Etiquette, not an institution of primary necessity, might have been

maintained if it had appeared only on state occasions, but as it was,

there was a daily wrangle over precedence; it ceased to be a matter of

art or court ceremonial, it became a question of power. And if from

the outset the Crown lacked an adviser equal to so great a crisis, the

aristocracy was still more lacking in a sense of its wider interests, an

instinct which might have supplied the deficiency. They stood nice about

M. de Talleyrand’s marriage, when M. de Talleyrand was the one man among

them with the steel-encompassed brains that can forge a new political

system and begin a new career of glory for a nation. The Faubourg

scoffed at a minister if he was not gently born, and produced no one of

gentle birth that was fit to be a minister. There were plenty of nobles

fitted to serve their country by raising the dignity of justices of

the peace, by improving the land, by opening out roads and canals, and

taking an active and leading part as country gentlemen; but these had

sold their estates to gamble on the Stock Exchange. Again the Faubourg

might have absorbed the energetic men among the bourgeoisie, and opened

their ranks to the ambition which was undermining authority; they

preferred instead to fight, and to fight unarmed, for of all that

they once possessed there was nothing left but tradition. For their

misfortune there was just precisely enough of their former wealth left

them as a class to keep up their bitter pride. They were content with

their past. Not one of them seriously thought of bidding the son of the

house take up arms from the pile of weapons which the nineteenth century

flings down in the market-place. Young men, shut out from office, were

dancing at Madame’s balls, while they should have been doing the

work done under the Republic and the Empire by young, conscientious,

harmlessly employed energies. It was their place to carry out at Paris

the programme which their seniors should have been following in the

country. The heads of houses might have won back recognition of their

titles by unremitting attention to local interests, by falling in with

the spirit of the age, by recasting their order to suit the taste of the

times.

But, pent up together in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the spirit of

the ancient court and traditions of bygone feuds between the nobles and

the Crown still lingered on, the aristocracy was not whole-hearted in

its allegiance to the Tuileries, and so much the more easily defeated

because it was concentrated in the Chamber of Peers, and badly organized

even there. If the noblesse had woven themselves into a network over

the country, they could have held their own; but cooped up in their

Faubourg, with their backs against the Chateau, or spread at full length

over the Budget, a single blow cut the thread of a fast-expiring life,

and a petty, smug-faced lawyer came forward with the axe. In spite of M.

Royer-Collard’s admirable discourse, the hereditary peerage and law of

entail fell before the lampoons of a man who made it a boast that he had

adroitly argued some few heads out of the executioner’s clutches, and

now forsooth must clumsily proceed to the slaying of old institutions.

There are examples and lessons for the future in all this. For if there

were not still a future before the French aristocracy, there would be

no need to do more than find a suitable sarcophagus; it were something

pitilessly cruel to burn the dead body of it with fire of Tophet. But

though the surgeon’s scalpel is ruthless, it sometimes gives back life

to a dying man; and the Faubourg Saint-Germain may wax more powerful

under persecution than in its day of triumph, if it but chooses to

organize itself under a leader.

And now it is easy to give a summary of this semi-political survey. The

wish to re-establish a large fortune was uppermost in everyone’s mind;

a lack of broad views, and a mass of small defects, a real need of

religion as a political factor, combined with a thirst for pleasure

which damaged the cause of religion and necessitated a good deal of

hypocrisy; a certain attitude of protest on the part of loftier and

clearer-sighted men who set their faces against Court jealousies; and

the disaffection of the provincial families, who often came of

purer descent than the nobles of the Court which alienated them from

itself--all these things combined to bring about a most discordant state

of things in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was neither compact in its

organisation, nor consequent in its action; neither completely moral,

nor frankly dissolute; it did not corrupt, nor was it corrupted; it

would neither wholly abandon the disputed points which damaged its

cause, nor yet adopt the policy that might have saved it. In short,

however effete individuals might be, the party as a whole was none

the less armed with all the great principles which lie at the roots of

national existence. What was there in the Faubourg that it should perish

in its strength?

It was very hard to please in the choice of candidates; the Faubourg

had good taste, it was scornfully fastidious, yet there was nothing very

glorious nor chivalrous truly about its fall.

In the Emigration of 1789 there were some traces of a loftier feeling;

but in the Emigration of 1830 from Paris into the country there was

nothing discernible but self-interest. A few famous men of letters, a

few oratorical triumphs in the Chambers, M. de Talleyrand’s attitude

in the Congress, the taking of Algiers, and not a few names that found

their way from the battlefield into the pages of history--all these

things were so many examples set before the French noblesse to show that

it was still open to them to take their part in the national existence,

and to win recognition of their claims, if, indeed, they could

condescend thus far. In every living organism the work of bringing

the whole into harmony within itself is always going on. If a man is

indolent, the indolence shows itself in everything that he does; and,

in the same manner, the general spirit of a class is pretty plainly

manifested in the face it turns on the world, and the soul informs the

body.

The women of the Restoration displayed neither the proud disregard

of public opinion shown by the court ladies of olden time in their

wantonness, nor yet the simple grandeur of the tardy virtues by which

they expiated their sins and shed so bright a glory about their names.

There was nothing either very frivolous or very serious about the woman

of the Restoration. She was hypocritical as a rule in her passion, and

compounded, so to speak, with its pleasures. Some few families led

the domestic life of the Duchesse d’Orleans, whose connubial couch was

exhibited so absurdly to visitors at the Palais Royal. Two or three kept

up the traditions of the Regency, filling cleverer women with something

like disgust. The great lady of the new school exercised no influence at

all over the manners of the time; and yet she might have done much.

She might, at worst, have presented as dignified a spectacle as

English-women of the same rank. But she hesitated feebly among old

precedents, became a bigot by force of circumstances, and allowed

nothing of herself to appear, not even her better qualities.

Not one among the Frenchwomen of that day had the ability to create a

salon whither leaders of fashion might come to take lessons in taste and

elegance. Their voices, which once laid down the law to literature, that

living expression of a time, now counted absolutely for nought. Now

when a literature lacks a general system, it fails to shape a body for

itself, and dies out with its period.

When in a nation at any time there is a people apart thus constituted,

the historian is pretty certain to find some representative figure,

some central personage who embodies the qualities and the defects of the

whole party to which he belongs; there is Coligny, for instance, among

the Huguenots, the Coadjuteur in the time of the Fronde, the Marechal de

Richelieu under Louis XV, Danton during the Terror. It is in the nature

of things that the man should be identified with the company in which

history finds him. How is it possible to lead a party without conforming

to its ideas? or to shine in any epoch unless a man represents the ideas

of his time? The wise and prudent head of a party is continually obliged

to bow to the prejudices and follies of its rear; and this is the

cause of actions for which he is afterwards criticised by this or that

historian sitting at a safer distance from terrific popular explosions,

coolly judging the passion and ferment without which the great struggles

of the world could not be carried on at all. And if this is true of

the Historical Comedy of the Centuries, it is equally true in a more

restricted sphere in the detached scenes of the national drama known as

the _Manners of the Age_.

At the beginning of that ephemeral life led by the Faubourg

Saint-Germain under the Restoration, to which, if there is any truth in

the above reflections, they failed to give stability, the most perfect

type of the aristocratic caste in its weakness and strength, its

greatness and littleness, might have been found for a brief space in a

young married woman who belonged to it. This was a woman artificially

educated, but in reality ignorant; a woman whose instincts and feelings

were lofty while the thought which should have controlled them was

wanting. She squandered the wealth of her nature in obedience to social

conventions; she was ready to brave society, yet she hesitated till her

scruples degenerated into artifice. With more wilfulness than real force

of character, impressionable rather than enthusiastic, gifted with more

brain than heart; she was supremely a woman, supremely a coquette,

and above all things a Parisienne, loving a brilliant life and gaiety,

reflecting never, or too late; imprudent to the verge of poetry, and

humble in the depths of her heart, in spite of her charming insolence.

Like some straight-growing reed, she made a show of independence; yet,

like the reed, she was ready to bend to a strong hand. She talked much

of religion, and had it not at heart, though she was prepared to find in

it a solution of her life. How explain a creature so complex? Capable

of heroism, yet sinking unconsciously from heroic heights to utter a

spiteful word; young and sweet-natured, not so much old at heart as

aged by the maxims of those about her; versed in a selfish philosophy in

which she was all unpractised, she had all the vices of a courtier, all

the nobleness of developing womanhood. She trusted nothing and no one,

yet there were times when she quitted her sceptical attitude for a

submissive credulity.

How should any portrait be anything but incomplete of her, in whom the

play of swiftly-changing colour made discord only to produce a poetic

confusion? For in her there shone a divine brightness, a radiance of

youth that blended all her bewildering characteristics in a certain

completeness and unity informed by her charm. Nothing was feigned. The

passion or semi-passion, the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual

pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all

spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position

as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was

wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above the world and

beneath the shelter of her name. There was something of the egoism of

Medea in her life, as in the life of the aristocracy that lay a-dying,

and would not so much as raise itself or stretch out a hand to any

political physician; so well aware of its feebleness, or so conscious

that it was already dust, that it refused to touch or be touched.

The Duchesse de Langeais (for that was her name) had been married for

about four years when the Restoration was finally consummated, which is

to say, in 1816. By that time the revolution of the Hundred Days had let

in the light on the mind of Louis XVIII. In spite of his surroundings,

he comprehended the situation and the age in which he was living; and it

was only later, when this Louis XI, without the axe, lay stricken down

by disease, that those about him got the upper hand. The Duchesse de

Langeais, a Navarreins by birth, came of a ducal house which had made

a point of never marrying below its rank since the reign of Louis XIV.

Every daughter of the house must sooner or later take a _tabouret_ at

Court. So, Antoinette de Navarreins, at the age of eighteen, came out of

the profound solitude in which her girlhood had been spent to marry the

Duc de Langeais’ eldest son. The two families at that time were living

quite out of the world; but after the invasion of France, the return

of the Bourbons seemed to every Royalist mind the only possible way of

putting an end to the miseries of the war.

The Ducs de Navarreins and de Langeais had been faithful throughout to

the exiled Princes, nobly resisting all the temptations of glory under

the Empire. Under the circumstances they naturally followed out the old

family policy; and Mlle Antoinette, a beautiful and portionless girl,

was married to M. le Marquis de Langeais only a few months before the

death of the Duke his father.

After the return of the Bourbons, the families resumed their rank,

offices, and dignity at Court; once more they entered public life, from

which hitherto they held aloof, and took their place high on the sunlit

summits of the new political world. In that time of general baseness and

sham political conversions, the public conscience was glad to recognise

the unstained loyalty of the two houses, and a consistency in political

and private life for which all parties involuntarily respected them.

But, unfortunately, as so often happens in a time of transition, the

most disinterested persons, the men whose loftiness of view and wise

principles would have gained the confidence of the French nation and led

them to believe in the generosity of a novel and spirited policy--these

men, to repeat, were taken out of affairs, and public business was

allowed to fall into the hands of others, who found it to their interest

to push principles to their extreme consequences by way of proving their

devotion.

