by Ouida
‘If I had a daughter,’ she thought, in those moments of candour and compunction, ‘I think I should say to her, “Commit any sin and incur any sorrow you like rather than make a marriage without sympathy; it is the one crime which society has agreed to applaud as an act of wisdom and of virtue; but it is a crime nevertheless. One is so young, one does not know; one listens to people who urge all the advantages of it, and when one does know it is too late.” However,’ she added in her own musings, ‘I dare say, if I had daughters, when they were old enough, I should do just the same as everybody else does; I should want them to make a beau mariage, and I should tell them to do it. It is the world which makes one like that. At the fair of Novgorod I once saw a little Simbirsh peasant arrested for stealing a necklace of blue and yellow beads; she burst out sobbing, and said she would not have taken it, but all the girls of her village had all their big beads, and she had none! In the big world we do the same. We want the big beads because other people have theirs. It is paltry; but then society is paltry at its best. They say, when you have entered an opium house, you may have made all the resolutions you will against smoking, you cannot keep them, the atmosphere gains on you, you yield, and smoke, and sink, like all the rest. The world is an opium house.’
Nature had designed her for something better than the opium house. Her intellect, her courage, and her chastity were all of great and fine quality, like the burnished blade of a sword, that is at once delicate and strong. But the world had absorbed her, and left little scope to those higher and nobler instincts. She was in her habits and her tastes a mere élégante, indolent, hard to please, hypercritical, of languid constitution, of infinite egotism. Given the impetus, this languor could alter, as by magic, into ardour, force, and energy; but the motive power could rarely be found which could rouse her, and she remained for the most part of her time a mere mondaine, of exquisite taste, of irresistible seduction, but useless, idle, contemptuous, cynical, vaguely disappointed, though all were at her feet, wanting, petulantly, like Alexander, more worlds to conquer. Sometimes in the ennui of the whole thing, and her dissatisfaction in it, she was only restrained from absolute evil by the consciousness of its vulgarity, and her own aversion to those indulgences in which most find their strongest temptation, but in which she only saw a humiliating and a grotesque affinity to the brutes.
As at four years old she had shrugged her small shoulders, with a sigh, before the bonbon boxes— ‘J’en ai tant!’ — so at four-and-twenty years old she was supercilious to the whole world because it had given her so much, and yet had nothing better than that to give. And incredulous that there was anywhere anything better, she lived in her calorifère-heated rooms, like an orchid in a hothouse, and amused herself as with a game by the desires, the pains, the reproaches, the solicitations, the jealousies, which fretted and fumed themselves in that arena of her salon, whilst she remained as tranquil, as pitiless, and as indifferent as fate.
No woman had the world more completely beneath her feet, yet she, like Othmar, was consumed by that eternal ennui which is the penalty of those who possess too much, have seen and heard too much too early, and have been from childhood the objects of adulation and of speculation; — of all those, indeed, who have mind and heart enough not to find all their interests in society, and yet have not that poetic temper which would give them a sure consolation and a safe refuge in the uncloying loveliness of nature.
Ennui is unjustly looked upon as the characteristic of the frivolous type of humanity; on the contrary, the frivolous character is perfectly content with frivolity, and never tires of it. Ennui is rather the mark of those whose taste is too fine and whose instincts are too high to let them be satisfied with the excitement of, and the victories of, society, and yet who have too little of that simplicity, or of that impersonality, which makes the artistic temperament capable of entirely withdrawing from the world and living its own life, self-sustained.
This delicate patrician had the seed in her of great roués, of dauntless conspirators, of haughty territorial tyrants, of men and of women who had emptied thrones and filled them, and given law for life and death to multitudes of vassals; she could not be altogether content with the rosewater politics of modern drawing-rooms, with the harmless rivalry of toilettes and equipages, with the trivial pastimes and as trivial passions of society. She was a woman of the world to the tips of her fingers, yet she could not be altogether content with an existence of Courts, chiffons, flirtations, endless entertainments, and unlimited expenditure.
