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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Duchesse de Langeais, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Duchesse de Langeais
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Ellen Marriage
+
+Release Date: March, 1996  [Etext #469]
+Posting Date: February 20, 2010
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DUCHESSE DE LANGEAIS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DUCHESSE OF LANGEAIS
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+Translated by Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+Preparer's Note:
+
+  The Duchesse of Langeais is the second part of a trilogy. Part
+  one is entitled Ferragus and part three is The Girl with the
+  Golden Eyes. The three stories are frequently combined under the
+  title The Thirteen.
+
+
+                           To Franz Liszt
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DUCHESSE OF LANGEAIS
+
+In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands a
+convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule instituted
+by St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first rigor of the
+reformation brought about by that illustrious woman. Extraordinary as
+this may seem, it is none the less true. Almost every religious house
+in the Peninsula, or in Europe for that matter, was either destroyed or
+disorganized by the outbreak of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
+wars; but as this island was protected through those times by the
+English fleet, its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure
+from the general trouble and spoliation. The storms of many kinds which
+shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century spent their
+force before they reached those cliffs at so short a distance from the
+coast of Andalusia.
+
+If the rumour of the Emperor's name so much as reached the shore of the
+island, it is doubtful whether the holy women kneeling in the cloisters
+grasped the reality of his dream-like progress of glory, or the majesty
+that blazed in flame across kingdom after kingdom during his meteor
+life.
+
+In the minds of the Roman Catholic world, the convent stood out
+pre-eminent for a stern discipline which nothing had changed; the purity
+of its rule had attracted unhappy women from the furthest parts of
+Europe, women deprived of all human ties, sighing after the long suicide
+accomplished in the breast of God. No convent, indeed, was so well
+fitted for that complete detachment of the soul from all earthly things,
+which is demanded by the religious life, albeit on the continent of
+Europe there are many convents magnificently adapted to the purpose
+of their existence. Buried away in the loneliest valleys, hanging
+in mid-air on the steepest mountainsides, set down on the brink
+of precipices, in every place man has sought for the poetry of the
+Infinite, the solemn awe of Silence; in every place man has striven to
+draw closer to God, seeking Him on mountain peaks, in the depths below
+the crags, at the cliff's edge; and everywhere man has found God. But
+nowhere, save on this half-European, half-African ledge of rock could
+you find so many different harmonies, combining so to raise the soul,
+that the sharpest pain comes to be like other memories; the strongest
+impressions are dulled, till the sorrows of life are laid to rest in the
+depths.
+
+The convent stands on the highest point of the crags at the uttermost
+end of the island. On the side towards the sea the rock was once rent
+sheer away in some globe-cataclysm; it rises up a straight wall from
+the base where the waves gnaw at the stone below high-water mark. Any
+assault is made impossible by the dangerous reefs that stretch far out
+to sea, with the sparkling waves of the Mediterranean playing over them.
+So, only from the sea can you discern the square mass of the convent
+built conformably to the minute rules laid down as to the shape, height,
+doors, and windows of monastic buildings. From the side of the town, the
+church completely hides the solid structure of the cloisters and their
+roofs, covered with broad slabs of stone impervious to sun or storm or
+gales of wind.
+
+The church itself, built by the munificence of a Spanish family, is the
+crowning edifice of the town. Its fine, bold front gives an imposing
+and picturesque look to the little city in the sea. The sight of such
+a city, with its close-huddled roofs, arranged for the most part
+amphitheatre-wise above a picturesque harbour, and crowned by a glorious
+cathedral front with triple-arched Gothic doorways, belfry towers, and
+filigree spires, is a spectacle surely in every way the sublimest on
+earth. Religion towering above daily life, to put men continually
+in mind of the End and the way, is in truth a thoroughly Spanish
+conception. But now surround this picture by the Mediterranean, and a
+burning sky, imagine a few palms here and there, a few stunted evergreen
+trees mingling their waving leaves with the motionless flowers and
+foliage of carved stone; look out over the reef with its white fringes
+of foam in contrast to the sapphire sea; and then turn to the city, with
+its galleries and terraces whither the townsfolk come to take the air
+among their flowers of an evening, above the houses and the tops of the
+trees in their little gardens; add a few sails down in the harbour; and
+lastly, in the stillness of falling night, listen to the organ music,
+the chanting of the services, the wonderful sound of bells pealing out
+over the open sea. There is sound and silence everywhere; oftener still
+there is silence over all.
+
+The church is divided within into a sombre mysterious nave and narrow
+aisles. For some reason, probably because the winds are so high, the
+architect was unable to build the flying buttresses and intervening
+chapels which adorn almost all cathedrals, nor are there openings of any
+kind in the walls which support the weight of the roof. Outside there
+is simply the heavy wall structure, a solid mass of grey stone further
+strengthened by huge piers placed at intervals. Inside, the nave and its
+little side galleries are lighted entirely by the great stained-glass
+rose-window suspended by a miracle of art above the centre doorway; for
+upon that side the exposure permits of the display of lacework in stone
+and of other beauties peculiar to the style improperly called Gothic.
+
+The larger part of the nave and aisles was left for the townsfolk, who
+came and went and heard mass there. The choir was shut off from the
+rest of the church by a grating and thick folds of brown curtain, left
+slightly apart in the middle in such a way that nothing of the choir
+could be seen from the church except the high altar and the officiating
+priest. The grating itself was divided up by the pillars which supported
+the organ loft; and this part of the structure, with its carved wooden
+columns, completed the line of the arcading in the gallery carried by
+the shafts in the nave. If any inquisitive person, therefore, had been
+bold enough to climb upon the narrow balustrade in the gallery to look
+down into the choir, he could have seen nothing but the tall eight-sided
+windows of stained glass beyond the high altar.
+
+At the time of the French expedition into Spain to establish Ferdinand
+VII once more on the throne, a French general came to the island after
+the taking of Cadiz, ostensibly to require the recognition of the King's
+Government, really to see the convent and to find some means of
+entering it. The undertaking was certainly a delicate one; but a man of
+passionate temper, whose life had been, as it were, but one series of
+poems in action, a man who all his life long had lived romances instead
+of writing them, a man pre-eminently a Doer, was sure to be tempted by a
+deed which seemed to be impossible.
+
+To open the doors of a convent of nuns by lawful means! The metropolitan
+or the Pope would scarcely have permitted it! And as for force or
+stratagem--might not any indiscretion cost him his position, his whole
+career as a soldier, and the end in view to boot? The Duc d'Angouleme
+was still in Spain; and of all the crimes which a man in favour with the
+Commander-in-Chief might commit, this one alone was certain to find him
+inexorable. The General had asked for the mission to gratify private
+motives of curiosity, though never was curiosity more hopeless. This
+final attempt was a matter of conscience. The Carmelite convent on the
+island was the only nunnery in Spain which had baffled his search.
+
+As he crossed from the mainland, scarcely an hour's distance, he felt a
+presentiment that his hopes were to be fulfilled; and afterwards, when
+as yet he had seen nothing of the convent but its walls, and of the nuns
+not so much as their robes; while he had merely heard the chanting of
+the service, there were dim auguries under the walls and in the sound of
+the voices to justify his frail hope. And, indeed, however faint those
+so unaccountable presentiments might be, never was human passion more
+vehemently excited than the General's curiosity at that moment. There
+are no small events for the heart; the heart exaggerates everything; the
+heart weighs the fall of a fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of
+a woman's glove in the same scales, and the glove is nearly always
+the heavier of the two. So here are the facts in all their prosaic
+simplicity. The facts first, the emotions will follow.
+
+An hour after the General landed on the island, the royal authority was
+re-established there. Some few Constitutional Spaniards who had found
+their way thither after the fall of Cadiz were allowed to charter
+a vessel and sail for London. So there was neither resistance nor
+reaction. But the change of government could not be effected in the
+little town without a mass, at which the two divisions under the
+General's command were obliged to be present. Now, it was upon this mass
+that the General had built his hopes of gaining some information as
+to the sisters in the convent; he was quite unaware how absolutely the
+Carmelites were cut off from the world; but he knew that there might be
+among them one whom he held dearer than life, dearer than honour.
+
+His hopes were cruelly dashed at once. Mass, it is true, was celebrated
+in state. In honour of such a solemnity, the curtains which always hid
+the choir were drawn back to display its riches, its valuable paintings
+and shrines so bright with gems that they eclipsed the glories of
+the ex-votos of gold and silver hung up by sailors of the port on
+the columns in the nave. But all the nuns had taken refuge in the
+organ-loft. And yet, in spite of this first check, during this very mass
+of thanksgiving, the most intimately thrilling drama that ever set a
+man's heart beating opened out widely before him.
+
+The sister who played the organ aroused such intense enthusiasm, that
+not a single man regretted that he had come to the service. Even the men
+in the ranks were delighted, and the officers were in ecstasy. As for
+the General, he was seemingly calm and indifferent. The sensations
+stirred in him as the sister played one piece after another belong to
+the small number of things which it is not lawful to utter; words are
+powerless to express them; like death, God, eternity, they can only be
+realised through their one point of contact with humanity. Strangely
+enough, the organ music seemed to belong to the school of Rossini, the
+musician who brings most human passion into his art.
+
+Some day his works, by their number and extent, will receive the
+reverence due to the Homer of music. From among all the scores that we
+owe to his great genius, the nun seemed to have chosen _Moses in Egypt_
+for special study, doubtless because the spirit of sacred music finds
+therein its supreme expression. Perhaps the soul of the great musician,
+so gloriously known to Europe, and the soul of this unknown executant
+had met in the intuitive apprehension of the same poetry. So at least
+thought two dilettanti officers who must have missed the Theatre Favart
+in Spain.
+
+At last in the _Te Deum_ no one could fail to discern a French soul in
+the sudden change that came over the music. Joy for the victory of the
+Most Christian King evidently stirred this nun's heart to the depths.
+She was a Frenchwoman beyond mistake. Soon the love of country shone
+out, breaking forth like shafts of light from the fugue, as the sister
+introduced variations with all a Parisienne's fastidious taste, and
+blended vague suggestions of our grandest national airs with her music.
+A Spaniard's fingers would not have brought this warmth into a
+graceful tribute paid to the victorious arms of France. The musician's
+nationality was revealed.
+
+"We find France everywhere, it seems," said one of the men.
+
+The General had left the church during the _Te Deum_; he could not
+listen any longer. The nun's music had been a revelation of a woman
+loved to frenzy; a woman so carefully hidden from the world's eyes,
+so deeply buried in the bosom of the Church, that hitherto the most
+ingenious and persistent efforts made by men who brought great influence
+and unusual powers to bear upon the search had failed to find her. The
+suspicion aroused in the General's heart became all but a certainty with
+the vague reminiscence of a sad, delicious melody, the air of _Fleuve
+du Tage_. The woman he loved had played the prelude to the ballad in
+a boudoir in Paris, how often! and now this nun had chosen the song
+to express an exile's longing, amid the joy of those that triumphed.
+Terrible sensation! To hope for the resurrection of a lost love, to find
+her only to know that she was lost, to catch a mysterious glimpse of her
+after five years--five years, in which the pent-up passion, chafing
+in an empty life, had grown the mightier for every fruitless effort to
+satisfy it!
+
+Who has not known, at least once in his life, what it is to lose some
+precious thing; and after hunting through his papers, ransacking his
+memory, and turning his house upside down; after one or two days spent
+in vain search, and hope, and despair; after a prodigious expenditure
+of the liveliest irritation of soul, who has not known the ineffable
+pleasure of finding that all-important nothing which had come to be a
+king of monomania? Very good. Now, spread that fury of search over five
+years; put a woman, put a heart, put love in the place of the trifle;
+transpose the monomania into the key of high passion; and, furthermore,
+let the seeker be a man of ardent temper, with a lion's heart and a
+leonine head and mane, a man to inspire awe and fear in those who come
+in contact with him--realise this, and you may, perhaps, understand why
+the General walked abruptly out of the church when the first notes of
+a ballad, which he used to hear with a rapture of delight in a
+gilt-paneled boudoir, began to vibrate along the aisles of the church in
+the sea.
+
+The General walked away down the steep street which led to the port, and
+only stopped when he could not hear the deep notes of the organ. Unable
+to think of anything but the love which broke out in volcanic eruption,
+filling his heart with fire, he only knew that the _Te Deum_ was over
+when the Spanish congregation came pouring out of the church. Feeling
+that his behaviour and attitude might seem ridiculous, he went back to
+head the procession, telling the alcalde and the governor that, feeling
+suddenly faint, he had gone out into the air. Casting about for a plea
+for prolonging his stay, it at once occurred to him to make the most of
+this excuse, framed on the spur of the moment. He declined, on a plea of
+increasing indisposition, to preside at the banquet given by the town
+to the French officers, betook himself to his bed, and sent a message to
+the Major-General, to the effect that temporary illness obliged him
+to leave the Colonel in command of the troops for the time being.
+This commonplace but very plausible stratagem relieved him of all
+responsibility for the time necessary to carry out his plans. The
+General, nothing if not "catholic and monarchical," took occasion to
+inform himself of the hours of the services, and manifested the greatest
+zeal for the performance of his religious duties, piety which caused no
+remark in Spain.
+
+The very next day, while the division was marching out of the town, the
+General went to the convent to be present at vespers. He found an empty
+church. The townsfolk, devout though they were, had all gone down to the
+quay to watch the embarkation of the troops. He felt glad to be the only
+man there. He tramped noisily up the nave, clanking his spurs till the
+vaulted roof rang with the sound; he coughed, he talked aloud to himself
+to let the nuns know, and more particularly to let the organist know
+that if the troops were gone, one Frenchman was left behind. Was this
+singular warning heard and understood? He thought so. It seemed to him
+that in the _Magnificat_ the organ made response which was borne to him
+on the vibrating air. The nun's spirit found wings in music and fled
+towards him, throbbing with the rhythmical pulse of the sounds. Then, in
+all its might, the music burst forth and filled the church with warmth.
+The Song of Joy set apart in the sublime liturgy of Latin Christianity
+to express the exaltation of the soul in the presence of the glory of
+the ever-living God, became the utterance of a heart almost terrified by
+its gladness in the presence of the glory of a mortal love; a love that
+yet lived, a love that had risen to trouble her even beyond the grave in
+which the nun is laid, that she may rise again as the bride of Christ.
+
+The organ is in truth the grandest, the most daring, the most
+magnificent of all instruments invented by human genius. It is a whole
+orchestra in itself. It can express anything in response to a skilled
+touch. Surely it is in some sort a pedestal on which the soul poises for
+a flight forth into space, essaying on her course to draw picture after
+picture in an endless series, to paint human life, to cross the Infinite
+that separates heaven from earth? And the longer a dreamer listens to
+those giant harmonies, the better he realizes that nothing save this
+hundred-voiced choir on earth can fill all the space between kneeling
+men, and a God hidden by the blinding light of the Sanctuary. The music
+is the one interpreter strong enough to bear up the prayers of humanity
+to heaven, prayer in its omnipotent moods, prayer tinged by the
+melancholy of many different natures, coloured by meditative ecstasy,
+upspringing with the impulse of repentance--blended with the myriad
+fancies of every creed. Yes. In those long vaulted aisles the melodies
+inspired by the sense of things divine are blended with a grandeur
+unknown before, are decked with new glory and might. Out of the dim
+daylight, and the deep silence broken by the chanting of the choir in
+response to the thunder of the organ, a veil is woven for God, and the
+brightness of His attributes shines through it.
+
+And this wealth of holy things seemed to be flung down like a grain of
+incense upon the fragile altar raised to Love beneath the eternal throne
+of a jealous and avenging God. Indeed, in the joy of the nun there
+was little of that awe and gravity which should harmonize with the
+solemnities of the _Magnificat_. She had enriched the music with
+graceful variations, earthly gladness throbbing through the rhythm of
+each. In such brilliant quivering notes some great singer might strive
+to find a voice for her love, her melodies fluttered as a bird flutters
+about her mate. There were moments when she seemed to leap back into
+the past, to dally there now with laughter, now with tears. Her changing
+moods, as it were, ran riot. She was like a woman excited and happy over
+her lover's return.
+
+But at length, after the swaying fugues of delirium, after the
+marvellous rendering of a vision of the past, a revulsion swept over the
+soul that thus found utterance for itself. With a swift transition from
+the major to the minor, the organist told her hearer of her present lot.
+She gave the story of long melancholy broodings, of the slow course
+of her moral malady. How day by day she deadened the senses, how every
+night cut off one more thought, how her heart was slowly reduced
+to ashes. The sadness deepened shade after shade through languid
+modulations, and in a little while the echoes were pouring out a torrent
+of grief. Then on a sudden, high notes rang out like the voices of
+angels singing together, as if to tell the lost but not forgotten lover
+that their spirits now could only meet in heaven. Pathetic hope! Then
+followed the _Amen_. No more joy, no more tears in the air, no sadness,
+no regrets. The _Amen_ was the return to God. The final chord was deep,
+solemn, even terrible; for the last rumblings of the bass sent a shiver
+through the audience that raised the hair on their heads; the nun shook
+out her veiling of crepe, and seemed to sink again into the grave from
+which she had risen for a moment. Slowly the reverberations died away;
+it seemed as if the church, but now so full of light, had returned to
+thick darkness.
+
+The General had been caught up and borne swiftly away by this
+strong-winged spirit; he had followed the course of its flight from
+beginning to end. He understood to the fullest extent the imagery of
+that burning symphony; for him the chords reached deep and far. For
+him, as for the sister, the poem meant future, present, and past. Is
+not music, and even opera music, a sort of text, which a susceptible
+or poetic temper, or a sore and stricken heart, may expand as memories
+shall determine? If a musician must needs have the heart of a poet, must
+not the listener too be in a manner a poet and a lover to hear all that
+lies in great music? Religion, love, and music--what are they but a
+threefold expression of the same fact, of that craving for expansion
+which stirs in every noble soul. And these three forms of poetry ascend
+to God, in whom all passion on earth finds its end. Wherefore the holy
+human trinity finds a place amid the infinite glories of God; of God,
+whom we always represent surrounded with the fires of love and seistrons
+of gold--music and light and harmony. Is not He the Cause and the End of
+all our strivings?
+
+The French General guessed rightly that here in the desert, on this bare
+rock in the sea, the nun had seized upon music as an outpouring of the
+passion that still consumed her. Was this her manner of offering up her
+love as a sacrifice to God? Or was it Love exultant in triumph over God?
+The questions were hard to answer. But one thing at least the General
+could not mistake--in this heart, dead to the world, the fire of passion
+burned as fiercely as in his own.
+
+Vespers over, he went back to the alcalde with whom he was staying.
+In the all-absorbing joy which comes in such full measure when a
+satisfaction sought long and painfully is attained at last, he could see
+nothing beyond this--he was still loved! In her heart love had grown
+in loneliness, even as his love had grown stronger as he surmounted one
+barrier after another which this woman had set between them! The glow of
+soul came to its natural end. There followed a longing to see her again,
+to contend with God for her, to snatch her away--a rash scheme, which
+appealed to a daring nature. He went to bed, when the meal was over, to
+avoid questions; to be alone and think at his ease; and he lay absorbed
+by deep thought till day broke.
+
+He rose only to go to mass. He went to the church and knelt close to
+the screen, with his forehead touching the curtain; he would have torn
+a hole in it if he had been alone, but his host had come with him out of
+politeness, and the least imprudence might compromise the whole future
+of his love, and ruin the new hopes.
+
+The organ sounded, but it was another player, and not the nun of the
+last two days whose hands touched the keys. It was all colorless and
+cold for the General. Was the woman he loved prostrated by emotion which
+well-nigh overcame a strong man's heart? Had she so fully realised and
+shared an unchanged, longed-for love, that now she lay dying on her bed
+in her cell? While innumerable thoughts of this kind perplexed his mind,
+the voice of the woman he worshipped rang out close beside him; he knew
+its clear resonant soprano. It was her voice, with that faint tremor in
+it which gave it all the charm that shyness and diffidence gives to a
+young girl; her voice, distinct from the mass of singing as a _prima
+donna's_ in the chorus of a finale. It was like a golden or silver
+thread in dark frieze.
+
+It was she! There could be no mistake. Parisienne now as ever, she had
+not laid coquetry aside when she threw off worldly adornments for the
+veil and the Carmelite's coarse serge. She who had affirmed her love
+last evening in the praise sent up to God, seemed now to say to her
+lover, "Yes, it is I. I am here. My love is unchanged, but I am beyond
+the reach of love. You will hear my voice, my soul shall enfold you,
+and I shall abide here under the brown shroud in the choir from which no
+power on earth can tear me. You shall never see me more!"
+
+"It is she indeed!" the General said to himself, raising his head. He
+had leant his face on his hands, unable at first to bear the intolerable
+emotion that surged like a whirlpool in his heart, when that well-known
+voice vibrated under the arcading, with the sound of the sea for
+accompaniment.
+
+Storm was without, and calm within the sanctuary. Still that rich voice
+poured out all its caressing notes; it fell like balm on the lover's
+burning heart; it blossomed upon the air--the air that a man would fain
+breathe more deeply to receive the effluence of a soul breathed forth
+with love in the words of the prayer. The alcalde coming to join
+his guest found him in tears during the elevation, while the nun was
+singing, and brought him back to his house. Surprised to find so much
+piety in a French military man, the worthy magistrate invited the
+confessor of the convent to meet his guest. Never had news given the
+General more pleasure; he paid the ecclesiastic a good deal of attention
+at supper, and confirmed his Spanish hosts in the high opinion they had
+formed of his piety by a not wholly disinterested respect.
+
+He inquired with gravity how many sisters there were in the convent, and
+asked for particulars of its endowment and revenues, as if from
+courtesy he wished to hear the good priest discourse on the subject most
+interesting to him. He informed himself as to the manner of life led by
+the holy women. Were they allowed to go out of the convent, or to see
+visitors?
+
+"Senor," replied the venerable churchman, "the rule is strict. A woman
+cannot enter a monastery of the order of St. Bruno without a special
+permission from His Holiness, and the rule here is equally stringent.
+No man may enter a convent of Barefoot Carmelites unless he is a priest
+specially attached to the services of the house by the Archbishop. None
+of the nuns may leave the convent; though the great Saint, St. Theresa,
+often left her cell. The Visitor or the Mothers Superior can alone give
+permission, subject to an authorization from the Archbishop, for a nun
+to see a visitor, and then especially in a case of illness. Now we are
+one of the principal houses, and consequently we have a Mother Superior
+here. Among other foreign sisters there is one Frenchwoman, Sister
+Theresa; she it is who directs the music in the chapel."
+
+"Oh!" said the General, with feigned surprise. "She must have rejoiced
+over the victory of the House of Bourbon."
+
+"I told them the reason of the mass; they are always a little bit
+inquisitive."
+
+"But Sister Theresa may have interests in France. Perhaps she would like
+to send some message or to hear news."
+
+"I do not think so. She would have come to ask me."
+
+"As a fellow-countryman, I should be quite curious to see her," said the
+General. "If it is possible, if the Lady Superior consents, if----"
+
+"Even at the grating and in the Reverend Mother's presence, an interview
+would be quite impossible for anybody whatsoever; but, strict as the
+Mother is, for a deliverer of our holy religion and the throne of his
+Catholic Majesty, the rule might be relaxed for a moment," said the
+confessor, blinking. "I will speak about it."
+
+"How old is Sister Theresa?" inquired the lover. He dared not ask any
+questions of the priest as to the nun's beauty.
+
+"She does not reckon years now," the good man answered, with a
+simplicity that made the General shudder.
+
+Next day before siesta, the confessor came to inform the French General
+that Sister Theresa and the Mother consented to receive him at the
+grating in the parlour before vespers. The General spent the siesta in
+pacing to and fro along the quay in the noonday heat. Thither the priest
+came to find him, and brought him to the convent by way of the gallery
+round the cemetery. Fountains, green trees, and rows of arcading
+maintained a cool freshness in keeping with the place.
+
+At the further end of the long gallery the priest led the way into a
+large room divided in two by a grating covered with a brown curtain. In
+the first, and in some sort of public half of the apartment, where the
+confessor left the newcomer, a wooden bench ran round the wall, and two
+or three chairs, also of wood, were placed near the grating. The ceiling
+consisted of bare unornamented joists and cross-beams of ilex wood. As
+the two windows were both on the inner side of the grating, and the dark
+surface of the wood was a bad reflector, the light in the place was so
+dim that you could scarcely see the great black crucifix, the portrait
+of Saint Theresa, and a picture of the Madonna which adorned the grey
+parlour walls. Tumultuous as the General's feelings were, they took
+something of the melancholy of the place. He grew calm in that homely
+quiet. A sense of something vast as the tomb took possession of him
+beneath the chill unceiled roof. Here, as in the grave, was there not
+eternal silence, deep peace--the sense of the Infinite? And besides this
+there was the quiet and the fixed thought of the cloister--a thought
+which you felt like a subtle presence in the air, and in the dim dusk
+of the room; an all-pervasive thought nowhere definitely expressed, and
+looming the larger in the imagination; for in the cloister the great
+saying, "Peace in the Lord," enters the least religious soul as a living
+force.
+
+The monk's life is scarcely comprehensible. A man seems confessed a
+weakling in a monastery; he was born to act, to live out a life of work;
+he is evading a man's destiny in his cell. But what man's strength,
+blended with pathetic weakness, is implied by a woman's choice of the
+convent life! A man may have any number of motives for burying himself
+in a monastery; for him it is the leap over the precipice. A woman
+has but one motive--she is a woman still; she betrothes herself to a
+Heavenly Bridegroom. Of the monk you may ask, "Why did you not fight
+your battle?" But if a woman immures herself in the cloister, is there
+not always a sublime battle fought first?
+
+At length it seemed to the General that that still room, and the lonely
+convent in the sea, were full of thoughts of him. Love seldom attains
+to solemnity; yet surely a love still faithful in the breast of God was
+something solemn, something more than a man had a right to look for
+as things are in this nineteenth century? The infinite grandeur of the
+situation might well produce an effect upon the General's mind; he had
+precisely enough elevation of soul to forget politics, honours, Spain,
+and society in Paris, and to rise to the height of this lofty climax.
+And what in truth could be more tragic? How much must pass in the souls
+of these two lovers, brought together in a place of strangers, on
+a ledge of granite in the sea; yet held apart by an intangible,
+unsurmountable barrier! Try to imagine the man saying within himself,
+"Shall I triumph over God in her heart?" when a faint rustling sound
+made him quiver, and the curtain was drawn aside.
+
+Between him and the light stood a woman. Her face was hidden by the veil
+that drooped from the folds upon her head; she was dressed according
+to the rule of the order in a gown of the colour become proverbial. Her
+bare feet were hidden; if the General could have seen them, he would
+have known how appallingly thin she had grown; and yet in spite of the
+thick folds of her coarse gown, a mere covering and no ornament, he
+could guess how tears, and prayer, and passion, and loneliness had
+wasted the woman before him.
+
+An ice-cold hand, belonging, no doubt, to the Mother Superior, held back
+the curtain. The General gave the enforced witness of their interview a
+searching glance, and met the dark, inscrutable gaze of an aged recluse.
+The Mother might have been a century old, but the bright, youthful eyes
+belied the wrinkles that furrowed her pale face.
+
+"Mme la Duchesse," he began, his voice shaken with emotion, "does your
+companion understand French?" The veiled figure bowed her head at the
+sound of his voice.
+
+"There is no duchess here," she replied. "It is Sister Theresa whom you
+see before you. She whom you call my companion is my mother in God, my
+superior here on earth."
+
+The words were so meekly spoken by the voice that sounded in other years
+amid harmonious surroundings of refined luxury, the voice of a queen of
+fashion in Paris. Such words from the lips that once spoke so lightly
+and flippantly struck the General dumb with amazement.
+
+"The Holy Mother only speaks Latin and Spanish," she added.
+
+"I understand neither. Dear Antoinette, make my excuses to her."
+
+The light fell full upon the nun's figure; a thrill of deep emotion
+betrayed itself in a faint quiver of her veil as she heard her name
+softly spoken by the man who had been so hard in the past.
+
+"My brother," she said, drawing her sleeve under her veil, perhaps to
+brush tears away, "I am Sister Theresa."
+
+Then, turning to the Superior, she spoke in Spanish; the General knew
+enough of the language to understand what she said perfectly well;
+possibly he could have spoken it had he chosen to do so.
+
+"Dear Mother, the gentleman presents his respects to you, and begs you
+to pardon him if he cannot pay them himself, but he knows neither of the
+languages which you speak----"
+
+The aged nun bent her head slowly, with an expression of angelic
+sweetness, enhanced at the same time by the consciousness of her power
+and dignity.
+
+"Do you know this gentleman?" she asked, with a keen glance.
+
+"Yes, Mother."
+
+"Go back to your cell, my daughter!" said the Mother imperiously.
+
+The General slipped aside behind the curtain lest the dreadful tumult
+within him should appear in his face; even in the shadow it seemed to
+him that he could still see the Superior's piercing eyes. He was afraid
+of her; she held his little, frail, hardly-won happiness in her hands;
+and he, who had never quailed under a triple row of guns, now trembled
+before this nun. The Duchess went towards the door, but she turned back.
+
+"Mother," she said, with dreadful calmness, "the Frenchman is one of my
+brothers."
+
+"Then stay, my daughter," said the Superior, after a pause.
+
+The piece of admirable Jesuitry told of such love and regret, that a man
+less strongly constituted might have broken down under the keen delight
+in the midst of a great and, for him, an entirely novel peril. Oh! how
+precious words, looks, and gestures became when love must baffle lynx
+eyes and tiger's claws! Sister Theresa came back.
+
+"You see, my brother, what I have dared to do only to speak to you for
+a moment of your salvation and of the prayers that my soul puts up for
+your soul daily. I am committing mortal sin. I have told a lie. How many
+days of penance must expiate that lie! But I shall endure it for your
+sake. My brother, you do not know what happiness it is to love in
+heaven; to feel that you can confess love purified by religion, love
+transported into the highest heights of all, so that we are permitted
+to lose sight of all but the soul. If the doctrine and the spirit of
+the Saint to whom we owe this refuge had not raised me above earth's
+anguish, and caught me up and set me, far indeed beneath the Sphere
+wherein she dwells, yet truly above this world, I should not have
+seen you again. But now I can see you, and hear your voice, and remain
+calm----"
+
+The General broke in, "But, Antoinette, let me see you, you whom I love
+passionately, desperately, as you could have wished me to love you."
+
+"Do not call me Antoinette, I implore you. Memories of the past hurt me.
+You must see no one here but Sister Theresa, a creature who trusts in
+the Divine mercy." She paused for a little, and then added, "You must
+control yourself, my brother. Our Mother would separate us without pity
+if there is any worldly passion in your face, or if you allow the tears
+to fall from your eyes."
+
+The General bowed his head to regain self-control; when he looked up
+again he saw her face beyond the grating--the thin, white, but still
+impassioned face of the nun. All the magic charm of youth that once
+bloomed there, all the fair contrast of velvet whiteness and the colour
+of the Bengal rose, had given place to a burning glow, as of a porcelain
+jar with a faint light shining through it. The wonderful hair in which
+she took such pride had been shaven; there was a bandage round her
+forehead and about her face. An ascetic life had left dark traces about
+the eyes, which still sometimes shot out fevered glances; their ordinary
+calm expression was but a veil. In a few words, she was but the ghost of
+her former self.
+
+"Ah! you that have come to be my life, you must come out of this tomb!
+You were mine; you had no right to give yourself, even to God. Did you
+not promise me to give up all at the least command from me? You may
+perhaps think me worthy of that promise now when you hear what I have
+done for you. I have sought you all through the world. You have been in
+my thoughts at every moment for five years; my life has been given to
+you. My friends, very powerful friends, as you know, have helped with
+all their might to search every convent in France, Italy, Spain, Sicily,
+and America. Love burned more brightly for every vain search. Again and
+again I made long journeys with a false hope; I have wasted my life and
+the heaviest throbbings of my heart in vain under many a dark convent
+wall. I am not speaking of a faithfulness that knows no bounds, for what
+is it?--nothing compared with the infinite longings of my love. If your
+remorse long ago was sincere, you ought not to hesitate to follow me
+today."
+
+"You forget that I am not free."
+
+"The Duke is dead," he answered quickly.
+
+Sister Theresa flushed red.
+
+"May heaven be open to him!" she cried with a quick rush of feeling. "He
+was generous to me.--But I did not mean such ties; it was one of my sins
+that I was ready to break them all without scruple--for you."
+
+"Are you speaking of your vows?" the General asked, frowning. "I did not
+think that anything weighed heavier with your heart than love. But do
+not think twice of it, Antoinette; the Holy Father himself shall absolve
+you of your oath. I will surely go to Rome, I will entreat all the
+powers of earth; if God could come down from heaven, I would----"
+
+"Do not blaspheme."
+
+"So do not fear the anger of God. Ah! I would far rather hear that
+you would leave your prison for me; that this very night you would let
+yourself down into a boat at the foot of the cliffs. And we would go
+away to be happy somewhere at the world's end, I know not where. And
+with me at your side, you should come back to life and health under the
+wings of love."
