by Ouida
She was surprised to find how much she liked it. There was not much genius, and there was a great deal of bad drawing, and worse modelling, and she had educated herself in the very strictest and coldest canons of art, and really caved for nothing later than Luca Signorelli, and abhorred Canova and everything that has come after him.
But there were some little figures in marble of young children that she could conscientiously buy; and the little Meissonier and Fortuny-like pictures were clever, if they were mere trick-work and told no story; and the modern oak carvings were really good; and on the whole she enjoyed her morning unusually; and her companion looked pleased, because she found things to praise.
As she walked, with Della Rocca beside her, in and out the dusky passage ways, with the obnoxious Valenciennes under her skirts sweeping the stones, and her silvery marabouts glancing like hoarfrost in the shadows of the looming walls, the Lady Hilda felt very happy, and on, good terms with herself and the world. No doubt, she thought, it was the fresh west wind blowing up the river from the sea which had done her so much good.
The golden Ostensoir, to which she had likened Floralia, no longer seemed filled with cigar-ash and absinthe dregs; but full of the fragrant rose-leaves of an imperishable Past, and the shining sands of a sweet unspent Time.
She made a poor sculptor happy for a year; she freed a young and promising painter from a heavy debt; she was often impatient with their productions, but she was most patient with their troubles.
She was only a woman of the world, touched for a day into warmer sympathies, but the blessings she drew down on her sank somehow into her heart, and made her half ashamed, half glad.
What was the use of writing fine contemptuous things of society unless one tried to drop oneself some little holy relic into the golden Ostensoir? She went home contented, and was so gentle with her maids that they thought she must be going to be unwell.
Her friend the Princess Olga came to chat with her, and they had their tea cosily in her dressing-room; and at eight o’clock she went to dine with Mrs. Washington, an American Parisienne or Parisian American, known wherever the world of fashion extended, and was taken into dinner by the Duca della Rocca.
After dinner there was a new tenor, who was less of a delusion than most new tenors are; and there was a great deal of very aesthetic and abstruse talk about music; she said little herself, but sat and listened to Della Rocca, who spoke often and eloquently, with infinite grace and accurate culture. To a woman who has cared for no one all her life, there is the strangest and sweetest pleasure in finding at last one voice whose mere sound is melody to her.
On the whole she went to bed still with that dreamful content which had come on her in the day — no doubt with the fresh sea wind. She knew that she had looked at her best in a dress of pale dead gold, with old black Spanish lace; and she had only one regret — that in too soft a mood she had allowed an English person, a Lady Featherleigh, of whom she did not approve, to be presented to her.
She was habitually the one desire and the one despair of all her countrywomen.
Except so far as her physical courage, her skill in riding, and her beautiful complexion, which no cold could redden, and no heat could change, might be counted as national characteristics, the Lady Hilda was a very un-English Englishwoman in everything.
Indeed your true élégante is raised high above all such small things as nationalities; she floats serenely in an atmosphere far too elevated to be coloured by country; a neutral ground on which the leaders of every civilized land meet far away from all ordinary mortality.
In Floralia she found a few such choice spirits accustomed to breathe the same æther as herself, and with those she lived, carefully avoiding the Penal Settlement as she continued to call the cosmopolitan society which was outside the zone of her own supreme fashion.
She saw it, indeed, in ball-rooms and morning receptions; it sighed humbly after her, pined for her notice, and would have been happy if she would but even have recompensed it by an insolence, but she merely ignored its existence, and always looked over its head innocently and cruelly with that divine serenity of indifference and disdain with which Nature had so liberally endowed her.
“Why should I know them? They wouldn’t please me,” she would say to those who ventured to remonstrate, and the answer was unanswerable.
“I can’t think how you manage, Hilda, to keep so clear of people,” said Madame Mila, enviously “Now, I get inundated with hosts of the horridest—”
“Because you cheapen yourself,” said Lady Hilda, very coolly.
“I never could keep people off me,” pursued the Comtesse. “When Spiridion had the Embassy in London, it was just the same; I was inundated! It’s good nature, I suppose. Certainly, you haven’t got too much of that.”
Lady Hilda smiled; she thought of those six or eight thousands which had gone for Madame Mila’s losses at play.
“Good nature is a very indifferent sort of quality,” she answered. “It is compounded of weakness, laziness, and vulgarity. Generally speaking, it is only a desire for popularity, and there is nothing more vulgar than that.”
