Another study of woman

In Parisian society you will almost always find two very different evenings in the balls and social affairs. First, the official evening, at which all the invited guests are present—a gay world bored with itself and others. Each person poses for his neighbor. The majority of the young women have come there to meet only one person. When each is satisfied that she is the handsomest woman present in the eyes of that person, and that his opinion is probably shared by some others, she is ready to leave—after the exchange of a few trivial speeches, such as “Shall you go early to La Crampade?”—“Madame de Portenduère sang very well, I think.”—“Who is that little woman over there, weighted down with diamonds?” Or, perhaps, after throwing out a few epigrams, which give passing pleasure and permanent wounds, the groups begin to disperse, mere[Pg 6] acquaintances take leave, and then the mistress of the house stops her personal friends and a few artists and lively fellows, saying in a whisper: “Don’t go, we shall have supper presently.”

The company then gathers in a little salon. The second, the real evening begins—an evening like those of the old régime, when everybody understands what is talked about, conversation is general, and each person present is expected to show his wit and to contribute to the general entertainment. The scene has changed: frank laughter succeeds the stiff artificial air which dulls the prettiest faces in society. In short, pleasure begins as the social time ends. The ball, that cold review of luxury, the parade of self-loves in full costume, is one of those English inventions which tend to turn all other nations into mere machines. England seems desirous that all the world should be as much and as often bored as herself. This second party succeeding the first is therefore in some French houses a lively protest of the former spirits of our joyous land. But, unfortunately, few houses thus protest; and the reason is plain: if suppers are no longer in vogue it is because at no time, under any régime, were there ever so few persons in France with settled positions, surroundings, fortunes, families, and names as under the reign of Louis Philippe, in which the Revolution was begun again legally. All the world is marching toward some end, or it is trotting after wealth. Time has become the most costly of all chattels;[Pg 7] no one can allow himself the great indulgence of coming home late and sleeping late the next morning. The second party is therefore only found among women rich enough really to entertain; and since July, 1830, such women may be counted on one’s fingers.

In spite of the mute opposition of the faubourg Saint-Germain, two or three women, among them the Marquise d’Espard and Mademoiselle des Touches, refused to renounce the influence they had held up to that time over Paris, and did not close their salons.

The salon of Mademoiselle des Touches, which was very celebrated in Paris, was the last asylum of the true French wit of other days, with its hidden profundity, its thousand casuistries, and its exquisite politeness. There you might observe the grace of manner which underlay the conventions of politeness; the easy flow of conversation in spite of the natural reserve of well-bred persons; and, above all, generosity and tolerance of ideas. There, no one dreamed of reserving his thought for a drama; no one had in mind a book to be made out of a narrative. In short, the hideous skeleton of literature in want did not rise and show itself in the face of some piquant sally or some interesting topic.

During the evening which I shall now describe, chance had collected in the salon of Mademoiselle des Touches a number of persons whose undeniable merits had won for them European reputations. This is not flattery of France, for several foreigners were among us.[Pg 8] The men who shone most brilliantly were by no means the most distinguished. Ingenious repartees, shrewd observations, excellent satires, descriptions given with brilliant clearness, sparkled and flowed extemporaneously, lavished themselves without reserve as without assumption, and were delightfully felt and delicately enjoyed. The men of the world were particularly noticeable for a grace, warmth of fancy that was wholly artistic. You will meet elsewhere in Europe elegant manners, cordiality, good-fellowship and knowledge, but in Paris only, in this salon and those I have just mentioned, will be found in perfection that particular form of intellect which gives to these social qualities an agreeable and varied harmony, a flowing motion by which this wealth of thoughts, of formulas, or narratives, of history itself, meanders easily along.

Paris, the capital of taste, alone knows the science which changes conversation to a tournament in which the quality of each mind is condensed into a flash, where each tilter says his word and casts his experience into it, where all are amused, refreshed, and have their faculties exercised. There alone you can exchange ideas; there you do not carry, like the dolphin in the fable, a monkey on your back; there you are understood, and you run no risk of staking your gold against counterfeit coin or copper. There, in short, talk, light and deep, floats, undulates, and turns, changing aspect and color at every sentence; there, too, secrets are well betrayed. Lively criticism and pithy narrative lead each other on. Eyes are listening[Pg 9] as well as ears; gestures put questions to which faces reply. There all is, in a word, thought and wit. Never had the oral phenomenon—which, if well studied and well-managed, makes the power of the orator and the narrator—so completely bewitched me.

I was not the only one sensitive to these influences, and we passed a delightful evening. The conversation finally turned to narrative, and led, in its rapid course, to curious confidences, striking portraits, and a multitude of fancies, which render that delightful improvisation altogether untransferable to paper. But, by leaving to a few things their pungency, their abrupt naturalness, their sophistical sinuosities, perhaps you will understand the charm of a true French soirée, taken at the moment when the pleasantest familiarity has made everyone forget his self-interests, self-loves, or, if you prefer so to call them, pretensions and affectations.

At about two in the morning, when supper was over, none but a few intimates, all proved friends, tried by an intercourse of fifteen years, and certain men of the world, well-bred and gifted with taste, remained around the table. A tone of absolute equality held sway among them; and yet there was no one present who did not feel proud of being himself.

Mademoiselle des Touches always obliged her guests to remain at table until they took their leave, having many times noticed the total change that takes place in the minds of those present by removal to another room. On the[Pg 10] way between a dining-room and a salon the charm snaps. According to Sterne, the ideas of an author are different after he has shaved from what they were before. If Sterne is right, we may boldly assert that the inclinations of people still seated around a dinner-table are not those of the same persons when returned to the salon. The atmosphere is heavier, the eye is no longer enlivened by the delightful disorder of the dessert; they have lost the benefits of that softening of the spirit, that kindliness and good-will which pervaded their being in the pleasant state of mind of those who have eaten well, and are sitting at their ease on chairs as comfortable as they can be made. Perhaps we talk more willingly in presence of the dessert and in company with choice wines, during the delightful moment when we rest our elbows on the table and lean our heads on our hands. Certain it is that people not only like to talk at such times, but they like to listen. Digestion, nearly always attentive, is, according to characters, either talkative or silent. Each person present then follows his inclination.

This preamble was needed to introduce you to the charms of a confidential narrative in which a celebrated man, now dead, depicted the innocent jesuitism of a woman with the crafty shrewdness of a man who has seen much of the world—a quality which makes public men the most delightful narrators when, like Talleyrand and Metternich, they condescend to tell a tale.

De Marsay, who had been prime minister for[Pg 11] more than six months, had already given proofs of superior capacity. Though friends who had long known him were not surprised to see him display both the talents and aptitudes of a statesman, they were still asking themselves whether he felt within himself a great political strength, or whether he had simply developed in the heat of circumstances. This question had just been put to him, with an evidently philosophical intention, by a man of intellect and observation whom he had made a prefect—a man who was a journalist for a long time, and who admired the prime minister without mingling his admiration with that touch of sour criticism by which, in Paris, one superior man excuses himself for admiring another.

“Has there been in your earlier life any fact, thought, or desire, which made you foresee your vocation?” asked Emile Blondet, “for we all have, like Newton, our particular apple which falls, and takes us to the surroundings in which our faculties can develop.”

Pretty women, political dandies, artists, old men, all de Marsay’s intimates, settled themselves comfortably, each in his own way, and looked at the prime minister. Is it necessary to say that the servants had left the dining-room, that the doors were closed and the portières drawn? The silence which now fell was so deep that the murmur of the coachmen’s voices and the subdued stamping of the horses impatient for their stable came up from the courtyard.

“A statesman, my friends, exists through one quality only,” said the minister, playing with his pearl-handled and gold dessert-knife. “To know how at all moments to be master of himself; to be able, on all occasions, to meet the crisis of events, however unexpected and accidental it may be; in short, to have, in his inner self, a cool, detached being, which looks on as a spectator at all the movements of our life, our passions, our sentiments, and which inspires us apropos of all things, with the decision of a kind of ready-reckoner.”

“You are explaining to us why statesmen are so rare in France,” said old Lord Dudley.

