THE FACE IN THE CROWD
Isabella had loved her mother, truly if rather fearfully, and in
return had been loved by her with as condescending a devotion as a
spirit so incessantly restless and ambitious as that of Louis XV.’s
eldest daughter could lavish on a child not born into the first order
of creation. How the indomitable sick woman had rejoiced in that early
fulfilment of her hopes, when the Austrian ambassador had come to put
an end to her doubts and apprehensions, her communications to her
husband show. She was jubilant; and so was impure old Bien-aimé, who
wrote the most touching and beautiful letter to congratulate his
son-in-law on the event, a letter full of sentiments “de les exprimer
pourrait les diminuer.” And now, before she might see brought to
ripeness any one of the countless schemes she was perpetually
revolving in her feverish brain for her family’s aggrandisement, she
had herself dropped in a moment from the tree like a rotten medlar.
The shock of her death did more to bring poor Isabel to her senses
than the harshest tyranny could have done. It seemed a very
retribution on her for her sins; and I doubt, if it had been possible
to marry her then offhand, but she would have acquiesced in her
fate--with despairing, perhaps, but without further revolt. The
thought that during all this time, while her mother had been
sojourning for her health’s sake at Versailles, she had been planning
in her guilty soul an act which, if committed, would have struck the
deadliest of blows at the pride and trusting affection, possibly at
the life itself, of that beloved parent, filled her with inexpressible
remorse. She went in these days with a face so pale and scared, that
one might have believed her haunted by the thought of her own direct
responsibility for the tragedy. The very memory of what had been
seemed to her a profanation to the sainted dead. She strove to cleanse
her conscience of all offence, even to the lingering shadow of a dream
which now could never come to be realised. She told herself so: it was
ended and finally; how, even if but one star from its firmament were
allowed to twinkle on, could she kneel and pray, without blasphemy,
for the repose of her mother’s soul?
To her father, in this emotional reaction, she wistfully and naturally
turned. Their common sorrow brought them closer together than they had
ever been as yet; and, while mothering his weakness and his distress,
she bitterly reproached herself for all that past unfilial attitude of
hers towards what she had considered his shallowness and vanity. Now
she recognised, or believed that she recognised, how much more fondly
wise than its chosen expression had been the purpose underlying that
attempt of his upon her faith. She no longer blamed him for it,
because his method had been simply characteristic.
It had been characteristic, indeed, as was no less the selfish quality
of his present grief. He bewailed his loss, almost as if it implied
some treachery to himself. Having grown resigned in submission to the
stronger will, to which he had conceded the practical management of
all his affairs of State and policy, he felt as if cruelly abandoned
by it at that moment in the promised maturation of its schemes when
its support was most needed. It was always his helplessness rather
than his sorrow that came uppermost in the tale of woe; and perhaps to
the heart of the woman and potential mother that made the surest
appeal. In ministering to his despair Isabella forgot her own.
And yet it is not to be inferred that Don Philip had been other than
devoted in his way to the vigorous soul who through such long years
had been his spirited coadjutor and support. To do him justice, he had
purposed on the first warning note of tragedy to set out for
Versailles--an intention for which the king his father-in-law, when he
came to hear of it, had gently rebuked him. And, indeed, the journey
would have been in vain. Short shrift and shift was the order in all
cases where that dreaded scourge proved mortal; and scarce was the
breath out of the august body before it was being hurried away by
night to the royal mausoleum of Saint Denis, where it was lowered with
scant ceremony into the vault from which, thirty years later, the
ghouls of the Revolution were to tear it, with fifty others, to
scatter its still impregnated dust to the winds. It was from
Marly--whither the Court, after its custom, had already fled the
terror--that Louis wrote his mild reproof, ending it with the words
“mes yeux baignent de larmes.”
So Don Philip, frustrated in his dutiful design, stayed on at home,
and regarded and pitied himself with something of the stupefaction of
the dreamer, who, thinking himself standing among company, discovers
suddenly that he has forgotten to put on his clothes. Thus he felt as
if delivered naked and aghast to a situation with which he was quite
unable to cope. He had leaned so long on that imperious will that he
seemed to have lost his capacity for standing alone.
