other men. He felt that the idol of Noblesse, before which they burned
incense at home, was hollow; he had come to be one of the commonest as
well as one of the worst types from a social point of view--a consistent
egoist. The aristocratic cult of the _ego_ simply taught him to follow
his own fancies; he had been idolized by those who had the care of him
in childhood, and adored by the companions who shared in his boyish
escapades, and so he had formed a habit of looking and judging
everything as it affected his own pleasure; he took it as a matter of
course when good souls saved him from the consequences of his follies,
a piece of mistaken kindness which could only lead to his ruin.
Victurnien’s early training, noble and pious though it was, had isolated
him too much. He was out of the current of the life of the time, for the
life of a provincial town is certainly not in the main current of the
age; Victurnien’s true destiny lifted him above it. He had learned
to think of an action, not as it affected others, nor relatively, but
absolutely from his own point of view. Like despots, he made the law
to suit the circumstance, a system which works in the lives of prodigal
sons the same confusion which fancy brings into art.
Victurnien was quick-sighted, he saw clearly and without illusion, but
he acted on impulse, and unwisely. An indefinable flaw of character,
often seen in young men, but impossible to explain, led him to will one
thing and do another. In spite of an active mind, which showed itself
in unexpected ways, the senses had but to assert themselves, and the
darkened brain seemed to exist no longer. He might have astonished wise
men; he was capable of setting fools agape. His desires, like a sudden
squall of bad weather, overclouded all the clear and lucid spaces of his
brain in a moment; and then, after the dissipations which he could not
resist, he sank, utterly exhausted in body, heart, and mind, into a
collapsed condition bordering upon imbecility. Such a character will
drag a man down into the mire if he is left to himself, or bring him to
the highest heights of political power if he has some stern friend
to keep him in hand. Neither Chesnel, nor the lad’s father, nor Aunt
Armande had fathomed the depths of a nature so nearly akin on many sides
to the poetic temperament, yet smitten with a terrible weakness at its
core.
By the time the old town lay several miles away, Victurnien felt not the
slightest regret; he thought no more about the father, who had loved ten
generations in his son, nor of the aunt, and her almost insane devotion.
He was looking forward to Paris with vehement ill-starred longings; in
thought he had lived in that fairyland, it had been the background of
his brightest dreams. He imagined that he would be first in Paris, as
he had been in the town and the department where his father’s name was
potent; but it was vanity, not pride, that filled his soul, and in his
dreams his pleasures were to be magnified by all the greatness of
Paris. The distance was soon crossed. The traveling coach, like his own
thoughts, left the narrow horizon of the province for the vast world of
the great city, without a break in the journey. He stayed in the Rue de
Richelieu, in a handsome hotel close to the boulevard, and hastened to
take possession of Paris as a famished horse rushes into a meadow.
He was not long in finding out the difference between country and
town, and was rather surprised than abashed by the change. His mental
quickness soon discovered how small an entity he was in the midst of
this all-comprehending Babylon; how insane it would be to attempt
to stem the torrent of new ideas and new ways. A single incident was
enough. He delivered his father’s letter of introduction to the Duc de
Lenoncourt, a noble who stood high in favor with the King. He saw the
duke in his splendid mansion, among surroundings befitting his rank.
Next day he met him again. This time the Peer of France was lounging
on foot along the boulevard, just like any ordinary mortal, with an
umbrella in his hand; he did not even wear the Blue Ribbon, without
which no knight of the order could have appeared in public in other
times. And, duke and peer and first gentleman of the bedchamber though
he was, M. de Lenoncourt, in spite of his high courtesy, could not
repress a smile as he read his relative’s letter; and that smile told
Victurnien that the Collection of Antiquities and the Tuileries were
separated by more than sixty leagues of road; the distance of several
centuries lay between them.
