by Ouida
That she occasionally had moments of supreme generosity, and a capacity seldom or never called out for heroic courage, did not alter the main fact that her life was essentially selfish. She never did anything that she did not wish to do; the great want in her existence, to herself, was that she so very seldom felt any wish for anything. When she did, she gratified it without any scruple or hesitation.
Her mind was too clear and logical for any creed to obtain any hold upon her; nominally, of course, she was of the Greek Church, and had too much good taste to create any scandal by openly separating herself from it; but her intelligence, as critical and as subtle as Voltaire’s or Bolingbroke’s, would no more have submitted to the bondage of religious superstition and tradition than she would have clothed her graceful person in one of the ‘Décrochez-moi-ça’ that hung in the windows of Paris clothes-shops. In morality, also, she did not much believe; she read Stuart Mill’s plea for the utility of virtue once, and smiled as she closed the book with a mental verdict of ‘non-proven.’
Pride (that pride which has been happily defined by a French writer as pas d’orgueil, mais de la fierté), and the delicacy of her taste, with her profound indifference, supplied the place in her of moral laws, and probably acted on her much more effectively than they would have done. Principle is but a palisade; temperament is a stone bastion.
‘Les honnêtes gens m’ennuient et les mauvaises gens me déplaisent,’ she was wont to say, with a frank confession of what many others have felt, and have not had the courage to say. She had no more rigidity of principle than any other person who has been reared in the midst of a witty, elegant, and corrupt society; but her perfect taste supplied the place of moral convictions, the grossness of vice offended her like a bad odour, or a staring colour; and everything loose or coarse seemed to her an affront to intelligence and to refinement.
Sometimes she almost envied the women who could plunge themselves into the hot springs of a passion, only it seemed to her vulgar; the same sort of vulgarity as swimming in public in a rose-coloured maillot. She could swim like an otter, but she never swam in public. The noisy and ungrateful pleasures which delight modern society seemed to her sheer imbecilities, whilst she would as soon have descended to an intrigue with her cook or her coachman as have made an amorous appointment in a private room at a café, or have mounted the stairs of a hired house to meet a Lovelace of the clubs. ‘Peut-on être plus bête!’ she would say, with supreme disdain, whenever she heard of the vulgarities which usually accompany Apate and Philotes in these the waning years of the nineteenth century. She quite understood the Parisienne in ‘Frou-frou’ who, tempted to make an assignation, awakes to a sense of its coarseness and commonness when she finds that the temple of love is upon the third floor in the Rue du Petit Hurleur, and that the wall-paper has five-and-twenty Poniatowskys jumping into the Elster repeated on every length of it.
‘In that sort of affair,’ she said once, ‘you must have either secrecy or a scandal; both to me seem in bad taste. And then, with the one you are at the mercy of your maid, and with the other you are at the mercy of the newspapers. To be sure,’ she added, ‘I cannot, perhaps, measure the force of the temptation, for I have never in my life seen any human being to meet whom I should have ever thought it worth while even to order out my coupé.’
Innumerable lives had done their uttermost to entwine themselves in hers and had only broken themselves helplessly on the rock of her supreme indifference, like so many ships upon icebergs. She was a charmeresse in the uttermost sense of that expressive word, but she was scarcely a coquette, though the most merciless coquetry might have done much less harm than she did. A coquette desires and strives to please; Nadine Napraxine fascinated other lives to hers without effort if without pity. She had one supreme end — to endeavour to amuse herself; and she had one unending appetite — that of the study of character. She so seldom succeeded in amusing herself that she came naturally to the conclusion that most characters contained no amusing elements.
‘Vous m’ennuyez!’ was her single word of explication to those whose homage she had permitted for a while only to send them adrift without a sign of compassion or contrition. To her the three words seemed entirely comprehensive. When some one more daring than the others had once ventured to remind her that he had not been quite so hateful to her only a brief while before, she had said, with some impatience, ‘Can one know that a book is dull unless one looks at a few pages? It is not one’s fault if it be ill-written. I cannot say why you all weary me, but if you do, it is not my fault either.’
