about the journey of an empty carriage, children, and leave me alone
with Antoinette. All three of you come and dine with me. I will
undertake to arrange matters suitably. You men understand nothing;
you are beginning to talk sourly already, and I have no wish to see a
quarrel between you and my dear child. Do me the pleasure to go.”
The three gentlemen probably guessed the Princess’s intentions; they
took their leave. M. de Navarreins kissed his daughter on the forehead
with, “Come, be good, dear child. It is not too late yet if you choose.”
“Couldn’t we find some good fellow in the family to pick a quarrel with
this Montriveau?” said the Vidame, as they went downstairs.
When the two women were alone, the Princess beckoned her niece to a
little low chair by her side.
“My pearl,” said she, “in this world below, I know nothing worse
calumniated than God and the eighteenth century; for as I look back over
my own young days, I do not recollect that a single duchess trampled the
proprieties underfoot as you have just done. Novelists and scribblers
brought the reign of Louis XV into disrepute. Do not believe them. The
du Barry, my dear, was quite as good as the Widow Scarron, and the more
agreeable woman of the two. In my time a woman could keep her dignity
among her gallantries. Indiscretion was the ruin of us, and the
beginning of all the mischief. The philosophists--the nobodies whom we
admitted into our salons--had no more gratitude or sense of decency than
to make an inventory of our hearts, to traduce us one and all, and to
rail against the age by way of a return for our kindness. The people are
not in a position to judge of anything whatsoever; they looked at the
facts, not at the form. But the men and women of those times, my heart,
were quite as remarkable as at any other period of the Monarchy. Not one
of your Werthers, none of your notabilities, as they are called, never
a one of your men in yellow kid gloves and trousers that disguise the
poverty of their legs, would cross Europe in the dress of a travelling
hawker to brave the daggers of a Duke of Modena, and to shut himself up
in the dressing-room of the Regent’s daughter at the risk of his life.
Not one of your little consumptive patients with their tortoiseshell
eyeglasses would hide himself in a closet for six weeks, like Lauzun,
to keep up his mistress’s courage while she was lying in of her child.
There was more passion in M. de Jaucourt’s little finger than in
your whole race of higglers that leave a woman to better themselves
elsewhere! Just tell me where to find the page that would be cut in
pieces and buried under the floorboards for one kiss on the Konigsmark’s
gloved finger!
“Really, it would seem today that the roles are exchanged, and women
are expected to show their devotion for men. These modern gentlemen are
worth less, and think more of themselves. Believe me, my dear, all these
adventures that have been made public, and now are turned against our
good Louis XV, were kept quite secret at first. If it had not been for
a pack of poetasters, scribblers, and moralists, who hung about our
waiting-women, and took down their slanders, our epoch would have
appeared in literature as a well-conducted age. I am justifying the
century and not its fringe. Perhaps a hundred women of quality were
lost; but for every one, the rogues set down ten, like the gazettes
after a battle when they count up the losses of the beaten side. And in
any case I do not know that the Revolution and the Empire can reproach
us; they were coarse, dull, licentious times. Faugh! it is revolting.
Those are the brothels of French history.
“This preamble, my dear child,” she continued after a pause, “brings
me to the thing that I have to say. If you care for Montriveau, you are
quite at liberty to love him at your ease, and as much as you can. I
know by experience that, unless you are locked up (but locking people
up is out of fashion now), you will do as you please; I should have done
the same at your age. Only, sweetheart, I should not have given up my
right to be the mother of future Ducs de Langeais. So mind appearances.
The Vidame is right. No man is worth a single one of the sacrifices
which we are foolish enough to make for their love. Put yourself in
such a position that you may still be M. de Langeais’ wife, in case you
should have the misfortune to repent. When you are an old woman, you
will be very glad to hear mass said at Court, and not in some provincial
convent. Therein lies the whole question. A single imprudence means an
allowance and a wandering life; it means that you are at the mercy of
your lover; it means that you must put up with insolence from women
that are not so honest, precisely because they have been very vulgarly
sharp-witted. It would be a hundred times better to go to Montriveau’s
at night in a cab, and disguised, instead of sending your carriage in
broad daylight. You are a little fool, my dear child! Your carriage
flattered his vanity; your person would have ensnared his heart. All
this that I have said is just and true; but, for my own part, I do not
blame you. You are two centuries behind the times with your false ideas
of greatness. There, leave us to arrange your affairs, and say that
Montriveau made your servants drunk to gratify his vanity and to
compromise you----”
The Duchess rose to her feet with a spring. “In Heaven’s name, aunt, do
not slander him!”
The old Princess’s eyes flashed.
“Dear child,” she said, “I should have liked to spare such of your
illusions as were not fatal. But there must be an end of all illusions
now. You would soften me if I were not so old. Come, now, do not vex
him, or us, or anyone else. I will undertake to satisfy everybody; but
promise me not to permit yourself a single step henceforth until you
have consulted me. Tell me all, and perhaps I may bring it all right
again.”
“Aunt, I promise----”
“To tell me everything?”
“Yes, everything. Everything that can be told.”
“But, my sweetheart, it is precisely what cannot be told that I want
to know. Let us understand each other thoroughly. Come, let me put my
withered old lips on your beautiful forehead. No; let me do as I wish. I
forbid you to kiss my bones. Old people have a courtesy of their own....
There, take me down to my carriage,” she added, when she had kissed her
niece.
“Then may I go to him in disguise, dear aunt?”
“Why--yes. The story can always be denied,” said the old Princess.
This was the one idea which the Duchess had clearly grasped in the
sermon. When Mme de Chauvry was seated in the corner of her carriage,
Mme de Langeais bade her a graceful adieu and went up to her room. She
was quite happy again.
“My person would have snared his heart; my aunt is right; a man cannot
surely refuse a pretty woman when she understands how to offer herself.”
That evening, at the Elysee-Bourbon, the Duc de Navarreins, M. de
Pamiers, M. de Marsay, M. de Grandlieu, and the Duc de Maufrigneuse
triumphantly refuted the scandals that were circulating with regard to
the Duchesse de Langeais. So many officers and other persons had seen
Montriveau walking in the Tuileries that morning, that the silly story
was set down to chance, which takes all that is offered. And so,
in spite of the fact that the Duchess’s carriage had waited before
Montriveau’s door, her character became as clear and as spotless as
Membrino’s sword after Sancho had polished it up.
But, at two o’clock, M. de Ronquerolles passed Montriveau in a deserted
alley, and said with a smile, “She is coming on, is your Duchess. Go on,
keep it up!” he added, and gave a significant cut of the riding whip to
his mare, who sped off like a bullet down the avenue.
Two days after the fruitless scandal, Mme de Langeais wrote to M. de
Montriveau. That letter, like the preceding ones, remained unanswered.
This time she took her own measures, and bribed M. de Montriveau’s man,
Auguste. And so at eight o’clock that evening she was introduced into
Armand’s apartment. It was not the room in which that secret scene had
passed; it was entirely different. The Duchess was told that the General
would not be at home that night. Had he two houses? The man would give
no answer. Mme de Langeais had bought the key of the room, but not the
man’s whole loyalty.
When she was left alone she saw her fourteen letters lying on an
old-fashioned stand, all of them uncreased and unopened. He had not
read them. She sank into an easy-chair, and for a while she lost
consciousness. When she came to herself, Auguste was holding vinegar for
her to inhale.
“A carriage; quick!” she ordered.
The carriage came. She hastened downstairs with convulsive speed, and
left orders that no one was to be admitted. For twenty-four hours she
lay in bed, and would have no one near her but her woman, who brought
her a cup of orange-flower water from time to time. Suzette heard
her mistress moan once or twice, and caught a glimpse of tears in the
brilliant eyes, now circled with dark shadows.
The next day, amid despairing tears, Mme de Langeais took her
resolution. Her man of business came for an interview, and no doubt
received instructions of some kind. Afterwards she sent for the
Vidame de Pamiers; and while she waited, she wrote a letter to M.
de Montriveau. The Vidame punctually came towards two o’clock that
afternoon, to find his young cousin looking white and worn, but
resigned; never had her divine loveliness been more poetic than now in
the languor of her agony.
“You owe this assignation to your eighty-four years, dear cousin,” she
said. “Ah! do not smile, I beg of you, when an unhappy woman has reached
the lowest depths of wretchedness. You are a gentleman, and after the
adventures of your youth you must feel some indulgence for women.”
“None whatever,” said he.
“Indeed!”
“Everything is in their favour.”
“Ah! Well, you are one of the inner family circle; possibly you will be
the last relative, the last friend whose hand I shall press, so I can
ask your good offices. Will you, dear Vidame, do me a service which I
could not ask of my own father, nor of my uncle Grandlieu, nor of any
woman? You cannot fail to understand. I beg of you to do my bidding, and
then to forget what you have done, whatever may come of it. It is this:
Will you take this letter and go to M. de Montriveau? will you see him
yourself, give it into his hands, and ask him, as you men can ask things
between yourselves--for you have a code of honour between man and man
which you do not use with us, and a different way of regarding things
between yourselves--ask him if he will read this letter? Not in
your presence. Certain feelings men hide from each other. I give you
authority to say, if you think it necessary to bring him, that it is a
question of life or death for me. If he deigns----”
“_Deigns_!” repeated the Vidame.
“If he deigns to read it,” the Duchess continued with dignity, “say one
thing more. You will go to see him about five o’clock, for I know that
he will dine at home today at that time. Very good. By way of answer he
must come to see me. If, three hours afterwards, by eight o’clock, he
does not leave his house, all will be over. The Duchesse de Langeais
will have vanished from the world. I shall not be dead, dear friend, no,
but no human power will ever find me again on this earth. Come and dine
with me; I shall at least have one friend with me in the last agony.
Yes, dear cousin, tonight will decide my fate; and whatever happens to
me, I pass through an ordeal by fire. There! not a word. I will hear
nothing of the nature of comment or advice----Let us chat and laugh
together,” she added, holding out a hand, which he kissed. “We will be
like two grey-headed philosophers who have learned how to enjoy life to
the last moment. I will look my best; I will be very enchanting for
you. You perhaps will be the last man to set eyes on the Duchesse de
Langeais.”
