by Ouida
“He is jealous,” they added, with a little fatuous laugh. “You come from Poland!”
“I have sung in Moscow and Warsaw,” said Corrèze, with an accent that warned them not to pursue the theme. “And it is true,” he added, with a grave coldness that had its weight from one so careless, so gay, and so facile of temper as he was. “It is true that in a part of Poland the Princess Vera Zouroff does live on one of her husband’s estates, devoting herself to the poor because she prefers solitude and exile to receiving as her friend the widow of Paul de Sonnaz, the sister of Hervé de Merilhac.”
For the moment, such is the immediate force of truth, no one laughed. There was the silence of respect.
Then they spoke of his return, of the opera that night, of his stay in Vienna, of all the topics of the hour then occupying the scarcely-opened salons of Paris. No man in the Ganaches was bold enough to speak again in his presence of Princess Zouroff.
“Why did you insult Corrèze?” said the Marquis de Merilhac, as Zouroff passed on with him to the Rue Scribe.
“I do not choose to be in the same club with a singer,” answered Zouroff, with rough impatience.
“But he belongs to half the great clubs of Europe.”
“Then I will insult him in half of them! You may have heart, il fait la cour à ma femme.”
“Jeanne told me something at Félicité,” said Hervé de Merilhac. “But she said it was only romance.”
“Romance! Faust or Edgardo! or, as in a Renaissance dress, he is adored by Leonora! Merci bien! I am not jealous, I am not unreasonable; I know the destinies of husbands. But I do not accept a rival in the satin and tinsel of the stage! Half a century ago,” added Zouroff, as he turned in at the doors of the Jockey Club, “one could have had this man beaten by one’s lackeys. Now one is obliged to meet him at one’s cercle and insult him as though he were a noble.”
“He is one,” said the Marquis de Merilhac, who was perplexed and dissatisfied.
“Faugh!” said Zouroff, with the scorn of a great prince.
The next morning, as Corrèze passed through the gardens of the Tuileries, he chanced to see the small, spare form of the Princesse Nelaguine; she was seated on a bench in the sunshine of the wintry morning, watching the little children of her eldest son float their boats upon one of the basins. He paused, hesitated, saluted her, and approached. Madame Nelaguine smiled on him.
“Why not?” she thought, “there is nothing true; even were it true she would be justified.”
Corrèze spoke to her with the compliment of daily life, which he, better than most men, could divest of the commonplace and invest with grace and dignity. Then abruptly he said to her, “Princesse, I was coming to you this morning; I have been to Szarisla—”
She started, and looked at him in surprise.
“To Szarisla? You have seen — my brothers wife? It is strange you should tell me.”
“I tell you because she is your brothers wife,” answered Corrèze; his face was pale and grave, and his tone was sad and cold, with an accent of rebuke, which her quick ear detected. “May I speak to you honestly? I should be your debtor if you would allow me.”
She hesitated; then sent the children and their attendants farther away, and motioned to him to sit beside her.
“I suppose you know what they say,” she said to him; “my brother would think I did ill to listen to you.”
“In what they say, they lie.”
“The world always lies, or almost always; I think it lies about you, or I should not speak to you. You have been to Szarisla?”
“I have been there; I have seen her for five minutes, no more, though I lived in the village five weeks. Madame, she had death in her face.”
The tears rushed into his hearers keen, curious eyes, her lips trembled.
“No — no, you exaggerate! Vera dying? You make my heart sick. I have feared for her health always — always — what did you do those five long weeks?”
“I waited to see her face,” said Corrèze simply; “Madame, listen to me one moment; I will try not to tire your patience. She is your brother’s wife; yes, but she is dealt with as he would never deal with one of his mistresses. Listen; long ago, when she was a child, I met her on a summer morning; I loved her then; call it fancy, caprice, poetry, what you will; her mother gave her, not to me, but to Prince Zouroff. I kept away from her; I would not sing in Russia whilst she was there; I would not approach her in Paris; if I had seen her in peace, seen her even respected, I would have tried to be content, I would for ever have been silent; instead, I have seen her insulted in every way that infidelity can insult a woman—”
“I know! I know! Spare me that; go on—”
“At last I knew that she was sent into exile; and why? because she would no longer receive Jeanne de Sonnaz.”
