by unceasing nervous
tension, forms a sort of halo, through which the world below is seen.
How otherwise can we account for the perennial good faith which leads
to so many repeated presentments of the same effects, and the constant
ignoring of warnings given by children, such a terror to their parents,
or by husbands, so familiar as they are with the peacock airs of their
wives? Monsieur de la Baudraye had the frankness of a man who opens an
umbrella at the first drop of rain. When his wife was started on the
subject of Negro emancipation or the improvement of convict prisons,
he would take up his little blue cap and vanish without a sound, in the
certainty of being able to get to Saint-Thibault to see off a cargo of
puncheons, and return an hour later to find the discussion approaching a
close. Or, if he had no business to attend to, he would go for a walk on
the Mall, whence he commanded the lovely panorama of the Loire valley,
and take a draught of fresh air while his wife was performing a sonata
in words, or a dialectical duet.
Once fairly established as a Superior Woman, Dinah was eager to prove
her devotion to the most remarkable creations of art. She threw herself
into the propaganda of the romantic school, including, under Art, poetry
and painting, literature and sculpture, furniture and the opera. Thus
she became a mediaevalist. She was also interested in any treasures that
dated from the Renaissance, and employed her allies as so many devoted
commission agents. Soon after she was married, she had become possessed
of the Rougets’ furniture, sold at Issoudun early in 1824. She purchased
some very good things at Nivernais and the Haute-Loire. At the New
Year and on her birthday her friends never failed to give her some
curiosities. These fancies found favor in the eyes of Monsieur de la
Baudraye; they gave him an appearance of sacrificing a few crowns to his
wife’s taste. In point of fact, his land mania allowed him to think of
nothing but the estate of Anzy.
These “antiquities” at that time cost much less than modern furniture.
By the end of five or six years the ante-room, the dining-room, the two
drawing-rooms, and the boudoir which Dinah had arranged on the ground
floor of La Baudraye, every spot even to the staircase, were crammed
with masterpieces collected in the four adjacent departments. These
surroundings, which were called _queer_ by the neighbors, were quite in
harmony with Dinah. All these Marvels, so soon to be the rage, struck
the imagination of the strangers introduced to her; they came expecting
something unusual; and they found their expectations surpassed when,
behind a bower of flowers, they saw these catacombs full of old things,
piled up as Sommerard used to pile them--that “Old Mortality” of
furniture. And then these finds served as so many springs which, turned
on by a question, played off an essay on Jean Goujon, Michel Columb,
Germain Pilon, Boulle, Van Huysum, and Boucher, the great native painter
of Le Berry; on Clodion, the carver of wood, on Venetian mirrors, on
Brustolone, an Italian tenor who was the Michael-Angelo of boxwood
and holm oak; on the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries, on the glazes of Bernard de Palissy, the enamels
of Petitot, the engravings of Albrecht Durer--whom she called Dur;
on illuminations on vellum, on Gothic architecture, early decorated,
flamboyant and pure--enough to turn an old man’s brain and fire a young
man with enthusiasm.
Madame de la Baudraye, possessed with the idea of waking up Sancerre,
tried to form a so-called literary circle. The Presiding Judge, Monsieur
Boirouge, who happened to have a house and garden on his hands, part of
the Popinot-Chandier property, favored the notion of this _coterie_.
The wily Judge talked over the rules of the society with Madame de la
Baudraye; he proposed to figure as one of the founders, and to let the
house for fifteen years to the literary club. By the time it had existed
a year the members were playing dominoes, billiards, and bouillotte, and
drinking mulled wine, punch, and liqueurs. A few elegant little suppers
were then given, and some masked balls during the Carnival. As to
literature--there were the newspapers. Politics and business were
discussed. Monsieur de la Baudraye was constantly there--on his wife’s
account, as she said jestingly.
This result deeply grieved the Superior Woman, who despaired of
Sancerre, and collected the wit of the neighborhood in her own
drawing-room. Nevertheless, and in spite of the efforts of Messieurs de
Chargeboeuf, Gravier, and de Clagny, of the Abbe Duret and the two chief
magistrates, of a young doctor, and a young Assistant Judge--all blind
admirers of Dinah’s--there were occasions when, weary of discussion,
they allowed themselves an excursion into the domain of agreeable
frivolity which constitutes the common basis of worldly conversation.
Monsieur Gravier called this “from grave to gay.” The Abbe Duret’s
rubber made another pleasing variety on the monologues of the oracle.
The three rivals, tired of keeping their minds up to the level of the
“high range of discussion”--as they called their conversation--but not
daring to confess it, would sometimes turn with ingratiating hints to
the old priest.
“Monsieur le Cure is dying for his game,” they would say.
The wily priest lent himself very readily to the little trick. He
protested.
“We should lose too much by ceasing to listen to our inspired hostess!”
and so he would incite Dinah’s magnanimity to take pity at last on her
dear Abbe.
This bold manoeuvre, a device of the Sous-prefet’s, was repeated with
so much skill that Dinah never suspected her slaves of escaping to the
prison yard, so to speak, of the cardtable; and they would leave her one
of the younger functionaries to harry.
One young landowner, and the dandy of Sancerre, fell away from Dinah’s
good graces in consequence of some rash demonstrations. After soliciting
the honor of admission to this little circle, where he flattered himself
he could snatch the blossom from the constituted authorities who guarded
it, he was so unfortunate as to yawn in the middle of an explanation
Dinah was favoring him with--for the fourth time, it is true--of the
philosophy of Kant. Monsieur de la Thaumassiere, the grandson of the
historian of Le Berry, was thenceforth regarded as a man entirely bereft
of soul and brains.
The three devotees _en titre_ each submitted to these exorbitant demands
on their mind and attention, in hope of a crowning triumph, when at last
Dinah should become human; for neither of them was so bold as to imagine
that Dinah would give up her innocence as a wife till she should have
lost all her illusions. In 1826, when she was surrounded by adorers,
Dinah completed her twentieth year, and the Abbe Duret kept her in
a sort of fervid Catholicism; so her worshipers had to be content to
overwhelm her with little attentions and small services, only too happy
to be taken for the carpet-knights of this sovereign lady, by strangers
admitted to spend an evening or two at La Baudraye.
“Madame de la Baudraye is a fruit that must be left to ripen.” This was
the opinion of Monsieur Gravier, who was waiting.
As to the lawyer, he wrote letters four pages long, to which Dinah
replied in soothing speech as she walked, leaning on his arm, round and
round the lawn after dinner.
Madame de la Baudraye, thus guarded by three passions, and always under
the eye of her pious mother, escaped the malignity of slander. It was so
evident to all Sancerre that no two of these three men would ever leave
the third alone with Madame de la Baudraye, that their jealousy was a
comedy to the lookers-on.