The names of the families grouped about the throne are quite different
in each successive reign, and the characters change with the names. It
would seem that, in the sphere of court, the same thing happens over and
over again in each generation; but each time there is a quite different
set of personages. If history did not prove that this is so, it would
seem incredible. The prominent men at the court of Louis XVIII.,
for instance, had scarcely any connection with the Rivieres, Blacas,
d’Avarays, Vitrolles, d’Autichamps, Pasquiers, Larochejaqueleins,
Decazes, Dambrays, Laines, de Villeles, La Bourdonnayes, and others who
shone at the court of Louis XV. Compare the courtiers of Henri IV. with
those of Louis XIV.; you will hardly find five great families of the
former time still in existence. The nephew of the great Richelieu was
a very insignificant person at the court of Louis XIV.; while His
Majesty’s favorite, Villeroi, was the grandson of a secretary ennobled
by Charles IX. And so it befell that the d’Esgrignons, all but princes
under the Valois, and all-powerful in the time of Henri IV., had no
fortune whatever at the court of Louis XVIII., which gave them not so
much as a thought. At this day there are names as famous as those
of royal houses--the Foix-Graillys, for instance, or the
d’Herouvilles--left to obscurity tantamount to extinction for want of
money, the one power of the time.
All which things Victurnien beheld entirely from his own point of view;
he felt the equality that he saw in Paris as a personal wrong. The
monster Equality was swallowing down the last fragments of social
distinction in the Restoration. Having made up his mind on this head, he
immediately proceeded to try to win back his place with such dangerous,
if blunted weapons, as the age left to the noblesse. It is an expensive
matter to gain the attention of Paris. To this end, Victurnien adopted
some of the ways then in vogue. He felt that it was a necessity to have
horses and fine carriages, and all the accessories of modern luxury;
he felt, in short, “that a man must keep abreast of the times,” as de
Marsay said--de Marsay, the first dandy that he came across in the first
drawing-room to which he was introduced. For his misfortune, he fell
in with a set of roues, with de Marsay, de Ronquerolles, Maxime de
Trailles, des Lupeaulx, Rastignac, Ajuda-Pinto, Beaudenord, de la
Roche-Hugon, de Manerville, and the Vandenesses, whom he met wherever he
went, and a great many houses were open to a young man with his ancient
name and reputation for wealth. He went to the Marquise d’Espard’s,
to the Duchesses de Grandlieu, de Carigliano, and de Chaulieu, to the
Marquises d’Aiglemont and de Listomere, to Mme. de Serizy’s, to the
Opera, to the embassies and elsewhere. The Faubourg Saint-Germain has
its provincial genealogies at its fingers’ ends; a great name once
recognized and adopted therein is a passport which opens many a door
that will scarcely turn on its hinges for unknown names or the lions of
a lower rank.
Victurnien found his relatives both amiable and ready to welcome him so
long as he did not appear as a suppliant; he saw at once that the surest
way of obtaining nothing was to ask for something. At Paris, if the
first impulse moves people to protect, second thoughts (which last
a good deal longer) impel them to despise the protege. Independence,
vanity, and pride, all the young Count’s better and worse feelings
combined, led him, on the contrary, to assume an aggressive attitude.
And therefore the Ducs de Verneuil, de Lenoncourt, de Chaulieu, de
Navarreins, d’Herouville, de Grandlieu, and de Maufrigneuse, the Princes
de Cadignan and de Blamont-Chauvry, were delighted to present the
charming survivor of the wreck of an ancient family at court.
Victurnien went to the Tuileries in a splendid carriage with his
armorial bearings on the panels; but his presentation to His Majesty
made it abundantly clear to him that the people occupied the royal
mind so much that his nobility was like to be forgotten. The restored
dynasty, moreover, was surrounded by triple ranks of eligible old men
and gray-headed courtiers; the young noblesse was reduced to a cipher,
and this Victurnien guessed at once. He saw that there was no suitable
place for him at court, nor in the government, nor the army, nor,
indeed, anywhere else. So he launched out into the world of pleasure.
Introduced at the Elyess-Bourbon, at the Duchesse d’Angouleme’s, at the
Pavillon Marsan, he met on all sides with the surface civilities due to
the heir of an old family, not so old but it could be called to mind by
the sight of a living member. And, after all, it was not a small thing
to be remembered. In the distinction with which Victurnien was honored
lay the way to the peerage and a splendid marriage; he had taken the
field with a false appearance of wealth, and his vanity would not
allow him to declare his real position. Besides, he had been so much
complimented on the figure that he made, he was so pleased with his
first success, that, like many other young men, he felt ashamed to draw
back. He took a suite of rooms in the Rue du Bac, with stables and a
complete equipment for the fashionable life to which he had committed
himself. These preliminaries cost him fifty thousand francs, which
money, moreover, the young gentleman managed to draw in spite of all
Chesnel’s wise precautions, thanks to a series of unforeseen events.