When once they wearied her it was of no use for them by any ingenuity, subserviency, or despair, to attempt to regain her favour. Her path, like that of all great victors, was strewn with unregarded victims. Now and then her composure had been ruffled, when the fate of someone of these had roused the adverse comments of the world, and the issue of some duel or the fact of some suicide had had her name, by common consent, coupled with it. She disliked that kind of notoriety; sincerely disliked it with all the hauteur and disgust of a very proud and sensitive refinement; but it never made her change the tenor of her ways.
‘If you do not like du potin, would it not be better — to — to — not to give rise to it?’ Napraxine himself had once humbly ventured to suggest when she was excessively angered because the journals of the hour had ventured to introduce her name into their narratives of a duel ending in the death of the young Principe d’Ivrea, who had been very popular and beloved in French and Italian society.
‘Du potin!’ she had echoed. ‘Why cannot you say scandal? What sense is there in slang? Give rise to it? Ivrea was a nice boy, but irascible like all Italians, and intensely vain; the least word irritated him. He chose to provoke de Prangins because de Prangins teased him, and the old man has been too strong for the young one. It is a great pity! he had a pretty face and a pretty manner, but I have no more to do with his death than the gilt arrow on the top of the house. Myself, I would much rather he had killed de Prangins.’
Napraxine had preserved a reverential silence; he knew that there was another side to the story, but he did not venture to say so.
When the jealousies, feuds, and quarrels which it amused her to excite and foment arrived at any such tragical conclusion as this with which the Duc de Prangins had disembarrassed her salons of a youth who of late had grown too presuming, she was always entirely innocent of being the cause of it. ‘I always tell them to like each other,’ she would say placidly; but therein they did not obey her.
She valued her power of destruction as the only possible means of her own amusement. It reconciled her to herself when she was most disposed to be discontented. Her delicate lips smiled with ineffable disdain when she saw other women se tordant comme des folles, as she expressed it, in their effort to secure the admiration or retain the passions of men, while she, merely lifting the cloud of her black lashes in the sunshine by the lake, or sitting still as marble in the shadow of her box at the ‘Français,’ could anchor down by her for ever the thoughts, the desires, the regrets, the destinies of young and old, of friend and enemy, of stranger and familiar, merely by the passive magnetism of that charm which Nature had given her.
‘Marie Stuart,’ she said once when she closed Chastelard, ‘a sorceress! Pooh! They make much too much of her. She had a charm, I suppose, but she could not have known how to use it, or she would never have married either Darnley or Bothwell, and she would never have allowed herself to be beaten by Elizabeth — a grey-haired virgin and a maîtresse femme!’
All women seemed to her to have been very weak: Josephine humiliated at Malmaison; Marie Antoinette, on the tumbril of death; Heloise, in her cell of Paraclete; Lady Hamilton, dying of want in Calais; Lady Blessington, poor and miserable in Paris: — what was the use of ‘charm’ if it ended like that?
‘I shall reign as long as I live,’ she said to herself. ‘And if I live to eighty men will be still eager to hear me talk.’
CHAPTER III.
‘This room is stifling, it is so small; and yet there are horrible draughts in it. I dare say the ridiculous walls are not an inch thick,’ said the Princess Napraxine now, as she rose from the breakfast-table, and drew her delicate skirts, with their undulating waves and foam of lace, out through the glass doors and over the marble of the terrace to the sheltered nook in which she had been sitting before breakfast, where a square Smyrna carpet was placed under several cushioned lounging-chairs. It was only two o’clock, and the air was warm and full of brilliant sunshine.