To reach Saint-Thibault from Caesar’s Gate there is a way much shorter
than that by the ramparts, down what is known in mountainous districts
as a _coursiere_, called at Sancerre _le Casse-cou_, or Break-neck
Alley. The name is significant as applied to a path down the steepest
part of the hillside, thickly strewn with stones, and shut in by the
high banks of the vineyards on each side. By way of the Break-neck the
distance from Sancerre to La Baudraye is much abridged. The ladies of
the place, jealous of the Sappho of Saint-Satur, were wont to walk on
the Mall, looking down this Longchamp of the bigwigs, whom they would
stop and engage in conversation--sometimes the Sous-prefet and
sometimes the Public Prosecutor--and who would listen with every sign of
impatience or uncivil absence of mind. As the turrets of La Baudraye are
visible from the Mall, many a younger man came to contemplate the abode
of Dinah while envying the ten or twelve privileged persons who might
spend their afternoons with the Queen of the neighborhood.
Monsieur de la Baudraye was not slow to discover the advantage he, as
Dinah’s husband, held over his wife’s adorers, and he made use of them
without any disguise, obtaining a remission of taxes, and gaining two
lawsuits. In every litigation he used the Public Prosecutor’s name with
such good effect that the matter was carried no further, and, like all
undersized men, he was contentious and litigious in business, though in
the gentlest manner.
At the same time, the more certainly guiltless she was, the less
conceivable did Madame de la Baudraye’s position seem to the prying eyes
of these women. Frequently, at the house of the Presidente de Boirouge,
the ladies of a certain age would spend a whole evening discussing
the La Baudraye household, among themselves of course. They all had
suspicions of a mystery, a secret such as always interests women who
have had some experience of life. And, in fact, at La Baudraye one of
those slow and monotonous conjugal tragedies was being played out which
would have remained for ever unknown if the merciless scalpel of the
nineteenth century, guided by the insistent demand for novelty, had not
dissected the darkest corners of the heart, or at any rate those which
the decency of past centuries left unopened. And that domestic drama
sufficiently accounts for Dinah’s immaculate virtue during her early
married life.
A young lady, whose triumphs at school had been the outcome of her
pride, and whose first scheme in life had been rewarded by a victory,
was not likely to pause in such a brilliant career. Frail as Monsieur
de la Baudraye might seem, he was really an unhoped-for good match for
Mademoiselle Dinah Piedefer. But what was the hidden motive of this
country landowner when, at forty-four, he married a girl of seventeen;
and what could his wife make out of the bargain? This was the text of
Dinah’s first meditations.
The little man never behaved quite as his wife expected. To begin with,
he allowed her to take the five precious acres now wasted in pleasure
grounds round La Baudraye, and paid, almost with generosity, the seven
or eight thousand francs required by Dinah for improvements in the
house, enabling her to buy the furniture at the Rougets’ sale at
Issoudun, and to redecorate her rooms in various styles--Mediaeval,
Louis XIV., and Pompadour. The young wife found it difficult to believe
that Monsieur de la Baudraye was so miserly as he was reputed, or else
she must have great influence with him. The illusion lasted a year and a
half.
After Monsieur de la Baudraye’s second journey to Paris, Dinah
discovered in him the Artic coldness of a provincial miser whenever
money was in question. The first time she asked for supplies she played
the sweetest of the comedies of which Eve invented the secret; but
the little man put it plainly to his wife that he gave her two hundred
francs a month for her personal expenses, and paid Madame Piedefer
twelve hundred francs a year as a charge on the lands of La Hautoy, and
that this was two hundred francs a year more than was agreed to under
the marriage settlement.
“I say nothing of the cost of housekeeping,” he said in conclusion. “You
may give your friends cake and tea in the evening, for you must have
some amusement. But I, who spent but fifteen hundred francs a year as a
bachelor, now spend six thousand, including rates and repairs, and
this is rather too much in relation to the nature of our property. A
winegrower is never sure of what his expenses may be--the making, the
duty, the casks--while the returns depend on a scorching day or a sudden
frost. Small owners, like us, whose income is far from being fixed, must
base their estimates on their minimum, for they have no means of making
up a deficit or a loss. What would become of us if a wine merchant
became bankrupt? In my opinion, promissory notes are so many
cabbage-leaves. To live as we are living, we ought always to have
a year’s income in hand and count on no more than two-thirds of our
returns.”
Any form of resistance is enough to make a woman vow to subdue it; Dinah
flung herself against a will of iron padded round with gentleness. She
tried to fill the little man’s soul with jealousy and alarms, but it
was stockaded with insolent confidence. He left Dinah, when he went to
Paris, with all the conviction of Medor in Angelique’s fidelity. When
she affected cold disdain, to nettle this changeling by the scorn a
courtesan sometimes shows to her “protector,” and which acts on him with
the certainty of the screw of a winepress, Monsieur de la Baudraye gazed
at his wife with fixed eyes, like those of a cat which, in the midst of
domestic broils, waits till a blow is threatened before stirring from
its place. The strange, speechless uneasiness that was perceptible under
his mute indifference almost terrified the young wife of twenty; she
could not at first understand the selfish quiescence of this man, who
might be compared to a cracked pot, and who, in order to live, regulated
his existence with the unchangeable regularity which a clockmaker
requires of a clock. So the little man always evaded his wife, while she
always hit out, as it were, ten feet above his head.
Dinah’s fits of fury when she saw herself condemned never to escape from
La Baudraye and Sancerre are more easily imagined than described--she
who had dreamed of handling a fortune and managing the dwarf whom she,
the giant, had at first humored in order to command. In the hope of some
day making her appearance on the greater stage of Paris, she accepted
the vulgar incense of her attendant knights with a view to seeing
Monsieur de la Baudraye’s name drawn from the electoral urn; for she
supposed him to be ambitious, after seeing him return thrice from Paris,
each time a step higher on the social ladder. But when she struck on the
man’s heart, it was as though she had tapped on marble! The man who had
been Receiver-General and Referendary, who was now Master of Appeals,
Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Royal Commissioner, was but a mole
throwing up its little hills round and round a vineyard! Then some
lamentations were poured into the heart of the Public Prosecutor, of the
Sous-prefet, even of Monsieur Gravier, and they all increased in
their devotion to this sublime victim; for, like all women, she never
mentioned her speculative schemes, and--again like all women--finding
such speculation vain, she ceased to speculate.
Dinah, tossed by mental storms, was still undecided when, in the autumn
of 1827, the news was told of the purchase by the Baron de la Baudraye
of the estate of Anzy. Then the little old man showed an impulsion of
pride and glee which for a few months changed the current of his wife’s
ideas; she fancied there was a hidden vein of greatness in the man when
she found him applying for a patent of entail. In his triumph the Baron
exclaimed:
“Dinah, you shall be a countess yet!”
There was then a patched-up reunion between the husband and wife, such
as can never endure, and which only humiliated and fatigued a woman
whose apparent superiority was unreal, while her unseen superiority was
genuine. This whimsical medley is commoner than people think. Dinah, who
was ridiculous from the perversity of her cleverness, had really great
qualities of soul, but circumstances did not bring these rarer powers to
light, while a provincial life debased the small change of her wit from
day to day. Monsieur de la Baudraye, on the contrary, devoid of soul, of
strength, and of wit, was fated to figure as a man of character, simply
by pursuing a plan of conduct which he was too feeble to change.
