by Ouida
‘J’ai étudié vos moyens de punir votre meute,’ she said once to the châtelaine of Amyôt, with a malice equal to her own. ‘Et je les ai imités; tant bien que mal!’
She was the only person in whom Nadine had ever found her equal in high-bred insolence, in merciless raillery, in unsparing allusions, couched in the subtilties of drawing-room banter or of drawing-room compliment. Blanche de Laon was the only one who could fence with those slender foils of her own, which could strike so surely and wound so profoundly. Blanche de Laon, outwardly her devoted admirer and friend, was the sole living being who could irritate her, could annoy her, and could make her feel that Time, to use the words of Madame de Grignan, robbed her every day of something which she would never recover and could ill afford to lose.
Before this insolent youth of Blanchette she, who had been Nadège Napraxine, felt almost old.
She was not old; she was still at the height of her own powers to charm. She proved it every day that she drove through the streets, every night that she passed down a ball-room. Still Blanchette, twelve years younger than she, reigning in her own world, repeating her own triumphs, awarding the cotillion to her own lovers, made a certain sense of coming age approach her. Age was not at her elbow yet, but she saw his shadow in the doorway. She forgot that approaching shadow at every other time, but Blanchette had the power to point it out to her in a thousand ways imperceptible to all spectators. Hundreds of other young beauties grew up and entered her society, and met her daily and nightly, and she never thought once about them, except when she wanted them for a costume quadrille at her ball in Paris or tableaux vivants at Amyôt. But Blanchette forced her to think of her; forced her to see in her a rival, perhaps an equal, in those kingdoms where she was wont to reign alone. Blanchette, when she let her myosotis-coloured eyes gaze at her, said to her with cruel pertinacity and candour:
‘You are a beautiful woman still, but you owe something to art now; you will have to owe more and more every year; you would not dare be seen at sunrise after the cotillion now; soon you will dance the cotillions no longer, but your daughter will dance them instead of you. How will you like it? You have too much esprit to be Cleopatra. You will not give and take love philtres at forty. You will have too much wit. But when your empire passes you will be wretched.’
All this the blue keen eyes of Blanche de Laon alone of all women said to her, anticipating the years that were to come, asking in irony —
‘How wilt thou bear from pity to implore
What once thy power from rapture could command?’
This is the question which every woman has to ask herself in the latter half of her life. A woman is like a carriage horse; all her beaux jours are crowded into the first years of her life; afterwards every year is a descent more or less rapid or gradual; after being made into an idol, after living on velvet, after knowing only the gilded oats and the rosewood stall and the days of delight, she and the horse both drift to neglect, and hunger, and rainy weather, and the dull plodding world between the shafts. The horse comes to the cab and the cart; the woman comes to middle age and old age; he is ungroomed, she is unsought; he stands in the streets dumbly wondering why his fate is so changed; she sits in the ball-room chaperons’ seat silently chafing against the lot which has become hers.
Men are so fortunate there. The very best of their life often comes in its later years. If a man be a poet, a soldier, a statesman, all the gilded laurels of fame are reserved for his later years; honours crowd on him in his autumn as fast as the leaves can fall in the woods. Even as a lover it is often in his later years that his greatest successes and his happiest passions come to him. This is always what creates the immense disparity between men and women. For men age may become an apotheosis. For women it is only a débâcle.
This will always cause disparity and discord between them. When love has said its last word to her, it is still weaving all kinds of first chapters to new stories for him. Nobody can help it. It is nature. The fault lies in the ordinances of modern civilisation, which have made their laws without any recognition of this fact, and indeed affects altogether to ignore its existence.
She said such things as these in jest very often; but beneath the jest there was a sorrowful and impatient foreboding. The days of darkness had not come to her, but they would certainly come. Having been in her way omnipotent as any Cæsar, she would see her laurels drop, her sceptre fall, her empire diminish. A woman holds her power to charm as Balzac’s hero held the peau de chagrin; little by little, at first imperceptibly, then faster with each hour, it shrinks and shrinks until one day there is nothing left — and life is over.
