The next morning the sun shone brilliantly; the sky was blue; the wind
was a very gentle breeze from the sea; her breakfast chocolate was well
made; the tea-roses and the heliotrope almost hid the magenta furniture
and the gilded plaster consoles and the staring mirrors. They had sent
her in a new story of Octave Feuillet; M. de St. Louis had forwarded
her a new volume of charming verse by Sully Prudhomme, only sold on the
Boulevards two days before, with a note of such grace and wit that it
ought to have been addressed to Elysium for Mme. de Sévigné; the post
brought her only one letter, which announced that her brother, Lord
Clairvaux, would come thither to please her, after the Newmarket Spring
Meeting, or perhaps before, since he had to see “Major Fridolin” in Paris.
On the whole, the next morning Lady Hilda, looking out of the hotel
window, decided to stay in Floralia.
She ordered her carriage out early, and drove hither and thither to enjoy
tranquilly the innumerable treasures of all the arts in which the city of
Floralia is so rich.
A Monsignore whom she knew well, learned, without pedantry, and who
united the more vivacious accomplishments of the virtuoso to the polished
softness of the churchman, accompanied her. The Clairvaux people from
time immemorial had been good Catholics.
Lady Hilda for her part never troubled her head about those things,
but she thought unbelief was very bad form, and that to throw over your
family religion was an impertinence to your ancestors. Some things in the
ceremonials of her church grated on her æsthetic and artistic ideas, but
then these things she attributed to the general decadence of the whole
age in taste.
Her Monsignore went home to luncheon with her, and made himself as
agreeable as a courtly churchman always is to every one; and afterwards
she studied the Penal Settlement more closely by calling on those leaders
of it whose cards lay in a heap in her anteroom, and amused herself with
its mind and manners, its attributes and antecedents.
“After all, the only people in any country that one can trust oneself
to know are the natives of it,” she said to herself, as she went to the
weekly “day” of the infinitely charming Marchesa del Trasimene, _nata_
Da Bolsena, where she met Della Rocca and M. de St. Louis, as everybody
meets everybody else, morning, afternoon, and evening, fifty times in the
twenty-four hours in Floralia, the results being antipathy or sympathy in
a fatal degree.
In her gyrations she herself excited extreme attention and endless envy,
especially in the breasts of those unhappy outsiders whom she termed the
Penal Settlement.
There was something about her!—Worth, Pingat, and La Ferrière dressed the
Penal Settlement, or it said they did. Carlo Maremma always swore that
there was a little dress-maker who lived opposite his stable who could
have told sad truths about many of these Paris-born toilettes; but no
doubt Maremma was wrong, because men know nothing about these things,
and are not aware that a practiced eye can tell the sweep of Worth’s
scissors under the shoulder-blades as surely as a connoisseur recognizes
the hand of Boule or Vernis Martin on a cabinet or an _étui_. At any
rate, the Penal Settlement swore it was adorned by Worth, Pingat, and La
Ferrière in all the glories and eccentricities imaginable of confections,
_unies_ and _mélangées_, Directoire and Premier Empire, Juive and Louis
Quinze; and if talking about a theory could prove it, certainly they
proved that they bore all Paris on their persons.
But there was something about _her_—it was difficult to say what; perhaps
it was in the tip of her Pompadour boot, or perhaps it hid in the back
widths of her skirt, or perhaps it lurked in the black sable fur of her
dolman,—but a something that made them feel there was a gulf, never to be
passed, between them and this world-famed _élégante_.
Lady Hilda would have said her secret lay in her always being just a
quarter of an hour in advance of the fashion. She was always the first
person to be seen in what six weeks afterwards was the rage; and when the
rage came, then Lady Hilda had dropped the fashion. Hence she was the
perpetual despair of all her sex,—a distinction which she was quite human
enough to enjoy in a contemptuous sort of way; as contemptuous of herself
as of others; for she had a certain vague generosity and largeness of
mind which lifted her above mean and small emotions in general.
She had been steeped in the world, as people call that combination of
ennui, excitement, selfishness, fatigue, and glitter, which forms the
various delights of modern existence, till it had penetrated her through
and through as a petrifying stream does the supple bough put in it. But
there were little corners in her mind which the petrifaction had not
reached.