There was in their lives a first phase, lasting six years, during which
Dinah, alas! became utterly provincial. In Paris there are several kinds
of women: the duchess and the financier’s wife, the ambassadress and the
consul’s wife, the wife of the minister who is a minister, and of him
who is no longer a minister; then there is the lady--quite the lady--of
the right bank of the Seine and of the left. But in the country there is
but one kind of woman, and she, poor thing, is the provincial woman.
This remark points to one of the sores of modern society. It must be
clearly understood: France in the nineteenth century is divided into two
broad zones--Paris, and the provinces. The provinces jealous of Paris;
Paris never thinking of the provinces but to demand money. Of old, Paris
was the Capital of the provinces, and the court ruled the Capital; now,
all Paris is the Court, and all the country is the town.
However lofty, beautiful, and clever a girl born in any department of
France may be on entering life, if, like Dinah Piedefer, she marries
in the country and remains there, she inevitably becomes the provincial
woman. In spite of every determination, the commonplace of second-rate
ideas, indifference to dress, the culture of vulgar people, swamp the
sublimer essence hidden in the youthful plant; all is over, it falls
into decay. How should it be otherwise? From their earliest years
girls bred in the country see none but provincials; they cannot imagine
anything superior, their choice lies among mediocrities; provincial
fathers marry their daughters to provincial sons; crossing the races is
never thought of, and the brain inevitably degenerates, so that in many
country towns intellect is as rare as the breed is hideous. Mankind
becomes dwarfed in mind and body, for the fatal principle of conformity
of fortune governs every matrimonial alliance. Men of talent, artists,
superior brains--every bird of brilliant plumage flies to Paris. The
provincial woman, inferior in herself, is also inferior through
her husband. How is she to live happy under this crushing twofold
consciousness?
But there is a third and terrible element besides her congenital and
conjugal inferiority which contributes to make the figure arid and
gloomy; to reduce it, narrow it, distort it fatally. Is not one of the
most flattering unctions a woman can lay to her soul the assurance of
being something in the existence of a superior man, chosen by herself,
wittingly, as if to have some revenge on marriage, wherein her tastes
were so little consulted? But if in the country the husbands are
inferior beings, the bachelors are no less so. When a provincial wife
commits her “little sin,” she falls in love with some so-called handsome
native, some indigenous dandy, a youth who wears gloves and is supposed
to ride well; but she knows at the bottom of her soul that her fancy
is in pursuit of the commonplace, more or less well dressed. Dinah was
preserved from this danger by the idea impressed upon her of her own
superiority. Even if she had not been as carefully guarded in her early
married life as she was by her mother, whose presence never weighed upon
her till the day when she wanted to be rid of it, her pride, and her
high sense of her own destinies, would have protected her. Flattered as
she was to find herself surrounded by admirers, she saw no lover
among them. No man here realized the poetical ideal which she and Anna
Grossetete had been wont to sketch. When, stirred by the involuntary
temptations suggested by the homage she received, she asked herself, “If
I had to make a choice, who should it be?” she owned to a preference for
Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, a gentleman of good family, whose appearance
and manners she liked, but whose cold nature, selfishness, and narrow
ambition, never rising above a prefecture and a good marriage, repelled
her. At a word from his family, who were alarmed lest he should be
killed for an intrigue, the Vicomte had already deserted a woman he had
loved in the town where he previously had been Sous-prefet.
Monsieur de Clagny, on the other hand, the only man whose mind appealed
to hers, whose ambition was founded on love, and who knew what love
means, Dinah thought perfectly odious. When Dinah saw herself condemned
to six years’ residence at Sancerre she was on the point of accepting
the devotion of Monsieur le Vicomte de Chargeboeuf; but he was appointed
to a prefecture and left the district. To Monsieur de Clagny’s great
satisfaction, the new Sous-prefet was a married man whose wife made
friends with Dinah. The lawyer had now no rival to fear but Monsieur
Gravier. Now Monsieur Gravier was the typical man of forty of whom women
make use while they laugh at him, whose hopes they intentionally and
remorselessly encourage, as we are kind to a beast of burden. In six
years, among all the men who were introduced to her from twenty leagues
round, there was not one in whose presence Dinah was conscious of the
excitement caused by personal beauty, by a belief in promised happiness,
by the impact of a superior soul, or the anticipation of a love affair,
even an unhappy one.
Thus none of Dinah’s choicest faculties had a chance of developing;
she swallowed many insults to her pride, which was constantly suffering
under the husband who so calmly walked the stage as supernumerary in the
drama of her life. Compelled to bury her wealth of love, she showed only
the surface to the world. Now and then she would try to rouse herself,
try to form some manly resolution; but she was kept in leading strings
by the need for money. And so, slowly and in spite of the ambitious
protests and grievous recriminations of her own mind, she underwent
the provincial metamorphosis here described. Each day took with it a
fragment of her spirited determination. She had laid down a rule for the
care of her person, which she gradually departed from. Though at first
she kept up with the fashions and the little novelties of elegant life,
she was obliged to limit her purchases by the amount of her allowance.
Instead of six hats, caps, or gowns, she resigned herself to one gown
each season. She was so much admired in a certain bonnet that she made
it do duty for two seasons. So it was in everything.
Not unfrequently her artistic sense led her to sacrifice the
requirements of her person to secure some bit of Gothic furniture. By
the seventh year she had come so low as to think it convenient to
have her morning dresses made at home by the best needlewoman in the
neighborhood; and her mother, her husband, and her friends pronounced
her charming in these inexpensive costumes which did credit to her
taste. Her ideas were imitated! As she had no standard of comparison,
Dinah fell into the snares that surround the provincial woman. If a
Parisian woman’s hips are too narrow or too full, her inventive wit and
the desire to please help to find some heroic remedy; if she has some
defect, some ugly spot, or small disfigurement, she is capable of making
it an adornment; this is often seen; but the provincial woman--never! If
her waist is too short and her figure ill balanced, well, she makes up
her mind to the worst, and her adorers--or they do not adore her--must
take her as she is, while the Parisian always insists on being taken for
what she is not. Hence the preposterous bustles, the audacious flatness,
the ridiculous fulness, the hideous outlines ingeniously displayed, to
which a whole town will become accustomed, but which are so astounding
when a provincial woman makes her appearance in Paris or among
Parisians. Dinah, who was extremely slim, showed it off to excess, and
never knew a dull moment when it became ridiculous; when, reduced by the
dull weariness of her life, she looked like a skeleton in clothes; and
her friends, seeing her every day, did not observe the gradual change in
her appearance.
This is one of the natural results of a provincial life. In spite of
marriage, a young woman preserves her beauty for some time, and the town
is proud of her; but everybody sees her every day, and when people meet
every day their perception is dulled. If, like Madame de la Baudraye,
she loses her color, it is scarcely noticed; or, again, if she flushes
a little, that is intelligible and interesting. A little neglect is
thought charming, and her face is so carefully studied, so well known,
that slight changes are scarcely noticed, and regarded at last as
“beauty spots.” When Dinah ceased to have a new dress with a new season,
she seemed to have made a concession to the philosophy of the place.