The Vicomte bowed, took the letter, and went without a word. At five
o’clock he returned. His cousin had studied to please him, and she
looked lovely indeed. The room was gay with flowers as if for a
festivity; the dinner was exquisite. For the grey-headed Vidame the
Duchess displayed all the brilliancy of her wit; she was more charming
than she had ever been before. At first the Vidame tried to look on
all these preparations as a young woman’s jest; but now and again the
attempted illusion faded, the spell of his fair cousin’s charm was
broken. He detected a shudder caused by some kind of sudden dread, and
once she seemed to listen during a pause.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
“Hush!” she said.
At seven o’clock the Duchess left him for a few minutes. When she came
back again she was dressed as her maid might have dressed for a journey.
She asked her guest to be her escort, took his arm, sprang into a
hackney coach, and by a quarter to eight they stood outside M. de
Montriveau’s door.
Armand meantime had been reading the following letter:--
“MY FRIEND,--I went to your rooms for a few minutes without your
knowledge; I found my letters there, and took them away. This cannot
be indifference, Armand, between us; and hatred would show itself quite
differently. If you love me, make an end of this cruel play, or you will
kill me, and afterwards, learning how much you were loved, you might be
in despair. If I have not rightly understood you, if you have no feeling
towards me but aversion, which implies both contempt and disgust, then
I give up all hope. A man never recovers from those feelings. You will
have no regrets. Dreadful though that thought may be, it will comfort me
in my long sorrow. Regrets? Oh, my Armand, may I never know of them; if
I thought that I had caused you a single regret----But, no, I will not
tell you what desolation I should feel. I should be living still, and I
could not be your wife; it would be too late!
“Now that I have given myself wholly to you in thought, to whom else
should I give myself?--to God. The eyes that you loved for a little
while shall never look on another man’s face; and may the glory of God
blind them to all besides. I shall never hear human voices more since I
heard yours--so gentle at the first, so terrible yesterday; for it seems
to me that I am still only on the morrow of your vengeance. And now
may the will of God consume me. Between His wrath and yours, my friend,
there will be nothing left for me but a little space for tears and
prayers.
“Perhaps you wonder why I write to you? Ah! do not think ill of me if I
keep a gleam of hope, and give one last sigh to happy life before I take
leave of it forever. I am in a hideous position. I feel all the inward
serenity that comes when a great resolution has been taken, even while I
hear the last growlings of the storm. When you went out on that terrible
adventure which so drew me to you, Armand, you went from the desert to
the oasis with a good guide to show you the way. Well, I am going out of
the oasis into the desert, and you are a pitiless guide to me. And yet
you only, my friend, can understand how melancholy it is to look back
for the last time on happiness--to you, and you only, I can make moan
without a blush. If you grant my entreaty, I shall be happy; if you are
inexorable, I shall expiate the wrong that I have done. After all, it is
natural, is it not, that a woman should wish to live, invested with all
noble feelings, in her friend’s memory? Oh! my one and only love, let
her to whom you gave life go down into the tomb in the belief that she
is great in your eyes. Your harshness led me to reflect; and now that I
love you so, it seems to me that I am less guilty than you think. Listen
to my justification, I owe it to you; and you that are all the world to
me, owe me at least a moment’s justice.
“I have learned by my own anguish all that I made you suffer by my
coquetry; but in those days I was utterly ignorant of love. _You_ know
what the torture is, and you mete it out to me! During those first eight
months that you gave me you never roused any feeling of love in me. Do
you ask why this was so, my friend? I can no more explain it than I can
tell you why I love you now. Oh! certainly it flattered my vanity that I
should be the subject of your passionate talk, and receive those burning
glances of yours; but you left me cold. No, I was not a woman; I had
no conception of womanly devotion and happiness. Who was to blame? You
would have despised me, would you not, if I had given myself without
the impulse of passion? Perhaps it is the highest height to which we
can rise--to give all and receive no joy; perhaps there is no merit in
yielding oneself to bliss that is foreseen and ardently desired. Alas,
my friend, I can say this now; these thoughts came to me when I played
with you; and you seemed to me so great even then that I would not have
you owe the gift to pity----What is this that I have written?
“I have taken back all my letters; I am flinging them one by one on the
fire; they are burning. You will never know what they confessed--all the
love and the passion and the madness----
“I will say no more, Armand; I will stop. I will not say another word of
my feelings. If my prayers have not echoed from my soul through yours,
I also, woman that I am, decline to owe your love to your pity. It is my
wish to be loved, because you cannot choose but love me, or else to
be left without mercy. If you refuse to read this letter, it shall be
burnt. If, after you have read it, you do not come to me within three
hours, to be henceforth forever my husband, the one man in the world for
me; then I shall never blush to know that this letter is in your hands,
the pride of my despair will protect my memory from all insult, and my
end shall be worthy of my love. When you see me no more on earth, albeit
I shall still be alive, you yourself will not think without a shudder
of the woman who, in three hours’ time, will live only to overwhelm
you with her tenderness; a woman consumed by a hopeless love, and
faithful--not to memories of past joys--but to a love that was slighted.
“The Duchesse de la Valliere wept for lost happiness and vanished power;
but the Duchesse de Langeais will be happy that she may weep and be a
power for you still. Yes, you will regret me. I see clearly that I was
not of this world, and I thank you for making it clear to me.
“Farewell; you will never touch _my_ axe. Yours was the executioner’s
axe, mine is God’s; yours kills, mine saves. Your love was but mortal,
it could not endure disdain or ridicule; mine can endure all things
without growing weaker, it will last eternally. Ah! I feel a sombre joy
in crushing you that believe yourself so great; in humbling you with the
calm, indulgent smile of one of the least among the angels that lie at
the feet of God, for to them is given the right and the power to protect
and watch over men in His name. You have but felt fleeting desires,
while the poor nun will shed the light of her ceaseless and ardent
prayer about you, she will shelter you all your life long beneath the
wings of a love that has nothing of earth in it.
“I have a presentiment of your answer; our trysting place shall be--in
heaven. Strength and weakness can both enter there, dear Armand; the
strong and the weak are bound to suffer. This thought soothes the
anguish of my final ordeal. So calm am I that I should fear that I had
ceased to love you if I were not about to leave the world for your sake.
“ANTOINETTE.”
“Dear Vidame,” said the Duchess as they reached Montriveau’s house, “do
me the kindness to ask at the door whether he is at home.” The Vidame,
obedient after the manner of the eighteenth century to a woman’s wish,
got out, and came back to bring his cousin an affirmative answer that
sent a shudder through her. She grasped his hand tightly in hers,
suffered him to kiss her on either cheek, and begged him to go at once.
He must not watch her movements nor try to protect her. “But the people
passing in the street,” he objected.
“No one can fail in respect to me,” she said. It was the last word
spoken by the Duchess and the woman of fashion.
The Vidame went. Mme de Langeais wrapped herself about in her cloak,
and stood on the doorstep until the clocks struck eight. The last stroke
died away. The unhappy woman waited ten, fifteen minutes; to the last
she tried to see a fresh humiliation in the delay, then her faith ebbed.
She turned to leave the fatal threshold.
“Oh, God!” the cry broke from her in spite of herself; it was the first
word spoken by the Carmelite.
Montriveau and some of his friends were talking together. He tried to
hasten them to a conclusion, but his clock was slow, and by the time he
started out for the Hotel de Langeais the Duchess was hurrying on foot
through the streets of Paris, goaded by the dull rage in her heart. She
reached the Boulevard d’Enfer, and looked out for the last time through
falling tears on the noisy, smoky city that lay below in a red mist,
lighted up by its own lamps. Then she hailed a cab, and drove away,
never to return. When the Marquis de Montriveau reached the Hotel de
Langeais, and found no trace of his mistress, he thought that he had
been duped. He hurried away at once to the Vidame, and found that worthy
gentleman in the act of slipping on his flowered dressing-gown, thinking
the while of his fair cousin’s happiness.
Montriveau gave him one of the terrific glances that produced the effect
of an electric shock on men and women alike.
“Is it possible that you have lent yourself to some cruel hoax,
monsieur?” Montriveau exclaimed. “I have just come from Mme de Langeais’
house; the servants say that she is out.”
“Then a great misfortune has happened, no doubt,” returned the Vidame,
“and through your fault. I left the Duchess at your door----”
“When?”
“At a quarter to eight.”
“Good evening,” returned Montriveau, and he hurried home to ask the
porter whether he had seen a lady standing on the doorstep that evening.
“Yes, my Lord Marquis, a handsome woman, who seemed very much put out.
She was crying like a Magdalen, but she never made a sound, and stood
as upright as a post. Then at last she went, and my wife and I that were
watching her while she could not see us, heard her say, ‘Oh, God!’ so
that it went to our hearts, asking your pardon, to hear her say it.”
Montriveau, in spite of all his firmness, turned pale at those few
words. He wrote a few lines to Ronquerolles, sent off the message at
once, and went up to his rooms. Ronquerolles came just about midnight.
Armand gave him the Duchess’s letter to read.
“Well?” asked Ronquerolles.
“She was here at my door at eight o’clock; at a quarter-past eight she
had gone. I have lost her, and I love her. Oh! if my life were my own, I
could blow my brains out.”
“Pooh, pooh! Keep cool,” said Ronquerolles. “Duchesses do not fly off
like wagtails. She cannot travel faster than three leagues an hour, and
tomorrow we will ride six.--Confound it! Mme de Langeais is no ordinary
woman,” he continued. “Tomorrow we will all of us mount and ride.
The police will put us on her track during the day. She must have a
carriage; angels of that sort have no wings. We shall find her whether
she is on the road or hidden in Paris. There is the semaphore. We can
stop her. You shall be happy. But, my dear fellow, you have made a
blunder, of which men of your energy are very often guilty. They judge
others by themselves, and do not know the point when human nature gives
way if you strain the cords too tightly. Why did you not say a word
to me sooner? I would have told you to be punctual. Good-bye till
tomorrow,” he added, as Montriveau said nothing. “Sleep if you can,” he
added, with a grasp of the hand.
But the greatest resources which society has ever placed at the disposal
of statesmen, kings, ministers, bankers, or any human power, in fact,
were all exhausted in vain. Neither Montriveau nor his friends could
find any trace of the Duchess. It was clear that she had entered a
convent. Montriveau determined to search, or to institute a search, for
her through every convent in the world. He must have her, even at the
cost of all the lives in a town. And in justice to this extraordinary
man, it must be said that his frenzied passion awoke to the same
ardour daily and lasted through five years. Only in 1829 did the Duc de
Navarreins hear by chance that his daughter had travelled to Spain as
Lady Julia Hopwood’s maid, that she had left her service at Cadiz, and
that Lady Julia never discovered that Mlle Caroline was the illustrious
duchess whose sudden disappearance filled the minds of the highest
society of Paris.