This morning—it was half-past five o’clock in a November afternoon, and
pitch dark, but of course it was morning still, as nobody had dined,
the advent of soup and sherry bringing the only meridian recognized in
society—the Lady Hilda refreshed with a cup of tea from the samovàr of
her friend the Princess Olga Schouvaloff, who came yearly to her palace
in the historical river-street of historical Floralia, and having been
assured by Princess Olga that if they kept quite among themselves and
never knew anybody else but the Floralian Russian and German nobility,
and steadfastly refused to allow anybody else to be presented to them,
Floralia was bearable,—nay, even really agreeable,—she got into her
coupé, and was driven through the gloom to her hotel.
Her head servant made her two announcements:—Madame de Caviare had
arrived that morning, and hoped to see her before dinner.
Lady Hilda’s brows frowned a little.
The Duca della Rocca had sent these flowers.
Lady Hilda’s eyes smiled a little.
They were only some cyclamens fresh from the country, in moss. She had
regretted to him the day before that those lovely simple wood flowers
could not be found in florists’ shops nor in flower-women’s baskets.
After all, she said to herself, it did not matter that Mila had come, she
was silly and not very proper, and a nuisance altogether; but Mila was
responsible for her own sins, and sometimes could be amusing. So the Lady
Hilda, in a good-humored and serene frame of mind, crossed the corridor
to the apartments her cousin had taken just opposite to her own.
“He is certainly very striking-looking,—like a Vandyke picture,” she
thought to herself, irrelevantly, as she tapped at her cousin’s door;
those cyclamens had pleased her; yet she had let thousands of the
loveliest and costliest bouquets wither in her anteroom every year of her
life, without deigning to ask or heed who were even the senders of them.
“Come in, if it’s you, dear,” said Madame Mila, ungrammatically and
vaguely, in answer to the tap.
The Countess de Caviare was an Englishwoman, and a cousin, one of the
great West country Trehillyons whom everybody knows, her mother having
been a Clairvaux. She had been grandly married in her first season to
a very high and mighty and almost imperial Russian, himself a most
good-humored and popular person, who killed all his horses with fast
driving, gambled very heavily, and never amused himself anywhere so well
as in the little low dancing-places round Paris.
Madame Mila, as her friends always called her, was as pretty a little
woman as could be imagined, who enameled herself to such perfection
that she had a face of fifteen, on the most fashionable and wonderfully
costumed of bodies; she was very fond of her cousin Hilda, because
she could borrow so much money of her, and she had come to Floralia
this winter because in Paris there was a rumor that she had cheated at
cards,—false, of course, but still odious.
If she had made a little pencil-mark on some of the aces, where was the
harm in that?
She almost always played with the same people, and they had won heaps of
money of her. Whilst those horrid creatures in the city and on the bourse
were allowed to “rig the market,” and nobody thought the worse of them
for spreading false news to send their shares up or down, why should not
one poor little woman try to help on Chance a little bit at play?
She was always in debt, though she admitted that her husband allowed her
liberally. She had eighty thousand francs a year by her settlements to
spend on herself, and he gave her another fifty thousand to do as she
pleased with: on the whole, about one-half what he allowed to Blanche
Souris, of the Château-Gaillard theatre.
She had had six children: three were living and three were dead; she
thought herself a good mother, because she gave her wet-nurses ever so
many silk gowns, and when she wanted the children for a fancy ball or a
drive, always saw that they were faultlessly dressed; and, besides, she
always took them to Trouville.
She had never had any grief in her life, except the loss of the Second
Empire; and even that she got over when she found that flying the Red
Cross flag had saved her hotel, without so much as a teacup being broken
in it, that MM. Worth and Offenbach were safe from all bullets, and that
society under the Septennate promised to be every bit as _leste_ as under
the Empire.
In a word, Madame Mila was a type of the women of her time.
The women who go semi-nude in an age which has begun to discover that the
nude in sculpture is very immoral; who discuss “Tue-la” in a generation
which decrees Molière to be coarse, and Beaumont and Fletcher indecent;
who have the Journal pour Rire on their tables in a day when no one who
respects themselves would name the Harlot’s Progress; who read Gautier
and Baudelaire in an era which finds “Don Juan” gross, and Shakspeare far
too plain; who strain all their energies to rival Mlles. Rose Thé and
La Petite Boulotte in everything; who go shrimping or oyster-hunting on
fashionable sea-shores, with their legs bare to the knee; who go to the
mountains with confections, high heels, and gold-tipped canes, shriek
over their gambling as the dawn reddens over the Alps, and know no more
of the glories of earth and sky, of sunrise and sunset, than do the
porcelain pots that hold their paint, or the silver dressing-box that
carries their hair-dye.
