For several ensuing days the princess revealed herself to d’Arthez as remarkable for her knowledge of literature. She discussed with perfect fearlessness the most difficult questions, thanks to her daily and nightly reading, pursued with an intrepidity worthy of the highest praise. D’Arthez, amazed, and incapable of suspecting that Diane d’Uxelles merely repeated at night that which she read in the morning (as some writers do), regarded her as a most superior woman. These conversations, however, led away from Diane’s object, and she tried to get back to the region of confidences from which d’Arthez had prudently retired after her coquettish rebuff; but it was not as easy as she expected to bring back a man of his nature who had once been startled away.
However, after a month of literary campaigning and the finest platonic discourses, d’Arthez grew bolder, and arrived every day at three o’clock. He retired at six, and returned at nine, to remain until midnight, or one in the morning, with the regularity of an ardent and impatient lover. The princess was always dressed with more or less studied elegance at the hour when d’Arthez presented himself. This mutual fidelity, the care they each took of their appearance, in fact, all about them expressed sentiments that neither dared avow, for the princess discerned very plainly that the great child with whom she had to do shrank from the combat as much as she desired it. Nevertheless d’Arthez put into his mute declarations a respectful awe which was infinitely pleasing to her. Both felt, every day, all the more united because nothing acknowledged or definite checked the course of their ideas, as occurs between lovers when there are formal demands on one side, and sincere or coquettish refusals on the other.
Like all men younger than their actual age, d’Arthez was a prey to those agitating irresolutions which are caused by the force of desires and the terror of displeasing, — a situation which a young woman does not comprehend when she shares it, but which the princess had too often deliberately produced not to enjoy its pleasures. In fact, Diane enjoyed these delightful juvenilities all the more keenly because she knew that she could put an end to them at any moment. She was like a great artist delighting in the vague, undecided lines of his sketch, knowing well that in a moment of inspiration he can complete the masterpiece still waiting to come to birth. Many a time, seeing d’Arthez on the point of advancing, she enjoyed stopping him short, with an imposing air and manner. She drove back the hidden storms of that still young heart, raised them again, and stilled them with a look, holding out her hand to be kissed, or saying some trifling insignificant words in a tender voice.
These manoeuvres, planned in cold blood, but enchantingly executed, carved her image deeper and deeper on the soul of that great writer and thinker whom she revelled in making childlike, confiding, simple, and almost silly beside her. And yet she had moments of repulsion against her own act, moments in which she could not help admiring the grandeur of such simplicity. This game of choicest coquetry attached her, insensibly, to her slave. At last, however, Diane grew impatient with an Epictetus of love; and when she thought she had trained him to the utmost credulity, she set to work to tie a thicker bandage still over his eyes.
CHAPTER IV. THE CONFESSION OF A PRETTY WOMAN
One evening Daniel found the princess thoughtful, one elbow resting on a little table, her beautiful blond head bathed in light from the lamp. She was toying with a letter which lay on the table-cloth. When d’Arthez had seen the paper distinctly, she folded it up, and stuck it in her belt.
“What is the matter?” asked d’Arthez; “you seem distressed.”
“I have received a letter from Monsieur de Cadignan,” she replied. “However great the wrongs he has done me, I cannot help thinking of his exile — without family, without son — from his native land.”
These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility. D’Arthez was deeply moved. The curiosity of the lover became, so to speak, a psychological and literary curiosity. He wanted to know the height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she thus forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world, taxed with frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such angels. Remembering how the princess had already repulsed him when he first tried to read that celestial heart, his voice, and he himself, trembled as he took the transparent, slender hand of the beautiful Diane with its curving finger-tips, and said, —
“Are we now such friends that you will tell me what you have suffered?”
“Yes,” she said, breathing forth the syllable like the most mellifluous note that Tulou’s flute had ever sighed.
Then she fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled. Daniel remained in a state of anxious expectation, impressed with the solemnity of the occasion. His poetic imagination made him see, as it were, clouds slowly dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary where the wounded lamb was kneeling at the divine feet.