Chesnel’s letter certainly reached his friend’s office, but Maitre
Sorbier was dead; and Mme. Sorbier, a matter-of-fact person, seeing it
was a business letter, handed it on to her husband’s successor. Maitre
Cardot, the new notary, informed the young Count that a draft on the
Treasury made payable to the deceased would be useless; and by way of
reply to the letter, which had cost the old provincial notary so much
thought, Cardot despatched four lines intended not to reach Chesnel’s
heart, but to produce the money. Chesnel made the draft payable
to Sorbier’s young successor; and the latter, feeling but little
inclination to adopt his correspondent’s sentimentality, was delighted
to put himself at the Count’s orders, and gave Victurnien as much money
as he wanted.
Now those who know what life in Paris means, know that fifty thousand
francs will not go very far in furniture, horses, carriages, and
elegance generally; but it must be borne in mind that Victurnien
immediately contracted some twenty thousand francs’ worth of debts
besides, and his tradespeople at first were not at all anxious to be
paid, for our young gentleman’s fortune had been prodigiously increased,
partly by rumor, partly by Josephin, that Chesnel in livery.
Victurnien had not been in town a month before he was obliged to repair
to his man of business for ten thousand francs; he had only been playing
whist with the Ducs de Navarreins, de Chaulieu, and de Lenoncourt, and
now and again at his club. He had begun by winning some thousands of
francs but pretty soon lost five or six thousand, which brought home to
him the necessity of a purse for play. Victurnien had the spirit that
gains goodwill everywhere, and puts a young man of a great family on a
level with the very highest. He was not merely admitted at once into
the band of patrician youth, but was even envied by the rest. It was
intoxicating to him to feel that he was envied, nor was he in this mood
very likely to think of reform. Indeed, he had completely lost his head.
He would not think of the means; he dipped into his money-bags as if
they could be refilled indefinitely; he deliberately shut his eyes to
the inevitable results of the system. In that dissipated set, in the
continual whirl of gaiety, people take the actors in their brilliant
costumes as they find them, no one inquires whether a man can afford to
make the figure he does, there is nothing in worse taste than inquiries
as to ways and means. A man ought to renew his wealth perpetually,
and as Nature does--below the surface and out of sight. People talk if
somebody comes to grief; they joke about a newcomer’s fortune till
their minds are set at rest, and at this they draw the line. Victurnien
d’Esgrignon, with all the Faubourg Saint-Germain to back him, with all
his protectors exaggerating the amount of his fortune (were it only to
rid themselves of responsibility), and magnifying his possessions in the
most refined and well-bred way, with a hint or a word; with all these
advantages--to repeat--Victurnien was, in fact, an eligible Count. He
was handsome, witty, sound in politics; his father still possessed the
ancestral castle and the lands of the marquisate. Such a young fellow
is sure of an admirable reception in houses where there are marriageable
daughters, fair but portionless partners at dances, and young married
women who find that time hangs heavy on their hands. So the world,
smiling, beckoned him to the foremost benches in its booth; the seats
reserved for marquises are still in the same place in Paris; and if the
names are changed, the things are the same as ever.
In the most exclusive circle of society in the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
Victurnien found the Chevalier’s double in the person of the Vidame de
Pamiers. The Vidame was a Chevalier de Valois raised to the tenth power,
invested with all the prestige of wealth, enjoying all the advantages of
high position. The dear Vidame was a repositary for everybody’s secrets,
and the gazette of the Faubourg besides; nevertheless, he was discreet,
and, like other gazettes, only said things that might safely be
published. Again Victurnien listened to the Chevalier’s esoteric
doctrines. The Vidame told young d’Esgrignon, without mincing matters,
to make conquests among women of quality, supplementing the advice with
anecdotes from his own experience. The Vicomte de Pamiers, it seemed,
had permitted himself much that it would serve no purpose to relate
here; so remote was it all from our modern manners, in which soul and
passion play so large a part, that nobody would believe it. But the
excellent Vidame did more than this.