Women who are in convulsions one day and on the top of a drag the next;
who are in hysterics for their lovers at noonday and in ecstasies over
baccarat at midnight; who laugh in little nooks together over each
other’s immoralities, and have a moral code so elastic that it will
pardon anything except innocence; who gossip over each other’s dresses,
and each other’s passions, in the selfsame self-satisfied chirp of
contentment, and who never resent anything on earth, except any eccentric
suggestion that life could be anything except a perpetual fête à la
Watteau in a perpetual blaze of lime-light.
Pain?—Are there not chloral and a flattering doctor? Sorrow?—Are there
not a course at the Baths, play at Monte Carlo, and new cases from Worth?
Shame?—Is it not a famine-fever which never comes near a well-laden
table? Old Age?—Are there not white and red paint, and heads of dead
hair, and even false bosoms? Death?—Well, no doubt there is death, but
they do not realize it; they hardly believe in it, they think about it so
little.
There is something unknown somewhere to fall on them some day that they
dread vaguely, for they are terrible cowards. But they worry as little
about it as possible. They give the millionth part of what they possess
away in its name to whatever church they belong to, and they think they
have arranged quite comfortably for all possible contingencies hereafter.
If it makes things safe, they will head bazaars for the poor, or wear
black in Holy Week, turn lottery-wheels for charity, or put on fancy
dresses in the name of benevolence, or do any little amiable trifle of
that sort. But as for changing their lives,—_pas si bête!_
A bird in the hand they hold worth two in the bush; and though your birds
may be winged on strong desire, and your bush the burning portent of
Moses, they will have none of them.
These women are not at all bad; oh, no! they are like sheep, that is all.
If it were fashionable to be virtuous, very likely they would be so. If
it were _chic_ to be devout, no doubt they would pass their life on their
knees. But, as it is, they know that a flavor of vice is as necessary to
their reputation as great ladies, as sorrel-leaves to soupe à la bonne
femme. They affect a license if they take it not.
They are like the barber, who said, with much pride, to Voltaire, “Je ne
suis qu’un pauvre diable de perruquier, mais je ne crois pas en Dieu plus
que les autres.”
They may be worth very little, but they are desperately afraid that you
should make such a mistake as to think them worth anything at all. You
are not likely, if you know them. Still, they are apprehensive.
Though one were to arise from the dead to preach to them, they would only
make of him a nine days’ wonder, and then laugh a little, and yawn a
little, and go on in their own paths.
Out of the eater came forth sweetness, and from evil there may be
begotten good; but out of nullity there can only come nullity. They have
wadded their ears, and though Jeremiah wailed of desolation, or Isaiah
thundered the wrath of heaven, they would not hear,—they would go on
looking at each other’s dresses.
What could Paul himself say that would change them?
You cannot make saw-dust into marble; you cannot make sea-sand into gold.
“Let us alone,” is all they ask; and it is all that you could do, though
the force and flame of Horeb were in you.
Mila, Countess de Caviare, having arrived early in the morning and
remained invisible all day, had awakened at five to a cup of tea, an
exquisite dressing-gown, and her choicest enamel; she now gave many
bird-like kisses to her cousin, heaped innumerable endearments upon her,
and, hearing there was nothing to do, sent out for a box at the French
Theatre.
“It is wretched acting,” said the Lady Hilda; “I went the other night,
but I did not stay half an hour.”
“That of course, ma chère,” said Madame Mila; “but we shall be sure to
see people we know,—heaps of people.”
“Such as they are,” said the Lady Hilda.
“At any rate, it is better than spending an evening alone. I never spent
an evening alone in my life,” said Mme. de Caviare, who could no more
live without a crowd about her than she could sleep without chlorodyne,
or put a petticoat on without two or three maids’ assistance.
The French company in Floralia is usually about the average of the weakly
patchwork troops of poor actors that pass on third-rate little stages in
the French departments; but Floralia, feminine and fashionable, flocks
to the French company because it can rely on something _tant soit peu
hazardé_, and is quite sure not to be bored with decency, and if by any
oversight or bad taste the management should put any serious sort of
piece on the stage, it can always turn its back to the stage and whisper
to its lovers or chatter shrilly to its allies.