‘They find us eccentric, capricious, autocratic, us Russians,’ she said one day. ‘I dare say we are so; they forget that, not a century ago, our great-grandparents were slaying Paul and Peter in their palaces, and could knout to death whole villages of men, women, and children, at their mere freak and fancy. I think it is very creditable to us not to be a thousand times worse than we are; our blood is made up of arack and of ice; we are the rude pines of the north French-polished!’
It was three o’clock in the day; she had given orders to be undisturbed. She had slept admirably for eight hours without any morphine. She had bathed twice, on her arrival and on her awaking, in warm water, opaque with otto of rose; she had breakfasted off her usual cup of cream and rolls made of milk. She was in a dreamy, drowsy, amused state of thought; and, as she lay on her couch in the boudoir, which was placed between her library and her dressing-chamber, her thoughts drifted persistently to the meeting of the dawn.
She felt very like Fate now, as she thought how odd it was that the first person she had met in Paris had been Othmar.
‘He is very much changed for so short a time. He is not a whit more content,’ she reflected, with pleasure.
The little room was the prettiest thing in all Paris. ‘It is a casket for a pearl,’ one of her adorers had said, and it seemed really a pity that for eight months out of the year the casket should be closed, and no ray of light ever enter it. Its furniture was of ivory, like that of the adjoining library, bed-room, and bathroom, and its hangings were of silvery satin embroidered with pale roses and apple-blossoms; Baudry had painted the ceiling with the story of Ædon and Procris: the glass in the windows was milk white, and the floor was covered with white bearskins: the atmosphere was like that of a hothouse, and as odorous; there were always a perfect seclusion and silence in it; the only sound which ever came there was the splash of a fountain in the garden below; it might have been set in the heart of the island of Alcina rather than in one of the great avenues of Paris. Here, lying back on one of her low couches with the air around her tropical, vaporous, dreamy, she mused within herself as to how she would deal with Othmar, a smile in her eyes and a doubt in her mind.
‘Let him alone,’ said her conscience.
‘No,’ said her vanity, and perhaps some other emotion also.
‘He never harmed you; he only loved you, and obeyed you, and went away,’ her conscience urged on her. But her vanity replied: ‘That was the worst offence. There are commands which are most honoured by disobedience. There are wounds which ought to be cherished, not healed.’
Unless she chose that it should be otherwise, Othmar, she knew, would be a stranger to her all his life. They would meet, perhaps, in the world very often, but they would exchange commonplace courtesy, and remain as far asunder as two ships that pass each other on the same ocean course, unless she chose. Her better self said to her, ‘Let him alone; he has tried to make another life for himself; he has failed, no doubt, but he has probably found a sort of peace, a kind of affection; if it can console him, do not disturb it.’ But the habits of supremacy and of intrigue, the love of dominion, the intolerance of opposition, which were instinctive in her, and which all her many triumphs and her permitted egotism had fostered and confirmed, forbade her to resign herself to such passivity, and urged her to take up her empire over his life.
And she had a vague wish to see him there again beside her, a wish not very strong, but strong enough to move her. It was here, in this room,
that he had first of all told her that he loved her, with words more daring and more imperious than any other had ventured to use in her presence; he was never like other people; he was probably no better, certainly no worse, than other men, but he was different: he pleased her imagination, he touched her sympathy; he was the only man with whom it had ever seemed to her that her life might have been lived harmoniously, with whom she might have understood something of that mystery of love in which she had never believed. To her temper it was the intrigue and intricacy of life which alone made it endurable, the unrolling of the ribbon of fate, the watching and controlling of the comedy of circumstances, which alone made it worth while to rise in the morning to the tedium of its routine.
