Among the remarkable men who owed their destiny to the Restoration, but
whom, unfortunately, the restored monarchy kept, with Martignac, aloof
from the concerns of government, was Felix de Vandenesse, removed, with
several others, to the Chamber of peers during the last days of Charles
X. This misfortune, though, as he supposed, temporary, made him think of
marriage, towards which he was also led, as so many men are, by a sort
of disgust for the emotions of gallantry, those fairy flowers of the
soul. There comes a vital moment to most of us when social life appears
in all its soberness.
Felix de Vandenesse had been in turn happy and unhappy, oftener unhappy
than happy, like men who, at their start in life, have met with Love in
its most perfect form. Such privileged beings can never subsequently be
satisfied; but, after fully experiencing life, and comparing characters,
they attain to a certain contentment, taking refuge in a spirit of
general indulgence. No one deceives them, for they delude themselves no
longer; but their resignation, their disillusionment is always graceful;
they expect what comes, and therefor they suffer less. Felix might
still rank among the handsomest and most agreeable men in Paris. He was
originally commended to many women by one of the noblest creatures of
our epoch, Madame de Mortsauf, who had died, it was said, out of love
and grief for him; but he was specially trained for social life by the
handsome and well-known Lady Dudley.
In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance,
owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him. Madame de
Manerville had closed the list of his amorous adventures; and perhaps
her dismissal had something to do with his frame of mind. At any rate,
without being in any way a Don Juan, he had gathered in the world
of love as many disenchantments as he had met with in the world
of politics. That ideal of womanhood and of passion, the type of
which--perhaps to his sorrow--had lighted and governed his dawn of life,
he despaired of ever finding again.
At thirty years of age, Comte Felix determined to put an end to the
burden of his various felicities by marriage. On that point his ideas
were extremely fixed; he wanted a young girl brought up in the strictest
tenets of Catholicism. It was enough for him to know how the Comtesse
de Granville had trained her daughters to make him, after he had once
resolved on marriage, request the hand of the eldest. He himself had
suffered under the despotism of a mother; he still remembered his
unhappy childhood too well not to recognize, beneath the reserves of
feminine shyness, the state to which such a yoke must have brought the
heart of a young girl, whether that heart was soured, embittered, or
rebellious, or whether it was still peaceful, lovable, and ready to
unclose to noble sentiments. Tyranny produces two opposite effects,
the symbols of which exist in two grand figures of ancient slavery,
Epictetus and Spartacus,--hatred and evil feelings on the one hand,
resignation and tenderness, on the other.
The Comte de Vandenesse recognized himself in Marie-Angelique de
Granville. In choosing for his wife an artless, innocent, and pure young
girl, this young old man determined to mingle a paternal feeling with
the conjugal feeling. He knew his own heart was withered by the world
and by politics, and he felt that he was giving in exchange for
a dawning life the remains of a worn-out existence. Beside those
springtide flowers he was putting the ice of winter; hoary experience
with young and innocent ignorance. After soberly judging the position,
he took up his conjugal career with ample precaution; indulgence and
perfect confidence were the two anchors to which he moored it. Mothers
of families ought to seek such men for their daughters. A good mind
protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a
surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother. Those three qualities are
the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage. All that his past career had
taught to Felix de Vandenesse, the observations of a life that was busy,
literary, and thoughtful by turns, all his forces, in fact, were now
employed in making his wife happy; to that end he applied his mind.
When Marie-Angelique left the maternal purgatory, she rose at once into
the conjugal paradise prepared for her by Felix, rue du Rocher, in
a house where all things were redolent of aristocracy, but where the
varnish of society did not impede the ease and “laisser-aller” which
young and loving hearts desire so much. From the start, Marie-Angelique
tasted all the sweets of material life to the very utmost. For two years
her husband made himself, as it were, her purveyor. He explained to her,
by degrees, and with great art, the things of life; he initiated her
slowly into the mysteries of the highest society; he taught her the
genealogies of noble families; he showed her the world; he guided her
taste in dress; he trained her to converse; he took her from theatre
to theatre, and made her study literature and current history. This
education he accomplished with all the care of a lover, father, master,
and husband; but he did it soberly and discreetly; he managed both
enjoyments and instructions in such a manner as not to destroy the value
of her religious ideas. In short, he carried out his enterprise with the
wisdom of a great master. At the end of four years, he had the happiness
of having formed in the Comtesse de Vandenesse one of the most lovable
and remarkable young women of our day.
