longitudes of Paris; you will meet her between the 10th and 110th Arcade
of the Rue de Rivoli; along the line of the Boulevards from the equator
of the Passage des Panoramas, where the products of India flourish,
where the warmest creations of industry are displayed, to the Cape of
the Madeleine; in the least muddy districts of the citizen quarters,
between No. 30 and No. 130 of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. During
the winter, she haunts the terrace of the Feuillants, but not the
asphalt pavement that lies parallel. According to the weather, she may
be seen flying in the Avenue of the Champs-Élyseés, which is bounded on
the east by the Place Louis XV., on the west by the Avenue de Marigny,
to the south by the road, to the north by the gardens of the Faubourg
Saint-Honoré. Never is this pretty variety of woman to be seen in the
hyperborean regions of the Rue Saint-Denis, never in the Kamtschatka of
miry, narrow, commercial streets, never anywhere in bad weather.
These flowers of Paris, blooming only in Oriental weather, perfume the
highways; and after five o’clock fold up like morning-glory flowers.
The women you will see later, looking a little like them, are would-be
ladies; while the fair Unknown, your Beatrice of a day, is a ‘perfect
lady.’
“It is not very easy for a foreigner, my dear Count, to recognize the
differences by which the observer emeritus distinguishes them—women
are such consummate actresses; but they are glaring in the eyes of
Parisians: hooks ill fastened, strings showing loops of rusty-white
tape through a gaping slit in the back, rubbed shoe-leather, ironed
bonnet-strings, an over-full skirt, an over-tight waist. You will see
a certain effort in the intentional droop of the eyelid. There is
something conventional in the attitude.
“As to the bourgeoise, the citizen womankind, she cannot possibly be
mistaken for the spell cast over you by the Unknown. She is bustling,
and goes out in all weathers, trots about, comes, goes, gazes, does not
know whether she will or will not go into a shop. Where the lady knows
just what she wants and what she is doing, the townswoman is undecided,
tucks up her skirts to cross a gutter, dragging a child by the hand,
which compels her to look out for the vehicles; she is a mother in
public, and talks to her daughter; she carries money in her bag, and has
open-work stockings on her feet; in winter, she wears a boa over her
fur cloak; in summer, a shawl and a scarf; she is accomplished in the
redundancies of dress.
“You will meet the fair Unknown again at the Italiens, at the Opéra,
at a ball. She will then appear under such a different aspect that you
would think them two beings devoid of any analogy. The woman has emerged
from those mysterious garments like a butterfly from its silky cocoon.
She serves up, like some rare dainty, to your lavished eyes, the forms
which her bodice scarcely revealed in the morning. At the theatre she
never mounts higher than the second tier, excepting at the Italiens.
You can there watch at your leisure the studied deliberateness of her
movements. The enchanting deceiver plays off all the little political
artifices of her sex so naturally as to exclude all idea of art
or premeditation. If she has a royally beautiful hand, the most
perspicacious beholder will believe that it is absolutely necessary that
she should twist, or refix, or push aside the ringlet or curl she plays
with. If she has some dignity of profile, you will be persuaded that she
is giving irony or grace to what she says to her neighbor, sitting in
such a position as to produce the magical effect of the ‘lost profile,’
so dear to great painters, by which the cheek catches the high light,
the nose is shown in clear outline, the nostrils are transparently rosy,
the forehead squarely modeled, the eye has its spangle of fire, but
fixed on space, and the white roundness of the chin is accentuated by
a line of light. If she has a pretty foot, she will throw herself on
a sofa with the coquettish grace of a cat in the sunshine, her feet
outstretched without your feeling that her attitude is anything but the
most charming model ever given to a sculptor by lassitude.
“Only the perfect lady is quite at her ease in full dress; nothing
inconveniences her. You will never see her, like the woman of the
citizen class, pulling up a refractory shoulder-strap, or pushing down a
rebellious whalebone, or looking whether her tucker is doing its office
of faithful guardian to two treasures of dazzling whiteness, or glancing
in the mirrors to see if her head-dress is keeping its place. Her toilet
is always in harmony with her character; she had had time to study
herself, to learn what becomes her, for she has long known what does not
suit her. You will not find her as you go out; she vanishes before the
end of the play. If by chance she is to be seen, calm and stately, on
the stairs, she is experiencing some violent emotion; she has to bestow
a glance, to receive a promise. Perhaps she goes down so slowly on
purpose to gratify the vanity of a slave whom she sometimes obeys. If
your meeting takes place at a ball or an evening party, you will gather
the honey, natural or affected of her insinuating voice; her empty
words will enchant you, and she will know how to give them the value of
thought by her inimitable bearing.”