The families of Langeais and Navarreins remained about the Court,

condemned to perform the duties required by Court ceremonial amid the

reproaches and sneers of the Liberal party. They were accused of gorging

themselves with riches and honours, and all the while their family

estates were no larger than before, and liberal allowances from the

civil list were wholly expended in keeping up the state necessary for

any European government, even if it be a Republic.

In 1818, M. le Duc de Langeais commanded a division of the army, and the

Duchess held a post about one of the Princesses, in virtue of which she

was free to live in Paris and apart from her husband without scandal.

The Duke, moreover, besides his military duties, had a place at Court,

to which he came during his term of waiting, leaving his major-general

in command. The Duke and Duchess were leading lives entirely apart, the

world none the wiser. Their marriage of convention shared the fate

of nearly all family arrangements of the kind. Two more antipathetic

dispositions could not well have been found; they were brought together;

they jarred upon each other; there was soreness on either side; then

they were divided once for all. Then they went their separate ways,

with a due regard for appearances. The Duc de Langeais, by nature

as methodical as the Chevalier de Folard himself, gave himself up

methodically to his own tastes and amusements, and left his wife at

liberty to do as she pleased so soon as he felt sure of her character.

He recognised in her a spirit pre-eminently proud, a cold heart, a

profound submissiveness to the usages of the world, and a youthful

loyalty. Under the eyes of great relations, with the light of a prudish

and bigoted Court turned full upon the Duchess, his honour was safe.

So the Duke calmly did as the _grands seigneurs_ of the eighteenth

century did before him, and left a young wife of two-and-twenty to her

own devices. He had deeply offended that wife, and in her nature there

was one appalling characteristic--she would never forgive an offence

when woman’s vanity and self-love, with all that was best in her nature

perhaps, had been slighted, wounded in secret. Insult and injury in the

face of the world a woman loves to forget; there is a way open to her of

showing herself great; she is a woman in her forgiveness; but a secret

offence women never pardon; for secret baseness, as for hidden virtues

and hidden love, they have no kindness.

This was Mme la Duchesse de Langeais’ real position, unknown to the

world. She herself did not reflect upon it. It was the time of the

rejoicings over the Duc de Berri’s marriage. The Court and the Faubourg

roused itself from its listlessness and reserve. This was the real

beginning of that unheard-of splendour which the Government of the

Restoration carried too far. At that time the Duchess, whether for

reasons of her own, or from vanity, never appeared in public without a

following of women equally distinguished by name and fortune. As queen

of fashion she had her _dames d’atours_, her ladies, who modeled their

manner and their wit on hers. They had been cleverly chosen. None of her

satellites belonged to the inmost Court circle, nor to the highest

level of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; but they had set their minds upon

admission to those inner sanctuaries. Being as yet simple denominations,

they wished to rise to the neighbourhood of the throne, and mingle with

the seraphic powers in the high sphere known as _le petit chateau_. Thus

surrounded, the Duchess’s position was stronger and more commanding and

secure. Her “ladies” defended her character and helped her to play her

detestable part of a woman of fashion. She could laugh at men at her

ease, play with fire, receive the homage on which the feminine nature is

nourished, and remain mistress of herself.

At Paris, in the highest society of all, a woman is a woman still; she

lives on incense, adulation, and honours. No beauty, however undoubted,

no face, however fair, is anything without admiration. Flattery and

a lover are proofs of power. And what is power without recognition?

Nothing. If the prettiest of women were left alone in a corner of a

drawing-room, she would droop. Put her in the very centre and summit of

social grandeur, she will at once aspire to reign over all hearts--often

because it is out of her power to be the happy queen of one. Dress and

manner and coquetry are all meant to please one of the poorest creatures

extant--the brainless coxcomb, whose handsome face is his sole merit;

it was for such as these that women threw themselves away. The gilded

wooden idols of the Restoration, for they were neither more nor less,

had neither the antecedents of the _petits maitres_ of the time of the

Fronde, nor the rough sterling worth of Napoleon’s heroes, not the wit

and fine manners of their grandsires; but something of all three they

meant to be without any trouble to themselves. Brave they were, like

all young Frenchmen; ability they possessed, no doubt, if they had had

a chance of proving it, but their places were filled up by the old

worn-out men, who kept them in leading strings. It was a day of

small things, a cold prosaic era. Perhaps it takes a long time for a

Restoration to become a Monarchy.

For the past eighteen months the Duchesse de Langeais had been leading

this empty life, filled with balls and subsequent visits, objectless

triumphs, and the transient loves that spring up and die in an evening’s

space. All eyes were turned on her when she entered a room; she reaped

her harvest of flatteries and some few words of warmer admiration, which

she encouraged by a gesture or a glance, but never suffered to penetrate

deeper than the skin. Her tone and bearing and everything else about her

imposed her will upon others. Her life was a sort of fever of vanity

and perpetual enjoyment, which turned her head. She was daring enough in

conversation; she would listen to anything, corrupting the surface, as

it were, of her heart. Yet when she returned home, she often blushed at

the story that had made her laugh; at the scandalous tale that supplied

the details, on the strength of which she analyzed the love that she had

never known, and marked the subtle distinctions of modern passion, not

with comment on the part of complacent hypocrites. For women know how

to say everything among themselves, and more of them are ruined by each

other than corrupted by men.

There came a moment when she discerned that not until a woman is loved

will the world fully recognise her beauty and her wit. What does a

husband prove? Simply that a girl or woman was endowed with wealth, or

well brought up; that her mother managed cleverly that in some way she

satisfied a man’s ambitions. A lover constantly bears witness to her

personal perfections. Then followed the discovery still in Mme de

Langeais’ early womanhood, that it was possible to be loved without

committing herself, without permission, without vouchsafing any

satisfaction beyond the most meagre dues. There was more than one demure

feminine hypocrite to instruct her in the art of playing such dangerous

comedies.

So the Duchess had her court, and the number of her adorers and

courtiers guaranteed her virtue. She was amiable and fascinating; she

flirted till the ball or the evening’s gaiety was at an end. Then the

curtain dropped. She was cold, indifferent, self-contained again till

the next day brought its renewed sensations, superficial as before. Two

or three men were completely deceived, and fell in love in earnest.

She laughed at them, she was utterly insensible. “I am loved!” she told

herself. “He loves me!” The certainty sufficed her. It is enough for the

miser to know that his every whim might be fulfilled if he chose; so it

was with the Duchess, and perhaps she did not even go so far as to form

a wish.

One evening she chanced to be at the house of an intimate friend Mme la

Vicomtesse de Fontaine, one of the humble rivals who cordially detested

her, and went with her everywhere. In a “friendship” of this sort both

sides are on their guard, and never lay their armor aside; confidences

are ingeniously indiscreet, and not unfrequently treacherous. Mme de

Langeais had distributed her little patronizing, friendly, or freezing

bows, with the air natural to a woman who knows the worth of her smiles,

when her eyes fell upon a total stranger. Something in the man’s large

gravity of aspect startled her, and, with a feeling almost like dread,

she turned to Mme de Maufrigneuse with, “Who is the newcomer, dear?”

“Someone that you have heard of, no doubt. The Marquis de Montriveau.”

“Oh! is it he?”

She took up her eyeglass and submitted him to a very insolent scrutiny,

as if he had been a picture meant to receive glances, not to return

them.

“Do introduce him; he ought to be interesting.”

“Nobody more tiresome and dull, dear. But he is the fashion.”

M. Armand de Montriveau, at that moment all unwittingly the object of

general curiosity, better deserved attention than any of the idols that

Paris needs must set up to worship for a brief space, for the city is

vexed by periodical fits of craving, a passion for _engouement_ and sham

enthusiasm, which must be satisfied. The Marquis was the only son of

General de Montriveau, one of the _ci-devants_ who served the Republic

nobly, and fell by Joubert’s side at Novi. Bonaparte had placed his son

at the school at Chalons, with the orphans of other generals who fell

on the battlefield, leaving their children under the protection of the

Republic. Armand de Montriveau left school with his way to make, entered

the artillery, and had only reached a major’s rank at the time of the

Fontainebleau disaster. In his section of the service the chances of

advancement were not many. There are fewer officers, in the first place,

among the gunners than in any other corps; and in the second place, the

feeling in the artillery was decidedly Liberal, not to say Republican;

and the Emperor, feeling little confidence in a body of highly educated

men who were apt to think for themselves, gave promotion grudgingly in

the service. In the artillery, accordingly, the general rule of the

army did not apply; the commanding officers were not invariably the most

remarkable men in their department, because there was less to be feared

from mediocrities. The artillery was a separate corps in those days, and

only came under Napoleon in action.

Besides these general causes, other reasons, inherent in Armand de

Montriveau’s character, were sufficient in themselves to account for his

tardy promotion. He was alone in the world. He had been thrown at

the age of twenty into the whirlwind of men directed by Napoleon; his

interests were bounded by himself, any day he might lose his life; it

became a habit of mind with him to live by his own self-respect and

the consciousness that he had done his duty. Like all shy men, he was

habitually silent; but his shyness sprang by no means from timidity;

it was a kind of modesty in him; he found any demonstration of vanity

intolerable. There was no sort of swagger about his fearlessness in

action; nothing escaped his eyes; he could give sensible advice to his

chums with unshaken coolness; he could go under fire, and duck upon

occasion to avoid bullets. He was kindly; but his expression was haughty

and stern, and his face gained him this character. In everything he was

rigorous as arithmetic; he never permitted the slightest deviation from

duty on any plausible pretext, nor blinked the consequences of a fact.

He would lend himself to nothing of which he was ashamed; he never asked

anything for himself; in short, Armand de Montriveau was one of many

great men unknown to fame, and philosophical enough to despise it;

living without attaching themselves to life, because they have not found

their opportunity of developing to the full their power to do and feel.

People were afraid of Montriveau; they respected him, but he was not

very popular. Men may indeed allow you to rise above them, but to

decline to descend as low as they can do is the one unpardonable sin.

In their feeling towards loftier natures, there is a trace of hate and

fear. Too much honour with them implies censure of themselves, a thing

forgiven neither to the living nor to the dead.

After the Emperor’s farewells at Fontainebleau, Montriveau, noble though

he was, was put on half-pay. Perhaps the heads of the War Office took

fright at uncompromising uprightness worthy of antiquity, or perhaps it

was known that he felt bound by his oath to the Imperial Eagle. During

the Hundred Days he was made a Colonel of the Guard, and left on the

field of Waterloo. His wounds kept him in Belgium he was not present

at the disbanding of the Army of the Loire, but the King’s government

declined to recognise promotion made during the Hundred Days, and Armand

de Montriveau left France.