Marie-Angelique felt for Felix precisely the feelings with which Felix
desired to inspire her,--true friendship, sincere gratitude, and a
fraternal love, in which was mingled, at certain times, a noble and
dignified tenderness, such as tenderness between husband and wife ought
to be. She was a mother, and a good mother. Felix had therefore attached
himself to his young wife by every bond without any appearance of
garroting her,--relying for his happiness on the charms of habit.
None but men trained in the school of life--men who have gone round
the circle of disillusionment, political and amorous--are capable of
following out a course like this. Felix, however, found in his work
the same pleasure that painters, writers, architects take in their
creations. He doubly enjoyed both the work and its fruition as he
admired his wife, so artless, yet so well-informed, witty, but natural,
lovable and chaste, a girl, and yet a mother, perfectly free, though
bound by the chains of righteousness. The history of all good homes is
that of prosperous peoples; it can be written in two lines, and has in
it nothing for literature. So, as happiness is only explicable to and
by itself, these four years furnish nothing to relate which was not as
tender as the soft outlines of eternal cherubs, as insipid, alas! as
manna, and about as amusing as the tale of “Astrea.”
In 1833, this edifice of happiness, so carefully erected by Felix
de Vandenesse, began to crumble, weakened at its base without his
knowledge. The heart of a woman of twenty-five is no longer that of a
girl of eighteen, any more than the heart of a woman of forty is that
of a woman of thirty. There are four ages in the life of woman; each
age creates a new woman. Vandenesse knew, no doubt, the law of these
transformations (created by our modern manners and morals), but he
forgot them in his own case,--just as the best grammarian will forget a
rule of grammar in writing a book, or the greatest general in the field
under fire, surprised by some unlooked-for change of base, forgets his
military tactics. The man who can perpetually bring his thought to bear
upon his facts is a man of genius; but the man of the highest genius
does not display genius at all times; if he did, he would be like to
God.
After four years of this life, with never a shock to the soul, nor
a word that produced the slightest discord in this sweet concert of
sentiment, the countess, feeling herself developed like a beautiful
plant in a fertile soil, caressed by the sun of a cloudless sky, awoke
to a sense of a new self. This crisis of her life, the subject of this
Scene, would be incomprehensible without certain explanations, which may
extenuate in the eyes of women the wrong-doing of this young countess, a
happy wife, a happy mother, who seems, at first sight, inexcusable.
Life results from the action of two opposing principles; when one of
them is lacking the being suffers. Vandenesse, by satisfying every need,
had suppressed desire, that king of creation, which fills an enormous
place in the moral forces. Extreme heat, extreme sorrow, complete
happiness, are all despotic principles that reign over spaces devoid of
production; they insist on being solitary; they stifle all that is not
themselves. Vandenesse was not a woman, and none but women know the art
of varying happiness; hence their coquetry, refusals, fears, quarrels,
and the all-wise clever foolery with which they put in doubt the things
that seemed to be without a cloud the night before. Men may weary by
their constancy, but women never. Vandenesse was too thoroughly kind
by nature to worry deliberately the woman he loved; on the contrary, he
kept her in the bluest and least cloudy heaven of love. The problem of
eternal beatitude is one of those whose solution is known only to God.
Here, below, the sublimest poets have simply harassed their readers when
attempting to picture paradise. Dante’s reef was that of Vandenesse; all
honor to such courage!
Felix’s wife began to find monotony in an Eden so well arranged;
the perfect happiness which the first woman found in her terrestrial
paradise gave her at length a sort of nausea of sweet things, and made
the countess wish, like Rivarol reading Florian, for a wolf in the fold.
Such, judging by the history of ages, appears to be the meaning of that
emblematic serpent to which Eve listened, in all probability, out of
ennui. This deduction may seem a little venturesome to Protestants, who
take the book of Genesis more seriously than the Jews themselves.