+
+"You must not talk like this," said Sister Theresa; "you do not know
+what you are to me now. I love you far better than I ever loved you
+before. Every day I pray for you; I see you with other eyes. Armand, if
+you but knew the happiness of giving yourself up, without shame, to a
+pure friendship which God watches over! You do not know what joy it is
+to me to pray for heaven's blessing on you. I never pray for myself: God
+will do with me according to His will; but, at the price of my soul, I
+wish I could be sure that you are happy here on earth, and that you
+will be happy hereafter throughout all ages. My eternal life is all that
+trouble has left me to offer up to you. I am old now with weeping; I am
+neither young nor fair; and in any case, you could not respect the
+nun who became a wife; no love, not even motherhood, could give me
+absolution.... What can you say to outweigh the uncounted thoughts that
+have gathered in my heart during the past five years, thoughts that have
+changed, and worn, and blighted it? I ought to have given a heart less
+sorrowful to God."
+
+"What can I say? Dear Antoinette, I will say this, that I love you; that
+affection, love, a great love, the joy of living in another heart that
+is ours, utterly and wholly ours, is so rare a thing and so hard to
+find, that I doubted you, and put you to sharp proof; but now, today, I
+love you, Antoinette, with all my soul's strength.... If you will follow
+me into solitude, I will hear no voice but yours, I will see no other
+face."
+
+"Hush, Armand! You are shortening the little time that we may be
+together here on earth."
+
+"Antoinette, will you come with me?"
+
+"I am never away from you. My life is in your heart, not through the
+selfish ties of earthly happiness, or vanity, or enjoyment; pale and
+withered as I am, I live here for you, in the breast of God. As God is
+just, you shall be happy----"
+
+"Words, words all of it! Pale and withered? How if I want you? How if I
+cannot be happy without you? Do you still think of nothing but duty with
+your lover before you? Is he never to come first and above all things
+else in your heart? In time past you put social success, yourself,
+heaven knows what, before him; now it is God, it is the welfare of my
+soul! In Sister Theresa I find the Duchess over again, ignorant of
+the happiness of love, insensible as ever, beneath the semblance of
+sensibility. You do not love me; you have never loved me----"
+
+"Oh, my brother----!"
+
+"You do not wish to leave this tomb. You love my soul, do you say?
+Very well, through you it will be lost forever. I shall make away with
+myself----"
+
+"Mother!" Sister Theresa called aloud in Spanish, "I have lied to you;
+this man is my lover!"
+
+The curtain fell at once. The General, in his stupor, scarcely heard the
+doors within as they clanged.
+
+"Ah! she loves me still!" he cried, understanding all the sublimity of
+that cry of hers. "She loves me still. She must be carried off...."
+
+
+
+The General left the island, returned to headquarters, pleaded
+ill-health, asked for leave of absence, and forthwith took his departure
+for France.
+
+And now for the incidents which brought the two personages in this Scene
+into their present relation to each other.
+
+
+
+The thing known in France as the Faubourg Saint-Germain is neither a
+Quarter, nor a sect, nor an institution, nor anything else that admits
+of a precise definition. There are great houses in the Place Royale, the
+Faubourg Saint-Honore, and the Chaussee d'Antin, in any one of which you
+may breathe the same atmosphere of Faubourg Saint-Germain. So, to begin
+with, the whole Faubourg is not within the Faubourg. There are men and
+women born far enough away from its influences who respond to them and
+take their place in the circle; and again there are others, born within
+its limits, who may yet be driven forth forever. For the last forty
+years the manners, and customs, and speech, in a word, the tradition of
+the Faubourg Saint-Germain, has been to Paris what the Court used to be
+in other times; it is what the Hotel Saint-Paul was to the fourteenth
+century; the Louvre to the fifteenth; the Palais, the Hotel Rambouillet,
+and the Place Royale to the sixteenth; and lastly, as Versailles was to
+the seventeenth and the eighteenth.
+
+Just as the ordinary workaday Paris will always centre about some point;
+so, through all periods of history, the Paris of the nobles and
+the upper classes converges towards some particular spot. It is a
+periodically recurrent phenomenon which presents ample matter for
+reflection to those who are fain to observe or describe the various
+social zones; and possibly an enquiry into the causes that bring about
+this centralization may do more than merely justify the probability of
+this episode; it may be of service to serious interests which some
+day will be more deeply rooted in the commonwealth, unless, indeed,
+experience is as meaningless for political parties as it is for youth.
+
+In every age the great nobles, and the rich who always ape the great
+nobles, build their houses as far as possible from crowded streets. When
+the Duc d'Uzes built his splendid hotel in the Rue Montmartre in
+the reign of Louis XIV, and set the fountain at his gates--for which
+beneficent action, to say nothing of his other virtues, he was held in
+such veneration that the whole quarter turned out in a body to follow
+his funeral--when the Duke, I say, chose this site for his house, he
+did so because that part of Paris was almost deserted in those days. But
+when the fortifications were pulled down, and the market gardens beyond
+the line of the boulevards began to fill with houses, then the d'Uzes
+family left their fine mansion, and in our time it was occupied by a
+banker. Later still, the noblesse began to find themselves out of their
+element among shopkeepers, left the Place Royale and the centre of
+Paris for good, and crossed the river to breathe freely in the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain, where palaces were reared already about the great
+hotel built by Louis XIV for the Duc de Maine--the Benjamin among his
+legitimated offspring. And indeed, for people accustomed to a stately
+life, can there be more unseemly surroundings than the bustle, the mud,
+the street cries, the bad smells, and narrow thoroughfares of a populous
+quarter? The very habits of life in a mercantile or manufacturing
+district are completely at variance with the lives of nobles. The
+shopkeeper and artisan are just going to bed when the great world is
+thinking of dinner; and the noisy stir of life begins among the former
+when the latter have gone to rest. Their day's calculations never
+coincide; the one class represents the expenditure, the other the
+receipts. Consequently their manners and customs are diametrically
+opposed.
+
+Nothing contemptuous is intended by this statement. An aristocracy is in
+a manner the intellect of the social system, as the middle classes and
+the proletariat may be said to be its organizing and working power. It
+naturally follows that these forces are differently situated; and of
+their antagonism there is bred a seeming antipathy produced by the
+performance of different functions, all of them, however, existing for
+one common end.
+
+Such social dissonances are so inevitably the outcome of any charter
+of the constitution, that however much a Liberal may be disposed to
+complain of them, as of treason against those sublime ideas with which
+the ambitious plebeian is apt to cover his designs, he would none the
+less think it a preposterous notion that M. le Prince de Montmorency,
+for instance, should continue to live in the Rue Saint-Martin at the
+corner of the street which bears that nobleman's name; or that M. le Duc
+de Fitz-James, descendant of the royal house of Scotland, should have
+his hotel at the angle of the Rue Marie Stuart and the Rue Montorgueil.
+_Sint ut sunt, aut non sint_, the grand words of the Jesuit, might be
+taken as a motto by the great in all countries. These social differences
+are patent in all ages; the fact is always accepted by the people; its
+"reasons of state" are self-evident; it is at once cause and effect, a
+principle and a law. The common sense of the masses never deserts them
+until demagogues stir them up to gain ends of their own; that common
+sense is based on the verities of social order; and the social order is
+the same everywhere, in Moscow as in London, in Geneva as in Calcutta.
+Given a certain number of families of unequal fortune in any given
+space, you will see an aristocracy forming under your eyes; there will
+be the patricians, the upper classes, and yet other ranks below them.
+Equality may be a _right_, but no power on earth can convert it into
+_fact_. It would be a good thing for France if this idea could be
+popularized. The benefits of political harmony are obvious to the least
+intelligent classes. Harmony is, as it were, the poetry of order, and
+order is a matter of vital importance to the working population. And
+what is order, reduced to its simplest expression, but the agreement
+of things among themselves--unity, in short? Architecture, music, and
+poetry, everything in France, and in France more than in any other
+country, is based upon this principle; it is written upon the very
+foundations of her clear accurate language, and a language must always
+be the most infallible index of national character. In the same way
+you may note that the French popular airs are those most calculated to
+strike the imagination, the best-modulated melodies are taken over by
+the people; clearness of thought, the intellectual simplicity of an idea
+attracts them; they like the incisive sayings that hold the greatest
+number of ideas. France is the one country in the world where a little
+phrase may bring about a great revolution. Whenever the masses have
+risen, it has been to bring men, affairs, and principles into agreement.
+No nation has a clearer conception of that idea of unity which should
+permeate the life of an aristocracy; possibly no other nation has so
+intelligent a comprehension of a political necessity; history will never
+find her behind the time. France has been led astray many a time, but
+she is deluded, woman-like, by generous ideas, by a glow of enthusiasm
+which at first outstrips sober reason.
+
+So, to begin with, the most striking characteristic of the Faubourg
+is the splendour of its great mansions, its great gardens, and a
+surrounding quiet in keeping with princely revenues drawn from great
+estates. And what is this distance set between a class and a whole
+metropolis but visible and outward expression of the widely different
+attitude of mind which must inevitably keep them apart? The position of
+the head is well defined in every organism. If by any chance a nation
+allows its head to fall at its feet, it is pretty sure sooner or later
+to discover that this is a suicidal measure; and since nations have no
+desire to perish, they set to work at once to grow a new head. If they
+lack the strength for this, they perish as Rome perished, and Venice,
+and so many other states.
+
+This distinction between the upper and lower spheres of social activity,
+emphasized by differences in their manner of living, necessarily
+implies that in the highest aristocracy there is real worth and some
+distinguishing merit. In any state, no matter what form of "government"
+is affected, so soon as the patrician class fails to maintain that
+complete superiority which is the condition of its existence, it ceases
+to be a force, and is pulled down at once by the populace. The people
+always wish to see money, power, and initiative in their leaders, hands,
+hearts, and heads; they must be the spokesmen, they must represent the
+intelligence and the glory of the nation. Nations, like women, love
+strength in those who rule them; they cannot give love without respect;
+they refuse utterly to obey those of whom they do not stand in awe.
+An aristocracy fallen into contempt is a _roi faineant_, a husband in
+petticoats; first it ceases to be itself, and then it ceases to be.
+
+And in this way the isolation of the great, the sharply marked
+distinction in their manner of life, or in a word, the general custom
+of the patrician caste is at once the sign of a real power, and their
+destruction so soon as that power is lost. The Faubourg Saint-Germain
+failed to recognise the conditions of its being, while it would still
+have been easy to perpetuate its existence, and therefore was brought
+low for a time. The Faubourg should have looked the facts fairly in the
+face, as the English aristocracy did before them; they should have seen
+that every institution has its climacteric periods, when words lose
+their old meanings, and ideas reappear in a new guise, and the whole
+conditions of politics wear a changed aspect, while the underlying
+realities undergo no essential alteration.
+
+These ideas demand further development which form an essential part of
+this episode; they are given here both as a succinct statement of the
+causes, and an explanation of the things which happen in the course of
+the story.
+
+The stateliness of the castles and palaces where nobles dwell; the
+luxury of the details; the constantly maintained sumptuousness of the
+furniture; the "atmosphere" in which the fortunate owner of landed
+estates (a rich man before he was born) lives and moves easily and
+without friction; the habit of mind which never descends to calculate
+the petty workaday gains of existence; the leisure; the higher education
+attainable at a much earlier age; and lastly, the aristocratic tradition
+that makes of him a social force, for which his opponents, by dint
+of study and a strong will and tenacity of vocation, are scarcely a
+match-all these things should contribute to form a lofty spirit in a
+man, possessed of such privileges from his youth up; they should
+stamp his character with that high self-respect, of which the least
+consequence is a nobleness of heart in harmony with the noble name that
+he bears. And in some few families all this is realised. There are
+noble characters here and there in the Faubourg, but they are marked
+exceptions to a general rule of egoism which has been the ruin of this
+world within a world. The privileges above enumerated are the birthright
+of the French noblesse, as of every patrician efflorescence ever formed
+on the surface of a nation; and will continue to be theirs so long as
+their existence is based upon real estate, or money; _domaine-sol_ and
+_domaine-argent_ alike, the only solid bases of an organized society;
+but such privileges are held upon the understanding that the patricians
+must continue to justify their existence. There is a sort of moral
+_fief_ held on a tenure of service rendered to the sovereign, and here
+in France the people are undoubtedly the sovereigns nowadays. The times
+are changed, and so are the weapons. The knight-banneret of old wore
+a coat of chain armor and a hauberk; he could handle a lance well and
+display his pennon, and no more was required of him; today he is bound
+to give proof of his intelligence. A stout heart was enough in the days
+of old; in our days he is required to have a capacious brain-pan. Skill
+and knowledge and capital--these three points mark out a social triangle
+on which the scutcheon of power is blazoned; our modern aristocracy must
+take its stand on these.
+
+A fine theorem is as good as a great name. The Rothschilds, the Fuggers
+of the nineteenth century, are princes _de facto_. A great artist is in
+reality an oligarch; he represents a whole century, and almost always he
+is a law to others. And the art of words, the high pressure machinery
+of the writer, the poet's genius, the merchant's steady endurance,
+the strong will of the statesman who concentrates a thousand dazzling
+qualities in himself, the general's sword--all these victories, in
+short, which a single individual will win, that he may tower above the
+rest of the world, the patrician class is now bound to win and keep
+exclusively. They must head the new forces as they once headed the
+material forces; how should they keep the position unless they are
+worthy of it? How, unless they are the soul and brain of a nation,
+shall they set its hands moving? How lead a people without the power of
+command? And what is the marshal's baton without the innate power of
+the captain in the man who wields it? The Faubourg Saint-Germain took to
+playing with batons, and fancied that all the power was in its hands.
+It inverted the terms of the proposition which called it into existence.
+And instead of flinging away the insignia which offended the people,
+and quietly grasping the power, it allowed the bourgeoisie to seize the
+authority, clung with fatal obstinacy to its shadow, and over and over
+again forgot the laws which a minority must observe if it would live.
+When an aristocracy is scarce a thousandth part of the body social, it
+is bound today, as of old, to multiply its points of action, so as to
+counterbalance the weight of the masses in a great crisis. And in our
+days those means of action must be living forces, and not historical
+memories.
+
+In France, unluckily, the noblesse were still so puffed up with the
+notion of their vanished power, that it was difficult to contend against
+a kind of innate presumption in themselves. Perhaps this is a national
+defect. The Frenchman is less given than anyone else to undervalue
+himself; it comes natural to him to go from his degree to the one above
+it; and while it is a rare thing for him to pity the unfortunates
+over whose heads he rises, he always groans in spirit to see so many
+fortunate people above him. He is very far from heartless, but too
+often he prefers to listen to his intellect. The national instinct which
+brings the Frenchman to the front, the vanity that wastes his substance,
+is as much a dominant passion as thrift in the Dutch. For three
+centuries it swayed the noblesse, who, in this respect, were certainly
+pre-eminently French. The scion of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, beholding
+his material superiority, was fully persuaded of his intellectual
+superiority. And everything contributed to confirm him in his belief;
+for ever since the Faubourg Saint-Germain existed at all--which is
+to say, ever since Versailles ceased to be the royal residence--the
+Faubourg, with some few gaps in continuity, was always backed up by the
+central power, which in France seldom fails to support that side. Thence
+its downfall in 1830.
+
+At that time the party of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was rather like
+an army without a base of operation. It had utterly failed to take
+advantage of the peace to plant itself in the heart of the nation.
+It sinned for want of learning its lesson, and through an utter
+incapability of regarding its interests as a whole. A future certainty
+was sacrificed to a doubtful present gain. This blunder in policy may
+perhaps be attributed to the following cause.
+
+The class-isolation so strenuously kept up by the noblesse brought about
+fatal results during the last forty years; even caste-patriotism was
+extinguished by it, and rivalry fostered among themselves. When the
+French noblesse of other times were rich and powerful, the nobles
+(_gentilhommes_) could choose their chiefs and obey them in the hour
+of danger. As their power diminished, they grew less amenable to
+discipline; and as in the last days of the Byzantine Empire, everyone
+wished to be emperor. They mistook their uniform weakness for uniform
+strength.
+
+Each family ruined by the Revolution and the abolition of the law of
+primogeniture thought only of itself, and not at all of the great family
+of the noblesse. It seemed to them that as each individual grew rich,
+the party as a whole would gain in strength. And herein lay their
+mistake. Money, likewise, is only the outward and visible sign of
+power. All these families were made up of persons who preserved a high
+tradition of courtesy, of true graciousness of life, of refined speech,
+with a family pride, and a squeamish sense of _noblesse oblige_ which
+suited well with the kind of life they led; a life wholly filled with
+occupations which become contemptible so soon as they cease to be
+accessories and take the chief place in existence. There was a certain
+intrinsic merit in all these people, but the merit was on the surface,
+and none of them were worth their face-value.
+
+Not a single one among those families had courage to ask itself the
+question, "Are we strong enough for the responsibility of power?" They
+were cast on the top, like the lawyers of 1830; and instead of taking
+the patron's place, like a great man, the Faubourg Saint-Germain showed
+itself greedy as an upstart. The most intelligent nation in the world
+perceived clearly that the restored nobles were organizing everything
+for their own particular benefit. From that day the noblesse was doomed.
+The Faubourg Saint-Germain tried to be an aristocracy when it could
+only be an oligarchy--two very different systems, as any man may see
+for himself if he gives an intelligent perusal to the list of the
+patronymics of the House of Peers.
+
+The King's Government certainly meant well; but the maxim that the
+people must be made to _will_ everything, even their own welfare, was
+pretty constantly forgotten, nor did they bear in mind that La France is
+a woman and capricious, and must be happy or chastised at her own good
+pleasure. If there had been many dukes like the Duc de Laval, whose
+modesty made him worthy of the name he bore, the elder branch would have
+been as securely seated on the throne as the House of Hanover at this
+day.
+
+In 1814 the noblesse of France were called upon to assert their
+superiority over the most aristocratic bourgeoisie in the most feminine
+of all countries, to take the lead in the most highly educated epoch the
+world had yet seen. And this was even more notably the case in 1820. The
+Faubourg Saint-Germain might very easily have led and amused the middle
+classes in days when people's heads were turned with distinctions, and
+art and science were all the rage. But the narrow-minded leaders of
+a time of great intellectual progress all of them detested art and
+science. They had not even the wit to present religion in attractive
+colours, though they needed its support. While Lamartine, Lamennais,
+Montalembert, and other writers were putting new life and elevation into
+men's ideas of religion, and gilding it with poetry, these bunglers in
+the Government chose to make the harshness of their creed felt all over
+the country. Never was nation in a more tractable humour; La France,
+like a tired woman, was ready to agree to anything; never was
+mismanagement so clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have
+forgiven wrongs more easily than bungling.
+
+If the noblesse meant to reinstate themselves, the better to found a
+strong oligarchy, they should have honestly and diligently searched
+their Houses for men of the stamp that Napoleon used; they should
+have turned themselves inside out to see if peradventure there was a
+Constitutionalist Richelieu lurking in the entrails of the Faubourg; and
+if that genius was not forthcoming from among them, they should have set
+out to find him, even in the fireless garret where he might happen to
+be perishing of cold; they should have assimilated him, as the English
+House of Lords continually assimilates aristocrats made by chance; and
+finally ordered him to be ruthless, to lop away the old wood, and cut
+the tree down to the living shoots. But, in the first place, the great
+system of English Toryism was far too large for narrow minds; the
+importation required time, and in France a tardy success is no better
+than a fiasco. So far, moreover, from adopting a policy of redemption,
+and looking for new forces where God puts them, these petty great folk
+took a dislike to any capacity that did not issue from their midst; and,
+lastly, instead of growing young again, the Faubourg Saint-Germain grew
+positively older.
+
+Etiquette, not an institution of primary necessity, might have been
+maintained if it had appeared only on state occasions, but as it was,
+there was a daily wrangle over precedence; it ceased to be a matter of
+art or court ceremonial, it became a question of power. And if from
+the outset the Crown lacked an adviser equal to so great a crisis, the
+aristocracy was still more lacking in a sense of its wider interests, an
+instinct which might have supplied the deficiency. They stood nice about
+M. de Talleyrand's marriage, when M. de Talleyrand was the one man among
+them with the steel-encompassed brains that can forge a new political
+system and begin a new career of glory for a nation. The Faubourg
+scoffed at a minister if he was not gently born, and produced no one of
+gentle birth that was fit to be a minister. There were plenty of nobles
+fitted to serve their country by raising the dignity of justices of
+the peace, by improving the land, by opening out roads and canals, and
+taking an active and leading part as country gentlemen; but these had
+sold their estates to gamble on the Stock Exchange. Again the Faubourg
+might have absorbed the energetic men among the bourgeoisie, and opened
+their ranks to the ambition which was undermining authority; they
+preferred instead to fight, and to fight unarmed, for of all that
+they once possessed there was nothing left but tradition. For their
+misfortune there was just precisely enough of their former wealth left
+them as a class to keep up their bitter pride. They were content with
+their past. Not one of them seriously thought of bidding the son of the
+house take up arms from the pile of weapons which the nineteenth century
+flings down in the market-place. Young men, shut out from office, were
+dancing at Madame's balls, while they should have been doing the
+work done under the Republic and the Empire by young, conscientious,
+harmlessly employed energies. It was their place to carry out at Paris
+the programme which their seniors should have been following in the
+country. The heads of houses might have won back recognition of their
+titles by unremitting attention to local interests, by falling in with
+the spirit of the age, by recasting their order to suit the taste of the
+times.
+
+But, pent up together in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the spirit of
+the ancient court and traditions of bygone feuds between the nobles and
+the Crown still lingered on, the aristocracy was not whole-hearted in
+its allegiance to the Tuileries, and so much the more easily defeated
+because it was concentrated in the Chamber of Peers, and badly organized
+even there. If the noblesse had woven themselves into a network over
+the country, they could have held their own; but cooped up in their
+Faubourg, with their backs against the Chateau, or spread at full length
+over the Budget, a single blow cut the thread of a fast-expiring life,
+and a petty, smug-faced lawyer came forward with the axe. In spite of M.
+Royer-Collard's admirable discourse, the hereditary peerage and law of
+entail fell before the lampoons of a man who made it a boast that he had
+adroitly argued some few heads out of the executioner's clutches, and
+now forsooth must clumsily proceed to the slaying of old institutions.
+
+There are examples and lessons for the future in all this. For if there
+were not still a future before the French aristocracy, there would be
+no need to do more than find a suitable sarcophagus; it were something
+pitilessly cruel to burn the dead body of it with fire of Tophet. But
+though the surgeon's scalpel is ruthless, it sometimes gives back life
+to a dying man; and the Faubourg Saint-Germain may wax more powerful
+under persecution than in its day of triumph, if it but chooses to
+organize itself under a leader.
+
+And now it is easy to give a summary of this semi-political survey. The
+wish to re-establish a large fortune was uppermost in everyone's mind;
+a lack of broad views, and a mass of small defects, a real need of
+religion as a political factor, combined with a thirst for pleasure
+which damaged the cause of religion and necessitated a good deal of
+hypocrisy; a certain attitude of protest on the part of loftier and
+clearer-sighted men who set their faces against Court jealousies; and
+the disaffection of the provincial families, who often came of
+purer descent than the nobles of the Court which alienated them from
+itself--all these things combined to bring about a most discordant state
+of things in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was neither compact in its
+organisation, nor consequent in its action; neither completely moral,
+nor frankly dissolute; it did not corrupt, nor was it corrupted; it
+would neither wholly abandon the disputed points which damaged its
+cause, nor yet adopt the policy that might have saved it. In short,
+however effete individuals might be, the party as a whole was none
+the less armed with all the great principles which lie at the roots of
+national existence. What was there in the Faubourg that it should perish
+in its strength?
+
+It was very hard to please in the choice of candidates; the Faubourg
+had good taste, it was scornfully fastidious, yet there was nothing very
+glorious nor chivalrous truly about its fall.
+
+In the Emigration of 1789 there were some traces of a loftier feeling;
+but in the Emigration of 1830 from Paris into the country there was
+nothing discernible but self-interest. A few famous men of letters, a
+few oratorical triumphs in the Chambers, M. de Talleyrand's attitude
+in the Congress, the taking of Algiers, and not a few names that found
+their way from the battlefield into the pages of history--all these
+things were so many examples set before the French noblesse to show that
+it was still open to them to take their part in the national existence,
+and to win recognition of their claims, if, indeed, they could
+condescend thus far. In every living organism the work of bringing
+the whole into harmony within itself is always going on. If a man is
+indolent, the indolence shows itself in everything that he does; and,
+in the same manner, the general spirit of a class is pretty plainly
+manifested in the face it turns on the world, and the soul informs the
+body.
+
+The women of the Restoration displayed neither the proud disregard
+of public opinion shown by the court ladies of olden time in their
+wantonness, nor yet the simple grandeur of the tardy virtues by which
+they expiated their sins and shed so bright a glory about their names.
+There was nothing either very frivolous or very serious about the woman
+of the Restoration. She was hypocritical as a rule in her passion, and
+compounded, so to speak, with its pleasures. Some few families led
+the domestic life of the Duchesse d'Orleans, whose connubial couch was
+exhibited so absurdly to visitors at the Palais Royal. Two or three kept
+up the traditions of the Regency, filling cleverer women with something
+like disgust. The great lady of the new school exercised no influence at
+all over the manners of the time; and yet she might have done much.
+She might, at worst, have presented as dignified a spectacle as
+English-women of the same rank. But she hesitated feebly among old
+precedents, became a bigot by force of circumstances, and allowed
+nothing of herself to appear, not even her better qualities.
+
+Not one among the Frenchwomen of that day had the ability to create a
+salon whither leaders of fashion might come to take lessons in taste and
+elegance. Their voices, which once laid down the law to literature, that
+living expression of a time, now counted absolutely for nought. Now
+when a literature lacks a general system, it fails to shape a body for
+itself, and dies out with its period.
+
+When in a nation at any time there is a people apart thus constituted,
+the historian is pretty certain to find some representative figure,
+some central personage who embodies the qualities and the defects of the
+whole party to which he belongs; there is Coligny, for instance, among
+the Huguenots, the Coadjuteur in the time of the Fronde, the Marechal de
+Richelieu under Louis XV, Danton during the Terror. It is in the nature
+of things that the man should be identified with the company in which
+history finds him. How is it possible to lead a party without conforming
+to its ideas? or to shine in any epoch unless a man represents the ideas
+of his time? The wise and prudent head of a party is continually obliged
+to bow to the prejudices and follies of its rear; and this is the
+cause of actions for which he is afterwards criticised by this or that
+historian sitting at a safer distance from terrific popular explosions,
+coolly judging the passion and ferment without which the great struggles
+of the world could not be carried on at all. And if this is true of
+the Historical Comedy of the Centuries, it is equally true in a more
+restricted sphere in the detached scenes of the national drama known as
+the _Manners of the Age_.
+
+
+
+At the beginning of that ephemeral life led by the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain under the Restoration, to which, if there is any truth in
+the above reflections, they failed to give stability, the most perfect
+type of the aristocratic caste in its weakness and strength, its
+greatness and littleness, might have been found for a brief space in a
+young married woman who belonged to it. This was a woman artificially
+educated, but in reality ignorant; a woman whose instincts and feelings
+were lofty while the thought which should have controlled them was
+wanting. She squandered the wealth of her nature in obedience to social
+conventions; she was ready to brave society, yet she hesitated till her
+scruples degenerated into artifice. With more wilfulness than real force
+of character, impressionable rather than enthusiastic, gifted with more
+brain than heart; she was supremely a woman, supremely a coquette,
+and above all things a Parisienne, loving a brilliant life and gaiety,
+reflecting never, or too late; imprudent to the verge of poetry, and
+humble in the depths of her heart, in spite of her charming insolence.
+Like some straight-growing reed, she made a show of independence; yet,
+like the reed, she was ready to bend to a strong hand. She talked much
+of religion, and had it not at heart, though she was prepared to find in
+it a solution of her life. How explain a creature so complex? Capable
+of heroism, yet sinking unconsciously from heroic heights to utter a
+spiteful word; young and sweet-natured, not so much old at heart as
+aged by the maxims of those about her; versed in a selfish philosophy in
+which she was all unpractised, she had all the vices of a courtier, all
+the nobleness of developing womanhood. She trusted nothing and no one,
+yet there were times when she quitted her sceptical attitude for a
+submissive credulity.
+
+How should any portrait be anything but incomplete of her, in whom the
+play of swiftly-changing colour made discord only to produce a poetic
+confusion? For in her there shone a divine brightness, a radiance of
+youth that blended all her bewildering characteristics in a certain
+completeness and unity informed by her charm. Nothing was feigned. The
+passion or semi-passion, the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual
+pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all
+spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position
+as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was
+wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above the world and
+beneath the shelter of her name. There was something of the egoism of
+Medea in her life, as in the life of the aristocracy that lay a-dying,
+and would not so much as raise itself or stretch out a hand to any
+political physician; so well aware of its feebleness, or so conscious
+that it was already dust, that it refused to touch or be touched.
+
+The Duchesse de Langeais (for that was her name) had been married for
+about four years when the Restoration was finally consummated, which is
+to say, in 1816. By that time the revolution of the Hundred Days had let
+in the light on the mind of Louis XVIII. In spite of his surroundings,
+he comprehended the situation and the age in which he was living; and it
+was only later, when this Louis XI, without the axe, lay stricken down
+by disease, that those about him got the upper hand. The Duchesse de
+Langeais, a Navarreins by birth, came of a ducal house which had made
+a point of never marrying below its rank since the reign of Louis XIV.
+Every daughter of the house must sooner or later take a _tabouret_ at
+Court. So, Antoinette de Navarreins, at the age of eighteen, came out of
+the profound solitude in which her girlhood had been spent to marry the
+Duc de Langeais' eldest son. The two families at that time were living
+quite out of the world; but after the invasion of France, the return
+of the Bourbons seemed to every Royalist mind the only possible way of
+putting an end to the miseries of the war.
+
+The Ducs de Navarreins and de Langeais had been faithful throughout to
+the exiled Princes, nobly resisting all the temptations of glory under
+the Empire. Under the circumstances they naturally followed out the old
+family policy; and Mlle Antoinette, a beautiful and portionless girl,
+was married to M. le Marquis de Langeais only a few months before the
+death of the Duke his father.
+
+After the return of the Bourbons, the families resumed their rank,
+offices, and dignity at Court; once more they entered public life, from
+which hitherto they held aloof, and took their place high on the sunlit
+summits of the new political world. In that time of general baseness and
+sham political conversions, the public conscience was glad to recognise
+the unstained loyalty of the two houses, and a consistency in political
+and private life for which all parties involuntarily respected them.
+But, unfortunately, as so often happens in a time of transition, the
+most disinterested persons, the men whose loftiness of view and wise
+principles would have gained the confidence of the French nation and led
+them to believe in the generosity of a novel and spirited policy--these
+men, to repeat, were taken out of affairs, and public business was
+allowed to fall into the hands of others, who found it to their interest
+to push principles to their extreme consequences by way of proving their
+devotion.
+
+The families of Langeais and Navarreins remained about the Court,
+condemned to perform the duties required by Court ceremonial amid the
+reproaches and sneers of the Liberal party. They were accused of gorging
+themselves with riches and honours, and all the while their family
+estates were no larger than before, and liberal allowances from the
+civil list were wholly expended in keeping up the state necessary for
+any European government, even if it be a Republic.
+
+In 1818, M. le Duc de Langeais commanded a division of the army, and the
+Duchess held a post about one of the Princesses, in virtue of which she
+was free to live in Paris and apart from her husband without scandal.
+The Duke, moreover, besides his military duties, had a place at Court,
+to which he came during his term of waiting, leaving his major-general
+in command. The Duke and Duchess were leading lives entirely apart, the
+world none the wiser. Their marriage of convention shared the fate
+of nearly all family arrangements of the kind. Two more antipathetic
+dispositions could not well have been found; they were brought together;
+they jarred upon each other; there was soreness on either side; then
+they were divided once for all. Then they went their separate ways,
+with a due regard for appearances. The Duc de Langeais, by nature
+as methodical as the Chevalier de Folard himself, gave himself up
+methodically to his own tastes and amusements, and left his wife at
+liberty to do as she pleased so soon as he felt sure of her character.
+He recognised in her a spirit pre-eminently proud, a cold heart, a
+profound submissiveness to the usages of the world, and a youthful
+loyalty. Under the eyes of great relations, with the light of a prudish
+and bigoted Court turned full upon the Duchess, his honour was safe.
+
+So the Duke calmly did as the _grands seigneurs_ of the eighteenth
+century did before him, and left a young wife of two-and-twenty to her
+own devices. He had deeply offended that wife, and in her nature there
+was one appalling characteristic--she would never forgive an offence
+when woman's vanity and self-love, with all that was best in her nature
+perhaps, had been slighted, wounded in secret. Insult and injury in the
+face of the world a woman loves to forget; there is a way open to her of
+showing herself great; she is a woman in her forgiveness; but a secret
+offence women never pardon; for secret baseness, as for hidden virtues
+and hidden love, they have no kindness.