His prostration was even abject while it lasted; but the true quality
of grief is to be measured more by endurance than collapse. Those who
succumb easily revive easily, and it was not to be supposed but that
that volatile brain would quickly rally from its depression under the
stimulus of such local distractions as offered.
Those were necessarily at first of a mortuary complexion, touching
such matters as the depth and period of the court mourning, the fasts
to be observed and the masses to be sung. The opportunities presented
by obsequies are only fully appreciated by two classes--those standing
at the opposite social extremes. A funeral is the poor man’s chance,
and the prince’s, since each in his way borrows a relative distinction
from the Majesty of Death. In the one case it is a brief affair, in
the other a protracted; but at the bottom of both there is the same
sentiment of reflected glory. Whether it be a lying-in-state, or a
hearse with one poor coach to follow, it is the corpse which ennobles
the relatives, and makes them greater than themselves by reason of
their kinship with it.
Now the widower awoke to the exciting potentialities of his position
as chief mourner, and to the realisation that a living ass might
command more attention than a dead lioness. As executor to the mighty
departed, it was his to rule, and thereby to take the credit for, the
quality of the honours to be accorded her. He extracted, at least,
some revivifying comfort from the process, some soothing flattery from
the profuse condolences of his subjects. When the dead was declared
great and unforgettable--and, indeed, whatever the personal trend of
Louise Elizabeth’s ambition, her forceful character had left its stamp
upon her times--he inhaled the incense as proffered to his own
nostrils. His vanity swallowed the innumerable eulogies, monodies and
elegiacs, extolling the deceased’s virtues, and, waxing fat upon them,
like Jeshurun kicked. “Where, then,” ended one passionate encomiast,
Frugoni, an abbé, “O, where, then, Death, is thy sting!” It is
certain that, if it lay rankling in that bereaved heart, there was
also much solace of honey to alleviate the pain it caused.
In short the duke only took means according to his lights to forget
his trouble; and what should we all do, under like circumstances, but
so study to fight the brooding demon of morbidity? Did he find a
wholesome diversion in discussing with la Coque the details of a
mourning coat, the braided sorrow of its cuffs, the sad expressive
disposition of its buttons, why grudge him that comfort simply because
we ourselves could see none in it? If a man can find solace for his
grief in cat’s-cradle, by all means let him play with strings. The two
played with strings in another sense, composing between them a
touching threnody, thick with the most harassing sobs and wails, to
which their own tears responded plentifully. They enjoyed it all
immensely in a sort of smug lugubrious way. His Highness looked double
the man he had been after a week or two’s enjoyment of these softly
melancholy preoccupations.
To Isabella, standing wistful and sorrowful in the background, the
improvement in her father’s spirits brought, with a greater ease on
his account, some vague feeling of distress. She was glad to see him
shed his despair for a healthier sentiment; yet she could not but
marvel over the choice of the means he could adopt, and find
sufficient, for the medicining of a sick soul. She tried to blind
herself to the essential shallowness of the nature which could thus
console its tragedy with sweetmeats; she tried to make allowances, to
be steadfastly loyal to her own converted sense of duty; yet the
conscious truth in her would not be so hoodwinked, or wholly justify
to her the self-sacrifice of which she had been so lavish.
Still she would have remained faithful to its ideals, if only he had
continued to cling to her; but, as she felt herself, her sympathy and
loving support, needed by him less and less--even at last, as he
developed these other healing resources, impatiently rejected--a sense
of such loneliness settled upon her as brought her own soul near the
verge of despair. She shrank back, like one who has put out a
confident hand to caress a dog, and has been savagely torn for one’s
trust. Thenceforth she seemed to realise, as she had never done yet,
the complete misery of her state. She had thrown away the substance to
grasp at the shadow, and her reward was in the righteousness of utter
desolation.
One day Fanchette alluded before her, with a disdainful lip, to a poor
little neglected herb, which had stood long untended on its table in a
sunless corner.
“Shall I throw it away, your Highness?” she said. “I think it is
dead.”
“Dead!” The word brought a shock of colour to the girl’s cheek, which
fled as quickly, leaving it ashy white. She seemed to have awakened in
an instant as from a distressed dream to the reality of something left
beside her when she fell asleep. So a mother, irresistibly overcome,
might startle to reconsciousness of her baby weakling, and sit up
aghast, with panic ears strained for reassurance of the soft-drawn
breaths. Her baby--theirs! and dying or dead! She looked, with wide
eyes glazed, staring at the pretty piteous thing, which her heart, in
its stupefaction, had forgotten. And then a rush of anger swept her,
coming from what source the power that made the feminine must answer.