“Well?” he said, in a soft, still voice.
Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes slowly, dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty. None but a monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in the graceful undulation of the neck with which the princess again lifted her charming head, to look once more into the eager eyes of that great man.
“Can I? ought I?” she murmured, with a gesture of hesitation, gazing at d’Arthez with a sublime expression of dreamy tenderness. “Men have so little faith in things of this kind; they think themselves so little bound to be discreet!”
“Ah! if you distrust me, why am I here?” cried d’Arthez.
“Oh, friend!” she said, giving to the exclamation the grace of an involuntary avowal, “when a woman attaches herself for life, think you she calculates? It is not question of refusal (how could I refuse you anything?), but the idea of what you may think of me if I speak. I would willingly confide to you the strange position in which I am at my age; but what would you think of a woman who could reveal the secret wounds of her married life? Turenne kept his word to robbers; do I not owe to my torturers the honor of a Turenne?”
“Have you passed your word to say nothing?”
“Monsieur de Cadignan did not think it necessary to bind me to secrecy — You are asking more than my soul! Tyrant! you want me to bury my honor itself in your breast,” she said, casting upon d’Arthez a look, by which she gave more value to her coming confidence than to her personal self.
“You must think me a very ordinary man, if you fear any evil, no matter what, from me,” he said, with ill-concealed bitterness.
“Forgive me, friend,” she replied, taking his hand in hers caressingly, and letting her fingers wander gently over it. “I know your worth. You have related to me your whole life; it is noble, it is beautiful, it is sublime, and worthy of your name; perhaps, in return, I owe you mine. But I fear to lower myself in your eyes by relating secrets which are not wholly mine. How can you believe — you, a man of solitude and poesy — the horrors of social life? Ah! you little think when you invent your dramas that they are far surpassed by those that are played in families apparently united. You are wholly ignorant of certain gilded sorrows.”
“I know all!” he cried.
“No, you know nothing.”
D’Arthez felt like a man lost on the Alps of a dark night, who sees, at the first gleam of dawn, a precipice at his feet. He looked at the princess with a bewildered air, and felt a cold chill running down his back. Diane thought for a moment that her man of genius was a weakling, but a flash from his eyes reassured her.
“You have become to me almost my judge,” she said, with a desperate air. “I must speak now, in virtue of the right that all calumniated beings have to show their innocence. I have been, I am still (if a poor recluse forced by the world to renounce the world is still remembered) accused of such light conduct, and so many evil things, that it may be allowed me to find in one strong heart a haven from which I cannot be driven. Hitherto I have always considered self-justification an insult to innocence; and that is why I have disdained to defend myse
lf. Besides, to whom could I appeal? Such cruel things can be confided to none but God or to one who seems to us very near Him — a priest, or another self. Well! I do know this, if my secrets are not as safe there,” she said, laying her hand on d’Arthez’s heart, “as they are here” (pressing the upper end of her busk beneath her fingers), “then you are not the grand d’Arthez I think you — I shall have been deceived.”
A tear moistened d’Arthez’s eyes, and Diane drank it in with a side look, which, however, gave no motion either to the pupils or the lids of her eyes. It was quick and neat, like the action of a cat pouncing on a mouse.
D’Arthez, for the first time, after sixty days of protocols, ventured to take that warm and perfumed hand, and press it to his lips with a long-drawn kiss, extending from the wrist to the tip of the fingers, which made the princess augur well of literature. She thought to herself that men of genius must know how to love with more perfection than conceited fops, men of the world, diplomatists, and even soldiers, although such beings have nothing else to do. She was a connoisseur, and knew very well that the capacity for love reveals itself chiefly in mere nothings. A woman well informed in such matters can read her future in a simple gesture; just as Cuvier could say from the fragment of a bone: This belonged to an animal of such or such dimensions, with or without horns, carnivorous, herbivorous, amphibious, etc., age, so many thousand years. Sure now of finding in d’Arthez as much imagination in love as there was in his written style, she thought it wise to bring him up at once to the highest pitch of passion and belief.