+
+This was Mme la Duchesse de Langeais' real position, unknown to the
+world. She herself did not reflect upon it. It was the time of the
+rejoicings over the Duc de Berri's marriage. The Court and the Faubourg
+roused itself from its listlessness and reserve. This was the real
+beginning of that unheard-of splendour which the Government of the
+Restoration carried too far. At that time the Duchess, whether for
+reasons of her own, or from vanity, never appeared in public without a
+following of women equally distinguished by name and fortune. As queen
+of fashion she had her _dames d'atours_, her ladies, who modeled their
+manner and their wit on hers. They had been cleverly chosen. None of her
+satellites belonged to the inmost Court circle, nor to the highest
+level of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; but they had set their minds upon
+admission to those inner sanctuaries. Being as yet simple denominations,
+they wished to rise to the neighbourhood of the throne, and mingle with
+the seraphic powers in the high sphere known as _le petit chateau_. Thus
+surrounded, the Duchess's position was stronger and more commanding and
+secure. Her "ladies" defended her character and helped her to play her
+detestable part of a woman of fashion. She could laugh at men at her
+ease, play with fire, receive the homage on which the feminine nature is
+nourished, and remain mistress of herself.
+
+At Paris, in the highest society of all, a woman is a woman still; she
+lives on incense, adulation, and honours. No beauty, however undoubted,
+no face, however fair, is anything without admiration. Flattery and
+a lover are proofs of power. And what is power without recognition?
+Nothing. If the prettiest of women were left alone in a corner of a
+drawing-room, she would droop. Put her in the very centre and summit of
+social grandeur, she will at once aspire to reign over all hearts--often
+because it is out of her power to be the happy queen of one. Dress and
+manner and coquetry are all meant to please one of the poorest creatures
+extant--the brainless coxcomb, whose handsome face is his sole merit;
+it was for such as these that women threw themselves away. The gilded
+wooden idols of the Restoration, for they were neither more nor less,
+had neither the antecedents of the _petits maitres_ of the time of the
+Fronde, nor the rough sterling worth of Napoleon's heroes, not the wit
+and fine manners of their grandsires; but something of all three they
+meant to be without any trouble to themselves. Brave they were, like
+all young Frenchmen; ability they possessed, no doubt, if they had had
+a chance of proving it, but their places were filled up by the old
+worn-out men, who kept them in leading strings. It was a day of
+small things, a cold prosaic era. Perhaps it takes a long time for a
+Restoration to become a Monarchy.
+
+For the past eighteen months the Duchesse de Langeais had been leading
+this empty life, filled with balls and subsequent visits, objectless
+triumphs, and the transient loves that spring up and die in an evening's
+space. All eyes were turned on her when she entered a room; she reaped
+her harvest of flatteries and some few words of warmer admiration, which
+she encouraged by a gesture or a glance, but never suffered to penetrate
+deeper than the skin. Her tone and bearing and everything else about her
+imposed her will upon others. Her life was a sort of fever of vanity
+and perpetual enjoyment, which turned her head. She was daring enough in
+conversation; she would listen to anything, corrupting the surface, as
+it were, of her heart. Yet when she returned home, she often blushed at
+the story that had made her laugh; at the scandalous tale that supplied
+the details, on the strength of which she analyzed the love that she had
+never known, and marked the subtle distinctions of modern passion, not
+with comment on the part of complacent hypocrites. For women know how
+to say everything among themselves, and more of them are ruined by each
+other than corrupted by men.
+
+There came a moment when she discerned that not until a woman is loved
+will the world fully recognise her beauty and her wit. What does a
+husband prove? Simply that a girl or woman was endowed with wealth, or
+well brought up; that her mother managed cleverly that in some way she
+satisfied a man's ambitions. A lover constantly bears witness to her
+personal perfections. Then followed the discovery still in Mme de
+Langeais' early womanhood, that it was possible to be loved without
+committing herself, without permission, without vouchsafing any
+satisfaction beyond the most meagre dues. There was more than one demure
+feminine hypocrite to instruct her in the art of playing such dangerous
+comedies.
+
+So the Duchess had her court, and the number of her adorers and
+courtiers guaranteed her virtue. She was amiable and fascinating; she
+flirted till the ball or the evening's gaiety was at an end. Then the
+curtain dropped. She was cold, indifferent, self-contained again till
+the next day brought its renewed sensations, superficial as before. Two
+or three men were completely deceived, and fell in love in earnest.
+She laughed at them, she was utterly insensible. "I am loved!" she told
+herself. "He loves me!" The certainty sufficed her. It is enough for the
+miser to know that his every whim might be fulfilled if he chose; so it
+was with the Duchess, and perhaps she did not even go so far as to form
+a wish.
+
+One evening she chanced to be at the house of an intimate friend Mme la
+Vicomtesse de Fontaine, one of the humble rivals who cordially detested
+her, and went with her everywhere. In a "friendship" of this sort both
+sides are on their guard, and never lay their armor aside; confidences
+are ingeniously indiscreet, and not unfrequently treacherous. Mme de
+Langeais had distributed her little patronizing, friendly, or freezing
+bows, with the air natural to a woman who knows the worth of her smiles,
+when her eyes fell upon a total stranger. Something in the man's large
+gravity of aspect startled her, and, with a feeling almost like dread,
+she turned to Mme de Maufrigneuse with, "Who is the newcomer, dear?"
+
+"Someone that you have heard of, no doubt. The Marquis de Montriveau."
+
+"Oh! is it he?"
+
+She took up her eyeglass and submitted him to a very insolent scrutiny,
+as if he had been a picture meant to receive glances, not to return
+them.
+
+"Do introduce him; he ought to be interesting."
+
+"Nobody more tiresome and dull, dear. But he is the fashion."
+
+M. Armand de Montriveau, at that moment all unwittingly the object of
+general curiosity, better deserved attention than any of the idols that
+Paris needs must set up to worship for a brief space, for the city is
+vexed by periodical fits of craving, a passion for _engouement_ and sham
+enthusiasm, which must be satisfied. The Marquis was the only son of
+General de Montriveau, one of the _ci-devants_ who served the Republic
+nobly, and fell by Joubert's side at Novi. Bonaparte had placed his son
+at the school at Chalons, with the orphans of other generals who fell
+on the battlefield, leaving their children under the protection of the
+Republic. Armand de Montriveau left school with his way to make, entered
+the artillery, and had only reached a major's rank at the time of the
+Fontainebleau disaster. In his section of the service the chances of
+advancement were not many. There are fewer officers, in the first place,
+among the gunners than in any other corps; and in the second place, the
+feeling in the artillery was decidedly Liberal, not to say Republican;
+and the Emperor, feeling little confidence in a body of highly educated
+men who were apt to think for themselves, gave promotion grudgingly in
+the service. In the artillery, accordingly, the general rule of the
+army did not apply; the commanding officers were not invariably the most
+remarkable men in their department, because there was less to be feared
+from mediocrities. The artillery was a separate corps in those days, and
+only came under Napoleon in action.
+
+Besides these general causes, other reasons, inherent in Armand de
+Montriveau's character, were sufficient in themselves to account for his
+tardy promotion. He was alone in the world. He had been thrown at
+the age of twenty into the whirlwind of men directed by Napoleon; his
+interests were bounded by himself, any day he might lose his life; it
+became a habit of mind with him to live by his own self-respect and
+the consciousness that he had done his duty. Like all shy men, he was
+habitually silent; but his shyness sprang by no means from timidity;
+it was a kind of modesty in him; he found any demonstration of vanity
+intolerable. There was no sort of swagger about his fearlessness in
+action; nothing escaped his eyes; he could give sensible advice to his
+chums with unshaken coolness; he could go under fire, and duck upon
+occasion to avoid bullets. He was kindly; but his expression was haughty
+and stern, and his face gained him this character. In everything he was
+rigorous as arithmetic; he never permitted the slightest deviation from
+duty on any plausible pretext, nor blinked the consequences of a fact.
+He would lend himself to nothing of which he was ashamed; he never asked
+anything for himself; in short, Armand de Montriveau was one of many
+great men unknown to fame, and philosophical enough to despise it;
+living without attaching themselves to life, because they have not found
+their opportunity of developing to the full their power to do and feel.
+
+People were afraid of Montriveau; they respected him, but he was not
+very popular. Men may indeed allow you to rise above them, but to
+decline to descend as low as they can do is the one unpardonable sin.
+In their feeling towards loftier natures, there is a trace of hate and
+fear. Too much honour with them implies censure of themselves, a thing
+forgiven neither to the living nor to the dead.
+
+After the Emperor's farewells at Fontainebleau, Montriveau, noble though
+he was, was put on half-pay. Perhaps the heads of the War Office took
+fright at uncompromising uprightness worthy of antiquity, or perhaps it
+was known that he felt bound by his oath to the Imperial Eagle. During
+the Hundred Days he was made a Colonel of the Guard, and left on the
+field of Waterloo. His wounds kept him in Belgium he was not present
+at the disbanding of the Army of the Loire, but the King's government
+declined to recognise promotion made during the Hundred Days, and Armand
+de Montriveau left France.
+
+An adventurous spirit, a loftiness of thought hitherto satisfied by
+the hazards of war, drove him on an exploring expedition through Upper
+Egypt; his sanity or impulse directed his enthusiasm to a project of
+great importance, he turned his attention to that unexplored Central
+Africa which occupies the learned of today. The scientific expedition
+was long and unfortunate. He had made a valuable collection of notes
+bearing on various geographical and commercial problems, of which
+solutions are still eagerly sought; and succeeded, after surmounting
+many obstacles, in reaching the heart of the continent, when he was
+betrayed into the hands of a hostile native tribe. Then, stripped of all
+that he had, for two years he led a wandering life in the desert,
+the slave of savages, threatened with death at every moment, and more
+cruelly treated than a dumb animal in the power of pitiless children.
+Physical strength, and a mind braced to endurance, enabled him to
+survive the horrors of that captivity; but his miraculous escape
+well-nigh exhausted his energies. When he reached the French colony at
+Senegal, a half-dead fugitive covered with rags, his memories of his
+former life were dim and shapeless. The great sacrifices made in his
+travels were all forgotten like his studies of African dialects, his
+discoveries, and observations. One story will give an idea of all that
+he passed through. Once for several days the children of the sheikh of
+the tribe amused themselves by putting him up for a mark and flinging
+horses' knuckle-bones at his head.
+
+Montriveau came back to Paris in 1818 a ruined man. He had no interest,
+and wished for none. He would have died twenty times over sooner than
+ask a favour of anyone; he would not even press the recognition of his
+claims. Adversity and hardship had developed his energy even in trifles,
+while the habit of preserving his self-respect before that spiritual
+self which we call conscience led him to attach consequence to the most
+apparently trivial actions. His merits and adventures became known,
+however, through his acquaintances, among the principal men of science
+in Paris, and some few well-read military men. The incidents of his
+slavery and subsequent escape bore witness to a courage, intelligence,
+and coolness which won him celebrity without his knowledge, and that
+transient fame of which Paris salons are lavish, though the artist that
+fain would keep it must make untold efforts.
+
+Montriveau's position suddenly changed towards the end of that year. He
+had been a poor man, he was now rich; or, externally at any rate, he had
+all the advantages of wealth. The King's government, trying to attach
+capable men to itself and to strengthen the army, made concessions
+about that time to Napoleon's old officers if their known loyalty and
+character offered guarantees of fidelity. M. de Montriveau's name once
+more appeared in the army list with the rank of colonel; he received his
+arrears of pay and passed into the Guards. All these favours, one
+after another, came to seek the Marquis de Montriveau; he had asked
+for nothing however small. Friends had taken the steps for him which he
+would have refused to take for himself.
+
+After this, his habits were modified all at once; contrary to his
+custom, he went into society. He was well received, everywhere he met
+with great deference and respect. He seemed to have found some end
+in life; but everything passed within the man, there were no external
+signs; in society he was silent and cold, and wore a grave, reserved
+face. His social success was great, precisely because he stood out in
+such strong contrast to the conventional faces which line the walls
+of Paris salons. He was, indeed, something quite new there. Terse
+of speech, like a hermit or a savage, his shyness was thought to be
+haughtiness, and people were greatly taken with it. He was something
+strange and great. Women generally were so much the more smitten
+with this original person because he was not to be caught by their
+flatteries, however adroit, nor by the wiles with which they circumvent
+the strongest men and corrode the steel temper. Their Parisian's
+grimaces were lost upon M. de Montriveau; his nature only responded to
+the sonorous vibration of lofty thought and feeling. And he would very
+promptly have been dropped but for the romance that hung about his
+adventures and his life; but for the men who cried him up behind his
+back; but for a woman who looked for a triumph for her vanity, the woman
+who was to fill his thoughts.
+
+For these reasons the Duchesse de Langeais' curiosity was no less lively
+than natural. Chance had so ordered it that her interest in the man
+before her had been aroused only the day before, when she heard the
+story of one of M. de Montriveau's adventures, a story calculated to
+make the strongest impression upon a woman's ever-changing fancy.
+
+During M. de Montriveau's voyage of discovery to the sources of the
+Nile, he had had an argument with one of his guides, surely the most
+extraordinary debate in the annals of travel. The district that he
+wished to explore could only be reached on foot across a tract of
+desert. Only one of his guides knew the way; no traveller had penetrated
+before into that part of the country, where the undaunted officer hoped
+to find a solution of several scientific problems. In spite of the
+representations made to him by the guide and the older men of the place,
+he started upon the formidable journey. Summoning up courage, already
+highly strung by the prospect of dreadful difficulties, he set out in
+the morning.
+
+The loose sand shifted under his feet at every step; and when, at the
+end of a long day's march, he lay down to sleep on the ground, he had
+never been so tired in his life. He knew, however, that he must be up
+and on his way before dawn next day, and his guide assured him that they
+should reach the end of their journey towards noon. That promise kept
+up his courage and gave him new strength. In spite of his sufferings,
+he continued his march, with some blasphemings against science; he was
+ashamed to complain to his guide, and kept his pain to himself. After
+marching for a third of the day, he felt his strength failing, his feet
+were bleeding, he asked if they should reach the place soon. "In an
+hour's time," said the guide. Armand braced himself for another hour's
+march, and they went on.
+
+The hour slipped by; he could not so much as see against the sky the
+palm-trees and crests of hill that should tell of the end of the journey
+near at hand; the horizon line of sand was vast as the circle of the
+open sea.
+
+He came to a stand, refused to go farther, and threatened the guide--he
+had deceived him, murdered him; tears of rage and weariness flowed over
+his fevered cheeks; he was bowed down with fatigue upon fatigue, his
+throat seemed to be glued by the desert thirst. The guide meanwhile
+stood motionless, listening to these complaints with an ironical
+expression, studying the while, with the apparent indifference of an
+Oriental, the scarcely perceptible indications in the lie of the sands,
+which looked almost black, like burnished gold.
+
+"I have made a mistake," he remarked coolly. "I could not make out the
+track, it is so long since I came this way; we are surely on it now, but
+we must push on for two hours."
+
+"The man is right," thought M. de Montriveau.
+
+So he went on again, struggling to follow the pitiless native. It seemed
+as if he were bound to his guide by some thread like the invisible tie
+between the condemned man and the headsman. But the two hours went by,
+Montriveau had spent his last drops of energy, and the skyline was a
+blank, there were no palm-trees, no hills. He could neither cry out
+nor groan, he lay down on the sand to die, but his eyes would have
+frightened the boldest; something in his face seemed to say that he
+would not die alone. His guide, like a very fiend, gave him back a cool
+glance like a man that knows his power, left him to lie there, and kept
+at a safe distance out of reach of his desperate victim. At last M.
+Montriveau recovered strength enough for a last curse. The guide came
+nearer, silenced him with a steady look, and said, "Was it not your own
+will to go where I am taking you, in spite of us all? You say that I
+have lied to you. If I had not, you would not be even here. Do you want
+the truth? Here it is. _We have still another five hours' march before
+us, and we cannot go back_. Sound yourself; if you have not courage
+enough, here is my dagger."
+
+Startled by this dreadful knowledge of pain and human strength, M.
+de Montriveau would not be behind a savage; he drew a fresh stock of
+courage from his pride as a European, rose to his feet, and followed
+his guide. The five hours were at an end, and still M. de Montriveau
+saw nothing, he turned his failing eyes upon his guide; but the Nubian
+hoisted him on his shoulders, and showed him a wide pool of water with
+greenness all about it, and a noble forest lighted up by the sunset. It
+lay only a hundred paces away; a vast ledge of granite hid the glorious
+landscape. It seemed to Armand that he had taken a new lease of life.
+His guide, that giant in courage and intelligence, finished his work of
+devotion by carrying him across the hot, slippery, scarcely discernible
+track on the granite. Behind him lay the hell of burning sand, before
+him the earthly paradise of the most beautiful oasis in the desert.
+
+The Duchess, struck from the first by the appearance of this romantic
+figure, was even more impressed when she learned that this was that
+Marquis de Montriveau of whom she had dreamed during the night. She had
+been with him among the hot desert sands, he had been the companion of
+her nightmare wanderings; for such a woman was not this a delightful
+presage of a new interest in her life? And never was a man's exterior
+a better exponent of his character; never were curious glances so well
+justified. The principal characteristic of his great, square-hewn head
+was the thick, luxuriant black hair which framed his face, and gave him
+a strikingly close resemblance to General Kleber; and the likeness still
+held good in the vigorous forehead, in the outlines of his face, the
+quiet fearlessness of his eyes, and a kind of fiery vehemence expressed
+by strongly marked features. He was short, deep-chested, and muscular
+as a lion. There was something of the despot about him, and an
+indescribable suggestion of the security of strength in his gait,
+bearing, and slightest movements. He seemed to know that his will was
+irresistible, perhaps because he wished for nothing unjust. And yet,
+like all really strong men, he was mild of speech, simple in his
+manners, and kindly natured; although it seemed as if, in the stress of
+a great crisis, all these finer qualities must disappear, and the man
+would show himself implacable, unshaken in his resolve, terrific in
+action. There was a certain drawing in of the inner line of the lips
+which, to a close observer, indicated an ironical bent.
+
+The Duchesse de Langeais, realising that a fleeting glory was to be
+won by such a conquest, made up her mind to gain a lover in Armand de
+Montriveau during the brief interval before the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse
+brought him to be introduced. She would prefer him above the others; she
+would attach him to herself, display all her powers of coquetry for him.
+It was a fancy, such a merest Duchess's whim as furnished a Lope or a
+Calderon with the plot of the _Dog in the Manger_. She would not suffer
+another woman to engross him; but she had not the remotest intention of
+being his.
+
+Nature had given the Duchess every qualification for the part of
+coquette, and education had perfected her. Women envied her, and men
+fell in love with her, not without reason. Nothing that can inspire
+love, justify it, and give it lasting empire was wanting in her. Her
+style of beauty, her manner, her voice, her bearing, all combined to
+give her that instinctive coquetry which seems to be the consciousness
+of power. Her shape was graceful; perhaps there was a trace of
+self-consciousness in her changes of movement, the one affectation that
+could be laid to her charge; but everything about her was a part of her
+personality, from her least little gesture to the peculiar turn of her
+phrases, the demure glance of her eyes. Her great lady's grace, her
+most striking characteristic, had not destroyed the very French quick
+mobility of her person. There was an extraordinary fascination in her
+swift, incessant changes of attitude. She seemed as if she surely would
+be a most delicious mistress when her corset and the encumbering costume
+of her part were laid aside. All the rapture of love surely was latent
+in the freedom of her expressive glances, in her caressing tones, in the
+charm of her words. She gave glimpses of the high-born courtesan within
+her, vainly protesting against the creeds of the duchess.
+
+You might sit near her through an evening, she would be gay and
+melancholy in turn, and her gaiety, like her sadness, seemed
+spontaneous. She could be gracious, disdainful, insolent, or confiding
+at will. Her apparent good nature was real; she had no temptation to
+descend to malignity. But at each moment her mood changed; she was full
+of confidence or craft; her moving tenderness would give place to a
+heart-breaking hardness and insensibility. Yet how paint her as she
+was, without bringing together all the extremes of feminine nature? In
+a word, the Duchess was anything that she wished to be or to seem.
+Her face was slightly too long. There was a grace in it, and a certain
+thinness and fineness that recalled the portraits of the Middle Ages.
+Her skin was white, with a faint rose tint. Everything about her erred,
+as it were, by an excess of delicacy.
+
+M. de Montriveau willingly consented to be introduced to the Duchesse
+de Langeais; and she, after the manner of persons whose sensitive taste
+leads them to avoid banalities, refrained from overwhelming him with
+questions and compliments. She received him with a gracious deference
+which could not fail to flatter a man of more than ordinary powers,
+for the fact that a man rises above the ordinary level implies that
+he possesses something of that tact which makes women quick to read
+feeling. If the Duchess showed any curiosity, it was by her glances;
+her compliments were conveyed in her manner; there was a winning grace
+displayed in her words, a subtle suggestion of a desire to please which
+she of all women knew the art of manifesting. Yet her whole conversation
+was but, in a manner, the body of the letter; the postscript with the
+principal thought in it was still to come. After half an hour spent in
+ordinary talk, in which the words gained all their value from her tone
+and smiles, M. de Montriveau was about to retire discreetly, when the
+Duchess stopped him with an expressive gesture.
+
+"I do not know, monsieur, whether these few minutes during which I have
+had the pleasure of talking to you proved so sufficiently attractive,
+that I may venture to ask you to call upon me; I am afraid that it may
+be very selfish of me to wish to have you all to myself. If I should
+be so fortunate as to find that my house is agreeable to you, you will
+always find me at home in the evening until ten o'clock."
+
+The invitation was given with such irresistible grace, that M. de
+Montriveau could not refuse to accept it. When he fell back again among
+the groups of men gathered at a distance from the women, his
+friends congratulated him, half laughingly, half in earnest, on the
+extraordinary reception vouchsafed him by the Duchesse de Langeais. The
+difficult and brilliant conquest had been made beyond a doubt, and the
+glory of it was reserved for the Artillery of the Guard. It is easy to
+imagine the jests, good and bad, when this topic had once been started;
+the world of Paris salons is so eager for amusement, and a joke lasts
+for such a short time, that everyone is eager to make the most of it
+while it is fresh.
+
+All unconsciously, the General felt flattered by this nonsense. From his
+place where he had taken his stand, his eyes were drawn again and again
+to the Duchess by countless wavering reflections. He could not help
+admitting to himself that of all the women whose beauty had captivated
+his eyes, not one had seemed to be a more exquisite embodiment of faults
+and fair qualities blended in a completeness that might realise the
+dreams of earliest manhood. Is there a man in any rank of life that has
+not felt indefinable rapture in his secret soul over the woman singled
+out (if only in his dreams) to be his own; when she, in body, soul, and
+social aspects, satisfies his every requirement, a thrice perfect woman?
+And if this threefold perfection that flatters his pride is no argument
+for loving her, it is beyond cavil one of the great inducements to the
+sentiment. Love would soon be convalescent, as the eighteenth century
+moralist remarked, were it not for vanity. And it is certainly true
+that for everyone, man or woman, there is a wealth of pleasure in
+the superiority of the beloved. Is she set so high by birth that a
+contemptuous glance can never wound her? is she wealthy enough to
+surround herself with state which falls nothing short of royalty, of
+kings, of finance during their short reign of splendour? is she so
+ready-witted that a keen-edged jest never brings her into confusion?
+beautiful enough to rival any woman?--Is it such a small thing to know
+that your self-love will never suffer through her? A man makes these
+reflections in the twinkling of an eye. And how if, in the future opened
+out by early ripened passion, he catches glimpses of the changeful
+delight of her charm, the frank innocence of a maiden soul, the perils
+of love's voyage, the thousand folds of the veil of coquetry? Is not
+this enough to move the coldest man's heart?
+
+This, therefore, was M. de Montriveau's position with regard to woman;
+his past life in some measure explaining the extraordinary fact. He
+had been thrown, when little more than a boy, into the hurricane of
+Napoleon's wars; his life had been spent on fields of battle. Of women
+he knew just so much as a traveller knows of a country when he travels
+across it in haste from one inn to another. The verdict which Voltaire
+passed upon his eighty years of life might, perhaps, have been applied
+by Montriveau to his own thirty-seven years of existence; had he not
+thirty-seven follies with which to reproach himself? At his age he was
+as much a novice in love as the lad that has just been furtively reading
+_Faublas_. Of women he had nothing to learn; of love he knew nothing;
+and thus, desires, quite unknown before, sprang from this virginity of
+feeling.
+
+There are men here and there as much engrossed in the work demanded of
+them by poverty or ambition, art or science, as M. de Montriveau by war
+and a life of adventure--these know what it is to be in this unusual
+position if they very seldom confess to it. Every man in Paris is
+supposed to have been in love. No woman in Paris cares to take what
+other women have passed over. The dread of being taken for a fool is the
+source of the coxcomb's bragging so common in France; for in France to
+have the reputation of a fool is to be a foreigner in one's own country.
+Vehement desire seized on M. de Montriveau, desire that had gathered
+strength from the heat of the desert and the first stirrings of a heart
+unknown as yet in its suppressed turbulence.
+
+A strong man, and violent as he was strong, he could keep mastery over
+himself; but as he talked of indifferent things, he retired within
+himself, and swore to possess this woman, for through that thought lay
+the only way to love for him. Desire became a solemn compact made with
+himself, an oath after the manner of the Arabs among whom he had lived;
+for among them a vow is a kind of contract made with Destiny a man's
+whole future is solemnly pledged to fulfil it, and everything even his
+own death, is regarded simply as a means to the one end.
+
+A younger man would have said to himself, "I should very much like to
+have the Duchess for my mistress!" or, "If the Duchesse de Langeais
+cared for a man, he would be a very lucky rascal!" But the General said,
+"I will have Mme de Langeais for my mistress." And if a man takes such
+an idea into his head when his heart has never been touched before, and
+love begins to be a kind of religion with him, he little knows in what a
+hell he has set his foot.
+
+Armand de Montriveau suddenly took flight and went home in the first hot
+fever-fit of the first love that he had known. When a man has kept all
+his boyish beliefs, illusions, frankness, and impetuosity into middle
+age, his first impulse is, as it were, to stretch out a hand to take the
+thing that he desires; a little later he realizes that there is a gulf
+set between them, and that it is all but impossible to cross it. A sort
+of childish impatience seizes him, he wants the thing the more,
+and trembles or cries. Wherefore, the next day, after the stormiest
+reflections that had yet perturbed his mind, Armand de Montriveau
+discovered that he was under the yoke of the senses, and his bondage
+made the heavier by his love.
+
+The woman so cavalierly treated in his thoughts of yesterday had become
+a most sacred and dreadful power. She was to be his world, his life,
+from this time forth. The greatest joy, the keenest anguish, that he
+had yet known grew colorless before the bare recollection of the least
+sensation stirred in him by her. The swiftest revolutions in a man's
+outward life only touch his interests, while passion brings a complete
+revulsion of feeling. And so in those who live by feeling, rather than
+by self-interest, the doers rather than the reasoners, the sanguine
+rather than the lymphatic temperaments, love works a complete
+revolution. In a flash, with one single reflection, Armand de Montriveau
+wiped out his whole past life.
+
+A score of times he asked himself, like a boy, "Shall I go, or shall I
+not?" and then at last he dressed, came to the Hotel de Langeais
+towards eight o'clock that evening, and was admitted. He was to see the
+woman--ah! not the woman--the idol that he had seen yesterday, among
+lights, a fresh innocent girl in gauze and silken lace and veiling.
+He burst in upon her to declare his love, as if it were a question of
+firing the first shot on a field of battle.
+
+Poor novice! He found his ethereal sylphide shrouded in a brown cashmere
+dressing-gown ingeniously befrilled, lying languidly stretched out upon
+a sofa in a dimly lighted boudoir. Mme de Langeais did not so much as
+rise, nothing was visible of her but her face, her hair was loose but
+confined by a scarf. A hand indicated a seat, a hand that seemed white
+as marble to Montriveau by the flickering light of a single candle at
+the further side of the room, and a voice as soft as the light said:
+
+"If it had been anyone else, M. le Marquis, a friend with whom I could
+dispense with ceremony, or a mere acquaintance in whom I felt but slight
+interest, I should have closed my door. I am exceedingly unwell."
+
+"I will go," Armand said to himself.
+
+"But I do not know how it is," she continued (and the simple warrior
+attributed the shining of her eyes to fever), "perhaps it was a
+presentiment of your kind visit (and no one can be more sensible of the
+prompt attention than I), but the vapors have left my head."
+
+"Then may I stay?"
+
+"Oh, I should be very sorry to allow you to go. I told myself this
+morning that it was impossible that I should have made the slightest
+impression on your mind, and that in all probability you took my request
+for one of the commonplaces of which Parisians are lavish on every
+occasion. And I forgave your ingratitude in advance. An explorer
+from the deserts is not supposed to know how exclusive we are in our
+friendships in the Faubourg."
+
+The gracious, half-murmured words dropped one by one, as if they had
+been weighted with the gladness that apparently brought them to her
+lips. The Duchess meant to have the full benefit of her headache, and
+her speculation was fully successful. The General, poor man, was really
+distressed by the lady's simulated distress. Like Crillon listening to
+the story of the Crucifixion, he was ready to draw his sword against the
+vapors. How could a man dare to speak just then to this suffering woman
+of the love that she inspired? Armand had already felt that it would be
+absurd to fire off a declaration of love point-blank at one so far above
+other women. With a single thought came understanding of the delicacies
+of feeling, of the soul's requirements. To love: what was that but to
+know how to plead, to beg for alms, to wait? And as for the love that
+he felt, must he not prove it? His tongue was mute, it was frozen by the
+conventions of the noble Faubourg, the majesty of a sick headache, the
+bashfulness of love. But no power on earth could veil his glances; the
+heat and the Infinite of the desert blazed in eyes calm as a panther's,
+beneath the lids that fell so seldom. The Duchess enjoyed the steady
+gaze that enveloped her in light and warmth.
+
+"Mme la Duchesse," he answered, "I am afraid I express my gratitude for
+your goodness very badly. At this moment I have but one desire--I wish
+it were in my power to cure the pain."
+
+"Permit me to throw this off, I feel too warm now," she said, gracefully
+tossing aside a cushion that covered her feet.
+
+"Madame, in Asia your feet would be worth some ten thousand sequins.
+
+"A traveler's compliment!" smiled she.
+
+It pleased the sprightly lady to involve a rough soldier in a labyrinth
+of nonsense, commonplaces, and meaningless talk, in which he manoeuvred,
+in military language, as Prince Charles might have done at close
+quarters with Napoleon. She took a mischievous amusement in
+reconnoitring the extent of his infatuation by the number of foolish
+speeches extracted from a novice whom she led step by step into a
+hopeless maze, meaning to leave him there in confusion. She began by
+laughing at him, but nevertheless it pleased her to make him forget how
+time went.
+
+The length of a first visit is frequently a compliment, but Armand was
+innocent of any such intent. The famous explorer spent an hour in chat
+on all sorts of subjects, said nothing that he meant to say, and was
+feeling that he was only an instrument on whom this woman played, when
+she rose, sat upright, drew the scarf from her hair, and wrapped it
+about her throat, leant her elbow on the cushions, did him the honour
+of a complete cure, and rang for lights. The most graceful movement
+succeeded to complete repose. She turned to M. de Montriveau, from whom
+she had just extracted a confidence which seemed to interest her deeply,
+and said:
+
+"You wish to make game of me by trying to make me believe that you
+have never loved. It is a man's great pretension with us. And we always
+believe it! Out of pure politeness. Do we not know what to expect
+from it for ourselves? Where is the man that has found but a single
+opportunity of losing his heart? But you love to deceive us, and we
+submit to be deceived, poor foolish creatures that we are; for your
+hypocrisy is, after all, a homage paid to the superiority of our
+sentiments, which are all purity."
+
+The last words were spoken with a disdainful pride that made the novice
+in love feel like a worthless bale flung into the deep, while the
+Duchess was an angel soaring back to her particular heaven.
+
+"Confound it!" thought Armand de Montriveau, "how am I to tell this wild
+thing that I love her?"
+
+He had told her already a score of times; or rather, the Duchess had
+a score of times read his secret in his eyes; and the passion in this
+unmistakably great man promised her amusement, and an interest in her
+empty life. So she prepared with no little dexterity to raise a certain
+number of redoubts for him to carry by storm before he should gain an
+entrance into her heart. Montriveau should overleap one difficulty after
+another; he should be a plaything for her caprice, just as an insect
+teased by children is made to jump from one finger to another, and in
+spite of all its pains is kept in the same place by its mischievous
+tormentor. And yet it gave the Duchess inexpressible happiness to see
+that this strong man had told her the truth. Armand had never loved, as
+he had said. He was about to go, in a bad humour with himself, and still
+more out of humour with her; but it delighted her to see a sullenness
+that she could conjure away with a word, a glance, or a gesture.
+
+"Will you come tomorrow evening?" she asked. "I am going to a ball, but
+I shall stay at home for you until ten o'clock."
+
+Montriveau spent most of the next day in smoking an indeterminate
+quantity of cigars in his study window, and so got through the hours
+till he could dress and go to the Hotel de Langeais. To anyone who had
+known the magnificent worth of the man, it would have been grievous to
+see him grown so small, so distrustful of himself; the mind that might
+have shed light over undiscovered worlds shrunk to the proportions of
+a she-coxcomb's boudoir. Even he himself felt that he had fallen so low
+already in his happiness that to save his life he could not have told
+his love to one of his closest friends. Is there not always a trace
+of shame in the lover's bashfulness, and perhaps in woman a certain
+exultation over diminished masculine stature? Indeed, but for a host of
+motives of this kind, how explain why women are nearly always the first
+to betray the secret?--a secret of which, perhaps, they soon weary.
