by Henry James
These observations seemed to make Madame de Cintre rather grave. At last she said, “Depend upon it, I don’t come up to the mark; your mark is too high. I am not all that you suppose; I am a much smaller affair. She is a magnificent woman, your ideal. Pray, how did she come to such perfection?”
“She was never anything else,” Newman said.
“I really believe,” Madame de Cintre went on, “that she is better than my own ideal. Do you know that is a very handsome compliment? Well, sir, I will make her my own!”
Mrs. Tristram came to see her dear Claire after Newman had announced his engagement, and she told our hero the next day that his good fortune was simply absurd. “For the ridiculous part of it is,” she said, “that you are evidently going to be as happy as if you were marrying Miss Smith or Miss Thompson. I call it a brilliant match for you, but you get brilliancy without paying any tax upon it. Those things are usually a compromise, but here you have everything, and nothing crowds anything else out. You will be brilliantly happy as well.” Newman thanked her for her pleasant, encouraging way of saying things; no woman could encourage or discourage better. Tristram’s way of saying things was different; he had been taken by his wife to call upon Madame de Cintre, and he gave an account of the expedition.
“You don’t catch me giving an opinion on your countess this time,” he said; “I put my foot in it once. That’s a d—d underhand thing to do, by the way—coming round to sound a fellow upon the woman you are going to marry. You deserve anything you get. Then of course you rush and tell her, and she takes care to make it pleasant for the poor spiteful wretch the first time he calls. I will do you the justice to say, however, that you don’t seem to have told Madame de Cintre; or if you have she’s uncommonly magnanimous. She was very nice; she was tremendously polite. She and Lizzie sat on the sofa, pressing each other’s hands and calling each other chere belle, and Madame de Cintre sent me with every third word a magnificent smile, as if to give me to understand that I too was a handsome dear. She quite made up for past neglect, I assure you; she was very pleasant and sociable. Only in an evil hour it came into her head to say that she must present us to her mother—her mother wished to know your friends. I didn’t want to know her mother, and I was on the point of telling Lizzie to go in alone and let me wait for her outside. But Lizzie, with her usual infernal ingenuity, guessed my purpose and reduced me by a glance of her eye. So they marched off arm in arm, and I followed as I could. We found the old lady in her arm-chair, twiddling her aristocratic thumbs. She looked at Lizzie from head to foot; but at that game Lizzie, to do her justice, was a match for her. My wife told her we were great friends of Mr. Newman. The marquise started a moment, and then said, ‘Oh, Mr. Newman! My daughter has made up her mind to marry a Mr. Newman.’ Then Madame de Cintre began to fondle Lizzie again, and said it was this dear lady that had planned the match and brought them together. ‘Oh, ‘tis you I have to thank for my American son-in-law,’ the old lady said to Mrs. Tristram. ‘It was a very clever thought of yours. Be sure of my gratitude.’ And then she began to look at me and presently said, ‘Pray, are you engaged in some species of manufacture?’ I wanted to say that I manufactured broom-sticks for old witches to ride on, but Lizzie got in ahead of me. ‘My husband, Madame la Marquise,’ she said, ‘belongs to that unfortunate class of persons who have no profession and no business, and do very little good in the world.’ To get her poke at the old woman she didn’t care where she shoved me. ‘Dear me,’ said the marquise, ‘we all have our duties.’ ‘I am sorry mine compel me to take leave of you,’ said Lizzie. And we bundled out again. But you have a mother-in-law, in all the force of the term.”
“Oh,” said Newman, “my mother-in-law desires nothing better than to let me alone.”