It is the same with matters of speech, choice of words and ideas, as it
is with matters of feeling. The mind can rust as well as the body if
it is not rubbed up in Paris; but the thing on which provincialism
most sets its stamp is gesture, gait, and movement; these soon lose the
briskness which Paris constantly keeps alive. The provincial is used to
walk and move in a world devoid of accident or change, there is nothing
to be avoided; so in Paris she walks on as raw recruits do, never
remembering that there may be hindrances, for there are none in her
way in her native place, where she is known, where she is always in her
place, and every one makes way for her. Thus she loses all the charm of
the unforeseen.
And have you ever noticed the effect on human beings of a life in
common? By the ineffaceable instinct of simian mimicry they all tend to
copy each other. Each one, without knowing it, acquires the gestures,
the tone of voice, the manner, the attitudes, the very countenance of
others. In six years Dinah had sunk to the pitch of the society she
lived in. As she acquired Monsieur de Clagny’s ideas she assumed his
tone of voice; she unconsciously fell into masculine manners from seeing
none but men; she fancied that by laughing at what was ridiculous in
them she was safe from catching it; but, as often happens, some hue of
what she laughed at remained in the grain.
A Parisian woman sees so many examples of good taste that a contrary
result ensues. In Paris women learn to seize the hour and moment when
they may appear to advantage; while Madame de la Baudraye, accustomed
to take the stage, acquired an indefinable theatrical and domineering
manner, the air of a _prima donna_ coming forward on the boards, of
which ironical smiles would soon have cured her in the capital.
But after she had acquired this stock of absurdities, and, deceived by
her worshipers, imagined them to be added graces, a moment of terrible
awakening came upon her like the fall of an avalanche from a mountain.
In one day she was crushed by a frightful comparison.
In 1829, after the departure of Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, she was excited
by the anticipation of a little pleasure; she was expecting the Baronne
de Fontaine. Anna’s husband, who was now Director-General under the
Minister of Finance, took advantage of leave of absence on the occasion
of his father’s death to take his wife to Italy. Anna wished to spend
the day at Sancerre with her school-friend. This meeting was strangely
disastrous. Anna, who at school had been far less handsome than Dinah,
now, as Baronne de Fontaine, was a thousand times handsomer than the
Baronne de la Baudraye, in spite of her fatigue and her traveling
dress. Anna stepped out of an elegant traveling chaise loaded with Paris
milliners’ boxes, and she had with her a lady’s maid, whose airs quite
frightened Dinah. All the difference between a woman of Paris and a
provincial was at once evident to Dinah’s intelligent eye; she saw
herself as her friend saw her--and Anna found her altered beyond
recognition. Anna spent six thousand francs a year on herself alone, as
much as kept the whole household at La Baudraye.
In twenty-four hours the friends had exchanged many confidences; and the
Parisian, seeing herself so far superior to the phoenix of Mademoiselle
Chamarolles’ school, showed her provincial friend such kindness, such
attentions, while giving her certain explanations, as were so many stabs
to Dinah, though she perfectly understood that Anna’s advantages all lay
on the surface, while her own were for ever buried.
When Anna had left, Madame de la Baudraye, by this time two-and-twenty,
fell into the depths of despair.
“What is it that ails you?” asked Monsieur de Clagny, seeing her so
dejected.
“Anna,” said she, “has learned to live, while I have been learning to
endure.”
A tragi-comedy was, in fact, being enacted in Madame de la Baudraye’s
house, in harmony with her struggles over money matters and her
successive transformations--a drama to which no one but Monsieur de
Clagny and the Abbe Duret ever knew the clue, when Dinah in sheer
idleness, or perhaps sheer vanity, revealed the secret of her anonymous
fame.
Though a mixture of verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French
literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be
one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of
narrative; for to give a just idea of the unconfessed struggle which
may excuse, though it cannot absolve Dinah, it is necessary to give an
analysis of a poem which was the outcome of her deep despair.
Her patience and her resignation alike broken by the departure of the
Vicomte de Chargeboeuf, Dinah took the worthy Abbe’s advice to exhale
her evil thoughts in verse--a proceeding which perhaps accounts for some
poets.
“You will find such relief as those who write epitaphs or elegies over
those whom they have lost. Pain is soothed in the heart as lines surge
up in the brain.”
This strange production caused a great ferment in the departments of
the Allier, the Nievre, and the Cher, proud to possess a poet capable
of rivalry with the glories of Paris. _Paquita la Sevillane_, by
_Jan Diaz_, was published in the _Echo du Morvan_, a review which
for eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial
indifference. Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz
was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric
verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced
by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, and
Romanesque mannerisms.
The poem began with this ballad:
Ah! if you knew the fragrant plain,
The air, the sky, of golden Spain,
Its fervid noons, its balmy spring,
Sad daughters of the northern gloom,
Of love, of heav’n, of native home,
You never would presume to sing!
For men are there of other mould
Than those who live in this dull cold.
And there to music low and sweet
Sevillian maids, from eve till dawn,
Dance lightly on the moonlit lawn
In satin shoes, on dainty feet.
Ah, you would be the first to blush
Over your dancers’ romp and rush,
And your too hideous carnival,
That turns your cheeks all chill and blue,
And skips the mud in hob-nail’d shoe--
A truly dismal festival.
To pale-faced girls, and in a squalid room,
Paquita sang; the murky town beneath
Was Rouen whence the slender spires rise
To chew the storm with teeth.
Rouen so hideous, noisy, full of rage--
And here followed a magnificent description of Rouen--where Dinah had
never been--written with the affected brutality which, a little later,
inspired so many imitations of Juvenal; a contrast drawn between the
life of a manufacturing town and the careless life of Spain, between
the love of Heaven and of human beauty, and the worship of machinery, in
short, between poetry and sordid money-making.
Then Jan Diaz accounted for Paquita’s horror of Normandy by saying:
Seville, you see, had been her native home,
Seville, where skies are blue and evening sweet.
She, at thirteen, the sovereign of the town,
Had lovers at her feet.
For her three Toreadors had gone to death
Or victory, the prize to be a kiss--
One kiss from those red lips of sweetest breath--
A longed-for touch of bliss!
The features of the Spanish girl’s portrait have served so often as
those of the courtesan in so many self-styled _poems_, that it would be
tiresome to quote here the hundred lines of description. To judge of the
lengths to which audacity had carried Dinah, it will be enough to give
the conclusion. According to Madame de la Baudraye’s ardent pen, Paquita
was so entirely created for love that she can hardly have met with a
knight worthy of her; for
.... In her passionate fire
Every man would have swooned from the heat,
When she at love’s feast, in her fervid desire,
As yet had but taken her seat.
“And yet she could quit the joys of Seville, its woods and fields of
orange-trees, for a Norman soldier who won her love and carried her away
to his hearth and home. She did not weep for her Andalusia, the Soldier
was her whole joy.... But the day came when he was compelled to start
for Russia in the footsteps of the great Emperor.”