“From a sentimental point of view it is certainly horrible,” said the minister, “and therefore when this phenomenon appears in a young man—Richelieu, warned of Concini’s danger by a letter over-night, slept till midday, when he knew his benefactor would be killed at ten o’clock—that young man, be he Pitt, or Napoleon if you like, is a monstrosity. I became that monster very early in life, thanks to a woman.”

“I thought,” said Madame de Montcornet (Virginie Blondet), smiling, “that we unmade more statesmen than we make.”

“The monster of whom I speak is only a monster inasmuch as he resists your sex,” said the narrator, with an ironical bow.

“If this tale relates to a love-affair,” said the Baronne de Nucingen, “I request that it may not be interrupted by reflections.”

“I was nineteen years of age,” resumed de Marsay; “the Restoration was becoming re-established—my oldest friends know how impetuous and fiery I then was. I was in love for the first time, and I may, at this late day, be permitted to say that I was one of the handsomest young men in Paris. I had youth and beauty, two advantages due to chance, of which we are as proud as if we had won them. I say nothing about the rest. Like all young men, I was in love with a woman about six years older than myself. Only one of you,” he said, looking round the table, “will guess her name or recognize her. Ronquerolles was the only one in those days who guessed my secret, and he kept it carefully. I might fear his smile, but he seems to be gone,” said the minister, again looking about him.

“For six months possessed by this love, but incapable of suspecting that it mastered me,” continued the minister, “I gave myself up to that adorable worship which is both the triumph and the fragile happiness of youth. I treasured her glove, I drank infusions of the flowers she had worn, I rose from my bed to go to stand beneath her windows. All my blood rushed to my heart as I breathed the perfume that she preferred. I was then a thousand leagues from suspecting that women are furnaces without and marble within.”

“I would then have blasted with contempt the philosopher who published to the world that terrible opinion, so profoundly true,” replied de Marsay. “You are all too wise and witty to need me to say more on that point; but perhaps the rest that I have to tell may recall to you your own follies. Well—a great lady, if ever there was one, a widow without children (oh! she had every advantage), my idol went so far as to shut herself up to mark my handkerchiefs with her own hair; in short, she responded to my follies with follies of her own. How is it possible not to believe in a passion when it is guaranteed by folly? We had put, each of us, all our wits into concealing so complete and glorious a love from the eyes of the world; and we succeeded. Of her, I shall tell you nothing; perfect in those days, she was considered until quite recently one of the handsomest women in Paris; at the time of which I speak men would have risked death to secure her favor. She was left comfortably as to fortune, for a woman who loved and was beloved; but the Restoration, to which she was indebted for higher honors, made her wealth insufficient to meet the requirements of her name and rank. As for me, I had the self-conceit that conceives no suspicions. Although my natural jealousy had in those days a hundred-and-twenty-Othello power, that terrible sentiment slumbered in my breast like gold in its bed of ore. I would have made my valet flog me had I felt the baseness to doubt the[Pg 15] purity and fidelity of that angel, so frail, so strong, so fair, so naive, so pure, so candid, whose blue eyes let me penetrate with adorable submission to the bottom of her heart. Never the least hesitation in pose, or look, or word; always white and fresh and tender to her beloved as the eastern lily of the Song of Songs. Ah, my friends!” cried the minister, sorrowfully, becoming for the moment a young man, “we must knock our heads very hard against the marble to dispel that poetry.”

This cry of nature, which found its echo among the guests, piqued their curiosity, already so cleverly excited.

“Every morning, mounted on that splendid Sultan you sent me from England,” he said to Lord Dudley, “I rode past her calèche and read my orders for the day in her bouquet, prepared in case we were unable to exchange a few words. Though we saw each other nearly every evening in society, and she wrote to me every day, we had invented, in order to deceive the world and baffle observation, a system of behavior. Not to look at each other, to avoid ever being together, to speak slightingly of each other’s qualities, all those well-worn maneuvers were of little value compared with our device of a mutual false devotion to an indifferent person, and an air of indifference to the true idol. If two lovers will play that game they can always dupe society, but they must be very sure of each other. Her substitute was a man high in court favor, cold and devout, whom she did not receive in her own house. Our comedy was only played for the[Pg 16] benefit of fools in salons. The question of marriage had not been discussed between us; six years’ difference in our ages might cause her to reflect. She knew nothing of the amount of my fortune, which, on principle, I have always concealed. As for me, charmed by her mind, her manners, the extent of her information and her knowledge of the world, I would have married her without reflection. And yet her reserve pleased me. Had she been the first to speak to me of marriage, I might have found something vulgar in that accomplished soul. Six full and perfect months! a diamond of the purest water! That was my allowance of love in this low world. One morning, being attacked by one of those bone-fevers which begin a severe cold, I wrote her a note putting off the happiness of a meeting for another day. No sooner was the letter gone than I regretted it. ‘She certainly will not believe that I am ill,’ I said to myself; for she was fond of seeming jealous and suspicious. When jealousy is real,” said de Marsay, interrupting himself, “it is the evident sign of a single-minded love.”

“A true and single-minded love,” said de Marsay, “produces a sort of bodily apathy in harmony with the contemplation into which the person falls. The mind then complicates all things; it works upon itself, it sets up fantasies in place of realities, which only torture it; but this jealousy is as fascinating as it is embarrassing.”

A foreign minister smiled, recognizing by the light of memory the truth of this remark.

“‘Besides,’ I said to myself, ‘why lose a happy day?’” continued de Marsay, resuming his narrative. “Wasn’t it better to go, ill as I was? For if she thought me ill I believed her capable of coming to see me and so compromising herself. I made an effort; I wrote a second letter, and as my confidential man was not on hand, I took it myself. The river lay between us; I had all Paris to cross. When I came within suitable distance of her house I called a porter and told him to deliver the letter immediately. Then the fine idea came into my head of driving past the house in a hackney-coach to see if the letter was delivered promptly. Just as I passed in front of it, about two o’clock in the afternoon, the great gate opened to admit the carriage of—whom do you suppose? The substitute! It is fifteen years since that happened; well! as I tell you of it, this exhausted orator, this minister dried to the core by contact with public business, still feels the boiling of something in his heart and a fire in his diaphragm. At the end of an hour I passed again—the carriage was still in the courtyard; my note had doubtless not been taken up to her. At last, at half-past three o’clock, the carriage drove away and I was able to study the face of my rival. He was grave, he did not smile; but he was certainly in love, and no doubt some plan was in the wind. At the appointed hour I kept my tryst; the queen of my soul was calm and serene. Here I must tell you that I have always thought Othello[Pg 18] not only stupid, but guilty of very bad taste. No man but one who was half a Negro would have behaved as he did. Shakespeare felt that when he called his play the Moor of Venice. The mere sight of the beloved woman has something so healing to the heart, that it dissipates all vexations, doubts, sorrows; my wrath subsided and I smiled again. This, at my present age, would have been horribly dissimulating, but then it was simply the result of my youth and love. My jealousy thus buried, I had the power to observe. I was visibly ill; the horrible doubts which had tortured me increased the appearance of illness, and she showed me the most tender solicitude. I found occasion, however, to slip in the words: ‘Had you any visitor this morning?’ explaining that I had wondered how she would amuse herself after receiving my first note.

“‘I?’ she said, ‘how could I think of any amusement after hearing of your illness? Until your second note came I was planning how to go to you.’