Betimes, on the evening of the 27th, he went to Madame de Bellegarde’s ball. The old house in the Rue de l’Universite looked strangely brilliant. In the circle of light projected from the outer gate a detachment of the populace stood watching the carriages roll in; the court was illumined with flaring torches and the portico carpeted with crimson. When Newman arrived there were but a few people present. The marquise and her two daughters were at the top of the staircase, where the sallow old nymph in the angle peeped out from a bower of plants. Madame de Bellegarde, in purple and fine laces, looked like an old lady painted by Vandyke; Madame de Cintre was dressed in white. The old lady greeted Newman with majestic formality, and looking round her, called several of the persons who were standing near. They were elderly gentlemen, of what Valentin de Bellegarde had designated as the high-nosed category; two or three of them wore cordons and stars. They approached with measured alertness, and the marquise said that she wished to present them to Mr. Newman, who was going to marry her daughter. Then she introduced successively three dukes, three counts, and a baron. These gentlemen bowed and smiled most agreeably, and Newman indulged in a series of impartial hand-shakes, accompanied by a “Happy to make your acquaintance, sir.” He looked at Madame de Cintre, but she was not looking at him. If his personal self-consciousness had been of a nature to make him constantly refer to her, as the critic before whom, in company, he played his part, he might have found it a flattering proof of her confidence that he never caught her eyes resting upon him. It is a reflection Newman did not make, but we nevertheless risk it, that in spite of this circumstance she probably saw every movement of his little finger. Young Madame de Bellegarde was dressed in an audacious toilet of crimson crape, bestrewn with huge silver moons—thin crescent and full disks.
“You don’t say anything about my dress,” she said to Newman.
“I feel,” he answered, “as if I were looking at you through a telescope. It is very strange.”
“If it is strange it matches the occasion. But I am not a heavenly body.”
“I never saw the sky at midnight that particular shade of crimson,” said Newman.
“That is my originality; any one could have chosen blue. My sister-in-law would have chosen a lovely shade of blue, with a dozen little delicate moons. But I think crimson is much more amusing. And I give my idea, which is moonshine.”
“Moonshine and bloodshed,” said Newman.
“A murder by moonlight,” laughed Madame de Bellegarde. “What a delicious idea for a toilet! To make it complete, there is the silver dagger, you see, stuck into my hair. But here comes Lord Deepmere,” she added in a moment. “I must find out what he thinks of it.” Lord Deepmere came up, looking very red in the face, and laughing. “Lord Deepmere can’t decide which he prefers, my sister-in-law or me,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “He likes Claire because she is his cousin, and me because I am not. But he has no right to make love to Claire, whereas I am perfectly disponible. It is very wrong to make love to a woman who is engaged, but it is very wrong not to make love to a woman who is married.”
“Oh, it’s very jolly making love to married women,” said Lord Deepmere, “because they can’t ask you to marry them.”
“Is that what the others do, the spinsters?” Newman inquired.
“Oh dear, yes,” said Lord Deepmere; “in England all the girls ask a fellow to marry them.”
“And a fellow brutally refuses,” said Madame de Bellegarde.
“Why, really, you know, a fellow can’t marry any girl that asks him,” said his lordship.
“Your cousin won’t ask you. She is going to marry Mr. Newman.”
“Oh, that’s a very different thing!” laughed Lord Deepmere.
“You would have accepted HER, I suppose. That makes me hope that after all you prefer me.”
“Oh, when things are nice I never prefer one to the other,” said the young Englishman. “I take them all.”
“Ah, what a horror! I won’t be taken in that way; I must be kept apart,” cried Madame de Bellegarde. “Mr. Newman is much better; he knows how to choose. Oh, he chooses as if he were threading a needle. He prefers Madame de Cintre to any conceivable creature or thing.”
“Well, you ca
n’t help my being her cousin,” said Lord Deepmere to Newman, with candid hilarity.
“Oh, no, I can’t help that,” said Newman, laughing back; “neither can she!”
“And you can’t help my dancing with her,” said Lord Deepmere, with sturdy simplicity.
“I could prevent that only by dancing with her myself,” said Newman. “But unfortunately I don’t know how to dance.”
“Oh, you may dance without knowing how; may you not, milord?” said Madame de Bellegarde. But to this Lord Deepmere replied that a fellow ought to know how to dance if he didn’t want to make an ass of himself; and at this moment Urbain de Bellegarde joined the group, slow-stepping and with his hands behind him.
“This is a very splendid entertainment,” said Newman, cheerfully. “The old house looks very bright.”