The feelings of the two lovers when they met again on either side of the
grating in the Carmelite convent should now be comprehended to the full,
and the violence of the passion awakened in either soul will doubtless
explain the catastrophe of the story.
In 1823 the Duc de Langeais was dead, and his wife was free. Antoinette
de Navarreins was living, consumed by love, on a ledge of rock in
the Mediterranean; but it was in the Pope’s power to dissolve Sister
Theresa’s vows. The happiness bought by so much love might yet bloom
for the two lovers. These thoughts sent Montriveau flying from Cadiz to
Marseilles, and from Marseilles to Paris.
A few months after his return to France, a merchant brig, fitted out and
munitioned for active service, set sail from the port of Marseilles for
Spain. The vessel had been chartered by several distinguished men, most
of them Frenchmen, who, smitten with a romantic passion for the East,
wished to make a journey to those lands. Montriveau’s familiar knowledge
of Eastern customs made him an invaluable travelling companion, and at
the entreaty of the rest he had joined the expedition; the Minister
of War appointed him lieutenant-general, and put him on the Artillery
Commission to facilitate his departure.
Twenty-fours hours later the brig lay to off the north-west shore of an
island within sight of the Spanish coast. She had been specially chosen
for her shallow keel and light mastage, so that she might lie at anchor
in safety half a league away from the reefs that secure the island from
approach in this direction. If fishing vessels or the people on the
island caught sight of the brig, they were scarcely likely to feel
suspicious of her at once; and besides, it was easy to give a reason for
her presence without delay. Montriveau hoisted the flag of the United
States before they came in sight of the island, and the crew of the
vessel were all American sailors, who spoke nothing but English. One
of M. de Montriveau’s companions took the men ashore in the ship’s
longboat, and made them so drunk at an inn in the little town that
they could not talk. Then he gave out that the brig was manned by
treasure-seekers, a gang of men whose hobby was well known in the United
States; indeed, some Spanish writer had written a history of them. The
presence of the brig among the reefs was now sufficiently explained.
The owners of the vessel, according to the self-styled boatswain’s mate,
were looking for the wreck of a galleon which foundered thereabouts in
1778 with a cargo of treasure from Mexico. The people at the inn and the
authorities asked no more questions.
Armand, and the devoted friends who were helping him in his difficult
enterprise, were all from the first of the opinion that there was no
hope of rescuing or carrying off Sister Theresa by force or stratagem
from the side of the little town. Wherefore these bold spirits, with one
accord, determined to take the bull by the horns. They would make a way
to the convent at the most seemingly inaccessible point; like General
Lamarque, at the storming of Capri, they would conquer Nature. The cliff
at the end of the island, a sheer block of granite, afforded even less
hold than the rock of Capri. So it seemed at least to Montriveau, who
had taken part in that incredible exploit, while the nuns in his eyes
were much more redoubtable than Sir Hudson Lowe. To raise a hubbub over
carrying off the Duchess would cover them with confusion. They might as
well set siege to the town and convent, like pirates, and leave not a
single soul to tell of their victory. So for them their expedition wore
but two aspects. There should be a conflagration and a feat of arms
that should dismay all Europe, while the motives of the crime remained
unknown; or, on the other hand, a mysterious, aerial descent which
should persuade the nuns that the Devil himself had paid them a visit.
They had decided upon the latter course in the secret council held
before they left Paris, and subsequently everything had been done to
insure the success of an expedition which promised some real excitement
to jaded spirits weary of Paris and its pleasures.
An extremely light pirogue, made at Marseilles on a Malayan model,
enabled them to cross the reef, until the rocks rose from out of the
water. Then two cables of iron wire were fastened several feet apart
between one rock and another. These wire ropes slanted upwards and
downwards in opposite directions, so that baskets of iron wire could
travel to and fro along them; and in this manner the rocks were covered
with a system of baskets and wire-cables, not unlike the filaments
which a certain species of spider weaves about a tree. The Chinese, an
essentially imitative people, were the first to take a lesson from the
work of instinct. Fragile as these bridges were, they were always ready
for use; high waves and the caprices of the sea could not throw them
out of working order; the ropes hung just sufficiently slack, so as to
present to the breakers that particular curve discovered by Cachin, the
immortal creator of the harbour at Cherbourg. Against this cunningly
devised line the angry surge is powerless; the law of that curve was
a secret wrested from Nature by that faculty of observation in which
nearly all human genius consists.
M. de Montriveau’s companions were alone on board the vessel, and out of
sight of every human eye. No one from the deck of a passing vessel could
have discovered either the brig hidden among the reefs, or the men at
work among the rocks; they lay below the ordinary range of the most
powerful telescope. Eleven days were spent in preparation, before the
Thirteen, with all their infernal power, could reach the foot of the
cliffs. The body of the rock rose up straight from the sea to a height
of thirty fathoms. Any attempt to climb the sheer wall of granite seemed
impossible; a mouse might as well try to creep up the slippery sides of
a plain china vase. Still there was a cleft, a straight line of fissure
so fortunately placed that large blocks of wood could be wedged firmly
into it at a distance of about a foot apart. Into these blocks the
daring workers drove iron cramps, specially made for the purpose, with
a broad iron bracket at the outer end, through which a hole had been
drilled. Each bracket carried a light deal board which corresponded with
a notch made in a pole that reached to the top of the cliffs, and was
firmly planted in the beach at their feet. With ingenuity worthy of
these men who found nothing impossible, one of their number, a skilled
mathematician, had calculated the angle from which the steps must start;
so that from the middle they rose gradually, like the sticks of a fan,
to the top of the cliff, and descended in the same fashion to its
base. That miraculously light, yet perfectly firm, staircase cost them
twenty-two days of toil. A little tinder and the surf of the sea would
destroy all trace of it forever in a single night. A betrayal of the
secret was impossible; and all search for the violators of the convent
was doomed to failure.
At the top of the rock there was a platform with sheer precipice on all
sides. The Thirteen, reconnoitring the ground with their glasses from
the masthead, made certain that though the ascent was steep and rough,
there would be no difficulty in gaining the convent garden, where the
trees were thick enough for a hiding-place. After such great efforts
they would not risk the success of their enterprise, and were compelled
to wait till the moon passed out of her last quarter.
For two nights Montriveau, wrapped in his cloak, lay out on the rock
platform. The singing at vespers and matins filled him with unutterable
joy. He stood under the wall to hear the music of the organ, listening
intently for one voice among the rest. But in spite of the silence, the
confused effect of music was all that reached his ears. In those sweet
harmonies defects of execution are lost; the pure spirit of art comes
into direct communication with the spirit of the hearer, making
no demand on the attention, no strain on the power of listening.
Intolerable memories awoke. All the love within him seemed to break into
blossom again at the breath of that music; he tried to find auguries of
happiness in the air. During the last night he sat with his eyes fixed
upon an ungrated window, for bars were not needed on the side of the
precipice. A light shone there all through the hours; and that instinct
of the heart, which is sometimes true, and as often false, cried within
him, “She is there!”
“She is certainly there! Tomorrow she will be mine,” he said to himself,
and joy blended with the slow tinkling of a bell that began to ring.
Strange unaccountable workings of the heart! The nun, wasted by yearning
love, worn out with tears and fasting, prayer and vigils; the woman of
nine-and-twenty, who had passed through heavy trials, was loved more
passionately than the lighthearted girl, the woman of four-and-twenty,
the sylphide, had ever been. But is there not, for men of vigorous
character, something attractive in the sublime expression engraven on
women’s faces by the impetuous stirrings of thought and misfortunes of
no ignoble kind? Is there not a beauty of suffering which is the most
interesting of all beauty to those men who feel that within them there
is an inexhaustible wealth of tenderness and consoling pity for a
creature so gracious in weakness, so strong with love? It is the
ordinary nature that is attracted by young, smooth, pink-and-white
beauty, or, in one word, by prettiness. In some faces love awakens
amid the wrinkles carved by sorrow and the ruin made by melancholy;
Montriveau could not but feel drawn to these. For cannot a lover,
with the voice of a great longing, call forth a wholly new creature? a
creature athrob with the life but just begun breaks forth for him alone,
from the outward form that is fair for him, and faded for all the world
besides. Does he not love two women?--One of them, as others see her,
is pale and wan and sad; but the other, the unseen love that his heart
knows, is an angel who understands life through feeling, and is adorned
in all her glory only for love’s high festivals.
The General left his post before sunrise, but not before he had heard
voices singing together, sweet voices full of tenderness sounding
faintly from the cell. When he came down to the foot of the cliffs where
his friends were waiting, he told them that never in his life had
he felt such enthralling bliss, and in the few words there was that
unmistakable thrill of repressed strong feeling, that magnificent
utterance which all men respect.
That night eleven of his devoted comrades made the ascent in the
darkness. Each man carried a poniard, a provision of chocolate, and
a set of house-breaking tools. They climbed the outer walls with
scaling-ladders, and crossed the cemetery of the convent. Montriveau
recognised the long, vaulted gallery through which he went to the
parlour, and remembered the windows of the room. His plans were made and
adopted in a moment. They would effect an entrance through one of the
windows in the Carmelite’s half of the parlour, find their way along
the corridors, ascertain whether the sister’s names were written on the
doors, find Sister Theresa’s cell, surprise her as she slept, and carry
her off, bound and gagged. The programme presented no difficulties to
men who combined boldness and a convict’s dexterity with the knowledge
peculiar to men of the world, especially as they would not scruple to
give a stab to ensure silence.
In two hours the bars were sawn through. Three men stood on guard
outside, and two inside the parlour. The rest, barefooted, took up their
posts along the corridor. Young Henri de Marsay, the most dexterous
man among them, disguised by way of precaution in a Carmelite’s robe,
exactly like the costume of the convent, led the way, and Montriveau
came immediately behind him. The clock struck three just as the two men
reached the dormitory cells. They soon saw the position. Everything was
perfectly quiet. With the help of a dark lantern they read the names
luckily written on every door, together with the picture of a saint or
saints and the mystical words which every nun takes as a kind of
motto for the beginning of her new life and the revelation of her
last thought. Montriveau reached Sister Theresa’s door and read the
inscription, _Sub invocatione sanctae matris Theresae_, and her motto,
_Adoremus in aeternum_. Suddenly his companion laid a hand on his
shoulder. A bright light was streaming through the chinks of the door.
