The Human Comedy
Page 38
Monsieur de Montriveau was pleased to be introduced to the Duchesse de Langeais, who, following the habit of persons whose exquisite taste leads them to avoid banalities, made her welcome him without an avalanche of questions or compliments but with a sort of respectful grace that surely flattered a superior man, for superiority in a man assumes a bit of tact that allows women to understand all sorts of feelings. If the duchess showed any curiosity it was through her look; her manners conveyed any compliments; and she deployed that caressing speech and refined desire to please which she could display better than any of her rivals. Yet all her conversation was in some way merely the body of the letter; there should have been a postscript in which the chief thought was still to come. When, after half an hour of trivial chitchat whose accent and smiles alone gave value to the words, Monsieur de Montriveau was about to retire discreetly when the duchess retained him with an expressive gesture.
“Monsieur,” she said to him, “I do not know whether the few moments in which I have had the pleasure of chatting with you have proved attractive enough to allow me to invite you to pay me a visit—I’m afraid that it may be selfish to wish to have you all to myself. If I should be so fortunate that it would please you to call, you would find me at home every evening until ten o’clock.”
This invitation was offered in such a charming way that Monsieur de Montriveau could not refuse it. When he hurried back to the groups of men gathered at a distance from the women, several of his friends congratulated him, half seriously, half teasingly, on the extraordinary welcome extended to him by the Duchesse de Langeais. This difficult and brilliant conquest was decisively achieved, and its glory had been reserved for the artillery of the guard. It is easy to imagine the pleasantries, good and bad, which the topic provoked in one of those Parisian salons so eager for such amusement, where mockeries are so brief that everyone hastens to take full advantage while they are still fresh.
The general felt unwittingly flattered by these inane remarks. From his vantage point, his eyes were drawn to the duchess by a thousand vague reflections. And he could not help admitting to himself that of all the women whose beauty had captivated him, none had offered him a more delicious expression of faults and virtues, harmonies the most juvenile imagination could want in a French mistress. What man, in any rank of life, has not felt in his soul an indefinable pleasure in a woman he has chosen, even dreamed of as his own, who embodies the triple moral, physical, and social perfections that allow him to see in her the satisfaction of all his wishes? If this is not a cause of love, this flattering combination is surely one of its greatest inducements. Love would be an invalid, said a profound moralist of the last century, were it not for vanity. For men and for women there is surely a wealth of pleasure in the superiority of the beloved. Is it not a great deal, if not everything, to know that they will never bruise our self-regard? That our beloved is so noble that a contemptuous glance will never wound her? Rich enough to be surrounded by a radiance equal to the splendors in which even the ephemeral kings of finance wrap themselves? Intelligent enough never to be humiliated by a good joke, and beautiful enough to be the rival of all her sex? These are thoughts a man has in the blink of an eye. But if the woman who inspires them introduces him at the same time, in the future of his precocious passion, to the shifting delights of grace, the innocence of a virgin soul, the thousand folds of a coquette’s dress, the perils of love—would these qualities fail to move the coldest man’s heart?
This was indeed Monsieur de Montriveau’s situation at the present moment with regard to the duchess, and his past life in some way explained this bizarre fact. Tossed as a youth into the hurricane of the Napoleonic Wars, he had lived his life on battlefields, and he knew about women only what a hurried traveler knows about a country as he goes from inn to inn. The marquis might have said of his own years what Voltaire used to say at eighty: He had thirty-seven follies to regret. At his age, he was as new to love as a young man who has just read Faublas in secret. He knew everything about women but nothing about love, and his virginity of feeling made his desires entirely new.
Just as Monsieur de Montriveau had been absorbed by the course of war and the events of his life, some men are absorbed by the labors to which poverty or ambition, art or science have condemned them, and they are familiar with this singular situation, although they rarely admit it. In Paris, all men are supposed to have been in love. No woman wants what another woman has rejected. In France, fear of being taken for a fool is the source of a general tendency to lie, since no Frenchman can be taken for a fool. At this moment, Monsieur de Montriveau was gripped both by violent desire, a desire accumulated in the desert heat, and by a movement of the heart whose burning grip he had not known before. As strong as he was violent, this man knew how to control his emotions, but even as he chatted about meaningless things, he retreated into himself and swore to possess this woman, for this was the only way he could enter into love. His desire became a vow made in the manner of the Arabs with whom he had lived, and for them, a vow is a contract with destiny. The success of the enterprise consecrated by their vow is crucial, and they count even their death as merely a means to that success. A younger man would have said, “I should certainly like to have the Duchesse de Langeais for my mistress!” or “Anyone loved by the Duchesse de Langeais will be a very lucky rascal!” But the general said to himself, “I will have Madame de Langeais for my mistress.” When a man with a virginal heart, for whom love becomes a religion, takes such an idea into his head, he does not know that he has just set foot into hell.