An adventurous spirit, a loftiness of thought hitherto satisfied by

the hazards of war, drove him on an exploring expedition through Upper

Egypt; his sanity or impulse directed his enthusiasm to a project of

great importance, he turned his attention to that unexplored Central

Africa which occupies the learned of today. The scientific expedition

was long and unfortunate. He had made a valuable collection of notes

bearing on various geographical and commercial problems, of which

solutions are still eagerly sought; and succeeded, after surmounting

many obstacles, in reaching the heart of the continent, when he was

betrayed into the hands of a hostile native tribe. Then, stripped of all

that he had, for two years he led a wandering life in the desert,

the slave of savages, threatened with death at every moment, and more

cruelly treated than a dumb animal in the power of pitiless children.

Physical strength, and a mind braced to endurance, enabled him to

survive the horrors of that captivity; but his miraculous escape

well-nigh exhausted his energies. When he reached the French colony at

Senegal, a half-dead fugitive covered with rags, his memories of his

former life were dim and shapeless. The great sacrifices made in his

travels were all forgotten like his studies of African dialects, his

discoveries, and observations. One story will give an idea of all that

he passed through. Once for several days the children of the sheikh of

the tribe amused themselves by putting him up for a mark and flinging

horses’ knuckle-bones at his head.

Montriveau came back to Paris in 1818 a ruined man. He had no interest,

and wished for none. He would have died twenty times over sooner than

ask a favour of anyone; he would not even press the recognition of his

claims. Adversity and hardship had developed his energy even in trifles,

while the habit of preserving his self-respect before that spiritual

self which we call conscience led him to attach consequence to the most

apparently trivial actions. His merits and adventures became known,

however, through his acquaintances, among the principal men of science

in Paris, and some few well-read military men. The incidents of his

slavery and subsequent escape bore witness to a courage, intelligence,

and coolness which won him celebrity without his knowledge, and that

transient fame of which Paris salons are lavish, though the artist that

fain would keep it must make untold efforts.

Montriveau’s position suddenly changed towards the end of that year. He

had been a poor man, he was now rich; or, externally at any rate, he had

all the advantages of wealth. The King’s government, trying to attach

capable men to itself and to strengthen the army, made concessions

about that time to Napoleon’s old officers if their known loyalty and

character offered guarantees of fidelity. M. de Montriveau’s name once

more appeared in the army list with the rank of colonel; he received his

arrears of pay and passed into the Guards. All these favours, one

after another, came to seek the Marquis de Montriveau; he had asked

for nothing however small. Friends had taken the steps for him which he

would have refused to take for himself.

After this, his habits were modified all at once; contrary to his

custom, he went into society. He was well received, everywhere he met

with great deference and respect. He seemed to have found some end

in life; but everything passed within the man, there were no external

signs; in society he was silent and cold, and wore a grave, reserved

face. His social success was great, precisely because he stood out in

such strong contrast to the conventional faces which line the walls

of Paris salons. He was, indeed, something quite new there. Terse

of speech, like a hermit or a savage, his shyness was thought to be

haughtiness, and people were greatly taken with it. He was something

strange and great. Women generally were so much the more smitten

with this original person because he was not to be caught by their

flatteries, however adroit, nor by the wiles with which they circumvent

the strongest men and corrode the steel temper. Their Parisian’s

grimaces were lost upon M. de Montriveau; his nature only responded to

the sonorous vibration of lofty thought and feeling. And he would very

promptly have been dropped but for the romance that hung about his

adventures and his life; but for the men who cried him up behind his

back; but for a woman who looked for a triumph for her vanity, the woman

who was to fill his thoughts.

For these reasons the Duchesse de Langeais’ curiosity was no less lively

than natural. Chance had so ordered it that her interest in the man

before her had been aroused only the day before, when she heard the

story of one of M. de Montriveau’s adventures, a story calculated to

make the strongest impression upon a woman’s ever-changing fancy.

During M. de Montriveau’s voyage of discovery to the sources of the

Nile, he had had an argument with one of his guides, surely the most

extraordinary debate in the annals of travel. The district that he

wished to explore could only be reached on foot across a tract of

desert. Only one of his guides knew the way; no traveller had penetrated

before into that part of the country, where the undaunted officer hoped

to find a solution of several scientific problems. In spite of the

representations made to him by the guide and the older men of the place,

he started upon the formidable journey. Summoning up courage, already

highly strung by the prospect of dreadful difficulties, he set out in

the morning.

The loose sand shifted under his feet at every step; and when, at the

end of a long day’s march, he lay down to sleep on the ground, he had

never been so tired in his life. He knew, however, that he must be up

and on his way before dawn next day, and his guide assured him that they

should reach the end of their journey towards noon. That promise kept

up his courage and gave him new strength. In spite of his sufferings,

he continued his march, with some blasphemings against science; he was

ashamed to complain to his guide, and kept his pain to himself. After

marching for a third of the day, he felt his strength failing, his feet

were bleeding, he asked if they should reach the place soon. “In an

hour’s time,” said the guide. Armand braced himself for another hour’s

march, and they went on.

The hour slipped by; he could not so much as see against the sky the

palm-trees and crests of hill that should tell of the end of the journey

near at hand; the horizon line of sand was vast as the circle of the

open sea.

He came to a stand, refused to go farther, and threatened the guide--he

had deceived him, murdered him; tears of rage and weariness flowed over

his fevered cheeks; he was bowed down with fatigue upon fatigue, his

throat seemed to be glued by the desert thirst. The guide meanwhile

stood motionless, listening to these complaints with an ironical

expression, studying the while, with the apparent indifference of an

Oriental, the scarcely perceptible indications in the lie of the sands,

which looked almost black, like burnished gold.

“I have made a mistake,” he remarked coolly. “I could not make out the

track, it is so long since I came this way; we are surely on it now, but

we must push on for two hours.”

“The man is right,” thought M. de Montriveau.

So he went on again, struggling to follow the pitiless native. It seemed

as if he were bound to his guide by some thread like the invisible tie

between the condemned man and the headsman. But the two hours went by,

Montriveau had spent his last drops of energy, and the skyline was a

blank, there were no palm-trees, no hills. He could neither cry out

nor groan, he lay down on the sand to die, but his eyes would have

frightened the boldest; something in his face seemed to say that he

would not die alone. His guide, like a very fiend, gave him back a cool

glance like a man that knows his power, left him to lie there, and kept

at a safe distance out of reach of his desperate victim. At last M.

Montriveau recovered strength enough for a last curse. The guide came

nearer, silenced him with a steady look, and said, “Was it not your own

will to go where I am taking you, in spite of us all? You say that I

have lied to you. If I had not, you would not be even here. Do you want

the truth? Here it is. _We have still another five hours’ march before

us, and we cannot go back_. Sound yourself; if you have not courage

enough, here is my dagger.”

Startled by this dreadful knowledge of pain and human strength, M.

de Montriveau would not be behind a savage; he drew a fresh stock of

courage from his pride as a European, rose to his feet, and followed

his guide. The five hours were at an end, and still M. de Montriveau

saw nothing, he turned his failing eyes upon his guide; but the Nubian

hoisted him on his shoulders, and showed him a wide pool of water with

greenness all about it, and a noble forest lighted up by the sunset. It

lay only a hundred paces away; a vast ledge of granite hid the glorious

landscape. It seemed to Armand that he had taken a new lease of life.

His guide, that giant in courage and intelligence, finished his work of

devotion by carrying him across the hot, slippery, scarcely discernible

track on the granite. Behind him lay the hell of burning sand, before

him the earthly paradise of the most beautiful oasis in the desert.

The Duchess, struck from the first by the appearance of this romantic

figure, was even more impressed when she learned that this was that

Marquis de Montriveau of whom she had dreamed during the night. She had

been with him among the hot desert sands, he had been the companion of

her nightmare wanderings; for such a woman was not this a delightful

presage of a new interest in her life? And never was a man’s exterior

a better exponent of his character; never were curious glances so well

justified. The principal characteristic of his great, square-hewn head

was the thick, luxuriant black hair which framed his face, and gave him

a strikingly close resemblance to General Kleber; and the likeness still

held good in the vigorous forehead, in the outlines of his face, the

quiet fearlessness of his eyes, and a kind of fiery vehemence expressed

by strongly marked features. He was short, deep-chested, and muscular

as a lion. There was something of the despot about him, and an

indescribable suggestion of the security of strength in his gait,

bearing, and slightest movements. He seemed to know that his will was

irresistible, perhaps because he wished for nothing unjust. And yet,

like all really strong men, he was mild of speech, simple in his

manners, and kindly natured; although it seemed as if, in the stress of

a great crisis, all these finer qualities must disappear, and the man

would show himself implacable, unshaken in his resolve, terrific in

action. There was a certain drawing in of the inner line of the lips

which, to a close observer, indicated an ironical bent.

The Duchesse de Langeais, realising that a fleeting glory was to be

won by such a conquest, made up her mind to gain a lover in Armand de

Montriveau during the brief interval before the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse

brought him to be introduced. She would prefer him above the others; she

would attach him to herself, display all her powers of coquetry for him.

It was a fancy, such a merest Duchess’s whim as furnished a Lope or a

Calderon with the plot of the _Dog in the Manger_. She would not suffer

another woman to engross him; but she had not the remotest intention of

being his.

Nature had given the Duchess every qualification for the part of

coquette, and education had perfected her. Women envied her, and men

fell in love with her, not without reason. Nothing that can inspire

love, justify it, and give it lasting empire was wanting in her. Her

style of beauty, her manner, her voice, her bearing, all combined to

give her that instinctive coquetry which seems to be the consciousness

of power. Her shape was graceful; perhaps there was a trace of

self-consciousness in her changes of movement, the one affectation that

could be laid to her charge; but everything about her was a part of her

personality, from her least little gesture to the peculiar turn of her

phrases, the demure glance of her eyes. Her great lady’s grace, her

most striking characteristic, had not destroyed the very French quick

mobility of her person. There was an extraordinary fascination in her

swift, incessant changes of attitude. She seemed as if she surely would

be a most delicious mistress when her corset and the encumbering costume

of her part were laid aside. All the rapture of love surely was latent

in the freedom of her expressive glances, in her caressing tones, in the

charm of her words. She gave glimpses of the high-born courtesan within

her, vainly protesting against the creeds of the duchess.

You might sit near her through an evening, she would be gay and

melancholy in turn, and her gaiety, like her sadness, seemed

spontaneous. She could be gracious, disdainful, insolent, or confiding

at will. Her apparent good nature was real; she had no temptation to

descend to malignity. But at each moment her mood changed; she was full

of confidence or craft; her moving tenderness would give place to a

heart-breaking hardness and insensibility. Yet how paint her as she

was, without bringing together all the extremes of feminine nature? In

a word, the Duchess was anything that she wished to be or to seem.

Her face was slightly too long. There was a grace in it, and a certain

thinness and fineness that recalled the portraits of the Middle Ages.

Her skin was white, with a faint rose tint. Everything about her erred,

as it were, by an excess of delicacy.