They went into their box as the second act ended of “Mme. de
Scabreuse,”—a play of the period, written by a celebrated author, in
which the lady married her nephew, and finding out that he was enamored
of her daughter, the offspring of a first marriage, bought poison for
them both, and then, suddenly changing her mind, with magnificent
magnanimity drank it herself, and blessed the lovers as she died in great
agonies.
It had been brought out in Paris with enormous success, and as Lady Hilda
and the countess had both seen it half a dozen times they could take no
interest in it.
“You _would_ come!” said the former, raising her eyebrows and seating
herself so as to see nothing whatever of the stage and as little as
possible of the house.
“Of course,” replied Madame Mila, whose lorgnon was ranging hither and
thither, like a general’s spy-glass before a battle. “There was nothing
else to do; at least you said there was nothing. Look! some of those
women have actually got the œuf de Pâques corsage—good heaven!—those went
out last year, utterly, utterly! Ah, there is Lucia San Luca,—what big
emeralds!—and there is Maria Castelfidardo: how old she is looking! That
is Lady Featherleigh: you remember that horrid scandal?—Yes, I hear they
do visit her here. How handsome Luisa Ottoseccoli looks! powder becomes
her so; her son is a pretty boy,—oh, you never stoop to boys; you are
wrong; nothing amuses one like a boy; _how_ they believe in one! There
is that Canadian woman who tried to get into notice in Paris two seasons
ago,—you remember?—they make her quite crême in this place,—the idea! She
is dressed very well: I dare say if she were always dumb she might pass.
She never would have been heard of even here, only Altavante pushed her
right and left, bribed the best people to her parties, and induced all
his other _tendresses_ to send her cards. In love! of course not! Who is
in love with a face like a Mohican squaw’s and a squeak like a goose’s?
But they are immensely rich; at least they have mountains of ready money;
he must have suffered dreadfully before he made her dress well. Teach her
grammar, in any language, he never will. There is the old Duchesse—why,
she was a centenarian when we were babies—but they say she plays every
atom as keenly as ever; nobody can beat her for lace, either—look at that
Spanish point. There are a few decent people here this winter; not many,
though; I think it would have been wiser to have stopped at Nice. Ah, mon
cher, comment ça va?—tell me, Maurice, who is that woman in black with
good diamonds, there, with Sanpierdareno and San Marco?”
“Maurice,” pressing her pretty hand, sank down on to the hard bench
behind her arm-chair and insinuated gracefully that the woman in black
with good diamonds was not “d’un vertu assez fort” to be noticed by
or described to such ladies as Mila, Countess de Caviare, but, since
identification of her was insisted on, proceeded to confess that she was
no less a person than the wild Duke of Stirling’s Gloria.
“Ah! is _that_ Gloria?” said Madame, with the keenest interest, bringing
her lorgnon to bear instantly. “How curious! I never chanced to see her
before. How quiet she looks, and how plainly she is dressed!”
“I am afraid we have left Gloria and her class no other way of being
singular!” said the Lady Hilda, who had muttered her welcome somewhat
coldly to Maurice.
Maurice, Vicomte des Gommeux, was a young Parisian, famous for leading
cotillons and driving piebalds; he followed Mme. de Caviare with the
regularity of her afternoon shadow, was as much an institution with her
as her anodynes, and much more useful than her courier. To avoid all
appearances that might set a wicked world talking, he generally arrived
in a city about twenty-four hours after her, and, as she was a woman of
good breeding who insisted on _les mœurs_, always went to another hotel.
He had held his present post actually so long as three years, and there
were as yet no signs of his being dismissed and replaced, for he was very
devoted, very obedient, very weak, saw nothing that he was intended not
to see, and was very adroit at rolling cigarettes.
“Il est si bon enfant!” said the Count de Caviare to everybody; he really
was grateful to the young man, some of whose predecessors had much
disturbed his wife’s temper and his own personal peace.
“Bonsoir, mesdames,” said the Duc de St. Louis, entering the box.
“Comtesse, charmé de vous voir—Miladi, à vos pieds. What a wretched
creature that is playing Julie de Scabreuse! I blush for my country.
When I was a young man, the smallest theatre in France would not have
endured that woman. There was a public then with proper feeling for the
histrionic as for every other art; a bad gesture or a false intonation
was hissed by every audience, were that audience only composed of workmen
and work-girls; but now——”
“May one enter, mesdames?” asked his friend, Della Rocca.