“Why do you refer to it like that?” she said. “Am I to submit for ever
to your insults and innuendoes? You should have made it your duty to
water it without consulting me. What has it done, poor thing, to be so
cruelly treated? Please to attend to it at once.”
And she walked haughtily away, scornful of the storm she knew her
reproof would evoke in that hysteric bosom; careless of how her words
might rankle and give forth poisonous humours.
But that night she dreamed that she awoke and saw her lover stand
beside her; and his face to her ghast eyes appeared all thinly laced
with blood; and in his hand he held a shrunk and withered plant.
“Dead!” he moaned: “O, faithless and untrue, look here! Dead, dead!”
And so wailing, while she strove madly for speech, he passed and
faded, seeming to melt away into the darkness; and, struggling, she
awoke in truth, her cheeks all wet with tears, and held out wild
entreating arms.
“No!” she whispered: “Beloved--no, no! Not to take it with you--not to
kill me like that! I will be true; I will never sin to it or you
again.” And so she lay sobbing, a great fear and rapture at her heart.
Then, suddenly, listening, with panic pulses, she rose, and, the cold
moonbeams playing on her white breast and feet, stole to a shadowy
corner, and gasped with joy to find _it_ still was there, and felt the
soil to see that it was moist, and let her tears drop on the shrunken
leaves.
She remembered all this the next morning as something that strangely
hovered between fact and fancy--a half actual, half dreaming ecstasy
like a sleepwalker’s. But, while she could not kill the impression of
joy it had recreated in her, she still strove to remain faithful to
her resolution of duty to her mother’s memory. That was an impossible
compromise, of course; but it sufficed the situation, while matters,
owing to the mourning, hung in abeyance.
On the 2nd of February, following that fatal December, a solemn
requiem mass for the repose of the soul of Madame Louise-Elizabeth of
France, eldest daughter of the King, Infanta of Spain, and Duchess of
Parma, was sung at Paris in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. There were
present the Dauphin and Dauphiness, Mesdames Adélaïde and Victoire,
younger sisters of the deceased, and a host of court notables. The
funeral oration was pronounced by the Bishop of Troyes, who, says the
chronicler, “found nothing to say about the deceased except the usual
banalities, and who even pushed hyperbole so far as to eulogise Don
Philip, representing him as one ‘adorned with every talent which makes
for the first success, with every quality which merits it, unshirking
the least labour which assures it.’”
That flattery, when it reached the ears of its object, may likely have
stimulated him to an emulation, and more than an emulation, of the
“pomp and circumstance” of the Parisian “service solennel.” Anyhow, to
the public obsequies of the late duchess, which were announced to be
held in the Church of the Madonna della Steccata, at Parma, on the
27th March following, all the ingenuity of symbol and device of which
an upholstering brain was capable was brought into play, with a result
calculated to impress the most flippant with the dignity and majesty
of death as interpreted by a master in the art of “make-up.”
To quote, somewhat loosely, the words of the same chronicler: “The
interior of the church [a fine Renaissance structure, in the Greek
form, dating from the early sixteenth century] was hung with black
cloth embellished with a mosaic of bones and tears. Six Corinthian
pillars fluted with silver had been erected at intervals round the
nave. Medallions, representing the virtues of the princess, and
ornamented with inscriptions and ermine-lined draperies, filled the
intercolumniations of the arches both great and small. The octagonal
catafalque set in the midst bore the arms of Madame on a field of
tears and fleurs-de-lys. Below this rose a pyramid draped with black
velvet, having on its summit a crown veiled in crêpe; while around
were grouped six white marble statues representing Religion, Faith,
Hope, Charity, and two others that stood for Death. From the vaulted
roof hung a great baldaquin ornamented with five sable plumes.
“The presence of the court bishop, the stately and melancholy
intoning, combined, with the throb of the organ, the wailing of the
stringed instruments and the countless lights, to give to the ceremony
a majesty worthy of the Infanta.”
Rather an abrupt pull-up that, as if the author in the midst of his
declamation had been hit suddenly in the middle. But enough has been
described to illustrate the fertility of the brain responsible for the
decorations.