M. de Montriveau willingly consented to be introduced to the Duchesse

de Langeais; and she, after the manner of persons whose sensitive taste

leads them to avoid banalities, refrained from overwhelming him with

questions and compliments. She received him with a gracious deference

which could not fail to flatter a man of more than ordinary powers,

for the fact that a man rises above the ordinary level implies that

he possesses something of that tact which makes women quick to read

feeling. If the Duchess showed any curiosity, it was by her glances;

her compliments were conveyed in her manner; there was a winning grace

displayed in her words, a subtle suggestion of a desire to please which

she of all women knew the art of manifesting. Yet her whole conversation

was but, in a manner, the body of the letter; the postscript with the

principal thought in it was still to come. After half an hour spent in

ordinary talk, in which the words gained all their value from her tone

and smiles, M. de Montriveau was about to retire discreetly, when the

Duchess stopped him with an expressive gesture.

“I do not know, monsieur, whether these few minutes during which I have

had the pleasure of talking to you proved so sufficiently attractive,

that I may venture to ask you to call upon me; I am afraid that it may

be very selfish of me to wish to have you all to myself. If I should

be so fortunate as to find that my house is agreeable to you, you will

always find me at home in the evening until ten o’clock.”

The invitation was given with such irresistible grace, that M. de

Montriveau could not refuse to accept it. When he fell back again among

the groups of men gathered at a distance from the women, his

friends congratulated him, half laughingly, half in earnest, on the

extraordinary reception vouchsafed him by the Duchesse de Langeais. The

difficult and brilliant conquest had been made beyond a doubt, and the

glory of it was reserved for the Artillery of the Guard. It is easy to

imagine the jests, good and bad, when this topic had once been started;

the world of Paris salons is so eager for amusement, and a joke lasts

for such a short time, that everyone is eager to make the most of it

while it is fresh.

All unconsciously, the General felt flattered by this nonsense. From his

place where he had taken his stand, his eyes were drawn again and again

to the Duchess by countless wavering reflections. He could not help

admitting to himself that of all the women whose beauty had captivated

his eyes, not one had seemed to be a more exquisite embodiment of faults

and fair qualities blended in a completeness that might realise the

dreams of earliest manhood. Is there a man in any rank of life that has

not felt indefinable rapture in his secret soul over the woman singled

out (if only in his dreams) to be his own; when she, in body, soul, and

social aspects, satisfies his every requirement, a thrice perfect woman?

And if this threefold perfection that flatters his pride is no argument

for loving her, it is beyond cavil one of the great inducements to the

sentiment. Love would soon be convalescent, as the eighteenth century

moralist remarked, were it not for vanity. And it is certainly true

that for everyone, man or woman, there is a wealth of pleasure in

the superiority of the beloved. Is she set so high by birth that a

contemptuous glance can never wound her? is she wealthy enough to

surround herself with state which falls nothing short of royalty, of

kings, of finance during their short reign of splendour? is she so

ready-witted that a keen-edged jest never brings her into confusion?

beautiful enough to rival any woman?--Is it such a small thing to know

that your self-love will never suffer through her? A man makes these

reflections in the twinkling of an eye. And how if, in the future opened

out by early ripened passion, he catches glimpses of the changeful

delight of her charm, the frank innocence of a maiden soul, the perils

of love’s voyage, the thousand folds of the veil of coquetry? Is not

this enough to move the coldest man’s heart?

This, therefore, was M. de Montriveau’s position with regard to woman;

his past life in some measure explaining the extraordinary fact. He

had been thrown, when little more than a boy, into the hurricane of

Napoleon’s wars; his life had been spent on fields of battle. Of women

he knew just so much as a traveller knows of a country when he travels

across it in haste from one inn to another. The verdict which Voltaire

passed upon his eighty years of life might, perhaps, have been applied

by Montriveau to his own thirty-seven years of existence; had he not

thirty-seven follies with which to reproach himself? At his age he was

as much a novice in love as the lad that has just been furtively reading

_Faublas_. Of women he had nothing to learn; of love he knew nothing;

and thus, desires, quite unknown before, sprang from this virginity of

feeling.

There are men here and there as much engrossed in the work demanded of

them by poverty or ambition, art or science, as M. de Montriveau by war

and a life of adventure--these know what it is to be in this unusual

position if they very seldom confess to it. Every man in Paris is

supposed to have been in love. No woman in Paris cares to take what

other women have passed over. The dread of being taken for a fool is the

source of the coxcomb’s bragging so common in France; for in France to

have the reputation of a fool is to be a foreigner in one’s own country.

Vehement desire seized on M. de Montriveau, desire that had gathered

strength from the heat of the desert and the first stirrings of a heart

unknown as yet in its suppressed turbulence.

A strong man, and violent as he was strong, he could keep mastery over

himself; but as he talked of indifferent things, he retired within

himself, and swore to possess this woman, for through that thought lay

the only way to love for him. Desire became a solemn compact made with

himself, an oath after the manner of the Arabs among whom he had lived;

for among them a vow is a kind of contract made with Destiny a man’s

whole future is solemnly pledged to fulfil it, and everything even his

own death, is regarded simply as a means to the one end.

A younger man would have said to himself, “I should very much like to

have the Duchess for my mistress!” or, “If the Duchesse de Langeais

cared for a man, he would be a very lucky rascal!” But the General said,

“I will have Mme de Langeais for my mistress.” And if a man takes such

an idea into his head when his heart has never been touched before, and

love begins to be a kind of religion with him, he little knows in what a

hell he has set his foot.

Armand de Montriveau suddenly took flight and went home in the first hot

fever-fit of the first love that he had known. When a man has kept all

his boyish beliefs, illusions, frankness, and impetuosity into middle

age, his first impulse is, as it were, to stretch out a hand to take the

thing that he desires; a little later he realizes that there is a gulf

set between them, and that it is all but impossible to cross it. A sort

of childish impatience seizes him, he wants the thing the more,

and trembles or cries. Wherefore, the next day, after the stormiest

reflections that had yet perturbed his mind, Armand de Montriveau

discovered that he was under the yoke of the senses, and his bondage

made the heavier by his love.

The woman so cavalierly treated in his thoughts of yesterday had become

a most sacred and dreadful power. She was to be his world, his life,

from this time forth. The greatest joy, the keenest anguish, that he

had yet known grew colorless before the bare recollection of the least

sensation stirred in him by her. The swiftest revolutions in a man’s

outward life only touch his interests, while passion brings a complete

revulsion of feeling. And so in those who live by feeling, rather than

by self-interest, the doers rather than the reasoners, the sanguine

rather than the lymphatic temperaments, love works a complete

revolution. In a flash, with one single reflection, Armand de Montriveau

wiped out his whole past life.

A score of times he asked himself, like a boy, “Shall I go, or shall I

not?” and then at last he dressed, came to the Hotel de Langeais

towards eight o’clock that evening, and was admitted. He was to see the

woman--ah! not the woman--the idol that he had seen yesterday, among

lights, a fresh innocent girl in gauze and silken lace and veiling.

He burst in upon her to declare his love, as if it were a question of

firing the first shot on a field of battle.

Poor novice! He found his ethereal sylphide shrouded in a brown cashmere

dressing-gown ingeniously befrilled, lying languidly stretched out upon

a sofa in a dimly lighted boudoir. Mme de Langeais did not so much as

rise, nothing was visible of her but her face, her hair was loose but

confined by a scarf. A hand indicated a seat, a hand that seemed white

as marble to Montriveau by the flickering light of a single candle at

the further side of the room, and a voice as soft as the light said:

“If it had been anyone else, M. le Marquis, a friend with whom I could

dispense with ceremony, or a mere acquaintance in whom I felt but slight

interest, I should have closed my door. I am exceedingly unwell.”

“I will go,” Armand said to himself.

“But I do not know how it is,” she continued (and the simple warrior

attributed the shining of her eyes to fever), “perhaps it was a

presentiment of your kind visit (and no one can be more sensible of the

prompt attention than I), but the vapors have left my head.”

“Then may I stay?”

“Oh, I should be very sorry to allow you to go. I told myself this

morning that it was impossible that I should have made the slightest

impression on your mind, and that in all probability you took my request

for one of the commonplaces of which Parisians are lavish on every

occasion. And I forgave your ingratitude in advance. An explorer

from the deserts is not supposed to know how exclusive we are in our

friendships in the Faubourg.”

The gracious, half-murmured words dropped one by one, as if they had

been weighted with the gladness that apparently brought them to her

lips. The Duchess meant to have the full benefit of her headache, and

her speculation was fully successful. The General, poor man, was really

distressed by the lady’s simulated distress. Like Crillon listening to

the story of the Crucifixion, he was ready to draw his sword against the

vapors. How could a man dare to speak just then to this suffering woman

of the love that she inspired? Armand had already felt that it would be

absurd to fire off a declaration of love point-blank at one so far above

other women. With a single thought came understanding of the delicacies

of feeling, of the soul’s requirements. To love: what was that but to

know how to plead, to beg for alms, to wait? And as for the love that

he felt, must he not prove it? His tongue was mute, it was frozen by the

conventions of the noble Faubourg, the majesty of a sick headache, the

bashfulness of love. But no power on earth could veil his glances; the

heat and the Infinite of the desert blazed in eyes calm as a panther’s,

beneath the lids that fell so seldom. The Duchess enjoyed the steady

gaze that enveloped her in light and warmth.

“Mme la Duchesse,” he answered, “I am afraid I express my gratitude for

your goodness very badly. At this moment I have but one desire--I wish

it were in my power to cure the pain.”

“Permit me to throw this off, I feel too warm now,” she said, gracefully

tossing aside a cushion that covered her feet.

“Madame, in Asia your feet would be worth some ten thousand sequins.

“A traveler’s compliment!” smiled she.

It pleased the sprightly lady to involve a rough soldier in a labyrinth

of nonsense, commonplaces, and meaningless talk, in which he manoeuvred,

in military language, as Prince Charles might have done at close

quarters with Napoleon. She took a mischievous amusement in

reconnoitring the extent of his infatuation by the number of foolish

speeches extracted from a novice whom she led step by step into a

hopeless maze, meaning to leave him there in confusion. She began by

laughing at him, but nevertheless it pleased her to make him forget how

time went.

The length of a first visit is frequently a compliment, but Armand was

innocent of any such intent. The famous explorer spent an hour in chat

on all sorts of subjects, said nothing that he meant to say, and was

feeling that he was only an instrument on whom this woman played, when

she rose, sat upright, drew the scarf from her hair, and wrapped it

about her throat, leant her elbow on the cushions, did him the honour

of a complete cure, and rang for lights. The most graceful movement

succeeded to complete repose. She turned to M. de Montriveau, from whom

she had just extracted a confidence which seemed to interest her deeply,

and said:

“You wish to make game of me by trying to make me believe that you

have never loved. It is a man’s great pretension with us. And we always

believe it! Out of pure politeness. Do we not know what to expect

from it for ourselves? Where is the man that has found but a single

opportunity of losing his heart? But you love to deceive us, and we

submit to be deceived, poor foolish creatures that we are; for your

hypocrisy is, after all, a homage paid to the superiority of our

sentiments, which are all purity.”