Nothing could be more dainty than the description of the parting between
the Spanish girl and the Normandy Captain of Artillery, who, in the
delirium of passion expressed with feeling worthy of Byron, exacted from
Paquita a vow of absolute fidelity, in the Cathedral at Rouen in front
of the alter of the Blessed Virgin, who
Though a Maid is a woman, and never forgives
When lovers are false to their vows.
A large part of the poem was devoted to describing Paquita’s sufferings
when alone in Rouen waiting till the campaign was over; she stood
writhing at the window bars as she watched happy couples go by; she
suppressed her passion in her heart with a determination that consumed
her; she lived on narcotics, and exhausted herself in dreams.
Almost she died, but still her heart was true;
And when at last her soldier came again,
He found her beauty ever fresh and new--
He had not loved in vain!
“But he, pale and frozen by the cold of Russia, chilled to the very
marrow, met his yearning fair one with a melancholy smile.”
The whole poem was written up to this situation, which was worked out
with such vigor and boldness as too entirely justified the Abbe Duret.
Paquita, on reaching the limits set to real love, did not, like Julie
and Heloise, throw herself into the ideal; no, she rushed into the paths
of vice, which is, no doubt, shockingly natural; but she did it without
any touch of magnificence, for lack of means, as it would be difficult
to find in Rouen men impassioned enough to place Paquita in a suitable
setting of luxury and splendor. This horrible realism, emphasized by
gloomy poetic feeling, had inspired some passages such as modern poetry
is too free with, rather too like the flayed anatomical figures known to
artists as _ecorches_. Then, by a highly philosophical revulsion, after
describing the house of ill-fame where the Andalusian ended her days,
the writer came back to the ballad at the opening:
Paquita now is faded, shrunk, and old,
But she it was who sang:
“If you but knew the fragrant plain,
The air, the sky, of golden Spain,” etc.
The gloomy vigor of this poem, running to about six hundred lines,
and serving as a powerful foil, to use a painter’s word, to the two
_seguidillas_ at the beginning and end, the masculine utterance of
inexpressible grief, alarmed the woman who found herself admired by
three departments, under the black cloak of the anonymous. While she
fully enjoyed the intoxicating delights of success, Dinah dreaded the
malignity of provincial society, where more than one woman, if the
secret should slip out, would certainly find points of resemblance
between the writer and Paquita. Reflection came too late; Dinah
shuddered with shame at having made “copy” of some of her woes.
“Write no more,” said the Abbe Duret. “You will cease to be a woman; you
will be a poet.”
Moulins, Nevers, Bourges were searched to find Jan Diaz; but Dinah was
impenetrable. To remove any evil impression, in case any unforeseen
chance should betray her name, she wrote a charming poem in two cantos
on _The Mass-Oak_, a legend of the Nivernais:
“Once upon a time the folks of Nevers and the folks of Saint-Saulge, at
war with each other, came at daybreak to fight a battle, in which one or
other should perish, and met in the forest of Faye. And then there stood
between them, under an oak, a priest whose aspect in the morning sun was
so commanding that the foes at his bidding heard Mass as he performed it
under the oak, and at the words of the Gospel they made friends.”--The
oak is still shown in the forest of Faye.
This poem, immeasurably superior to _Paquita la Sevillane_, was far less
admired.
After these two attempts Madame de la Baudraye, feeling herself a poet,
had a light on her brow and a flash in her eyes that made her handsomer
than ever. She cast longing looks at Paris, aspiring to fame--and fell
back into her den of La Baudraye, her daily squabbles with her husband,
and her little circle, where everybody’s character, intentions, and
remarks were too well known not to have become a bore. Though she found
relief from her dreary life in literary work, and poetry echoed loudly
in her empty life, though she thus found an outlet for her energies,
literature increased her hatred of the gray and ponderous provincial
atmosphere.
When, after the Revolution of 1830, the glory of George Sand was
reflected on Le Berry, many a town envied La Chatre the privilege of
having given birth to this rival of Madame de Stael and Camille Maupin,
and were ready to do homage to minor feminine talent. Thus there arose
in France a vast number of tenth Muses, young girls or young wives
tempted from a silent life by the bait of glory. Very strange doctrines
were proclaimed as to the part women should play in society. Though the
sound common sense which lies at the root of the French nature was not
perverted, women were suffered to express ideas and profess opinions
which they would not have owned to a few years previously.
Monsieur de Clagny took advantage of this outbreak of freedom to
collect the works of Jan Diaz in a small volume printed by Desroziers at
Moulins. He wrote a little notice of the author, too early snatched from
the world of letters, which was amusing to those who were in the secret,
but which even then had not the merit of novelty. Such practical jokes,
capital so long as the author remains unknown, fall rather flat if
subsequently the poet stands confessed.
From this point of view, however, the memoir of Jan Diaz, born at
Bourges in 1807, the son of a Spanish prisoner, may very likely some
day deceive the compiler of some _Universal Biography_. Nothing is
overlooked; neither the names of the professors at the Bourges College,
nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and
other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy,
melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called
_Tristesse_ (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems _Paquita la
Sevillane_ and _Le Chene de la Messe_; three sonnets, a description of
the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale
called _Carola_, published as the work he was engaged on at the time
of his death, constituted the whole of these literary remains; and the
poet’s last hours, full of misery and despair, could not fail to wring
the hearts of the feeling public of the Nievre, the Bourbonnais, the
Cher, and the Morvan, where he died near Chateau-Chinon, unknown to all,
even to the woman he had loved!
Of this little yellow paper volume two hundred copies were printed;
one hundred and fifty were sold--about fifty in each department. This
average of tender and poetic souls in three departments of France is
enough to revive the enthusiasm of writers as to the _Furia Francese_,
which nowadays is more apt to expend itself in business than in books.
When Monsieur de Clagny had given away a certain number of copies,
Dinah still had seven or eight, wrapped up in the newspapers which had
published notices of the work. Twenty copies forwarded to the Paris
papers were swamped in the editors’ offices. Nathan was taken in as well
as several of his fellow-countrymen of Le Berry, and wrote an article on
the great man, in which he credited him with all the fine qualities we
discover in those who are dead and buried.
Lousteau, warned by his fellow-schoolfellows, who could not remember Jan
Diaz, waited for information from Sancerre, and learned that Jan Diaz
was a pseudonym assumed by a woman.
Then, in and around Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye became the rage; she
was the future rival of George Sand. From Sancerre to Bourges a poem was
praised which, at any other time, would certainly have been hooted. The
provincial public--like every French public, perhaps--does not share the
love of the King of the French for the happy medium: it lifts you to the
skies or drags you in the mud.
By this time the good Abbe, Madame de la Baudraye’s counselor, was dead;
he would certainly have prevented her rushing into public life. But
three years of work without recognition weighed on Dinah’s soul, and
she accepted the clatter of fame as a substitute for her disappointed
ambitions. Poetry and dreams of celebrity, which had lulled her grief
since her meeting with Anna Grossetete, no longer sufficed to exhaust
the activity of her morbid heart. The Abbe Duret, who had talked of the
world when the voice of religion was impotent, who understood Dinah, and
promised her a happy future by assuring her that God would compensate
her for her sufferings bravely endured,--this good old man could no
longer stand between the opening to sin and the handsome young woman he
had called his daughter.