“I don’t see that it is vulgar at all,” said Madame Mila, with some sharpness. “I like to think I am popular; to see a mob look after me; to have the shop-boys rush out to get a glimpse of me; to hear the crowd on a race-day call out ‘ain’t she a rare ‘un! my eye, ain’t she fit!’ just as if I were one of the mares. I often give a crossing-sweeper a shilling in London, just to make him ‘bless my pretty eyes.’ Why, even when I go to that beastly place of Spiridion’s in Russia, I make the hideous serfs in love with me; it puts one on good terms with oneself. I often think when the people in the streets don’t turn after me as I go — then I shall know that I’m old!”
Lady Hilda’s eyebrows expressed unutterable contempt; these were sentiments to her entirely incomprehensible.
“How very agreeable — to make the streets the barometer of one’s looks—’ fair or foul.’ So you live in apprehension of a railway porter’s indifference, and only approve of yourself if a racing tout smiles! My dear Mila, I never did believe you would have gone lower in the scale of human adorers than your Gommeux and Poisseux.”
“At all events I am not so vain as you are, Hilda,” retorted the Comtesse. “You approve of yourself eternally, whether all the world hates you or not. I remember Charlie Barrington saying of you once— ‘I wonder why that woman keeps straight — why should she? She don’t care a hang what anybody says of her.’”
“How discerning of Lord Barrington! If people only ‘keep straight’ for the sake of what other people say of them, I think they may just as well ‘go off the rails’ in any manner they like. Certainly, what I chose to do, I should do, without reference to the approbation of the mob — either of the streets or of the drawing-rooms.”
“Exactly what Barrington said,” returned Madame Mila; “but then why do you — I mean, why don’t you — amuse yourself?”
The Lady Hilda laughed.
“My dear! the Gommeux and the Poisseux would not amuse me. I am not so happily constituted as you are.”
Madame Mila coloured.
“That’s all very fine talk, but you know it isn’t natural—”
“To live decently? — no, I suppose it is not now-a-days. Perhaps it never was. But, my dear Mila, you needn’t be too disquieted about me. If it make you any more comfortable as to my sanity, I can assure you it is not virtue; no one knows such a word; it is only indifference.”
“You are very queer, Hilda,” said Madame Mila, impatiently; “all I know is, I should like to see you in love, and see what you’d say then.”
The Lady Hilda, who was never more moved by her feather-headed cousin’s words than a rock by a butterfly, felt a sudden warmth on her face — perhaps of anger.
“In love!” she echoed, with less languor and more of impetuosity than she had ever displayed, “are you ever in love, any of you, ever? You have senses and vanity and
an inordinate fear of not being in the fashion — and so you take your lovers as you drink your stimulants and wear your wigs and tie your skirts back — because everybody else does it, and not to do it is to be odd, or prudish, or something you would hate to be called. Love! it is an unknown thing to you all.
You have a sort of miserable hectic passion, perhaps, that is a drug you take as you take chlorodyne — just to excite you and make your jaded nerves a little alive again, and yet you are such cowards that you have not even the courage of passion, but label your drug Friendship, and beg Society to observe that you only keep it for family uses like arnica or like glycerine. You want notoriety; you want to indulge your fancies, and yet keep your place in the world. You like to drag a young man about by a chain, as if he were the dancing monkey that you depended upon for subsistence. You like other women to see that you are not too passée to be every whit as improper as if you were twenty. You like to advertise your successes as it were with drum and trumpet, because if you did not, people might begin to doubt that you had any. You like all that, and you like to feel there is nothing you do not know and no length you have not gone, and so you ring all the changes on all the varieties of intrigue and sensuality, and go over the gamut of sickly sentiment and nauseous license as an orchestra tunes its strings up every night! That is what all you people call love; I am content enough to have no knowledge of it—”
“Good gracious, Hilda!” said Madame Mila, with wide-open eyes of absolute amazement; “you talk as if you were one of the angry husbands in a comedy of Feuillet or Dumas. I don’t think you know anything about it at all; how should you? You only admire yourself, and like art and all that kind of thing, and are as cold as ice to everybody. ‘À la place du cœur, vous n’avez qu’un caillou;’ I’ve read that somewhere.”