“‘Quite,’ she answered, looking at me with so perfect an expression of innocence that it rivaled that which drove the Moor to kill his Desdemona. As she alone occupied her house, that word was a shocking falsehood. A single lie destroys that absolute confidence which, for certain souls, is itself the basis of love. To express to you what went on inside of me at that moment, it is necessary to admit that we have an inner being of which the visible man[Pg 19] is the scabbard, and that that being, brilliant as light itself, is as delicate as a vapor. Well, that glorious inward I was thenceforth and forever clothed in crêpe. Yes, I felt a cold and fleshless hand placing upon me the shroud of experience, imposing upon my soul the eternal mourning which follows a first betrayal. Lowering my eyes not to let her see my dazed condition, a proud thought came into my mind which restored to me some strength: ‘If she deceives you she is unworthy of you.’ I excused the flush in my face, and a few tears that came into my eyes, on the ground of increased illness, and the gentle creature insisted on taking me home in her carriage. On the way she was tenderness itself; her solicitude would have deceived the same Moor of Venice whom I take for my point of comparison. In fact, if that big child had hesitated two seconds longer he would, as any intelligent spectator divines, have asked pardon of Desdemona. Therefore, to kill a woman is the act of a child. She wept as she left me at my own door, so unhappy was she at not being able to nurse me herself! She wished she were my valet, she was jealous of his cares! All this was written to me the next day as a happy Clarissa might have written it. There is always the soul of a monkey in the sweetest and most angelic of women!”

At these words the women present lowered their eyes as if wounded by a cruel truth so brutally stated.

“I tell you nothing of the night, nor of the[Pg 20] week that I passed,” continued de Marsay, “but it was then that I saw myself a statesman.”

Those words were so finely uttered that, one and all, we made a gesture of admiration.

“While reflecting, with an infernal spirit, on all the forms of cruel vengeance to which we can subject a woman,” continued de Marsay—“and there were many and irreparable ones in this case—I suddenly despised myself; I felt that I was commonplace, and I formulated, insensibly, a dreadful code, that of Indulgence. To take revenge upon a woman—does not such an act admit that there is but one woman in the world for us, and that we cannot live without her? If so, is vengeance a means to recover her? But if she is not indispensable to us, if there are others for us, why not allow her the same right to change that we claim for ourselves? This, you must fully understand, applies only to passion; otherwise it would be anti-social; nothing proves the necessity of indissoluble marriage more than the instability of passion. The two sexes need to be chained together like the wild beasts that they are, in laws as mute and unchangeable as fate. Suppress revenge, and betrayal becomes nothing in love, its teeth are drawn. Those who think that there exists but one woman in the world for them, they may take to vengeance, and then there is but one form for it—that of Othello. Mine was different; it was this—”

The last three words produced among us that imperceptible movement which journalists[Pg 21] describe in parliamentary debates as “profound sensation.”

“Cured of my cold and of pure, absolute, divinest love, I let myself go into an adventure with another heroine, who was charming, of a style of beauty exactly opposite to that of my deceiving angel. I took good care, however, not to break with that very clever creature and good comedian, for I don’t know whether a true love can of itself give more graceful enjoyments than accomplished treachery. Such hypocrisy equals virtue. I don’t say this for you Englishmen,” added the minister, gently, addressing Lady Marimore, daughter of Lord Dudley. “Well, I even tried to fall in love. It happened that I wanted for this new angel a little gift done with my own hair, and I went to a certain artist in hair, much in vogue in those days, who lived in the rue Boucher. This man had a monopoly of gifts done in hair, and I give his address for the benefit of those who haven’t much hair of their own; he keeps locks of all kinds and all colors. After receiving my order, he showed me his work. I then saw products of patients surpassing those of fairy tales and even of convicts; and he put me up to all the caprices and fashions which reigned in the realm of hair.

“‘For the last year,’ he said to me, ‘there has been a rage for marking linen with hair; happily, I had a fine collection on hand and excellent work-women.’

“Hearing these words, a suspicion crossed[Pg 22] my mind. I drew out my handkerchief and said to him:

“‘That lady was very difficult to suit; she insisted on matching the very shade of her hair. My wife marked those handkerchiefs herself. You have there, monsieur, one of the finest things of the kind ever executed.’

“Before this last flash of light I might still have believed in something; I could still have given some attention to a woman’s word. I left that shop having faith in pleasure, but, in the matter of love, as much of an atheist as a mathematician. Two months later I was seated beside my angelic deceiver on a sofa in her boudoir. I was holding one of her hands, which were very beautiful, and together we were climbing the Alps of sentiment, gathering flowers by the way, plucking the petals from the daisies (there is always a moment in life when we pluck out the daisy petals, though it may be in a salon where there are no daisies). At the moment of deepest tenderness, when we seem to love the most, love is so conscious of its lack of duration that one feels an invincible need to ask: ‘Do you love me?’—‘Will you love me always?’ I seized that lyrical moment, so warm, so flowery, so expansive, to make her tell her finest lies, with the ravishing exaggerations of that Gascon poetry peculiar to love. Charlotte then displayed the choicest flowers of[Pg 23] her deception: she could not live without me; I was the only man in all the world to her; yet she feared to weary me, for in my presence her mind forsook her; near me her faculties became all love; she was too loving not to have many fears; of late she had sought a means to attach me forever to her side; but God alone could do that.”

The women who were listening to de Marsay seemed offended by his mimicry; for he accompanied these words with pantomime, poses of the head, and affectations of manner, which conveyed the scene.

“At the moment when I was expected to believe these adorable falsehoods, I said to her, still holding her right hand in mine:

“The thrust was so direct, my glance met hers so straight, that the quiver of her hand lying softly in mine, slight as it was, could not be completely concealed. Her eyes fell before mine, and a slight flush came into her cheeks.

“‘The duke!’ she said, feigning the utmost astonishment. ‘What can you mean?’

“‘I know all,’ I replied. ‘In my opinion you had better not delay the marriage. He is rich, he is a duke; but also, he is religious—more than that, he is a bigot! You don’t seem aware how urgent it is that you should make him commit himself in his own eyes and before God; if you don’t do this soon you will never gain your end.’

“‘Is this a dream?’ she said, pushing up her hair from her forehead with Malibran’s celebrated gesture, fifteen years before Malibran ever made it.

“‘Come, don’t play the babe unborn, my angel,’ I said, trying to take both her hands. But she crossed them in front of her with an angry and prudish little air. ‘Marry him, I am willing,’ I continued. ‘In fact, I strongly advise it.’

“‘But,’ she said, falling at my feet, ‘there’s some horrible mistake here; I love no man but you in this world; you can ask me for any proof you like.’

“‘Well, then, I have committed the greatest of crimes,’ I went on. ‘I have doubted your love and your fidelity; and I have looked at the matter calmly—’

“‘Calmly!’ she cried, sighing. ‘Enough, Henri, I see that you no longer love me.’

“You observe that she was quick to seize that way of escape. In such scenes an adverb is often very dangerous. But luckily curiosity induced her to add:

“‘What have you seen or heard? Have I ever[Pg 25] spoken to the duke except in society? Have you ever noticed in my eyes—’

“‘No,’ I said, ‘but I have in his. You have made me go eight times to Saint-Thomas d’Aquin to see you both hearing mass together.’

“‘I wish I could be,’ I replied, admiring the suppleness of that quick mind, and the acrobatic feats by which she strove to blind me. ‘But, by dint of going to church, I have become an unbeliever. The day of my first cold and your first deception you received the duke when you thought me safe in bed, and you told me you had seen no man.’

“‘How so? I think your marriage with the duke an excellent affair; he gives you a fine name, the only position that is really suited to you, an honorable and brilliant future. You will be one of the queens of Paris. I should do you a great wrong if I placed any obstacles in the way of this arrangement, this honorable life, this superb alliance. Ah! some day, Charlotte, you will do me justice by discovering how different my character is from that of other young men. You are on the point of being forced to break with me, and yet you would have found it very difficult to do so. The duke is watching you; his virtue is very stern, and it is high time that you and I should part. You will have to be a prude, I warn you of that.[Pg 26] The duke is a vain man, and he wants to be proud of his wife.’

“‘Ah!’ she said, bursting into tears, ‘Henri, if you had only spoken!’ (you see she was determined to put the blame on me)—‘yes, if you had wished it we could have lived all our lives together, married, happy before the world, or in some quiet corner of it.’

“‘Well, it is too late now,’ I said, kissing her hands and assuming the air of a victim.

“‘No, you have gone too far with the duke. I shall even make a journey, to separate us from each other more completely. We should each have to fear the love of our own hearts.’

“‘I think not,’ I replied, ‘but he is watching you. Make yourself dévote, attend to your religious duties, for the duke is seeking proof; he is hesitating, and you ought to make him come to a decision.’