The wise old priest had more than once endeavored to enlighten Dinah
as to her husband’s character, telling her that the man could hate; but
women are not ready to believe in such force in weak natures, and hatred
is too constantly in action not to be a vital force. Dinah, finding her
husband incapable of love, denied him the power to hate.
“Do not confound hatred and vengeance,” said the Abbe. “They are two
different sentiments. One is the instinct of small minds; the other is
the outcome of law which great souls obey. God is avenged, but He does
not hate. Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all
their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny. So beware
of offending Monsieur de la Baudraye; he would forgive an infidelity,
because he could make capital of it, but he would be doubly implacable
if you should touch him on the spot so cruelly wounded by Monsieur
Milaud of Nevers, and would make your life unendurable.”
Now, at the time when the whole countryside--Nevers and Sancerre, Le
Morvan and Le Berry--was priding itself on Madame de la Baudraye, and
lauding her under the name of Jan Diaz, “little La Baudraye” felt her
glory a mortal blow. He alone knew the secret source of _Paquita la
Sevillane_. When this terrible work was spoken of, everybody said of
Dinah--“Poor woman! Poor soul!”
The women rejoiced in being able to pity her who had so long oppressed
them; never had Dinah seemed to stand higher in the eyes of the
neighborhood.
The shriveled old man, more wrinkled, yellower, feebler than ever, gave
no sign; but Dinah sometimes detected in his eyes, as he looked at her,
a sort of icy venom which gave the lie to his increased politeness
and gentleness. She understood at last that this was not, as she had
supposed, a mere domestic squabble; but when she forced an explanation
with her “insect,” as Monsieur Gravier called him, she found the cold,
hard impassibility of steel. She flew into a passion; she reproached
him for her life these eleven years past; she made--intentionally--what
women call a scene. But “little La Baudraye” sat in an armchair with his
eyes shut, and listened phlegmatically to the storm. And, as usual, the
dwarf got the better of his wife. Dinah saw that she had done wrong in
writing; she vowed never to write another line, and she kept her vow.
Then was there desolation in the Sancerrois.
“Why did not Madame de la Baudraye compose any more verses?” was the
universal cry.
At this time Madame de la Baudraye had no enemies; every one rushed to
see her, not a week passed without fresh introductions. The wife of the
presiding judge, an august _bourgeoise_, _nee_ Popinot-Chandier, desired
her son, a youth of two-and-twenty, to pay his humble respects to La
Baudraye, and flattered herself that she might see her Gatien in the
good graces of this Superior Woman.--The words Superior Woman had
superseded the absurd nickname of _The Sappho of Saint-Satur_.--This
lady, who for nine years had led the opposition, was so delighted at the
good reception accorded to her son, that she became loud in her praises
of the Muse of Sancerre.
“After all,” she exclaimed, in reply to a tirade from Madame de Clagny,
who hated her husband’s supposed mistress, “she is the handsomest and
cleverest woman in the whole province!”
After scrambling through so many brambles and setting off on so many
different roads, after dreaming of love in splendor and scenting the
darkest dramas, thinking such terrible joys would be cheaply purchased
so weary was she of her dreary existence, one day Dinah fell into the
pit she had sworn to avoid. Seeing Monsieur de Clagny always sacrificing
himself, and at last refusing a high appointment in Paris, where his
family wanted to see him, she said to herself, “He loves me!” She
vanquished her repulsion, and seemed willing to reward so much
constancy.
It was to this impulse of generosity on her part that a coalition was
due, formed in Sancerre to secure the return of Monsieur de Clagny at
the next elections. Madame de la Baudraye had dreamed of going to Paris
in the wake of the new deputy.
But, in spite of the most solemn promises, the hundred and fifty votes
to be recorded in favor of this adorer of the lovely Dinah--who hoped
to see this defender of the widow and the orphan wearing the gown of the
Keeper of the Seals--figured as an imposing minority of fifty votes. The
jealousy of the President de Boirouge, and Monsieur Gravier’s hatred,
for he believed in the candidate’s supremacy in Dinah’s heart, had been
worked upon by a young Sous-prefet; and for this worthy deed the allies
got the young man made a prefet elsewhere.
“I shall never cease to regret,” said he, as he quitted Sancerre, “that
I did not succeed in pleasing Madame de la Baudraye; that would have
made my triumph complete!”
The household that was thus racked by domestic troubles was calm on
the surface; here were two ill-assorted but resigned beings, and the
indescribable propriety, the lie that society insists on, and which to
Dinah was an unendurable yoke. Why did she long to throw off the mask
she had worn for twelve years? Whence this weariness which, every day,
increased her hope of finding herself a widow?
The reader who has noted all the phases of her existence will have
understood the various illusions by which Dinah, like many another
woman, had been deceived. After an attempt to master Monsieur de la
Baudraye, she had indulged the hope of becoming a mother. Between those
miserable disputes over household matters and the melancholy conviction
as to her fate, quite a long time had elapsed. Then, when she had looked
for consolation, the consoler, Monsieur de Chargeboeuf had left her.
Thus, the overwhelming temptation which commonly causes women to sin had
hitherto been absent. For if there are, after all, some women who make
straight for unfaithfulness, are there not many more who cling to hope,
and do not fall till they have wandered long in a labyrinth of secret
woes?
Such was Dinah. She had so little impulse to fail in her duty, that she
did not care enough for Monsieur de Clagny to forgive him his defeat.
Then the move to the Chateau d’Anzy, the rearrangement of her collected
treasures and curiosities, which derived added value from the splendid
setting which Philibert de Lorme seemed to have planned on purpose for
this museum, occupied her for several months, giving her leisure to
meditate one of those decisive steps that startle the public, ignorant
of the motives which, however, it sometimes discovers by dint of gossip
and suppositions.
Madame de la Baudraye had been greatly struck by the reputation of
Lousteau, who was regarded as a lady’s man of the first water in
consequence of his intimacies among actresses; she was anxious to know
him; she read his books, and was fired with enthusiasm, less perhaps for
his talents than for his successes with women; and to attract him to the
country, she started the notion that it was obligatory on Sancerre to
return one of its great men at the elections. She made Gatien Boirouge
write to the great physician Bianchon, whom he claimed as a cousin
through the Popinots. Then she persuaded an old friend of the departed
Madame Lousteau to stir up the journalist’s ambitions by letting him
know that certain persons in Sancerre were firmly bent on electing a
deputy from among the distinguished men in Paris.
Tired of her commonplace neighbors, Madame de la Baudraye would thus at
last meet really illustrious men, and might give her fall the lustre of
fame.
Neither Lousteau nor Bianchon replied; they were waiting perhaps till
the holidays. Bianchon, who had won his professor’s chair the year
before after a brilliant contest, could not leave his lectures.
In the month of September, when the vintage was at its height, the two
Parisians arrived in their native province, and found it absorbed in the
unremitting toil of the wine-crop of 1836; there could therefore be
no public demonstration in their favor. “We have fallen flat,” said
Lousteau to his companion, in the slang of the stage.