The last words were spoken with a disdainful pride that made the novice

in love feel like a worthless bale flung into the deep, while the

Duchess was an angel soaring back to her particular heaven.

“Confound it!” thought Armand de Montriveau, “how am I to tell this wild

thing that I love her?”

He had told her already a score of times; or rather, the Duchess had

a score of times read his secret in his eyes; and the passion in this

unmistakably great man promised her amusement, and an interest in her

empty life. So she prepared with no little dexterity to raise a certain

number of redoubts for him to carry by storm before he should gain an

entrance into her heart. Montriveau should overleap one difficulty after

another; he should be a plaything for her caprice, just as an insect

teased by children is made to jump from one finger to another, and in

spite of all its pains is kept in the same place by its mischievous

tormentor. And yet it gave the Duchess inexpressible happiness to see

that this strong man had told her the truth. Armand had never loved, as

he had said. He was about to go, in a bad humour with himself, and still

more out of humour with her; but it delighted her to see a sullenness

that she could conjure away with a word, a glance, or a gesture.

“Will you come tomorrow evening?” she asked. “I am going to a ball, but

I shall stay at home for you until ten o’clock.”

Montriveau spent most of the next day in smoking an indeterminate

quantity of cigars in his study window, and so got through the hours

till he could dress and go to the Hotel de Langeais. To anyone who had

known the magnificent worth of the man, it would have been grievous to

see him grown so small, so distrustful of himself; the mind that might

have shed light over undiscovered worlds shrunk to the proportions of

a she-coxcomb’s boudoir. Even he himself felt that he had fallen so low

already in his happiness that to save his life he could not have told

his love to one of his closest friends. Is there not always a trace

of shame in the lover’s bashfulness, and perhaps in woman a certain

exultation over diminished masculine stature? Indeed, but for a host of

motives of this kind, how explain why women are nearly always the first

to betray the secret?--a secret of which, perhaps, they soon weary.

“Mme la Duchesse cannot see visitors, monsieur,” said the man; “she is

dressing, she begs you to wait for her here.”

Armand walked up and down the drawing-room, studying her taste in the

least details. He admired Mme de Langeais herself in the objects of her

choosing; they revealed her life before he could grasp her personality

and ideas. About an hour later the Duchess came noiselessly out of her

chamber. Montriveau turned, saw her flit like a shadow across the room,

and trembled. She came up to him, not with a bourgeoise’s enquiry, “How

do I look?” She was sure of herself; her steady eyes said plainly, “I am

adorned to please you.”

No one surely, save the old fairy godmother of some princess in

disguise, could have wound a cloud of gauze about the dainty throat, so

that the dazzling satin skin beneath should gleam through the gleaming

folds. The Duchess was dazzling. The pale blue colour of her gown,

repeated in the flowers in her hair, appeared by the richness of its hue

to lend substance to a fragile form grown too wholly ethereal; for as

she glided towards Armand, the loose ends of her scarf floated about

her, putting that valiant warrior in mind of the bright damosel flies

that hover now over water, now over the flowers with which they seem to

mingle and blend.

“I have kept you waiting,” she said, with the tone that a woman can

always bring into her voice for the man whom she wishes to please.

“I would wait patiently through an eternity,” said he, “if I were sure

of finding a divinity so fair; but it is no compliment to speak of your

beauty to you; nothing save worship could touch you. Suffer me only to

kiss your scarf.”

“Oh, fie!” she said, with a commanding gesture, “I esteem you enough to

give you my hand.”

She held it out for his kiss. A woman’s hand, still moist from the

scented bath, has a soft freshness, a velvet smoothness that sends a

tingling thrill from the lips to the soul. And if a man is attracted to

a woman, and his senses are as quick to feel pleasure as his heart is

full of love, such a kiss, though chaste in appearance, may conjure up a

terrific storm.

“Will you always give it me like this?” the General asked humbly when he

had pressed that dangerous hand respectfully to his lips.

“Yes, but there we must stop,” she said, smiling. She sat down,

and seemed very slow over putting on her gloves, trying to slip the

unstretched kid over all her fingers at once, while she watched M.

de Montriveau; and he was lost in admiration of the Duchess and those

repeated graceful movements of hers.

“Ah! you were punctual,” she said; “that is right. I like punctuality.

It is the courtesy of kings, His Majesty says; but to my thinking, from

you men it is the most respectful flattery of all. Now, is it not? Just

tell me.”

Again she gave him a side glance to express her insidious friendship,

for he was dumb with happiness sheer happiness through such nothings

as these! Oh, the Duchess understood _son metier de femme_--the art

and mystery of being a woman--most marvelously well; she knew, to

admiration, how to raise a man in his own esteem as he humbled himself

to her; how to reward every step of the descent to sentimental folly

with hollow flatteries.

“You will never forget to come at nine o’clock.”

“No; but are you going to a ball every night?”

“Do I know?” she answered, with a little childlike shrug of the

shoulders; the gesture was meant to say that she was nothing if not

capricious, and that a lover must take her as she was.--“Besides,” she

added, “what is that to you? You shall be my escort.”

“That would be difficult tonight,” he objected; “I am not properly

dressed.”

“It seems to me,” she returned loftily, “that if anyone has a right

to complain of your costume, it is I. Know, therefore, _monsieur le

voyageur_, that if I accept a man’s arm, he is forthwith above the laws

of fashion, nobody would venture to criticise him. You do not know the

world, I see; I like you the better for it.”

And even as she spoke she swept him into the pettiness of that world by

the attempt to initiate him into the vanities of a woman of fashion.

“If she chooses to do a foolish thing for me, I should be a simpleton to

prevent her,” said Armand to himself. “She has a liking for me beyond a

doubt; and as for the world, she cannot despise it more than I do. So,

now for the ball if she likes.”

The Duchess probably thought that if the General came with her and

appeared in a ballroom in boots and a black tie, nobody would hesitate

to believe that he was violently in love with her. And the General was

well pleased that the queen of fashion should think of compromising

herself for him; hope gave him wit. He had gained confidence, he brought

out his thoughts and views; he felt nothing of the restraint that

weighed on his spirits yesterday. His talk was interesting and animated,

and full of those first confidences so sweet to make and to receive.

Was Mme de Langeais really carried away by his talk, or had she

devised this charming piece of coquetry? At any rate, she looked up

mischievously as the clock struck twelve.

“Ah! you have made me too late for the ball!” she exclaimed, surprised

and vexed that she had forgotten how time was going.

The next moment she approved the exchange of pleasures with a smile that

made Armand’s heart give a sudden leap.

“I certainly promised Mme de Beauseant,” she added. “They are all

expecting me.”

“Very well--go.”

“No--go on. I will stay. Your Eastern adventures fascinate me. Tell

me the whole story of your life. I love to share in a brave man’s

hardships, and I feel them all, indeed I do!”

She was playing with her scarf, twisting it and pulling it to

pieces, with jerky, impatient movements that seemed to tell of inward

dissatisfaction and deep reflection.

“_We_ are fit for nothing,” she went on. “Ah! we are contemptible,

selfish, frivolous creatures. We can bore ourselves with amusements,

and that is all we can do. Not one of us that understands that she has

a part to play in life. In old days in France, women were beneficent

lights; they lived to comfort those that mourned, to encourage high

virtues, to reward artists and stir new life with noble thoughts. If the

world has grown so petty, ours is the fault. You make me loathe the ball

and this world in which I live. No, I am not giving up much for you.”

She had plucked her scarf to pieces, as a child plays with a flower,

pulling away all the petals one by one; and now she crushed it into a

ball, and flung it away. She could show her swan’s neck.

She rang the bell. “I shall not go out tonight,” she told the footman.

Her long, blue eyes turned timidly to Armand; and by the look of

misgiving in them, he knew that he was meant to take the order for a

confession, for a first and great favour. There was a pause, filled with

many thoughts, before she spoke with that tenderness which is often in

women’s voices, and not so often in their hearts. “You have had a hard

life,” she said.

“No,” returned Armand. “Until today I did not know what happiness was.”

“Then you know it now?” she asked, looking at him with a demure, keen

glance.

“What is happiness for me henceforth but this--to see you, to hear

you?... Until now I have only known privation; now I know that I can be

unhappy----”

“That will do, that will do,” she said. “You must go; it is past

midnight. Let us regard appearances. People must not talk about us. I

do not know quite what I shall say; but the headache is a good-natured

friend, and tells no tales.”

“Is there to be a ball tomorrow night?”

“You would grow accustomed to the life, I think. Very well. Yes, we will

go again tomorrow night.”

There was not a happier man in the world than Armand when he went out

from her. Every evening he came to Mme de Langeais’ at the hour kept for

him by a tacit understanding.

It would be tedious, and, for the many young men who carry a redundance

of such sweet memories in their hearts, it were superfluous to follow

the story step by step--the progress of a romance growing in those hours

spent together, a romance controlled entirely by a woman’s will. If

sentiment went too fast, she would raise a quarrel over a word, or when

words flagged behind her thoughts, she appealed to the feelings. Perhaps

the only way of following such Penelope’s progress is by marking its

outward and visible signs.

As, for instance, within a few days of their first meeting, the

assiduous General had won and kept the right to kiss his lady’s

insatiable hands. Wherever Mme de Langeais went, M. de Montriveau

was certain to be seen, till people jokingly called him “Her Grace’s

orderly.” And already he had made enemies; others were jealous, and

envied him his position. Mme de Langeais had attained her end. The

Marquis de Montriveau was among her numerous train of adorers, and a

means of humiliating those who boasted of their progress in her good

graces, for she publicly gave him preference over them all.

“Decidedly, M. de Montriveau is the man for whom the Duchess shows a

preference,” pronounced Mme de Serizy.

And who in Paris does not know what it means when a woman “shows a

preference?” All went on therefore according to prescribed rule. The

anecdotes which people were pleased to circulate concerning the General

put that warrior in so formidable a light, that the more adroit quietly

dropped their pretensions to the Duchess, and remained in her train

merely to turn the position to account, and to use her name and

personality to make better terms for themselves with certain stars of

the second magnitude. And those lesser powers were delighted to take a

lover away from Mme de Langeais. The Duchess was keen-sighted enough to

see these desertions and treaties with the enemy; and her pride would

not suffer her to be the dupe of them. As M. de Talleyrand, one of her

great admirers, said, she knew how to take a second edition of revenge,

laying the two-edged blade of a sarcasm between the pairs in these

“morganatic” unions. Her mocking disdain contributed not a little to

increase her reputation as an extremely clever woman and a person to

be feared. Her character for virtue was consolidated while she amused

herself with other people’s secrets, and kept her own to herself. Yet,

after two months of assiduities, she saw with a vague dread in the

depths of her soul that M. de Montriveau understood nothing of the

subtleties of flirtation after the manner of the Faubourg Saint-Germain;

he was taking a Parisienne’s coquetry in earnest.

