Floralia was once a city of great fame. It stands upon an historical
river. It is adorned with all that the Arts can create of beauty, of
grace, and of majesty. Its chronicles blaze with heroical deeds and
with the achievements of genius. Great men have been bred within its
walls,—men so great that the world has never seen their like since.
Floralia, in her liberties, in her citizens, in her poets and painters
and sculptors, once upon a time had few rivals, perhaps, indeed, no
equals, upon earth.
By what strange irony of fate, by what singular cynical caprice of
accident, has this fairest of cities, with her time-honored towers lifted
to her radiant skies, become the universal hostelry of cosmopolitan
fashion and of fashionable idleness? Sad vicissitudes of fallen
fortunes!—to such base uses do the greatest come.
It is Belisarius turned croupier to a gaming-table; it is Cæsar selling
cigars and newspapers; it is Apelles drawing for the “Albums pour Rire;”
it is Pindar rhyming the couplets for “Fleur de Thé;” it is Praxiteles
designing costumes for a calico ball; it is Phidias forming the poses of
a ballet!
Perhaps the mighty ghosts of mediæval Floralia do walk, sadly and
ashamed, by midnight under the shadow of its exquisite piles of marble
and of stone. If they do, nobody sees them; the cigarette-smoke is too
thick.
As for the modern rulers of Floralia, they have risen elastic and elated
to the height of the situation, and have done their best and uttermost to
degrade their city into due accordance with her present circumstances,
and have destroyed as much as they dared of her noble picturesqueness and
ancient ways, and have tacked on to her venerable palaces and graceful
towers, stucco mansions and straight hideous streets, and staring walls
covered with advertisements, and barren boulevards studded with toy trees
that are cropped as soon as they presume to grow a leaf, and have striven
all they know to fit her for her fortunes, as her inn-keepers, when they
take an antique palace, hasten to fit up a smoking-room, and, making a
paradise of gas-jets and liqueurs, write over it, “Il Bar Americano.”
It is considered very clever to adapt oneself to one’s fortunes; and
if so, the rulers of Floralia are very clever indeed; only the stucco
and the straight streets and the frightful boulevards cost money, and
Floralia has no money, and a very heavy and terrible debt; and whether it
be really worth while to deface a most beautiful and artistic city, and
ruin your nobles and gentry, and grind down your artisans and peasants,
and make your whole province impoverished and ill-content, for the
mere sake of pleasing some strangers by the stucco and the hoardings
that their eyes are used to at home,—well, that perhaps may be an open
question.
The Lady Hilda Vorarlberg had written thus far when she got tired, left
off, and looked out of the window on to the mountain-born and poet-hymned
river of Floralia. She had an idea that she would write a novel; she was
always going to do things that she never did do.
After all, they were not her own ideas that she had written, but only
those of a Floralian, the Duca della Rocca, whom she had met the night
before. But then the ideas of everybody have been somebody else’s
beforehand,—Plato’s, or Bion’s, or Theophrastus’s, or your favorite
newspaper’s; and the Lady Hilda, although she had been but two days in
the Winter City, had already in her first drive shuddered at the stucco
and the hoardings, and shivered at the boulevards and the little shaven
trees. For she was a person of very refined and fastidious taste, and
did really know something about the arts, and such persons suffer very
acutely from what the peculiar mind of your modern municipalities calls,
in its innocence, “improvements.”
The Lady Hilda had been to a reception, too, the night before, and
had gone with the preconceived conviction that a certain illustrious
Sovereign had not been far wrong when she had called Floralia the Botany
Bay of modern society; but then the Lady Hilda was easily bored, and not
easily pleased, and liked very few things, almost none: she liked her
horses, she liked M. Worth, she liked bric-à-brac, she liked her brother,
Lord Clairvaux, and, when she came to think of it—well, that was really
all.
The Lady Hilda was a beautiful woman, and knew it; she was dressed
in the height of fashion,—_i.e._, like a mediæval saint out of a
picture; her velvet robe clung close to her, and her gold belt, with
its chains and pouch and fittings, would not have disgraced Cellini’s
own working; her hair was in a cloud in front and in a club behind; her
figure was perfect: M. Worth, who is accustomed to furnish figures as
well as clothes, had a great reverence for her; in her, Nature, of whom
generally speaking he is disposed to think very poorly, did not need his
assistance; he thought it extraordinary, but, as he could not improve her
in that respect, he had to be content with draping Perfection, which he
did to perfection of course.
Her face also was left to nature, in a very blamable degree for a woman
of fashion. Her friends argued to her that any woman, however fair a
skin she might have, must look washed out without enamel or rouge at
the least. But the Lady Hilda, conscious of her own delicate bloom, was
obdurate on the point.