M. de Ronquerolles came up at that moment.
“All the nuns are in the church,” he said; “they are beginning the
Office for the Dead.”
“I will stay here,” said Montriveau. “Go back into the parlour, and shut
the door at the end of the passage.”
He threw open the door and rushed in, preceded by his disguised
companion, who let down the veil over his face.
There before them lay the dead Duchess; her plank bed had been laid on
the floor of the outer room of her cell, between two lighted candles.
Neither Montriveau nor de Marsay spoke a word or uttered a cry; but they
looked into each other’s faces. The General’s dumb gesture tried to say,
“Let us carry her away!”
“Quickly” shouted Ronquerolles, “the procession of nuns is leaving the
church. You will be caught!”
With magical swiftness of movement, prompted by an intense desire, the
dead woman was carried into the convent parlour, passed through the
window, and lowered from the walls before the Abbess, followed by the
nuns, returned to take up Sister Theresa’s body. The sister left in
charge had imprudently left her post; there were secrets that she longed
to know; and so busy was she ransacking the inner room, that she heard
nothing, and was horrified when she came back to find that the body was
gone. Before the women, in their blank amazement, could think of making
a search, the Duchess had been lowered by a cord to the foot of the
crags, and Montriveau’s companions had destroyed all traces of their
work. By nine o’clock that morning there was not a sign to show that
either staircase or wire-cables had ever existed, and Sister Theresa’s
body had been taken on board. The brig came into the port to ship her
crew, and sailed that day.
Montriveau, down in the cabin, was left alone with Antoinette
de Navarreins. For some hours it seemed as if her dead face was
transfigured for him by that unearthly beauty which the calm of death
gives to the body before it perishes.
“Look here,” said Ronquerolles when Montriveau reappeared on deck,
“_that_ was a woman once, now it is nothing. Let us tie a cannon ball
to both feet and throw the body overboard; and if ever you think of her
again, think of her as of some book that you read as a boy.”
“Yes,” assented Montriveau, “it is nothing now but a dream.”
“That is sensible of you. Now, after this, have passions; but as for
love, a man ought to know how to place it wisely; it is only a woman’s
last love that can satisfy a man’s first love.”
ADDENDUM
Note: The Duchesse de Langeais is the second part of a trilogy.
Part one is entitled Ferragus and part three is The Girl with
the Golden Eyes. In other addendum references all three stories
are usually combined under the title The Thirteen.
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Blamont-Chauvry, Princesse de
Madame Firmiani
The Lily of the Valley
Grandlieu, Duc Ferdinand de
The Gondreville Mystery
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Modeste Mignon
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Granville, Comtesse Angelique de
A Second Home
A Daughter of Eve
Keller, Madame Francois
Domestic Peace
The Member for Arcis
Langeais, Duc de
An Episode under the Terror
Langeais, Duchesse Antoinette de
Father Goriot
Ferragus
Marsay, Henri de
Ferragus
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The Unconscious Humorists
Another Study of Woman
The Lily of the Valley
Father Goriot
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet
A Marriage Settlement
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
The Ball at Sceaux
Modeste Mignon
The Secrets of a Princess
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Montriveau, General Marquis Armand de
Father Goriot
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Another Study of Woman
Pierrette
The Member for Arcis
Navarreins, Duc de
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Colonel Chabert
The Muse of the Department
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Peasantry
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Country Parson
The Magic Skin
The Gondreville Mystery
The Secrets of a Princess
Cousin Betty
Pamiers, Vidame de
Ferragus
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ronquerolles, Marquis de
The Imaginary Mistress
The Peasantry
Ursule Mirouet
A Woman of Thirty
Another Study of Woman
Ferragus
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The Member for Arcis
Serizy, Comtesse de
A Start in Life
Ferragus
Ursule Mirouet
A Woman of Thirty
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Another Study of Woman
The Imaginary Mistress
Soulanges, Comtesse Hortense de
Domestic Peace
The Peasantry
Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice de
The Chouans
The Gondreville Mystery
Letters of Two Brides
Gaudissart II
III. THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES
Translated by Ellen Marriage
DEDICATION
To Eugene Delacroix, Painter
One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is,
surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace--a people fearful
to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual
turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop
of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to
be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces
give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with
which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of
weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of
hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of
a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few
observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its
cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages--youth and decay: youth,
wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at
this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection,
experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that
vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even
extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A
few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal
hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been
called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire,
everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights
up again, with shooting sparks, and is consumed. In no other country has
life ever been more ardent or acute. The social nature, even in fusion,
seems to say after each completed work: “Pass on to another!” just as
Nature says herself. Like Nature herself, this social nature is busied
with insects and flowers of a day--ephemeral trifles; and so, too,
it throws up fire and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before
analyzing the causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of
this intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed
out which bleaches and discolors, tints with blue or brown individuals
in more or less degree.
By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being
interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction
has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon which
all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect, the Parisian, with
his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth,
lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at everything,
consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets,
desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with
indifference--his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze
or glass--as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune. In
Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current
compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed: there love is
a desire, and hatred a whim; there’s no true kinsman but the
thousand-franc note, no better friend than the pawnbroker. This
universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the
street, there is no one _de trop_, there is no one absolutely useful,
or absolutely harmful--knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There
everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and
the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never
be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country
without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however,
every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold
and pleasure. Take those two words for a lantern, and explore that great
stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters, and follow the windings
of that thought which agitates, sustains, and occupies it! Consider!
And, in the first place, examine the world which possesses nothing.
The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue,
his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live--well, this very man,
who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his
strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child, and ties
him to the wheel. The manufacturer--or I know not what secondary thread
which sets in motion all these folk who with their foul hands mould
and gild porcelain, sew coats and dresses, beat out iron, turn wood and
steel, weave hemp, festoon crystal, imitate flowers, work woolen things,
break in horses, dress harness, carve in copper, paint carriages, blow
glass, corrode the diamond, polish metals, turn marble into leaves,
labor on pebbles, deck out thought, tinge, bleach, or blacken
everything--well, this middleman has come to that world of sweat and
good-will, of study and patience, with promises of lavish wages, either
in the name of the town’s caprices or with the voice of the monster
dubbed speculation. Thus, these _quadrumanes_ set themselves to watch,
work, and suffer, to fast, sweat, and bestir them. Then, careless of the
future, greedy of pleasure, counting on their right arm as the painter
on his palette, lords for one day, they throw their money on Mondays
to the _cabarets_ which gird the town like a belt of mud, haunts of the
most shameless of the daughters of Venus, in which the periodical money
of this people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at
work, is squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there
is no repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up to
actions which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a
thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,
are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with
intoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, but it
steals to-morrow’s bread, the week’s soup, the wife’s dress, the child’s
wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for all creatures
have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhood beneath the
yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and
have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with his hideousness and
his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideous nation--sublime
in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season, and once in a
century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripe with brandy for
the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine, to take fire at
a captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold and Pleasure! If
we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an alms, for
lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of
Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well or ill earned,
this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Were it not for
the _cabarets_, would not the Government be overturned every Tuesday?
Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off its pleasure, is
penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread, stimulated by a need
of material procreation, which has become a habit to it. None the
less, this people has its phenomenal virtues, its complete men, unknown
Napoleons, who are the type of its strength carried to its highest
expression, and sum up its social capacity in an existence wherein
thought and movement combine less to bring joy into it than to
neutralize the action of sorrow.
Chance has made an artisan economical, chance has favored him with
forethought, he has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and
found himself a father, and, after some years of hard privation, he
embarks in some little draper’s business, hires a shop. If neither
sickness nor vice blocks his way--if he has prospered--there is the
sketch of this normal life.
And, in the first place, hail to that king of Parisian activity, to whom
time and space give way. Yes, hail to that being, composed of saltpetre
and gas, who makes children for France during his laborious nights,
and in the day multiplies his personality for the service, glory,
and pleasure of his fellow-citizens. This man solves the problem
of sufficing at once to his amiable wife, to his hearth, to the
_Constitutionnel_, to his office, to the National Guard, to the opera,
and to God; but, only in order that the _Constitutionnel_, his office,
the National Guard, the opera, his wife, and God may be changed into
coin. In fine, hail to an irreproachable pluralist. Up every day at five
o’clock, he traverses like a bird the space which separates his dwelling
from the Rue Montmartre. Let it blow or thunder, rain or snow, he is at
the _Constitutionnel_, and waits there for the load of newspapers which
he has undertaken to distribute. He receives this political bread with
eagerness, takes it, bears it away. At nine o’clock he is in the bosom
of his family, flings a jest to his wife, snatches a loud kiss from her,
gulps down a cup of coffee, or scolds his children. At a quarter to ten
he puts in an appearance at the _Mairie_. There, stuck upon a stool,
like a parrot on its perch, warmed by Paris town, he registers until
four o’clock, with never a tear or a smile, the deaths and births of an
entire district. The sorrow, the happiness, of the parish flow beneath
his pen--as the essence of the _Constitutionnel_ traveled before upon
his shoulders. Nothing weighs upon him! He goes always straight before
him, takes his patriotism ready made from the newspaper, contradicts no
one, shouts or applauds with the world, and lives like a bird. Two yards
from his parish, in the event of an important ceremony, he can yield
his place to an assistant, and betake himself to chant a requiem from
a stall in the church of which on Sundays he is the fairest ornament,
where his is the most imposing voice, where he distorts his huge mouth
with energy to thunder out a joyous _Amen_. So is he chorister. At four
o’clock, freed from his official servitude, he reappears to shed joy and
gaiety upon the most famous shop in the city. Happy is his wife, he has
no time to be jealous: he is a man of action rather than of sentiment.
His mere arrival spurs the young ladies at the counter; their bright
eyes storm the customers; he expands in the midst of all the finery, the
lace and muslin kerchiefs, that their cunning hands have wrought. Or,
again, more often still, before his dinner he waits on a client, copies
the page of a newspaper, or carries to the doorkeeper some goods that
have been delayed. Every other day, at six, he is faithful to his
post. A permanent bass for the chorus, he betakes himself to the opera,
prepared to become a soldier or an arab, prisoner, savage, peasant,
spirit, camel’s leg or lion, a devil or a genie, a slave or a
eunuch, black or white; always ready to feign joy or sorrow, pity or
astonishment, to utter cries that never vary, to hold his tongue, to
hunt, or fight for Rome or Egypt, but always at heart--a huckster still.