“You will not tame _him_, dear Duchess,” the old Vidame de Pamiers had

said. “‘Tis a first cousin to the eagle; he will carry you off to his

eyrie if you do not take care.”

Then Mme de Langeais felt afraid. The shrewd old noble’s words sounded

like a prophecy. The next day she tried to turn love to hate. She was

harsh, exacting, irritable, unbearable; Montriveau disarmed her with

angelic sweetness. She so little knew the great generosity of a large

nature, that the kindly jests with which her first complaints were met

went to her heart. She sought a quarrel, and found proofs of affection.

She persisted.

“When a man idolizes you, how can he have vexed you?” asked Armand.

“You do not vex me,” she answered, suddenly grown gentle and submissive.

“But why do you wish to compromise me? For me you ought to be nothing

but a _friend_. Do you not know it? I wish I could see that you had the

instincts, the delicacy of real friendship, so that I might lose neither

your respect nor the pleasure that your presence gives me.”

“Nothing but your _friend_!” he cried out. The terrible word sent an

electric shock through his brain. “On the faith of these happy hours

that you grant me, I sleep and wake in your heart. And now today, for no

reason, you are pleased to destroy all the secret hopes by which I live.

You have required promises of such constancy in me, you have said so

much of your horror of women made up of nothing but caprice; and now do

you wish me to understand that, like other women here in Paris, you have

passions, and know nothing of love? If so, why did you ask my life of

me? why did you accept it?”

“I was wrong, my friend. Oh, it is wrong of a woman to yield to such

intoxication when she must not and cannot make any return.”

“I understand. You have merely been coquetting with me, and----”

“Coquetting?” she repeated. “I detest coquetry. A coquette Armand, makes

promises to many, and gives herself to none; and a woman who keeps such

promises is a libertine. This much I believed I had grasped of our code.

But to be melancholy with humorists, gay with the frivolous, and politic

with ambitious souls; to listen to a babbler with every appearance

of admiration, to talk of war with a soldier, wax enthusiastic with

philanthropists over the good of the nation, and to give to each one his

little dole of flattery--it seems to me that this is as much a matter of

necessity as dress, diamonds, and gloves, or flowers in one’s hair. Such

talk is the moral counterpart of the toilette. You take it up and lay it

aside with the plumed head-dress. Do you call this coquetry? Why, I have

never treated you as I treat everyone else. With you, my friend, I am

sincere. Have I not always shared your views, and when you convinced me

after a discussion, was I not always perfectly glad? In short, I love

you, but only as a devout and pure woman may love. I have thought it

over. I am a married woman, Armand. My way of life with M. de Langeais

gives me liberty to bestow my heart; but law and custom leave me no

right to dispose of my person. If a woman loses her honour, she is

an outcast in any rank of life; and I have yet to meet with a single

example of a man that realizes all that our sacrifices demand of him in

such a case. Quite otherwise. Anyone can foresee the rupture between Mme

de Beauseant and M. d’Ajuda (for he is going to marry Mlle de Rochefide,

it seems), that affair made it clear to my mind that these very

sacrifices on the woman’s part are almost always the cause of the man’s

desertion. If you had loved me sincerely, you would have kept away for a

time.--Now, I will lay aside all vanity for you; is not that something?

What will not people say of a woman to whom no man attaches himself?

Oh, she is heartless, brainless, soulless; and what is more, devoid

of charm! Coquettes will not spare me. They will rob me of the very

qualities that mortify them. So long as my reputation is safe, what do I

care if my rivals deny my merits? They certainly will not inherit them.

Come, my friend; give up something for her who sacrifices so much for

you. Do not come quite so often; I shall love you none the less.”

“Ah!” said Armand, with the profound irony of a wounded heart in his

words and tone. “Love, so the scribblers say, only feeds on illusions.

Nothing could be truer, I see; I am expected to imagine that I am loved.

But, there!--there are some thoughts like wounds, from which there is no

recovery. My belief in you was one of the last left to me, and now I see

that there is nothing left to believe in this earth.”

She began to smile.

“Yes,” Montriveau went on in an unsteady voice, “this Catholic faith to

which you wish to convert me is a lie that men make for themselves; hope

is a lie at the expense of the future; pride, a lie between us and our

fellows; and pity, and prudence, and terror are cunning lies. And now

my happiness is to be one more lying delusion; I am expected to delude

myself, to be willing to give gold coin for silver to the end. If you

can so easily dispense with my visits; if you can confess me neither

as your friend nor your lover, you do not care for me! And I, poor fool

that I am, tell myself this, and know it, and love you!”

“But, dear me, poor Armand, you are flying into a passion!”

“I flying into a passion?”

“Yes. You think that the whole question is opened because I ask you to

be careful.”

In her heart of hearts she was delighted with the anger that leapt out

in her lover’s eyes. Even as she tortured him, she was criticising

him, watching every slightest change that passed over his face. If

the General had been so unluckily inspired as to show himself generous

without discussion (as happens occasionally with some artless souls),

he would have been a banished man forever, accused and convicted of not

knowing how to love. Most women are not displeased to have their code of

right and wrong broken through. Do they not flatter themselves that they

never yield except to force? But Armand was not learned enough in this

kind of lore to see the snare ingeniously spread for him by the Duchess.

So much of the child was there in the strong man in love.

“If all you want is to preserve appearances,” he began in his

simplicity, “I am willing to----”

“Simply to preserve appearances!” the lady broke in; “why, what idea can

you have of me? Have I given you the slightest reason to suppose that I

can be yours?”

“Why, what else are we talking about?” demanded Montriveau.

“Monsieur, you frighten me!... No, pardon me. Thank you,” she added,

coldly; “thank you, Armand. You have given me timely warning of

imprudence; committed quite unconsciously, believe it, my friend. You

know how to endure, you say. I also know how to endure. We will not

see each other for a time; and then, when both of us have contrived to

recover calmness to some extent, we will think about arrangements for

a happiness sanctioned by the world. I am young, Armand; a man with no

delicacy might tempt a woman of four-and-twenty to do many foolish, wild

things for his sake. But _you_! You will be my friend, promise me that

you will?”

“The woman of four-and-twenty,” returned he, “knows what she is about.”

He sat down on the sofa in the boudoir, and leant his head on his hands.

“Do you love me, madame?” he asked at length, raising his head, and

turning a face full of resolution upon her. “Say it straight out; Yes or

No!”

His direct question dismayed the Duchess more than a threat of suicide

could have done; indeed, the woman of the nineteenth century is not to

be frightened by that stale stratagem, the sword has ceased to be part

of the masculine costume. But in the effect of eyelids and lashes, in

the contraction of the gaze, in the twitching of the lips, is there not

some influence that communicates the terror which they express with such

vivid magnetic power?

“Ah, if I were free, if----”

“Oh! is it only your husband that stands in the way?” the General

exclaimed joyfully, as he strode to and fro in the boudoir. “Dear

Antoinette, I wield a more absolute power than the Autocrat of all the

Russias. I have a compact with Fate; I can advance or retard destiny,

so far as men are concerned, at my fancy, as you alter the hands of a

watch. If you can direct the course of fate in our political machinery,

it simply means (does it not?) that you understand the ins and outs of

it. You shall be free before very long, and then you must remember your

promise.”

“Armand!” she cried. “What do you mean? Great heavens! Can you imagine

that I am to be the prize of a crime? Do you want to kill me? Why! you

cannot have any religion in you! For my own part, I fear God. M. de

Langeais may have given me reason to hate him, but I wish him no manner

of harm.”

M. de Montriveau beat a tattoo on the marble chimney-piece, and only

looked composedly at the lady.

“Dear,” continued she, “respect him. He does not love me, he is not kind

to me, but I have duties to fulfil with regard to him. What would I not

do to avert the calamities with which you threaten him?--Listen,” she

continued after a pause, “I will not say another word about separation;

you shall come here as in the past, and I will still give you my

forehead to kiss. If I refused once or twice, it was pure coquetry,

indeed it was. But let us understand each other,” she added as he came

closer. “You will permit me to add to the number of my satellites; to

receive even more visitors in the morning than heretofore; I mean to be

twice as frivolous; I mean to use you to all appearance very badly;

to feign a rupture; you must come not quite so often, and then,

afterwards----”

While she spoke, she had allowed him to put an arm about her waist,

Montriveau was holding her tightly to him, and she seemed to feel the

exceeding pleasure that women usually feel in that close contact, an

earnest of the bliss of a closer union. And then, doubtless she meant to

elicit some confidence, for she raised herself on tiptoe, and laid her

forehead against Armand’s burning lips.

“And then,” Montriveau finished her sentence for her, “you shall not

speak to me of your husband. You ought not to think of him again.”

Mme de Langeais was silent awhile.

“At least,” she said, after a significant pause, “at least you will do

all that I wish without grumbling, you will not be naughty; tell me so,

my friend? You wanted to frighten me, did you not? Come, now, confess

it?... You are too good ever to think of crimes. But is it possible that

you can have secrets that I do not know? How can you control Fate?”

“Now, when you confirm the gift of the heart that you have already given

me, I am far too happy to know exactly how to answer you. I can trust

you, Antoinette; I shall have no suspicion, no unfounded jealousy of

you. But if accident should set you free, we shall be one----”

“Accident, Armand?” (With that little dainty turn of the head that seems

to say so many things, a gesture that such women as the Duchess can use

on light occasions, as a great singer can act with her voice.) “Pure

accident,” she repeated. “Mind that. If anything should happen to M. de

Langeais by your fault, I should never be yours.”

And so they parted, mutually content. The Duchess had made a pact

that left her free to prove to the world by words and deeds that M. de

Montriveau was no lover of hers. And as for him, the wily Duchess

vowed to tire him out. He should have nothing of her beyond the little

concessions snatched in the course of contests that she could stop

at her pleasure. She had so pretty an art of revoking the grant

of yesterday, she was so much in earnest in her purpose to remain

technically virtuous, that she felt that there was not the slightest

danger for her in preliminaries fraught with peril for a woman less sure

of her self-command. After all, the Duchess was practically separated

from her husband; a marriage long since annulled was no great sacrifice

to make to her love.