The situation of Madame de Vandenesse can, however, be explained without
recourse to Biblical images. She felt in her soul an enormous power that
was unemployed. Her happiness gave her no suffering; it rolled along
without care or uneasiness; she was not afraid of losing it; each
morning it shone upon her, with the same blue sky, the same smile, the
same sweet words. That clear, still lake was unruffled by any breeze,
even a zephyr; she would fain have seen a ripple on its glassy surface.
Her desire had something so infantine about it that it ought to be
excused; but society is not more indulgent than the God of Genesis.
Madame de Vandenesse, having now become intelligently clever, was
aware that such sentiments were not permissible, and she refrained from
confiding them to her “dear little husband.” Her genuine simplicity had
not invented any other name for him; for one can’t call up in cold blood
that delightfully exaggerated language which love imparts to its victims
in the midst of flames.
Vandenesse, glad of this adorable reserve, kept his wife, by deliberate
calculations, in the temperate regions of conjugal affection. He never
condescended to seek a reward or even an acknowledgment of the infinite
pains which he gave himself; his wife thought his luxury and good taste
her natural right, and she felt no gratitude for the fact that her pride
and self-love had never suffered. It was thus in everything. Kindness
has its mishaps; often it is attributed to temperament; people are
seldom willing to recognize it as the secret effort of a noble soul.
About this period of her life, Madame Felix de Vandenesse had attained
to a degree of worldly knowledge which enabled her to quit
the insignificant role of a timid, listening, and observing
supernumerary,--a part played, they say, for some time, by Giulia Grisi
in the chorus at La Scala. The young countess now felt herself capable
of attempting the part of prima-donna, and she did so on several
occasions. To the great satisfaction of her husband, she began to mingle
in conversations. Intelligent ideas and delicate observations put into
her mind by her intercourse with her husband, made her remarked upon,
and success emboldened her. Vandenesse, to whom the world admitted that
his wife was beautiful, was delighted when the same assurance was given
that she was clever and witty. On their return from a ball, concert, or
rout where Marie had shone brilliantly, she would turn to her husband,
as she took off her ornaments, and say, with a joyous, self-assured
air,--
“Were you pleased with me this evening?”
The countess excited jealousies; among others that of her husband’s
sister, Madame de Listomere, who until now had patronized her, thinking
that she protected a foil to her own merits. A countess, beautiful,
witty and virtuous!--what a prey for the tongues of the world! Felix had
broken with too many women, and too many women had broken with him,
to leave them indifferent to his marriage. When these women beheld in
Madame de Vandenesse a small woman with red hands, and rather awkward
manner, saying little, and apparently not thinking much, they
thought themselves sufficiently avenged. The disasters of July, 1830,
supervened; society was dissolved for two years; the rich evaded the
turmoil and left Paris either for foreign travel or for their estates in
the country, and none of the salons reopened until 1833. When that time
came, the faubourg Saint-Germain still sulked, but it held intercourse
with a few houses, regarding them as neutral ground,--among others that
of the Austrian ambassador, where the legitimist society and the new
social world met together in the persons of their best representatives.
Attached by many ties of the heart and by gratitude to the exiled
family, and strong in his personal convictions, Vandenesse did not
consider himself obliged to imitate the silly behavior of his party.
In times of danger, he had done his duty at the risk of his life; his
fidelity had never been compromised, and he determined to take his
wife into general society without fear of its becoming so. His former
mistresses could scarcely recognize the bride they had thought so
childish in the elegant, witty, and gentle countess, who now appeared
in society with the exquisite manners of the highest female aristocracy.
Mesdames d’Espard, de Manerville, and Lady Dudley, with others less
known, felt the serpent waking up in the depths of their hearts; they
heard the low hissings of angry pride; they were jealous of Felix’s
happiness, and would gladly have given their prettiest jewel to do him
some harm; but instead of being hostile to the countess, these kind,
ill-natured women surrounded her, showed her the utmost friendship, and
praised her to me. Sufficiently aware of their intentions, Felix watched
their relations with Marie, and warned her to distrust them. They all
suspected the uneasiness of the count at their intimacy with his wife,
and they redoubled their attentions and flatteries, so that they gave
her an enormous vogue in society, to the great displeasure of her
sister-in-law, the Marquise de Listomere, who could not understand it.