At midnight he returns--a man, the good husband, the tender father;
he slips into the conjugal bed, his imagination still afire with the
illusive forms of the operatic nymphs, and so turns to the profit
of conjugal love the world’s depravities, the voluptuous curves of
Taglioni’s leg. And finally, if he sleeps, he sleeps apace, and hurries
through his slumber as he does his life.
This man sums up all things--history, literature, politics, government,
religion, military science. Is he not a living encyclopaedia, a
grotesque Atlas; ceaselessly in motion, like Paris itself, and knowing
not repose? He is all legs. No physiognomy could preserve its purity
amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at thirty, an old man, his
stomach tanned by repeated doses of brandy, will be held, according to
certain leisured philosophers, to be happier than the huckster is.
The one perishes in a breath, and the other by degrees. From his eight
industries, from the labor of his shoulders, his throat, his hands,
from his wife and his business, the one derives--as from so many
farms--children, some thousands of francs, and the most laborious
happiness that has ever diverted the heart of man. This fortune and
these children, or the children who sum up everything for him, become
the prey of the world above, to which he brings his ducats and his
daughter or his son, reared at college, who, with more education than
his father, raises higher his ambitious gaze. Often the son of a retail
tradesman would fain be something in the State.
Ambition of that sort carries on our thought to the second Parisian
sphere. Go up one story, then, and descend to the _entresol_: or climb
down from the attic and remain on the fourth floor; in fine, penetrate
into the world which has possessions: the same result! Wholesale
merchants, and their men--people with small banking accounts and much
integrity--rogues and catspaws, clerks old and young, sheriffs’ clerks,
barristers’ clerks, solicitors’ clerks; in fine, all the working,
thinking, and speculating members of that lower middle class which
honeycombs the interests of Paris and watches over its granary,
accumulates the coin, stores the products that the proletariat have
made, preserves the fruits of the South, the fishes, the wine from every
sun-favored hill; which stretches its hands over the Orient, and takes
from it the shawls that the Russ and the Turk despise; which harvests
even from the Indies; crouches down in expectation of a sale, greedy
of profit; which discounts bills, turns over and collects all kinds of
securities, holds all Paris in its hand, watches over the fantasies
of children, spies out the caprices and the vices of mature age,
sucks money out of disease. Even so, if they drink no brandy, like the
artisan, nor wallow in the mire of debauch, all equally abuse their
strength, immeasurably strain their bodies and their minds alike, are
burned away with desires, devastated with the swiftness of the pace. In
their case the physical distortion is accomplished beneath the whip of
interests, beneath the scourge of ambitions which torture the educated
portion of this monstrous city, just as in the case of the proletariat
it is brought about by the cruel see-saw of the material elaborations
perpetually required from the despotism of the aristocratic “_I will_.”
Here, too, then, in order to obey that universal master, pleasure or
gold, they must devour time, hasten time, find more than four-and-twenty
hours in the day and night, waste themselves, slay themselves, and
purchase two years of unhealthy repose with thirty years of old age.
Only, the working-man dies in hospital when the last term of his stunted
growth expires; whereas the man of the middle class is set upon living,
and lives on, but in a state of idiocy. You will meet him, with his
worn, flat old face, with no light in his eyes, with no strength in his
limbs, dragging himself with a dazed air along the boulevard--the belt
of his Venus, of his beloved city. What was his want? The sabre of the
National Guard, a permanent stock-pot, a decent plot in Pere Lachaise,
and, for his old age, a little gold honestly earned. _HIS_ Monday is on
Sunday, his rest a drive in a hired carriage--a country excursion during
which his wife and children glut themselves merrily with dust or bask
in the sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur’s, whose poisonous
dinner has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till
midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads
which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water;
but what would Rabelais’ Gargantua,--that misunderstood figure of
an audacity so sublime,--what would that giant say, fallen from the
celestial spheres, if he amused himself by contemplating the motions of
this secondary life of Paris, of which here is one of the formulae? Have
you seen one of those little constructions--cold in summer, and with
no other warmth than a small stove in winter--placed beneath the vast
copper dome which crowns the Halle-auble? Madame is there by morning.
She is engaged at the markets, and makes by this occupation twelve
thousand francs a year, people say. Monsieur, when Madame is up, passes
into a gloomy office, where he lends money till the week-end to the
tradesmen of his district. By nine o’clock he is at the passport office,
of which he is one of the minor officials. By evening he is at the
box-office of the Theatre Italien, or of any other theatre you like. The
children are put out to nurse, and only return to be sent to college or
to boarding-school. Monsieur and Madame live on the third floor, have
but one cook, give dances in a salon twelve foot by eight, lit by
argand lamps; but they give a hundred and fifty thousand francs to their
daughter, and retire at the age of fifty, an age when they begin to show
themselves on the balcony of the opera, in a _fiacre_ at Longchamps; or,
on sunny days, in faded clothes on the boulevards--the fruit of all this
sowing. Respected by their neighbors, in good odor with the government,
connected with the upper middle classes, Monsieur obtains at sixty-five
the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and his daughter’s father-in-law, a
parochial mayor, invites him to his evenings. These life-long labors,
then, are for the good of the children, whom these lower middle classes
are inevitably driven to exalt. Thus each sphere directs all its efforts
towards the sphere above it. The son of the rich grocer becomes a
notary, the son of the timber merchant becomes a magistrate. No link
is wanting in the chain, and everything stimulates the upward march of
money.
Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps,
will some day find its Dante. In this third social circle, a sort of
Parisian belly, in which the interests of the town are digested, and
where they are condensed into the form known as _business_, there moves
and agitates, as by some acrid and bitter intestinal process, the crowd
of lawyers, doctors, notaries, councillors, business men, bankers, big
merchants, speculators, and magistrates. Here are to be found even
more causes of moral and physical destruction than elsewhere. These
people--almost all of them--live in unhealthy offices, in fetid
ante-chambers, in little barred dens, and spend their days bowed down
beneath the weight of affairs; they rise at dawn to be in time, not to
be left behind, to gain all or not to lose, to overreach a man or his
money, to open or wind up some business, to take advantage of some
fleeting opportunity, to get a man hanged or set him free. They infect
their horses, they overdrive and age and break them, like their own
legs, before their time. Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes
them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short. What soul can remain
great, pure, moral, and generous, and, consequently, what face retain
its beauty in this depraving practice of a calling which compels one to
bear the weight of the public sorrows, to analyze them, to weigh them,
estimate them, and mark them out by rule? Where do these folk put aside
their hearts?... I do not know; but they leave them somewhere or other,
when they have any, before they descend each morning into the abyss of
the misery which puts families on the rack. For them there is no such
thing as mystery; they see the reverse side of society, whose confessors
they are, and despise it. Then, whatever they do, owing to their contact
with corruption, they either are horrified at it and grow gloomy, or
else, out of lassitude, or some secret compromise, espouse it. In fine,
they necessarily become callous to every sentiment, since man, his laws
and his institutions, make them steal, like jackals, from corpses that
are still warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living,
the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be
speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases
for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx. Neither the great
merchant, nor the judge, nor the pleader preserves his sense of right;
they feel no more, they apply set rules that leave cases out of count.
Borne along by their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor
fathers nor lovers; they glide on sledges over the facts of life, and
live at all times at the high pressure conduced by business and the vast
city. When they return to their homes they are required to go to a ball,
to the opera, into society, where they can make clients, acquaintances,
protectors. They all eat to excess, play and keep vigil, and their faces
become bloated, flushed, and emaciated.
To this terrific expenditure of intellectual strength, to such multifold
moral contradictions, they oppose--not, indeed pleasure, it would be too
pale a contrast--but debauchery, a debauchery both secret and alarming,
for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the morality of
society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They
know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside
it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are
crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in
reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments.
Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices,
to do away with the need of having opinions, just as they adapt their
conscience to the standard of the Code or the Tribunal of Commerce.
Having started early to become men of note, they turn into mediocrities,
and crawl over the high places of the world. So, too, their faces
present the harsh pallor, the deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished
eyes, and garrulous, sensual mouths, in which the observer recognizes
the symptoms of the degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the
circle of a special idea which destroys the creative faculties of the
brain and the gift of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. No
man who has allowed himself to be caught in the revolutions of the gear
of these huge machines can ever become great. If he is a doctor, either
he has practised little or he is an exception--a Bichat who dies young.
If a great merchant, something remains--he is almost Jacques Coeur. Did
Robespierre practise? Danton was an idler who waited. But who, moreover
has ever felt envious of the figures of Danton and Robespierre, however
lofty they were? These men of affairs, _par excellence_, attract money
to them, and hoard it in order to ally themselves with aristocratic
families. If the ambition of the working-man is that of the small
tradesman, here, too, are the same passions. The type of this class
might be either an ambitious bourgeois, who, after a life of privation
and continual scheming, passes into the Council of State as an ant
passes through a chink; or some newspaper editor, jaded with intrigue,
whom the king makes a peer of France--perhaps to revenge himself on the
nobility; or some notary become mayor of his parish: all people crushed
with business, who, if they attain their end, are literally _killed_ in
its attainment. In France the usage is to glorify wigs. Napoleon, Louis
XVI., the great rulers, alone have always wished for young men to fulfil
their projects.
Above this sphere the artist world exists. But here, too, the faces
stamped with the seal of originality are worn, nobly indeed, but worn,
fatigued, nervous. Harassed by a need of production, outrun by their
costly fantasies, worn out by devouring genius, hungry for pleasure, the
artists of Paris would all regain by excessive labor what they have lost
by idleness, and vainly seek to reconcile the world and glory, money
and art. To begin with, the artist is ceaselessly panting under his
creditors; his necessities beget his debts, and his debts require of
him his nights. After his labor, his pleasure. The comedian plays till
midnight, studies in the morning, rehearses at noon; the sculptor is
bent before his statue; the journalist is a marching thought, like the
soldier when at war; the painter who is the fashion is crushed with
work, the painter with no occupation, if he feels himself to be a man of
genius, gnaws his entrails. Competition, rivalry, calumny assail talent.