“To be such a woman, is it not necessary to be very clever?” asked the
Polish Count.
“It is necessary to have great taste,” replied the Princesse de
Cadignan.
“And in France taste is more than cleverness,” said the Russian.
“This woman’s cleverness is the triumph of a purely plastic art,”
Blondet went on. “You will not know what she said, but you will be
fascinated. She will toss her head, or gently shrug her white shoulders;
she will gild an insignificant speech with a charming pout and smile; or
throw a Voltairean epigram into an ‘Indeed!’ an ‘Ah!’ a ‘What then!’
A jerk of her head will be her most pertinent form of questioning; she
will give meaning to the movement by which she twirls a vinaigrette
hanging to her finger by a ring. She gets an artificial grandeur out
of superlative trivialities; she simply drops her hand impressively,
letting it fall over the arm of her chair as dewdrops hang on the cup of
a flower, and all is said—she has pronounced judgment beyond appeal, to
the apprehension of the most obtuse. She knows how to listen to you;
she gives you the opportunity of shining, and—I ask your modesty—those
moments are rare?”
The candid simplicity of the young Pole, to whom Blondet spoke, made all
the party shout with laughter.
“Now, you will not talk for half-an-hour with a bourgeoise without her
alluding to her husband in one way or another,” Blondet went on with
unperturbed gravity; “whereas, even if you know that your lady
is married, she will have the delicacy to conceal her husband so
effectually that it will need the enterprise of Christopher Columbus to
discover him. Often you will fail in the attempt single-handed. If you
have had no opportunity of inquiring, towards the end of the evening you
detect her gazing fixedly at a middle-aged man wearing a decoration, who
bows and goes out. She has ordered her carriage, and goes.
“You are not the rose, but you have been with the rose, and you go
to bed under the golden canopy of a delicious dream, which will last
perhaps after Sleep, with his heavy finger, has opened the ivory gates
of the temple of dreams.
“The lady, when she is at home, sees no one before four; she is shrewd
enough always to keep you waiting. In her house you will find everything
in good taste; her luxury is for hourly use, and duly renewed; you will
see nothing under glass shades, no rags of wrappings hanging about, and
looking like a pantry. You will find the staircase warmed. Flowers on
all sides will charm your sight—flowers, the only gift she accepts, and
those only from certain people, for nosegays live but a day; they give
pleasure, and must be replaced; to her they are, as in the East, a
symbol and a promise. The costly toys of fashion lie about, but not so
as to suggest a museum or a curiosity shop. You will find her sitting by
the fire in a low chair, from which she will not rise to greet you.
Her talk will not now be what it was at the ball; there she was our
creditor; in her own home she owes you the pleasure of her wit. These
are the shades of which the lady is a marvelous mistress. What she
likes in you is a man to swell her circle, an object for the cares
and attentions which such women are now happy to bestow. Therefore, to
attract you to her drawing-room, she will be bewitchingly charming. This
especially is where you feel how isolated women are nowadays, and
why they want a little world of their own, to which they may seem a
constellation. Conversation is impossible without generalities.”
“Yes,” said de Marsay, “you have truly hit the fault of our age.
The epigram—a volume in a word—no longer strikes, as it did in the
eighteenth century, at persons or at things, but at squalid events, and
it dies in a day.”
“Hence,” said Blondet, “the intelligence of the lady, if she has any,
consists in casting doubts on everything. Here lies the great difference
between two women; the townswoman is certainly virtuous; the lady
does not know yet whether she is, or whether she always will be; she
hesitates and struggles where the other refuses point-blank and falls
full length. This hesitancy in everything is one of the last graces left
to her by our horrible times. She rarely goes to church, but she will
talk to you of religion; and if you have the good taste to affect
Free-thought, she will try to convert you, for you will have opened
the way for the stereotyped phrases, the head-shaking and gestures
understood by all these women: ‘For shame! I thought you had too much
sense to attack religion. Society is tottering, and you deprive it
of its support. Why, religion at this moment means you and me; it is
property, and the future of our children! Ah! let us not be selfish!