‘Is life worth living?’ she said once, hearing of the title of a book of drawing-room philosophy. ‘Yes, I think it is, if you are the cat, if you are the spider, if you are the eagle, if you are the dog; not if you are the mouse, or the fly, or the lamb, or the hare. Life is certainly worth living, too, if you regard it as what it is, a dramatic entertainment, diversion. This is the true use of riches, that it enables you to give yourself up to watching and controlling circumstances as if men and women were marionettes; it enables you to sit in your fauteuil and look on without moving unless you wish. I think that life must be always rather tiresome to anybody over ten years old, but the only possible way to endure it is to regard it as a spectacle, as a comedy, or, as Manteuffel has said, that a general sitting in his saddle regards the battlefield he governs.’
This was what she said and felt in her cynical moods, and she was cynical now on her return to Paris; she had left her better self behind her in the snow-drifts of her own country. The woman who had spoken so tenderly of Boganof scarcely existed in her; she lived in an atmosphere of adulation, excitation, ennui, and frivolous occupations. The heroic protectress of the Siberian exile had scarcely a trait in common with her; she spent half the day in the discussion of new costumes with her tailors, and the other half surrounded by flatterers and courtiers in the pursuit of new distractions.
Analysis was so natural to her that it seemed to her in no situation or even crisis of her life would she have abandoned it. There is a well-known physiologist, now head of a famous laboratory, who, when his son died, a boy of twelve, scarcely waited for the child’s last breath to plunge his scalpel into the still warm body in hopes of some discovery of the law of life. If she had had any emotions she would have done a similar thing; she would have dissected them even if they had sprung from her own life blood.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
‘Is Madame Napraxine a good woman?’ said Yseulte timidly one day in her own drawing-room to Melville, whilst she coloured to the eyes as she pronounced the name.
‘Good, my dear!’ echoed Friederich Othmar, who overheard and replied to the question. ‘The epithet is comically incongruous. She would be as horrified if she heard you as if you called her ma bourgeoise.’
Melville laughed a little despite himself, and hesitated before giving his own reply: he was embarrassed. How could he as a priest say to this innocent creature what he as a man of the world knew to be the truth; that the simple classifications of good and bad can no more suffice to describe the varieties of human character than the shepherd’s simple names for herb and flower can suffice for the botanist’s floral nomenclature and complicated subdivisions.
‘She has very noble qualities,’ he said at length. ‘Perhaps they are somewhat obscured by the habits of the world. She is of an exceedingly complicated character. I fear I scarcely know her well enough to describe her with perfect correctness. But I know some noble acts of her life; one I may tell you.’
And he related to her the episode of Boganof.
Yseulte listened with wonder: to her youthful imagination her one enemy appeared in all the dark hues with which youth ever paints what it dislikes and dreads, exaggerated like the rainbow light with which it decks what it loves. All the highest instincts of her nature were touched to sympathy by what she now heard, but a pain of which Melville knew nothing contracted her heart as she thought that if her husband had indeed loved such a woman as this, it was natural that she would for ever retain her power on him.
‘And she is so beautiful!’ she added, with a little sigh. Melville looked at her in surprise.
‘Who has been talking to her?’ he wondered as he said aloud:
‘There are women more beautiful. You have but to look in your mirror, my child. But she has a surpassing grace, an incomparable fascination, some of which springs, perhaps, from her very defects. She is a woman essentially of the modern type, all nerves and scepticism intermingled; ironical, incredulous, indifferent, yet capable of heroic coups de tête; dissatisfied with the worldly life and yet incapable of living any other; the Réné of Chateaubriand, made female and left without a God.’
‘Except her tailor!’ said Friederich Othmar, who approached the little nook in which Melville was seated in the boudoir.
‘Pardon me,’ said Melville, with a smile. ‘Madame Napraxine’s tailor is but her slave, like every one else whom she employs or encounters. The king of couturiers trembles before her, he is so afraid of her displeasure; if she blame his creations they are ruined. She makes la pluie et le beau temps in the world of fashion.’