Some, in desperation, plunge into the abyss of vice, others die young
and unknown because they have discounted their future too soon. Few of
these figures, originally sublime, remain beautiful. On the other hand,
the flagrant beauty of their heads is not understood. An artist’s face
is always exorbitant, it is always above or below the conventional lines
of what fools call the _beau-ideal_. What power is it that destroys
them? Passion. Every passion in Paris resolves into two terms: gold and
pleasure. Now, do you not breathe again? Do you not feel air and space
purified? Here is neither labor nor suffering. The soaring arch of
gold has reached the summit. From the lowest gutters, where its
stream commences, from the little shops where it is stopped by puny
coffer-dams, from the heart of the counting-houses and great workshops,
where its volume is that of ingots--gold, in the shape of dowries and
inheritances, guided by the hands of young girls or the bony fingers of
age, courses towards the aristocracy, where it will become a blazing,
expansive stream. But, before leaving the four territories upon which
the utmost wealth of Paris is based, it is fitting, having cited the
moral causes, to deduce those which are physical, and to call attention
to a pestilence, latent, as it were, which incessantly acts upon the
faces of the porter, the artisan, the small shopkeeper; to point out
a deleterious influence the corruption of which equals that of the
Parisian administrators who allow it so complacently to exist!
If the air of the houses in which the greater proportion of the middle
classes live is noxious, if the atmosphere of the streets belches out
cruel miasmas into stuffy back-kitchens where there is little air,
realize that, apart from this pestilence, the forty thousand houses of
this great city have their foundations in filth, which the powers that
be have not yet seriously attempted to enclose with mortar walls solid
enough to prevent even the most fetid mud from filtering through the
soil, poisoning the wells, and maintaining subterraneously to Lutetia
the tradition of her celebrated name. Half of Paris sleeps amidst the
putrid exhalations of courts and streets and sewers. But let us turn
to the vast saloons, gilded and airy; the hotels in their gardens,
the rich, indolent, happy moneyed world. There the faces are lined and
scarred with vanity. There nothing is real. To seek for pleasure is it
not to find _ennui_? People in society have at an early age warped their
nature. Having no occupation other than to wallow in pleasure, they
have speedily misused their sense, as the artisan has misused brandy.
Pleasure is of the nature of certain medical substances: in order to
obtain constantly the same effects the doses must be doubled, and death
or degradation is contained in the last. All the lower classes are on
their knees before the wealthy, and watch their tastes in order to turn
them into vices and exploit them. Thus you see in these folk at an early
age tastes instead of passions, romantic fantasies and lukewarm loves.
There impotence reigns; there ideas have ceased--they have evaporated
together with energy amongst the affectations of the boudoir and the
cajolements of women. There are fledglings of forty, old doctors
of sixty years. The wealthy obtain in Paris ready-made wit and
science--formulated opinions which save them the need of having wit,
science, or opinion of their own. The irrationality of this world is
equaled by its weakness and its licentiousness. It is greedy of time
to the point of wasting it. Seek in it for affection as little as
for ideas. Its kisses conceal a profound indifference, its urbanity
a perpetual contempt. It has no other fashion of love. Flashes of wit
without profundity, a wealth of indiscretion, scandal, and above all,
commonplace. Such is the sum of its speech; but these happy fortunates
pretend that they do not meet to make and repeat maxims in the manner of
La Rochefoucauld as though there did not exist a mean, invented by the
eighteenth century, between a superfluity and absolute blank. If a few
men of character indulge in witticism, at once subtle and refined, they
are misunderstood; soon, tired of giving without receiving, they remain
at home, and leave fools to reign over their territory. This hollow
life, this perpetual expectation of a pleasure which never comes, this
permanent _ennui_ and emptiness of soul, heart, and mind, the lassitude
of the upper Parisian world, is reproduced on its features, and stamps
its parchment faces, its premature wrinkles, that physiognomy of the
wealthy upon which impotence has set its grimace, in which gold is
mirrored, and whence intelligence has fled.
Such a view of moral Paris proves that physical Paris could not be other
than it is. This coroneted town is like a queen, who, being always
with child, has desires of irresistible fury. Paris is the crown of the
world, a brain which perishes of genius and leads human civilization;
it is a great man, a perpetually creative artist, a politician with
second-sight who must of necessity have wrinkles on his forehead, the
vices of a great man, the fantasies of the artist, and the politician’s
disillusions. Its physiognomy suggests the evolution of good and evil,
battle and victory; the moral combat of ‘89, the clarion calls of which
still re-echo in every corner of the world; and also the downfall of
1814. Thus this city can no more be moral, or cordial, or clean, than
the engines which impel those proud leviathans which you admire
when they cleave the waves! Is not Paris a sublime vessel laden with
intelligence? Yes, her arms are one of those oracles which fatality
sometimes allows. The _City of Paris_ has her great mast, all of bronze,
carved with victories, and for watchman--Napoleon. The barque may roll
and pitch, but she cleaves the world, illuminates it through the hundred
mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the seas of science, rides with
full sail, cries from the height of her tops, with the voice of her
scientists and artists: “Onward, advance! Follow me!” She carries a
huge crew, which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers. Boys
and urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy _bourgeoisie_;
working-men and sailor-men touched with tar; in her cabins the lucky
passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the
bulwarks; then, on the deck, her soldiers, innovators or ambitious,
would accost every fresh shore, and shooting out their bright lights
upon it, ask for glory which is pleasure, or for love which needs gold.
Thus the exorbitant movement of the proletariat, the corrupting
influence of the interests which consume the two middle classes, the
cruelties of the artist’s thought, and the excessive pleasure which is
sought for incessantly by the great, explain the normal ugliness of
the Parisian physiognomy. It is only in the Orient that the human race
presents a magnificent figure, but that is an effect of the constant
calm affected by those profound philosophers with their long pipes,
their short legs, their square contour, who despise and hold activity
in horror, whilst in Paris the little and the great and the mediocre run
and leap and drive, whipped on by an inexorable goddess, Necessity--the
necessity for money, glory, and amusement. Thus, any face which is fresh
and graceful and reposeful, any really young face, is in Paris the most
extraordinary of exceptions; it is met with rarely. Should you see one
there, be sure it belongs either to a young and ardent ecclesiastic or
to some good abbe of forty with three chins; to a young girl of pure
life such as is brought up in certain middle-class families; to a mother
of twenty, still full of illusions, as she suckles her first-born; to a
young man newly embarked from the provinces, and intrusted to the care
of some devout dowager who keeps him without a sou; or, perhaps, to some
shop assistant who goes to bed at midnight wearied out with folding
and unfolding calico, and rises at seven o’clock to arrange the window;
often again to some man of science or poetry, who lives monastically in
the embrace of a fine idea, who remains sober, patient, and chaste;
else to some self-contented fool, feeding himself on folly, reeking of
health, in a perpetual state of absorption with his own smile; or to the
soft and happy race of loungers, the only folk really happy in Paris,
which unfolds for them hour by hour its moving poetry.
Nevertheless, there is in Paris a proportion of privileged beings to
whom this excessive movement of industries, interests, affairs, arts,
and gold is profitable. These beings are women. Although they also have
a thousand secret causes which, here more than elsewhere, destroy their
physiognomy, there are to be found in the feminine world little happy
colonies, who live in Oriental fashion and can preserve their beauty;
but these women rarely show themselves on foot in the streets, they lie
hid like rare plants who only unfold their petals at certain hours, and
constitute veritable exotic exceptions. However, Paris is essentially
the country of contrasts. If true sentiments are rare there, there also
are to be found, as elsewhere, noble friendships and unlimited devotion.
On this battlefield of interests and passions, just as in the midst
of those marching societies where egoism triumphs, where every one
is obliged to defend himself, and which we call _armies_, it seems as
though sentiments liked to be complete when they showed themselves,
and are sublime by juxtaposition. So it is with faces. In Paris one
sometimes sees in the aristocracy, set like stars, the ravishing faces
of young people, the fruit of quite exceptional manners and education.
To the youthful beauty of the English stock they unite the firmness
of Southern traits. The fire of their eyes, a delicious bloom on their
lips, the lustrous black of their soft locks, a white complexion, a
distinguished caste of features, render them the flowers of the human
race, magnificent to behold against the mass of other faces, worn, old,
wrinkled, and grimacing. So women, too, admire such young people with
that eager pleasure which men take in watching a pretty girl, elegant,
gracious, and embellished with all the virginal charms with which our
imagination pleases to adorn the perfect woman. If this hurried glance
at the population of Paris has enabled us to conceive the rarity of a
Raphaelesque face, and the passionate admiration which such an one must
inspire at the first sight, the prime interest of our history will have
been justified. _Quod erat demonstrandum_--if one may be permitted to
apply scholastic formulae to the science of manners.
Upon one of those fine spring mornings, when the leaves, although
unfolded, are not yet green, when the sun begins to gild the roofs, and
the sky is blue, when the population of Paris issues from its cells to
swarm along the boulevards, glides like a serpent of a thousand coils
through the Rue de la Paix towards the Tuileries, saluting the hymeneal
magnificence which the country puts on; on one of these joyous days,
then, a young man as beautiful as the day itself, dressed with taste,
easy of manner--to let out the secret he was a love-child, the natural
son of Lord Dudley and the famous Marquise de Vordac--was walking in the
great avenue of the Tuileries. This Adonis, by name Henri de Marsay,
was born in France, when Lord Dudley had just married the young lady,
already Henri’s mother, to an old gentleman called M. de Marsay. This
faded and almost extinguished butterfly recognized the child as his own
in consideration of the life interest in a fund of a hundred thousand
francs definitively assigned to his putative son; a generosity which
did not cost Lord Dudley too dear. French funds were worth at that time
seventeen francs, fifty centimes. The old gentleman died without having
ever known his wife. Madame de Marsay subsequently married the Marquis
de Vordac, but before becoming a marquise she showed very little anxiety
as to her son and Lord Dudley. To begin with, the declaration of war
between France and England had separated the two lovers, and fidelity
at all costs was not, and never will be, the fashion of Paris. Then the
successes of the woman, elegant, pretty, universally adored, crushed in
the Parisienne the maternal sentiment. Lord Dudley was no more troubled
about his offspring than was the mother,--the speedy infidelity of a
young girl he had ardently loved gave him, perhaps, a sort of aversion
for all that issued from her. Moreover, fathers can, perhaps, only love
the children with whom they are fully acquainted, a social belief of the
utmost importance for the peace of families, which should be held by all
the celibate, proving as it does that paternity is a sentiment nourished
artificially by woman, custom, and the law.
Poor Henri de Marsay knew no other father than that one of the two who
was not compelled to be one. The paternity of M. de Marsay was naturally
most incomplete. In the natural order, it is but for a few fleeting
instants that children have a father, and M. de Marsay imitated nature.