“If YOU are pleased, we are content,” said the marquis, lifting his shoulders and bending them forward.
“Oh, I suspect every one is pleased,” said Newman. “How can they help being pleased when the first thing they see as they come in is your sister, standing there as beautiful as an angel?”
“Yes, she is very beautiful,” rejoined the marquis, solemnly. “But that is not so great a source of satisfaction to other people, naturally, as to you.”
“Yes, I am satisfied, marquis, I am satisfied,” said Newman, with his protracted enunciation. “And now tell me,” he added, looking round, “who some of your friends are.”
M. de Bellegarde looked about him in silence, with his head bent and his hand raised to his lower lip, which he slowly rubbed. A stream of people had been pouring into the salon in which Newman stood with his host, the rooms were filling up and the spectacle had become brilliant. It borrowed its splendor chiefly from the shining shoulders and profuse jewels of the women, and from the voluminous elegance of their dresses. There were no uniforms, as Madame de Bellegarde’s door was inexorably closed against the myrmidons of the upstart power which then ruled the fortunes of France, and the great company of smiling and chattering faces was not graced by any very frequent suggestions of harmonious beauty. It is a pity, nevertheless, that Newman had not been a physiognomist, for a great many of the faces were irregularly agreeable, expressive, and suggestive. If the occasion had been different they would hardly have pleased him; he would have thought the women not pretty enough and the men too smirking; but he was now in a humor to receive none but agreeable impressions, and he looked no more narrowly than to perceive that every one was brilliant, and to feel that the sun of their brilliancy was a part of his credit. “I will present you to some people,” said M. de Bellegarde after a while. “I will make a point of it, in fact. You will allow me?”
“Oh, I will shake hands with any one you want,” said Newman. “Your mother just introduced me to half a dozen old gentlemen. Take care you don’t pick up the same parties again.”
“Who are the gentlemen to whom my mother presented you?”
“Upon my word, I forgot them,” said Newman, laughing. “The people here look very much alike.”
“I suspect they have not forgotten you,” said the marquis. And he began to walk through the rooms. Newman, to keep near him in the crowd, took his arm; after which for some time, the marquis walked straight along, in silence. At last, reaching the farther end of the suite of reception-rooms, Newman found himself in the presence of a lady of monstrous proportions, seated in a very capacious arm-chair, with several persons standing in a semicircle round her. This little group had divided as the marquis came up, and M. de Bellegarde stepped forward and stood for an instant silent and obsequious, with his hat raised to his lips, as Newman had seen some gentlemen stand in churches as soon as they entered their pews. The lady, indeed, bore a very fair likeness to a reverend effigy in some idolatrous shrine. She was monumentally stout and imperturbably serene. Her aspect was to Newman almost formidable; he had a troubled consciousness of a triple chin, a small piercing eye, a vast expanse of uncovered bosom, a nodding and twinkling tiara of plumes and gems, and an immense circumference of satin petticoat. With her little circle of beholders this remarkable woman reminded him of the Fat Lady at a fair. She fixed her small, unwinking eyes at the new-comers.
“Dear duchess,” said the marquis, “let me present you our good friend Mr. Newman, of whom you have heard us speak. Wishing to make Mr. Newman known to those who are dear to us, I could not possibly fail to begin with you.”
“Charmed, dear friend; charmed, monsieur,” said the duchess in a voice which, though small and shrill, was not disagreeable, while Newman executed his obeisance. “I came on purpose to see monsieur. I hope he appreciates the compliment. You have only to look at me to do so, sir,” she continued, sweeping her person with a much-encompassing glance. Newman hardly knew what to say, though it seemed that to a duchess who joked about her corpulence one might say almost anything. On hearing that the duchess had come on purpose to see Newman, the gentlemen who surrounded her turned a little and looked at him with sympathetic curiosity. The marquis with supernatural gravity mentioned to him the name of each, while the gentleman who bore it bowed; they were all what are called in France beaux noms. “I wanted extremely to see you,” the duchess went on. “C’est positif. In the first place, I am very fond of the person you are going to marry; she is the most charming creature in France. Mind you treat her well, or you shall hear some news of me. But you look as if you were good. I am told you are very remarkable. I have heard all sorts of extraordinary things about you. Voyons, are they true?”