“It was a madness to refuse to receive Jeanne de Sonnaz; after all, what did it matter? women meet their rivals, their foes, every hour, and kiss them. It was madness to refuse!”
“It may have been. It was noble, it was truthful, it was brave, it was befitting the delicacy and the dignity of her nature. For that act, though no one can deny that she is in the right, she is exiled into a land where life is unendurable, even to yourselves, natives of it; where the year is divided between an endless winter and a short, parching season of heat that it is mockery to call the summer; where the only living creatures that surround her are servants who watch and chronicle her simplest action, and peasants, whose God is a dream, and whose homes are hovels. Did your brother wish for her death, or for her insanity, that he chose Szarisla?”
“My brother wishes that she should meet Jeanne de Sonnaz. I am frank with you; be frank with me. Are you the lover of my brother’s wife? Paris says so.”
“Madame, that I love her, and shall love no other whilst I live, I do not deny. That I am her lover is a lie, a calumny, a blasphemy, against her.”
Madame Nelaguine was silent; she looked at him with searching, piercing eyes.
“What did you do, then, at Szarisla?”
“I went to see her face, to hear her footsteps, to be sure that she lived. I spoke to her; I laid my soul, my honour, all the service of my life, at her feet, and she rejected them. That is all.”
“Ah?”
She was once more silent; she was a suspicious woman and a cynical, and often false herself, and never credulous; yet she believed him.
“You have been unwise, imprudent; you should never have gone there,” she said suddenly. “And she is ill you say?”
“The priest said so; she looks so; she is weak; she is all alone. I should never have gone there? I should have been a coward indeed if I had not; if I had known her so deeply wronged, and had not at least offered her vengeance—”
“Her husband is my brother!”
“It is because he is your brother that I asked the grace of your patience to-day. Madame, remember it is very terrible that at twenty years old an innocent creature, lovely as the morning, should be confined in exile till she dies of utter weariness, of utter loneliness, of utter hopelessness! Prince Zouroff is within his rights, but nonetheless is he an assassin. I believe he alleges that she is free to return, but when he couples her return with an unworthy condition that she cannot accept, she is as much his captive as though chains were on her. If she remain there, she will not live, and she will never consent to leave Szarisla, since she can only leave it at the price of affected friendship with the Duchesse de Sonnaz—”
“What would you have me do?” cried his hearer in a sudden agitation very rare with her, in which anger and sorrow strove together; “what is it you ask? what is it you wish? I do not understand—”
“I wish you to speak to Prince Zouroff.”
“Speak to Sergius?”
“In my name, yes; he would not hear me or I would speak myself. Madame, your brother knows very well that his wife is as innocent as the angels, but it suits him that all the world should suspect her.”
“Then
he is a villain!”
“He is under the influence of an unscrupulous woman, that is nearly the same thing. Madame de Sonnaz never forgave his marriage; she now avenges it. Madame, what I wish is that you should speak to your brother as I speak to you. He would not hear me; that is natural. He is her husband, I am nothing; he has the right to refuse to listen to her name from my mouth. But you, he will hear. Tell him what I have told you; tell him that, when the world speaks of me and of her it lies; and tell him — I can think of no better way — that to remove all possibility of suspicion, to put away all semblance of truth from the rumours of society, I myself will die to the world. Why not? I am tired. She will never be mine. Fame is nothing to me. The very music I have adored all my life seems like the mere shaking of dried peas in an empty bladder. I cannot forget one womans face, a woman who will never be mine. I will leave art and the world of men; I will go back to the mountains where I was born, and live the life my fathers led; in a season Europe will have forgotten that it had ever an idol called Corrèze. Nay, if that fail to content him, if he doubt that I shall keep my word, I will do more; I will enter one of those retreats where men are alone with their memories and with God. There is the Chartreuse that has sheltered greater men than I and nobler lives than mine. It is all alone amidst the hills; I should be in my native air; I could go there. You stare; do you doubt? I give my word that I will die to the world; I can think of no other way to save her name from mine. If that content him I will do it, if he will bring her back into the honour of the world, and never force her to see Jeanne de Sonnaz. Does it seem so much to you to do? it is nothing; I would die in my body for her, or to do her any good. Thus I shall die, only in name.”