“One may,—if you will only shut the door. Thanks for the cyclamens,” said
the Lady Hilda, with a little of the weariness going off her delicate,
proud face.
Della Rocca took the seat behind her, as the slave Maurice surrendered
his to M. de St. Louis.
“Happy flowers! I found them in my own woods this morning,” he said, as
he took his seat. “You do not seem much amused, madame.”
“Amused! The play is odious. Even poor Desclée’s genius could only give
it a horrible fascination.”
“It has the worst fault of all, it is unnatural.”
“Yes; it is very curious, but the French will have so much vice in the
drama, and the English must have so much virtue, that a natural or
possible play is an impossibility now upon either stage.”
“You looked more interested in the majolica this morning——”
“How! did you see me?”
“I was passing through the tower of the Podestà on business. Is it not
wonderful our old pottery! It is intensely to be regretted that Ginori
and Carocci imitate it so closely; it vulgarizes a thing whose chief
beauty after all is association and age.”
“Yes; what charm there is in a marriage plate of Maestro Giorgio’s, or
a sweetmeat-dish of your Orazio Fontana’s! But there is very scanty
pleasure in reproductions of them, however clever these may be, such as
Pietro Gay sends out to Paris and Vienna Exhibitions.”
“You mean, there can be no mind in an imitation?”
“Of course; I would rather have the crudest original thing than the
mere galvanism of the corpse of a dead genius. I would give a thousand
paintings by Froment, Damousse, or any of the finest living artists of
Sèvres, for one piece by old Van der Meer of Delft; but I would prefer
a painting on Sèvres done yesterday by Froment or Damousse, or even any
much less famous worker, provided only it had originality in it, to the
best reproduction of a Van der Meer that modern manufacturers could
produce.”
“I think you are right; but I fear our old pottery-painters were not
very original. They copied from the pictures and engravings of Mantegna,
Raffaelle, Marcantonio, Marco di Ravenna, Beatricius, and a score of
others.”
“The application was original, and the sentiment they brought to it.
Those old artists put so much heart into their work.”
“Because when they painted a _stemma_ on the glaze they had still feudal
faith in nobility, and when they painted a Madonna or Ecce Homo they
had still child-like belief in divinity. What does the pottery-painter
of to-day care for the coat of arms or the religious subject he may be
commissioned to execute for a dinner-service or a chapel? It may be
admirable painting,—if you give a very high price,—but it will still be
only manufacture.”
“Then what pleasant lives those pottery-painters of the early days must
have led! They were never long stationary. They wandered about decorating
at their fancy, now here and now there,—now a vase for a pharmacy, and
now a stove for a king. You find German names on Italian ware, and
Italian names on Flemish grès; the Nuremberger would work in Venice, the
Dutchman would work in Rouen.”
“Sometimes, however, they were accused of sorcery; the great potter,
Hans Kraut, you remember, was feared by his townsmen as possessed by the
devil, and was buried ignominiously outside the gates, in his nook of the
Black Forest. But on the whole they were happy, no doubt,—men of simple
habits and of worthy lives.”
“You care for art yourself, M. Della Rocca?”
There came a gleam of interest in her handsome, languid hazel eyes, as
she turned them upon him.
“Every Italian does,” he answered her. “I do not think we are ever,
or I think, if ever, very seldom, connoisseurs in the way that your
Englishman and Frenchman is so. We are never very learned as to styles
and dates; we cannot boast the huckster’s eye of the Northern bric-à-brac
hunter: it is quite another thing with us; we love art as children their
nurses’ tales and cradle-songs; it is a familiar affection with us, and
affection is never very analytical; the Robbia over the chapel-door,
the apostle-pot that the men in the stables drink out of, the Sodoma or
the Beato Angelico that hangs before our eyes daily as we dine, the old
bronze _secchia_ that we wash our hands in as boys in the loggia,—these
are all so homely and dear to us that we grow up with a love for them
all as natural as our love for our mothers. You will say the children
of all rich people see beautiful and ancient things from their birth;
so they do, but not _as_ we see them: here they are too often degraded
to the basest household uses, and made no more account of than the dust
which gathers on them; but that very neglect of them makes them the more
kindred to us. Art elsewhere is the guest of the salon,—with us she is
the playmate of the infant and the serving-maid of the peasant: the mules
may drink from an Etruscan sarcophagus, and the pigeons be fed from a
patina of the twelfth century.”