“She rose, walked about the boudoir in a state of agitation either feigned or real; then she found a pose and a glance which she no doubt felt to be in harmony with the situation; for she stopped before me, held out her hand, and said in a voice full of emotion:

“‘Henri, you are a loyal, noble, charming man, and I shall never forget you.’

“This was excellent strategy. She was enchanting[Pg 27] in this attitude, which was necessary to the situation in which she wanted to stand toward me. I assumed the manner of a man so distressed that she took me by the hand and led me—almost threw me, though gently—on the sofa, saying, after a moment’s silence: ‘I am deeply grieved, my friend. You love me truly?’

“I have suffered once more in thus recalling her treachery, but at any rate I still laugh at the air of conviction and soft inward satisfaction which she felt, if not at my death, at least at my eternal unhappiness,” continued de Marsay. “Oh! you needn’t laugh yet,” he said to the guests; “the best is still to come. I looked at her very tenderly, after a pause, and said:

“Charlotte sprang up from the sofa like a frightened doe; she trembled like a leaf, as she cast upon me one of those looks in which a[Pg 28] woman forgets her dignity, her modesty, her craftiness, even her grace—the glittering glance of a hunted serpent, forced to its hole—and said:

“On that third idea, which I leave you to guess, she made the finest organ pause ears ever listened to.

“‘Good heavens!’ she cried, ‘how wretched women are! We are never truly loved. There is nothing genuine to men in the purest sentiments. But, let me tell you, though you trick us, you are still our dupes.’

“‘So I see,’ I said with a contrite air. ‘You have too much wit in your anger for your heart to suffer much.’

“‘You have degraded life and the world in my eyes,’ she said; ‘you have torn away all my illusions, you have debased my heart—’

“In short, she said to me all that I had the right to say to her, with an unconcealed simplicity, a naive effrontery, which would certainly have got the better of any man but me.

“‘What will become of us, poor hapless women, in the social life which Louis XVIII’s Charter has created for us? Yes, we were born to suffer. As for love, we are always above you, and you are always below us, in loyalty. None of you have honesty in your hearts. For[Pg 29] you, love is a game in which you think it fair to cheat.’

“‘Dear,’ I said, ‘to take things seriously in our present social life would be to play at perfect love with an actress.’

“‘What infamous treachery!’ she cried. ‘So this has all been reasoned out?’

“‘Farewell, Monsieur de Marsay,’ she said; ‘you have deceived me shamefully.’

“‘Will Madame la duchesse,’ I asked in a submissive manner, ‘remember Charlotte’s wrongs?’

“She inclined her head; and I left her to a sentiment which allowed her to think that she had something to avenge. My friends, I have deeply studied the lives of men who have had success with women; and I feel sure that neither the Maréchal de Richelieu, nor Lauzun, nor Louis de Valois ever made, for the first time, so able a retreat. As for my own heart and mind, they were formed then and forever; and the control I gained over the unreflecting impulses which cause us to commit so many follies gave me the coolness and self-possession which you know of.”

An almost imperceptible smile which flickered for a moment on de Marsay’s pale lips made Delphine de Nucingen color.

The naiveté of the celebrated banker had such success that his wife, who had been that “second” of de Marsay’s, could not help laughing with the rest of the company.

“You are all disposed to condemn that woman,” said Lady Dudley, “but I can understand why she should not consider her marriage in the light of an inconstancy. Men never will distinguish between constancy and fidelity. I knew the woman whose history Monsieur de Marsay has just related; she was one of the last of your great ladies.”

“Alas! you are right there,” said de Marsay. “For the last fifty years we have been taking part in the steady destruction of all social distinctions. We ought to have saved women from the great shipwreck, but the Civil Code has passed its level over their heads. However terrible the words may be, they must be said; the duchess is disappearing, and so is the marquise. As for baronesses (I ask pardon of Madame de Nucingen, who will make herself a true countess when her husband becomes peer of France), the baronesses have never been regarded seriously.”

“Countesses will remain,” said de Marsay. “An elegant woman will always be more or less a countess—countess of the Empire, or of yesterday, countess of the vieille roche, or, as they say in Italy, countess of civility. But as[Pg 31] for the great lady, she is dead—dead with the grandiose surroundings of the last century; dead with her powder, mouches, and high-heeled slippers, and her busked corset adorned with its triangle of flowing ribbons. Duchesses in the present day can pass through ordinary doors that are not widened to admit a hoop. The Empire saw the last of the gowns with trains. Napoleon little imagined the effects of the Code of which he was so proud. That man, by creating his duchesses, generated the race of comme il faut[2] women whom we see today—the resulting product of his legislation.”

“Thought, used as a hammer by the lad leaving school and the nameless journalist, has demolished the splendors of the social state,” said the Comte de Vandenesse. “Today, any absurd fellow who can hold his head above a collar, cover his manly breast with half a yard of satin in the form of a waistcoat, present a brow shining with future genius under his frizzed hair, and blunder along in varnished pumps and silk socks costing half a dozen francs, now wears a glass in the arch of one eye by squeezing his cheek against it and—whether he’s a lawyer’s clerk, the son of a contractor, or a banker’s bastard—ogles impertinently the prettiest duchess, rates her charms as she comes down the staircase of a theater, and says to his friend (clothed by Buisson, like the rest of us), ‘There, my dear fellow, is a comme il faut woman.’”

“You have never made yourselves,” said Lord[Pg 32] Dudley, “into a party; it will be long now before you have any place politically. A great deal has been said in France about organizing labor, but property has never yet organized. Here is what is happening to you: A duke, no matter who (there were still a few under Louis XVIII and Charles X who possessed two hundred thousand francs a year, a splendid mansion and a retinue of servants),—that duke could still behave like a great seigneur. The last of these great French lords is the Prince de Talleyrand. This duke dies, and, let us suppose, leaves four children, two of whom are daughters. Each of these heirs, supposing that he has managed to marry them well, will inherit, at most, sixty to eighty thousand francs a year; each is father or mother of several children, consequently obliged to live on one floor, probably the ground-floor, of a house, with the strictest economy—it may be that they are even obliged to borrow money. The wife of the eldest son, who is a duchess in name only, has neither carriage, nor servants, nor opera-box, nor time of her own; she hasn’t even her own suite of rooms in a family mansion, nor her own fortune, nor her personal baubles. She is buried in marriage as a wife of the rue Saint Denis is buried in commerce; she buys the socks of her dear babes, feeds and teaches her daughters, whom she no longer puts to school in a convent. Your women of rank simply sit upon their nests.”

“Alas, yes!” said Joseph Bridau. “Our epoch no longer possesses those exquisite feminine flowers which adorned the great centuries of[Pg 33] the French monarchy. The fan of the great lady is broken. Woman no longer blushes, whispers sly malice, hides her face behind her fan only to show it—the fan serves merely to fan her! When a thing is no longer anything but what it is, it is too useful to belong to luxury.”

“Everything in France has assisted in producing the comme il faut woman,” said Daniel d’Arthèz. “The aristocracy has consented to this state of things by retreating to its estates to hide and die—emigrating to the interior before ideas as formerly it emigrated to foreign parts before the populace. Women who could have established European salons, controlled opinion and turned it like a glove, who should have ruled the world by guiding the men of art and thought who outwardly ruled it, have committed the fatal blunder of abandoning their ground, ashamed to have to struggle with a bourgeoisie intoxicated by power and making its début on the world’s stage only, perhaps, to be hacked in pieces by the barbarians who are at its heels. Where the bourgeois affects to see princesses, there are none but so-called fashionable women. Princes no longer find great ladies to distinguish; they cannot even render famous a woman taken from the ranks. The Duc de Bourbon was the last prince to use that privilege.”

“The press follows suit,” remarked Rastignac. “Women no longer have the charm of spoken[Pg 34] feuilletons, delightful satires uttered in choicest language. In like manner we nowadays read feuilletons written in a patois which changes every three years, and ‘little journals,’ as lively as undertakers, and as light as the lead of their own type. French conversation is now carried on in revolutionary Iroquois from end to end of France, where the long printed columns of the newspapers take the place in ancient mansions of those brilliant coteries of men and women who conversed there in former days.”