Monsieur de Montriveau abruptly left the salon and returned home, consumed by the first fevers of love he had ever felt. At around middle age, if a man still retains the beliefs, the illusions, the frankness, the impetuousness of childhood, his first impulse is, as it were, to reach out his hand and grab what he desires. Then once he has gauged the nearly impossible distance he must cross, he is overcome by a sort of childish astonishment or impatience, which reinforces the value of the coveted object and causes him to tremble or weep. So the next day, after the stormiest reflections that had ever racked his soul, Armand de Montriveau discovered he was under the yoke of his senses, made even heavier by a true love. This woman, treated so cavalierly the evening before, had become by the following day the holiest, most dreaded of powers. From that time forward she was his world and his life. The memory of the slightest emotions she had stirred in him was now his greatest joy, and his deepest sorrows paled beside it. The most violent revolutions only trouble a man’s interests while passion overturns his feelings. And for those who live more by feeling than by interest, for those who have more soul and blood than mind and lymph, a real love produces a total change of existence. With a single line, through a single reflection, Armand de Montriveau thus erased all his past life. After asking himself twenty times, like a child, “Will I go? Won’t I go?,” he dressed, went to the Hôtel de Langeais at around eight o’clock in the evening, and was admitted. He was to see the woman—no, not the woman, the idol he had seen the evening before, in the light, like a fresh and pure young girl dressed in gauze, lace, and veiling. He arrived impetuously to declare his love for her, as if he were firing the first cannon shot on the battlefield.
Poor novice! He found his ethereal sylph wrapped in a brown cashmere peignoir, cunningly frilled, languidly reclining on the divan in a dimly lit boudoir. Madame de Langeais did not even rise, she lifted only her head, her tousled hair held back in a veil. Then the duchess made a sign to him to take a seat, gesturing with her hand which, in the shadows produced by the trembling light of a single, distant candle, seemed to Montriveau’s eyes as white as a hand made of marble. And with a voice as soft as the candlelight, she said to him, “If it had not been you, monsieur le marquis, if it had been a friend with whom I could be frank or someone indifferent to me who was only of slight interest, I would have sent you away. You see me suffering terribly.”
Armand said to himself, “I will go.”
“So I can stay,” Montriveau said to her.
“Oh, I would be so sorry to see you leave. I was saying to myself only this morning that I must not have made the slightest impression on you, and that you had doubtless taken my invitation for one of those banal remarks Parisian women scatter at random. And I forgave your ingratitude in advance. A man who comes in from the deserts cannot be expected to know how exclusive we are in our friendships in the Faubourg.”
These gracious, half-murmured words fell one by one, as if they were laden with the joyful feeling that seemed to dictate them. The duchess wanted to have all the benefits of her migraine, and her speculation was successful. The poor soldier was truly suffering from this lady’s pretended suffering. Like Crillon hearing the story of Jesus Christ, he was ready to draw his sword against the vapors. Ah, how could a man dare to speak to this suffering woman of the love she inspired? Armand already understood that he was ridiculous to fire off his love point-blank at such a superior woman. He understood in a single thought all the delicacies of feeling and demands of the soul. To love—what is this but to know how to plead, to beg, to wait? Feeling such love, did he not need to prove it? He found his tongue paralyzed, frozen by the conventions of the noble Faubourg, by the majesty of the migraine, and by the shyness of true love. But no power in the world could veil the look in his eyes, which burst with warmth, the endless vastness of the desert—eyes as calm as those of panthers that rarely blinked. She adored this fixed look that bathed her in light and love.
“Madame la duchesse,” he answered, “I fear I am clumsy in expressing my gratitude for your inspiring kindnesses. At this moment I wish for only one thing, the power to relieve your suffering.”
“Allow me to take this off, I feel too warm now,” she said, gracefully tossing aside the cushion that was covering her bare feet.
“Madame, in Asia your feet would be worth nearly ten thousand sequins.”
“A traveler’s compliment,” she said, smiling.
This witty woman took pleasure in casting the rough Montriveau into a conversation full of silliness, commonplaces, and nonsense, as Prince Charles might have done in battle with Napoleon. She took mischievous amusement in seeing the extent of this budding passion displayed by the number of foolish words drawn from this novice, whom she led little by little into a hopeless maze where she wished to leave him ashamed of himself. So she began by mocking this man, though it pleased her to make him forget the passage of time. The length of a first visit is often a compliment, but Armand was not informed of this. The famous traveler was in this boudoir for an hour, chatting about everything, saying nothing, feeling that he was merely an instrument being played upon by this woman, when she rose, sat down again, put the veil she had worn on her head around her neck, leaned on her elbow, did him the honor of a complete cure, and rang for someone to light the candles in her boudoir. Her absolute inaction was followed by the most graceful movements. She turned toward Monsieur de Montriveau and told him, in response to a confidence she had just drawn from him and which seemed of vivid interest to her, “You want to make fun of me by trying to make me think that you have never loved before. This is the great pretense of men with us. We believe them. Out of pure politeness! Do we not know what to expect of it ourselves? Where is the man who has not fallen in love at least once in his life? But you like to deceive us, and we allow you to do so, poor fools that we are, because your deceptions are still homage paid to the superiority of our feelings, which are all purity.”
These last words were spoken with a proud disdain that made this novice lover feel like a ball tossed to the bottom of a chasm, while the duchess was an angel soaring back to her private heaven.