In 1836, Lousteau, worn by sixteen years of struggle in the Capital,
and aged quite as much by pleasure as by penury, hard work, and
disappointments, looked eight-and-forty, though he was no more than
thirty-seven. He was already bald, and had assumed a Byronic air in
harmony with his early decay and the lines furrowed in his face
by over-indulgence in champagne. He ascribed these signs-manual of
dissipation to the severities of a literary life, declaring that the
Press was murderous; and he gave it to be understood that it consumed
superior talents, so as to lend a grace to his exhaustion. In his native
town he thought proper to exaggerate his affected contempt of life and
his spurious misanthropy. Still, his eyes could flash with fire like
a volcano supposed to be extinct, and he endeavored, by dressing
fashionably, to make up for the lack of youth that might strike a
woman’s eye.
Horace Bianchon, who wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, was fat and
burly, as beseems a fashionable physician, with a patriarchal air, his
hair thick and long, a prominent brow, the frame of a hard worker, and
the calm expression of a philosopher. This somewhat prosaic personality
set off his more frivolous companion to advantage.
The two great men remained unrecognized during a whole morning at the
inn where they had put up, and it was only by chance that Monsieur de
Clagny heard of their arrival. Madame de la Baudraye, in despair at
this, despatched Gatien Boirouge, who had no vineyards, to beg the two
gentlemen to spend a few days at the Chateau d’Anzy. For the last
year Dinah had played the chatelaine, and spent the winter only at La
Baudraye. Monsieur Gravier, the Public Prosecutor, the Presiding Judge,
and Gatien Boirouge combined to give a banquet to the great men, to meet
the literary personages of the town.
On hearing that the beautiful Madame de la Baudraye was Jan Diaz,
the Parisians went to spend three days at Anzy, fetched in a sort of
wagonette driven by Gatien himself. The young man, under a genuine
illusion, spoke of Madame de la Baudraye not only as the handsomest
woman in those parts, a woman so superior that she might give George
Sand a qualm, but as a woman who would produce a great sensation in
Paris. Hence the extreme though suppressed astonishment of Doctor
Bianchon and the waggish journalist when they beheld, on the garden
steps of Anzy, a lady dressed in thin black cashmere with a deep tucker,
in effect like a riding-habit cut short, for they quite understood the
pretentiousness of such extreme simplicity. Dinah also wore a black
velvet cap, like that in the portrait of Raphael, and below it her hair
fell in thick curls. This attire showed off a rather pretty figure, fine
eyes, and handsome eyelids somewhat faded by the weariful life that has
been described. In Le Berry the singularity of this _artistic_ costume
was a cloak for the romantic affectations of the Superior Woman.
On seeing the affectations of their too amiable hostess--which were,
indeed, affectations of soul and mind--the friends glanced at each
other, and put on a deeply serious expression to listen to Madame de la
Baudraye, who made them a set speech of thanks for coming to cheer the
monotony of her days. Dinah walked her guests round and round the
lawn, ornamented with large vases of flowers, which lay in front of the
Chateau d’Anzy.
“How is it,” said Lousteau, the practical joker, “that so handsome a
woman as you, and apparently so superior, should have remained buried in
the country? What do you do to make life endurable?”
“Ah! that is the crux,” said the lady. “It is unendurable. Utter despair
or dull resignation--there is no third alternative; that is the arid
soil in which our existence is rooted, and on which a thousand stagnant
ideas fall; they cannot fertilize the ground, but they supply food
for the etiolated flowers of our desert souls. Never believe in
indifference! Indifference is either despair or resignation. Then each
woman takes up the pursuit which, according to her character, seems to
promise some amusement. Some rush into jam-making and washing, household
management, the rural joys of the vintage or the harvest, bottling
fruit, embroidering handkerchiefs, the cares of motherhood, the
intrigues of a country town. Others torment a much-enduring piano,
which, at the end of seven years, sounds like an old kettle, and ends
its asthmatic life at the Chateau d’Anzy. Some pious dames talk over the
different brands of the Word of God--the Abbe Fritaud as compared with
the Abbe Guinard. They play cards in the evening, dance with the same
partners for twelve years running, in the same rooms, at the same dates.
This delightful life is varied by solemn walks on the Mall, visits of
politeness among the women, who ask each other where they bought their
gowns.
“Conversation is bounded on the south by remarks on the intrigues lying
hidden under the stagnant water of provincial life, on the north by
proposed marriages, on the west by jealousies, and on the east by sour
remarks.
“And so,” she went on, striking an attitude, “you see a woman wrinkled
at nine-and-twenty, ten years before the time fixed by the rules of
Doctor Bianchon, a woman whose skin is ruined at an early age, who turns
as yellow as a quince when she is yellow at all--we have seen some turn
green. When we have reached that point, we try to justify our normal
condition; then we turn and rend the terrible passion of Paris with
teeth as sharp as rat’s teeth. We have Puritan women here, sour enough
to tear the laces of Parisian finery, and eat out all the poetry of your
Parisian beauties, who undermine the happiness of others while they cry
up their walnuts and rancid bacon, glorify this squalid mouse-hole,
and the dingy color and conventual small of our delightful life at
Sancerre.”
“I admire such courage, madame,” said Bianchon. “When we have to
endure such misfortunes, it is well to have the wit to make a virtue of
necessity.”
Amazed at the brilliant move by which Dinah thus placed provincial life
at the mercy of her guests, in anticipation of their sarcasms, Gatien
Boirouge nudged Lousteau’s elbow, with a glance and a smile, which said:
“Well! did I say too much?”
“But, madame,” said Lousteau, “you are proving that we are still in
Paris. I shall steal this gem of description; it will be worth ten
thousand francs to me in an article.”
“Oh, monsieur,” she retorted, “never trust provincial women.”
“And why not?” said Lousteau.
Madame de la Baudraye was wily enough--an innocent form of cunning, to
be sure--to show the two Parisians, one of whom she would choose to be
her conquerer, the snare into which he would fall, reflecting that she
would have the upper hand at the moment when he should cease to see it.
“When you first come,” said she, “you laugh at us. Then when you have
forgotten the impression of Paris brilliancy, and see us in our own
sphere, you pay court to us, if only as a pastime. And you, who are
famous for your past passions, will be the object of attentions which
will flatter you. Then take care!” cried Dinah, with a coquettish
gesture, raising herself above provincial absurdities and Lousteau’s
irony by her own sarcastic speech. “When a poor little country-bred
woman has an eccentric passion for some superior man, some Parisian
who has wandered into the provinces, it is to her something more than a
sentiment; she makes it her occupation and part of all her life. There
is nothing more dangerous than the attachment of such a woman; she
compares, she studies, she reflects, she dreams; and she will not give
up her dream, she thinks still of the man she loves when he has ceased
to think of her.