“I don’t know what you can have heard,” said Newman.
“Oh, you have your legende. We have heard that you have had a career the most checkered, the most bizarre. What is that about your having founded a city some ten years ago in the great West, a city which contains to-day half a million of inhabitants? Isn’t it half a million, messieurs? You are exclusive proprietor of this flourishing settlement, and are consequently fabulously rich, and you would be richer still if you didn’t grant lands and houses free of rent to all newcomers who will pledge themselves never to smoke cigars. At this game, in three years, we are told, you are going to be made president of America.”
The duchess recited this amazing “legend” with a smooth self-possession which gave the speech to Newman’s mind, the air of being a bit of amusing dialogue in a play, delivered by a veteran comic actress. Before she had ceased speaking he had burst into loud, irrepressible laughter. “Dear duchess, dear duchess,” the marquis began to murmur, soothingly. Two or three persons came to the door of the room to see who was laughing at the duchess. But the lady continued with the soft, serene assurance of a person who, as a duchess, was certain of being listened to, and, as a garrulous woman, was independent of the pulse of her auditors. “But I know you are very remarkable. You must be, to have endeared yourself to this good marquis and to his admirable world. They are very exacting. I myself am not very sure at this hour of really possessing it. Eh, Bellegarde? To please you, I see, one must be an American millionaire. But your real triumph, my dear sir, is pleasing the countess; she is as difficult as a princess in a fairy tale. Your success is a miracle. What is your secret? I don’t ask you to reveal it before all these gentlemen, but come and see me some day and give me a specimen of your talents.”
“The secret is with Madame de Cintre,” said Newman. “You must ask her for it. It consists in her having a great deal of charity.”
“Very pretty!” said the duchess. “That’s a very nice specimen, to begin with. What, Bellegarde, are you already taking monsieur away?”
“I have a duty to perform, dear friend,” said the marquis, pointing to the other groups.
“Ah, for you I know what that means. Well, I have seen monsieur; that is what I wanted. He can’t persuade me that he isn’t very clever. Farewell.”
As Newman passed on with his host, he asked who the duchess was. “The greatest lady in France,” said the marquis. M. de Bellegarde then presented his prospective brother-in-law to so
me twenty other persons of both sexes, selected apparently for their typically august character. In some cases this character was written in good round hand upon the countenance of the wearer; in others Newman was thankful for such help as his companion’s impressively brief intimation contributed to the discovery of it. There were large, majestic men, and small demonstrative men; there were ugly ladies in yellow lace and quaint jewels, and pretty ladies with white shoulders from which jewels and every thing else were absent. Every one gave Newman extreme attention, every one smiled, every one was charmed to make his acquaintance, every one looked at him with that soft hardness of good society which puts out its hand but keeps its fingers closed over the coin. If the marquis was going about as a bear-leader, if the fiction of Beauty and the Beast was supposed to have found its companion-piece, the general impression appeared to be that the bear was a very fair imitation of humanity. Newman found his reception among the marquis’s friends very “pleasant;” he could not have said more for it. It was pleasant to be treated with so much explicit politeness; it was pleasant to hear neatly turned civilities, with a flavor of wit, uttered from beneath carefully-shaped mustaches; it was pleasant to see clever Frenchwomen—they all seemed clever—turn their backs to their partners to get a good look at the strange American whom Claire de Cintre was to marry, and reward the object of the exhibition with a charming smile. At last, as he turned away from a battery of smiles and other amenities, Newman caught the eye of the marquis looking at him heavily; and thereupon, for a single instant, he checked himself. “Am I behaving like a d—d fool?” he asked himself. “Am I stepping about like a terrier on his hind legs?” At this moment he perceived Mrs. Tristram at the other side of the room, and he waved his hand in farewell to M. de Bellegarde and made his way toward her.