“Good grief!” Armand de Montriveau exclaimed to himself. “How can I tell this wild creature that I love her?”
He had already told her twenty times, or rather the duchess had read it twenty times in his eyes and seen in the passion of this truly great man something to amuse her, something of interest to inject into her dull life, so she prepared with great cleverness to raise a certain number of fortifications around her for him to overcome before allowing him to enter her heart. As the plaything of her caprice, Montriveau would have to stay still while jumping from one difficulty to another, like one of those insects a child torments by making it jump from one finger to another, thinking that it is going forward while its mischievous executioner keeps it in place. Nonetheless, the duchess recognized with inexpressible happiness that this man of character was true to his word. Armand had, indeed, never loved. He was about to retreat, displeased with himself, still more displeased with her, but she was joyful to see him in a sulk, which she could dispel with a word, a glance, or a gesture.
“Will you come tomorrow evening?” she said to him. “I am going to the ball, but I will wait for you until ten o’clock.”
The marquis spent most of the following day sitting at the window of his study, smoking an indeterminate number of cigars. In this way he passed the hours until it was time to dress and go to the Hôtel de Langeais. It would have been a great pity for one of those who knew the magnificent value of this man to see him become so small, so trembling, to see the thought that might encompass worlds shrunk to the proportions of the boudoir of a “petite-maîtresse.” But he already felt so fallen in his happiness that to save his life, he would not have confided his love to any of his closest friends. Is there not always a touch of shame in the modesty a man feels when he loves, and perhaps in a woman a certain pride in his reduced standing? But for a host of motives of this kind, how shall we explain why women are nearly always the first to betray the secret of their love—a secret that perhaps bores them?
“Monsieur,” said the valet, “madame la duchesse is not presentable, she is dressing and begs you to wait for her here.”
Armand strolled around the salon, studying the taste reflected in the smallest details. He admired Madame de Langeais by admiring her things, which betrayed her habits before he could grasp in them her person and her ideas. After about an hour, the duchess emerged from her room without a sound. Montriveau turned, saw her walking toward him with the lightness of a shadow; he was shaken. She came to him, without saying in bourgeois fashion: “How do I look?” She was sure of herself, and her steady look conveyed: “I have embellished myself like this to please you.”
No one but an old fairy godmother to some unheralded princess could have wrapped around this coquettish woman’s neck the cloud of gauze whose bright folds floated to reveal the dazzling satin of her skin. The duchess was radiant. The pale blue of her gown, repeated in the flowers of her coiffure, seemed to lend body by the richness of its color to the fragile, ethereal forms. Gliding quickly toward Armand, she made the ends of her scarf, which had been hanging by her sides, float on the air, and the brave soldier could not then help but compare her to the pretty blue insects that hover above the water, among the flowers with which they seemed to mingle.
“I’ve made you wait,” she said, in a voice that women know how to use for the man they want to please.
“I would wait patiently for an eternity if I were sure to find a goddess as beautiful as you. But to speak to you of your beauty is no longer a compliment; nothing but adoration can touch you. Therefore, let me only kiss your scarf.”
“Oh, pooh!” she said, with a proud gesture. “I admire you enough to offer you my hand.”
And she held out to him her still-moist hand to kiss. A woman’s hand, when she emerges from her bath, has an ineffable soft freshness, a velvet smoothness that sends a tingle from the lips to the soul. And in a man in love, who is so sensual that love has filled his heart, this seemingly chaste kiss can stir formidable storms.
“Will you always give it to me like this?” the general humbly asked.
“Yes, but we shall stop here,” she said, smiling.
She sat down and seemed very clumsy pulling on her gloves, wishing to slide the narrow, delicate leather the length of her fingers, and looking at the same time at Monsieur de Montriveau, who was admiring first the duchess, then the grace of her repeated gestures.
“Oh, that’s quite right,” she said. “You were punctual, I love punctuality. His Majesty says it is the courtesy of kings, but to my mind, I think that it is the most respectful of flatteries a man can show a woman. Now is it not? Tell me . . .”
Then she gave him another look to express a seductive friendship, finding him mute with happiness and quite happy from these nothings. Ah! The duchess understood to perfection the art of being a woman, she knew admirably how to raise a man in his own esteem as he humbled himself to her and to reward him with empty flatteries at every step he took in his descent to sentimental inanities.
“You will never forget to come at nine o’clock.”
“No, but will you go to the ball every evening?”
“How do I know?” she answered, shrugging her shoulders with a childish gesture, as if to admit that she was utterly capricious and that a lover should take her as she was. “Besides,” she went on, “what difference does it make to you? You shall be my escort.”
“For this evening,” he said, “it would be difficult. I am not properly dressed.”
“It seems to me,” she answered, looking at him proudly, “that if someone must suffer from your dress, I must. But you should know, Monsieur Explorer, that the man whose arm I accept is always above fashion, no one would dare to criticize him. I see that you do not know the world, and I like you the more for it.”
And so she threw him into the pettiness of the world, attempting to initiate him into the vanities of a woman of fashion.