“What do you think of Della Rocca, Hilda?” asked Madame Mila at the same
hour that night, toasting her pink satin slipper before her dressing-room
fire.
Lady Hilda yawned, unclasping her _rivière_ of sapphires.
“He has a very good manner. There is some truth in what Olga Schouvaloff
always maintains, that after an Italian all other men seem boors.”
“I am sure Maurice is not a boor!” said the countess, pettishly.
“Oh, no, my dear: he parts his hair in the middle, talks the last new,
unintelligible, aristocratic _argot_, and he has the charms of every
actress and dancer in Paris catalogued clearly in a brain otherwise duly
clouded, as fashion requires, by brandy in the morning and absinthe
before dinner! Boors don’t do those things, nor yet get half as learned
as to Mlle. Rose Thé and la Petite Boulotte.”
Madame Mila reddened angrily.
“What spiteful things to say! He never looked at that hideous little
Boulotte, or any of the horrible creatures; and he never drinks; he is a
perfect gentleman.”
“Not quite that, ma chère; if he had been, he would either have dismissed
himself or made you dismiss your husband!”
Madame Mila raged in passionate wrath for five minutes, and then began to
cry a little, whimperingly.
Lady Hilda gathered up her _rivière_, took her candlestick, and bade her
good-night.
“It is no use making that noise, Mila,” she said, coolly. “You have
always known what I think; but you prefer to be in the fashion; of course
you must go on as you like; only please to remember,—don’t let _me_ see
too much of Des Gommeux.”
Madame Mila, left alone to the contemplation of her pink slippers, fumed
and sulked and felt very angry indeed; but she had borrowed a thousand
pounds some six or eight times from the Lady Hilda to pay her debts at
play; and of course it was such a trifle that she had always forgotten to
pay it again, because if ever she had any ready money there was always
some jeweler or man dress-maker, or creditor of some kind who would not
wait; and then, though it was not her fault, because she played as high
as she could any night she got a chance to do so, somehow or other she
generally lost, and never had a single sou to spare: so she muttered
her rage to the pink slippers alone, and decided that it was never worth
while to be put out about the Lady Hilda’s “ways.”
“She is a bit of ice herself,” she said to her slippers, and wondered how
Lady Hilda or anybody else could object to what she did, or see any harm
in it. Maurice always went to another hotel.
Mme. Mila lived her life in a manner very closely resembling that of the
horrible creatures Mlles. Rose Thé and Boulotte; really, when compared
by a cynic, there was very little difference to be found between those
persons and pretty Madame Mila.
But Rose Thé and Boulotte of course were creatures, and she was a very
great little lady, and went to all the courts and embassies in Europe,
and was sought and courted by the very best and stiffest people, being
very _chic_ and very rich, and very lofty in every way, and very careful
to make Maurice go to a different hotel.
She had had twenty Maurices in her time, indeed, but then the Count de
Caviare never complained, and was careful to drive with her in the Bois,
and pass at least three months of each year under the same roof with
her; so that nobody could say anything, it being an accepted axiom with
Society that when the husband does not object to his own dishonor there
is no dishonor at all in the matter for any one. If he be sensitive to
it, then indeed you must cut his wife, and there will be nothing too
bad to be said of her; but if he only do but connive at his own infamy
himself, then all is quite right, and everything is as it should be.
When the Prince of Cracow, with half Little Russia in his possession,
entertains the beautiful Lady Lightwood at a banquet at his villa at
Frascati, Richmond, or Auteuil, a score of gilded lackeys shout, “La
voiture de Madame la Comtesse!” the assembled guests receive her sweet
good-night, the Prince of Cracow bows low and thanks her for the honor
she has done to him, she goes out at the hall door, and the carriage
bowls away with loud crash and fiery steeds and rolls on its way out of
the park gates. Society is quite satisfied. Society knows very well that
a million roubles find their yearly way into the empty pockets of Lord
Lightwood, and that a little later the carriage will sweep round again to
a side-door hidden under the laurels wide open, and receive the beautiful
Lady Lightwood: but what is that to Society? It has seen her drive away:
that is quite sufficient; everybody is satisfied with that.
If you give Society very good dinners, Society will never be so ill-bred
as to see that side-door under your laurels.
Do drive out at the hall door; do,—for the sake of les Bienséances; that
is all Society asks of you: there are some things Society feels it owes
to Itself, and this is one of them.
Of course, whether you come back again or not, can be nobody’s business.