+
+"Mme la Duchesse cannot see visitors, monsieur," said the man; "she is
+dressing, she begs you to wait for her here."
+
+Armand walked up and down the drawing-room, studying her taste in the
+least details. He admired Mme de Langeais herself in the objects of her
+choosing; they revealed her life before he could grasp her personality
+and ideas. About an hour later the Duchess came noiselessly out of her
+chamber. Montriveau turned, saw her flit like a shadow across the room,
+and trembled. She came up to him, not with a bourgeoise's enquiry, "How
+do I look?" She was sure of herself; her steady eyes said plainly, "I am
+adorned to please you."
+
+No one surely, save the old fairy godmother of some princess in
+disguise, could have wound a cloud of gauze about the dainty throat, so
+that the dazzling satin skin beneath should gleam through the gleaming
+folds. The Duchess was dazzling. The pale blue colour of her gown,
+repeated in the flowers in her hair, appeared by the richness of its hue
+to lend substance to a fragile form grown too wholly ethereal; for as
+she glided towards Armand, the loose ends of her scarf floated about
+her, putting that valiant warrior in mind of the bright damosel flies
+that hover now over water, now over the flowers with which they seem to
+mingle and blend.
+
+"I have kept you waiting," she said, with the tone that a woman can
+always bring into her voice for the man whom she wishes to please.
+
+"I would wait patiently through an eternity," said he, "if I were sure
+of finding a divinity so fair; but it is no compliment to speak of your
+beauty to you; nothing save worship could touch you. Suffer me only to
+kiss your scarf."
+
+"Oh, fie!" she said, with a commanding gesture, "I esteem you enough to
+give you my hand."
+
+She held it out for his kiss. A woman's hand, still moist from the
+scented bath, has a soft freshness, a velvet smoothness that sends a
+tingling thrill from the lips to the soul. And if a man is attracted to
+a woman, and his senses are as quick to feel pleasure as his heart is
+full of love, such a kiss, though chaste in appearance, may conjure up a
+terrific storm.
+
+"Will you always give it me like this?" the General asked humbly when he
+had pressed that dangerous hand respectfully to his lips.
+
+"Yes, but there we must stop," she said, smiling. She sat down,
+and seemed very slow over putting on her gloves, trying to slip the
+unstretched kid over all her fingers at once, while she watched M.
+de Montriveau; and he was lost in admiration of the Duchess and those
+repeated graceful movements of hers.
+
+"Ah! you were punctual," she said; "that is right. I like punctuality.
+It is the courtesy of kings, His Majesty says; but to my thinking, from
+you men it is the most respectful flattery of all. Now, is it not? Just
+tell me."
+
+Again she gave him a side glance to express her insidious friendship,
+for he was dumb with happiness sheer happiness through such nothings
+as these! Oh, the Duchess understood _son metier de femme_--the art
+and mystery of being a woman--most marvelously well; she knew, to
+admiration, how to raise a man in his own esteem as he humbled himself
+to her; how to reward every step of the descent to sentimental folly
+with hollow flatteries.
+
+"You will never forget to come at nine o'clock."
+
+"No; but are you going to a ball every night?"
+
+"Do I know?" she answered, with a little childlike shrug of the
+shoulders; the gesture was meant to say that she was nothing if not
+capricious, and that a lover must take her as she was.--"Besides," she
+added, "what is that to you? You shall be my escort."
+
+"That would be difficult tonight," he objected; "I am not properly
+dressed."
+
+"It seems to me," she returned loftily, "that if anyone has a right
+to complain of your costume, it is I. Know, therefore, _monsieur le
+voyageur_, that if I accept a man's arm, he is forthwith above the laws
+of fashion, nobody would venture to criticise him. You do not know the
+world, I see; I like you the better for it."
+
+And even as she spoke she swept him into the pettiness of that world by
+the attempt to initiate him into the vanities of a woman of fashion.
+
+"If she chooses to do a foolish thing for me, I should be a simpleton to
+prevent her," said Armand to himself. "She has a liking for me beyond a
+doubt; and as for the world, she cannot despise it more than I do. So,
+now for the ball if she likes."
+
+The Duchess probably thought that if the General came with her and
+appeared in a ballroom in boots and a black tie, nobody would hesitate
+to believe that he was violently in love with her. And the General was
+well pleased that the queen of fashion should think of compromising
+herself for him; hope gave him wit. He had gained confidence, he brought
+out his thoughts and views; he felt nothing of the restraint that
+weighed on his spirits yesterday. His talk was interesting and animated,
+and full of those first confidences so sweet to make and to receive.
+
+Was Mme de Langeais really carried away by his talk, or had she
+devised this charming piece of coquetry? At any rate, she looked up
+mischievously as the clock struck twelve.
+
+"Ah! you have made me too late for the ball!" she exclaimed, surprised
+and vexed that she had forgotten how time was going.
+
+The next moment she approved the exchange of pleasures with a smile that
+made Armand's heart give a sudden leap.
+
+"I certainly promised Mme de Beauseant," she added. "They are all
+expecting me."
+
+"Very well--go."
+
+"No--go on. I will stay. Your Eastern adventures fascinate me. Tell
+me the whole story of your life. I love to share in a brave man's
+hardships, and I feel them all, indeed I do!"
+
+She was playing with her scarf, twisting it and pulling it to
+pieces, with jerky, impatient movements that seemed to tell of inward
+dissatisfaction and deep reflection.
+
+"_We_ are fit for nothing," she went on. "Ah! we are contemptible,
+selfish, frivolous creatures. We can bore ourselves with amusements,
+and that is all we can do. Not one of us that understands that she has
+a part to play in life. In old days in France, women were beneficent
+lights; they lived to comfort those that mourned, to encourage high
+virtues, to reward artists and stir new life with noble thoughts. If the
+world has grown so petty, ours is the fault. You make me loathe the ball
+and this world in which I live. No, I am not giving up much for you."
+
+She had plucked her scarf to pieces, as a child plays with a flower,
+pulling away all the petals one by one; and now she crushed it into a
+ball, and flung it away. She could show her swan's neck.
+
+She rang the bell. "I shall not go out tonight," she told the footman.
+Her long, blue eyes turned timidly to Armand; and by the look of
+misgiving in them, he knew that he was meant to take the order for a
+confession, for a first and great favour. There was a pause, filled with
+many thoughts, before she spoke with that tenderness which is often in
+women's voices, and not so often in their hearts. "You have had a hard
+life," she said.
+
+"No," returned Armand. "Until today I did not know what happiness was."
+
+"Then you know it now?" she asked, looking at him with a demure, keen
+glance.
+
+"What is happiness for me henceforth but this--to see you, to hear
+you?... Until now I have only known privation; now I know that I can be
+unhappy----"
+
+"That will do, that will do," she said. "You must go; it is past
+midnight. Let us regard appearances. People must not talk about us. I
+do not know quite what I shall say; but the headache is a good-natured
+friend, and tells no tales."
+
+"Is there to be a ball tomorrow night?"
+
+"You would grow accustomed to the life, I think. Very well. Yes, we will
+go again tomorrow night."
+
+There was not a happier man in the world than Armand when he went out
+from her. Every evening he came to Mme de Langeais' at the hour kept for
+him by a tacit understanding.
+
+It would be tedious, and, for the many young men who carry a redundance
+of such sweet memories in their hearts, it were superfluous to follow
+the story step by step--the progress of a romance growing in those hours
+spent together, a romance controlled entirely by a woman's will. If
+sentiment went too fast, she would raise a quarrel over a word, or when
+words flagged behind her thoughts, she appealed to the feelings. Perhaps
+the only way of following such Penelope's progress is by marking its
+outward and visible signs.
+
+As, for instance, within a few days of their first meeting, the
+assiduous General had won and kept the right to kiss his lady's
+insatiable hands. Wherever Mme de Langeais went, M. de Montriveau
+was certain to be seen, till people jokingly called him "Her Grace's
+orderly." And already he had made enemies; others were jealous, and
+envied him his position. Mme de Langeais had attained her end. The
+Marquis de Montriveau was among her numerous train of adorers, and a
+means of humiliating those who boasted of their progress in her good
+graces, for she publicly gave him preference over them all.
+
+"Decidedly, M. de Montriveau is the man for whom the Duchess shows a
+preference," pronounced Mme de Serizy.
+
+And who in Paris does not know what it means when a woman "shows a
+preference?" All went on therefore according to prescribed rule. The
+anecdotes which people were pleased to circulate concerning the General
+put that warrior in so formidable a light, that the more adroit quietly
+dropped their pretensions to the Duchess, and remained in her train
+merely to turn the position to account, and to use her name and
+personality to make better terms for themselves with certain stars of
+the second magnitude. And those lesser powers were delighted to take a
+lover away from Mme de Langeais. The Duchess was keen-sighted enough to
+see these desertions and treaties with the enemy; and her pride would
+not suffer her to be the dupe of them. As M. de Talleyrand, one of her
+great admirers, said, she knew how to take a second edition of revenge,
+laying the two-edged blade of a sarcasm between the pairs in these
+"morganatic" unions. Her mocking disdain contributed not a little to
+increase her reputation as an extremely clever woman and a person to
+be feared. Her character for virtue was consolidated while she amused
+herself with other people's secrets, and kept her own to herself. Yet,
+after two months of assiduities, she saw with a vague dread in the
+depths of her soul that M. de Montriveau understood nothing of the
+subtleties of flirtation after the manner of the Faubourg Saint-Germain;
+he was taking a Parisienne's coquetry in earnest.
+
+"You will not tame _him_, dear Duchess," the old Vidame de Pamiers had
+said. "'Tis a first cousin to the eagle; he will carry you off to his
+eyrie if you do not take care."
+
+Then Mme de Langeais felt afraid. The shrewd old noble's words sounded
+like a prophecy. The next day she tried to turn love to hate. She was
+harsh, exacting, irritable, unbearable; Montriveau disarmed her with
+angelic sweetness. She so little knew the great generosity of a large
+nature, that the kindly jests with which her first complaints were met
+went to her heart. She sought a quarrel, and found proofs of affection.
+She persisted.
+
+"When a man idolizes you, how can he have vexed you?" asked Armand.
+
+"You do not vex me," she answered, suddenly grown gentle and submissive.
+"But why do you wish to compromise me? For me you ought to be nothing
+but a _friend_. Do you not know it? I wish I could see that you had the
+instincts, the delicacy of real friendship, so that I might lose neither
+your respect nor the pleasure that your presence gives me."
+
+"Nothing but your _friend_!" he cried out. The terrible word sent an
+electric shock through his brain. "On the faith of these happy hours
+that you grant me, I sleep and wake in your heart. And now today, for no
+reason, you are pleased to destroy all the secret hopes by which I live.
+You have required promises of such constancy in me, you have said so
+much of your horror of women made up of nothing but caprice; and now do
+you wish me to understand that, like other women here in Paris, you have
+passions, and know nothing of love? If so, why did you ask my life of
+me? why did you accept it?"
+
+"I was wrong, my friend. Oh, it is wrong of a woman to yield to such
+intoxication when she must not and cannot make any return."
+
+"I understand. You have merely been coquetting with me, and----"
+
+"Coquetting?" she repeated. "I detest coquetry. A coquette Armand, makes
+promises to many, and gives herself to none; and a woman who keeps such
+promises is a libertine. This much I believed I had grasped of our code.
+But to be melancholy with humorists, gay with the frivolous, and politic
+with ambitious souls; to listen to a babbler with every appearance
+of admiration, to talk of war with a soldier, wax enthusiastic with
+philanthropists over the good of the nation, and to give to each one his
+little dole of flattery--it seems to me that this is as much a matter of
+necessity as dress, diamonds, and gloves, or flowers in one's hair. Such
+talk is the moral counterpart of the toilette. You take it up and lay it
+aside with the plumed head-dress. Do you call this coquetry? Why, I have
+never treated you as I treat everyone else. With you, my friend, I am
+sincere. Have I not always shared your views, and when you convinced me
+after a discussion, was I not always perfectly glad? In short, I love
+you, but only as a devout and pure woman may love. I have thought it
+over. I am a married woman, Armand. My way of life with M. de Langeais
+gives me liberty to bestow my heart; but law and custom leave me no
+right to dispose of my person. If a woman loses her honour, she is
+an outcast in any rank of life; and I have yet to meet with a single
+example of a man that realizes all that our sacrifices demand of him in
+such a case. Quite otherwise. Anyone can foresee the rupture between Mme
+de Beauseant and M. d'Ajuda (for he is going to marry Mlle de Rochefide,
+it seems), that affair made it clear to my mind that these very
+sacrifices on the woman's part are almost always the cause of the man's
+desertion. If you had loved me sincerely, you would have kept away for a
+time.--Now, I will lay aside all vanity for you; is not that something?
+What will not people say of a woman to whom no man attaches himself?
+Oh, she is heartless, brainless, soulless; and what is more, devoid
+of charm! Coquettes will not spare me. They will rob me of the very
+qualities that mortify them. So long as my reputation is safe, what do I
+care if my rivals deny my merits? They certainly will not inherit them.
+Come, my friend; give up something for her who sacrifices so much for
+you. Do not come quite so often; I shall love you none the less."
+
+"Ah!" said Armand, with the profound irony of a wounded heart in his
+words and tone. "Love, so the scribblers say, only feeds on illusions.
+Nothing could be truer, I see; I am expected to imagine that I am loved.
+But, there!--there are some thoughts like wounds, from which there is no
+recovery. My belief in you was one of the last left to me, and now I see
+that there is nothing left to believe in this earth."
+
+She began to smile.
+
+"Yes," Montriveau went on in an unsteady voice, "this Catholic faith to
+which you wish to convert me is a lie that men make for themselves; hope
+is a lie at the expense of the future; pride, a lie between us and our
+fellows; and pity, and prudence, and terror are cunning lies. And now
+my happiness is to be one more lying delusion; I am expected to delude
+myself, to be willing to give gold coin for silver to the end. If you
+can so easily dispense with my visits; if you can confess me neither
+as your friend nor your lover, you do not care for me! And I, poor fool
+that I am, tell myself this, and know it, and love you!"
+
+"But, dear me, poor Armand, you are flying into a passion!"
+
+"I flying into a passion?"
+
+"Yes. You think that the whole question is opened because I ask you to
+be careful."
+
+In her heart of hearts she was delighted with the anger that leapt out
+in her lover's eyes. Even as she tortured him, she was criticising
+him, watching every slightest change that passed over his face. If
+the General had been so unluckily inspired as to show himself generous
+without discussion (as happens occasionally with some artless souls),
+he would have been a banished man forever, accused and convicted of not
+knowing how to love. Most women are not displeased to have their code of
+right and wrong broken through. Do they not flatter themselves that they
+never yield except to force? But Armand was not learned enough in this
+kind of lore to see the snare ingeniously spread for him by the Duchess.
+So much of the child was there in the strong man in love.
+
+"If all you want is to preserve appearances," he began in his
+simplicity, "I am willing to----"
+
+"Simply to preserve appearances!" the lady broke in; "why, what idea can
+you have of me? Have I given you the slightest reason to suppose that I
+can be yours?"
+
+"Why, what else are we talking about?" demanded Montriveau.
+
+"Monsieur, you frighten me!... No, pardon me. Thank you," she added,
+coldly; "thank you, Armand. You have given me timely warning of
+imprudence; committed quite unconsciously, believe it, my friend. You
+know how to endure, you say. I also know how to endure. We will not
+see each other for a time; and then, when both of us have contrived to
+recover calmness to some extent, we will think about arrangements for
+a happiness sanctioned by the world. I am young, Armand; a man with no
+delicacy might tempt a woman of four-and-twenty to do many foolish, wild
+things for his sake. But _you_! You will be my friend, promise me that
+you will?"
+
+"The woman of four-and-twenty," returned he, "knows what she is about."
+
+He sat down on the sofa in the boudoir, and leant his head on his hands.
+
+"Do you love me, madame?" he asked at length, raising his head, and
+turning a face full of resolution upon her. "Say it straight out; Yes or
+No!"
+
+His direct question dismayed the Duchess more than a threat of suicide
+could have done; indeed, the woman of the nineteenth century is not to
+be frightened by that stale stratagem, the sword has ceased to be part
+of the masculine costume. But in the effect of eyelids and lashes, in
+the contraction of the gaze, in the twitching of the lips, is there not
+some influence that communicates the terror which they express with such
+vivid magnetic power?
+
+"Ah, if I were free, if----"
+
+"Oh! is it only your husband that stands in the way?" the General
+exclaimed joyfully, as he strode to and fro in the boudoir. "Dear
+Antoinette, I wield a more absolute power than the Autocrat of all the
+Russias. I have a compact with Fate; I can advance or retard destiny,
+so far as men are concerned, at my fancy, as you alter the hands of a
+watch. If you can direct the course of fate in our political machinery,
+it simply means (does it not?) that you understand the ins and outs of
+it. You shall be free before very long, and then you must remember your
+promise."
+
+"Armand!" she cried. "What do you mean? Great heavens! Can you imagine
+that I am to be the prize of a crime? Do you want to kill me? Why! you
+cannot have any religion in you! For my own part, I fear God. M. de
+Langeais may have given me reason to hate him, but I wish him no manner
+of harm."
+
+M. de Montriveau beat a tattoo on the marble chimney-piece, and only
+looked composedly at the lady.
+
+"Dear," continued she, "respect him. He does not love me, he is not kind
+to me, but I have duties to fulfil with regard to him. What would I not
+do to avert the calamities with which you threaten him?--Listen," she
+continued after a pause, "I will not say another word about separation;
+you shall come here as in the past, and I will still give you my
+forehead to kiss. If I refused once or twice, it was pure coquetry,
+indeed it was. But let us understand each other," she added as he came
+closer. "You will permit me to add to the number of my satellites; to
+receive even more visitors in the morning than heretofore; I mean to be
+twice as frivolous; I mean to use you to all appearance very badly;
+to feign a rupture; you must come not quite so often, and then,
+afterwards----"
+
+While she spoke, she had allowed him to put an arm about her waist,
+Montriveau was holding her tightly to him, and she seemed to feel the
+exceeding pleasure that women usually feel in that close contact, an
+earnest of the bliss of a closer union. And then, doubtless she meant to
+elicit some confidence, for she raised herself on tiptoe, and laid her
+forehead against Armand's burning lips.
+
+"And then," Montriveau finished her sentence for her, "you shall not
+speak to me of your husband. You ought not to think of him again."
+
+Mme de Langeais was silent awhile.
+
+"At least," she said, after a significant pause, "at least you will do
+all that I wish without grumbling, you will not be naughty; tell me so,
+my friend? You wanted to frighten me, did you not? Come, now, confess
+it?... You are too good ever to think of crimes. But is it possible that
+you can have secrets that I do not know? How can you control Fate?"
+
+"Now, when you confirm the gift of the heart that you have already given
+me, I am far too happy to know exactly how to answer you. I can trust
+you, Antoinette; I shall have no suspicion, no unfounded jealousy of
+you. But if accident should set you free, we shall be one----"
+
+"Accident, Armand?" (With that little dainty turn of the head that seems
+to say so many things, a gesture that such women as the Duchess can use
+on light occasions, as a great singer can act with her voice.) "Pure
+accident," she repeated. "Mind that. If anything should happen to M. de
+Langeais by your fault, I should never be yours."
+
+And so they parted, mutually content. The Duchess had made a pact
+that left her free to prove to the world by words and deeds that M. de
+Montriveau was no lover of hers. And as for him, the wily Duchess
+vowed to tire him out. He should have nothing of her beyond the little
+concessions snatched in the course of contests that she could stop
+at her pleasure. She had so pretty an art of revoking the grant
+of yesterday, she was so much in earnest in her purpose to remain
+technically virtuous, that she felt that there was not the slightest
+danger for her in preliminaries fraught with peril for a woman less sure
+of her self-command. After all, the Duchess was practically separated
+from her husband; a marriage long since annulled was no great sacrifice
+to make to her love.
+
+Montriveau on his side was quite happy to win the vaguest promise, glad
+once for all to sweep aside, with all scruples of conjugal fidelity, her
+stock of excuses for refusing herself to his love. He had gained ground
+a little, and congratulated himself. And so for a time he took unfair
+advantage of the rights so hardly won. More a boy than he had ever been
+in his life, he gave himself up to all the childishness that makes first
+love the flower of life. He was a child again as he poured out all
+his soul, all the thwarted forces that passion had given him, upon her
+hands, upon the dazzling forehead that looked so pure to his eyes; upon
+her fair hair; on the tufted curls where his lips were pressed. And the
+Duchess, on whom his love was poured like a flood, was vanquished by
+the magnetic influence of her lover's warmth; she hesitated to begin
+the quarrel that must part them forever. She was more a woman than she
+thought, this slight creature, in her effort to reconcile the demands
+of religion with the ever-new sensations of vanity, the semblance of
+pleasure which turns a Parisienne's head. Every Sunday she went to Mass;
+she never missed a service; then, when evening came, she was steeped in
+the intoxicating bliss of repressed desire. Armand and Mme de Langeais,
+like Hindoo fakirs, found the reward of their continence in the
+temptations to which it gave rise. Possibly, the Duchess had ended by
+resolving love into fraternal caresses, harmless enough, as it might
+have seemed to the rest of the world, while they borrowed extremes
+of degradation from the license of her thoughts. How else explain the
+incomprehensible mystery of her continual fluctuations? Every morning
+she proposed to herself to shut her door on the Marquis de Montriveau;
+every evening, at the appointed hour, she fell under the charm of his
+presence. There was a languid defence; then she grew less unkind. Her
+words were sweet and soothing. They were lovers--lovers only could have
+been thus. For him the Duchess would display her most sparkling wit, her
+most captivating wiles; and when at last she had wrought upon his senses
+and his soul, she might submit herself passively to his fierce caresses,
+but she had her _nec plus ultra_ of passion; and when once it was
+reached, she grew angry if he lost the mastery of himself and made
+as though he would pass beyond. No woman on earth can brave the
+consequences of refusal without some motive; nothing is more natural
+than to yield to love; wherefore Mme de Langeais promptly raised a
+second line of fortification, a stronghold less easy to carry than
+the first. She evoked the terrors of religion. Never did Father of
+the Church, however eloquent, plead the cause of God better than the
+Duchess. Never was the wrath of the Most High better justified than
+by her voice. She used no preacher's commonplaces, no rhetorical
+amplifications. No. She had a "pulpit-tremor" of her own. To Armand's
+most passionate entreaty, she replied with a tearful gaze, and a gesture
+in which a terrible plenitude of emotion found expression. She stopped
+his mouth with an appeal for mercy. She would not hear another word; if
+she did, she must succumb; and better death than criminal happiness.
+
+"Is it nothing to disobey God?" she asked him, recovering a voice grown
+faint in the crises of inward struggles, through which the fair
+actress appeared to find it hard to preserve her self-control. "I would
+sacrifice society, I would give up the whole world for you, gladly; but
+it is very selfish of you to ask my whole after-life of me for a moment
+of pleasure. Come, now! are you not happy?" she added, holding out her
+hand; and certainly in her careless toilette the sight of her afforded
+consolations to her lover, who made the most of them.
+
+Sometimes from policy, to keep her hold on a man whose ardent passion
+gave her emotions unknown before, sometimes in weakness, she suffered
+him to snatch a swift kiss; and immediately, in feigned terror, she
+flushed red and exiled Armand from the sofa so soon as the sofa became
+dangerous ground.
+
+"Your joys are sins for me to expiate, Armand; they are paid for by
+penitence and remorse," she cried.
+
+And Montriveau, now at two chairs' distance from that aristocratic
+petticoat, betook himself to blasphemy and railed against Providence.
+The Duchess grew angry at such times.
+
+"My friend," she said drily, "I do not understand why you decline to
+believe in God, for it is impossible to believe in man. Hush, do not
+talk like that. You have too great a nature to take up their Liberal
+nonsense with its pretension to abolish God."
+
+Theological and political disputes acted like a cold douche on
+Montriveau; he calmed down; he could not return to love when the Duchess
+stirred up his wrath by suddenly setting him down a thousand miles away
+from the boudoir, discussing theories of absolute monarchy, which she
+defended to admiration. Few women venture to be democrats; the attitude
+of democratic champion is scarcely compatible with tyrannous feminine
+sway. But often, on the other hand, the General shook out his mane,
+dropped politics with a leonine growling and lashing of the flanks, and
+sprang upon his prey; he was no longer capable of carrying a heart and
+brain at such variance for very far; he came back, terrible with love,
+to his mistress. And she, if she felt the prick of fancy stimulated to
+a dangerous point, knew that it was time to leave her boudoir; she came
+out of the atmosphere surcharged with desires that she drew in with
+her breath, sat down to the piano, and sang the most exquisite songs
+of modern music, and so baffled the physical attraction which at times
+showed her no mercy, though she was strong enough to fight it down.
+
+At such times she was something sublime in Armand's eyes; she was not
+acting, she was genuine; the unhappy lover was convinced that she loved
+him. Her egoistic resistance deluded him into a belief that she was a
+pure and sainted woman; he resigned himself; he talked of Platonic love,
+did this artillery officer!
+
+When Mme de Langeais had played with religion sufficiently to suit her
+own purposes, she played with it again for Armand's benefit. She wanted
+to bring him back to a Christian frame of mind; she brought out her
+edition of _Le Genie du Christianisme_, adapted for the use of military
+men. Montriveau chafed; his yoke was heavy. Oh! at that, possessed by
+the spirit of contradiction, she dinned religion into his ears, to see
+whether God might not rid her of this suitor, for the man's persistence
+was beginning to frighten her. And in any case she was glad to prolong
+any quarrel, if it bade fair to keep the dispute on moral grounds for
+an indefinite period; the material struggle which followed it was more
+dangerous.
+
+But if the time of her opposition on the ground of the marriage law
+might be said to be the _epoque civile_ of this sentimental warfare, the
+ensuing phase which might be taken to constitute the _epoque religieuse_
+had also its crisis and consequent decline of severity.
+
+Armand happening to come in very early one evening, found M. l'Abbe
+Gondrand, the Duchess's spiritual director, established in an armchair
+by the fireside, looking as a spiritual director might be expected to
+look while digesting his dinner and the charming sins of his penitent.
+In the ecclesiastic's bearing there was a stateliness befitting a
+dignitary of the Church; and the episcopal violet hue already appeared
+in his dress. At sight of his fresh, well-preserved complexion, smooth
+forehead, and ascetic's mouth, Montriveau's countenance grew uncommonly
+dark; he said not a word under the malicious scrutiny of the other's
+gaze, and greeted neither the lady nor the priest. The lover apart,
+Montriveau was not wanting in tact; so a few glances exchanged with the
+bishop-designate told him that here was the real forger of the Duchess's
+armory of scruples.
+
+That an ambitious abbe should control the happiness of a man of
+Montriveau's temper, and by underhand ways! The thought burst in a
+furious tide over his face, clenched his fists, and set him chafing and
+pacing to and fro; but when he came back to his place intending to make
+a scene, a single look from the Duchess was enough. He was quiet.
+
+Any other woman would have been put out by her lover's gloomy silence;
+it was quite otherwise with Mme de Langeais. She continued her
+conversation with M. de Gondrand on the necessity of re-establishing the
+Church in its ancient splendour. And she talked brilliantly.
+
+The Church, she maintained, ought to be a temporal as well as a
+spiritual power, stating her case better than the Abbe had done, and
+regretting that the Chamber of Peers, unlike the English House of Lords,
+had no bench of bishops. Nevertheless, the Abbe rose, yielded his place
+to the General, and took his leave, knowing that in Lent he could play a
+return game. As for the Duchess, Montriveau's behaviour had excited
+her curiosity to such a pitch that she scarcely rose to return her
+director's low bow.
+
+"What is the matter with you, my friend?"
+
+"Why, I cannot stomach that Abbe of yours."
+
+"Why did you not take a book?" she asked, careless whether the Abbe,
+then closing the door, heard her or no.
+
+The General paused, for the gesture which accompanied the Duchess's
+speech further increased the exceeding insolence of her words.
+
+"My dear Antoinette, thank you for giving love precedence of the Church;
+but, for pity's sake, allow me to ask one question."
+
+"Oh! you are questioning me! I am quite willing. You are my friend, are
+you not? I certainly can open the bottom of my heart to you; you will
+see only one image there."
+
+"Do you talk about our love to that man?"
+
+"He is my confessor."
+
+"Does he know that I love you?"
+
+"M. de Montriveau, you cannot claim, I think, to penetrate the secrets
+of the confessional?"
+
+"Does that man know all about our quarrels and my love for you?"
+
+"That man, monsieur; say God!"
+
+"God again! _I_ ought to be alone in your heart. But leave God alone
+where He is, for the love of God and me. Madame, you _shall not_ go to
+confession again, or----"
+
+"Or?" she repeated sweetly.
+
+"Or I will never come back here."
+
+"Then go, Armand. Good-bye, good-bye forever."
+
+She rose and went to her boudoir without so much as a glance at Armand,
+as he stood with his hand on the back of a chair. How long he stood
+there motionless he himself never knew. The soul within has the
+mysterious power of expanding as of contracting space.
+
+He opened the door of the boudoir. It was dark within. A faint voice was
+raised to say sharply:
+
+"I did not ring. What made you come in without orders? Go away,
+Suzette."
+
+"Then you are ill," exclaimed Montriveau.
+
+"Stand up, monsieur, and go out of the room for a minute at any rate,"
+she said, ringing the bell.
+
+"Mme la Duchesse rang for lights?" said the footman, coming in with the
+candles. When the lovers were alone together, Mme de Langeais still lay
+on her couch; she was just as silent and motionless as if Montriveau had
+not been there.
+
+"Dear, I was wrong," he began, a note of pain and a sublime kindness in
+his voice. "Indeed, I would not have you without religion----"
+
+"It is fortunate that you can recognise the necessity of a conscience,"
+she said in a hard voice, without looking at him. "I thank you in God's
+name."
+
+The General was broken down by her harshness; this woman seemed as
+if she could be at will a sister or a stranger to him. He made one
+despairing stride towards the door. He would leave her forever without
+another word. He was wretched; and the Duchess was laughing within
+herself over mental anguish far more cruel than the old judicial
+torture. But as for going away, it was not in his power to do it. In any
+sort of crisis, a woman is, as it were, bursting with a certain quantity
+of things to say; so long as she has not delivered herself of them,
+she experiences the sensation which we are apt to feel at the sight of
+something incomplete. Mme de Langeais had not said all that was in her
+mind. She took up her parable and said:
+
+"We have not the same convictions, General, I am pained to think. It
+would be dreadful if a woman could not believe in a religion which
+permits us to love beyond the grave. I set Christian sentiments aside;
+you cannot understand them. Let me simply speak to you of expediency.
+Would you forbid a woman at court the table of the Lord when it is
+customary to take the sacrament at Easter? People must certainly do
+something for their party. The Liberals, whatever they may wish to do,
+will never destroy the religious instinct. Religion will always be
+a political necessity. Would you undertake to govern a nation of
+logic-choppers? Napoleon was afraid to try; he persecuted ideologists.
+If you want to keep people from reasoning, you must give them something
+to feel. So let us accept the Roman Catholic Church with all its
+consequences. And if we would have France go to mass, ought we not to
+begin by going ourselves? Religion, you see, Armand, is a bond uniting
+all the conservative principles which enable the rich to live in
+tranquillity. Religion and the rights of property are intimately
+connected. It is certainly a finer thing to lead a nation by ideas of
+morality than by fear of the scaffold, as in the time of the Terror--the
+one method by which your odious Revolution could enforce obedience.
+The priest and the king--that means you, and me, and the Princess
+my neighbour; and, in a word, the interests of all honest people
+personified. There, my friend, just be so good as to belong to your
+party, you that might be its Scylla if you had the slightest ambition
+that way. I know nothing about politics myself; I argue from my own
+feelings; but still I know enough to guess that society would
+be overturned if people were always calling its foundations in
+question----"
+
+"If that is how your Court and your Government think, I am sorry for
+you," broke in Montriveau. "The Restoration, madam, ought to say, like
+Catherine de Medici, when she heard that the battle of Dreux was lost,
+'Very well; now we will go to the meeting-house.' Now 1815 was your
+battle of Dreux. Like the royal power of those days, you won in
+fact, while you lost in right. Political Protestantism has gained an
+ascendancy over people's minds. If you have no mind to issue your Edict
+of Nantes; or if, when it is issued, you publish a Revocation; if you
+should one day be accused and convicted of repudiating the Charter,
+which is simply a pledge given to maintain the interests established
+under the Republic, then the Revolution will rise again, terrible in her
+strength, and strike but a single blow. It will not be the Revolution
+that will go into exile; she is the very soil of France. Men die, but
+people's interests do not die. ... Eh, great Heavens! what are France
+and the crown and rightful sovereigns, and the whole world besides, to
+us? Idle words compared with my happiness. Let them reign or be hurled
+from the throne, little do I care. Where am I now?"
+
+"In the Duchesse de Langeais' boudoir, my friend."
+
+"No, no. No more of the Duchess, no more of Langeais; I am with my dear
+Antoinette."
+
+"Will you do me the pleasure to stay where you are," she said, laughing
+and pushing him back, gently however.
+
+"So you have never loved me," he retorted, and anger flashed in
+lightning from his eyes.