The Comtesse Felix de Vandenesse was cited as the most charming and
the cleverest woman in Paris. Marie’s other sister-in-law, the Marquise
Charles de Vandenesse, was consumed with vexation at the confusion
of names and the comparisons it sometimes brought about. Though the
marquise was a handsome and clever woman, her rivals took delight in
comparing her with her sister-in-law, with all the more point because
the countess was a dozen years younger. These women knew very well what
bitterness Marie’s social vogue would bring into her intercourse with
both of her sisters-in-law, who, in fact, became cold and disobliging
in proportion to her triumph in society. She was thus surrounded by
dangerous relations and intimate enemies.
Every one knows that French literature at that particular period was
endeavoring to defend itself against an apathetic indifference (the
result of the political drama) by producing works more or less Byronian,
in which the only topics really discussed were conjugal delinquencies.
Infringements of the marriage tie formed the staple of reviews, books,
and dramas. This eternal subject grew more and more the fashion. The
lover, that nightmare of husbands, was everywhere, except perhaps in
homes, where, in point of fact, under the bourgeois regime, he was less
seen than formerly. It is not when every one rushes to their window and
cries “Thief!” and lights the streets, that robbers abound. It is true
that during those years so fruitful of turmoil--urban, political,
and moral--a few matrimonial catastrophes took place; but these were
exceptional, and less observed than they would have been under the
Restoration. Nevertheless, women talked a great deal together about
books and the stage, then the two chief forms of poesy. The lover thus
became one of their leading topics,--a being rare in point of act and
much desired. The few affairs which were known gave rise to discussions,
and these discussions were, as usually happens, carried on by immaculate
women.
A fact worthy of remark is the aversion shown to such conversations by
women who are enjoying some illicit happiness; they maintain before the
eyes of the world a reserved, prudish, and even timid countenance;
they seem to ask silence on the subject, or some condonation of their
pleasure from society. When, on the contrary, a woman talks freely of
such catastrophes, and seems to take pleasure in doing so, allowing
herself to explain the emotions that justify the guilty parties, we may
be sure that she herself is at the crossways of indecision, and does not
know what road she might take.
During this winter, the Comtesse de Vandenesse heard the great voice of
the social world roaring in her ears, and the wind of its stormy gusts
blew round her. Her pretended friends, who maintained their reputations
at the height of their rank and their positions, often produced in
her presence the seductive idea of the lover; they cast into her soul
certain ardent talk of love, the “mot d’enigme” which life propounds to
woman, the grand passion, as Madame de Stael called it,--preaching by
example. When the countess asked naively, in a small and select circle
of these friends, what difference there was between a lover and a
husband, all those who wished evil to Felix took care to reply in a way
to pique her curiosity, or fire her imagination, or touch her heart, or
interest her mind.
“Oh! my dear, we vegetate with a husband, but we live with a lover,”
said her sister-in-law, the marquise.
“Marriage, my dear, is our purgatory; love is paradise,” said Lady
Dudley.
“Don’t believe her,” cried Mademoiselle des Touches; “it is hell.”
“But a hell we like,” remarked Madame de Rochefide. “There is often more
pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!”
“With a husband, my dear innocent, we live, as it were, in our own
life; but to love, is to live in the life of another,” said the Marquise
d’Espard.
“A lover is forbidden fruit, and that to me, says all!” cried the pretty
Moina de Saint-Heren, laughing.
When she was not at some diplomatic rout, or at a ball given by rich
foreigners, like Lady Dudley or the Princesse Galathionne, the Comtesse
de Vandenesse might be seen, after the Opera, at the houses of Madame
d’Espard, the Marquise de Listomere, Mademoiselle des Touches, the
Comtesse de Montcornet, or the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, the only
aristocratic houses then open; and never did she leave any one of them
without some evil seed of the world being sown in her heart. She heard
talk of completing her life,--a saying much in fashion in those days; of
being comprehended,--another word to which women gave strange meanings.
She often returned home uneasy, excited, curious, and thoughtful. She
began to find something less, she hardly knew what, in her life; but she
did not yet go so far as to think it lonely.