“The knell of Great Society has sounded, do you know it?” said a Russian prince; “and the first stroke of its iron tongue is your modern French term: femme comme il faut.”

“You are right prince,” said de Marsay. “That woman, issuing from the ranks of the nobility, or growing from the bourgeoisie, coming from any and every region, even the provinces, is the expression of the spirit of our day—a last image of good taste, wit, intellect, grace, and distinction united, but all diminishing. We shall see no more grandes dames in France, but for a long time still to come there will be comme il faut women, sent by public opinion to the Upper Feminine Chamber—women who will be to the fair sex what the ‘gentleman’ is among his fellows in England.”

“And they call that progress!” said Mademoiselle des Touches. “I would like to know what progress is.”

“This,” said Madame de Nucingen: “Formerly a woman might have the voice of a fish-wife,[Pg 35] the walk of a grenadier, the forehead of the boldest hussy, a fat foot, a thick hand, but nevertheless that woman was a ‘great lady’; but now, be she a Montmorency—if the Demoiselles de Montmorency could ever have such attributes—she would not be a woman comme il faut.”

“What is meant by a woman comme il faut?” asked Comte Adam Laginski, naively.

“She’s a modern creation, a deplorable triumph of the elective system applied to the fair sex,” said de Marsay. “Every revolution has its term, or saying, in which it is summed up and described. Our social revolution has ended in the comme il faut woman.”

“You are right,” said the Russian prince, who had come to Paris to make himself a literary reputation. “To explain certain terms or sayings added century by century to your noble language, would be to write a glorious history. Organize, for instance, is the word of the Empire; it contains Napoleon—the whole of him.”

“But all that is not telling us what you mean by the woman comme il faut,” cried the young Pole, with some impatience.

“I’ll explain her to you,” said Emile Blondet. “On a fine morning you are lounging about Paris. It is more than two o’clock, but not yet five. You see a woman coming toward you; the first glance you cast upon her is like the preface to a fine book; it makes you anticipate a world of refined and elegant things. Like[Pg 36] the botanist crossing hill and valley as he searches for specimens, among all varieties of Parisian commonness you have found a rare flower. Either this woman is accompanied by two very distinguished-looking men, one of whom is decorated, or by a footman in undress livery who follows her at a little distance. She wears neither startling colors, nor open-worked stockings, nor over-ornamental buckles, nor drawers with embroidered frills visible at her ankles. You notice that her shoes are either prunella, with strings crossed on the instep over thread stockings of extreme fineness, or gray silk stockings that are perfectly plain; or else she wears dainty little boots of exquisite simplicity. Some pretty and inexpensive stuff makes you notice her gown, the shape of which surprises the bourgeois, it is almost always a pelisse, fastened by knots of ribbon and delicately edged with a silken cord or an almost imperceptible binding. The lady has an art of her own in putting on a shawl or a mantle; she knows how to wrap it from her waist to her throat, forming a sort of carapace which would make a bourgeoise look like a tortoise, but under which the comme il faut woman contrives to suggest a beautiful figure while concealing it. How? by what means? That is a secret which she keeps, without the protection of any patent. She walks with a certain concentric and harmonious motion, which makes her sweet alluring figure quiver under the stuffs as an adder at midday makes the green grass-tops above him move. Does she owe to angel or devil that[Pg 37] graceful undulation which plays beneath the black silk mantle, sways the lace of its border, and sheds a balmy air which I shall venture to call the breeze-Parisian? You remark upon her arms, about her waist, around her neck, a science of folds draping even a restive stuff, which reminds you of the ancient Mnemosyne. Ah! how well she understands—forgive me the expression—the technique of walking. Examine well the way in which she puts her foot forward, moulding an outline beneath her gown with a decent precision which excites the admiration, restrained by respect, of those who pass her. If an Englishwoman tried that walk she would look like a grenadier marching to the assault of a redoubt. To the woman of Paris belongs the genius of gait. The municipality has long owed her our coming asphalt pavements. You will observe that this lady jostles no one. In order to pass, she stands still, waiting with proud modesty until a way is made for her. Her attitude, both tranquil and disdainful, obliges the most insolent dandy to step aside. Her bonnet, of remarkable simplicity, has fresh strings. Possibly, there may be flowers upon it; but the cleverest of these women wear only ribbons. Feathers require a carriage, flowers attract the eye. Beneath the bonnet you see the cool and restful face of a woman who is sure of herself, but without self-conceit; who looks at nothing, but sees all; and whose vanity, lulled by continual gratification, gives to her countenance an expression of indifference which piques curiosity. She knows she is being studied; she is well aware that nearly[Pg 38] everyone, even women, turn round to look at her. She passes through Paris like a film of gossamer, as white and as pearly. This beautiful specimen of her sex prefers the warmest latitudes and the cleanest longitudes in Paris; you will therefore find her between the 10th and the 110th arcade of the rue de Rivoli, along the line of the boulevards, from the equator of the Panorama, where the productions of the Indies flourish and the finest creations of industry are blooming, to the cape of the Madeleine; you will find her also in the least muddy regions of the bourgeoisie, between number 30 and number 150 of the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. During the winter she takes her pleasure on the terrace of the Feuillants, and not upon the bituminous pavements which skirt it. According to weather, she glides through the alleys of the Champs Elysées. Never will you meet this charming variety of woman in the hyperboreal regions of the rue Saint-Denis, never in the Kamchatka of muddy streets small and commercial, and never anywhere in rainy weather. These flowers of Paris, opening to the sun, perfume the promenades and fold their leaves by five in the afternoon like a convolvulus. The women whom you will see later having slightly the same air and trying to imitate them are of another race. This fair unknown, the Beatrice of our day, is the comme il faut woman.

“It is not always easy, my dear count,” said Blondet, interrupting himself for a moment, “for foreigners to perceive the differences by which a connoisseur emeritus distinguishes the[Pg 39] two species, for women are born comedians. But those differences strike the eye of all Parisians: hooks are visible, tapes show their yellowish white through a gap at the back of the gown; shoes are worn at heel, bonnet strings have been ironed, the gown puffs out too much, the bustle is flattened. You notice a sort of effort in the premeditated lowering of the eyelids. The attitude is conventional. As for the bourgeoise, it is impossible to confound her with the woman who is comme il faut; she makes an admirable foil to her, she explains the charm the unknown lady has cast upon you. The bourgeoise is busy; she is out in all weathers; comes and goes and trots; is undecided whether she will, or whether she will not enter a shop. Where the comme il faut woman knows perfectly well what she wants and what she means to do, the bourgeoise is undecided, pulls up her gown to cross a gutter, drags a child after her, and is forced to watch for carriages; she is a mother in public and lectures her daughter; carries money in a hand-bag and wears open-work stockings, a boa above a fur cape in winter, and a shawl with a scarf in summer—the bourgeoise is an adept at the superfluities of the toilet. As for your Beatrice, you will find her in the evening at the Opera, or in a ballroom. She then appears under an aspect so different that you fancy her two different creations without relationship. The woman has issued from her morning vestments like a butterfly from its larva. She serves, as a dainty morsel to your raptured senses, the form which her shawl scarce outlined in the[Pg 40] morning. At the theater the woman of society never goes higher than the second tier of boxes, unless at the Italian opera. You can therefore study at your ease the precise slowness of her movements. This adorable maneuverer uses all the little artifices of woman’s manner with a natural ease that precludes the idea of art and premeditation. Is her hand royally beautiful, the most suspicious man would believe it absolutely necessary to roll, or fasten up, or toss aside whichever ringlet or curl she may touch. Has she nobility of profile, you will think she is merely giving irony or charm to what she says to her neighbor, by turning her head in a manner to produce that magic effect, so dear to great painters, which draws the light to the cheek, defines the nose with a clear outline, illumines the pink of the nostril, carves the forehead with sharp prominence, and leaves a touch of high light on the chin. If she has a pretty foot she throws herself on a sofa with the coquetry of a cat in the sunshine, her feet forward, without your seeing anything more in that pretty pose than a charming model of lassitude for a sculptor. No other woman but the woman comme il faut is ever perfectly at her ease in her clothes; nothing disturbs her. You will never see her putting in place, like a bourgeoise, a rebellious shoulder-knot, or looking to see if the lace of her chemisette fulfills it purpose of unfaithful guardian to the sparkling whiteness of her bosom; never will you find her looking in a mirror to learn whether her coiffure is perfectly intact. Her toilet is always in harmony with her character; she had[Pg 41] had time to study herself and to decide what suits her; she has long known what does not suit her. You never see her when the audience of a theater disperses; she departs before the end of the play. If by chance she is seen, calm and sedate, upon the steps of the staircase, some strong sentiment has prompted her. She is there to order; she has some look to give, some promise to receive. Perhaps she is descending slowly to gratify the vanity of a slave whom she occasionally obeys. If you meet her in society, at a ball or a soirée, you will gather the honey, real or affected, of her practised voice; you will be enchanted with her idle talk, to which she contrives to impart the semblance of thought with inimitable skill—”