She withdrew her hand hastily, with a magnificent movement full of varied emotions. If she had said in words: “Stop, or I shall die,” she could not have spoken more plainly. She remained for a moment with her eyes in d’Arthez’s eyes, expressing in that one glance happiness, prudery, fear, confidence, languor, a vague longing, and virgin modesty. She was twenty years old! but remember, she had prepared for this hour of comic falsehood by the choicest art of dress; she was there in her armchair like a flower, ready to blossom at the first kiss of sunshine. True or false, she intoxicated Daniel.
It if is permissible to risk a personal opinion we must avow that it would be delightful to be thus deceived for a good long time. Certainly Talma on the stage was often above and beyond nature, but the Princesse de Cadignan is the greatest true comedian of our day. Nothing was wanting to this woman but an attentive audience. Unfortunately, at epochs perturbed by political storms, women disappear like water-lilies which need a cloudless sky and balmy zephyrs to spread their bloom to our enraptured eyes.
The hour had come; Diane was now to entangle that great man in the inextricable meshes of a romance carefully prepared, to which he was fated to listen as the neophyte of early Christian times listened to the epistles of an apostle.
“My friend,” began Diane, “my mother, who still lives at Uxelles, married me in 1814, when I was seventeen years old (you see how old I am now!) to Monsieur de Maufrigneuse, not out of affection for me, but out of regard for him. She discharged her debt to the only man she had ever loved, for the happiness she had once received from him. Oh! you need not be astonished at so horrible a conspiracy; it frequently takes place. Many women are more lovers than mothers, though the majority are more mothers than wives. The two sentiments, love and motherhood, developed as they are by our manners and customs, often struggle together in the hearts of women; one or other must succumb when they are not of equal strength; when they are, they produce some exceptional women, the glory of our sex. A man of your genius must surely comprehend many things that bewilder fools but are none the less true; indeed I may go further and call them justifiable through difference of characters, temperaments, attachments, situations. I, for example, at this moment, after twenty years of misfortunes, of deceptions, of calumnies endured, and weary days and hollow pleasures, is it not natural that I should incline to fall at the feet of a man who would love me sincerely and forever? And yet, the world would condemn me. But twenty years of suffering might well excuse a few brief years which may still remain to me of youth given to a sacred and real love. This will not happen. I am not so rash as to sacrifice my hopes of heaven. I have borne the burden and heat of the day, I shall finish my course and win my recompense.”
“Angel!” thought d’Arthez.
“After all, I have never blamed my mother; she knew little of me. Mothers who lead a life like that of the Duchesse d’Uxelles keep their children at a distance. I saw and knew nothing of the world until my marriage. You can judge of my innocence! I knew nothing; I was incapable of understanding the causes of my marriage. I had a fine fortune; sixty thousand francs a year in forests, which the Revolution overlooked (or had not been able to sell) in the Nivernais, with the noble chateau of d’Anzy. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was steeped in debt. Later I learned what it was to have debts, but then I was too utterly ignorant of life to suspect my position; the money saved out of my fortune went to pacify my husband’s creditors. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was forty-eight years of age when I married him; but those years were like military campaigns, they ought to count for twice what they were. Ah! what a life I led for ten years! If any one had known the suffering of this poor, calumniated little woman! To be watched by a mother jealous of her daughter! Heavens! You who make dramas, you will never invent anything as direful as that. Ordinarily, according to the little that I know of literature, a drama is a suite of actions, speeches, movements which hurry to a catastrophe; but what I speak of was a catastrophe in action. It was an avalanche fallen in the morning and falling again at night only to fall again the next day. I am cold now as I speak to you of that cavern without an opening, cold, sombre, in which I lived. I, poor little thing that I was! brought up in a convent like a mystic rose, knowing nothing of marriage, developing late, I was happy at first; I enjoyed the goodwill and harmony of our family. The birth