“‘Elle n’a qu’un écusson,’” corrected Lady Hilda, her serenity returning. “If Hugo had known much about women he would have said— ‘qu’un chiffon;’ but perhaps a dissyllable wouldn’t have scanned—”
“You never will convince me,” continued Madame de Caviare, “that you would not be a happier woman if you had what you call senses and the rest of it. One can’t live without sensations and emotions of some sort. You never feel any except before a bit of Kronenthal china or a triptych of some old fogey of a painter. You do care awfully about your horses to be sure, but then as you don’t bet on anything, I don’t see what excitement you can get out of them. You won’t play — which is the best thing to take to of all, because it will last; the older they grow, the wilder women get about it; look at Spiridion’s aunt Seraphine — over eighty — as keen as a ferret over her winnings, and as fierce as a torn-cat over her losses. Now, that is a thing that can’t hurt any one, let you say what you like; everybody plays, why won’t you? If you lost half your income in one night, it wouldn’t ruin you, and you have no idea how delicious it is to get dizzy over the cards; you know one bets even at poker to any amount—”
“Thanks; it won’t tempt me,” answered Lady Hilda. “I have played at Baden, to see if it would amuse me, and it didn’t amuse me in the least; no more than M. des Gommeux does! My dearest Mila, I am sure that you people who do excite yourselves over baccarat and poker, and can feel really flattered at having a Maurice always in attendance, and can divert yourselves with oyster suppers and masked balls and cotillon riots, are the happy women of this world, that I quite grant you: oysters and Maurices and cotillon and poker are so very easy to be got —— —”
“And men like women who like them!”
“That I grant too; poker and cotillons don’t exact any very fine manners, and men nowadays always like to be, metaphorically, in their smoking-coats. Only you see we are not always all constituted of the same fortunate disposition; poker and cotillons only bore me. You should think it my misfortune not my fault. I am sure it must be charming to drink a quantity of champagne, and whirl round like a South-sea islander, and play pranks that pass in a palace though the police would interfere in a dancing garden, and be found by the sun drinking soup at a supper-table: I am sure it must be quite delightful. Only you see it doesn’t amuse me; — no more than scrambling amongst a pack of cards flung on their faces, which you say is delightful too; or keeping a Maurice in your pocket, like your cigar-case and your handkerchief, which you say is most delightful of all. But good bye, my dear, we shall quarrel if we talk much longer like this; and we must not quarrel till to-morrow morning; because your Dissimulée dress will look nothing without my Austraisienne one. What time shall I call for you? Make it as late as you can. I shall only just show myself.”
“Three o’clock, then — that is quite early enough,” muttered Madame Mila, somewhat sulkily; but she had teazed and prayed her cousin into accompanying her in Louis Seize costumes, most carefully compiled by Worth from engravings and pictures of the period, to the Trasimene costume ball, and would not fall out with her just on the eve of it, because she knew their entrance would be the’ effect of the night, accompanied as they would be by the Duc de St. Louis and M. des Gommeux as Grand Ecuyer de France, and as Petit Maître en chenille, of the same century.
“Say half-past,” answered the Lady Hilda, as she closed the door and went into her own rooms on the opposite side of the staircase.
“I really begin to think she is jealous of Maurice and in love with him!” thought Madame Mila, in whose eyes Maurice was irresistible, though with the peculiar optimism of ladies in her position she was perfectly certain that he was adamant also to all save herself. And the idea of her fastidious cousin’s hopeless passion so tickled her fancy that she laughed herself into a good humour as her maids disrobed her; and she curled herself up in her bed to get a good night’s sleep out before donning the Dissimulée costume for the Trasimene ball, so that she should go at half-past three “as fresh as paint,” in the most literal sense of the word, to all the joyous rioting of the cotillon which Maurice was to lead.
“You shine upon us late, Madame,” said Della Rocca, advancing to meet the Lady Hilda, when they reached, at four o’clock in the morning, the vast and lofty rooms glittering with fancy dresses.
“I only came at all to please Mila, and she only comes for the cotillon,” she answered him, and she thought how well he looked as she glanced at him. He wore a white Louis Treize Mousquetaire dress, and he had the collar of the Golden Fleece about his throat, for, amongst his many useless titles, and barren dignities, he was, like many an Italian noble, also a grandee of Spain.
“You do not dance, Madame?” he asked.
“Very seldom,” she answered, as she accepted his arm to move through the rooms. “When mediaeval dresses came in, dancing should have been banished. Who could dance well in a long close clinging robe tightly tied back, and heavy with gold thread and bullion fringes; they should revive the minuet; we might go through that without being ridiculous. But if they will have the cotillon instead, they should dress like the girls in Offenbach’s pieces, as many of them happen to be to-night. I do not object to a mixture of epochs in furniture, but romping in a rénaissance skirt! — that is really almost blasphemy enough to raise the ghost of Titian!”