+
+"No, dear"; but the "No" was equivalent to "Yes."
+
+"I am a great ass," he said, kissing her hands. The terrible queen was a
+woman once more.--"Antoinette," he went on, laying his head on her feet,
+"you are too chastely tender to speak of our happiness to anyone in this
+world."
+
+"Oh!" she cried, rising to her feet with a swift, graceful spring,
+"you are a great simpleton." And without another word she fled into the
+drawing-room.
+
+"What is it now?" wondered the General, little knowing that the touch of
+his burning forehead had sent a swift electric thrill through her from
+foot to head.
+
+In hot wrath he followed her to the drawing-room, only to hear divinely
+sweet chords. The Duchess was at the piano. If the man of science or the
+poet can at once enjoy and comprehend, bringing his intelligence to bear
+upon his enjoyment without loss of delight, he is conscious that the
+alphabet and phraseology of music are but cunning instruments for
+the composer, like the wood and copper wire under the hands of the
+executant. For the poet and the man of science there is a music existing
+apart, underlying the double expression of this language of the spirit
+and senses. _Andiamo mio ben_ can draw tears of joy or pitying laughter
+at the will of the singer; and not unfrequently one here and there in
+the world, some girl unable to live and bear the heavy burden of an
+unguessed pain, some man whose soul vibrates with the throb of passion,
+may take up a musical theme, and lo! heaven is opened for them, or they
+find a language for themselves in some sublime melody, some song lost to
+the world.
+
+The General was listening now to such a song; a mysterious music unknown
+to all other ears, as the solitary plaint of some mateless bird dying
+alone in a virgin forest.
+
+"Great Heavens! what are you playing there?" he asked in an unsteady
+voice.
+
+"The prelude of a ballad, called, I believe, _Fleuve du Tage_."
+
+"I did not know that there was such music in a piano," he returned.
+
+"Ah!" she said, and for the first time she looked at him as a woman
+looks at the man she loves, "nor do you know, my friend, that I love
+you, and that you cause me horrible suffering; and that I feel that I
+must utter my cry of pain without putting it too plainly into words. If
+I did not, I should yield----But you see nothing."
+
+"And you will not make me happy!"
+
+"Armand, I should die of sorrow the next day."
+
+The General turned abruptly from her and went. But out in the street he
+brushed away the tears that he would not let fall.
+
+The religious phase lasted for three months. At the end of that time the
+Duchess grew weary of vain repetitions; the Deity, bound hand and foot,
+was delivered up to her lover. Possibly she may have feared that by
+sheer dint of talking of eternity she might perpetuate his love in this
+world and the next. For her own sake, it must be believed that no man
+had touched her heart, or her conduct would be inexcusable. She was
+young; the time when men and women feel that they cannot afford to lose
+time or to quibble over their joys was still far off. She, no doubt, was
+on the verge not of first love, but of her first experience of the bliss
+of love. And from inexperience, for want of the painful lessons which
+would have taught her to value the treasure poured out at her feet, she
+was playing with it. Knowing nothing of the glory and rapture of the
+light, she was fain to stay in the shadow.
+
+Armand was just beginning to understand this strange situation; he put
+his hope in the first word spoken by nature. Every evening, as he came
+away from Mme de Langeais', he told himself that no woman would accept
+the tenderest, most delicate proofs of a man's love during seven months,
+nor yield passively to the slighter demands of passion, only to cheat
+love at the last. He was waiting patiently for the sun to gain power,
+not doubting but that he should receive the earliest fruits. The married
+woman's hesitations and the religious scruples he could quite well
+understand. He even rejoiced over those battles. He mistook the
+Duchess's heartless coquetry for modesty; and he would not have had her
+otherwise. So he had loved to see her devising obstacles; was he not
+gradually triumphing over them? Did not every victory won swell the
+meagre sum of lovers' intimacies long denied, and at last conceded with
+every sign of love? Still, he had had such leisure to taste the full
+sweetness of every small successive conquest on which a lover feeds
+his love, that these had come to be matters of use and wont. So far as
+obstacles went, there were none now save his own awe of her; nothing
+else left between him and his desire save the whims of her who allowed
+him to call her Antoinette. So he made up his mind to demand more, to
+demand all. Embarrassed like a young lover who cannot dare to believe
+that his idol can stoop so low, he hesitated for a long time. He passed
+through the experience of terrible reactions within himself. A set
+purpose was annihilated by a word, and definite resolves died within him
+on the threshold. He despised himself for his weakness, and still his
+desire remained unuttered. Nevertheless, one evening, after sitting
+in gloomy melancholy, he brought out a fierce demand for his illegally
+legitimate rights. The Duchess had not to wait for her bond-slave's
+request to guess his desire. When was a man's desire a secret? And have
+not women an intuitive knowledge of the meaning of certain changes of
+countenance?
+
+"What! you wish to be my friend no longer?" she broke in at the first
+words, and a divine red surging like new blood under the transparent
+skin, lent brightness to her eyes. "As a reward for my generosity, you
+would dishonor me? Just reflect a little. I myself have thought much
+over this; and I think always for us _both_. There is such a thing as
+a woman's loyalty, and we can no more fail in it than you can fail in
+honour. _I_ cannot blind myself. If I am yours, how, in any sense, can
+I be M. de Langeais' wife? Can you require the sacrifice of my position,
+my rank, my whole life in return for a doubtful love that could not wait
+patiently for seven months? What! already you would rob me of my right
+to dispose of myself? No, no; you must not talk like this again. No, not
+another word. I will not, I cannot listen to you."
+
+Mme de Langeais raised both hands to her head to push back the tufted
+curls from her hot forehead; she seemed very much excited.
+
+"You come to a weak woman with your purpose definitely planned out. You
+say--'For a certain length of time she will talk to me of her husband,
+then of God, and then of the inevitable consequences. But I will use
+and abuse the ascendancy I shall gain over her; I will make myself
+indispensable; all the bonds of habit, all the misconstructions of
+outsiders, will make for me; and at length, when our _liaison_ is taken
+for granted by all the world, I shall be this woman's master.'--Now, be
+frank; these are your thoughts! Oh! you calculate, and you say that you
+love. Shame on you! You are enamoured? Ah! that I well believe! You
+wish to possess me, to have me for your mistress, that is all! Very well
+then, No! The _Duchesse de Langeais_ will not descend so far. Simple
+_bourgeoises_ may be the victims of your treachery--I, never! Nothing
+gives me assurance of your love. You speak of my beauty; I may lose
+every trace of it in six months, like the dear Princess, my neighbour.
+You are captivated by my wit, my grace. Great Heavens! you would soon
+grow used to them and to the pleasures of possession. Have not the
+little concessions that I was weak enough to make come to be a matter of
+course in the last few months? Some day, when ruin comes, you will give
+me no reason for the change in you beyond a curt, 'I have ceased to
+care for you.'--Then, rank and fortune and honour and all that was the
+Duchesse de Langeais will be swallowed up in one disappointed hope.
+I shall have children to bear witness to my shame, and----" With an
+involuntary gesture she interrupted herself, and continued: "But I am
+too good-natured to explain all this to you when you know it better than
+I. Come! let us stay as we are. I am only too fortunate in that I can
+still break these bonds which you think so strong. Is there anything so
+very heroic in coming to the Hotel de Langeais to spend an evening
+with a woman whose prattle amuses you?--a woman whom you take for a
+plaything? Why, half a dozen young coxcombs come here just as regularly
+every afternoon between three and five. They, too, are very generous, I
+am to suppose? I make fun of them; they stand my petulance and insolence
+pretty quietly, and make me laugh; but as for you, I give all the
+treasures of my soul to you, and you wish to ruin me, you try my
+patience in endless ways. Hush, that will do, that will do," she
+continued, seeing that he was about to speak, "you have no heart,
+no soul, no delicacy. I know what you want to tell me. Very well,
+then--yes. I would rather you should take me for a cold, insensible
+woman, with no devotion in her composition, no heart even, than be
+taken by everybody else for a vulgar person, and be condemned to your
+so-called pleasures, of which you would most certainly tire, and to
+everlasting punishment for it afterwards. Your selfish love is not worth
+so many sacrifices...."
+
+The words give but a very inadequate idea of the discourse which the
+Duchess trilled out with the quick volubility of a bird-organ. Nor,
+truly, was there anything to prevent her from talking on for some time
+to come, for poor Armand's only reply to the torrent of flute notes was
+a silence filled with cruelly painful thoughts. He was just beginning to
+see that this woman was playing with him; he divined instinctively
+that a devoted love, a responsive love, does not reason and count
+the consequences in this way. Then, as he heard her reproach him with
+detestable motives, he felt something like shame as he remembered that
+unconsciously he had made those very calculations. With angelic honesty
+of purpose, he looked within, and self-examination found nothing but
+selfishness in all his thoughts and motives, in the answers which he
+framed and could not utter. He was self-convicted. In his despair
+he longed to fling himself from the window. The egoism of it was
+intolerable.
+
+What indeed can a man say when a woman will not believe in love?--Let me
+prove how much I love you.--The _I_ is always there.
+
+The heroes of the boudoir, in such circumstances, can follow the example
+of the primitive logician who preceded the Pyrrhonists and denied
+movement. Montriveau was not equal to this feat. With all his audacity,
+he lacked this precise kind which never deserts an adept in the formulas
+of feminine algebra. If so many women, and even the best of women, fall
+a prey to a kind of expert to whom the vulgar give a grosser name, it is
+perhaps because the said experts are great _provers_, and love, in spite
+of its delicious poetry of sentiment, requires a little more geometry
+than people are wont to think.
+
+Now the Duchess and Montriveau were alike in this--they were both
+equally unversed in love lore. The lady's knowledge of theory was but
+scanty; in practice she knew nothing whatever; she felt nothing, and
+reflected over everything. Montriveau had had but little experience, was
+absolutely ignorant of theory, and felt too much to reflect at all. Both
+therefore were enduring the consequences of the singular situation.
+At that supreme moment the myriad thoughts in his mind might have
+been reduced to the formula--"Submit to be mine----" words which seem
+horribly selfish to a woman for whom they awaken no memories, recall no
+ideas. Something nevertheless he must say. And what was more, though her
+barbed shafts had set his blood tingling, though the short phrases that
+she discharged at him one by one were very keen and sharp and cold, he
+must control himself lest he should lose all by an outbreak of anger.
+
+"Mme la Duchesse, I am in despair that God should have invented no way
+for a woman to confirm the gift of her heart save by adding the gift of
+her person. The high value which you yourself put upon the gift teaches
+me that I cannot attach less importance to it. If you have given me
+your inmost self and your whole heart, as you tell me, what can the rest
+matter? And besides, if my happiness means so painful a sacrifice, let
+us say no more about it. But you must pardon a man of spirit if he feels
+humiliated at being taken for a spaniel."
+
+The tone in which the last remark was uttered might perhaps have
+frightened another woman; but when the wearer of a petticoat has allowed
+herself to be addressed as a Divinity, and thereby set herself above all
+other mortals, no power on earth can be so haughty.
+
+"M. le Marquis, I am in despair that God should not have invented
+some nobler way for a man to confirm the gift of his heart than by the
+manifestation of prodigiously vulgar desires. We become bond-slaves
+when we give ourselves body and soul, but a man is bound to nothing by
+accepting the gift. Who will assure me that love will last? The very
+love that I might show for you at every moment, the better to keep your
+love, might serve you as a reason for deserting me. I have no wish to be
+a second edition of Mme de Beauseant. Who can ever know what it is that
+keeps you beside us? Our persistent coldness of heart is the cause of
+an unfailing passion in some of you; other men ask for an untiring
+devotion, to be idolized at every moment; some for gentleness, others
+for tyranny. No woman in this world as yet has really read the riddle of
+man's heart."
+
+There was a pause. When she spoke again it was in a different tone.
+
+"After all, my friend, you cannot prevent a woman from trembling at the
+question, 'Will this love last always?' Hard though my words may be,
+the dread of losing you puts them into my mouth. Oh, me! it is not I
+who speaks, dear, it is reason; and how should anyone so mad as I be
+reasonable? In truth, I am nothing of the sort."
+
+The poignant irony of her answer had changed before the end into the
+most musical accents in which a woman could find utterance for ingenuous
+love. To listen to her words was to pass in a moment from martyrdom to
+heaven. Montriveau grew pale; and for the first time in his life, he
+fell on his knees before a woman. He kissed the Duchess's skirt hem, her
+knees, her feet; but for the credit of the Faubourg Saint-Germain it is
+necessary to respect the mysteries of its boudoirs, where many are fain
+to take the utmost that Love can give without giving proof of love in
+return.
+
+The Duchess thought herself generous when she suffered herself to be
+adored. But Montriveau was in a wild frenzy of joy over her complete
+surrender of the position.
+
+"Dear Antoinette," he cried. "Yes, you are right; I will not have you
+doubt any longer. I too am trembling at this moment--lest the angel of
+my life should leave me; I wish I could invent some tie that might bind
+us to each other irrevocably."
+
+"Ah!" she said, under her breath, "so I was right, you see."
+
+"Let me say all that I have to say; I will scatter all your fears with
+a word. Listen! if I deserted you, I should deserve to die a thousand
+deaths. Be wholly mine, and I will give you the right to kill me if I
+am false. I myself will write a letter explaining certain reasons for
+taking my own life; I will make my final arrangements, in short. You
+shall have the letter in your keeping; in the eye of the law it will be
+a sufficient explanation of my death. You can avenge yourself, and fear
+nothing from God or men."
+
+"What good would the letter be to me? What would life be if I had lost
+your love? If I wished to kill you, should I not be ready to follow? No;
+thank you for the thought, but I do not want the letter. Should I not
+begin to dread that you were faithful to me through fear? And if a man
+knows that he must risk his life for a stolen pleasure, might it not
+seem more tempting? Armand, the thing I ask of you is the one hard thing
+to do."
+
+"Then what is it that you wish?"
+
+"Your obedience and my liberty."
+
+"Ah, God!" cried he, "I am a child."
+
+"A wayward, much spoilt child," she said, stroking the thick hair,
+for his head still lay on her knee. "Ah! and loved far more than he
+believes, and yet he is very disobedient. Why not stay as we are? Why
+not sacrifice to me the desires that hurt me? Why not take what I can
+give, when it is all that I can honestly grant? Are you not happy?"
+
+"Oh yes, I am happy when I have not a doubt left. Antoinette, doubt in
+love is a kind of death, is it not?"
+
+In a moment he showed himself as he was, as all men are under the
+influence of that hot fever; he grew eloquent, insinuating. And the
+Duchess tasted the pleasures which she reconciled with her conscience
+by some private, Jesuitical ukase of her own; Armand's love gave her a
+thrill of cerebral excitement which custom made as necessary to her as
+society, or the Opera. To feel that she was adored by this man, who rose
+above other men, whose character frightened her; to treat him like a
+child; to play with him as Poppaea played with Nero--many women, like
+the wives of King Henry VIII, have paid for such a perilous delight with
+all the blood in their veins. Grim presentiment! Even as she surrendered
+the delicate, pale, gold curls to his touch, and felt the close pressure
+of his hand, the little hand of a man whose greatness she could not
+mistake; even as she herself played with his dark, thick locks, in that
+boudoir where she reigned a queen, the Duchess would say to herself:
+
+"This man is capable of killing me if he once finds out that I am
+playing with him."
+
+Armand de Montriveau stayed with her till two o'clock in the morning.
+From that moment this woman, whom he loved, was neither a duchess nor a
+Navarreins; Antoinette, in her disguises, had gone so far as to appear
+to be a woman. On that most blissful evening, the sweetest prelude ever
+played by a Parisienne to what the world calls "a slip"; in spite of all
+her affectations of a coyness which she did not feel, the General saw
+all maidenly beauty in her. He had some excuse for believing that so
+many storms of caprice had been but clouds covering a heavenly soul;
+that these must be lifted one by one like the veils that hid her divine
+loveliness. The Duchess became, for him, the most simple and girlish
+mistress; she was the one woman in the world for him; and he went away
+quite happy in that at last he had brought her to give him such pledges
+of love, that it seemed to him impossible but that he should be but her
+husband henceforth in secret, her choice sanctioned by Heaven.
+
+Armand went slowly home, turning this thought in his mind with the
+impartiality of a man who is conscious of all the responsibilities that
+love lays on him while he tastes the sweetness of its joys. He went
+along the Quais to see the widest possible space of sky; his heart had
+grown in him; he would fain have had the bounds of the firmament and of
+earth enlarged. It seemed to him that his lungs drew an ampler breath.
+In the course of his self-examination, as he walked, he vowed to love
+this woman so devoutly, that every day of her life she should find
+absolution for her sins against society in unfailing happiness. Sweet
+stirrings of life when life is at the full! The man that is strong
+enough to steep his soul in the colour of one emotion, feels infinite
+joy as glimpses open out for him of an ardent lifetime that knows no
+diminution of passion to the end; even so it is permitted to certain
+mystics, in ecstasy, to behold the Light of God. Love would be naught
+without the belief that it would last forever; love grows great
+through constancy. It was thus that, wholly absorbed by his happiness,
+Montriveau understood passion.
+
+"We belong to each other forever!"
+
+The thought was like a talisman fulfilling the wishes of his life. He
+did not ask whether the Duchess might not change, whether her love might
+not last. No, for he had faith. Without that virtue there is no future
+for Christianity, and perhaps it is even more necessary to society.
+A conception of life as feeling occurred to him for the first time;
+hitherto he had lived by action, the most strenuous exertion of human
+energies, the physical devotion, as it may be called, of the soldier.
+
+Next day M. de Montriveau went early in the direction of the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain. He had made an appointment at a house not far from the
+Hotel de Langeais; and the business over, he went thither as if to his
+own home. The General's companion chanced to be a man for whom he felt
+a kind of repulsion whenever he met him in other houses. This was the
+Marquis de Ronquerolles, whose reputation had grown so great in Paris
+boudoirs. He was witty, clever, and what was more--courageous; he set
+the fashion to all the young men in Paris. As a man of gallantry, his
+success and experience were equally matters of envy; and neither fortune
+nor birth was wanting in his case, qualifications which add such lustre
+in Paris to a reputation as a leader of fashion.
+
+"Where are you going?" asked M. de Ronquerolles.
+
+"To Mme de Langeais'."
+
+"Ah, true. I forgot that you had allowed her to lime(sp) you. You are
+wasting your affections on her when they might be much better employed
+elsewhere. I could have told you of half a score of women in the
+financial world, any one of them a thousand times better worth your
+while than that titled courtesan, who does with her brains what less
+artificial women do with----"
+
+"What is this, my dear fellow?" Armand broke in. "The Duchess is an
+angel of innocence."
+
+Ronquerolles began to laugh.
+
+"Things being thus, dear boy," said he, "it is my duty to enlighten you.
+Just a word; there is no harm in it between ourselves. Has the Duchess
+surrendered? If so, I have nothing more to say. Come, give me your
+confidence. There is no occasion to waste your time in grafting
+your great nature on that unthankful stock, when all your hopes and
+cultivation will come to nothing."
+
+Armand ingenuously made a kind of general report of his position,
+enumerating with much minuteness the slender rights so hardly won.
+Ronquerolles burst into a peal of laughter so heartless, that it would
+have cost any other man his life. But from their manner of speaking and
+looking at each other during that colloquy beneath the wall, in a corner
+almost as remote from intrusion as the desert itself, it was easy to
+imagine the friendship between the two men knew no bounds, and that no
+power on earth could estrange them.
+
+"My dear Armand, why did you not tell me that the Duchess was a puzzle
+to you? I would have given you a little advice which might have brought
+your flirtation properly through. You must know, to begin with, that the
+women of our Faubourg, like any other women, love to steep themselves in
+love; but they have a mind to possess and not to be possessed. They have
+made a sort of compromise with human nature. The code of their parish
+gives them a pretty wide latitude short of the last transgression. The
+sweets enjoyed by this fair Duchess of yours are so many venial sins
+to be washed away in the waters of penitence. But if you had the
+impertinence to ask in earnest for the moral sin to which naturally
+you are sure to attach the highest importance, you would see the deep
+disdain with which the door of the boudoir and the house would be
+incontinently shut upon you. The tender Antoinette would dismiss
+everything from her memory; you would be less than a cipher for her.
+She would wipe away your kisses, my dear friend, as indifferently as she
+would perform her ablutions. She would sponge love from her cheeks as
+she washes off rouge. We know women of that sort--the thorough-bred
+Parisienne. Have you ever noticed a grisette tripping along the street?
+Her face is as good as a picture. A pretty cap, fresh cheeks, trim hair,
+a guileful smile, and the rest of her almost neglected. Is not this true
+to the life? Well, that is the Parisienne. She knows that her face is
+all that will be seen, so she devotes all her care, finery, and vanity
+to her head. The Duchess is the same; the head is everything with her.
+She can only feel through her intellect, her heart lies in her brain,
+she is a sort of intellectual epicure, she has a head-voice. We call
+that kind of poor creature a Lais of the intellect. You have been taken
+in like a boy. If you doubt it, you can have proof of it tonight, this
+morning, this instant. Go up to her, try the demand as an experiment,
+insist peremptorily if it is refused. You might set about it like the
+late Marechal de Richelieu, and get nothing for your pains."
+
+Armand was dumb with amazement.
+
+"Has your desire reached the point of infatuation?"
+
+"I want her at any cost!" Montriveau cried out despairingly.
+
+"Very well. Now, look here. Be as inexorable as she is herself. Try to
+humiliate her, to sting her vanity. Do _not_ try to move her heart,
+nor her soul, but the woman's nerves and temperament, for she is both
+nervous and lymphatic. If you can once awaken desire in her, you are
+safe. But you must drop these romantic boyish notions of yours. If when
+once you have her in your eagle's talons you yield a point or draw back,
+if you so much as stir an eyelid, if she thinks that she can regain her
+ascendancy over you, she will slip out of your clutches like a fish, and
+you will never catch her again. Be as inflexible as law. Show no more
+charity than the headsman. Hit hard, and then hit again. Strike and keep
+on striking as if you were giving her the knout. Duchesses are made of
+hard stuff, my dear Armand; there is a sort of feminine nature that is
+only softened by repeated blows; and as suffering develops a heart in
+women of that sort, so it is a work of charity not to spare the rod.
+Do you persevere. Ah! when pain has thoroughly relaxed those nerves and
+softened the fibres that you take to be so pliant and yielding; when
+a shriveled heart has learned to expand and contract and to beat under
+this discipline; when the brain has capitulated--then, perhaps, passion
+may enter among the steel springs of this machinery that turns out tears
+and affectations and languors and melting phrases; then you shall see a
+most magnificent conflagration (always supposing that the chimney takes
+fire). The steel feminine system will glow red-hot like iron in the
+forge; that kind of heat lasts longer than any other, and the glow of it
+may possibly turn to love.
+
+"Still," he continued, "I have my doubts. And, after all, is it worth
+while to take so much trouble with the Duchess? Between ourselves a man
+of my stamp ought first to take her in hand and break her in; I would
+make a charming woman of her; she is a thoroughbred; whereas, you two
+left to yourselves will never get beyond the A B C. But you are in love
+with her, and just now you might not perhaps share my views on this
+subject----. A pleasant time to you, my children," added Ronquerolles,
+after a pause. Then with a laugh: "I have decided myself for facile
+beauties; they are tender, at any rate, the natural woman appears in
+their love without any of your social seasonings. A woman that haggles
+over herself, my poor boy, and only means to inspire love! Well, have
+her like an extra horse--for show. The match between the sofa and
+confessional, black and white, queen and knight, conscientious scruples
+and pleasure, is an uncommonly amusing game of chess. And if a man knows
+the game, let him be never so little of a rake, he wins in three moves.
+Now, if I undertook a woman of that sort, I should start with the
+deliberate purpose of----" His voice sank to a whisper over the last
+words in Armand's ear, and he went before there was time to reply.
+
+As for Montriveau, he sprang at a bound across the courtyard of the
+Hotel de Langeais, went unannounced up the stairs straight to the
+Duchess's bedroom.
+
+"This is an unheard-of thing," she said, hastily wrapping her
+dressing-gown about her. "Armand! this is abominable of you! Come, leave
+the room, I beg. Just go out of the room, and go at once. Wait for me in
+the drawing-room.--Come now!"
+
+"Dear angel, has a plighted lover no privilege whatsoever?"
+
+"But, monsieur, it is in the worst possible taste of a plighted lover or
+a wedded husband to break in like this upon his wife."
+
+He came up to the Duchess, took her in his arms, and held her tightly to
+him.
+
+"Forgive, dear Antoinette; but a host of horrid doubts are fermenting in
+my heart."
+
+"_Doubts_? Fie!--Oh, fie on you!"
+
+"Doubts all but justified. If you loved me, would you make this quarrel?
+Would you not be glad to see me? Would you not have felt a something
+stir in your heart? For I, that am not a woman, feel a thrill in my
+inmost self at the mere sound of your voice. Often in a ballroom a
+longing has come upon me to spring to your side and put my arms about
+your neck."
+
+"Oh! if you have doubts of me so long as I am not ready to spring to
+your arms before all the world, I shall be doubted all my life long, I
+suppose. Why, Othello was a mere child compared with you!"
+
+"Ah!" he cried despairingly, "you have no love for me----"
+
+"Admit, at any rate, that at this moment you are not lovable."
+
+"Then I have still to find favour in your sight?"
+
+"Oh, I should think so. Come," added she, "with a little imperious air,
+go out of the room, leave me. I am not like you; I wish always to find
+favour in your eyes."
+
+Never woman better understood the art of putting charm into insolence,
+and does not the charm double the effect? is it not enough to infuriate
+the coolest of men? There was a sort of untrammeled freedom about Mme
+de Langeais; a something in her eyes, her voice, her attitude, which is
+never seen in a woman who loves when she stands face to face with him at
+the mere sight of whom her heart must needs begin to beat. The Marquis
+de Ronquerolles' counsels had cured Armand of sheepishness; and further,
+there came to his aid that rapid power of intuition which passion will
+develop at moments in the least wise among mortals, while a great man
+at such a time possesses it to the full. He guessed the terrible truth
+revealed by the Duchess's nonchalance, and his heart swelled with the
+storm like a lake rising in flood.
+
+"If you told me the truth yesterday, be mine, dear Antoinette," he
+cried; "you shall----"
+
+"In the first place," said she composedly, thrusting him back as he
+came nearer--"in the first place, you are not to compromise me. My woman
+might overhear you. Respect me, I beg of you. Your familiarity is all
+very well in my boudoir in an evening; here it is quite different.
+Besides, what may your 'you shall' mean? 'You shall.' No one as yet
+has ever used that word to me. It is quite ridiculous, it seems to me,
+absolutely ridiculous.
+
+"Will you surrender nothing to me on this point?"
+
+"Oh! do you call a woman's right to dispose of herself a 'point?' A
+capital point indeed; you will permit me to be entirely my own mistress
+on that 'point.'"
+
+"And how if, believing in your promises to me, I should absolutely
+require it?"
+
+"Oh! then you would prove that I made the greatest possible mistake when
+I made you a promise of any kind; and I should beg you to leave me in
+peace."
+
+The General's face grew white; he was about to spring to her side, when
+Mme de Langeais rang the bell, the maid appeared, and, smiling with a
+mocking grace, the Duchess added, "Be so good as to return when I am
+visible."
+
+Then Montriveau felt the hardness of a woman as cold and keen as a steel
+blade; she was crushing in her scorn. In one moment she had snapped
+the bonds which held firm only for her lover. She had read Armand's
+intention in his face, and held that the moment had come for teaching
+the Imperial soldier his lesson. He was to be made to feel that though
+duchesses may lend themselves to love, they do not give themselves, and
+that the conquest of one of them would prove a harder matter than the
+conquest of Europe.
+
+"Madame," returned Armand, "I have not time to wait. I am a spoilt
+child, as you told me yourself. When I seriously resolve to have that of
+which we have been speaking, I shall have it."
+
+"You will have it?" queried she, and there was a trace of surprise in
+her loftiness.
+
+"I shall have it."
+
+"Oh! you would do me a great pleasure by 'resolving' to have it. For
+curiosity's sake, I should be delighted to know how you would set about
+it----"
+
+"I am delighted to put a new interest into your life," interrupted
+Montriveau, breaking into a laugh which dismayed the Duchess. "Will you
+permit me to take you to the ball tonight?"
+
+"A thousand thanks. M. de Marsay has been beforehand with you. I gave
+him my promise."
+
+Montriveau bowed gravely and went.
+
+"So Ronquerolles was right," thought he, "and now for a game of chess."
+
+Thenceforward he hid his agitation by complete composure. No man is
+strong enough to bear such sudden alternations from the height of
+happiness to the depths of wretchedness. So he had caught a glimpse of
+happy life the better to feel the emptiness of his previous existence?
+There was a terrible storm within him; but he had learned to endure,
+and bore the shock of tumultuous thoughts as a granite cliff stands out
+against the surge of an angry sea.
+
+"I could say nothing. When I am with her my wits desert me. She does not
+know how vile and contemptible she is. Nobody has ventured to bring her
+face to face with herself. She has played with many a man, no doubt; I
+will avenge them all."
+
+For the first time, it may be, in a man's heart, revenge and love were
+blended so equally that Montriveau himself could not know whether love
+or revenge would carry all before it. That very evening he went to the
+ball at which he was sure of seeing the Duchesse de Langeais, and almost
+despaired of reaching her heart. He inclined to think that there was
+something diabolical about this woman, who was gracious to him and
+radiant with charming smiles; probably because she had no wish to
+allow the world to think that she had compromised herself with M. de
+Montriveau. Coolness on both sides is a sign of love; but so long as
+the Duchess was the same as ever, while the Marquis looked sullen and
+morose, was it not plain that she had conceded nothing? Onlookers know
+the rejected lover by various signs and tokens; they never mistake the
+genuine symptoms for a coolness such as some women command their adorers
+to feign, in the hope of concealing their love. Everyone laughed at
+Montriveau; and he, having omitted to consult his cornac, was abstracted
+and ill at ease. M. de Ronquerolles would very likely have bidden him
+compromise the Duchess by responding to her show of friendliness by
+passionate demonstrations; but as it was, Armand de Montriveau came away
+from the ball, loathing human nature, and even then scarcely ready to
+believe in such complete depravity.
+
+"If there is no executioner for such crimes," he said, as he looked up
+at the lighted windows of the ballroom where the most enchanting women
+in Paris were dancing, laughing, and chatting, "I will take you by the
+nape of the neck, Mme la Duchesse, and make you feel something that
+bites more deeply than the knife in the Place de la Greve. Steel against
+steel; we shall see which heart will leave the deeper mark."
+
+For a week or so Mme de Langeais hoped to see the Marquis de Montriveau
+again; but he contented himself with sending his card every morning to
+the Hotel de Langeais. The Duchess could not help shuddering each time
+that the card was brought in, and a dim foreboding crossed her mind, but
+the thought was vague as a presentiment of disaster. When her eyes fell
+on the name, it seemed to her that she felt the touch of the implacable
+man's strong hand in her hair; sometimes the words seemed like a
+prognostication of a vengeance which her lively intellect invented in
+the most shocking forms. She had studied him too well not to dread him.
+Would he murder her, she wondered? Would that bull-necked man dash out
+her vitals by flinging her over his head? Would he trample her body
+under his feet? When, where, and how would he get her into his power?
+Would he make her suffer very much, and what kind of pain would he
+inflict? She repented of her conduct. There were hours when, if he had
+come, she would have gone to his arms in complete self-surrender.
+
+Every night before she slept she saw Montriveau's face; every night it
+wore a different aspect. Sometimes she saw his bitter smile, sometimes
+the Jovelike knitting of the brows; or his leonine look, or some
+disdainful movement of the shoulders made him terrible for her. Next day
+the card seemed stained with blood. The name of Montriveau stirred her
+now as the presence of the fiery, stubborn, exacting lover had never
+done. Her apprehensions gathered strength in the silence. She was
+forced, without aid from without, to face the thought of a hideous duel
+of which she could not speak. Her proud hard nature was more responsive
+to thrills of hate than it had ever been to the caresses of love. Ah! if
+the General could but have seen her, as she sat with her forehead
+drawn into folds between her brows; immersed in bitter thoughts in that
+boudoir where he had enjoyed such happy moments, he might perhaps
+have conceived high hopes. Of all human passions, is not pride alone
+incapable of engendering anything base? Mme de Langeais kept her
+thoughts to herself, but is it not permissible to suppose that M. de
+Montriveau was no longer indifferent to her? And has not a man gained
+ground immensely when a woman thinks about him? He is bound to make
+progress with her either one way or the other afterwards.
+
+Put any feminine creature under the feet of a furious horse or other
+fearsome beast; she will certainly drop on her knees and look for death;
+but if the brute shows a milder mood and does not utterly slay her,
+she will love the horse, lion, bull, or what not, and will speak of him
+quite at her ease. The Duchess felt that she was under the lion's paws;
+she quaked, but she did not hate him.
+
+The man and woman thus singularly placed with regard to each other met
+three times in society during the course of that week. Each time,
+in reply to coquettish questioning glances, the Duchess received a
+respectful bow, and smiles tinged with such savage irony, that all her
+apprehensions over the card in the morning were revived at night.
+Our lives are simply such as our feelings shape them for us; and the
+feelings of these two had hollowed out a great gulf between them.