“Now one of the catastrophes that weigh most heavily on a woman in the
provinces is that abrupt termination of her passion which is so often
seen in England. In the country, a life under minute observation as keen
as an Indian’s compels a woman either to keep on the rails or to start
aside like a steam engine wrecked by an obstacle. The strategies of
love, the coquetting which form half the composition of a Parisian
woman, are utterly unknown here.”
“That is true,” said Lousteau. “There is in a country-bred woman’s heart
a store of surprises, as in some toys.”
“Dear me!” Dinah went on, “a woman will have spoken to you three times
in the course of a winter, and without your knowing it, you will be
lodged in her heart. Then comes a picnic, an excursion, what not, and
all is said--or, if you prefer it, all is done! This conduct, which
seems odd to unobserving persons, is really very natural. A poet, such
as you are, or a philosopher, an observer, like Doctor Bianchon, instead
of vilifying the provincial woman and believing her depraved, would be
able to guess the wonderful unrevealed poetry, every chapter, in short,
of the sweet romance of which the last phrase falls to the benefit of
some happy sub-lieutenant or some provincial bigwig.”
“The provincial women I have met in Paris,” said Lousteau, “were, in
fact, rapid in their proceedings--”
“My word, they are strange,” said the lady, giving a significant shrug
of her shoulders.
“They are like the playgoers who book for the second performance,
feeling sure that the piece will not fail,” replied the journalist.
“And what is the cause of all these woes?” asked Bianchon.
“Paris is the monster that brings us grief,” replied the Superior
Woman. “The evil is seven leagues round, and devastates the whole
land. Provincial life is not self-existent. It is only when a nation is
divided into fifty minor states that each can have a physiognomy of its
own, and then a woman reflects the glory of the sphere where she reigns.
This social phenomenon, I am told, may be seen in Italy, Switzerland,
and Germany; but in France, as in every country where there is but
one capital, a dead level of manners must necessarily result from
centralization.”
“Then you would say that manners could only recover their individuality
and native distinction by the formation of a federation of French states
into one empire?” said Lousteau.
“That is hardly to be wished, for France would have to conquer too many
countries,” said Bianchon.
“This misfortune is unknown in England,” exclaimed Dinah. “London does
not exert such tyranny as that by which Paris oppresses France--for
which, indeed, French ingenuity will at last find a remedy; however, it
has a worse disease in its vile hypocrisy, which is a far greater evil!”
“The English aristocracy,” said Lousteau, hastening to put a word in,
for he foresaw a Byronic paragraph, “has the advantage over ours
of assimilating every form of superiority; it lives in the midst of
magnificent parks; it is in London for no more than two months. It lives
in the country, flourishing there, and making it flourish.”
“Yes,” said Madame de la Baudraye, “London is the capital of trade and
speculation and the centre of government. The aristocracy hold a ‘mote’
there for sixty days only; it gives and takes the passwords of the day,
looks in on the legislative cookery, reviews the girls to marry, the
carriages to be sold, exchanges greetings, and is away again; and is so
far from amusing, that it cannot bear itself for more than the few days
known as ‘the season.’”
“Hence,” said Lousteau, hoping to stop this nimble tongue by an epigram,
“in Perfidious Albion, as the _Constitutionnel_ has it, you may happen
to meet a charming woman in any part of the kingdom.”
“But charming _English_ women!” replied Madame de la Baudraye with
a smile. “Here is my mother, I will introduce you,” said she, seeing
Madame Piedefer coming towards them.
Having introduced the two Paris lions to the ambitious skeleton that
called itself woman under the name of Madame Piedefer--a tall, lean
personage, with a red face, teeth that were doubtfully genuine, and hair
that was undoubtedly dyed, Dinah left her visitors to themselves for a
few minutes.
“Well,” said Gatien to Lousteau, “what do you think of her?”
“I think that the clever woman of Sancerre is simply the greatest
chatterbox,” replied the journalist.
“A woman who wants to see you deputy!” cried Gatien. “An angel!”
“Forgive me, I forgot you were in love with her,” said Lousteau.
“Forgive the cynicism of an old scamp.--Ask Bianchon; I have no
illusions left. I see things as they are. The woman has evidently dried
up her mother like a partridge left to roast at too fierce a fire.”
Gatien de Boirouge contrived to let Madame de la Baudraye know what
the journalist had said of her in the course of the dinner, which was
copious, not to say splendid, and the lady took care not to talk
too much while it was proceeding. This lack of conversation betrayed
Gatien’s indiscretion. Etienne tried to regain his footing, but all
Dinah’s advances were directed to Bianchon.
However, half-way through the evening, the Baroness was gracious to
Lousteau again. Have you never observed what great meanness may
be committed for small ends? Thus the haughty Dinah, who would not
sacrifice herself for a fool, who in the depths of the country led such
a wretched life of struggles, of suppressed rebellion, of unuttered
poetry, who to get away from Lousteau had climbed the highest and
steepest peak of her scorn, and who would not have come down if she
had seen the sham Byron at her feet, suddenly stepped off it as she
recollected her album.
Madame de la Baudraye had caught the mania for autographs; she possessed
an oblong volume which deserved the name of album better than most, as
two-thirds of the pages were still blank. The Baronne de Fontaine, who
had kept it for three months, had with great difficulty obtained a line
from Rossini, six bars written by Meyerbeer, the four lines that Victor
Hugo writes in every album, a verse from Lamartine, a few words from
Beranger, _Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du depart d’Ulysse_ (the first
words of _Telemaque_) written by George Sand, Scribe’s famous lines on
the Umbrella, a sentence from Charles Nodier, an outline of distance by
Jules Dupre, the signature of David d’Angers, and three notes written
by Hector Berlioz. Monsieur de Clagny, during a visit to Paris, added a
song by Lacenaire--a much coveted autograph, two lines from Fieschi, and
an extremely short note from Napoleon, which were pasted on to pages of
the album. Then Monsieur Gravier, in the course of a tour, had persuaded
Mademoiselle Mars to write her name on this album, with Mademoiselles
Georges, Taglioni, and Grisi, and some distinguished actors, such as
Frederick Lemaitre, Monrose, Bouffe, Rubini, Lablache, Nourrit, and
Arnal; for he knew a set of old fellows brought up in the seraglio, as
they phrased it, who did him this favor.
This beginning of a collection was all the more precious to Dinah
because she was the only person for ten leagues round who owned an
album. Within the last two years, however, several young ladies had
acquired such books, in which they made their friends and acquaintances
write more or less absurd quotations or sentiments. You who spend your
lives in collecting autographs, simple and happy souls, like Dutch tulip
fanciers, you will excuse Dinah when, in her fear of not keeping her
guests more than two days, she begged Bianchon to enrich the volume she
handed to him with a few lines of his writing.
The doctor made Lousteau smile by showing him this sentence on the first
page:
“What makes the populace dangerous is that it has in its pocket an
absolution for every crime.
“J. B. DE CLAGNY.”
“We will second the man who is brave enough to plead in favor of the
Monarchy,” Desplein’s great pupil whispered to Lousteau, and he wrote
below:
“The distinction between Napoleon and a water-carrier is evident
only to Society; Nature takes no account of it. Thus Democracy,
which resists inequality, constantly appeals to Nature.