of my poor boy, who is all me — you must have been struck by the likeness? my hair, my eyes, the shape of my face, my mouth, my smile, my teeth! — well, his birth was a relief to me; my thoughts were diverted by the first joys of maternity from my husband, who gave me no pleasure and did nothing for me that was kind or amiable; those joys were all the keener because I knew no others. It had been so often rung into my ears that a mother should respect herself. Besides, a young girl loves to play the mother. I was so proud of my flower — for Georges was beautiful, a miracle, I thought! I saw and thought of nothing but my son, I lived with my son. I never let his nurse dress or undress him. Such cares, so wearing to mothers who have a regiment of children, were all my pleasure. But after three or four years, as I was not an actual fool, light came to my eyes in spite of the pains taken to blindfold me. Can you see me at that final awakening, in 1819? The drama of ‘The Brothers at enmity’ is a rose-water tragedy beside that of a mother and daughter placed as we then were. But I braved them all, my mother, my husband, the world, by public coquetries which society talked of, — and heaven knows how it talked! You can see, my friend, how the men with whom I was accused of folly were to me the dagger with which to stab my enemies. Thinking only of my vengeance, I did not see or feel the wounds I was inflicting on myself. Innocent as a child, I was thought a wicked woman, the worst of women, and I knew nothing of it! The world is very foolish, very blind, very ignorant; it can penetrate no secrets but those which amuse it and serve its malice: noble things, great things, it puts its hand before its eyes to avoid seeing. But, as I look back, it seems to me that I had an attitude and aspect of indignant innocence, with movements of pride, which a great painter would have recognized. I must have enlivened many a ball with my tempests of anger and disdain. Lost poesy! such sublime poems are only made in the glowing indignation which seizes us at twenty. Later, we are wrathful no longer, we are too weary, vice no longer amazes us, we are cowards, we fear. But then — oh! I kept a great pace! For all that I played the silliest personage in the world; I was charged with crimes by which I never benefited. But I had such pleasure in compromising myself.
That was my revenge! Ah! I have played many childish tricks! I went to Italy with a thoughtless youth, whom I crushed when he spoke to me of love, but later, when I herd that he was compromised on my account (he had committed a forgery to get money) I rushed to save him. My mother and husband kept me almost without means; but, this time, I went to the king. Louis XVIII., that man without a heart, was touched; he gave me a hundred thousand francs from his privy purse. The Marquis d’Esgrignon — you must have seen him in society for he ended by making a rich marriage — was saved from the abyss into which he had plunged for my sake. That adventure, caused by my own folly, led me to reflect. I saw that I myself was the first victim of my vengeance. My mother, who knew I was too proud, too d’Uxelles, to conduct myself really ill, began to see the harm that she had done me and was frightened by it. She was then fifty-two years of age; she left Paris and went to live at Uxelles. There she expiates her wrong-doing by a life of devotion and expresses the utmost affection for me. After her departure I was face to face, alone, with Monsieur de Maufrigneuse. Oh! my friend, you men can never know what an old man of gallantry can be. What a home is that of a man accustomed to the adulation of women of the world, when he finds neither incense nor censer in his own house! dead to all! and yet, perhaps for that very reason, jealous. I wished — when Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was wholly mine — I wished to be a good wife, but I found myself repulsed with the harshness of a soured spirit by a man who treated me like a child and took pleasure in humiliating my self-respect at every turn, in crushing me under the scorn of his experience, and in convicting me of total ignorance. He wounded me on all occasions. He did everything to make me detest him and to give me the right to betray him; but I was still the dupe of my own hope and of my desire to do right through several years. Shall I tell you the cruel saying that drove me to further follies? ‘The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse has gone back to her husband,’ said the world. ‘Bah! it is always a triumph to bring the dead to life; it is all she can now do,’ replied my best friend, a relation, she, at whose house I met you — ”
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 668