“Dine with me at a tavern to-morrow,” said he, by way of conclusion. “We
will digest our dinner at the Opera, and afterwards I will take you to a
house where several people have the greatest wish to meet you.”
The Vidame gave a delightful little dinner at the Rocher de Cancale;
three guests only were asked to meet Victurnien--de Marsay, Rastignac,
and Blondet. Emile Blondet, the young Count’s fellow-townsman, was a man
of letters on the outskirts of society to which he had been introduced
by a charming woman from the same province. This was one of the Vicomte
de Troisville’s daughters, now married to the Comte de Montcornet,
one of those of Napoleon’s generals who went over to the Bourbons. The
Vidame held that a dinner-party of more than six persons was beneath
contempt. In that case, according to him, there was an end alike of
cookery and conversation, and a man could not sip his wine in a proper
frame of mind.
“I have not yet told you, my dear boy, where I mean to take you
to-night,” he said, taking Victurnien’s hands and tapping on them.
“You are going to see Mlle. des Touches; all the pretty women with any
pretensions to wit will be at her house en petit comite. Literature,
art, poetry, any sort of genius, in short, is held in great esteem
there. It is one of our old-world bureaux d’esprit, with a veneer of
monarchical doctrine, the livery of this present age.”
“It is sometimes as tiresome and tedious there as a pair of new boots,
but there are women with whom you cannot meet anywhere else,” said de
Marsay.
“If all the poets who went there to rub up their muse were like
our friend here,” said Rastignac, tapping Blondet familiarly on the
shoulder, “we should have some fun. But a plague of odes, and ballads,
and driveling meditations, and novels with wide margins, pervades the
sofas and the atmosphere.”
“I don’t dislike them,” said de Marsay, “so long as they corrupt girls’
minds, and don’t spoil women.”
“Gentlemen,” smiled Blondet, “you are encroaching on my field of
literature.”
“You need not talk. You have robbed us of the most charming woman in the
world, you lucky rogue; we may be allowed to steal your less brilliant
ideas,” cried Rastignac.
“Yes, he is a lucky rascal,” said the Vidame, and he twitched
Blondet’s ear. “But perhaps Victurnien here will be luckier still this
evening----”
“_Already_!” exclaimed de Marsay. “Why, he only came here a month ago;
he has scarcely had time to shake the dust of his old manor house off
his feet, to wipe off the brine in which his aunt kept him preserved;
he has only just set up a decent horse, a tilbury in the latest style, a
groom----”
“No, no, not a groom,” interrupted Rastignac; “he has some sort of an
agricultural laborer that he brought with him ‘from his place.’ Buisson,
who understands a livery as well as most, declared that the man was
physically incapable of wearing a jacket.”
“I will tell you what, you ought to have modeled yourself on
Beaudenord,” the Vidame said seriously. “He has this advantage over
all of you, my young friends, he has a genuine specimen of the English
tiger----”
“Just see, gentlemen, what the noblesse have come to in France!” cried
Victurnien. “For them the one important thing is to have a tiger, a
thoroughbred, and baubles----”
“Bless me!” said Blondet. “‘This gentleman’s good sense at times appalls
me.’--Well, yes, young moralist, you nobles have come to that. You have
not even left to you that lustre of lavish expenditure for which the
dear Vidame was famous fifty years ago. We revel on a second floor in
the Rue Montorgueil. There are no more wars with the Cardinal, no Field
of the Cloth of Gold. You, Comte d’Esgrignon, in short, are supping
in the company of one Blondet, younger son of a miserable provincial
magistrate, with whom you would not shake hands down yonder; and in ten
years’ time you may sit beside him among peers of the realm. Believe in
yourself after that, if you can.”
“Ah, well,” said Rastignac, “we have passed from action to thought, from
brute force to force of intellect, we are talking----”
“Let us not talk of our reverses,” protested the Vidame; “I have made
up my mind to die merrily. If our friend here has not a tiger as yet, he
comes of a race of lions, and can dispense with one.”
“He cannot do without a tiger,” said Blondet; “he is too newly come to
town.”