He ceased to speak, and his hearer was silent. There was no sound but the wind blowing through the scorched ruins of the Tuileries, and scattering on the earth the withered leaves of the trees.
“But what you will do is a martyrdom,” she cried abruptly; “it is death ten thousand times over! Retreat from the world? you? the worlds idol!”
“I would do more for her if I knew what to do.”
She held out her hand to him.
“You are very noble.”
“I will do what I say,” he answered simply.
She was silent, in the silence of a great amaze; the amazement of a selfish and a corrupt nature at one that is unselfish and uncorrupted.
“You are very noble,” she murmured once more, “and she is worthy of your heroism. Alas! it will be of no use; you do not understand my brothers character, nor what is now moving his mind. You do not see that his desire is, not to save his wife from you, but to force her to divorce him.”
“If he were not your brother—”
“You would curse him as a scoundrel? He is not that; he is a man, too rich, spoiled by the world, and now dominated by a dangerous woman. I will speak to him; I will tell him what you have said; but I have little hope.”
She gave him her hand again, her eyes were wet. He rose, bowed, and left her. He had done what he could.
At that moment Sergius Zouroff, in the smoking-room of the Ganaches, was reading a little letter that had come to him from the chateau of Ruilhières. It was very short, it said only, “Corrèze has returned to Paris; he has been at Szarisla. Do not let his talent, the trained talent of the stage, deceive you.”
Madame Nelaguine an hour later told him of what had been said to her in the gardens of the Tuileries. She spoke with an eloquence she could command at will, with an emotion that was rarely visible in her.
“This man is noble,” she said when she had exhausted all argument and all entreaty, and had won no syllable from him in reply. “Have you no nobility to answer his? His sacrifice would be unparalleled, his devotion superb; he will die to the world in the height of his fame, like a king that abdicates in full glory and youth. Can you not rise for once to his height? Will a prince of our blood be surpassed in generosity by an artist?”
He heard his sister speak in unbroken silence. She was afraid with a great fear. His stormy passions usually spent themselves in rage that was too indolent to act, but his silence was always as terrible as the silence of the frost at midnight in his own plains, when men were dying in the snow.
“You may be the dupe of a comedian’s coup de théâtre,” was all that he said when she had ended; “I am not; tell him so.”
Sergius Zouroff knew well when he looked into his own heart that he was doing a base thing; he knew well that Vere was as pure of any earthly sin as any earthly creature can be; he did not believe any one of the daughters of men had ever been so innocent as she, or so faithful to the things she deemed her duty. But he stifled his conscience, and let loose only the rage which consumed him; half rage against her because she was for ever lost to him, half rage against himself for this other tyranny, which he had allowed to eat into and absorb his life. He was sullen, angered, dissatisfied, a dull remorse was awake in him, and the savage temper which had been always uncontrolled in him, craved for some victim on which to vent itself. His wife he dared not approach. His fury, though never his suspicions, fell upon Corrèze.
“He is not her lover; she is as pure as the ice,” he said impatiently to himself. But she was not there, and Corrèze was before his eyes in Paris. A real and sombre hatred grew up in him; for little, for nothing, he would have killed this man as he killed a bird.
Corrèze sang this night at the Grand Opéra, according to his engagement.