‘It is all in dreadful taste,’ she said for the hundredth time. ‘This sort of mock-Syrian scenery, mixed up with châlets, villas, and hotels, has such a look of the stage. It seems made on purpose for maquillées beauties, dyed and pampered gamblers, and great ladies who are received nowhere else. Places have all a physiognomy, moral as well as physical. The Riviera must have been enchanting when there was only a mule-track as wide as a ribbon between the hills and the sea from Marseilles to Genoa, but now that the moral emanations of Monte Carlo and of the cinq heures at all the nondescript houses, and of the baccarat groups in the clubs which are not as exclusive as they might be, have spread all along the coast like miasma, the whole thing is only a décor de scène, the very gardens are masquerading as Egypt, as Damascus, as Palermo. It is all postiche.’
‘You are very cruel, madame,’ murmured Melville.
‘That is the only thing you can any of you find to reply when I say anything that is true!’ said the Princess, with triumph.
‘The de Vannes are your nearest neighbours,’ suggested her husband.
‘Did you mean that Cri-Cri is bien nature?’ she said, with her little low laugh. ‘I fear neither of them will contribute anything to redeem the character of the place for either maquillage or gambling — —’
‘Why would you come to it?’ he asked, with all a man’s stupidity.
‘Why do people ever ask one why one does things?’ she interrupted, irritably. ‘One imagines one will like a thing; one gets it; and directly, of course, one does not like it. That is a kind of general law. Monsignore Melville will tell us, I suppose, that it is to prevent us attaching ourselves to the pleasures of this world; but as it also operates in preventing one’s attaching oneself to anybody, as well as anything, I do not know that the result is as admirable as he would imagine.’
‘I never said — —’ began Melville.
‘Oh, no, but you would say if you were in the pulpit,’ she replied, before he could finish his sentence. ‘You would say that even ennui and satiety and depression have their uses if they lead the soul to heaven; but that is just what they do not do; they only lead to morphia, chloral, dyspepsia, and Karlsbad. It is quite impossible — it must be quite impossible, even for you, Monsignore — to consider Karlsbad as an antechamber to heaven!’
Melville tried to look shocked, but did not succeed well, as he was a little Rabelaisian and Montaignist at heart, and not intended by nature for a Churchman.
‘What are we going to do?’ said the Prince, as he stretched himself in his chair, and lighted another cigarette.
‘Stay where we are,’ suggested Geraldine, who desired nothing better, as a tête-à-tête was a favour never accorded to him twice in twenty-four hours.
‘Oh, not I, indeed!’ cried Napraxine, with as much alacrity as was possible beneath his heavy ‘envelope of flesh.’ ‘I shall go to Monte Carlo. I have told them to harness. If you like to come — —’
At that moment a servant brought him a card. He read what was written in pencilled lines upon it; then raised his head with a pleased exclamation.
‘Je vous le donne en mille!’ he cried. ‘Nadine, who do you think is here?’
‘A goose with a diseased liver, or a hundred green oysters?’ said his wife, contemptuously. ‘I can imagine no lesser source for so much radiance.’
The Prince, regardless of sarcasm, or tempered to endurance of it by long habit, answered placidly:
‘No; it is Othmar.’
The face of Nadine Napraxine changed considerably; the most astute observer could not have decided whether annoyance or gratification was the most visible expression; her eyes lighted with a look different to the mild amusement with which she had greeted Geraldine.
‘Where can he have come from?’ continued her husband. ‘He was in Asia a little while ago. One is always so glad to see him. He is so unlike other people. It is only you, Nadine, who do not appreciate him.’
‘He is poseur,’ said she with languor. ‘But I do not know whether that is reason enough to keep him waiting at the gate?’
‘I forgot,’ said Napraxine. ‘There is no one less poseur, I assure you. Clever as you are, you sometimes mistake. Grégor, beg Count Othmar to join us here.’
The servant withdrew. Princess Nadine put a large peacock fan between her and the sun; she yawned a little.
‘Seven minutes for Grégor to send down to the gate, seven minutes for Othmar to come up from the gate, a minute and a half more for him to traverse the house; we have fifteen minutes and a half in which to vilify our coming friend, as modern hospitality binds us to do. Let us begin. We must be stupid indeed if we cannot kill anybody’s character in a quarter of an hour.’
‘There is no character to kill,’ began her husband.
‘Pardon me! No one can say he is characterless. He is a very marked character.’