+
+The Comtesse de Serizy, the Marquis de Ronquerolles' sister, gave a
+great ball at the beginning of the following week, and Mme de Langeais
+was sure to go to it. Armand was the first person whom the Duchess saw
+when she came into the room, and this time Armand was looking out for
+her, or so she thought at least. The two exchanged a look, and suddenly
+the woman felt a cold perspiration break from every pore. She had
+thought all along that Montriveau was capable of taking reprisals in
+some unheard-of way proportioned to their condition, and now the revenge
+had been discovered, it was ready, heated, and boiling. Lightnings
+flashed from the foiled lover's eyes, his face was radiant with exultant
+vengeance. And the Duchess? Her eyes were haggard in spite of her
+resolution to be cool and insolent. She went to take her place beside
+the Comtesse de Serizy, who could not help exclaiming, "Dear Antoinette!
+what is the matter with you? You are enough to frighten one."
+
+"I shall be all right after a quadrille," she answered, giving a hand to
+a young man who came up at that moment.
+
+Mme de Langeais waltzed that evening with a sort of excitement and
+transport which redoubled Montriveau's lowering looks. He stood in front
+of the line of spectators, who were amusing themselves by looking on.
+Every time that _she_ came past him, his eyes darted down upon her
+eddying face; he might have been a tiger with the prey in his grasp. The
+waltz came to an end, Mme de Langeais went back to her place beside the
+Countess, and Montriveau never took his eyes off her, talking all the
+while with a stranger.
+
+"One of the things that struck me most on the journey," he was saying
+(and the Duchess listened with all her ears), "was the remark which the
+man makes at Westminster when you are shown the axe with which a man in
+a mask cut off Charles the First's head, so they tell you. The King made
+it first of all to some inquisitive person, and they repeat it still in
+memory of him."
+
+"What does the man say?" asked Mme de Serizy.
+
+"'Do not touch the axe!'" replied Montriveau, and there was menace in
+the sound of his voice.
+
+"Really, my Lord Marquis," said Mme de Langeais, "you tell this old
+story that everybody knows if they have been to London, and look at my
+neck in such a melodramatic way that you seem to me to have an axe in
+your hand."
+
+The Duchess was in a cold sweat, but nevertheless she laughed as she
+spoke the last words.
+
+"But circumstances give the story a quite new application," returned he.
+
+"How so; pray tell me, for pity's sake?"
+
+"In this way, madame--you have touched the axe," said Montriveau,
+lowering his voice.
+
+"What an enchanting prophecy!" returned she, smiling with assumed grace.
+"And when is my head to fall?"
+
+"I have no wish to see that pretty head of yours cut off. I only fear
+some great misfortune for you. If your head were clipped close, would
+you feel no regrets for the dainty golden hair that you turn to such
+good account?"
+
+"There are those for whom a woman would love to make such a sacrifice;
+even if, as often happens, it is for the sake of a man who cannot make
+allowances for an outbreak of temper."
+
+"Quite so. Well, and if some wag were to spoil your beauty on a sudden
+by some chemical process, and you, who are but eighteen for us, were to
+be a hundred years old?"
+
+"Why, the smallpox is our Battle of Waterloo, monsieur," she
+interrupted. "After it is over we find out those who love us sincerely."
+
+"Would you not regret the lovely face that?"
+
+"Oh! indeed I should, but less for my own sake than for the sake of
+someone else whose delight it might have been. And, after all, if I were
+loved, always loved, and truly loved, what would my beauty matter to
+me?--What do you say, Clara?"
+
+"It is a dangerous speculation," replied Mme de Serizy.
+
+"Is it permissible to ask His Majesty the King of Sorcerers when I made
+the mistake of touching the axe, since I have not been to London as
+yet?----"
+
+"_Not so_," he answered in English, with a burst of ironical laughter.
+
+"And when will the punishment begin?"
+
+At this Montriveau coolly took out his watch, and ascertained the hour
+with a truly appalling air of conviction.
+
+"A dreadful misfortune will befall you before this day is out."
+
+"I am not a child to be easily frightened, or rather, I am a child
+ignorant of danger," said the Duchess. "I shall dance now without fear
+on the edge of the precipice."
+
+"I am delighted to know that you have so much strength of character," he
+answered, as he watched her go to take her place in a square dance.
+
+But the Duchess, in spite of her apparent contempt for Armand's dark
+prophecies, was really frightened. Her late lover's presence weighed
+upon her morally and physically with a sense of oppression that scarcely
+ceased when he left the ballroom. And yet when she had drawn freer
+breath, and enjoyed the relief for a moment, she found herself
+regretting the sensation of dread, so greedy of extreme sensations is
+the feminine nature. The regret was not love, but it was certainly akin
+to other feelings which prepare the way for love. And then--as if the
+impression which Montriveau had made upon her were suddenly revived--she
+recollected his air of conviction as he took out his watch, and in a
+sudden spasm of dread she went out.
+
+By this time it was about midnight. One of her servants, waiting with
+her pelisse, went down to order her carriage. On her way home she fell
+naturally enough to musing over M. de Montriveau's prediction. Arrived
+in her own courtyard, as she supposed, she entered a vestibule almost
+like that of her own hotel, and suddenly saw that the staircase was
+different. She was in a strange house. Turning to call her servants, she
+was attacked by several men, who rapidly flung a handkerchief over her
+mouth, bound her hand and foot, and carried her off. She shrieked aloud.
+
+"Madame, our orders are to kill you if you scream," a voice said in her
+ear.
+
+So great was the Duchess's terror, that she could never recollect how
+nor by whom she was transported. When she came to herself, she was lying
+on a couch in a bachelor's lodging, her hands and feet tied with silken
+cords. In spite of herself, she shrieked aloud as she looked round and
+met Armand de Montriveau's eyes. He was sitting in his dressing-gown,
+quietly smoking a cigar in his armchair.
+
+"Do not cry out, Mme la Duchesse," he said, coolly taking the cigar out
+of his mouth; "I have a headache. Besides, I will untie you. But listen
+attentively to what I have the honour to say to you."
+
+Very carefully he untied the knots that bound her feet.
+
+"What would be the use of calling out? Nobody can hear your cries.
+You are too well bred to make any unnecessary fuss. If you do not stay
+quietly, if you insist upon a struggle with me, I shall tie your
+hands and feet again. All things considered, I think that you have
+self-respect enough to stay on this sofa as if you were lying on your
+own at home; cold as ever, if you will. You have made me shed many tears
+on this couch, tears that I hid from all other eyes."
+
+While Montriveau was speaking, the Duchess glanced about her; it was
+a woman's glance, a stolen look that saw all things and seemed to see
+nothing. She was much pleased with the room. It was rather like a
+monk's cell. The man's character and thoughts seemed to pervade it. No
+decoration of any kind broke the grey painted surface of the walls.
+A green carpet covered the floor. A black sofa, a table littered with
+papers, two big easy-chairs, a chest of drawers with an alarum clock by
+way of ornament, a very low bedstead with a coverlet flung over it--a
+red cloth with a black key border--all these things made part of a
+whole that told of a life reduced to its simplest terms. A triple
+candle-sconce of Egyptian design on the chimney-piece recalled the
+vast spaces of the desert and Montriveau's long wanderings; a huge
+sphinx-claw stood out beneath the folds of stuff at the bed-foot;
+and just beyond, a green curtain with a black and scarlet border was
+suspended by large rings from a spear handle above a door near one
+corner of the room. The other door by which the band had entered was
+likewise curtained, but the drapery hung from an ordinary curtain-rod.
+As the Duchess finally noted that the pattern was the same on both, she
+saw that the door at the bed-foot stood open; gleams of ruddy light
+from the room beyond flickered below the fringed border. Naturally, the
+ominous light roused her curiosity; she fancied she could distinguish
+strange shapes in the shadows; but as it did not occur to her at the
+time that danger could come from that quarter, she tried to gratify a
+more ardent curiosity.
+
+"Monsieur, if it is not indiscreet, may I ask what you mean to do with
+me?" The insolence and irony of the tone stung through the words. The
+Duchess quite believed that she read extravagant love in Montriveau's
+speech. He had carried her off; was not that in itself an acknowledgment
+of her power?
+
+"Nothing whatever, madame," he returned, gracefully puffing the last
+whiff of cigar smoke. "You will remain here for a short time. First
+of all, I should like to explain to you what you are, and what I am. I
+cannot put my thoughts into words whilst you are twisting on the sofa
+in your boudoir; and besides, in your own house you take offence at the
+slightest hint, you ring the bell, make an outcry, and turn your lover
+out at the door as if he were the basest of wretches. Here my mind is
+unfettered. Here nobody can turn me out. Here you shall be my victim for
+a few seconds, and you are going to be so exceedingly kind as to listen
+to me. You need fear nothing. I did not carry you off to insult you, nor
+yet to take by force what you refused to grant of your own will to my
+unworthiness. I could not stoop so low. You possibly think of outrage;
+for myself, I have no such thoughts."
+
+He flung his cigar coolly into the fire.
+
+"The smoke is unpleasant to you, no doubt, madame?" he said, and rising
+at once, he took a chafing-dish from the hearth, burnt perfumes, and
+purified the air. The Duchess's astonishment was only equaled by her
+humiliation. She was in this man's power; and he would not abuse his
+power. The eyes in which love had once blazed like flame were now quiet
+and steady as stars. She trembled. Her dread of Armand was increased by
+a nightmare sensation of restlessness and utter inability to move; she
+felt as if she were turned to stone. She lay passive in the grip of
+fear. She thought she saw the light behind the curtains grow to a blaze,
+as if blown up by a pair of bellows; in another moment the gleams of
+flame grew brighter, and she fancied that three masked figures suddenly
+flashed out; but the terrible vision disappeared so swiftly that she
+took it for an optical delusion.
+
+"Madame," Armand continued with cold contempt, "one minute, just one
+minute is enough for me, and you shall feel it afterwards at every
+moment throughout your lifetime, the one eternity over which I have
+power. I am not God. Listen carefully to me," he continued, pausing to
+add solemnity to his words. "Love will always come at your call. You
+have boundless power over men: but remember that once you called love,
+and love came to you; love as pure and true-hearted as may be on earth,
+and as reverent as it was passionate; fond as a devoted woman's, as a
+mother's love; a love so great indeed, that it was past the bounds of
+reason. You played with it, and you committed a crime. Every woman has a
+right to refuse herself to love which she feels she cannot share; and
+if a man loves and cannot win love in return, he is not to be pitied,
+he has no right to complain. But with a semblance of love to attract
+an unfortunate creature cut off from all affection; to teach him to
+understand happiness to the full, only to snatch it from him; to rob him
+of his future of felicity; to slay his happiness not merely today,
+but as long as his life lasts, by poisoning every hour of it and every
+thought--this I call a fearful crime!"
+
+"Monsieur----"
+
+"I cannot allow you to answer me yet. So listen to me still. In any case
+I have rights over you; but I only choose to exercise one--the right of
+the judge over the criminal, so that I may arouse your conscience. If
+you had no conscience left, I should not reproach you at all; but you
+are so young! You must feel some life still in your heart; or so I like
+to believe. While I think of you as depraved enough to do a wrong which
+the law does not punish, I do not think you so degraded that you cannot
+comprehend the full meaning of my words. I resume."
+
+As he spoke the Duchess heard the smothered sound of a pair of bellows.
+Those mysterious figures which she had just seen were blowing up the
+fire, no doubt; the glow shone through the curtain. But Montriveau's
+lurid face was turned upon her; she could not choose but wait with a
+fast-beating heart and eyes fixed in a stare. However curious she felt,
+the heat in Armand's words interested her even more than the crackling
+of the mysterious flames.
+
+"Madame," he went on after a pause, "if some poor wretch commits a
+murder in Paris, it is the executioner's duty, you know, to lay hands on
+him and stretch him on the plank, where murderers pay for their crimes
+with their heads. Then the newspapers inform everyone, rich and poor, so
+that the former are assured that they may sleep in peace, and the latter
+are warned that they must be on the watch if they would live. Well, you
+that are religious, and even a little of a bigot, may have masses said
+for such a man's soul. You both belong to the same family, but yours is
+the elder branch; and the elder branch may occupy high places in peace
+and live happily and without cares. Want or anger may drive your brother
+the convict to take a man's life; you have taken more, you have taken
+the joy out of a man's life, you have killed all that was best in his
+life--his dearest beliefs. The murderer simply lay in wait for his
+victim, and killed him reluctantly, and in fear of the scaffold; but
+_you_ ...! You heaped up every sin that weakness can commit against
+strength that suspected no evil; you tamed a passive victim, the better
+to gnaw his heart out; you lured him with caresses; you left nothing
+undone that could set him dreaming, imagining, longing for the bliss of
+love. You asked innumerable sacrifices of him, only to refuse to make
+any in return. He should see the light indeed before you put out his
+eyes! It is wonderful how you found the heart to do it! Such villainies
+demand a display of resource quite above the comprehension of those
+bourgeoises whom you laugh at and despise. They can give and forgive;
+they know how to love and suffer. The grandeur of their devotion dwarfs
+us. Rising higher in the social scale, one finds just as much mud as at
+the lower end; but with this difference, at the upper end it is hard and
+gilded over.
+
+"Yes, to find baseness in perfection, you must look for a noble bringing
+up, a great name, a fair woman, a duchess. You cannot fall lower than
+the lowest unless you are set high above the rest of the world.--I
+express my thoughts badly; the wounds you dealt me are too painful as
+yet, but do not think that I complain. My words are not the expression
+of any hope for myself; there is no trace of bitterness in them. Know
+this, madame, for a certainty--I forgive you. My forgiveness is so
+complete that you need not feel in the least sorry that you came hither
+to find it against your will.... But you might take advantage of other
+hearts as child-like as my own, and it is my duty to spare them anguish.
+So you have inspired the thought of justice. Expiate your sin here
+on earth; God may perhaps forgive you; I wish that He may, but He is
+inexorable, and will strike."
+
+The broken-spirited, broken-hearted woman looked up, her eyes filled
+with tears.
+
+"Why do you cry? Be true to your nature. You could look on indifferently
+at the torture of a heart as you broke it. That will do, madame, do not
+cry. I cannot bear it any longer. Other men will tell you that you have
+given them life; as for myself, I tell you, with rapture, that you have
+given me blank extinction. Perhaps you guess that I am not my own, that
+I am bound to live for my friends, that from this time forth I must
+endure the cold chill of death, as well as the burden of life? Is it
+possible that there can be so much kindness in you? Are you like the
+desert tigress that licks the wounds she has inflicted?"
+
+The Duchess burst out sobbing.
+
+"Pray spare your tears, madame. If I believed in them at all, it would
+merely set me on my guard. Is this another of your artifices? or is it
+not? You have used so many with me; how can one think that there is any
+truth in you? Nothing that you do or say has any power now to move me.
+That is all I have to say."
+
+Mme de Langeais rose to her feet, with a great dignity and humility in
+her bearing.
+
+"You are right to treat me very hardly," she said, holding out a hand to
+the man who did not take it; "you have not spoken hardly enough; and I
+deserve this punishment."
+
+"_I_ punish you, madame! A man must love still, to punish, must he not?
+From me you must expect no feeling, nothing resembling it. If I chose, I
+might be accuser and judge in my cause, and pronounce and carry out the
+sentence. But I am about to fulfil a duty, not a desire of vengeance of
+any kind. The cruelest revenge of all, I think, is scorn of revenge when
+it is in our power to take it. Perhaps I shall be the minister of your
+pleasures; who knows? Perhaps from this time forth, as you gracefully
+wear the tokens of disgrace by which society marks out the criminal, you
+may perforce learn something of the convict's sense of honour. And then,
+you will love!"
+
+The Duchess sat listening; her meekness was unfeigned; it was no
+coquettish device. When she spoke at last, it was after a silence.
+
+"Armand," she began, "it seems to me that when I resisted love, I was
+obeying all the instincts of woman's modesty; I should not have looked
+for such reproaches from _you_. I was weak; you have turned all my
+weaknesses against me, and made so many crimes of them. How could you
+fail to understand that the curiosity of love might have carried me
+further than I ought to go; and that next morning I might be angry
+with myself, and wretched because I had gone too far? Alas! I sinned in
+ignorance. I was as sincere in my wrongdoing, I swear to you, as in
+my remorse. There was far more love for you in my severity than in my
+concessions. And besides, of what do you complain? I gave you my heart;
+that was not enough; you demanded, brutally, that I should give my
+person----"
+
+"Brutally?" repeated Montriveau. But to himself he said, "If I once
+allow her to dispute over words, I am lost."
+
+"Yes. You came to me as if I were one of those women. You showed none
+of the respect, none of the attentions of love. Had I not reason to
+reflect? Very well, I reflected. The unseemliness of your conduct is not
+inexcusable; love lay at the source of it; let me think so, and
+justify you to myself.--Well, Armand, this evening, even while you were
+prophesying evil, I felt convinced that there was happiness in store for
+us both. Yes, I put my faith in the noble, proud nature so often tested
+and proved." She bent lower. "And I was yours wholly," she murmured in
+his ear. "I felt a longing that I cannot express to give happiness to a
+man so violently tried by adversity. If I must have a master, my master
+should be a great man. As I felt conscious of my height, the less I
+cared to descend. I felt I could trust you, I saw a whole lifetime of
+love, while you were pointing to death.... Strength and kindness always
+go together. My friend, you are so strong, you will not be unkind to
+a helpless woman who loves you. If I was wrong, is there no way of
+obtaining forgiveness? No way of making reparation? Repentance is the
+charm of love; I should like to be very charming for you. How could I,
+alone among women, fail to know a woman's doubts and fears, the timidity
+that it is so natural to feel when you bind yourself for life, and
+know how easily a man snaps such ties? The bourgeoises, with whom you
+compared me just now, give themselves, but they struggle first. Very
+well--I struggled; but here I am!--Ah! God, he does not hear me!" she
+broke off, and wringing her hands, she cried out "But I love you! I am
+yours!" and fell at Armand's feet.
+
+"Yours! yours! my one and only master!"
+
+Armand tried to raise her.
+
+"Madame, it is too late! Antoinette cannot save the Duchesse de
+Langeais. I cannot believe in either. Today you may give yourself;
+tomorrow, you may refuse. No power in earth or heaven can insure me the
+sweet constancy of love. All love's pledges lay in the past; and now
+nothing of that past exists."
+
+The light behind the curtain blazed up so brightly, that the Duchess
+could not help turning her head; this time she distinctly saw the three
+masked figures.
+
+"Armand," she said, "I would not wish to think ill of you. Why are those
+men there? What are you going to do to me?"
+
+"Those men will be as silent as I myself with regard to the thing which
+is about to be done. Think of them simply as my hands and my heart. One
+of them is a surgeon----"
+
+"A surgeon! Armand, my friend, of all things, suspense is the hardest
+to bear. Just speak; tell me if you wish for my life; I will give it to
+you, you shall not take it----"
+
+"Then you did not understand me? Did I not speak just now of justice?
+To put an end to your misapprehensions," continued he, taking up a small
+steel object from the table, "I will now explain what I have decided
+with regard to you."
+
+He held out a Lorraine cross, fastened to the tip of a steel rod.
+
+"Two of my friends at this very moment are heating another cross, made
+on this pattern, red-hot. We are going to stamp it upon your forehead,
+here between the eyes, so that there will be no possibility of hiding
+the mark with diamonds, and so avoiding people's questions. In short,
+you shall bear on your forehead the brand of infamy which your brothers
+the convicts wear on their shoulders. The pain is a mere trifle, but I
+feared a nervous crisis of some kind, of resistance----"
+
+"Resistance?" she cried, clapping her hands for joy. "Oh no, no! I would
+have the whole world here to see. Ah, my Armand, brand her quickly,
+this creature of yours; brand her with your mark as a poor little trifle
+belonging to you. You asked for pledges of my love; here they are all in
+one. Ah! for me there is nothing but mercy and forgiveness and eternal
+happiness in this revenge of yours. When you have marked this woman with
+your mark, when you set your crimson brand on her, your slave in soul,
+you can never afterwards abandon her, you will be mine for evermore?
+When you cut me off from my kind, you make yourself responsible for my
+happiness, or you prove yourself base; and I know that you are noble and
+great! Why, when a woman loves, the brand of love is burnt into her
+soul by her own will.--Come in, gentlemen! come in and brand her,
+this Duchesse de Langeais. She is M. de Montriveau's forever! Ah! come
+quickly, all of you, my forehead burns hotter than your fire!"
+
+Armand turned his head sharply away lest he should see the Duchess
+kneeling, quivering with the throbbings of her heart. He said some word,
+and his three friends vanished.
+
+The women of Paris salons know how one mirror reflects another. The
+Duchess, with every motive for reading the depths of Armand's heart, was
+all eyes; and Armand, all unsuspicious of the mirror, brushed away two
+tears as they fell. Her whole future lay in those two tears. When he
+turned round again to help her to rise, she was standing before him,
+sure of love. Her pulses must have throbbed fast when he spoke with the
+firmness she had known so well how to use of old while she played with
+him.
+
+"I spare you, madame. All that has taken place shall be as if it had
+never been, you may believe me. But now, let us bid each other goodbye.
+I like to think that you were sincere in your coquetries on your sofa,
+sincere again in this outpouring of your heart. Good-bye. I feel that
+there is no faith in you left in me. You would torment me again; you
+would always be the Duchess, and----But there, good-bye, we shall never
+understand each other.
+
+"Now, what do you wish?" he continued, taking the tone of a master of
+the ceremonies--"to return home, or to go back to Mme de Serizy's
+ball? I have done all in my power to prevent any scandal. Neither your
+servants nor anyone else can possibly know what has passed between us
+in the last quarter of an hour. Your servants have no idea that you have
+left the ballroom; your carriage never left Mme de Serizy's courtyard;
+your brougham may likewise be found in the court of your own hotel.
+Where do you wish to be?"
+
+"What do you counsel, Armand?"
+
+"There is no Armand now, Mme la Duchesse. We are strangers to each
+other."
+
+"Then take me to the ball," she said, still curious to put Armand's
+power to the test. "Thrust a soul that suffered in the world, and must
+always suffer there, if there is no happiness for her now, down into
+hell again. And yet, oh my friend, I love you as your bourgeoises love;
+I love you so that I could come to you and fling my arms about your neck
+before all the world if you asked it off me. The hateful world has not
+corrupted me. I am young at least, and I have grown younger still. I am
+a child, yes, your child, your new creature. Ah! do not drive me forth
+out of my Eden!"
+
+Armand shook his head.
+
+"Ah! let me take something with me, if I go, some little thing to wear
+tonight on my heart," she said, taking possession of Armand's glove,
+which she twisted into her handkerchief.
+
+"No, I am _not_ like all those depraved women. You do not know the
+world, and so you cannot know my worth. You shall know it now! There are
+women who sell themselves for money; there are others to be gained by
+gifts, it is a vile world! Oh, I wish I were a simple bourgeoise, a
+working girl, if you would rather have a woman beneath you than a woman
+whose devotion is accompanied by high rank, as men count it. Oh, my
+Armand, there are noble, high, and chaste and pure natures among us;
+and then they are lovely indeed. I would have all nobleness that I might
+offer it all up to you. Misfortune willed that I should be a duchess;
+I would I were a royal princess, that my offering might be complete. I
+would be a grisette for you, and a queen for everyone besides."
+
+He listened, damping his cigars with his lips.
+
+"You will let me know when you wish to go," he said.
+
+"But I should like to stay----"
+
+"That is another matter!"
+
+"Stay, that was badly rolled," she cried, seizing on a cigar and
+devouring all that Armand's lips had touched.
+
+"Do you smoke?"
+
+"Oh, what would I not do to please you?"
+
+"Very well. Go, madame."
+
+"I will obey you," she answered, with tears in her eyes.
+
+"You must be blindfolded; you must not see a glimpse of the way."
+
+"I am ready, Armand," she said, bandaging her eyes.
+
+"Can you see?"
+
+"No."
+
+Noiselessly he knelt before her.
+
+"Ah! I can hear you!" she cried, with a little fond gesture, thinking
+that the pretence of harshness was over.
+
+He made as if he would kiss her lips; she held up her face.
+
+"You can see, madame."
+
+"I am just a little bit curious."
+
+"So you always deceive me?"
+
+"Ah! take off this handkerchief, sir," she cried out, with the passion
+of a great generosity repelled with scorn, "lead me; I will not open my
+eyes."
+
+Armand felt sure of her after that cry. He led the way; the Duchess
+nobly true to her word, was blind. But while Montriveau held her hand
+as a father might, and led her up and down flights of stairs, he was
+studying the throbbing pulses of this woman's heart so suddenly invaded
+by Love. Mme de Langeais, rejoicing in this power of speech, was glad to
+let him know all; but he was inflexible; his hand was passive in reply
+to the questionings of her hand.
+
+At length, after some journey made together, Armand bade her go forward;
+the opening was doubtless narrow, for as she went she felt that his hand
+protected her dress. His care touched her; it was a revelation surely
+that there was a little love still left; yet it was in some sort a
+farewell, for Montriveau left her without a word. The air was warm; the
+Duchess, feeling the heat, opened her eyes, and found herself standing
+by the fire in the Comtesse de Serizy's boudoir.
+
+She was alone. Her first thought was for her disordered toilette; in a
+moment she had adjusted her dress and restored her picturesque coiffure.
+
+"Well, dear Antoinette, we have been looking for you everywhere." It was
+the Comtesse de Serizy who spoke as she opened the door.
+
+"I came here to breathe," said the Duchess; "it is unbearably hot in the
+rooms."
+
+"People thought that you had gone; but my brother Ronquerolles told me
+that your servants were waiting for you."
+
+"I am tired out, dear, let me stay and rest here for a minute," and the
+Duchess sat down on the sofa.
+
+"Why, what is the matter with you? You are shaking from head to foot!"
+
+The Marquis de Ronquerolles came in.
+
+"Mme la Duchesse, I was afraid that something might have happened. I
+have just come across your coachman, the man is as tipsy as all the
+Swiss in Switzerland."
+
+The Duchess made no answer; she was looking round the room, at the
+chimney-piece and the tall mirrors, seeking the trace of an opening.
+Then with an extraordinary sensation she recollected that she was again
+in the midst of the gaiety of the ballroom after that terrific scene
+which had changed the whole course of her life. She began to shiver
+violently.
+
+"M. de Montriveau's prophecy has shaken my nerves," she said. "It was
+a joke, but still I will see whether his axe from London will haunt me
+even in my sleep. So good-bye, dear.--Good-bye, M. le Marquis."
+
+As she went through the rooms she was beset with inquiries and regrets.
+Her world seemed to have dwindled now that she, its queen, had fallen so
+low, was so diminished. And what, moreover, were these men compared with
+him whom she loved with all her heart; with the man grown great by all
+that she had lost in stature? The giant had regained the height that he
+had lost for a while, and she exaggerated it perhaps beyond measure. She
+looked, in spite of herself, at the servant who had attended her to the
+ball. He was fast asleep.
+
+"Have you been here all the time?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+As she took her seat in her carriage she saw, in fact, that her coachman
+was drunk--so drunk, that at any other time she would have been afraid;
+but after a great crisis in life, fear loses its appetite for common
+food. She reached home, at any rate, without accident; but even there
+she felt a change in herself, a new feeling that she could not shake
+off. For her, there was now but one man in the world; which is to say
+that henceforth she cared to shine for his sake alone.
+
+While the physiologist can define love promptly by following out natural
+laws, the moralist finds a far more perplexing problem before him if
+he attempts to consider love in all its developments due to social
+conditions. Still, in spite of the heresies of the endless sects that
+divide the church of Love, there is one broad and trenchant line of
+difference in doctrine, a line that all the discussion in the world can
+never deflect. A rigid application of this line explains the nature
+of the crisis through which the Duchess, like most women, was to pass.
+Passion she knew, but she did not love as yet.
+
+Love and passion are two different conditions which poets and men of the
+world, philosophers and fools, alike continually confound. Love implies
+a give and take, a certainty of bliss that nothing can change; it
+means so close a clinging of the heart, and an exchange of happiness so
+constant, that there is no room left for jealousy. Then possession is a
+means and not an end; unfaithfulness may give pain, but the bond is not
+less close; the soul is neither more nor less ardent or troubled, but
+happy at every moment; in short, the divine breath of desire spreading
+from end to end of the immensity of Time steeps it all for us in the
+selfsame hue; life takes the tint of the unclouded heaven. But Passion
+is the foreshadowing of Love, and of that Infinite to which all
+suffering souls aspire. Passion is a hope that may be cheated. Passion
+means both suffering and transition. Passion dies out when hope is
+dead. Men and women may pass through this experience many times without
+dishonor, for it is so natural to spring towards happiness; but there is
+only one love in a lifetime. All discussions of sentiment ever
+conducted on paper or by word of mouth may therefore be resumed by
+two questions--"Is it passion? Is it love?" So, since love comes into
+existence only through the intimate experience of the bliss which gives
+it lasting life, the Duchess was beneath the yoke of passion as yet; and
+as she knew the fierce tumult, the unconscious calculations, the fevered
+cravings, and all that is meant by that word _passion_--she suffered.
+Through all the trouble of her soul there rose eddying gusts of tempest,
+raised by vanity or self-love, or pride or a high spirit; for all these
+forms of egoism make common cause together.
+
+She had said to this man, "I love you; I am yours!" Was it possible that
+the Duchesse de Langeais should have uttered those words--in vain? She
+must either be loved now or play her part of queen no longer. And then
+she felt the loneliness of the luxurious couch where pleasure had never
+yet set his glowing feet; and over and over again, while she tossed and
+writhed there, she said, "I want to be loved."
+
+But the belief that she still had in herself gave her hope of success.
+The Duchess might be piqued, the vain Parisienne might be humiliated;
+but the woman saw glimpses of wedded happiness, and imagination,
+avenging the time lost for nature, took a delight in kindling the
+inextinguishable fire in her veins. She all but attained to the
+sensations of love; for amid her poignant doubt whether she was loved in
+return, she felt glad at heart to say to herself, "I love him!" As for
+her scruples, religion, and the world she could trample them under foot!
+Montriveau was her religion now. She spent the next day in a state
+of moral torpor, troubled by a physical unrest, which no words could
+express. She wrote letters and tore them all up, and invented a thousand
+impossible fancies.
+
+When M. de Montriveau's usual hour arrived, she tried to think that he
+would come, and enjoyed the feeling of expectation. Her whole life was
+concentrated in the single sense of hearing. Sometimes she shut her
+eyes, straining her ears to listen through space, wishing that she
+could annihilate everything that lay between her and her lover, and so
+establish that perfect silence which sounds may traverse from afar. In
+her tense self-concentration, the ticking of the clock grew hateful
+to her; she stopped its ill-omened garrulity. The twelve strokes of
+midnight sounded from the drawing-room.
+
+"Ah, God!" she cried, "to see him here would be happiness. And yet, it
+is not so very long since he came here, brought by desire, and the tones
+of his voice filled this boudoir. And now there is nothing."
+
+She remembered the times that she had played the coquette with him, and
+how that her coquetry had cost her her lover, and the despairing tears
+flowed for long.
+
+Her woman came at length with, "Mme la Duchesse does not know, perhaps,
+that it is two o'clock in the morning; I thought that madame was not
+feeling well."
+
+"Yes, I am going to bed," said the Duchess, drying her eyes. "But
+remember, Suzanne, never to come in again without orders; I tell you
+this for the last time."
+
+For a week, Mme de Langeais went to every house where there was a hope
+of meeting M. de Montriveau. Contrary to her usual habits, she came
+early and went late; gave up dancing, and went to the card-tables. Her
+experiments were fruitless. She did not succeed in getting a glimpse of
+Armand. She did not dare to utter his name now. One evening, however, in
+a fit of despair, she spoke to Mme de Serizy, and asked as carelessly as
+she could, "You must have quarreled with M. de Montriveau? He is not to
+be seen at your house now."
+
+The Countess laughed. "So he does not come here either?" she returned.
+"He is not to be seen anywhere, for that matter. He is interested in
+some woman, no doubt."
+
+"I used to think that the Marquis de Ronquerolles was one of his
+friends----" the Duchess began sweetly.
+
+"I have never heard my brother say that he was acquainted with him."
+
+Mme de Langeais did not reply. Mme de Serizy concluded from the
+Duchess's silence that she might apply the scourge with impunity to a
+discreet friendship which she had seen, with bitterness of soul, for a
+long time past.
+
+"So you miss that melancholy personage, do you? I have heard most
+extraordinary things of him. Wound his feelings, he never comes back,
+he forgives nothing; and, if you love him, he keeps you in chains. To
+everything that I said of him, one of those that praise him sky-high
+would always answer, 'He knows how to love!' People are always telling
+me that Montriveau would give up all for his friend; that his is a great
+nature. Pooh! society does not want such tremendous natures. Men of that
+stamp are all very well at home; let them stay there and leave us to our
+pleasant littlenesses. What do you say, Antoinette?"
+
+Woman of the world though she was, the Duchess seemed agitated, yet she
+replied in a natural voice that deceived her fair friend:
+
+"I am sorry to miss him. I took a great interest in him, and promised
+to myself to be his sincere friend. I like great natures, dear friend,
+ridiculous though you may think it. To give oneself to a fool is a clear
+confession, is it not, that one is governed wholly by one's senses?"