Lady Hilda listened with the look of awakened interest still in her large
eyes; he spoke in his own tongue, and with feeling and grace: it was new
to her to find a man with whom art was an emotion instead of an opinion.
The art world she had met with was one that was very positive, very
eclectic, very hypercritical, very highly cultured; it had many theories
and elegant phrases; it laid down endless doctrines, and found pleasure
in endless disputations. Whenever she had tired of the world of fashion,
this was the world she had turned to; it had imbued her with knowledge of
art, and immeasurable contempt for those to whom art was a dead letter;
but art had remained with her rather an intellectual dissipation than a
tenderness of sentiment.
“As you care for these things, madame,” continued Della Rocca, with
hesitation, “might I one day hope that you would honor my poor villa?
It has little else left in it, but there are still a few rare pieces of
Gubbio and Urbino and Faenza, and I have a Calvary which, if not by Lucca
himself, is certainly by Andrea della Robbia.”
“I shall be glad to see them. Your villa is near?”
“About ten miles’ distance, up in the hills. It was once a great
stronghold as well as palace. Now it can boast no interest save such as
may go with fallen fortunes. For more than a century we have been too
poor to be able to do any more than keep wind and water out of it; and it
had been cleared before my time of almost everything of value. Happily,
however, the chestnut woods outside it have not been touched. They shroud
its nakedness.”
“Your villa, Della Rocca?” cried Madame de Caviare, who had known him for
several years. “I have never seen it; we will drive out there some day
when the cold winds are gone——”
“Vous me comblez de bontés,” he answered, with a low bow. “Alas, madame,
there is very little that will repay you: it is hardly more than a ruin.
But if you and Miladi will indeed honor it——”
“It is a very fine place still,” said the Duc de St. Louis, a little
impatiently. “It has suffered in sieges, and is by so much the more
interesting. For myself, I endure very much pain from having a whole
house, and one built no later than 1730. My great-grandfather pulled down
the noble old castle, built at the same time as Château-Gaillard,—imagine
the barbarism!—and employed the ponderous _rocaille_ of Oppenord to
replace it. It is very curious, but loss of taste in the nobles has
always been followed by a revolution of the mob. The _décadence_ always
ushers in the democracy.”
“We may well be threatened, then, in this day with universal equality!”
said the Lady Hilda, hiding a very small yawn behind her fan.
“Nay, madame,” said Della Rocca. “In this day the nobles do not even do
so much as to lead a wrong taste; they accept and adopt every form of it,
as imposed on them by their tailors, their architects, their clubs, and
their municipalities, as _rocaille_ was imposed by the cabinet-makers.”
“How fearfully serious you all are!” said Madame de Caviare. “There is
that dreadful Canadian woman standing up,—what rubies!—how fond vulgar
women always are of rubies! That _passe-partout_ of hers is rather
pretty; gold thread on _blondine_ satin, is it not, Hilda? My glass is
not very strong——”
Lady Hilda looked through her glass, and decided the important point in
the affirmative.
“How she is rouged!” pursued the countess. “I am sure Altavante did not
lay _that_ on; he is much too artistic. Maurice, have you a cigarette?”
“It is not allowed, ma chère,” said the Lady Hilda.
“Pooh!” said Madame de Caviare, accepting a little delicate paper roll.
“It was very kind of you, Hilda, to remind me of that; you wished me to
enjoy it. Won’t you have one too?”
Lady Hilda said “No” with her fan.
“If the Rococo brought the Revolution, Duc,” she asked, “what will our
smoking bring?—the end of the world?”
“It will bring animosity of the sexes, abolition of the marriage-laws,
and large increase of paralysis,” replied M. de St. Louis, with great
decision.
“You have answered me without a compliment:—what flattery to my
intelligence!”
“Miladi, I never flatter you. I am not in the habit of imitating all the
world.”
“You look severe, Della Rocca,” said Madame Mila. “Do you disapprove of
women smoking?”
“Madame, a woman of grace lends grace to all she does, no doubt.”
“That is to say, you don’t approve it?”
“Madame, I merely doubt whether Lionardo would have painted Mona Lisa had
she smoked.”