“Then it isn’t necessary for the comme il faut woman to have intellect?” said the young Polish count.

“It is impossible to be that kind of woman without taste,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.

“And to have taste is, in France, to have more than mind,” said the Russian prince.

“The mind of this woman is the triumph of an art that is wholly plastic,” replied Blondet. “You don’t know what she says, but you are charmed. She has nodded her head or sweetly shrugged her handsome shoulders, or gilded some meaningless phrase with a smile or a charming pout, or put Voltaire’s epigram into an ‘Oh!’ an ‘Ah!’ an ‘Is it possible?’ The turn of her head is an active interrogation; she gives meaning of some kind to the movement with which she dances a vinaigrette fastened by a[Pg 42] chain to her finger. These are artificial great effects obtained by very small ones: she lets her hand fall nobly from the arm of her chair, and all is said; she has rendered judgment without appeal, fit to move the most insensible. She has listened to you, she has given you an opportunity to show your wit; and—I appeal to your modesty—such moments in society are rare.”

The innocent air of the young Pole whom Blondet was addressing made every one laugh heartily.

“You can’t talk half an hour with a bourgeoise before she brings to light her husband under one form or another,” continued Blondet, whose gravity was not shaken; “but if your comme il faut woman is married she has the tact to conceal her husband, and the perseverance of a Christopher Columbus would hardly enable you to discover him. If you have not been able to question others on this point, you will see her toward the end of the evening fix her eyes steadily on a man of middle age, who inclines his head and leaves the room; she has told her husband to call up the carriage, and she departs. In her own house no comme il faut woman is ever seen before four o’clock, the hour at which she receives. She is wise enough to make you wait even then. You will find good taste throughout her house; her luxury is intended for use, and is renewed when needful; you will see nothing there under glass cases, nor any swathings of protective gauze. The staircase is warm; flowers gladden you everywhere; flowers are the only presents[Pg 43] she accepts, and those from a few persons only; bouquets give pleasure and live for a single day and are then renewed. To her they are, as in the East, a symbol and a promise. The costly trifles of fashion are spread about, but her salons are not turned into a museum or an old curiosity shop. You will find her seated on a sofa at the corner of the fireplace, whence she will bow to you without rising. Her conversation is no longer that of the ballroom; in her own house she is bound to entertain you. The comme il faut woman possesses all these shades of behavior in perfection. She welcomes in you a man who will swell the circle of her society, the great object of the cares and anxieties of all women of the world. Consequently, to attach you to her salon she will make herself charmingly coquettish. You will feel above all, in that salon, how isolated women are in the present day and why they endeavor to have a little society about them in which they can shine as constellations. But this is the death of conversation; conversation is impossible without generalities.”

“Yes,” said de Marsay, “you have seized upon the great defect of our epoch. Epigram, that book in a word, no longer falls, as in the eighteenth century, on persons and on things, but on petty events and dies with the day.”

“The wit of the comme il faut woman, when she has any,” resumed Blondet, “consists in putting a doubt on everything, while the bourgeoise uses hers to affirm everything. There lies a great difference between the two women.[Pg 44] The bourgeoise is certain of her virtue; the comme il faut woman is not sure whether she has any yet, or whether she has always had it. This hesitation about everything is one of the last graces our horrible epoch has granted her. She seldom goes to church, but she will talk religion to you and try to convert you, if you have the good sense to play the freethinker, for that will open the way to the stereotyped phrases, the motions of the head and the gestures which belong to such women: ‘Ah, fie! I thought you had more intelligence than to attack religion. Society is crumbling already and you remove its prop. But religion at this moment is you and I, it is property, it is the future of our children! Ah! let us not be egotists. Individualism is the disease of our epoch, and religion is the sole remedy; it unites the families that your laws disunite,’ etc., etc. She begins in this way a neo-Christian sermon sprinkled with political ideas, which is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but moral (oh! devilishly moral), in which you will find echoes of every protest that modern doctrines driven to bay have given voice to.”

The women present could not help laughing at the mincing affectations of their sex with which Emile Blondet illustrated his sarcasms.

“Those remarks, my dear Comte Adam,” said Blondet, looking at the young Pole, “will show you that the comme il faut woman represents intellectual hodge-podge as well as political jumble; just as she lives surrounded by the brilliant but not lasting products of modern industry, which aims at the destruction of its[Pg 45] work in order to replace it. You will leave her house saying to yourself, ‘She has, decidedly, very superior ideas’; and you think so all the more because she has sounded your heart and mind with a delicate hand; she has sought your secrets—for the comme il faut woman feigns ignorance of everything, in order to discover everything; but she is discreet; there are things she never admits knowing, however well she may know them. Nevertheless you will feel uneasy, you are ignorant of the real state of her heart. Formerly the great ladies loved openly, banners displayed; now the woman comme il faut has her little passion ruled like a sheet of music paper with its signs and notes, its minims, rests, and sharps and flats. Always weak, she will neither sacrifice her love, her husband, or the future of her children. She’s a woman of ambiguous middle-paths, of squint-eyed temporizing with conventions, of unavowed passions carried along between two breakwaters. She fears her servants like an Englishwoman who sees before her the perspective of a divorce suit. This woman, so apparently at her ease in a ballroom, so charming on the street, is a slave at home. She has no independence, unless locked in with her own ideas. She is determined to remain outwardly the woman comme il faut. That’s her theory of life. A woman separated from her husband, reduced to a pittance, without carriage or luxury or opera-box, is today neither wife, maid, nor bourgeoise; she dissolves, she becomes a thing. What is to become of her? The Carmelites won’t take married[Pg 46] women. Will her lover always want her? That’s a question. Therefore the comme il faut woman may sometimes cause calumny, but never condemnation.”

“Consequently, the comme il faut woman,” continued Blondet, “lives between English hypocrisy and the frankness of the eighteenth century—a bastard system emblematic of a period when nothing that comes is like that which goes, when transitions lead nowhere, when the great figures of the past are blotted out, and distinctions are purely personal. In my opinion it is impossible for a woman, even though she be born on the steps of a throne, to acquire before the age of twenty-five, the encyclopedic science of nothings, the art of maneuvering, the various great little things—music of the voice, harmonies of color, angelic deviltries and innocent wickedness, the language and the silence, the gravity and the folly, the wit and the stupidity, the diplomacy and the ignorance which constitute the woman comme il faut.”

“Accepting the description you have just given of her,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to Emile Blondet, “where do you class the authoress? Is she a woman comme il faut!”

“When she is not gifted with genius, she is a woman comme il n’en faut pas,”[3] replied Emile Blondet, accompanying his answer with a glance which might pass for a frank compliment[Pg 47] to Camille Maupin. “But that is not my own saying; it belongs to Napoleon, who hated women of genius,” he added.