“His elegance may be new as yet,” returned de Marsay, “but we are
adopting it. He is worthy of us, he understands his age, he has brains,
he is nobly born and gently bred; we are going to like him, and serve
him, and push him----”
“Whither?” inquired Blondet.
“Inquisitive soul!” said Rastignac.
“With whom will he take up to-night?” de Marsay asked.
“With a whole seraglio,” said the Vidame.
“Plague take it! What can we have done that the dear Vidame is punishing
us by keeping his word to the infanta? I should be pitiable indeed if I
did not know her----”
“And I was once a coxcomb even as he,” said the Vidame, indicating de
Marsay.
The conversation continued pitched in the same key, charmingly
scandalous, and agreeably corrupt. The dinner went off very pleasantly.
Rastignac and de Marsay went to the Opera with the Vidame and
Victurnien, with a view to following them afterwards to Mlle. des
Touches’ salon. And thither, accordingly, this pair of rakes betook
themselves, calculating that by that time the tragedy would have been
read; for of all things to be taken between eleven and twelve o’clock at
night, a tragedy in their opinion was the most unwholesome. They went to
keep a watch on Victurnien and to embarrass him, a piece of schoolboys’s
mischief embittered by a jealous dandy’s spite. But Victurnien was
gifted with that page’s effrontery which is a great help to ease
of manner; and Rastignac, watching him as he made his entrance, was
surprised to see how quickly he caught the tone of the moment.
“That young d’Esgrignon will go far, will he not?” he said, addressing
his companion.
“That is as may be,” returned de Marsay, “but he is in a fair way.”
The Vidame introduced his young friend to one of the most amiable
and frivolous duchesses of the day, a lady whose adventures caused an
explosion five years later. Just then, however, she was in the full
blaze of her glory; she had been suspected, it is true, of equivocal
conduct; but suspicion, while it is still suspicion and not proof, marks
a woman out with the kind of distinction which slander gives to a man.
Nonentities are never slandered; they chafe because they are left in
peace. This woman was, in fact, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, a daughter
of the d’Uxelles; her father-in-law was still alive; she was not to
be the Princesse de Cadignan for some years to come. A friend of the
Duchesse de Langeais and the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, two glories
departed, she was likewise intimate with the Marquise d’Espard, with
whom she disputed her fragile sovereignty as queen of fashion. Great
relations lent her countenance for a long while, but the Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse was one of those women who, in some way, nobody knows how,
or why, or where, will spend the rents of all the lands of earth, and of
the moon likewise, if they were not out of reach. The general outline of
her character was scarcely known as yet; de Marsay, and de Marsay only,
really had read her. That redoubtable dandy now watched the Vidame de
Pamiers’ introduction of his young friend to that lovely woman, and bent
over to say in Rastignac’s ear:
“My dear fellow, he will go up _whizz_! like a rocket, and come down
like a stick,” an atrociously vulgar saying which was remarkably
fulfilled.
The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had lost her heart to Victurnien after
first giving her mind to a serious study of him. Any lover who should
have caught the glance by which she expressed her gratitude to the
Vidame might well have been jealous of such friendship. Women are like
horses let loose on a steppe when they feel, as the Duchess felt with
the Vidame de Pamiers, that the ground is safe; at such moments they
are themselves; perhaps it pleases them to give, as it were, samples
of their tenderness in intimacy in this way. It was a guarded glance,
nothing was lost between eye and eye; there was no possibility of
reflection in any mirror. Nobody intercepted it.
“See how she has prepared herself,” Rastignac said, turning to de
Marsay. “What a virginal toilette; what swan’s grace in that snow-white
throat of hers! How white her gown is, and she is wearing a sash like a
little girl; she looks round like a madonna inviolate. Who would think
that you had passed that way?”
“The very reason why she looks as she does,” returned de Marsay, with a
triumphant air.
The two young men exchanged a smile. Mme. de Maufrigneuse saw the smile
and guessed at their conversation, and gave the pair a broadside of her
eyes, an art acquired by Frenchwomen since the Peace, when Englishwomen
imported it into this country, together with the shape of their silver
plate, their horses and harness, and the piles of insular ice which
impart a refreshing coolness to the atmosphere of any room in which a
certain number of British females are gathered together. The young
men grew serious as a couple of clerks at the end of a homily from
headquarters before the receipt of an expected bonus.