“I would rather look washed out than caked over,” she would reply; which
was cruel, but conclusive. So she went into the world without painting,
and made them all look beside her as if they had come out of a comic
opera.
In everything else she was, however, as artificial as became her sex, her
station, and her century.
She was a very fortunate woman; at least society always said so. The
Clairvaux people were very terribly poor, though very noble and mighty.
She had been married at sixteen, immediately on her presentation, to
a great European capitalist of nondescript nationality, who had made
an enormous fortune upon the stock exchanges in ways that were never
inquired into, and this gentleman, whose wealth was as solid as it
sounded fabulous, had had the good taste to die in the first months of
their wedded life, leaving her fifty thousand a year, and bequeathing
the rest of his money to the Prince Imperial. Besides her large income,
she had the biggest jewels, the choicest horses, the handsomest house in
London, the prettiest hotel in Paris, etc., etc., etc.; and she could
very well afford to have a fresh toilette a day from her friend Worth if
she chose. Very often she did choose. “What a lucky creature!” said every
other woman; and so she was. But she would have been still more so had
she not been quite so much bored. Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that
always _will_ get in the golden slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure.
The Lady Hilda looked out of the window and found it raining heavily.
When the sky of Floralia does rain, it does it thoroughly, and gets the
disagreeable duty over, which is much more merciful to mankind than the
perpetual drizzle and dripping of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or Middlesex.
It was the rain that had made her almost inclined to think she would
write a novel; she was so tired of reading them.
She countermanded her carriage, had some more wood thrown on the fire,
and felt disposed to regret that she had decided to winter here. She
missed all her _bibelots_, and all the wonderful shades and graces of
color with which her own houses were made as rich yet as subdued in tone
as any old cloisonné enamel. She had the finest rooms, here, in a hotel
which had been the old palace of Murat; and she had sent for flowers to
fill every nook and corner of them, an order which Floralia will execute
for as many francs as any other city would ask in napoleons.
But there is always a nakedness and a gaudiness in the finest suites of
any hotel; and the Lady Hilda, though she had educated little else, had
so educated her eyes and her taste that a _criard_ bit of furniture hurt
her as the grating of a false quantity hurts a scholar. She knew the
value of grays and creams and lavenders and olive greens and pale sea
blues and dead gold and Oriental blendings. She had to seat herself now
in an arm-chair that was of a brightness and newness in magenta brocade
that made her close her eyelids involuntarily to avoid the horror of it,
as she took up some letters from female friends and wondered why they
wrote them, and took up a tale of Zola’s and threw it aside in disgust,
and began to think that she would go to Algeria, since her doctors had
agreed that her lungs would not bear the cold of Paris this winter.
Only there was no art in Algeria, and there was plenty in Floralia,
present and traditional, and, so far as a woman of fashion can demean
herself to think seriously of anything beyond dress and rivalry, she
had in a way studied art of all kind, languidly indeed and perhaps
superficially, but still with some true understanding of it; for,
although she had done her best, as became a _femme comme il faut_, to
stifle the intelligence she had been created with, she yet had moments
in which M. Worth did not seem Jehovah, and in which Society scarcely
appeared the Alpha and Omega of human existence, as of course they did to
her when she was in her right frame of mind.
“I shall go to Algeria or Rome,” she said to herself: it rained
pitilessly, hiding even the bridges on the opposite side of the river;
she had a dreadful magenta-colored chair, and the window-curtains were
scarlet; the letters were on thin foreign paper and crossed; the book
was unreadable; at luncheon they had given her horrible soup and a
vol-au-vent that for all flavor it possessed might have been made of
acorns, ship-biscuit, and shalots; and she had just heard that her cousin
the Countess de Caviare, whom she never approved of, and who always
borrowed money of her, was coming also to the Hôtel Murat. It was not
wonderful that she settled in her own mind to leave Floralia as soon as
she had come to it.
It was four o’clock.
She thought she would send round to the bric-à-brac dealers’ and tell
them to bring her what china and enamels and things they had in their
shops for her to look at; little that is worth having ever comes into the
market in these days, save when private collections are publicly sold;
she knew the Hôtel Drouot and Christie and Mansom’s too well not to know
that: still, it would be something to do.
Her hand was on the bell when one of her servants entered. He had a card
on a salver.
“Does Madame receive?” he asked, in some trepidation, for do what her
servants might they generally did wrong; when they obeyed her she had
almost invariably changed her mind before her command could be executed,
and when they did not obey her, then the Clairvaux blood, which was
crossed with French and Russian, and had been Norman to begin with, made
itself felt in her usually tranquil veins.
She glanced at the card. It might be a bric-à-brac dealer’s.
On it was written “Duca della Rocca.” She paused doubtfully some moments.
“It is raining very hard,” she thought; then gave a sign of assent.
Everybody wearied her after ten minutes; still, when it was raining so
hard——