On the day of the service, the streets from an early hour were
thronged with sombre-clad citizens all hurrying to anticipate all
others in the securing of the best places for viewing and hearing. It
was a cold clear morning, and the soaring dome of the church,
surmounting its four shallow cupolas, seemed to glitter very remote
and quiet up in its blue vault. More than all the glooming symbols in
the depths below it spoke the free tranquil thought of immortality,
lovely and consoling; and so it seemed to two sad unmothered eyes,
that caught a glimpse of it through the window of the state coach, as
that solemn vehicle approached the porch.
By now all business was suspended in the city, a tithe of whose
population was packed away within those close and throbbing walls,
while hundreds, unable to gain a footing in the building, crowded the
Piazza and all the approaches outside, awaiting the arrival of the
ducal party.
Among these watchers was a young gentleman, who had come riding in
that morning from Mantua thirty miles away. He had left the old
Virgilian town at midnight, being hard pressed for time, and had
entered Parma to the clang of tolling bells, many and monotonous. The
sound at first had knocked upon his heart with a strange foreboding,
and he had reined in, with a thick catch at his throat. What did this
melancholy music portend--and these sombre crowds, all silent, all
intent, all streaming in one direction?
“His slackening steps pause at the gate--
Does she wake or sleep?--the time is late--
Does she sleep now, or watch and wait?
She has watched, she has waited long,
Watching athwart the golden grate
With a patient song.”
A mad conceit--an insane fear. And yet--he bent, put a brief hoarse
question to a passer-by and learnt the truth.
Her mother--dead some months now, as he knew. He breathed out a little
laugh of relief, reckless, self-scornful, and pushed on his way. In so
far, at least, the occasion was opportune; he might see her, and not
be seen. It was for that very purpose he had taken advantage of the
sudden armistice to hurry from Lusatia, while the fighting he had been
engaged in was suspended, and speed these long leagues back to the
Lombard plains. He had travelled day and night; he was war-worn and
spent with weariness; yet he would think his pains well recompensed by
one glimpse of the loved face. Only for one moment to stay the
insatiable hunger of his heart--to acquire new nerve and resolution
for the end that could not now be long delayed. He desired, he told
himself, to learn that she was reconciled and happy; that the ruin
with which he had threatened her young life was averted, and then he
would leave her once more, this time never to return. And so men will
go out of their way to lie to themselves, knowing that the truth
stands steadfast to the good resolution which first inspired it.
He put up his horse, and, strolling out, mingled with the people. He
was reckless of discovery, as one must be who is reckless of his life.
He had timed his approach to the church so fortuitously that he could
see, over the heads of the mob, the ducal cortège as it accompanied
the carriages. The nearness of her presence--though, penned as he was
within that living wall, he could distinguish nothing of it--made his
veins throb between rapture and agony. And then he bent himself, as
the pressure of the crowd relaxed, and it resigned itself to the long
hour of waiting before the reappearance of the august mourners, to
edging a passage to some nearer coign of vantage, where he might
watch, himself unobserved.
His cool persistence--his military bearing and assurance,
perhaps--gained him his purpose by degrees. When within two or three
of the foremost row, under the shadow of a buttress he stopped and
stood fast, abiding the mad moment.
The swell of the organ came to him; the sweet voices of the choir.
Something seemed to rise in his heart, half-suffocating him. And then
a magnetic thrill ran through the crowd, and he knew that he was to
face the ordeal.
The ducal carriage already waited at the steps. There came out first
from the great portal a little group of her Highness’s women, and he
saw that one of them was Fanchette. At that very moment a surge of the
crowd drove him forward and almost from his feet, so that to save
himself he had to “rush” two or three of the steps, and to pause an
instant to recover his balance before re-descending them. In that
second, the girl, looking round, was aware of him, and bending
immediately, as if to withdraw her skirts from his neighbourhood,
whispered: “At four o’clock, on the Mezzo bridge.”
The next moment, hustled by the guards, he was down again, and near
his former position. But the slight disturbance had attracted the
attention of a young lady just issuing from the church on her father’s
arm. One instant she turned her eyes and saw him; the next, with a
little swerve, momentary, scarce perceptible, she was going down the
steps to the carriage.