The worthy man would not have sold his name had he been free from
vices. Thus he squandered without remorse in gambling hells, and drank
elsewhere, the few dividends which the National Treasury paid to
its bondholders. Then he handed over the child to an aged sister, a
Demoiselle de Marsay, who took much care of him, and provided him, out
of the meagre sum allowed by her brother, with a tutor, an abbe without
a farthing, who took the measure of the youth’s future, and determined
to pay himself out of the hundred thousand livres for the care given to
his pupil, for whom he conceived an affection. As chance had it, this
tutor was a true priest, one of those ecclesiastics cut out to become
cardinals in France, or Borgias beneath the tiara. He taught the child
in three years what he might have learned at college in ten. Then the
great man, by name the Abbe de Maronis, completed the education of
his pupil by making him study civilization under all its aspects: he
nourished him on his experience, led him little into churches, which
at that time were closed; introduced him sometimes behind the scenes of
theatres, more often into the houses of courtesans; he exhibited human
emotions to him one by one; taught him politics in the drawing-rooms,
where they simmered at the time, explained to him the machinery of
government, and endeavored out of attraction towards a fine nature,
deserted, yet rich in promise, virilely to replace a mother: is not the
Church the mother of orphans? The pupil was responsive to so much care.
The worthy priest died in 1812, a bishop, with the satisfaction of
having left in this world a child whose heart and mind were so well
moulded that he could outwit a man of forty. Who would have expected to
have found a heart of bronze, a brain of steel, beneath external traits
as seductive as ever the old painters, those naive artists, had given to
the serpent in the terrestrial paradise? Nor was that all. In addition,
the good-natured prelate had procured for the child of his choice
certain acquaintances in the best Parisian society, which might equal
in value, in the young man’s hand, another hundred thousand invested
livres. In fine, this priest, vicious but politic, sceptical yet
learned, treacherous yet amiable, weak in appearance yet as vigorous
physically as intellectually, was so genuinely useful to his pupil, so
complacent to his vices, so fine a calculator of all kinds of strength,
so profound when it was needful to make some human reckoning, so
youthful at table, at Frascati, at--I know not where, that the grateful
Henri de Marsay was hardly moved at aught in 1814, except when he looked
at the portrait of his beloved bishop, the only personal possession
which the prelate had been able to bequeath him (admirable type of
the men whose genius will preserve the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman
Church, compromised for the moment by the feebleness of its recruits and
the decrepit age of its pontiffs; but if the church likes!).
The continental war prevented young De Marsay from knowing his real
father. It is doubtful whether he was aware of his name. A deserted
child, he was equally ignorant of Madame de Marsay. Naturally, he had
little regret for his putative father. As for Mademoiselle de Marsay,
his only mother, he built for her a handsome little monument in Pere
Lachaise when she died. Monseigneur de Maronis had guaranteed to this
old lady one of the best places in the skies, so that when he saw her
die happy, Henri gave her some egotistical tears; he began to weep on
his own account. Observing this grief, the abbe dried his pupil’s tears,
bidding him observe that the good woman took her snuff most offensively,
and was becoming so ugly and deaf and tedious that he ought to return
thanks for her death. The bishop had emancipated his pupil in 1811.
Then, when the mother of M. de Marsay remarried, the priest chose, in a
family council, one of those honest dullards, picked out by him through
the windows of his confessional, and charged him with the administration
of the fortune, the revenues of which he was willing to apply to the
needs of the community, but of which he wished to preserve the capital.
Towards the end of 1814, then, Henri de Marsay had no sentiment of
obligation in the world, and was as free as an unmated bird. Although he
had lived twenty-two years he appeared to be barely seventeen. As a rule
the most fastidious of his rivals considered him to be the prettiest
youth in Paris. From his father, Lord Dudley, he had derived a pair of
the most amorously deceiving blue eyes; from his mother the bushiest of
black hair, from both pure blood, the skin of a young girl, a gentle
and modest expression, a refined and aristocratic figure, and beautiful
hands. For a woman, to see him was to lose her head for him; do you
understand? to conceive one of those desires which eat the heart, which
are forgotten because of the impossibility of satisfying them, because
women in Paris are commonly without tenacity. Few of them say to
themselves, after the fashion of men, the “_Je Maintiendrai_,” of the
House of Orange.
Underneath this fresh young life, and in spite of the limpid springs in
his eyes, Henri had a lion’s courage, a monkey’s agility. He could cut a
ball in half at ten paces on the blade of a knife; he rode his horse
in a way that made you realize the fable of the Centaur; drove a
four-in-hand with grace; was as light as a cherub and quiet as a lamb,
but knew how to beat a townsman at the terrible game of _savate_ or
cudgels; moreover, he played the piano in a fashion which would have
enabled him to become an artist should he fall on calamity, and owned
a voice which would have been worth to Barbaja fifty thousand francs a
season. Alas, that all these fine qualities, these pretty faults, were
tarnished by one abominable vice: he believed neither in man nor woman,
God nor Devil. Capricious nature had commenced by endowing him, a priest
had completed the work.
To render this adventure comprehensible, it is necessary to add here
that Lord Dudley naturally found many women disposed to reproduce
samples of such a delicious pattern. His second masterpiece of this
kind was a young girl named Euphemie, born of a Spanish lady, reared in
Havana, and brought to Madrid with a young Creole woman of the Antilles,
and with all the ruinous tastes of the Colonies, but fortunately married
to an old and extremely rich Spanish noble, Don Hijos, Marquis de
San-Real, who, since the occupation of Spain by French troops, had taken
up his abode in Paris, and lived in the Rue St. Lazare. As much from
indifference as from any respect for the innocence of youth, Lord Dudley
was not in the habit of keeping his children informed of the relations
he created for them in all parts. That is a slightly inconvenient form
of civilization; it has so many advantages that we must overlook its
drawbacks in consideration of its benefits. Lord Dudley, to make no more
words of it, came to Paris in 1816 to take refuge from the pursuit of
English justice, which protects nothing Oriental except commerce. The
exiled lord, when he saw Henri, asked who that handsome young man might
be. Then, upon hearing the name, “Ah, it is my son.... What a pity!” he
said.
Such was the story of the young man who, about the middle of the month
of April, 1815, was walking indolently up the broad avenue of the
Tuileries, after the fashion of all those animals who, knowing their
strength, pass along in majesty and peace. Middle-class matrons turned
back naively to look at him again; other women, without turning round,
waited for him to pass again, and engraved him in their minds that they
might remember in due season that fragrant face, which would not have
disadorned the body of the fairest among themselves.
“What are you doing here on Sunday?” said the Marquis de Ronquerolles to
Henri, as he passed.
“There’s a fish in the net,” answered the young man.
This exchange of thoughts was accomplished by means of two significant
glances, without it appearing that either De Ronquerolles or De Marsay
had any knowledge of the other. The young man was taking note of the
passers-by with that promptitude of eye and ear which is peculiar to the
Parisian who seems, at first, to see and hear nothing, but who sees and
hears all.
At that moment a young man came up to him and took him familiarly by the
arm, saying to him: “How are you, my dear De Marsay?”
“Extremely well,” De Marsay answered, with that air of apparent
affection which amongst the young men of Paris proves nothing, either
for the present or the future.
In effect, the youth of Paris resemble the youth of no other town. They
may be divided into two classes: the young man who has something, and
the young man who has nothing; or the young man who thinks and he who
spends. But, be it well understood this applies only to those natives of
the soil who maintain in Paris the delicious course of the elegant life.
There exist, as well, plenty of other young men, but they are children
who are late in conceiving Parisian life, and who remain its dupes. They
do not speculate, they study; they _fag_, as the others say. Finally
there are to be found, besides, certain young people, rich or poor, who
embrace careers and follow them with a single heart; they are somewhat
like the Emile of Rousseau, of the flesh of citizens, and they never
appear in society. The diplomatic impolitely dub them fools. Be they
that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the
yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready
to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their
mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for
conduct and integrity. This sort of social _prizemen_ infests the
administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They
diminish and level down the country and constitute, in some manner, in
the body politic, a lymph which infects it and renders it flabby. These
honest folk call men of talent immoral or rogues. If such rogues require
to be paid for their services, at least their services are there;
whereas the other sort do harm and are respected by the mob; but,
happily for France, elegant youth stigmatizes them ceaselessly under the
name of louts.
At the first glance, then, it is natural to consider as very distinct
the two sorts of young men who lead the life of elegance, the amiable
corporation to which Henri de Marsay belonged. But the observer, who
goes beyond the superficial aspect of things, is soon convinced that
the difference is purely moral, and that nothing is so deceptive as this
pretty outside. Nevertheless, all alike take precedence over everybody
else; speak rightly or wrongly of things, of men, literature, and the
fine arts; have ever in their mouth the Pitt and Coburg of each year;
interrupt a conversation with a pun, turn into ridicule science and the
_savant_; despise all things which they do not know or which they fear;
set themselves above all by constituting themselves the supreme
judges of all. They would all hoax their fathers, and be ready to shed
crocodile tears upon their mothers’ breasts; but generally they believe
in nothing, blaspheme women, or play at modesty, and in reality are led
by some old woman or an evil courtesan. They are all equally eaten
to the bone with calculation, with depravity, with a brutal lust to
succeed, and if you plumbed for their hearts you would find in all a
stone. In their normal state they have the prettiest exterior, stake
their friendship at every turn, are captivating alike. The same badinage
dominates their ever-changing jargon; they seek for oddity in their
toilette, glory in repeating the stupidities of such and such actor who
is in fashion, and commence operations, it matters not with whom, with
contempt and impertinence, in order to have, as it were, the first move
in the game; but, woe betide him who does not know how to take a blow
on one cheek for the sake of rendering two. They resemble, in fine, that
pretty white spray which crests the stormy waves. They dress and dance,
dine and take their pleasure, on the day of Waterloo, in the time of
cholera or revolution. Finally, their expenses are all the same, but
here the contrast comes in. Of this fluctuating fortune, so agreeably
flung away, some possess the capital for which the others wait; they
have the same tailors, but the bills of the latter are still to pay.
Next, if the first, like sieves, take in ideas of all kinds without
retaining any, the latter compare them and assimilate all the good.