“Don’t be too hard on Napoleon,” said Canalis, with an emphatic tone and gesture, “It was one of his littlenesses—for he had them—to be jealous of literary fame. Who can explain, or describe, or comprehend Napoleon?—a man represented always with folded arms, yet who did all things; who was the greatest known Power, the most concentrated power, the most corrosive and acid of all powers; a strong genius which led an armed civilization throughout the world and fixed it nowhere; a man who could do all because he willed all; prodigious phenomenon of Will!—subduing disease by a battle, yet doomed to die of disease in his bed after living unscathed amid cannon-balls and bullets; a man who had in his head a Code and a Sword, word and action; a clear-sighted mind which divined all except his own fall; a capricious politician who played his soldiers like pawns and yet respected three heads—Talleyrand, Pozzo di Borgo, and Metternich, diplomatists whose death would have saved the French Empire, but whose life seemed to him of more value than that of thousands of soldiers; a man to whom, by some rare privilege, nature had left a heart in his iron body; a man at midnight kind and laughing among women, and the next day handling Europe without gloves; hypocritical and generous; loving vulgarity and simplicity; without taste, but protecting Art; and, in spite of these antitheses, grand in all things by instinct or by organization;[Pg 48] Caesar at twenty-five years of age, Cromwell at thirty, but a good husband and a good father like any bourgeois of Père Lachaise; a man who created great public buildings, empires, kings, codes, poems, and one romance, and all with greater range than accuracy. Did he not attempt to make Europe France; and after bearing our weight upon the earth until it changed the laws of gravitation, has he not left us poorer than the day he put his hand upon us? He who made an empire with his name, lost that name on the borders of his empire in a sea of blood and slaughtered men. A man all thought and action, who was able to comprehend both Desaix and Fouché.”

“Despotic power and legal justice, each in due season, makes the true ruler,” said de Marsay.

“But,” said the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the other women with a smile both dubious and satirical, “have we women really deteriorated as these gentlemen seem to think? Because today, under a system which belittles everything, you men like little dishes, little apartments, little paintings, little journals, little books, is that any reason why women should be less grand than they have been? Does the human heart change because you change your habits? In all epochs passions remain the same. I know splendid devotions, sublime endurances which lack publicity—fame, if you prefer to call it so. Many a woman is not less an Agnes Sorel because she never saved a king of France. Do you think our Marquise d’Espard worth less than Madame Doublet or[Pg 49] Madame du Deffand, in whose salon so much harm was said and done? Isn’t Taglioni the equal of Camargo? and Malibran of Saint-Huberti? Are not our poets superior to those of the eighteenth century? If, at this moment, thanks to the grocers who govern us, we have no style of our own, didn’t the Empire have a style as fully its own as that of Louis XV? And its splendor was surely fabulous. Have the arts and sciences lost ground?”

“I agree with you, madame,” said Général de Montriveau. “In my opinion the women of this epoch are truly great. When posterity gives a verdict upon us will not Madame Recamier’s fame be equal to that of the loveliest women of past ages? We have made history so fast that we lack historians to write it down. The reign of Louis XIV had but one Madame de Sévigné, while we have a thousand today in Paris who can write better letters, but do not publish them. Whether the French woman calls herself femme comme il faut or great lady, she will always be the pre-eminent woman. Emile Blondet has made us a picture of the manners and charms of a woman of the present day; but, if occasion offered, this mincing, affected being, who plays a part and warbles out the ideas of Monsieur this, that, and the other, would show herself heroic! Even your faults, mesdames, seem the more poetic because they are and always will be hedged about with great dangers. I have seen much of the world, perhaps I have studied it too late; but, under circumstances in which the illegality of your sentiments might find excuse, I have always observed[Pg 50] the effects of some chance—you may call it Providence if you like—which fatally overtake those women whom we call frail.”

“I hope,” said Madame de Camps, “that we are able to be great in other ways.”

“All the more because he has preached by example,” said the Baronne de Nucingen.

“Alas!” said Général de Montriveau, “of the many dramas—that’s a word you are constantly using,” he said with a nod to Blondet, “in which to my knowledge the hand of God has showed itself, the most terrible was one that was partly my own doing.”

“The taste of a virtuous woman,” said de Marsay replying to the charming daughter of Lord Dudley.