“I am afraid Madama Pampinet and the Fiammina must have romped sometimes,” said Della Rocca with a smile. “But then you will say the Decadence had already cast its shadow before it.”
“Yes; but there never was an age so vulgar as our own,” said the Lady Hilda. “That I am positive of; — look, even peasants are vulgar now: they wear tall hats and tawdry bonnets on Sundays; and, as for our society, it is ‘rowdy:’ there is no other word for it, if you understand what that means.”
“Canaille?”
“Yes, Canaille. M. de St. Louis says, the ‘femme comme il faut’ of his youth is extinct - as the dodo: language is slang, society is a mob, dress is display, amusement is riot, people are let into society who have no other claim to be there but money and impudence, and are as ignorant as our maids and our grooms, and more so. It is all as bad as it can be, a
nd I suppose it will only go on getting worse. You Italians are the only people with whom manner is not a lost art.”
“You do us much honour. Perhaps we too shall be infected before long. We are sending our lads to public schools in your country: they will probably come back unable to bow, ashamed of natural grace, and ambitious to emulate the groom model in everything. This is thought an advanced education.”
Lady Hilda laughed.
“The rich Egyptians go to English universities, and take back to the Nile a passion for rathunting and brandy, and the most hideous hats and coats in the universe; and then think they have improved on the age of the Pharaohs. I hope Italy will never be infected, but I am afraid; you have gasworks, tramways, and mixed marriages, and your populace has almost entirely abandoned costume.”
“And in the cities we have lost the instinct of good taste in the most fatal manner. Perhaps it has died out with the old costumes. Who knows? Dress is after all the thermometer of taste. Modem male attire is of all others the most frightful, the most grotesque, the most gloomy, and, to our climate, the most unsuitable.”
“Yes. Tall hats and tail coats appear to me to be like the locusts, wherever they spread they bear barrenness in their train. But the temper of your people will always procure to you some natural grace, some natural elegance.”
“Let us hope so; but in all public works our taste already is gone. One may say, without vanity, that in full sense of beauty and of proportion, Italy surpassed of old all the world: how is it, I often ask myself, that we have lost so much of this? Here in Floralia, if we require gas - works we erect their chimneys on the very bank of our river, ruining one of the loveliest views in the world, and one that has been a tradition of beauty for ages. If it be deemed necessary to break down and widen our picturesque old bridges, we render them hideous as any railway road, by hedging them with frightful monotonous parapets of cast-iron, the heaviest, most soulless, most hateful thing that is manufactured. Do we make a fine hill-drive, costing us enormously, when we have no money to pay for it, we make one, indeed, as fine as any in Europe; and having made it, then we ruin it by planting at every step cafés, and guinguettes, and guard houses, and every artificial abomination and vulgarity in stucco and brickwork that can render its noble scenery ridiculous. Do we deem it advisable, for sanitary or other purposes, to turn the people out of the ancient market where they keep their stalls under the old palace walls happily enough, summer and winter, like so many Dutch pictures, we build a cage of iron and glass like an enormous cucumber frame, inexpressibly hideous, and equally incommodious, and only adapted to grill the people in June and turn them to ice in January. What is the reason? We have liberal givers such as your countryman Sloane, such as my countryman Galliera, yet what single modern thing worth producing can we show? We have destroyed much that will be as irreparable a loss to future generations as the art destroyed in the great siege is to us. But we have produced nothing save deformity. Perhaps, indeed, we might not have any second Michael Angelo to answer if we called on him; but it is certain that we must have architects capable of devising something in carven stone to edge a bridge; we must have artists who, were they consulted, would say, ‘do not insult a sublime panorama of the most poetic and celebrated valley in the world by putting into the foreground a square guards’ box, a stucco drinking-house, and the gilded lamps of a dancing-garden.’ We must have men capable of so much as that — yet they are either never employed or never listened to; the truth I fear is that a public work now-a-days with us is like a plant being carried to be planted in a city square, of which every one who passes it plucks off a leaf: by the time it reaches its destination the plant is leafless. The public work is the plant, and the money to be got from it is the foliage; provided each one plucks as much foliage as he can, no one cares in what state the plant reaches the piazza.”