+
+Mme de Serizy's "preferences" had always been for commonplace men; her
+lover at the moment, the Marquis d'Aiglemont, was a fine, tall man.
+
+After this, the Countess soon took her departure, you may be sure Mme
+de Langeais saw hope in Armand's withdrawal from the world; she wrote to
+him at once; it was a humble, gentle letter, surely it would bring him
+if he loved her still. She sent her footman with it next day. On the
+servant's return, she asked whether he had given the letter to M. de
+Montriveau himself, and could not restrain the movement of joy at the
+affirmative answer. Armand was in Paris! He stayed alone in his house;
+he did not go out into society! So she was loved! All day long she
+waited for an answer that never came. Again and again, when impatience
+grew unbearable, Antoinette found reasons for his delay. Armand felt
+embarrassed; the reply would come by post; but night came, and she could
+not deceive herself any longer. It was a dreadful day, a day of pain
+grown sweet, of intolerable heart-throbs, a day when the heart squanders
+the very forces of life in riot.
+
+Next day she sent for an answer.
+
+"M. le Marquis sent word that he would call on Mme la Duchesse,"
+reported Julien.
+
+She fled lest her happiness should be seen in her face, and flung
+herself on her couch to devour her first sensations.
+
+"He is coming!"
+
+The thought rent her soul. And, in truth, woe unto those for whom
+suspense is not the most horrible time of tempest, while it increases
+and multiplies the sweetest joys; for they have nothing in them of
+that flame which quickens the images of things, giving to them a second
+existence, so that we cling as closely to the pure essence as to its
+outward and visible manifestation. What is suspense in love but a
+constant drawing upon an unfailing hope?--a submission to the terrible
+scourging of passion, while passion is yet happy, and the disenchantment
+of reality has not set in. The constant putting forth of strength and
+longing, called suspense, is surely, to the human soul, as fragrance
+to the flower that breathes it forth. We soon leave the brilliant,
+unsatisfying colours of tulips and coreopsis, but we turn again and
+again to drink in the sweetness of orange-blossoms or volkameria-flowers
+compared separately, each in its own land, to a betrothed bride, full of
+love, made fair by the past and future.
+
+The Duchess learned the joys of this new life of hers through the
+rapture with which she received the scourgings of love. As this change
+wrought in her, she saw other destinies before her, and a better
+meaning in the things of life. As she hurried to her dressing-room, she
+understood what studied adornment and the most minute attention to
+her toilet mean when these are undertaken for love's sake and not for
+vanity. Even now this making ready helped her to bear the long time of
+waiting. A relapse of intense agitation set in when she was dressed; she
+passed through nervous paroxysms brought on by the dreadful power which
+sets the whole mind in ferment. Perhaps that power is only a disease,
+though the pain of it is sweet. The Duchess was dressed and waiting
+at two o clock in the afternoon. At half-past eleven that night M.
+de Montriveau had not arrived. To try to give an idea of the anguish
+endured by a woman who might be said to be the spoilt child of
+civilization, would be to attempt to say how many imaginings the heart
+can condense into one thought. As well endeavour to measure the forces
+expended by the soul in a sigh whenever the bell rang; to estimate the
+drain of life when a carriage rolled past without stopping, and left her
+prostrate.
+
+"Can he be playing with me?" she said, as the clocks struck midnight.
+
+She grew white; her teeth chattered; she struck her hands together and
+leapt up and crossed the boudoir, recollecting as she did so how often
+he had come thither without a summons. But she resigned herself. Had she
+not seen him grow pale, and start up under the stinging barbs of irony?
+Then Mme de Langeais felt the horror of the woman's appointed lot; a
+man's is the active part, a woman must wait passively when she loves. If
+a woman goes beyond her beloved, she makes a mistake which few men can
+forgive; almost every man would feel that a woman lowers herself by this
+piece of angelic flattery. But Armand's was a great nature; he surely
+must be one of the very few who can repay such exceeding love by love
+that lasts forever.
+
+"Well, I will make the advance," she told herself, as she tossed on her
+bed and found no sleep there; "I will go to him. I will not weary myself
+with holding out a hand to him, but I will hold it out. A man of a
+thousand will see a promise of love and constancy in every step that a
+woman takes towards him. Yes, the angels must come down from heaven to
+reach men; and I wish to be an angel for him."
+
+Next day she wrote. It was a billet of the kind in which the intellects
+of the ten thousand Sevignes that Paris now can number particularly
+excel. And yet only a Duchesse de Langeais, brought up by Mme la
+Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, could have written that delicious note; no
+other woman could complain without lowering herself; could spread wings
+in such a flight without draggling her pinions in humiliation; rise
+gracefully in revolt; scold without giving offence; and pardon without
+compromising her personal dignity.
+
+Julien went with the note. Julien, like his kind, was the victim of
+love's marches and countermarches.
+
+"What did M. de Montriveau reply?" she asked, as indifferently as she
+could, when the man came back to report himself.
+
+"M. le Marquis requested me to tell Mme la Duchesse that it was all
+right."
+
+Oh the dreadful reaction of the soul upon herself! To have her heart
+stretched on the rack before curious witnesses; yet not to utter a
+sound, to be forced to keep silence! One of the countless miseries of
+the rich!
+
+More than three weeks went by. Mme de Langeais wrote again and again,
+and no answer came from Montriveau. At last she gave out that she was
+ill, to gain a dispensation from attendance on the Princess and from
+social duties. She was only at home to her father the Duc de Navarreins,
+her aunt the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, the old Vidame de Pamiers
+(her maternal great-uncle), and to her husband's uncle, the Duc de
+Grandlieu. These persons found no difficulty in believing that the
+Duchess was ill, seeing that she grew thinner and paler and more
+dejected every day. The vague ardour of love, the smart of wounded
+pride, the continual prick of the only scorn that could touch her,
+the yearnings towards joys that she craved with a vain continual
+longing--all these things told upon her, mind and body; all the forces
+of her nature were stimulated to no purpose. She was paying the arrears
+of her life of make-believe.
+
+She went out at last to a review. M. de Montriveau was to be there. For
+the Duchess, on the balcony of the Tuileries with the Royal Family,
+it was one of those festival days that are long remembered. She looked
+supremely beautiful in her languor; she was greeted with admiration in
+all eyes. It was Montriveau's presence that made her so fair.
+
+Once or twice they exchanged glances. The General came almost to her
+feet in all the glory of that soldier's uniform, which produces an
+effect upon the feminine imagination to which the most prudish will
+confess. When a woman is very much in love, and has not seen her lover
+for two months, such a swift moment must be something like the phase of
+a dream when the eyes embrace a world that stretches away forever.
+Only women or young men can imagine the dull, frenzied hunger in the
+Duchess's eyes. As for older men, if during the paroxysms of early
+passion in youth they had experience of such phenomena of nervous power;
+at a later day it is so completely forgotten that they deny the very
+existence of the luxuriant ecstasy--the only name that can be given to
+these wonderful intuitions. Religious ecstasy is the aberration of a
+soul that has shaken off its bonds of flesh; whereas in amorous ecstasy
+all the forces of soul and body are embraced and blended in one. If
+a woman falls a victim to the tyrannous frenzy before which Mme de
+Langeais was forced to bend, she will take one decisive resolution
+after another so swiftly that it is impossible to give account of them.
+Thought after thought rises and flits across her brain, as clouds are
+whirled by the wind across the grey veil of mist that shuts out the sun.
+Thenceforth the facts reveal all. And the facts are these.
+
+The day after the review, Mme de Langeais sent her carriage and liveried
+servants to wait at the Marquis de Montriveau's door from eight o'clock
+in the morning till three in the afternoon. Armand lived in the Rue de
+Tournon, a few steps away from the Chamber of Peers, and that very
+day the House was sitting; but long before the peers returned to their
+palaces, several people had recognised the Duchess's carriage and
+liveries. The first of these was the Baron de Maulincour. That young
+officer had met with disdain from Mme de Langeais and a better reception
+from Mme de Serizy; he betook himself at once therefore to his mistress,
+and under seal of secrecy told her of this strange freak.
+
+In a moment the news was spread with telegraphic speed through all the
+coteries in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; it reached the Tuileries and the
+Elysee-Bourbon; it was the sensation of the day, the matter of all the
+talk from noon till night. Almost everywhere the women denied the facts,
+but in such a manner that the report was confirmed; the men one and
+all believed it, and manifested a most indulgent interest in Mme de
+Langeais. Some among them threw the blame on Armand.
+
+"That savage of a Montriveau is a man of bronze," said they; "he
+insisted on making this scandal, no doubt."
+
+"Very well, then," others replied, "Mme de Langeais has been guilty of
+a most generous piece of imprudence. To renounce the world and rank, and
+fortune, and consideration for her lover's sake, and that in the face
+of all Paris, is as fine a _coup d'etat_ for a woman as that barber's
+knife-thrust, which so affected Canning in a court of assize. Not one
+of the women who blame the Duchess would make a declaration worthy of
+ancient times. It is heroic of Mme de Langeais to proclaim herself so
+frankly. Now there is nothing left to her but to love Montriveau. There
+must be something great about a woman if she says, 'I will have but one
+passion.'"
+
+"But what is to become of society, monsieur, if you honour vice in this
+way without respect for virtue?" asked the Comtesse de Granville, the
+attorney-general's wife.
+
+While the Chateau, the Faubourg, and the Chaussee d'Antin were
+discussing the shipwreck of aristocratic virtue; while excited young men
+rushed about on horseback to make sure that the carriage was standing in
+the Rue de Tournon, and the Duchess in consequence was beyond a doubt in
+M. de Montriveau's rooms, Mme de Langeais, with heavy throbbing pulses,
+was lying hidden away in her boudoir. And Armand?--he had been out all
+night, and at that moment was walking with M. de Marsay in the Gardens
+of the Tuileries. The elder members, of Mme de Langeais' family were
+engaged in calling upon one another, arranging to read her a homily
+and to hold a consultation as to the best way of putting a stop to the
+scandal.
+
+At three o'clock, therefore, M. le Duc de Navarreins, the Vidame de
+Pamiers, the old Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, and the Duc de Grandlieu
+were assembled in Mme la Duchesse de Langeais' drawing-room. To them, as
+to all curious inquirers, the servants said that their mistress was not
+at home; the Duchess had made no exceptions to her orders. But these
+four personages shone conspicuous in that lofty sphere, of which the
+revolutions and hereditary pretensions are solemnly recorded year by
+year in the _Almanach de Gotha_, wherefore without some slight sketch of
+each of them this picture of society were incomplete.
+
+The Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, in the feminine world, was a most
+poetic wreck of the reign of Louis Quinze. In her beautiful prime, so it
+was said, she had done her part to win for that monarch his appellation
+of _le Bien-aime_. Of her past charms of feature, little remained save
+a remarkably prominent slender nose, curved like a Turkish scimitar, now
+the principal ornament of a countenance that put you in mind of an old
+white glove. Add a few powdered curls, high-heeled pantoufles, a cap
+with upstanding loops of lace, black mittens, and a decided taste for
+_ombre_. But to do full justice to the lady, it must be said that she
+appeared in low-necked gowns of an evening (so high an opinion of her
+ruins had she), wore long gloves, and raddled her cheeks with Martin's
+classic rouge. An appalling amiability in her wrinkles, a prodigious
+brightness in the old lady's eyes, a profound dignity in her whole
+person, together with the triple barbed wit of her tongue, and an
+infallible memory in her head, made of her a real power in the land. The
+whole Cabinet des Chartes was entered in duplicate on the parchment
+of her brain. She knew all the genealogies of every noble house in
+Europe--princes, dukes, and counts--and could put her hand on the last
+descendants of Charlemagne in the direct line. No usurpation of title
+could escape the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry.
+
+Young men who wished to stand well at Court, ambitious men, and young
+married women paid her assiduous homage. Her salon set the tone of the
+Faubourg Saint-Germain. The words of this Talleyrand in petticoats
+were taken as final decrees. People came to consult her on questions of
+etiquette or usages, or to take lessons in good taste. And, in truth,
+no other old woman could put back her snuff-box in her pocket as the
+Princess could; while there was a precision and a grace about the
+movements of her skirts, when she sat down or crossed her feet, which
+drove the finest ladies of the young generation to despair. Her voice
+had remained in her head during one-third of her lifetime; but she could
+not prevent a descent into the membranes of the nose, which lent to it a
+peculiar expressiveness. She still retained a hundred and fifty thousand
+livres of her great fortune, for Napoleon had generously returned her
+woods to her; so that personally and in the matter of possessions she
+was a woman of no little consequence.
+
+This curious antique, seated in a low chair by the fireside, was
+chatting with the Vidame de Pamiers, a contemporary ruin. The Vidame was
+a big, tall, and spare man, a seigneur of the old school, and had been
+a Commander of the Order of Malta. His neck had always been so tightly
+compressed by a strangulation stock, that his cheeks pouched over it a
+little, and he held his head high; to many people this would have given
+an air of self-sufficiency, but in the Vidame it was justified by a
+Voltairean wit. His wide prominent eyes seemed to see everything, and as
+a matter of fact there was not much that they had not seen. Altogether,
+his person was a perfect model of aristocratic outline, slim and
+slender, supple and agreeable. He seemed as if he could be pliant or
+rigid at will, and twist and bend, or rear his head like a snake.
+
+The Duc de Navarreins was pacing up and down the room with the Duc de
+Grandlieu. Both were men of fifty-six or thereabouts, and still hale;
+both were short, corpulent, flourishing, somewhat florid-complexioned
+men with jaded eyes, and lower lips that had begun to hang already. But
+for an exquisite refinement of accent, an urbane courtesy, and an ease
+of manner that could change in a moment to insolence, a superficial
+observer might have taken them for a couple of bankers. Any such mistake
+would have been impossible, however, if the listener could have heard
+them converse, and seen them on their guard with men whom they feared,
+vapid and commonplace with their equals, slippery with the inferiors
+whom courtiers and statesmen know how to tame by a tactful word, or to
+humiliate with an unexpected phrase.
+
+Such were the representatives of the great noblesse that determined to
+perish rather than submit to any change. It was a noblesse that deserved
+praise and blame in equal measure; a noblesse that will never be judged
+impartially until some poet shall arise to tell how joyfully the nobles
+obeyed the King though their heads fell under a Richelieu's axe, and how
+deeply they scorned the guillotine of '89 as a foul revenge.
+
+Another noticeable trait in all the four was a thin voice that agreed
+peculiarly well with their ideas and bearing. Among themselves, at any
+rate, they were on terms of perfect equality. None of them betrayed
+any sign of annoyance over the Duchess's escapade, but all of them had
+learned at Court to hide their feelings.
+
+And here, lest critics should condemn the puerility of the opening of
+the forthcoming scene, it is perhaps as well to remind the reader that
+Locke, once happening to be in the company of several great lords,
+renowned no less for their wit than for their breeding and political
+consistency, wickedly amused himself by taking down their conversation
+by some shorthand process of his own; and afterwards, when he read
+it over to them to see what they could make of it, they all burst out
+laughing. And, in truth, the tinsel jargon which circulates among the
+upper ranks in every country yields mighty little gold to the crucible
+when washed in the ashes of literature or philosophy. In every rank of
+society (some few Parisian salons excepted) the curious observer finds
+folly a constant quantity beneath a more or less transparent varnish.
+Conversation with any substance in it is a rare exception, and
+boeotianism is current coin in every zone. In the higher regions they
+must perforce talk more, but to make up for it they think the less.
+Thinking is a tiring exercise, and the rich like their lives to flow by
+easily and without effort. It is by comparing the fundamental matter of
+jests, as you rise in the social scale from the street-boy to the peer
+of France, that the observer arrives at a true comprehension of M. de
+Talleyrand's maxim, "The manner is everything"; an elegant rendering of
+the legal axiom, "The form is of more consequence than the matter." In
+the eyes of the poet the advantage rests with the lower classes, for
+they seldom fail to give a certain character of rude poetry to their
+thoughts. Perhaps also this same observation may explain the sterility
+of the salons, their emptiness, their shallowness, and the repugnance
+felt by men of ability for bartering their ideas for such pitiful small
+change.
+
+The Duke suddenly stopped as if some bright idea occurred to him, and
+remarked to his neighbour:
+
+"So you have sold Tornthon?"
+
+"No, he is ill. I am very much afraid I shall lose him, and I should be
+uncommonly sorry. He is a very good hunter. Do you know how the Duchesse
+de Marigny is?"
+
+"No. I did not go this morning. I was just going out to call when
+you came in to speak about Antoinette. But yesterday she was very ill
+indeed; they had given her up, she took the sacrament."
+
+"Her death will make a change in your cousin's position."
+
+"Not at all. She gave away her property in her lifetime, only keeping
+an annuity. She made over the Guebriant estate to her niece, Mme de
+Soulanges, subject to a yearly charge."
+
+"It will be a great loss for society. She was a kind woman. Her family
+will miss her; her experience and advice carried weight. Her son Marigny
+is an amiable man; he has a sharp wit, he can talk. He is pleasant, very
+pleasant. Pleasant? oh, that no one can deny, but--ill regulated to
+the last degree. Well, and yet it is an extraordinary thing, he is
+very acute. He was dining at the club the other day with that moneyed
+Chaussee-d'Antin set. Your uncle (he always goes there for his game
+of cards) found him there to his astonishment, and asked if he was a
+member. 'Yes,' said he, 'I don't go into society now; I am living among
+the bankers.'--You know why?" added the Marquis, with a meaning smile.
+
+"No," said the Duke.
+
+"He is smitten with that little Mme Keller, Gondreville's daughter; she
+is only lately married, and has a great vogue, they say, in that set."
+
+"Well, Antoinette does not find time heavy on her hands, it seems,"
+remarked the Vidame.
+
+"My affection for that little woman has driven me to find a singular
+pastime," replied the Princess, as she returned her snuff-box to her
+pocket.
+
+"Dear aunt, I am extremely vexed," said the Duke, stopping short in his
+walk. "Nobody but one of Bonaparte's men could ask such an indecorous
+thing of a woman of fashion. Between ourselves, Antoinette might have
+made a better choice."
+
+"The Montriveaus are a very old family and very well connected, my
+dear," replied the Princess; "they are related to all the noblest houses
+of Burgundy. If the Dulmen branch of the Arschoot Rivaudoults should
+come to an end in Galicia, the Montriveaus would succeed to the Arschoot
+title and estates. They inherit through their great-grandfather.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"I know it better than this Montriveau's father did. I told him about
+it, I used to see a good deal of him; and, Chevalier of several orders
+though he was, he only laughed; he was an encyclopaedist. But his
+brother turned the relationship to good account during the emigration.
+I have heard it said that his northern kinsfolk were most kind in every
+way----"
+
+"Yes, to be sure. The Comte de Montriveau died at St. Petersburg,"
+said the Vidame. "I met him there. He was a big man with an incredible
+passion for oysters."
+
+"However many did he eat?" asked the Duc de Grandlieu.
+
+"Ten dozen every day."
+
+"And did they not disagree with him?"
+
+"Not the least bit in the world."
+
+"Why, that is extraordinary! Had he neither the stone nor gout, nor any
+other complaint, in consequence?"
+
+"No; his health was perfectly good, and he died through an accident."
+
+"By accident! Nature prompted him to eat oysters, so probably he
+required them; for up to a certain point our predominant tastes are
+conditions of our existence."
+
+"I am of your opinion," said the Princess, with a smile.
+
+"Madame, you always put a malicious construction on things," returned
+the Marquis.
+
+"I only want you to understand that these remarks might leave a wrong
+impression on a young woman's mind," said she, and interrupted herself
+to exclaim, "But this niece, this niece of mine!"
+
+"Dear aunt, I still refuse to believe that she can have gone to M. de
+Montriveau," said the Duc de Navarreins.
+
+"Bah!" returned the Princess.
+
+"What do you think, Vidame?" asked the Marquis.
+
+"If the Duchess were an artless simpleton, I should think that----"
+
+"But when a woman is in love she becomes an artless simpleton," retorted
+the Princess. "Really, my poor Vidame, you must be getting older."
+
+"After all, what is to be done?" asked the Duke.
+
+"If my dear niece is wise," said the Princess, "she will go to Court
+this evening--fortunately, today is Monday, and reception day--and you
+must see that we all rally round her and give the lie to this absurd
+rumour. There are hundreds of ways of explaining things; and if the
+Marquis de Montriveau is a gentleman, he will come to our assistance. We
+will bring these children to listen to reason----"
+
+"But, dear aunt, it is not easy to tell M. de Montriveau the truth to
+his face. He is one of Bonaparte's pupils, and he has a position. Why,
+he is one of the great men of the day; he is high up in the Guards, and
+very useful there. He has not a spark of ambition. He is just the man to
+say, 'Here is my commission, leave me in peace,' if the King should say
+a word that he did not like."
+
+"Then, pray, what are his opinions?"
+
+"Very unsound."
+
+"Really," sighed the Princess, "the King is, as he always has been, a
+Jacobin under the Lilies of France."
+
+"Oh! not quite so bad," said the Vidame.
+
+"Yes; I have known him for a long while. The man that pointed out the
+Court to his wife on the occasion of her first state dinner in public
+with, 'These are our people,' could only be a black-hearted scoundrel.
+I can see Monsieur exactly the same as ever in the King. The bad brother
+who voted so wrongly in his department of the Constituent Assembly was
+sure to compound with the Liberals and allow them to argue and talk.
+This philosophical cant will be just as dangerous now for the younger
+brother as it used to be for the elder; this fat man with the little
+mind is amusing himself by creating difficulties, and how his successor
+is to get out of them I do not know; he holds his younger brother in
+abhorrence; he would be glad to think as he lay dying, 'He will not
+reign very long----'"
+
+"Aunt, he is the King, and I have the honour to be in his service----"
+
+"But does your post take away your right of free speech, my dear? You
+come of quite as good a house as the Bourbons. If the Guises had shown a
+little more resolution, His Majesty would be a nobody at this day. It is
+time I went out of this world, the noblesse is dead. Yes, it is all
+over with you, my children," she continued, looking as she spoke at the
+Vidame. "What has my niece done that the whole town should be talking
+about her? She is in the wrong; I disapprove of her conduct, a useless
+scandal is a blunder; that is why I still have my doubts about this want
+of regard for appearances; I brought her up, and I know that----"
+
+Just at that moment the Duchess came out of her boudoir. She had
+recognised her aunt's voice and heard the name of Montriveau. She
+was still in her loose morning-gown; and even as she came in, M.
+de Grandlieu, looking carelessly out of the window, saw his niece's
+carriage driving back along the street. The Duke took his daughter's
+face in both hands and kissed her on the forehead.
+
+"So, dear girl," he said, "you do not know what is going on?"
+
+"Has anything extraordinary happened, father dear?"
+
+"Why, all Paris believes that you are with M. de Montriveau."
+
+"My dear Antoinette, you were at home all the time, were you not?"
+said the Princess, holding out a hand, which the Duchess kissed with
+affectionate respect.
+
+"Yes, dear mother; I was at home all the time. And," she added, as she
+turned to greet the Vidame and the Marquis, "I wished that all Paris
+should think that I was with M. de Montriveau."
+
+The Duke flung up his hands, struck them together in despair, and folded
+his arms.
+
+"Then, cannot you see what will come of this mad freak?" he asked at
+last.
+
+But the aged Princess had suddenly risen, and stood looking steadily
+at the Duchess, the younger woman flushed, and her eyes fell. Mme de
+Chauvry gently drew her closer, and said, "My little angel, let me kiss
+you!"
+
+She kissed her niece very affectionately on the forehead, and continued
+smiling, while she held her hand in a tight clasp.
+
+"We are not under the Valois now, dear child. You have compromised your
+husband and your position. Still, we will arrange to make everything
+right."
+
+"But, dear aunt, I do not wish to make it right at all. It is my wish
+that all Paris should say that I was with M. de Montriveau this morning.
+If you destroy that belief, however ill grounded it may be, you will do
+me a singular disservice."
+
+"Do you really wish to ruin yourself, child, and to grieve your family?"
+
+"My family, father, unintentionally condemned me to irreparable
+misfortune when they sacrificed me to family considerations. You may,
+perhaps, blame me for seeking alleviations, but you will certainly feel
+for me."
+
+"After all the endless pains you take to settle your daughters
+suitably!" muttered M. de Navarreins, addressing the Vidame.
+
+The Princess shook a stray grain of snuff from her skirts. "My dear
+little girl," she said, "be happy, if you can. We are not talking of
+troubling your felicity, but of reconciling it with social usages. We
+all of us here assembled know that marriage is a defective institution
+tempered by love. But when you take a lover, is there any need to make
+your bed in the Place du Carrousel? See now, just be a bit reasonable,
+and hear what we have to say."
+
+"I am listening."
+
+"Mme la Duchesse," began the Duc de Grandlieu, "if it were any part of
+an uncle's duty to look after his nieces, he ought to have a position;
+society would owe him honours and rewards and a salary, exactly as if
+he were in the King's service. So I am not here to talk about my nephew,
+but of your own interests. Let us look ahead a little. If you persist in
+making a scandal--I have seen the animal before, and I own that I have
+no great liking for him--Langeais is stingy enough, and he does not care
+a rap for anyone but himself; he will have a separation; he will stick
+to your money, and leave you poor, and consequently you will be a
+nobody. The income of a hundred thousand livres that you have just
+inherited from your maternal great-aunt will go to pay for his
+mistresses' amusements. You will be bound and gagged by the law;
+you will have to say _Amen_ to all these arrangements. Suppose M. de
+Montriveau leaves you----dear me! do not let us put ourselves in a
+passion, my dear niece; a man does not leave a woman while she is young
+and pretty; still, we have seen so many pretty women left disconsolate,
+even among princesses, that you will permit the supposition, an all but
+impossible supposition I quite wish to believe.----Well, suppose that
+he goes, what will become of you without a husband? Keep well with your
+husband as you take care of your beauty; for beauty, after all, is a
+woman's parachute, and a husband also stands between you and worse. I
+am supposing that you are happy and loved to the end, and I am leaving
+unpleasant or unfortunate events altogether out of the reckoning. This
+being so, fortunately or unfortunately, you may have children. What are
+they to be? Montriveaus? Very well; they certainly will not succeed to
+their father's whole fortune. You will want to give them all that you
+have; he will wish to do the same. Nothing more natural, dear me!
+And you will find the law against you. How many times have we
+seen heirs-at-law bringing a law-suit to recover the property from
+illegitimate children? Every court of law rings with such actions all
+over the world. You will create a _fidei commissum_ perhaps; and if the
+trustee betrays your confidence, your children have no remedy against
+him; and they are ruined. So choose carefully. You see the perplexities
+of the position. In every possible way your children will be sacrificed
+of necessity to the fancies of your heart; they will have no recognised
+status. While they are little they will be charming; but, Lord! some day
+they will reproach you for thinking of no one but your two selves. We
+old gentlemen know all about it. Little boys grow up into men, and men
+are ungrateful beings. When I was in Germany, did I not hear young de
+Horn say, after supper, 'If my mother had been an honest woman, I should
+be prince-regnant!' _If_?' We have spent our lives in hearing plebeians
+say _if_. _If_ brought about the Revolution. When a man cannot lay the
+blame on his father or mother, he holds God responsible for his hard
+lot. In short, dear child, we are here to open your eyes. I will say all
+I have to say in a few words, on which you had better meditate: A woman
+ought never to put her husband in the right."
+
+"Uncle, so long as I cared for nobody, I could calculate; I looked at
+interests then, as you do; now, I can only feel."
+
+"But, my dear little girl," remonstrated the Vidame, "life is simply a
+complication of interests and feelings; to be happy, more particularly
+in your position, one must try to reconcile one's feelings with
+one's interests. A grisette may love according to her fancy, that is
+intelligible enough, but you have a pretty fortune, a family, a name and
+a place at Court, and you ought not to fling them out of the window.
+And what have we been asking you to do to keep them all?--To manoeuvre
+carefully instead of falling foul of social conventions. Lord! I shall
+very soon be eighty years old, and I cannot recollect, under any regime,
+a love worth the price that you are willing to pay for the love of this
+lucky young man."
+
+The Duchess silenced the Vidame with a look; if Montriveau could have
+seen that glance, he would have forgiven all.
+
+"It would be very effective on the stage," remarked the Duc de
+Grandlieu, "but it all amounts to nothing when your jointure and
+position and independence is concerned. You are not grateful, my dear
+niece. You will not find many families where the relatives have courage
+enough to teach the wisdom gained by experience, and to make rash young
+heads listen to reason. Renounce your salvation in two minutes, if it
+pleases you to damn yourself; well and good; but reflect well beforehand
+when it comes to renouncing your income. I know of no confessor who
+remits the pains of poverty. I have a right, I think, to speak in this
+way to you; for if you are ruined, I am the one person who can offer you
+a refuge. I am almost an uncle to Langeais, and I alone have a right to
+put him in the wrong."
+
+The Duc de Navarreins roused himself from painful reflections.
+
+"Since you speak of feeling, my child," he said, "let me remind you that
+a woman who bears your name ought to be moved by sentiments which do
+not touch ordinary people. Can you wish to give an advantage to the
+Liberals, to those Jesuits of Robespierre's that are doing all they
+can to vilify the noblesse? Some things a Navarreins cannot do
+without failing in duty to his house. You would not be alone in your
+dishonor----"
+
+"Come, come!" said the Princess. "Dishonor? Do not make such a fuss
+about the journey of an empty carriage, children, and leave me alone
+with Antoinette. All three of you come and dine with me. I will
+undertake to arrange matters suitably. You men understand nothing;
+you are beginning to talk sourly already, and I have no wish to see a
+quarrel between you and my dear child. Do me the pleasure to go."
+
+The three gentlemen probably guessed the Princess's intentions; they
+took their leave. M. de Navarreins kissed his daughter on the forehead
+with, "Come, be good, dear child. It is not too late yet if you choose."
+
+"Couldn't we find some good fellow in the family to pick a quarrel with
+this Montriveau?" said the Vidame, as they went downstairs.
+
+When the two women were alone, the Princess beckoned her niece to a
+little low chair by her side.
+
+"My pearl," said she, "in this world below, I know nothing worse
+calumniated than God and the eighteenth century; for as I look back over
+my own young days, I do not recollect that a single duchess trampled the
+proprieties underfoot as you have just done. Novelists and scribblers
+brought the reign of Louis XV into disrepute. Do not believe them. The
+du Barry, my dear, was quite as good as the Widow Scarron, and the more
+agreeable woman of the two. In my time a woman could keep her dignity
+among her gallantries. Indiscretion was the ruin of us, and the
+beginning of all the mischief. The philosophists--the nobodies whom we
+admitted into our salons--had no more gratitude or sense of decency than
+to make an inventory of our hearts, to traduce us one and all, and to
+rail against the age by way of a return for our kindness. The people are
+not in a position to judge of anything whatsoever; they looked at the
+facts, not at the form. But the men and women of those times, my heart,
+were quite as remarkable as at any other period of the Monarchy. Not one
+of your Werthers, none of your notabilities, as they are called, never
+a one of your men in yellow kid gloves and trousers that disguise the
+poverty of their legs, would cross Europe in the dress of a travelling
+hawker to brave the daggers of a Duke of Modena, and to shut himself up
+in the dressing-room of the Regent's daughter at the risk of his life.
+Not one of your little consumptive patients with their tortoiseshell
+eyeglasses would hide himself in a closet for six weeks, like Lauzun,
+to keep up his mistress's courage while she was lying in of her child.
+There was more passion in M. de Jaucourt's little finger than in
+your whole race of higglers that leave a woman to better themselves
+elsewhere! Just tell me where to find the page that would be cut in
+pieces and buried under the floorboards for one kiss on the Konigsmark's
+gloved finger!
+
+"Really, it would seem today that the roles are exchanged, and women
+are expected to show their devotion for men. These modern gentlemen are
+worth less, and think more of themselves. Believe me, my dear, all these
+adventures that have been made public, and now are turned against our
+good Louis XV, were kept quite secret at first. If it had not been for
+a pack of poetasters, scribblers, and moralists, who hung about our
+waiting-women, and took down their slanders, our epoch would have
+appeared in literature as a well-conducted age. I am justifying the
+century and not its fringe. Perhaps a hundred women of quality were
+lost; but for every one, the rogues set down ten, like the gazettes
+after a battle when they count up the losses of the beaten side. And in
+any case I do not know that the Revolution and the Empire can reproach
+us; they were coarse, dull, licentious times. Faugh! it is revolting.
+Those are the brothels of French history.
+
+"This preamble, my dear child," she continued after a pause, "brings
+me to the thing that I have to say. If you care for Montriveau, you are
+quite at liberty to love him at your ease, and as much as you can. I
+know by experience that, unless you are locked up (but locking people
+up is out of fashion now), you will do as you please; I should have done
+the same at your age. Only, sweetheart, I should not have given up my
+right to be the mother of future Ducs de Langeais. So mind appearances.