Montriveau on his side was quite happy to win the vaguest promise, glad

once for all to sweep aside, with all scruples of conjugal fidelity, her

stock of excuses for refusing herself to his love. He had gained ground

a little, and congratulated himself. And so for a time he took unfair

advantage of the rights so hardly won. More a boy than he had ever been

in his life, he gave himself up to all the childishness that makes first

love the flower of life. He was a child again as he poured out all

his soul, all the thwarted forces that passion had given him, upon her

hands, upon the dazzling forehead that looked so pure to his eyes; upon

her fair hair; on the tufted curls where his lips were pressed. And the

Duchess, on whom his love was poured like a flood, was vanquished by

the magnetic influence of her lover’s warmth; she hesitated to begin

the quarrel that must part them forever. She was more a woman than she

thought, this slight creature, in her effort to reconcile the demands

of religion with the ever-new sensations of vanity, the semblance of

pleasure which turns a Parisienne’s head. Every Sunday she went to Mass;

she never missed a service; then, when evening came, she was steeped in

the intoxicating bliss of repressed desire. Armand and Mme de Langeais,

like Hindoo fakirs, found the reward of their continence in the

temptations to which it gave rise. Possibly, the Duchess had ended by

resolving love into fraternal caresses, harmless enough, as it might

have seemed to the rest of the world, while they borrowed extremes

of degradation from the license of her thoughts. How else explain the

incomprehensible mystery of her continual fluctuations? Every morning

she proposed to herself to shut her door on the Marquis de Montriveau;

every evening, at the appointed hour, she fell under the charm of his

presence. There was a languid defence; then she grew less unkind. Her

words were sweet and soothing. They were lovers--lovers only could have

been thus. For him the Duchess would display her most sparkling wit, her

most captivating wiles; and when at last she had wrought upon his senses

and his soul, she might submit herself passively to his fierce caresses,

but she had her _nec plus ultra_ of passion; and when once it was

reached, she grew angry if he lost the mastery of himself and made

as though he would pass beyond. No woman on earth can brave the

consequences of refusal without some motive; nothing is more natural

than to yield to love; wherefore Mme de Langeais promptly raised a

second line of fortification, a stronghold less easy to carry than

the first. She evoked the terrors of religion. Never did Father of

the Church, however eloquent, plead the cause of God better than the

Duchess. Never was the wrath of the Most High better justified than

by her voice. She used no preacher’s commonplaces, no rhetorical

amplifications. No. She had a “pulpit-tremor” of her own. To Armand’s

most passionate entreaty, she replied with a tearful gaze, and a gesture

in which a terrible plenitude of emotion found expression. She stopped

his mouth with an appeal for mercy. She would not hear another word; if

she did, she must succumb; and better death than criminal happiness.

“Is it nothing to disobey God?” she asked him, recovering a voice grown

faint in the crises of inward struggles, through which the fair

actress appeared to find it hard to preserve her self-control. “I would

sacrifice society, I would give up the whole world for you, gladly; but

it is very selfish of you to ask my whole after-life of me for a moment

of pleasure. Come, now! are you not happy?” she added, holding out her

hand; and certainly in her careless toilette the sight of her afforded

consolations to her lover, who made the most of them.

Sometimes from policy, to keep her hold on a man whose ardent passion

gave her emotions unknown before, sometimes in weakness, she suffered

him to snatch a swift kiss; and immediately, in feigned terror, she

flushed red and exiled Armand from the sofa so soon as the sofa became

dangerous ground.

“Your joys are sins for me to expiate, Armand; they are paid for by

penitence and remorse,” she cried.

And Montriveau, now at two chairs’ distance from that aristocratic

petticoat, betook himself to blasphemy and railed against Providence.

The Duchess grew angry at such times.

“My friend,” she said drily, “I do not understand why you decline to

believe in God, for it is impossible to believe in man. Hush, do not

talk like that. You have too great a nature to take up their Liberal

nonsense with its pretension to abolish God.”

Theological and political disputes acted like a cold douche on

Montriveau; he calmed down; he could not return to love when the Duchess

stirred up his wrath by suddenly setting him down a thousand miles away

from the boudoir, discussing theories of absolute monarchy, which she

defended to admiration. Few women venture to be democrats; the attitude

of democratic champion is scarcely compatible with tyrannous feminine

sway. But often, on the other hand, the General shook out his mane,

dropped politics with a leonine growling and lashing of the flanks, and

sprang upon his prey; he was no longer capable of carrying a heart and

brain at such variance for very far; he came back, terrible with love,

to his mistress. And she, if she felt the prick of fancy stimulated to

a dangerous point, knew that it was time to leave her boudoir; she came

out of the atmosphere surcharged with desires that she drew in with

her breath, sat down to the piano, and sang the most exquisite songs

of modern music, and so baffled the physical attraction which at times

showed her no mercy, though she was strong enough to fight it down.

At such times she was something sublime in Armand’s eyes; she was not

acting, she was genuine; the unhappy lover was convinced that she loved

him. Her egoistic resistance deluded him into a belief that she was a

pure and sainted woman; he resigned himself; he talked of Platonic love,

did this artillery officer!

When Mme de Langeais had played with religion sufficiently to suit her

own purposes, she played with it again for Armand’s benefit. She wanted

to bring him back to a Christian frame of mind; she brought out her

edition of _Le Genie du Christianisme_, adapted for the use of military

men. Montriveau chafed; his yoke was heavy. Oh! at that, possessed by

the spirit of contradiction, she dinned religion into his ears, to see

whether God might not rid her of this suitor, for the man’s persistence

was beginning to frighten her. And in any case she was glad to prolong

any quarrel, if it bade fair to keep the dispute on moral grounds for

an indefinite period; the material struggle which followed it was more

dangerous.

But if the time of her opposition on the ground of the marriage law

might be said to be the _epoque civile_ of this sentimental warfare, the

ensuing phase which might be taken to constitute the _epoque religieuse_

had also its crisis and consequent decline of severity.

Armand happening to come in very early one evening, found M. l’Abbe

Gondrand, the Duchess’s spiritual director, established in an armchair

by the fireside, looking as a spiritual director might be expected to

look while digesting his dinner and the charming sins of his penitent.

In the ecclesiastic’s bearing there was a stateliness befitting a

dignitary of the Church; and the episcopal violet hue already appeared

in his dress. At sight of his fresh, well-preserved complexion, smooth

forehead, and ascetic’s mouth, Montriveau’s countenance grew uncommonly

dark; he said not a word under the malicious scrutiny of the other’s

gaze, and greeted neither the lady nor the priest. The lover apart,

Montriveau was not wanting in tact; so a few glances exchanged with the

bishop-designate told him that here was the real forger of the Duchess’s

armory of scruples.

That an ambitious abbe should control the happiness of a man of

Montriveau’s temper, and by underhand ways! The thought burst in a

furious tide over his face, clenched his fists, and set him chafing and

pacing to and fro; but when he came back to his place intending to make

a scene, a single look from the Duchess was enough. He was quiet.

Any other woman would have been put out by her lover’s gloomy silence;

it was quite otherwise with Mme de Langeais. She continued her

conversation with M. de Gondrand on the necessity of re-establishing the

Church in its ancient splendour. And she talked brilliantly.

The Church, she maintained, ought to be a temporal as well as a

spiritual power, stating her case better than the Abbe had done, and

regretting that the Chamber of Peers, unlike the English House of Lords,

had no bench of bishops. Nevertheless, the Abbe rose, yielded his place

to the General, and took his leave, knowing that in Lent he could play a

return game. As for the Duchess, Montriveau’s behaviour had excited

her curiosity to such a pitch that she scarcely rose to return her

director’s low bow.

“What is the matter with you, my friend?”

“Why, I cannot stomach that Abbe of yours.”

“Why did you not take a book?” she asked, careless whether the Abbe,

then closing the door, heard her or no.

The General paused, for the gesture which accompanied the Duchess’s

speech further increased the exceeding insolence of her words.

“My dear Antoinette, thank you for giving love precedence of the Church;

but, for pity’s sake, allow me to ask one question.”

“Oh! you are questioning me! I am quite willing. You are my friend, are

you not? I certainly can open the bottom of my heart to you; you will

see only one image there.”

“Do you talk about our love to that man?”

“He is my confessor.”

“Does he know that I love you?”

“M. de Montriveau, you cannot claim, I think, to penetrate the secrets

of the confessional?”

“Does that man know all about our quarrels and my love for you?”

“That man, monsieur; say God!”

“God again! _I_ ought to be alone in your heart. But leave God alone

where He is, for the love of God and me. Madame, you _shall not_ go to

confession again, or----”

“Or?” she repeated sweetly.

“Or I will never come back here.”

“Then go, Armand. Good-bye, good-bye forever.”

She rose and went to her boudoir without so much as a glance at Armand,

as he stood with his hand on the back of a chair. How long he stood

there motionless he himself never knew. The soul within has the

mysterious power of expanding as of contracting space.

He opened the door of the boudoir. It was dark within. A faint voice was

raised to say sharply:

“I did not ring. What made you come in without orders? Go away,

Suzette.”

“Then you are ill,” exclaimed Montriveau.

“Stand up, monsieur, and go out of the room for a minute at any rate,”

she said, ringing the bell.

“Mme la Duchesse rang for lights?” said the footman, coming in with the

candles. When the lovers were alone together, Mme de Langeais still lay

on her couch; she was just as silent and motionless as if Montriveau had

not been there.

“Dear, I was wrong,” he began, a note of pain and a sublime kindness in

his voice. “Indeed, I would not have you without religion----”

“It is fortunate that you can recognise the necessity of a conscience,”

she said in a hard voice, without looking at him. “I thank you in God’s

name.”

The General was broken down by her harshness; this woman seemed as

if she could be at will a sister or a stranger to him. He made one

despairing stride towards the door. He would leave her forever without

another word. He was wretched; and the Duchess was laughing within

herself over mental anguish far more cruel than the old judicial

torture. But as for going away, it was not in his power to do it. In any

sort of crisis, a woman is, as it were, bursting with a certain quantity

of things to say; so long as she has not delivered herself of them,

she experiences the sensation which we are apt to feel at the sight of

something incomplete. Mme de Langeais had not said all that was in her

mind. She took up her parable and said:

“We have not the same convictions, General, I am pained to think. It

would be dreadful if a woman could not believe in a religion which

permits us to love beyond the grave. I set Christian sentiments aside;

you cannot understand them. Let me simply speak to you of expediency.

Would you forbid a woman at court the table of the Lord when it is

customary to take the sacrament at Easter? People must certainly do

something for their party. The Liberals, whatever they may wish to do,

will never destroy the religious instinct. Religion will always be

a political necessity. Would you undertake to govern a nation of

logic-choppers? Napoleon was afraid to try; he persecuted ideologists.

If you want to keep people from reasoning, you must give them something

to feel. So let us accept the Roman Catholic Church with all its

consequences. And if we would have France go to mass, ought we not to

begin by going ourselves? Religion, you see, Armand, is a bond uniting

all the conservative principles which enable the rich to live in

tranquillity. Religion and the rights of property are intimately

connected. It is certainly a finer thing to lead a nation by ideas of

morality than by fear of the scaffold, as in the time of the Terror--the

one method by which your odious Revolution could enforce obedience.