‘And yet she could do what you say for that unhappy man in Siberia?’ murmured Yseulte, who had listened with seriousness and some perplexity to all that had been said of one in whom her instinct felt was the enemy of her life.
‘You should understand a character which is made up of contradictions, my dear,’ interrupted the Baron; ‘for you have one beside you every day in Otho’s. Your own is formed with just a few broad, simple, fair lines, ruled very straight on the old pattern, which was in use before the Revolution, or even farther back than that, in the days of Anne of Bretagne and of Blanche of Castille. But your husband’s — and some other people’s — is a tangled mass of unformed desires and of widely-opposed qualities which are for ever in conflict, and are as unsatisfactory and as indefinite as any impressionniste’s picture.’
Yseulte did not hear; she was absorbed in her own reflections; her face was very grave.
‘M. le Baron, you cannot have everything,’ said Melville, gaily. ‘Your age has destroyed the femme croyante. Nature, which always avenges herself, gives you the femme du monde, which, in its lowest stages, becomes the cabotine, and in its highest just such an ethereal, capricious, tantalising combination of the finest culture and the most languid scepticism, as captivates and tortures her world in the person of the Princess Napraxine.’
‘Excuse me in my turn if I say that you are quite mistaken,’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘The two species of womankind have existed since the days of Athens and of Rome, and modern theology and modern scepticism have nothing to do with either of them. Penelope and Circe are as old as the islands and the seas. If you will not find me impertinent, I cannot help saying that ecclesiastics always remind me of the old story (I think it is in Moore’s Diary) of the grazier’s son who went to Switzerland, and was only impressed by one fact — that bullocks were very cheap there. Christianity is a purely modern thing. What are eighteen centuries in the history of the world? Yet every churchman refers every virtue and every vice of human nature to the influence or the absence of this purely modern creed, which has, after all, not one tenth of the magnetic power of absorption of Buddhism and nothing like the grasp on the mind of a multitude which Islamism has possessed.’
Friederich Othmar had always an especial pleasure in teazing Melville, and in contemplating the address with which the trained talent of the theologian vaulted over the difficulties which his reason was forced to acknowledge.
As Melville was about to reply, the groom of the chambers entered and announced ‘Madame la Princesse Napraxine.’
Yseulte rose with a startled look upon her young face, which was not yet trained to conceal what she felt beneath that mask of serenity and smiling indifference which makes the mo
st impenetrable of all masks. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes had a momentary look of bewilderment. She did not hear the words of graceful greeting with which her visitor answered the courtesy she mechanically made.
Melville, who himself felt a little guilty, hastened to her rescue, and the Baron, as he rolled a low chair for the newcomer, thought to himself, ‘What a pity Otho is not here; it is always better to have those situations gone through, and over. The poor child! — so happy as she has been! It will be a pity if Circe come. But Circe always comes. How can Melville pretend that Circe is anything new, or has only sprung into existence because women do not go to church! Madame Napraxine is precisely the same kind of charmeresse that Propertius used to write odes to on his tablets; the type was more consistent then, because in our days costume is incongruous, and life is more complicated, and people are more tired, but it remains integrally the same.’
Nadine Napraxine meanwhile was saying:
‘Your people were unwilling to let me in because it was not your day; but I insisted. When one desires a thing very much one always insists till one gets it. I find Paris talking of nothing but the Countess Othmar; I was eager to claim from her the privilege of an old friend.’
It was said with sweetness, apparent frankness, and all her own inimitable grace. She lightly touched, with the softest, slightest kiss, the cheeks of Yseulte, which grew warm and then cold. Not appearing to notice her embarrassment, Nadine Napraxine continued to string her pretty, careless, courteous phrases together with that tact which is the most useful and the most graceful of all the talents. Yseulte had all a girl’s embarrassment before her, and that dignity which was an instinct in her became, by contrast, almost stiffness.