Life is over: though the automatic joyless mechanism of living may go on for half a century more.
It is useless to say that the affections will compensate for this decadence. They will do no such thing. As intelligence is more and more highly cultured, and taste made more fastidious, the power to console of the ties of family grows less and less; the mind becomes too subtle, the sympathies become too exacting and refined, to accept blindly such companionship or compensation as these ties may afford.
Every woman who has had the power to make herself beloved has known a height of ecstasy beside which all the rest of life must for ever look pale and dull. You say to a woman, ‘When your lovers fall away from you, console yourself with your children.’ It is as though you said to her, ‘As you can no longer have the passion-music of the great orchestras, listen to the little airs of the chamber harmonium.’
While your lover loves you he is all yours; you are his sun and moon, his dawn and darkness, his idol, his lawgiver, his ecstasy — what can compensate to you for the loss of that power? Whether time or marriage or other women kill that for you, whenever it goes utterly, you are more beggared than any queen driven from her kingdom naked in winter snows, like Elizabeth of Hungary. And it always goes; always, always! We reach the height, but we cannot stay at it. We live for a few instants with the stars, then down we drop like stones.
So she would think at times; and the presence of Blanche de Laon had power to recall and emphasise such thoughts more irritatingly than had that of any other woman. In a thousand hinted insolences, couched in bland phrase, Blanchette again and again reminded her that ‘le jour est aux jeunes.’
The day was indeed still her own, but twilight was near.
It was the Princesse de Laon’s fashion of vengeance — pending any other.
Blanchette had known very little emotion in her twenty years of existence, hardly any pain except that of some ruffled egotism or some denied caprice. She had been a woman of the world to her finger tips, from the time of her infancy, when she had been curled and frizzed and dressed in the latest mode to show her small person in the children’s balls at Deauville or at Aix; but when she had heard of the death of her cousin, and realised that she would never hear the voice of Yseulte again on earth, she had known a grief more violent, a regret more sudden and sincere, than her vain and self-absorbed little life could have been supposed capable of in its inflated frivolity and egotism. With her intuitive knowledge of human nature, she had divined the true cause of that death, and into her small cold soul there had entered two sentiments which were not of self: the one an imperishable regret for her cousin, the other an imperishable hatred of Nadine Napraxine.
Others forgot: she did not.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Amyôt was to the great world of the hour what Compiègne used to be to it in the finest days of the Second Empire. More indeed, for whilst nearly all patrician France would never pass an imperial threshold, there was no one of such eminence in all the nobilities of Europe that he or she did not covet, and feel flattered to obtain, their invitation to those summer and autumnal festivities of the Château Othmar. But enraptured as her guests all were, the châtelaine of Amyôt remained moderately pleased by what pleased her guests so excessively, and less and less pleased with every year.
‘After all, there is nothing really new i
n anything we do here,’ she said slightingly to Loris Loswa, who occupied there a half-privileged and half-subordinate position as chief director of the various entertainments; it was he who brought the greatest actors on the stage, who initiated the greatest singers to direct the concerts, who invented new figures for the cotillions, and who organised the moonlight fêtes in the gardens with the docility of a courtier and the ready imagination of a clever artist steeped to his fingers’ ends in the traditions of the eighteenth century.
‘Vereschaguin would certainly not be one half so useful in the summer in a French château,’ said Nadine, with her contemptuous appreciation of his merits and accomplishments.
‘Take care that your poodle does not bite one day,’ Othmar answered. ‘You hurt his vanity very often.’
‘He may bite me for aught I know,’ she replied. ‘But be very sure he will never quarrel with Amyôt. He is very prudent in his own self-interest.’
‘But no man likes to be merely used as you show that you use him.’
‘I pay him. I have made him the fashion. I can unmake him.’
Othmar ventured to demur to that.