“What a good idea you give me!—I will be painted by Millais or Cabanel,
smoking. It will be novel. The cigar shall be in my mouth. I will send
you the first photograph. Ah! there is Nordlingen; he will come over
here, and he is the greatest bore in Europe. You know what your king here
said when Nordlingen had bored him at three audiences about heaven knows
what: ‘I never knew the use of sentinels before: let that man be shot if
he ask audience again!’ We cannot shoot him; let us go to supper. Duc,
you will follow us, with M. des Gommeux?—and you too, Della Rocca? There
is that odious Canadian woman going; let us make haste; I should like to
see that blondine cloak close; I shall know whether it looks like Worth
or Pingat.”
She passed out on the Duc’s arm, and the Lady Hilda accepted Della
Rocca’s, while the well-trained Maurice, who knew his duties, rushed to
find the footman in the vestibule, and to arrest another gilded youth and
kindred spirit, a M. des Poisseux, whom Madame Mila had espied in the
crowd and charged him to bring with him to supper. Madame Mila preferred,
to all the world, the young men of her world of five-and-twenty or less;
they had no mind whatever, they had not character enough to be jealous,
and they were as full of the last new scandals as any dowager of sixty.
“They talk of the progress of this age: contrast M. de St. Louis with M.
des Gommeux and M. des Poisseux!” said the Lady Hilda, with her little
contemptuous smile.
Della Rocca laughed.
“You make me for the first time, madame, well content to belong to what
the Gommeux and the Poisseux would call a past generation. But there
are not many like our friend the Duc; he has stepped down to us from
the terraces of Marly; I am certain he went to sleep one night after a
gavotte with Montespan, and has only just awakened.”
The supper was gay and bright; Lady Hilda, rejecting chicken and
champagne and accepting only ice-water and cigarettes, deigned to be
amusing, though sarcastic, and Madame Mila was always in one of the two
extremes,—either syncope, sal volatile, and hysterics, or laughter,
frolic, smoke, and _risqué_ stories.
She and her sisterhood spend their lives in this see-saw; the first state
is for the mornings, when they remember their losses at play, their
lovers’ looks at other women, the compromising notes they have written,
and how much too much to be safe their maids know of them; the second
state is for the evenings, when they have their war-paint on, have taken
a little nip of some stimulant at afternoon tea, are going to half a
dozen houses between midnight and dawn, and are quite sure their lovers
never even see that any other women exist.
“He could not have a better illustration of the difference between a
woman with taste and a woman without it,” thought the Duc de St. Louis,
surveying the two; the countess had a million or two of false curls in a
tower above her pretty tiny face, was almost as _décolletée_ as a Guiza
picture, chirped the fashionable slang of the boulevards and salons in
the shrillest and swiftest of voices, and poured forth slanders that were
more diverting than decorous.
Lady Hilda was dressed like a picture of Marie Antoinette in 1770; her
rich hair was lifted from her low fair forehead in due keeping with
her costume; she swept aside her cousin’s naughty stories with as much
taste as contempt, and spoke a French which Marie Antoinette could have
recognized as the language in which Voltaire once scoffed and André
Chénier sighed. To be sure, she did smoke a little; but then even the
most perfect taste cannot quite escape the _cachet_ of its era.
“It was not necessary, my friend, to say that your place was so poor,”
said M. de St. Louis, as they went out of the hotel together: he had
known his companion from boyhood.
“I am not ashamed of my poverty,” said Della Rocca, somewhat coldly.
“Besides,” he added, with a laugh which had not much mirth in it, “our
poverty is as well known as that of the city. I think the most dishonest
Della Rocca could not conceal it by his adroitness, any more than
Floralia could conceal her public debt.”
“That may be, but neither you nor the town need proclaim the state of
your affairs,” said the Duc, who never gave up an opinion. “You should
let her be interested in you before you make it so evident that such
silence is quite permissible. You need say nothing; you need hide
nothing; you need only let things alone.”
“My dear Duc,” said Della Rocca, with a laugh that had merriment in it
and some irritation, “think for one moment of that woman’s position,
and say could anything ever induce her to change it,—except one thing?
Riches could add nothing to her; the highest rank could scarcely be any
charm to her; she has everything she can want or wish for;—if she had
the power of wishing left, which I doubt, the only spell that might
enchain her would be love, if she have any capacity to feel it, which I
doubt also.—Well, granted that aroused, what would poverty or riches in
her lover matter to one who has secure forever a golden pedestal of her
own from which to survey the wars of the world? She refused the Prince
of Deutschland; that I know, since he told me himself; and men do not
boast of rejections: what position, pray, would ever tempt her since she
refused Deutschland?—and he has all personal attractions, too, as well as
his future crown.”