The priest and the king--that means you, and me, and the Princess

my neighbour; and, in a word, the interests of all honest people

personified. There, my friend, just be so good as to belong to your

party, you that might be its Scylla if you had the slightest ambition

that way. I know nothing about politics myself; I argue from my own

feelings; but still I know enough to guess that society would

be overturned if people were always calling its foundations in

question----”

“If that is how your Court and your Government think, I am sorry for

you,” broke in Montriveau. “The Restoration, madam, ought to say, like

Catherine de Medici, when she heard that the battle of Dreux was lost,

‘Very well; now we will go to the meeting-house.’ Now 1815 was your

battle of Dreux. Like the royal power of those days, you won in

fact, while you lost in right. Political Protestantism has gained an

ascendancy over people’s minds. If you have no mind to issue your Edict

of Nantes; or if, when it is issued, you publish a Revocation; if you

should one day be accused and convicted of repudiating the Charter,

which is simply a pledge given to maintain the interests established

under the Republic, then the Revolution will rise again, terrible in her

strength, and strike but a single blow. It will not be the Revolution

that will go into exile; she is the very soil of France. Men die, but

people’s interests do not die. ... Eh, great Heavens! what are France

and the crown and rightful sovereigns, and the whole world besides, to

us? Idle words compared with my happiness. Let them reign or be hurled

from the throne, little do I care. Where am I now?”

“In the Duchesse de Langeais’ boudoir, my friend.”

“No, no. No more of the Duchess, no more of Langeais; I am with my dear

Antoinette.”

“Will you do me the pleasure to stay where you are,” she said, laughing

and pushing him back, gently however.

“So you have never loved me,” he retorted, and anger flashed in

lightning from his eyes.

“No, dear”; but the “No” was equivalent to “Yes.”

“I am a great ass,” he said, kissing her hands. The terrible queen was a

woman once more.--“Antoinette,” he went on, laying his head on her feet,

“you are too chastely tender to speak of our happiness to anyone in this

world.”

“Oh!” she cried, rising to her feet with a swift, graceful spring,

“you are a great simpleton.” And without another word she fled into the

drawing-room.

“What is it now?” wondered the General, little knowing that the touch of

his burning forehead had sent a swift electric thrill through her from

foot to head.

In hot wrath he followed her to the drawing-room, only to hear divinely

sweet chords. The Duchess was at the piano. If the man of science or the

poet can at once enjoy and comprehend, bringing his intelligence to bear

upon his enjoyment without loss of delight, he is conscious that the

alphabet and phraseology of music are but cunning instruments for

the composer, like the wood and copper wire under the hands of the

executant. For the poet and the man of science there is a music existing

apart, underlying the double expression of this language of the spirit

and senses. _Andiamo mio ben_ can draw tears of joy or pitying laughter

at the will of the singer; and not unfrequently one here and there in

the world, some girl unable to live and bear the heavy burden of an

unguessed pain, some man whose soul vibrates with the throb of passion,

may take up a musical theme, and lo! heaven is opened for them, or they

find a language for themselves in some sublime melody, some song lost to

the world.

The General was listening now to such a song; a mysterious music unknown

to all other ears, as the solitary plaint of some mateless bird dying

alone in a virgin forest.

“Great Heavens! what are you playing there?” he asked in an unsteady

voice.

“The prelude of a ballad, called, I believe, _Fleuve du Tage_.”

“I did not know that there was such music in a piano,” he returned.

“Ah!” she said, and for the first time she looked at him as a woman

looks at the man she loves, “nor do you know, my friend, that I love

you, and that you cause me horrible suffering; and that I feel that I

must utter my cry of pain without putting it too plainly into words. If

I did not, I should yield----But you see nothing.”

“And you will not make me happy!”

“Armand, I should die of sorrow the next day.”

The General turned abruptly from her and went. But out in the street he

brushed away the tears that he would not let fall.

The religious phase lasted for three months. At the end of that time the

Duchess grew weary of vain repetitions; the Deity, bound hand and foot,

was delivered up to her lover. Possibly she may have feared that by

sheer dint of talking of eternity she might perpetuate his love in this

world and the next. For her own sake, it must be believed that no man

had touched her heart, or her conduct would be inexcusable. She was

young; the time when men and women feel that they cannot afford to lose

time or to quibble over their joys was still far off. She, no doubt, was

on the verge not of first love, but of her first experience of the bliss

of love. And from inexperience, for want of the painful lessons which

would have taught her to value the treasure poured out at her feet, she

was playing with it. Knowing nothing of the glory and rapture of the

light, she was fain to stay in the shadow.

Armand was just beginning to understand this strange situation; he put

his hope in the first word spoken by nature. Every evening, as he came

away from Mme de Langeais’, he told himself that no woman would accept

the tenderest, most delicate proofs of a man’s love during seven months,

nor yield passively to the slighter demands of passion, only to cheat

love at the last. He was waiting patiently for the sun to gain power,

not doubting but that he should receive the earliest fruits. The married

woman’s hesitations and the religious scruples he could quite well

understand. He even rejoiced over those battles. He mistook the

Duchess’s heartless coquetry for modesty; and he would not have had her

otherwise. So he had loved to see her devising obstacles; was he not

gradually triumphing over them? Did not every victory won swell the

meagre sum of lovers’ intimacies long denied, and at last conceded with

every sign of love? Still, he had had such leisure to taste the full

sweetness of every small successive conquest on which a lover feeds

his love, that these had come to be matters of use and wont. So far as

obstacles went, there were none now save his own awe of her; nothing

else left between him and his desire save the whims of her who allowed

him to call her Antoinette. So he made up his mind to demand more, to

demand all. Embarrassed like a young lover who cannot dare to believe

that his idol can stoop so low, he hesitated for a long time. He passed

through the experience of terrible reactions within himself. A set

purpose was annihilated by a word, and definite resolves died within him

on the threshold. He despised himself for his weakness, and still his

desire remained unuttered. Nevertheless, one evening, after sitting

in gloomy melancholy, he brought out a fierce demand for his illegally

legitimate rights. The Duchess had not to wait for her bond-slave’s

request to guess his desire. When was a man’s desire a secret? And have

not women an intuitive knowledge of the meaning of certain changes of

countenance?

“What! you wish to be my friend no longer?” she broke in at the first

words, and a divine red surging like new blood under the transparent

skin, lent brightness to her eyes. “As a reward for my generosity, you

would dishonor me? Just reflect a little. I myself have thought much

over this; and I think always for us _both_. There is such a thing as

a woman’s loyalty, and we can no more fail in it than you can fail in

honour. _I_ cannot blind myself. If I am yours, how, in any sense, can

I be M. de Langeais’ wife? Can you require the sacrifice of my position,

my rank, my whole life in return for a doubtful love that could not wait

patiently for seven months? What! already you would rob me of my right

to dispose of myself? No, no; you must not talk like this again. No, not

another word. I will not, I cannot listen to you.”

Mme de Langeais raised both hands to her head to push back the tufted

curls from her hot forehead; she seemed very much excited.

“You come to a weak woman with your purpose definitely planned out. You

say--‘For a certain length of time she will talk to me of her husband,

then of God, and then of the inevitable consequences. But I will use

and abuse the ascendancy I shall gain over her; I will make myself

indispensable; all the bonds of habit, all the misconstructions of

outsiders, will make for me; and at length, when our _liaison_ is taken

for granted by all the world, I shall be this woman’s master.’--Now, be

frank; these are your thoughts! Oh! you calculate, and you say that you

love. Shame on you! You are enamoured? Ah! that I well believe! You

wish to possess me, to have me for your mistress, that is all! Very well

then, No! The _Duchesse de Langeais_ will not descend so far. Simple

_bourgeoises_ may be the victims of your treachery--I, never! Nothing

gives me assurance of your love. You speak of my beauty; I may lose

every trace of it in six months, like the dear Princess, my neighbour.

You are captivated by my wit, my grace. Great Heavens! you would soon

grow used to them and to the pleasures of possession. Have not the

little concessions that I was weak enough to make come to be a matter of

course in the last few months? Some day, when ruin comes, you will give

me no reason for the change in you beyond a curt, ‘I have ceased to

care for you.’--Then, rank and fortune and honour and all that was the

Duchesse de Langeais will be swallowed up in one disappointed hope.

I shall have children to bear witness to my shame, and----” With an

involuntary gesture she interrupted herself, and continued: “But I am

too good-natured to explain all this to you when you know it better than

I. Come! let us stay as we are. I am only too fortunate in that I can

still break these bonds which you think so strong. Is there anything so

very heroic in coming to the Hotel de Langeais to spend an evening

with a woman whose prattle amuses you?--a woman whom you take for a

plaything? Why, half a dozen young coxcombs come here just as regularly

every afternoon between three and five. They, too, are very generous, I

am to suppose? I make fun of them; they stand my petulance and insolence

pretty quietly, and make me laugh; but as for you, I give all the

treasures of my soul to you, and you wish to ruin me, you try my

patience in endless ways. Hush, that will do, that will do,” she

continued, seeing that he was about to speak, “you have no heart,

no soul, no delicacy. I know what you want to tell me. Very well,

then--yes. I would rather you should take me for a cold, insensible

woman, with no devotion in her composition, no heart even, than be

taken by everybody else for a vulgar person, and be condemned to your

so-called pleasures, of which you would most certainly tire, and to

everlasting punishment for it afterwards. Your selfish love is not worth

so many sacrifices....”

The words give but a very inadequate idea of the discourse which the

Duchess trilled out with the quick volubility of a bird-organ. Nor,

truly, was there anything to prevent her from talking on for some time

to come, for poor Armand’s only reply to the torrent of flute notes was

a silence filled with cruelly painful thoughts. He was just beginning to

see that this woman was playing with him; he divined instinctively

that a devoted love, a responsive love, does not reason and count

the consequences in this way. Then, as he heard her reproach him with

detestable motives, he felt something like shame as he remembered that

unconsciously he had made those very calculations. With angelic honesty

of purpose, he looked within, and self-examination found nothing but

selfishness in all his thoughts and motives, in the answers which he

framed and could not utter. He was self-convicted. In his despair

he longed to fling himself from the window. The egoism of it was

intolerable.

What indeed can a man say when a woman will not believe in love?--Let me

prove how much I love you.--The _I_ is always there.

The heroes of the boudoir, in such circumstances, can follow the example

of the primitive logician who preceded the Pyrrhonists and denied

movement. Montriveau was not equal to this feat. With all his audacity,

he lacked this precise kind which never deserts an adept in the formulas

of feminine algebra. If so many women, and even the best of women, fall

a prey to a kind of expert to whom the vulgar give a grosser name, it is

perhaps because the said experts are great _provers_, and love, in spite

of its delicious poetry of sentiment, requires a little more geometry

than people are wont to think.

Now the Duchess and Montriveau were alike in this--they were both

equally unversed in love lore. The lady’s knowledge of theory was but

scanty; in practice she knew nothing whatever; she felt nothing, and

reflected over everything. Montriveau had had but little experience, was

absolutely ignorant of theory, and felt too much to reflect at all. Both

therefore were enduring the consequences of the singular situation.

At that supreme moment the myriad thoughts in his mind might have

been reduced to the formula--“Submit to be mine----” words which seem

horribly selfish to a woman for whom they awaken no memories, recall no

ideas. Something nevertheless he must say. And what was more, though her

barbed shafts had set his blood tingling, though the short phrases that

she discharged at him one by one were very keen and sharp and cold, he

must control himself lest he should lose all by an outbreak of anger.