Society can swear to the fact of the hall door.
Madame Mila was attentive to the matter of the hall door; indeed,
abhorred a scandal,—it always made everything uncomfortable. She was
always careful of appearances. Even if you called on her unexpectedly,
Des Gommeux was always in an inner room, unseen, and you could declare
with a clear conscience that you never found him with her, were the oath
ever required in defense of her character. Of course, you have no sort of
business with who or what may be in inner rooms: Society does not require
you to search a house as if you were a detective.
If you can say, coolly, “Oh, there’s nothing in it; I never see him
there,” Society believes you, and is quite satisfied: that is, if it
wishes to believe you; if it do not wish, nothing would ever satisfy
it,—no, not though there rose one from the dead to bear witness.
Madame Mila would not have done anything to jeopardize her going to
courts, and having all the embassies to show her jewels in, for anything
that any man in the whole world could have offered her.
Madame Mila thought a woman who left her husband and made a scandal, a
horrid creature; nay, she was worse, she was a blunderer, and by her
blunder made a great deal of unpleasantness for other and wiser women.
After a stupid, open thing of that kind, Society always got so dreadfully
prudish for about three months, that it was disagreeable for everybody.
To run off with a man, and lose your settlements, and very likely have to
end in a boarding-house in Boulogne?—could anything be more idiotic?
Madame Mila thought that a woman so forgetting herself deserved even a
worse fate than the boarding-house. Madame Mila, who was quite content
that her husband should make a fool of himself about Blanche Souris,
or anybody else, so long as he walked arm-in-arm now and then with Des
Gommeux and called him “mon cher,” was indeed in every iota the true
Femme Galante of the nineteenth century.
The Femme Galante has passed through many various changes, in
many countries. The dames of the Decamerone were unlike the fair
athlete-seekers of the days of Horace; and the powdered coquettes of the
years of Molière were sisters only by the kinship of a common vice to the
frivolous and fragile fagot of impulses that is called Frou-frou.
The Femme Galante has always been a feature in every age. Poets,
from Juvenal to Musset, have railed at her; artists, from Titian to
Winterhalter, have painted her; dramatists, from Aristophanes to Congreve
and Beaumarchais and Dumas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her;
caricaturists, from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavarni,
have poured out their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of
to-day has been missed hitherto.
Frou-frou, who stands for her, is not in the least the true type.
Frou-frou is a creature that can love, can suffer, can repent, can die.
She is false in sentimentality and in art, but she is tender after
all; poor, feverish, wistful, changeful morsel of humanity,—a slender,
helpless, breathless, and frail thing, who, under one sad, short sin,
sinks down to death.
But Frou-frou is in no sense the true Femme Galante of her day. Frou-frou
is much more a fancy than a fact. It is not Frou-frou that Molière would
have handed down to other generations in enduring ridicule had he been
living now. To Frou-frou he would have doffed his hat with dim eyes; what
he would have fastened for all time in his pillory would have been a very
different, and far more conspicuous offender.
The Femme Galante, who has neither the scruples nor the follies of poor
Frou-frou; who neither forfeits her place nor leaves her lord; who has
studied adultery as one of the fine arts and made it one of the domestic
virtues; who takes her lover to her friends’ houses as she takes her muff
or her dog, and teaches her sons and daughters to call him by familiar
names; who writes notes of assignation with the same pen that calls her
boy home from school, and who smooths her child’s curls with the same
fingers that stray over her lover’s lips; who challenges the world to
find a flaw in her, and who smiles serene at her husband’s table on a
society she is careful to conciliate; who has woven the most sacred ties
and most unholy pleasures into so deft a braid that none can say where
one commences or the other ends; who uses the sanctity of her maternity
to cover the lawlessness of her license; and who, incapable alike of the
self-abandonment of love or of the self-sacrifice of duty, has not even
such poor, cheap honor as in the creatures of the streets may make guilt
loyal to its dupe and partner.
This is the Femme Galante of the passing century, who, with her hand on
her husband’s arm, babbles of her virtue in complacent boast, smiles in
her lover’s eyes, and, ignoring such a vulgar word as Sin, talks with a
smile of Friendship. Beside her Frou-frou were innocence itself, Marion
de L’Orme were honesty, Marion Leseant were purity, Cleopatra were
chaste, and Faustina were faithful.
She is the female Tartufe of seduction, the Précieuse Ridicule of
passion, the parody of Love, the standing gibe of Womanhood.