Individualism is the disease of the age, and religion is the only
remedy; it unites families which your laws put asunder,’ and so forth.
Then she plunges into some neo-Christian speech sprinkled with political
notions which is neither Catholic nor Protestant—but moral? Oh! deuced
moral!—in which you may recognize a fag end of every material woven by
modern doctrines, at loggerheads together.”
The women could not help laughing at the airs by which Blondet
illustrated his satire.
“This explanation, dear Count Adam,” said Blondet, turning to the
Pole, “will have proved to you that the ‘perfect lady’ represents
the intellectual no less than the political muddle, just as she is
surrounded by the showy and not very lasting products of an industry
which is always aiming at destroying its work in order to replace it by
something else. When you leave her you say to yourself: She certainly
has superior ideas! And you believe it all the more because she will
have sounded your heart with a delicate touch, and have asked you your
secrets; she affects ignorance, to learn everything; there are some
things she never knows, not even when she knows them. You alone will
be uneasy, you will know nothing of the state of her heart. The
great ladies of old flaunted their love-affairs, with newspapers and
advertisements; in these days the lady has her little passion neatly
ruled like a sheet of music with its crotchets and quavers and minims,
its rests, its pauses, its sharps to sign the key. A mere weak women,
she is anxious not to compromise her love, or her husband, or the future
of her children. Name, position, and fortune are no longer flags so
respected as to protect all kinds of merchandise on board. The whole
aristocracy no longer advances in a body to screen the lady. She has
not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of lofty antagonism;
she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be crushed. Thus
she is apt at Jesuitical _mezzo termine_, she is a creature
of equivocal compromises, of guarded proprieties, of anonymous passions
steered between two reef-bound shores. She is as much afraid of her
servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a trial in the
divorce-court. This woman—so free at a ball, so attractive out
walking—is a slave at home; she is never independent but in perfect
privacy, or theoretically. She must preserve herself in her position as
a lady. This is her task.
“For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a meagre
allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the divine
accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a townswoman;
she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will not receive a
married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover still have anything
to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect lady may perhaps
give occasion to calumny, never to slander.”
“It is all so horribly true,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.
“And so,” said Blondet, “our ‘perfect lady’ lives between English
hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century—a
bastard system, symptomatic of an age in which nothing that grows up
is at all like the thing that has vanished, in which transition leads
nowhere, everything is a matter of degree; all the great figures shrink
into the background, and distinction is purely personal. I am fully
convinced that it is impossible for a woman, even if she were born
close to a throne, to acquire before the age of five-and-twenty the
encyclopaedic knowledge of trifles, the practice of manoeuvring, the
important small things, the musical tones and harmony of coloring, the
angelic bedevilments and innocent cunning, the speech and the silence,
the seriousness and the banter, the wit and the obtuseness, the
diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady.”
“And where, in accordance with the sketch you have drawn,” said
Mademoiselle des Touches to Émile Blondet, “would you class the female
author? Is she a perfect lady, a woman _comme il faut?_”
“When she has no genius, she is a woman _comme il n’en faut
pas_,” Blondet replied, emphasizing the words with a stolen
glance, which might make them seem praise frankly addressed to Camille
Maupin. “This epigram is not mine, but Napoleon’s,” he added.