If the first believe they know something, know nothing and understand
everything, lend all to those who need nothing and offer nothing to
those who are in need; the latter study secretly others’ thoughts and
place out their money, like their follies, at big interest. The one
class have no more faithful impressions, because their soul, like
a mirror, worn from use, no longer reflects any image; the others
economize their senses and life, even while they seem, like the first,
to be flinging them away broadcast. The first, on the faith of a hope,
devote themselves without conviction to a system which has wind and tide
against it, but they leap upon another political craft when the first
goes adrift; the second take the measure of the future, sound it, and
see in political fidelity what the English see in commercial integrity,
an element of success. Where the young man of possessions makes a pun or
an epigram upon the restoration of the throne, he who has nothing makes
a public calculation or a secret reservation, and obtains everything by
giving a handshake to his friends. The one deny every faculty to others,
look upon all their ideas as new, as though the world had been made
yesterday, they have unlimited confidence in themselves, and no crueler
enemy than those same selves. But the others are armed with an incessant
distrust of men, whom they estimate at their value, and are sufficiently
profound to have one thought beyond their friends, whom they exploit;
then of evenings, when they lay their heads on their pillows, they weigh
men as a miser weighs his gold pieces. The one are vexed at an aimless
impertinence, and allow themselves to be ridiculed by the diplomatic,
who make them dance for them by pulling what is the main string of these
puppets--their vanity. Thus, a day comes when those who had nothing have
something, and those who had something have nothing. The latter look
at their comrades who have achieved positions as cunning fellows; their
hearts may be bad, but their heads are strong. “He is very strong!” is
the supreme praise accorded to those who have attained _quibuscumque
viis_, political rank, a woman, or a fortune. Amongst them are to be
found certain young men who play this _role_ by commencing with having
debts. Naturally, these are more dangerous than those who play it
without a farthing.
The young man who called himself a friend of Henri de Marsay was a
rattle-head who had come from the provinces, and whom the young men then
in fashion were teaching the art of running through an inheritance;
but he had one last leg to stand on in his province, in the shape of a
secure establishment. He was simply an heir who had passed without any
transition from his pittance of a hundred francs a month to the entire
paternal fortune, and who, if he had not wit enough to perceive that he
was laughed at, was sufficiently cautious to stop short at two-thirds
of his capital. He had learned at Paris, for a consideration of some
thousands of francs, the exact value of harness, the art of not being
too respectful to his gloves, learned to make skilful meditations upon
the right wages to give people, and to seek out what bargain was the
best to close with them. He set store on his capacity to speak in good
terms of his horses, of his Pyrenean hound; to tell by her dress, her
walk, her shoes, to what class a woman belonged; to study _ecarte_,
remember a few fashionable catchwords, and win by his sojourn in
Parisian society the necessary authority to import later into his
province a taste for tea and silver of an English fashion, and to obtain
the right of despising everything around him for the rest of his days.
De Marsay had admitted him to his society in order to make use of him in
the world, just as a bold speculator employs a confidential clerk. The
friendship, real or feigned, of De Marsay was a social position for Paul
de Manerville, who, on his side, thought himself astute in exploiting,
after his fashion, his intimate friend. He lived in the reflecting
lustre of his friend, walked constantly under his umbrella, wore his
boots, gilded himself with his rays. When he posed in Henri’s company or
walked at his side, he had the air of saying: “Don’t insult us, we are
real dogs.” He often permitted himself to remark fatuously: “If I were
to ask Henri for such and such a thing, he is a good enough friend of
mine to do it.” But he was careful never to ask anything of him. He
feared him, and his fear, although imperceptible, reacted upon the
others, and was of use to De Marsay.
“De Marsay is a man of a thousand,” said Paul. “Ah, you will see, he
will be what he likes. I should not be surprised to find him one of
these days Minister of Foreign Affairs. Nothing can withstand him.”
He made of De Marsay what Corporal Trim made of his cap, a perpetual
instance.
“Ask De Marsay and you will see!”
Or again:
“The other day we were hunting, De Marsay and I, He would not believe
me, but I jumped a hedge without moving on my horse!”
Or again:
“We were with some women, De Marsay and I, and upon my word of honor, I
was----” etc.
Thus Paul de Manerville could not be classed amongst the great,
illustrious, and powerful family of fools who succeed. He would one day
be a deputy. For the time he was not even a young man. His friend, De
Marsay, defined him thus: “You ask me what is Paul? Paul? Why, Paul de
Manerville!”
“I am surprised, my dear fellow,” he said to De Marsay, “to see you here
on a Sunday.”
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“Is it an intrigue?”
“An intrigue.”
“Bah!”
“I can mention it to you without compromising my passion. Besides,
a woman who comes to the Tuileries on Sundays is of no account,
aristocratically speaking.”
“Ah! ah!”
“Hold your tongue then, or I shall tell you nothing. Your laugh is too
loud, you will make people think that we have lunched too well. Last
Thursday, here on the Terrasse des Feuillants, I was walking along,
thinking of nothing at all, but when I got to the gate of the Rue de
Castiglione, by which I intended to leave, I came face to face with a
woman, or rather a young girl; who, if she did not throw herself at my
head, stopped short, less I think, from human respect, than from one of
those movements of profound surprise which affect the limbs, creep down
the length of the spine, and cease only in the sole of the feet, to nail
you to the ground. I have often produced effects of this nature, a sort
of animal magnetism which becomes enormously powerful when the
relations are reciprocally precise. But, my dear fellow, this was not
stupefaction, nor was she a common girl. Morally speaking, her face
seemed to say: ‘What, is it you, my ideal! The creation of my thoughts,
of my morning and evening dreams! What, are you there? Why this morning?
Why not yesterday? Take me, I am thine, _et cetera_!’ Good, I said to
myself, another one! Then I scrutinize her. Ah, my dear fellow, speaking
physically, my incognita is the most adorable feminine person whom I
ever met. She belongs to that feminine variety which the Romans call
_fulva, flava_--the woman of fire. And in chief, what struck me the
most, what I am still taken with, are her two yellow eyes, like a
tiger’s, a golden yellow that gleams, living gold, gold which thinks,
gold which loves, and is determined to take refuge in your pocket.”
“My dear fellow, we are full of her!” cried Paul. “She comes here
sometimes--_the girl with the golden eyes_! That is the name we have
given her. She is a young creature--not more than twenty-two, and I
have seen her here in the time of the Bourbons, but with a woman who was
worth a hundred thousand of her.”
“Silence, Paul! It is impossible for any woman to surpass this girl; she
is like the cat who rubs herself against your legs; a white girl with
ash-colored hair, delicate in appearance, but who must have downy
threads on the third phalanx of her fingers, and all along her cheeks
a white down whose line, luminous on fine days, begins at her ears and
loses itself on her neck.”
“Ah, the other, my dear De Marsay! She has black eyes which have never
wept, but which burn; black eyebrows which meet and give her an air of
hardness contradicted by the compact curve of her lips, on which the
kisses do not stay, lips burning and fresh; a Moorish color that warms a
man like the sun. But--upon my word of honor, she is like you!”
“You flatter her!”
“A firm figure, the tapering figure of a corvette built for speed, which
rushes down upon the merchant vessel with French impetuosity, which
grapples with her and sinks her at the same time.”
“After all, my dear fellow,” answered De Marsay, “what has that got
to do with me, since I have never seen her? Ever since I have studied
women, my incognita is the only one whose virginal bosom, whose
ardent and voluptuous forms, have realized for me the only woman of
my dreams--of my dreams! She is the original of that ravishing picture
called _La Femme Caressant sa Chimere_, the warmest, the most infernal
inspiration of the genius of antiquity; a holy poem prostituted by those
who have copied it for frescoes and mosiacs; for a heap of bourgeois
who see in this gem nothing more than a gew-gaw and hang it on their
watch-chains--whereas, it is the whole woman, an abyss of pleasure into
which one plunges and finds no end; whereas, it is the ideal woman, to
be seen sometimes in reality in Spain or Italy, almost never in France.
Well, I have again seen this girl of the gold eyes, this woman caressing
her chimera. I saw her on Friday. I had a presentiment that on the
following day she would be here at the same hour; I was not mistaken.
I have taken a pleasure in following her without being observed, in
studying her indolent walk, the walk of the woman without occupation,
but in the movements of which one devines all the pleasure that lies
asleep. Well, she turned back again, she saw me, once more she adored
me, once more trembled, shivered. It was then I noticed the genuine
Spanish duenna who looked after her, a hyena upon whom some jealous
man has put a dress, a she-devil well paid, no doubt, to guard this
delicious creature.... Ah, then the duenna made me deeper in love. I
grew curious. On Saturday, nobody. And here I am to-day waiting for
this girl whose chimera I am, asking nothing better than to pose as the
monster in the fresco.”
“There she is,” said Paul. “Every one is turning round to look at her.”
The unknown blushed, her eyes shone; she saw Henri, she shut them and
passed by.
“You say that she notices you?” cried Paul, facetiously.
The duenna looked fixedly and attentively at the two young men. When the
unknown and Henri passed each other again, the young girl touched him,
and with her hand pressed the hand of the young man. Then she turned her
head and smiled with passion, but the duenna led her away very quickly
to the gate of the Rue de Castiglione.
The two friends followed the young girl, admiring the magnificent grace
of the neck which met her head in a harmony of vigorous lines, and upon
which a few coils of hair were tightly wound. The girl with the golden
eyes had that well-knitted, arched, slender foot which presents so
many attractions to the dainty imagination. Moreover, she was shod with
elegance, and wore a short skirt. During her course she turned from
time to time to look at Henri, and appeared to follow the old woman
regretfully, seeming to be at once her mistress and her slave; she
could break her with blows, but could not dismiss her. All that was
perceptible. The two friends reached the gate. Two men in livery let
down the step of a tasteful _coupe_ emblazoned with armorial bearings.
The girl with the golden eyes was the first to enter it, took her seat
at the side where she could be best seen when the carriage turned,
put her hand on the door, and waved her handkerchief in the duennna’s
despite. In contempt of what might be said by the curious, her
handkerchief cried to Henri openly: “Follow me!”
“Have you ever seen a handkerchief better thrown?” said Henri to Paul de
Manerville.
Then, observing a fiacre on the point of departure, having just set down
a fare, he made a sign to the driver to wait.
“Follow that carriage, notice the house and the street where it
stops--you shall have ten francs.... Paul, adieu.”
The cab followed the _coupe_. The _coupe_ stopped in the Rue Saint
Lazare before one of the finest houses of the neighborhood.