“Still, granting all that, to make your lack of fortune so very
conspicuous is to render your purpose conspicuous also, and to draw her
attention to it unwisely,” said the Duc, who viewed all these matters
calmly, as a kind of mixture of diplomacy and business.
“Caro mio,” said Della Rocca, lightly, as he descended the last step, “be
very sure that if I ever have such a purpose your Lady Hilda has too much
wit not to perceive it in a day. But I have not such a purpose. I do not
like a woman who smokes.”
And with a good-night he walked away to his own house, which was a street
or two distant. The Duc chuckled, no wise discomfited.
“An Italian always swears he will never do the thing he means to do in an
hour,” he reflected, as he got in his cab.
The Della Rocca Palace was let to many tenants and in various divisions;
he himself retained only a few chambers looking upon the old quiet green
garden, high-walled, dark with ilex, and musical with fountains.
He crossed the silent courts, mounted the vast black stairways, and
entered his solitary rooms. There was a lamp burning; and his dog got up
and welcomed him. He slipped on an old velvet smoking-coat, lighted a
cigar, and sat down: the counsels and projects of M. de St. Louis were
not so entirely rejected by him as he had wished the Duc to suppose.
He admired her; he did not approve her; he was not even sure that he
liked her in any way; but he could not but see that here at last was the
marriage which would bring the resurrection of all his fortunes.
Neither did he feel any of the humility which he had expressed to M. de
St. Louis. Though she might be as cold as people all said she was, he had
little fear, if he once endeavored, he would fail in making his way into
her grace. With an Italian, love is too perfect a science for him to be
uncertain of its results.
Besides, he believed that he detected a different character in her to
what the world thought, and she also thought, was her own. He thought men
had all failed with her because they had not gone the right road to work.
After all, to make a woman in love with you was easy enough. At least he
had always found it so.
She was a woman, too, of unusual beauty, and of supreme grace, and a
great alliance; her money would restore him to the lost power of his
ancestors, and save a mighty and stainless name from falling into
that paralysis of poverty and that dust of obscurity which is sooner
or later its utter extinction. She seemed cast across his path by
a caress of Fortune, from which it would be madness to turn aside.
True, he had a wholly different ideal for his wife; he disliked those
world-famous _élégantes_; he disliked women who smoked and knew their
Paris as thoroughly as Houssaye or Dumas; he disliked the extravagant,
artificial, empty, frivolous life they led, their endless chase after
new excitements, and their insatiable appetite for “frissons nouveaux;”
he disliked their literature, their habits, their cynicism, their ennui,
their coldness, and their dissipations; he knew them well, and disliked
them in all things; what he desired in his wife were natural emotions,
unworn innocence, serenity, simplicity, and freshness of enjoyment:
though he was of the world, he did not care very much for it; he had a
meditative, imaginative temperament, and the whirl of modern society was
soon wearisome to him; on the other hand, he knew the world too well to
want a woman beside him who knew it equally well.
On the whole, the project of M. de St. Louis repelled as much as it
attracted him. Yet his wisdom told him that it was the marriage beyond
all others which would best fulfill his destiny in the way which from
his earliest years he had been accustomed to regard as inevitable; and
moreover there was something about her which charmed his senses, though
his judgment feared and in some things his taste disapproved her.
Besides, to make so self-engrossed a woman love,—he smiled as he sat and
smoked in the solitude of his great dim vaulted room, and then he sighed
impatiently.
After all, it was not a _beau rôle_ to woo a woman for the sheer sake
of her fortune; and he was too true a gentleman not to know it. And
what would money do for him if it were hers and not his?—it would only
humiliate him. He felt no taste for the position of a prince consort: it
would pass to his children certainly after him, and so raise up the old
name to its olden dignity; but for himself——
He got up and walked to the window; the clear winter stars, large
before morning, were shining through the iron bars and lozenged panes
of the ancient casement; the fountain in the cortile was shining in the
moonlight; the ducal coronet, carved in stone above the gateway, stood
out whitely from the shadows.
“After all, she would despise me, and I should despise myself,” he
thought: the old coronet had been sadly battered in war, but it had never
been chaffered and bought.