‘That was not what I meant,’ said Napraxine. ‘I meant that no one could say otherwise than good of him. And if there were such a one, he should not say it before me.’
Nadine Napraxine let her eye rest on her husband with a peculiar expression, half pity, half derision, which might have given him plentiful food for reflection, had he been a man who ever reflected.
‘Poor Platon! He has all the antique virtues!’ she said softly. ‘He even thinks it necessary to defend his acquaintances behind their backs. Quel type admirable!’
‘Why do you like Othmar, Prince?’ said Geraldine, abruptly. ‘I detest him.’
‘Indeed?’ said Napraxine, in surprise. ‘You must be almost alone, then. What do you see to dislike?’
Geraldine glanced at his hostess, but she refused to accept the challenge of his regard. She was looking out to sea with a little dreamy amused smile.
‘I hate all financiers,’ said Geraldine, moodily and lamely. ‘La grande Juiverie is one gigantic nest of brigands; those men get everything, whilst we lose even our old acres.’
‘Perhaps that is your fault,’ said Prince Platon; ‘and Othmar, believe me, has nothing to do with the Juiverie; the Othmar are pure Croats; Croats loathe Hebrews.’
‘He is very fortunate, Prince, to have your admiration and your confidence,’ said Geraldine, with a sarcasm, lost on the pachydermatous placidity of his host.
‘I have always liked Othmar since one day, of which I will tell you when we have more time,’ answered Napraxine.
‘Please tell us now,’ said his wife. ‘I have always been curious to know the affinity between you and Othmar. It is a walrus gambling with a stag.’
‘Am I the walrus? It is an awkward animal,’ said her husband good-humouredly. ‘No, the tale can wait; he will be here in a moment.’
‘If he were an Admirable Crichton he would be detestable, if only because he is so hideously rich,’ interrupted Geraldine, with sullenness, ‘and the Princess has already spoken of another defect, the greatest a man can have, to my thinking; he is poseur.’
‘Pshaw!’ said the Prince. ‘How? What do you mean? Othmar, I should say, never thinks of himself.’
‘Oh, he is poseur, certainly,’ said Geraldine, with an undisguised cruel exultation in the cruel epithet. ‘He is a Crœsus, and he poses for simplicity; he is a financier, and he poses as a grand-seigneur; he is gorged with gold, and he poses as a Spartan on black broth. The whole life of the man is affectation. His humility is as detestable as his pride; his liberalities are as offensive as his possessions.’
‘
Tiens, tiens!’ murmured Napraxine, taking his cigar out of his mouth. ‘My dear friend, you are under my roof, or at least on my terrace, so I cannot quarrel with you. I can only ask you kindly to remember what I said a little while ago, and to spare me again recalling to you that Othmar also is my friend. You will understand.’
Geraldine coloured slightly, conscious of having been ill-bred, and muttered sullenly, ‘I beg your pardon.’ A more tart and stinging retort was on his lips to the effect that the new comer was the last man on earth whom his host should welcome, but his awe of the Princess Napraxine repressed it. She herself gave her husband a glance of more appreciation than she had ever cast on him, and said to herself, ‘The walrus is the clumsiest and the stupidest of all living creatures, but it is so honest — —’ and said aloud:
‘Verify your quotations, was the advice given by a dying don to an Oxford student. Geraldine quoted from me, but he did not stay to verify what he quoted. I spoke in haste. Othmar is a tiny trifle of a poseur, but it is quite unconsciously; it is the consequence of an anomalous position. All his instincts refuse to be the Samuel Bernard of his generation, and he is equally horrified at the idea of appearing as a Sidonia. If he had only ten thousand francs a year to-morrow he would be happy and charming. As it is, with his ten millions or his ten hundred millions, there is always the sense of that wall of ingots filling up the background, and keeping, as he thinks, the sunshine out of his life. Occasionally it makes him see everything yellow, like the jaundice, and to everybody else it makes him seem a colossus, which is distressing to him, as he is of ordinary stature.’