The opera-house was in a tumult of rapture and homage; flowers rained on him; women wept; Paris the cynical, Paris the mocker, Paris the inconstant, was faithful to him, worshipped him, loved him as poets love, and dogs. It was the grandest night that even his triumphal life had ever known. It was the last. When the glittering crowds swam before his eyes, and welcomed his return, in his heart he said to them, “farewell.”
As men doomed to death at dawn look at the sunrise of the last day they will ever see, so he looked at the crowds that hung upon his voice. It was for the last time, he said to himself; to-morrow he would keep the word he had given to Sergius Zouroff and would perish to the world. He would sing no more, save in the matin song, in the cold, white dawns, in the monastery of the mountains above Grenoble.
“She said rightly,” he thought; “it is so easy to die.”
“But to live so would be hard.”
He would leave the laugh of the world behind him; a few women would mourn their lost lover, and the nations would mourn their lost music, but the memory of nations is short-lived for the absent, and he knew well that for the most part the world would laugh; laugh at Ruy Blas, who chose to bury his life for a fatal passion in the solitudes of the mountains in days when passion has lost all dignity and solitude all consolation. To the world he would seem but a romantic fool, since in this time there are neither faith nor force, but only a dreary and monotonous triviality that has no fire for hatred and has no soul for sacrifice.
“I can think of nothing else,” he said to himself. He could think of no other way by which he could efface himself from the living world without leaving remorse or calumny upon her name. And to him it was not so terrible as it would have been to others. He had had all the uttermost sweetness and perfection of life, he had drunk deeply of all its intoxications, he was now at the zenith of his triumphs. He thought that it would be better to lay aside the cup still full rather than drain it to the lees. He thought that it would not be so very bitter after all to abdicate, not one half so bitter as to await the waning of triumphs, the decay of strength, the gradual change from public idolatry to public apathy, which all genius sees that does not perish in its prime. And he had more of the old faiths in him than most men of his generation. He had something of the enthusiast and of the visionary, of Montalembert and of Pascal. It would not be so hard, he thought, to dwell amidst the silence of the mountains, waiting until the Unknown God should reveal by death the mysteries of life. Beyond all and beneath all, as he had often said, he was a mountaineer; he would
be a monk amidst the mountains. Let the world laugh.
As the crowd of the opera house recalled him, and the plaudits that he would never hear again thundered around him, he murmured:
Je briserai sur mon genou
Le sceptre avec le diadème
Comme un enfant casse un joujou,
Moi-même, en plein règne, au grand jour.
And his eyes were wet as he looked for the last time on the people of Paris and said in his heart — farewell.
As he went away from the theatre, amidst the shouts of the exulting multitude — waiting as when kings pass through cities that hail them as victors — a note was brought to him. It was from Nadine Nelaguine. It said merely: “I have spoken to my brother, but it is of no use. He will hear no reason. Leave Paris.”
The face of Corrèze grew dark.
“I will not leave Paris,” he said to himself. He saw in the counsel a warning or a threat. “I will not leave Paris until I enter the shroud of the monkish habit.”
And he smiled a little wearily, thinking again that when he should have buried himself in the Chartreuse the world would only see in the action a coup de théâtre; a fit ending to the histrion who had been so often the Fernando of its lyric triumphs.
He went down the street slowly on foot, the note of Nadine Nelaguine in his hand, his carriage following him filled with the bouquets and wreaths that had covered the stage that night.
He looked up at the stars and thought: “When I am amidst the snows alone in my cell, will these nights seem to me like heaven or like hell?”
An old and intimate friend touched his arm and gave him ajournai of the evening.
“Have you read this?” said his friend, and pointed to an article signed, “Un qui n’y croit pas.”
It was one of the wittiest papers that was sold upon the Boulevards; there was a brilliant social study; it was called, “Les anges terrestres.”
Under thin disguises it made its sport and jest of the Ice-flower away in Poland, and the Romeo of Paris, who was breaking the hearts of women by an anchorite’s coldness.