+The Vidame is right. No man is worth a single one of the sacrifices
+which we are foolish enough to make for their love. Put yourself in
+such a position that you may still be M. de Langeais' wife, in case you
+should have the misfortune to repent. When you are an old woman, you
+will be very glad to hear mass said at Court, and not in some provincial
+convent. Therein lies the whole question. A single imprudence means an
+allowance and a wandering life; it means that you are at the mercy of
+your lover; it means that you must put up with insolence from women
+that are not so honest, precisely because they have been very vulgarly
+sharp-witted. It would be a hundred times better to go to Montriveau's
+at night in a cab, and disguised, instead of sending your carriage in
+broad daylight. You are a little fool, my dear child! Your carriage
+flattered his vanity; your person would have ensnared his heart. All
+this that I have said is just and true; but, for my own part, I do not
+blame you. You are two centuries behind the times with your false ideas
+of greatness. There, leave us to arrange your affairs, and say that
+Montriveau made your servants drunk to gratify his vanity and to
+compromise you----"
+
+The Duchess rose to her feet with a spring. "In Heaven's name, aunt, do
+not slander him!"
+
+The old Princess's eyes flashed.
+
+"Dear child," she said, "I should have liked to spare such of your
+illusions as were not fatal. But there must be an end of all illusions
+now. You would soften me if I were not so old. Come, now, do not vex
+him, or us, or anyone else. I will undertake to satisfy everybody; but
+promise me not to permit yourself a single step henceforth until you
+have consulted me. Tell me all, and perhaps I may bring it all right
+again."
+
+"Aunt, I promise----"
+
+"To tell me everything?"
+
+"Yes, everything. Everything that can be told."
+
+"But, my sweetheart, it is precisely what cannot be told that I want
+to know. Let us understand each other thoroughly. Come, let me put my
+withered old lips on your beautiful forehead. No; let me do as I wish. I
+forbid you to kiss my bones. Old people have a courtesy of their own....
+There, take me down to my carriage," she added, when she had kissed her
+niece.
+
+"Then may I go to him in disguise, dear aunt?"
+
+"Why--yes. The story can always be denied," said the old Princess.
+
+This was the one idea which the Duchess had clearly grasped in the
+sermon. When Mme de Chauvry was seated in the corner of her carriage,
+Mme de Langeais bade her a graceful adieu and went up to her room. She
+was quite happy again.
+
+"My person would have snared his heart; my aunt is right; a man cannot
+surely refuse a pretty woman when she understands how to offer herself."
+
+That evening, at the Elysee-Bourbon, the Duc de Navarreins, M. de
+Pamiers, M. de Marsay, M. de Grandlieu, and the Duc de Maufrigneuse
+triumphantly refuted the scandals that were circulating with regard to
+the Duchesse de Langeais. So many officers and other persons had seen
+Montriveau walking in the Tuileries that morning, that the silly story
+was set down to chance, which takes all that is offered. And so,
+in spite of the fact that the Duchess's carriage had waited before
+Montriveau's door, her character became as clear and as spotless as
+Membrino's sword after Sancho had polished it up.
+
+But, at two o'clock, M. de Ronquerolles passed Montriveau in a deserted
+alley, and said with a smile, "She is coming on, is your Duchess. Go on,
+keep it up!" he added, and gave a significant cut of the riding whip to
+his mare, who sped off like a bullet down the avenue.
+
+Two days after the fruitless scandal, Mme de Langeais wrote to M. de
+Montriveau. That letter, like the preceding ones, remained unanswered.
+This time she took her own measures, and bribed M. de Montriveau's man,
+Auguste. And so at eight o'clock that evening she was introduced into
+Armand's apartment. It was not the room in which that secret scene had
+passed; it was entirely different. The Duchess was told that the General
+would not be at home that night. Had he two houses? The man would give
+no answer. Mme de Langeais had bought the key of the room, but not the
+man's whole loyalty.
+
+When she was left alone she saw her fourteen letters lying on an
+old-fashioned stand, all of them uncreased and unopened. He had not
+read them. She sank into an easy-chair, and for a while she lost
+consciousness. When she came to herself, Auguste was holding vinegar for
+her to inhale.
+
+"A carriage; quick!" she ordered.
+
+The carriage came. She hastened downstairs with convulsive speed, and
+left orders that no one was to be admitted. For twenty-four hours she
+lay in bed, and would have no one near her but her woman, who brought
+her a cup of orange-flower water from time to time. Suzette heard
+her mistress moan once or twice, and caught a glimpse of tears in the
+brilliant eyes, now circled with dark shadows.
+
+The next day, amid despairing tears, Mme de Langeais took her
+resolution. Her man of business came for an interview, and no doubt
+received instructions of some kind. Afterwards she sent for the
+Vidame de Pamiers; and while she waited, she wrote a letter to M.
+de Montriveau. The Vidame punctually came towards two o'clock that
+afternoon, to find his young cousin looking white and worn, but
+resigned; never had her divine loveliness been more poetic than now in
+the languor of her agony.
+
+"You owe this assignation to your eighty-four years, dear cousin," she
+said. "Ah! do not smile, I beg of you, when an unhappy woman has reached
+the lowest depths of wretchedness. You are a gentleman, and after the
+adventures of your youth you must feel some indulgence for women."
+
+"None whatever," said he.
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Everything is in their favour."
+
+"Ah! Well, you are one of the inner family circle; possibly you will be
+the last relative, the last friend whose hand I shall press, so I can
+ask your good offices. Will you, dear Vidame, do me a service which I
+could not ask of my own father, nor of my uncle Grandlieu, nor of any
+woman? You cannot fail to understand. I beg of you to do my bidding, and
+then to forget what you have done, whatever may come of it. It is this:
+Will you take this letter and go to M. de Montriveau? will you see him
+yourself, give it into his hands, and ask him, as you men can ask things
+between yourselves--for you have a code of honour between man and man
+which you do not use with us, and a different way of regarding things
+between yourselves--ask him if he will read this letter? Not in
+your presence. Certain feelings men hide from each other. I give you
+authority to say, if you think it necessary to bring him, that it is a
+question of life or death for me. If he deigns----"
+
+"_Deigns_!" repeated the Vidame.
+
+"If he deigns to read it," the Duchess continued with dignity, "say one
+thing more. You will go to see him about five o'clock, for I know that
+he will dine at home today at that time. Very good. By way of answer he
+must come to see me. If, three hours afterwards, by eight o'clock, he
+does not leave his house, all will be over. The Duchesse de Langeais
+will have vanished from the world. I shall not be dead, dear friend, no,
+but no human power will ever find me again on this earth. Come and dine
+with me; I shall at least have one friend with me in the last agony.
+Yes, dear cousin, tonight will decide my fate; and whatever happens to
+me, I pass through an ordeal by fire. There! not a word. I will hear
+nothing of the nature of comment or advice----Let us chat and laugh
+together," she added, holding out a hand, which he kissed. "We will be
+like two grey-headed philosophers who have learned how to enjoy life to
+the last moment. I will look my best; I will be very enchanting for
+you. You perhaps will be the last man to set eyes on the Duchesse de
+Langeais."
+
+The Vicomte bowed, took the letter, and went without a word. At five
+o'clock he returned. His cousin had studied to please him, and she
+looked lovely indeed. The room was gay with flowers as if for a
+festivity; the dinner was exquisite. For the grey-headed Vidame the
+Duchess displayed all the brilliancy of her wit; she was more charming
+than she had ever been before. At first the Vidame tried to look on
+all these preparations as a young woman's jest; but now and again the
+attempted illusion faded, the spell of his fair cousin's charm was
+broken. He detected a shudder caused by some kind of sudden dread, and
+once she seemed to listen during a pause.
+
+"What is the matter?" he asked.
+
+"Hush!" she said.
+
+At seven o'clock the Duchess left him for a few minutes. When she came
+back again she was dressed as her maid might have dressed for a journey.
+She asked her guest to be her escort, took his arm, sprang into a
+hackney coach, and by a quarter to eight they stood outside M. de
+Montriveau's door.
+
+Armand meantime had been reading the following letter:--
+
+
+"MY FRIEND,--I went to your rooms for a few minutes without your
+knowledge; I found my letters there, and took them away. This cannot
+be indifference, Armand, between us; and hatred would show itself quite
+differently. If you love me, make an end of this cruel play, or you will
+kill me, and afterwards, learning how much you were loved, you might be
+in despair. If I have not rightly understood you, if you have no feeling
+towards me but aversion, which implies both contempt and disgust, then
+I give up all hope. A man never recovers from those feelings. You will
+have no regrets. Dreadful though that thought may be, it will comfort me
+in my long sorrow. Regrets? Oh, my Armand, may I never know of them; if
+I thought that I had caused you a single regret----But, no, I will not
+tell you what desolation I should feel. I should be living still, and I
+could not be your wife; it would be too late!
+
+"Now that I have given myself wholly to you in thought, to whom else
+should I give myself?--to God. The eyes that you loved for a little
+while shall never look on another man's face; and may the glory of God
+blind them to all besides. I shall never hear human voices more since I
+heard yours--so gentle at the first, so terrible yesterday; for it seems
+to me that I am still only on the morrow of your vengeance. And now
+may the will of God consume me. Between His wrath and yours, my friend,
+there will be nothing left for me but a little space for tears and
+prayers.
+
+"Perhaps you wonder why I write to you? Ah! do not think ill of me if I
+keep a gleam of hope, and give one last sigh to happy life before I take
+leave of it forever. I am in a hideous position. I feel all the inward
+serenity that comes when a great resolution has been taken, even while I
+hear the last growlings of the storm. When you went out on that terrible
+adventure which so drew me to you, Armand, you went from the desert to
+the oasis with a good guide to show you the way. Well, I am going out of
+the oasis into the desert, and you are a pitiless guide to me. And yet
+you only, my friend, can understand how melancholy it is to look back
+for the last time on happiness--to you, and you only, I can make moan
+without a blush. If you grant my entreaty, I shall be happy; if you are
+inexorable, I shall expiate the wrong that I have done. After all, it is
+natural, is it not, that a woman should wish to live, invested with all
+noble feelings, in her friend's memory? Oh! my one and only love, let
+her to whom you gave life go down into the tomb in the belief that she
+is great in your eyes. Your harshness led me to reflect; and now that I
+love you so, it seems to me that I am less guilty than you think. Listen
+to my justification, I owe it to you; and you that are all the world to
+me, owe me at least a moment's justice.
+
+"I have learned by my own anguish all that I made you suffer by my
+coquetry; but in those days I was utterly ignorant of love. _You_ know
+what the torture is, and you mete it out to me! During those first eight
+months that you gave me you never roused any feeling of love in me. Do
+you ask why this was so, my friend? I can no more explain it than I can
+tell you why I love you now. Oh! certainly it flattered my vanity that I
+should be the subject of your passionate talk, and receive those burning
+glances of yours; but you left me cold. No, I was not a woman; I had
+no conception of womanly devotion and happiness. Who was to blame? You
+would have despised me, would you not, if I had given myself without
+the impulse of passion? Perhaps it is the highest height to which we
+can rise--to give all and receive no joy; perhaps there is no merit in
+yielding oneself to bliss that is foreseen and ardently desired. Alas,
+my friend, I can say this now; these thoughts came to me when I played
+with you; and you seemed to me so great even then that I would not have
+you owe the gift to pity----What is this that I have written?
+
+"I have taken back all my letters; I am flinging them one by one on the
+fire; they are burning. You will never know what they confessed--all the
+love and the passion and the madness----
+
+"I will say no more, Armand; I will stop. I will not say another word of
+my feelings. If my prayers have not echoed from my soul through yours,
+I also, woman that I am, decline to owe your love to your pity. It is my
+wish to be loved, because you cannot choose but love me, or else to
+be left without mercy. If you refuse to read this letter, it shall be
+burnt. If, after you have read it, you do not come to me within three
+hours, to be henceforth forever my husband, the one man in the world for
+me; then I shall never blush to know that this letter is in your hands,
+the pride of my despair will protect my memory from all insult, and my
+end shall be worthy of my love. When you see me no more on earth, albeit
+I shall still be alive, you yourself will not think without a shudder
+of the woman who, in three hours' time, will live only to overwhelm
+you with her tenderness; a woman consumed by a hopeless love, and
+faithful--not to memories of past joys--but to a love that was slighted.
+
+"The Duchesse de la Valliere wept for lost happiness and vanished power;
+but the Duchesse de Langeais will be happy that she may weep and be a
+power for you still. Yes, you will regret me. I see clearly that I was
+not of this world, and I thank you for making it clear to me.
+
+"Farewell; you will never touch _my_ axe. Yours was the executioner's
+axe, mine is God's; yours kills, mine saves. Your love was but mortal,
+it could not endure disdain or ridicule; mine can endure all things
+without growing weaker, it will last eternally. Ah! I feel a sombre joy
+in crushing you that believe yourself so great; in humbling you with the
+calm, indulgent smile of one of the least among the angels that lie at
+the feet of God, for to them is given the right and the power to protect
+and watch over men in His name. You have but felt fleeting desires,
+while the poor nun will shed the light of her ceaseless and ardent
+prayer about you, she will shelter you all your life long beneath the
+wings of a love that has nothing of earth in it.
+
+"I have a presentiment of your answer; our trysting place shall be--in
+heaven. Strength and weakness can both enter there, dear Armand; the
+strong and the weak are bound to suffer. This thought soothes the
+anguish of my final ordeal. So calm am I that I should fear that I had
+ceased to love you if I were not about to leave the world for your sake.
+
+                                                "ANTOINETTE."
+
+
+"Dear Vidame," said the Duchess as they reached Montriveau's house, "do
+me the kindness to ask at the door whether he is at home." The Vidame,
+obedient after the manner of the eighteenth century to a woman's wish,
+got out, and came back to bring his cousin an affirmative answer that
+sent a shudder through her. She grasped his hand tightly in hers,
+suffered him to kiss her on either cheek, and begged him to go at once.
+He must not watch her movements nor try to protect her. "But the people
+passing in the street," he objected.
+
+"No one can fail in respect to me," she said. It was the last word
+spoken by the Duchess and the woman of fashion.
+
+The Vidame went. Mme de Langeais wrapped herself about in her cloak,
+and stood on the doorstep until the clocks struck eight. The last stroke
+died away. The unhappy woman waited ten, fifteen minutes; to the last
+she tried to see a fresh humiliation in the delay, then her faith ebbed.
+She turned to leave the fatal threshold.
+
+"Oh, God!" the cry broke from her in spite of herself; it was the first
+word spoken by the Carmelite.
+
+
+
+Montriveau and some of his friends were talking together. He tried to
+hasten them to a conclusion, but his clock was slow, and by the time he
+started out for the Hotel de Langeais the Duchess was hurrying on foot
+through the streets of Paris, goaded by the dull rage in her heart. She
+reached the Boulevard d'Enfer, and looked out for the last time through
+falling tears on the noisy, smoky city that lay below in a red mist,
+lighted up by its own lamps. Then she hailed a cab, and drove away,
+never to return. When the Marquis de Montriveau reached the Hotel de
+Langeais, and found no trace of his mistress, he thought that he had
+been duped. He hurried away at once to the Vidame, and found that worthy
+gentleman in the act of slipping on his flowered dressing-gown, thinking
+the while of his fair cousin's happiness.
+
+Montriveau gave him one of the terrific glances that produced the effect
+of an electric shock on men and women alike.
+
+"Is it possible that you have lent yourself to some cruel hoax,
+monsieur?" Montriveau exclaimed. "I have just come from Mme de Langeais'
+house; the servants say that she is out."
+
+"Then a great misfortune has happened, no doubt," returned the Vidame,
+"and through your fault. I left the Duchess at your door----"
+
+"When?"
+
+"At a quarter to eight."
+
+"Good evening," returned Montriveau, and he hurried home to ask the
+porter whether he had seen a lady standing on the doorstep that evening.
+
+"Yes, my Lord Marquis, a handsome woman, who seemed very much put out.
+She was crying like a Magdalen, but she never made a sound, and stood
+as upright as a post. Then at last she went, and my wife and I that were
+watching her while she could not see us, heard her say, 'Oh, God!' so
+that it went to our hearts, asking your pardon, to hear her say it."
+
+Montriveau, in spite of all his firmness, turned pale at those few
+words. He wrote a few lines to Ronquerolles, sent off the message at
+once, and went up to his rooms. Ronquerolles came just about midnight.
+
+Armand gave him the Duchess's letter to read.
+
+"Well?" asked Ronquerolles.
+
+"She was here at my door at eight o'clock; at a quarter-past eight she
+had gone. I have lost her, and I love her. Oh! if my life were my own, I
+could blow my brains out."
+
+"Pooh, pooh! Keep cool," said Ronquerolles. "Duchesses do not fly off
+like wagtails. She cannot travel faster than three leagues an hour, and
+tomorrow we will ride six.--Confound it! Mme de Langeais is no ordinary
+woman," he continued. "Tomorrow we will all of us mount and ride.
+The police will put us on her track during the day. She must have a
+carriage; angels of that sort have no wings. We shall find her whether
+she is on the road or hidden in Paris. There is the semaphore. We can
+stop her. You shall be happy. But, my dear fellow, you have made a
+blunder, of which men of your energy are very often guilty. They judge
+others by themselves, and do not know the point when human nature gives
+way if you strain the cords too tightly. Why did you not say a word
+to me sooner? I would have told you to be punctual. Good-bye till
+tomorrow," he added, as Montriveau said nothing. "Sleep if you can," he
+added, with a grasp of the hand.
+
+But the greatest resources which society has ever placed at the disposal
+of statesmen, kings, ministers, bankers, or any human power, in fact,
+were all exhausted in vain. Neither Montriveau nor his friends could
+find any trace of the Duchess. It was clear that she had entered a
+convent. Montriveau determined to search, or to institute a search, for
+her through every convent in the world. He must have her, even at the
+cost of all the lives in a town. And in justice to this extraordinary
+man, it must be said that his frenzied passion awoke to the same
+ardour daily and lasted through five years. Only in 1829 did the Duc de
+Navarreins hear by chance that his daughter had travelled to Spain as
+Lady Julia Hopwood's maid, that she had left her service at Cadiz, and
+that Lady Julia never discovered that Mlle Caroline was the illustrious
+duchess whose sudden disappearance filled the minds of the highest
+society of Paris.
+
+
+
+The feelings of the two lovers when they met again on either side of the
+grating in the Carmelite convent should now be comprehended to the full,
+and the violence of the passion awakened in either soul will doubtless
+explain the catastrophe of the story.
+
+In 1823 the Duc de Langeais was dead, and his wife was free. Antoinette
+de Navarreins was living, consumed by love, on a ledge of rock in
+the Mediterranean; but it was in the Pope's power to dissolve Sister
+Theresa's vows. The happiness bought by so much love might yet bloom
+for the two lovers. These thoughts sent Montriveau flying from Cadiz to
+Marseilles, and from Marseilles to Paris.
+
+A few months after his return to France, a merchant brig, fitted out and
+munitioned for active service, set sail from the port of Marseilles for
+Spain. The vessel had been chartered by several distinguished men, most
+of them Frenchmen, who, smitten with a romantic passion for the East,
+wished to make a journey to those lands. Montriveau's familiar knowledge
+of Eastern customs made him an invaluable travelling companion, and at
+the entreaty of the rest he had joined the expedition; the Minister
+of War appointed him lieutenant-general, and put him on the Artillery
+Commission to facilitate his departure.
+
+Twenty-fours hours later the brig lay to off the north-west shore of an
+island within sight of the Spanish coast. She had been specially chosen
+for her shallow keel and light mastage, so that she might lie at anchor
+in safety half a league away from the reefs that secure the island from
+approach in this direction. If fishing vessels or the people on the
+island caught sight of the brig, they were scarcely likely to feel
+suspicious of her at once; and besides, it was easy to give a reason for
+her presence without delay. Montriveau hoisted the flag of the United
+States before they came in sight of the island, and the crew of the
+vessel were all American sailors, who spoke nothing but English. One
+of M. de Montriveau's companions took the men ashore in the ship's
+longboat, and made them so drunk at an inn in the little town that
+they could not talk. Then he gave out that the brig was manned by
+treasure-seekers, a gang of men whose hobby was well known in the United
+States; indeed, some Spanish writer had written a history of them. The
+presence of the brig among the reefs was now sufficiently explained.
+The owners of the vessel, according to the self-styled boatswain's mate,
+were looking for the wreck of a galleon which foundered thereabouts in
+1778 with a cargo of treasure from Mexico. The people at the inn and the
+authorities asked no more questions.
+
+Armand, and the devoted friends who were helping him in his difficult
+enterprise, were all from the first of the opinion that there was no
+hope of rescuing or carrying off Sister Theresa by force or stratagem
+from the side of the little town. Wherefore these bold spirits, with one
+accord, determined to take the bull by the horns. They would make a way
+to the convent at the most seemingly inaccessible point; like General
+Lamarque, at the storming of Capri, they would conquer Nature. The cliff
+at the end of the island, a sheer block of granite, afforded even less
+hold than the rock of Capri. So it seemed at least to Montriveau, who
+had taken part in that incredible exploit, while the nuns in his eyes
+were much more redoubtable than Sir Hudson Lowe. To raise a hubbub over
+carrying off the Duchess would cover them with confusion. They might as
+well set siege to the town and convent, like pirates, and leave not a
+single soul to tell of their victory. So for them their expedition wore
+but two aspects. There should be a conflagration and a feat of arms
+that should dismay all Europe, while the motives of the crime remained
+unknown; or, on the other hand, a mysterious, aerial descent which
+should persuade the nuns that the Devil himself had paid them a visit.
+They had decided upon the latter course in the secret council held
+before they left Paris, and subsequently everything had been done to
+insure the success of an expedition which promised some real excitement
+to jaded spirits weary of Paris and its pleasures.
+
+An extremely light pirogue, made at Marseilles on a Malayan model,
+enabled them to cross the reef, until the rocks rose from out of the
+water. Then two cables of iron wire were fastened several feet apart
+between one rock and another. These wire ropes slanted upwards and
+downwards in opposite directions, so that baskets of iron wire could
+travel to and fro along them; and in this manner the rocks were covered
+with a system of baskets and wire-cables, not unlike the filaments
+which a certain species of spider weaves about a tree. The Chinese, an
+essentially imitative people, were the first to take a lesson from the
+work of instinct. Fragile as these bridges were, they were always ready
+for use; high waves and the caprices of the sea could not throw them
+out of working order; the ropes hung just sufficiently slack, so as to
+present to the breakers that particular curve discovered by Cachin, the
+immortal creator of the harbour at Cherbourg. Against this cunningly
+devised line the angry surge is powerless; the law of that curve was
+a secret wrested from Nature by that faculty of observation in which
+nearly all human genius consists.
+
+M. de Montriveau's companions were alone on board the vessel, and out of
+sight of every human eye. No one from the deck of a passing vessel could
+have discovered either the brig hidden among the reefs, or the men at
+work among the rocks; they lay below the ordinary range of the most
+powerful telescope. Eleven days were spent in preparation, before the
+Thirteen, with all their infernal power, could reach the foot of the
+cliffs. The body of the rock rose up straight from the sea to a height
+of thirty fathoms. Any attempt to climb the sheer wall of granite seemed
+impossible; a mouse might as well try to creep up the slippery sides of
+a plain china vase. Still there was a cleft, a straight line of fissure
+so fortunately placed that large blocks of wood could be wedged firmly
+into it at a distance of about a foot apart. Into these blocks the
+daring workers drove iron cramps, specially made for the purpose, with
+a broad iron bracket at the outer end, through which a hole had been
+drilled. Each bracket carried a light deal board which corresponded with
+a notch made in a pole that reached to the top of the cliffs, and was
+firmly planted in the beach at their feet. With ingenuity worthy of
+these men who found nothing impossible, one of their number, a skilled
+mathematician, had calculated the angle from which the steps must start;
+so that from the middle they rose gradually, like the sticks of a fan,
+to the top of the cliff, and descended in the same fashion to its
+base. That miraculously light, yet perfectly firm, staircase cost them
+twenty-two days of toil. A little tinder and the surf of the sea would
+destroy all trace of it forever in a single night. A betrayal of the
+secret was impossible; and all search for the violators of the convent
+was doomed to failure.
+
+At the top of the rock there was a platform with sheer precipice on all
+sides. The Thirteen, reconnoitring the ground with their glasses from
+the masthead, made certain that though the ascent was steep and rough,
+there would be no difficulty in gaining the convent garden, where the
+trees were thick enough for a hiding-place. After such great efforts
+they would not risk the success of their enterprise, and were compelled
+to wait till the moon passed out of her last quarter.
+
+For two nights Montriveau, wrapped in his cloak, lay out on the rock
+platform. The singing at vespers and matins filled him with unutterable
+joy. He stood under the wall to hear the music of the organ, listening
+intently for one voice among the rest. But in spite of the silence, the
+confused effect of music was all that reached his ears. In those sweet
+harmonies defects of execution are lost; the pure spirit of art comes
+into direct communication with the spirit of the hearer, making
+no demand on the attention, no strain on the power of listening.
+Intolerable memories awoke. All the love within him seemed to break into
+blossom again at the breath of that music; he tried to find auguries of
+happiness in the air. During the last night he sat with his eyes fixed
+upon an ungrated window, for bars were not needed on the side of the
+precipice. A light shone there all through the hours; and that instinct
+of the heart, which is sometimes true, and as often false, cried within
+him, "She is there!"
+
+"She is certainly there! Tomorrow she will be mine," he said to himself,
+and joy blended with the slow tinkling of a bell that began to ring.
+
+Strange unaccountable workings of the heart! The nun, wasted by yearning
+love, worn out with tears and fasting, prayer and vigils; the woman of
+nine-and-twenty, who had passed through heavy trials, was loved more
+passionately than the lighthearted girl, the woman of four-and-twenty,
+the sylphide, had ever been. But is there not, for men of vigorous
+character, something attractive in the sublime expression engraven on
+women's faces by the impetuous stirrings of thought and misfortunes of
+no ignoble kind? Is there not a beauty of suffering which is the most
+interesting of all beauty to those men who feel that within them there
+is an inexhaustible wealth of tenderness and consoling pity for a
+creature so gracious in weakness, so strong with love? It is the
+ordinary nature that is attracted by young, smooth, pink-and-white
+beauty, or, in one word, by prettiness. In some faces love awakens
+amid the wrinkles carved by sorrow and the ruin made by melancholy;
+Montriveau could not but feel drawn to these. For cannot a lover,
+with the voice of a great longing, call forth a wholly new creature? a
+creature athrob with the life but just begun breaks forth for him alone,
+from the outward form that is fair for him, and faded for all the world
+besides. Does he not love two women?--One of them, as others see her,
+is pale and wan and sad; but the other, the unseen love that his heart
+knows, is an angel who understands life through feeling, and is adorned
+in all her glory only for love's high festivals.
+
+The General left his post before sunrise, but not before he had heard
+voices singing together, sweet voices full of tenderness sounding
+faintly from the cell. When he came down to the foot of the cliffs where
+his friends were waiting, he told them that never in his life had
+he felt such enthralling bliss, and in the few words there was that
+unmistakable thrill of repressed strong feeling, that magnificent
+utterance which all men respect.
+
+
+
+That night eleven of his devoted comrades made the ascent in the
+darkness. Each man carried a poniard, a provision of chocolate, and
+a set of house-breaking tools. They climbed the outer walls with
+scaling-ladders, and crossed the cemetery of the convent. Montriveau
+recognised the long, vaulted gallery through which he went to the
+parlour, and remembered the windows of the room. His plans were made and
+adopted in a moment. They would effect an entrance through one of the
+windows in the Carmelite's half of the parlour, find their way along
+the corridors, ascertain whether the sister's names were written on the
+doors, find Sister Theresa's cell, surprise her as she slept, and carry
+her off, bound and gagged. The programme presented no difficulties to
+men who combined boldness and a convict's dexterity with the knowledge
+peculiar to men of the world, especially as they would not scruple to
+give a stab to ensure silence.
+
+In two hours the bars were sawn through. Three men stood on guard
+outside, and two inside the parlour. The rest, barefooted, took up their
+posts along the corridor. Young Henri de Marsay, the most dexterous
+man among them, disguised by way of precaution in a Carmelite's robe,
+exactly like the costume of the convent, led the way, and Montriveau
+came immediately behind him. The clock struck three just as the two men
+reached the dormitory cells. They soon saw the position. Everything was
+perfectly quiet. With the help of a dark lantern they read the names
+luckily written on every door, together with the picture of a saint or
+saints and the mystical words which every nun takes as a kind of
+motto for the beginning of her new life and the revelation of her
+last thought. Montriveau reached Sister Theresa's door and read the
+inscription, _Sub invocatione sanctae matris Theresae_, and her motto,
+_Adoremus in aeternum_. Suddenly his companion laid a hand on his
+shoulder. A bright light was streaming through the chinks of the door.
+M. de Ronquerolles came up at that moment.
+
+"All the nuns are in the church," he said; "they are beginning the
+Office for the Dead."
+
+"I will stay here," said Montriveau. "Go back into the parlour, and shut
+the door at the end of the passage."
+
+He threw open the door and rushed in, preceded by his disguised
+companion, who let down the veil over his face.
+
+There before them lay the dead Duchess; her plank bed had been laid on
+the floor of the outer room of her cell, between two lighted candles.
+Neither Montriveau nor de Marsay spoke a word or uttered a cry; but they
+looked into each other's faces. The General's dumb gesture tried to say,
+"Let us carry her away!"
+
+"Quickly" shouted Ronquerolles, "the procession of nuns is leaving the
+church. You will be caught!"
+
+With magical swiftness of movement, prompted by an intense desire, the
+dead woman was carried into the convent parlour, passed through the
+window, and lowered from the walls before the Abbess, followed by the
+nuns, returned to take up Sister Theresa's body. The sister left in
+charge had imprudently left her post; there were secrets that she longed
+to know; and so busy was she ransacking the inner room, that she heard
+nothing, and was horrified when she came back to find that the body was
+gone. Before the women, in their blank amazement, could think of making
+a search, the Duchess had been lowered by a cord to the foot of the
+crags, and Montriveau's companions had destroyed all traces of their
+work. By nine o'clock that morning there was not a sign to show that
+either staircase or wire-cables had ever existed, and Sister Theresa's
+body had been taken on board. The brig came into the port to ship her
+crew, and sailed that day.
+
+Montriveau, down in the cabin, was left alone with Antoinette
+de Navarreins. For some hours it seemed as if her dead face was
+transfigured for him by that unearthly beauty which the calm of death
+gives to the body before it perishes.
+
+"Look here," said Ronquerolles when Montriveau reappeared on deck,
+"_that_ was a woman once, now it is nothing. Let us tie a cannon ball
+to both feet and throw the body overboard; and if ever you think of her
+again, think of her as of some book that you read as a boy."
+
+"Yes," assented Montriveau, "it is nothing now but a dream."
+
+"That is sensible of you. Now, after this, have passions; but as for
+love, a man ought to know how to place it wisely; it is only a woman's
+last love that can satisfy a man's first love."
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+Note: The Duchesse de Langeais is the second part of a trilogy. Part one
+is entitled Ferragus and part three is The Girl with the Golden Eyes. In
+other addendum references all three stories are usually combined under
+the title The Thirteen.
+
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+   Blamont-Chauvry, Princesse de
+     Madame Firmiani
+     The Lily of the Valley
+
+   Grandlieu, Duc Ferdinand de
+     The Gondreville Mystery
+     A Bachelor's Establishment
+     Modeste Mignon
+     Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+   Granville, Comtesse Angelique de
+     A Second Home
+     A Daughter of Eve
+
+   Keller, Madame Francois
+     Domestic Peace
+     The Member for Arcis
+
+   Langeais, Duc de
+     An Episode under the Terror
+
+   Langeais, Duchesse Antoinette de
+     Father Goriot
+     Ferragus
+
+   Marsay, Henri de
+     Ferragus
+     The Girl with the Golden Eyes
+     The Unconscious Humorists
+     Another Study of Woman
+     The Lily of the Valley
+     Father Goriot
+     Jealousies of a Country Town
+     Ursule Mirouet
+     A Marriage Settlement
+     Lost Illusions
+     A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+     Letters of Two Brides
+     The Ball at Sceaux
+     Modeste Mignon
+     The Secrets of a Princess
+     The Gondreville Mystery
+     A Daughter of Eve
+
+   Montriveau, General Marquis Armand de
+     Father Goriot
+     Lost Illusions
+     A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+     Another Study of Woman
+     Pierrette
+     The Member for Arcis
+
+   Navarreins, Duc de
+     A Bachelor's Establishment
+     Colonel Chabert
+     The Muse of the Department
+     Jealousies of a Country Town
+     The Peasantry
+     Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+     The Country Parson
+     The Magic Skin
+     The Gondreville Mystery
+     The Secrets of a Princess
+     Cousin Betty
+
+   Pamiers, Vidame de
+     Ferragus
+     Jealousies of a Country Town
+
+   Ronquerolles, Marquis de
+     The Imaginary Mistress
+     The Peasantry
+     Ursule Mirouet
+     A Woman of Thirty
+     Another Study of Woman
+     Ferragus
+     The Girl with the Golden Eyes
+     The Member for Arcis
+
+   Serizy, Comtesse de
+     A Start in Life
+     Ferragus
+     Ursule Mirouet
+     A Woman of Thirty
+     Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+     Another Study of Woman
+     The Imaginary Mistress
+
+   Soulanges, Comtesse Hortense de
+     Domestic Peace
+     The Peasantry
+
+   Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice de
+     The Chouans
+     The Gondreville Mystery
+     Letters of Two Brides
+     Gaudissart II
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Duchesse de Langeais, by Honore de Balzac
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