“During the campaign of 1812,” said Général de Montriveau, “I was the involuntary cause of a terrible misfortune, which may serve you, Docteur Bianchon,” he said, turning to me—“you, who take so much note of the human mind while you study the human body—to solve certain of your riddles concerning the will. I was making my second campaign; I liked the danger and I laughed at everything, simple young lieutenant of artillery that I was! When we reached the Beresina the army no longer kept, as you know, any discipline; military obedience was at an end. A crowd of men of[Pg 51] all nations was making its way instinctively from north to south. Soldiers drove their bare-footed and ragged general from their camp-fires if he brought them neither wood nor provisions. After the passage of that famous river, the disorder was checked. I came out quietly, alone, without food, from the marshes of Zembin, and I walked along looking for a house where some one might be willing to admit me. Finding none all day, being driven away from those I came to, I fortunately saw late in the evening a miserable little Polish farmhouse, of which I can give you no idea unless you have seen the wooden houses of lower Normandy or the poorest hovels of La Beauce. These Polish dwellings consist of a single room, one end of which is divided off by a plank partition and serves as a storehouse for provisions. I saw in the twilight a light smoke rising from this building, and hoping to find comrades more compassionate than the persons I had hitherto approached, I marched boldly to the door. Entering, I found a table spread. Several officers, among whom was a woman (a not unusual sight), were eating potatoes and horse-flesh broiled on the embers, and frozen beets. I recognized two or three captains of artillery belonging to the regiment in which I had first served. I was received with a volley of hails which would greatly have surprised me on the other side of the Beresina; but at this moment the cold was less intense, my comrades were resting, they were warm, they were eating, and piles of straw at the end of the room offered them the prospect of a delightful night. We[Pg 52] didn’t ask for much in those days. My comrades could be generous gratis—a very common way of being generous, by the bye. At the end of the table, near the door which led into the small room filled with straw and hay, I saw my former colonel, one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met in the varied collection of men it has been my lot to know. He was an Italian. Whenever human beings are handsome in southern countries they are sublimely handsome. Have you ever noticed the peculiar whiteness of Italians when they are white? It is magnificent, especially in the light. When I read the fantastic portrait Charles Nodier has given us of Colonel Oudet, I found my own impressions expressed in every sentence. Italian, like most of the officers of his regiment—borrowed by the Emperor from the army of Prince Eugène—my colonel was a man of great height, admirably proportioned, possibly a trifle too stout, but amazingly vigorous and light, agile as a greyhound. His black hair, curling profusely, set into brilliant relief a clear white skin like that of a woman. He had handsome feet, small hands, a charming mouth, and an aquiline nose with delicate lines, the tip of which contracted naturally and turned white when he was angry, which was often. His irascibility so passed all belief that I shall tell you nothing of it; you shall judge for yourself. No one was ever at ease in his presence. Perhaps I was the only man who did not fear him. It is true that he had taken a singular liking to me; he thought whatever I did was good. When anger worked within him,[Pg 53] his forehead contracted, his muscles stood out in the middle of it like the horse-shoe of Red-gauntlet. That sign would have terrified you more than the magnetic lightning of his blue eyes. His whole body would then quiver, and his strength, always so great in his normal condition, passed all bounds. He rolled his r’s excessively. His voice, certainly as powerful as that of Charles Nodier’s Oudet, gave an indescribable richness of sound to the syllable which contained that consonant. Though this vice of pronunciation was, in him, and at all times, a charm, you cannot imagine the power that accent, considered so vulgar in Paris, was capable of expressing when he commanded a maneuver, or was in any way excited. You must have heard it to understand it. When the colonel was tranquil his blue eyes were full of angelic sweetness; his pure brow sparkled with an expression that was full of charm. At a parade of the Army of Italy no man could compare with him. Even d’Orsay himself, the handsome d’Orsay, was vanquished by our colonel at the last review held by Napoleon before his entrance into Russia. In this gifted man all was contradiction. Passion lives by contrasts. Therefore do not ask me whether he was conscious of those irresistible influences to which our nature” (the general looked toward the Princesse de Cadignan) “bends like molten glass beneath the blower’s pipe; but it so chanced that by some unusual fatality the colonel had had but few love-affairs, or had neglected to have them. To give you an idea of his violence, I will tell you in two words what I once saw him do in a[Pg 54] fit of anger. We were marching with our cannon along a very narrow road, bordered on one side by woods and on the other by a rather steep bank. Half way along this road we met another regiment of artillery, its colonel marching with it. This colonel wanted to make the captain of our regiment at the head of the first battery give way to his troop. Naturally our captain refused. But the colonel of the other regiment made a sign to his first battery to advance, and in spite of the care the first driver took to keep close into the woods the wheel of the gun carriage caught the right leg of our captain, broke it, and flung him to the other side of his horse. It was done in a moment. Our colonel, who happened to be at a little distance, saw the quarrel, and galloped furiously up through the trees and among the wheels at the risk of being flung with all his hoofs in the air, reaching the spot in face of the other colonel just as the captain cried out, ‘Help!’ and fell. No! our Italian colonel was no longer a man. Foam, like that of champagne, boiled from his mouth, he growled like a lion. Incapable of uttering a word, even a cry, he made a dreadful sign to his adversary, pointing to the wood, and drew his sabre. They entered it. In two seconds we saw the other colonel on the ground with his head split in two. The soldiers of that regiment retreated, ha! the devil! and in quick time, too! Our captain, who just missed being killed, and who was yelping in the ditch where the wheel of the gun-carriage had flung him, had a wife, a charming Italian woman from[Pg 55] Messina, who was not indifferent to our colonel. This circumstance had greatly increased his fury. His protection was due to the husband; he was bound to defend him as well as the wife. Now, in the miserable Polish cabin this side of Zembin, where, as I told you, I received such cordial welcome, this very captain sat opposite to me, and his wife was at the other end of the table opposite to the colonel. She was a little woman, named Rosina, very dark, but bearing in her black eyes, shaped like almonds, all the ardor of the sun of Sicily. At this moment she was deplorably thin, her cheeks were covered with dust like a peach exposed to the weather on a high road. Scarcely clothed and all in rags, wearied by marches, her hair in disorder beneath the fragment of a shawl tied across her head, there was still all the presence of a woman about her; her movements were pretty, her rosy, dimpled mouth, her white teeth, the lines of her face and bust, charms which misery, cold, and want of care had not entirely effaced—still told of love and sweetness to anyone whose mind could dwell upon a woman. Rosina evidently possessed one of those natures which are fragile in appearance, but are full of nervous strength. The face of the husband, a Piedmontese nobleman, expressed a sort of jeering good-humor, if it is permissible to ally those two words. Brave, intelligent and educated, he nevertheless seemed to ignore the relations which had existed between his wife and the colonel for nearly three years. I attributed this indifference to the strange customs of Italy, or to some[Pg 56] secret in their own home; but there was in the man’s face one feature which had always inspired me with involuntary distrust. His underlip, thin and very flexible, turned down at its two extremities instead of turning up, which seemed to me to reveal an underlying cruelty in a character apparently phlegmatic and indolent. You can well imagine that the conversation was not brilliant when I entered. My weary comrades were eating in silence, but they naturally asked me a few questions; and we related our several misfortunes, mingling them with reflections on the campaign, the generals, their blunders, the Russians, and the cold. Soon after my arrival, the colonel, having finished his meagre meal, wiped his mustache, wished us good-night, cast his black eye toward the woman, and said, ‘Rosina.’ Then without awaiting any reply he went into the space partitioned off for forage. The meaning of his summons was evident; and the young woman made an indescribable gesture, which expressed both the annoyance that she felt at seeing her dependance thus exhibited without respect for human feelings, and her sense of the affront offered to her dignity as a woman and to her husband. And yet in the strained expression of her features and in the violent contraction of her eyebrows, there seemed to be a sort of foreboding; perhaps a presentiment of her fate came over her. Rosina continued to sit tranquilly at the table; a moment later the colonel’s voice was heard repeating her name, ‘Rosina!’ The tone of this new summons was even more brutal than that of[Pg 57] the first. The rolling accent of the colonel’s voice and the echo which the Italian language gives to vowels and final letters revealed in a startling manner the tyranny, impatience, and will of that man. Rosina turned pale, but she rose, passed behind us, and joined the colonel. All my comrades maintained a rigid silence; but I, unhappily, after looking round at them, began to laugh, and the laugh was then repeated from mouth to mouth. ‘You laugh?’ said the husband. ‘Faith, comrade,’ I replied, becoming serious, ‘I did wrong, I admit it; I ask ten thousand pardons; and if you are not content with such excuses I am ready to give you satisfaction.’ ‘It is not you who have done wrong, it is I,’ he replied coldly. Thereupon we all shook down our straw about the room and were soon lost in the sleep of weariness. The next day each man, without awaking his neighbor, without looking for a journeying companion, started on his way with that utter egotism which made our retreat from Russia one of the most horrible dramas of personality, sadness, and horror which ever took place beneath the heavens. Yet after each man had gone some seven or eight hundred yards from our night’s lodging, we came together and marched along like geese led in flocks by the unconscious dominance of a child. A common necessity was driving us along. When we reached a slight elevation from which we could see the house where we had passed the night, we heard sounds that resembled the roaring of lions in the desert or the bellowing of bulls; but no! that clamor could not be compared to[Pg 58] any known sound. Mingled with that horrible and sinister roar came the feeble cry of a woman. We all turned round, seized with a sensation—I know not how to describe it—of fear; the house was no longer visible, only a burning pile; the building, which someone had barricaded, was in flames. Clouds of smoke, driven by the wind, rolled toward us, bringing raucous sounds and a strong indescribable odor. A few steps from us marched the captain, who had quietly joined our caravan; we looked at him in silence, for none of us dared question him. But he, divining our curiosity, touched his breast with the forefinger of his right hand and pointed with the left to the conflagration. ‘Son io!’ he said. We continued our way without another word to him.”

“It would be too dreadful to let us part with that horrible scene in our minds,” said Madame de Montcornet. “I shall dream of it.”

“Tell us, before we go, what punishment befell Monsieur de Marsay’s first love,” said Lord Dudley, smiling.

“Monsieur Bianchon can tell you that,” replied de Marsay, turning to me. “He saw her die.”

“Yes,” I said, “and her death was one of the most beautiful I ever witnessed. The duke and I had passed the night beside the pillow of the dying woman, whose disease, consumption, was[Pg 59] then in its final stages; no hope remained, and she had received the last offices of the Church the preceding evening. The duke had fallen asleep. Madame la duchesse, waking about four in the morning, made me, in a touching manner and with a smile, a tender little sign to let him sleep; and yet she felt she was about to die! She had reached a stage of extraordinary thinness, but her face preserved its features, and its outlines were truly sublime. Her pallor made her skin resemble porcelain behind which a light has been placed. Her brilliant eyes and the color in her cheeks shone out upon this skin so softly beautiful, while the whole countenance seemed to breathe forth a commanding tranquility. Evidently she pitied the duke, and the feeling took its rise in a lofty sentiment which seemed to see no limit in the approach of death. The silence was profound. The chamber, softly lighted by a lamp, had the appearance of all sick-chambers at the moment of death. At that instant the clock struck. The duke awoke, and was in despair at having slept. I did not see the gesture of impatience with which he showed the regret he felt at having lost his wife from sight during the few last moments granted to him; but it is certain that any other person than the dying woman might have been mistaken about him. A statesman, preoccupied with the interests of France, the duke had many of those apparent oddities which often make men of genius pass for fools, though the explanation may be found in the exquisite nature and requirements of their mind. He now took a chair beside the bed and looked fixedly at his wife. The dying[Pg 60] woman put out her hand and took that of her husband which she pressed gently, saying in a soft but trembling voice:

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Translated by George Milburn.

[2] “As it should be”—correct, ideal, perfect.

[3] “As it shouldn’t be,” the opposite of comme il faut.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Another study of woman

Another Study of Woman

ANOTHER STUDY OF WOMAN[1]

FOOTNOTES:

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