“You need not owe Napoleon any grudge on that score,” said Canalis,
with an emphatic tone and gesture. “It was one of his weaknesses to be
jealous of literary genius—for he had his mean points. Who will ever
explain, depict, or understand Napoleon? A man represented with his arms
folded, and who did everything, who was the greatest force ever known,
the most concentrated, the most mordant, the most acid of all forces;
a singular genius who carried armed civilization in every direction
without fixing it anywhere; a man who could do everything because
he willed everything; a prodigious phenomenon of will, conquering an
illness by a battle, and yet doomed to die of disease in bed after
living in the midst of ball and bullets; a man with a code and a
sword in his brain, word and deed; a clear-sighted spirit that foresaw
everything but his own fall; a capricious politician who risked men by
handfuls out of economy, and who spared three heads—those of Talleyrand,
of Pozzo de Borgo, and of Metternich, diplomatists whose death would
have saved the French Empire, and who seemed to him of greater weight
than thousands of soldiers; a man to whom nature, as a rare privilege,
had given a heart in a frame of bronze; mirthful and kind at midnight
amid women, and next morning manipulating Europe as a young girl might
amuse herself by splashing water in her bath! Hypocritical and generous;
loving tawdriness and simplicity; devoid of taste, but protecting the
arts; and in spite of these antitheses, really great in everything
by instinct or by temperament; Caesar at five-and-twenty, Cromwell at
thirty; and then, like my grocer buried in Père Lachaise, a good husband
and a good father. In short, he improvised public works, empires, kings,
codes, verses, a romance—and all with more range than precision. Did he
not aim at making all Europe France? And after making us weigh on the
earth in such a way as to change the laws of gravitation, he left us
poorer than on the day when he first laid hands on us; while he, who had
taken an empire by his name, lost his name on the frontier of his empire
in a sea of blood and soldiers. A man all thought and all action, who
comprehended Desaix and Fouché.”
“All despotism and all justice at the right moments. The true king!”
said de Marsay.
“Ah! vat a pleashre it is to dichest vile you talk,” said Baron de
Nucingen.
“But do you suppose that the treat we are giving you is a common one?”
asked Joseph Bridau. “If you had to pay for the charms of conversation
as you do for those of dancing or of music, your fortune would be
inadequate! There is no second performance of the same flash of wit.”
“And are we really so much deteriorated as these gentlemen think?” said
the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the women with a smile at once
sceptical and ironical. “Because, in these days, under a regime which
makes everything small, you prefer small dishes, small rooms, small
pictures, small articles, small newspapers, small books, does that prove
that women too have grown smaller? Why should the human heart change
because you change your coat? In all ages the passions remain the same.
I know cases of beautiful devotion, of sublime sufferings, which lack
the publicity—the glory, if you choose—which formerly gave lustre to
the errors of some women. But though one may not have saved a King of
France, one is not the less an Agnès Sorel. Do you believe that our
dear Marquise d’Espard is not the peer of Madame Doublet, or Madame
du Deffant, in whose rooms so much evil was spoken and done? Is not
Taglioni a match for Camargo? or Malibran the equal of Saint-Huberti?
Are not our poets superior to those of the eighteenth century? If at
this moment, through the fault of the Grocers who govern us, we have not
a style of our own, had not the Empire its distinguishing stamp as
the age of Louis XV. had, and was not its splendor fabulous? Have the
sciences lost anything?”
“I am quite of your opinion, madame; the women of this age are truly
great,” replied the Comte de Vandenesse. “When posterity shall have
followed us, will not Madame Recamier appear in proportions as fine
as those of the most beautiful women of the past? We have made so much
history that historians will be lacking. The age of Louis XIV. had but
one Madame de Sévigné; we have a thousand now in Paris who certainly
write better than she did, and who do not publish their letters. Whether
the Frenchwoman be called ‘perfect lady,’ or great lady, she will always
be the woman among women.
“Émile Blondet has given us a picture of the fascinations of a woman
of the day; but, at need, this creature who bridles or shows off, who
chirps out the ideas of Mr. This and Mr. That, would be heroic. And it
must be said, your faults, mesdames, are all the more poetical, because
they must always and under all circumstances be surrounded by greater
perils. I have seen much of the world, I have studied it perhaps too
late; but in cases where the illegality of your feelings might
be excused, I have always observed the effects of I know not what
chance—which you may call Providence—inevitably overwhelming such as we
consider light women.”
“I hope,” said Madame de Vandenesse, “that we can be great in other
ways——”
“Oh, let the Comte de Vandenesse preach to us!” exclaimed Madame de
Serizy.
“With all the more reason because he has preached a great deal by
example,” said the Baronne de Nucingen.
“On my honor!” said General de Montriveau, “in all the dramas—a word you
are very fond of,” he said, looking at Blondet—”in which the finger of
God has been visible, the most frightful I ever knew was very near being
by my act——”
“Well, tell us all about it!” cried Lady Barimore; “I love to shudder!”
“It is the taste of a virtuous woman,” replied de Marsay, looking at
Lord Dudley’s lovely daughter.
“During the campaign of 1812,” General de Montriveau began, “I was the
involuntary cause of a terrible disaster which may be of use to you,
Doctor Bianchon,” turning to me, “since, while devoting yourself to the
human body, you concern yourself a good deal with the mind; it may tend
to solve some of the problems of the will.
“I was going through my second campaign; I enjoyed danger, and laughed
at everything, like the young and foolish lieutenant of artillery that
I was. When we reached the Beresina, the army had, as you know, lost all
discipline, and had forgotten military obedience. It was a medley of men
of all nations, instinctively making their way from north to south. The
soldiers would drive a general in rags and bare-foot away from their
fire if he brought neither wood nor victuals. After the passage of this
famous river disorder did not diminish. I had come quietly and alone,
without food, out of the marshes of Zembin, and was wandering in search
of a house where I might be taken in. Finding none or driven away from
those I came across, happily towards evening I perceived a wretched
little Polish farm, of which nothing can give you any idea unless
you have seen the wooden houses of Lower Normandy, or the poorest
farm-buildings of la Beauce. These dwellings consist of a single room,
with one end divided off by a wooden partition, the smaller division
serving as a store-room for forage.
“In the darkness of twilight I could just see a faint smoke rising above
this house. Hoping to find there some comrades more compassionate than
those I had hitherto addressed, I boldly walked as far as the farm.
On going in, I found the table laid. Several officers, and with them
a woman—a common sight enough—were eating potatoes, some horseflesh
broiled over the charcoal, and some frozen beetroots. I recognized among
the company two or three artillery captains of the regiment in which
I had first served. I was welcomed with a shout of acclamation, which
would have amazed me greatly on the other side of the Beresina; but at
this moment the cold was less intense; my fellow-officers were resting,
they were warm, they had food, and the room, strewn with trusses of
straw, gave the promise of a delightful night. We did not ask for so
much in those days. My comrades could be philanthropists gratis—one of
the commonest ways of being philanthropic. I sat down to eat on one of
the bundles of straw.
“At the end of the table, by the side of the door opening into the
smaller room full of straw and hay, sat my old colonel, one of the most
extraordinary men I ever saw among all the mixed collection of men it
has been my lot to meet. He was an Italian. Now, whenever human nature
is truly fine in the lands of the South, it is really sublime. I do not
know whether you have ever observed the extreme fairness of Italians
when they are fair. It is exquisite, especially under an artificial
light. When I read the fantastical portrait of Colonel Oudet sketched
by Charles Nodier, I found my own sensations in every one of his elegant
phrases. Italian, then, as were most of the officers of his regiment,
which had, in fact, been borrowed by the Emperor from Eugene’s army,
my colonel was a tall man, at least eight or nine inches above the
standard, and was admirably proportioned—a little stout perhaps, but
prodigiously powerful, active, and clean-limbed as a greyhound. His
black hair in abundant curls showed up his complexion, as white as a
woman’s; he had small hands, a shapely foot, a pleasant mouth, and
an aquiline nose delicately formed, of which the tip used to become
naturally pinched and white whenever he was angry, as happened often.
His irascibility was so far beyond belief that I will tell you nothing
about it; you will have the opportunity of judging of it. No one could
be calm in his presence. I alone, perhaps, was not afraid of him; he had
indeed taken such a singular fancy to me that he thought everything I
did right. When he was in a rage his brow was knit and the muscles of
the middle of his forehead set in a delta, or, to be more explicit, in
Redgauntlet’s horseshoe. This mark was, perhaps, even more terrifying
than the magnetic flashes of his blue eyes. His whole frame quivered,
and his strength, great as it was in his normal state, became almost
unbounded.
“He spoke with a strong guttural roll. His voice, at least as powerful
as that of Charles Nordier’s Oudet, threw an incredible fulness of
tone into the syllable or the consonant in which this burr was sounded.
Though this faulty pronunciation was at times a grace, when commanding
his men, or when he was excited, you cannot imagine, unless you had
heard it, what force was expressed by this accent, which at Paris is so
common. When the Colonel was quiescent, his blue eyes were angelically
sweet, and his smooth brow had a most charming expression. On parade,
or with the army of Italy, not a man could compare with him. Indeed,
d’Orsay himself, the handsome d’Orsay, was eclipsed by our colonel on
the occasion of the last review held by Napoleon before the invasion of
Russia.