‘You can do a great deal in faisant la pluie et le beau temps, we all know; but surely the fashion which Loswa has attained (for it is fashion and not fame) is, though a great deal of it may be owing to full artificial support, yet real enough to stand alone. For his own generation, at any rate.’
‘My dear Otho, nothing is ever easier than to dénigrer: Pope has said it before us. It costs an immense quantity of time and trouble to make a reputation, but to unmake it is as easy as to unravel wool. A word will do. If I were to hint that Loswa is a little loud in his colour, a little crude or voulu in his treatment, everyone would begin to find his talent vulgar. I shall not say it, because I shall not think it; he is an incomparable artist in his own way; but he always knows that I can say it, and that knowledge keeps him my slave.’
Othmar was silent: he did not like Loswa, and was impatient of his familiarity at Amyôt, a familiarity made more offensive to him by its mixture with flattering docility. That Loswa had a talent so masterly that it was nearly genius he quite admitted, but the quality of the talent was artificial, and seemed to him to represent the moral fibre of the artist’s character.
‘All Russians of a certain class are artificial,’ said his wife to him when he said this. ‘We are all stove plants — children of a forced culture and an unreal atmosphere. In our natural instincts we are cruel, fierce, fickle, Slav toto corde. In our social relations we are the most polished of all people. As children we bite like little wolves; grown-up we know more perfectly than anyone else how to caress our enemies. Loswa is only like us all.’
‘The future of the world is with Russia?’
‘I think so. All the science of history makes one sure of it: but at the present instant we are the oddest union of the most absolute barbarism and the most polished civilisation that the world holds. Society has nothing so perfectly cultured as the Russian patrician; Europe has nothing so barbarously ignorant and besotted as the Russian peasant. “Les extrêmes se touchent” more startlingly in Russia than in any other country, and out of those conflicting elements will come the dominant race of the future, as you say.’
Othmar looked at her, then said after a pause: ‘I have always wondered that you have not cared to become a great political leader; all political questions interest you, and nothing else does.’
‘My dear Otho, I should only be a conspirator if I did; you would not wish that; it would upset the House of Othmar.’
‘I should like whatever pleased you,’ he said, weakly perhaps but sincerely.
‘Even your own ruin?’ she asked, amused.
‘Even that, perhaps!’ he answered — and thought: ‘if it served to draw us more closely together.’
She guessed what remained unspoken.
‘I do not think ruin would have an agreeable effect on my character,’ she said, still with amusement at his romantic fancies. ‘I have never at all understood why it should develop all one’s virtues to have a bad cook, or why it should render one angelic to be obliged to draw on one’s stockings oneself, or brush one’s own hair before a cracked glass. I think it would only make me exceedingly unpleasant to everybody, yourself included.’
‘Marie Antoinette — —’
‘Oh, poor Marie Antoinette! She adorns the moral of every lesson of earthly vicissitudes! I think the very enormity of her agony served as a stimulant. Besides, she knew she had all posterity for an audience. In great crises it ought to be easy to behave greatly. Antigone and Iphigenia are intelligible to me.’
‘Because you have instincts which are great in you; only — —’
‘Only what? Do not pause. The one privilege of marriage which is really valuable, is the permission to say disagreeable things.’
‘It is a privilege of which the wise do not avail themselves. I was only going to say that I think you would become heroic, were you in heroic circumstances. But the world is always with you and its influences are narcotic or alcoholic, heroic never.’
‘I hope I should go to the scaffold decently, if you mean that, were I sent there. That always seems to me a very easy thing to do. But to be amiable or philosophic if one had no waiting-woman, or no bath, or no change of clothes, seems to me much more difficult.’
‘Yet, even then, if you were tried — —’
‘Pray do not, in your anxiety to test my character, go and ruin my fortune! Poverty is tolerable in a novel; but in real life it can only be sordid, tiresome, and vulgar.’
‘Not necessarily vulgar. I assure you if I could have brought the House of Othmar down as Samson did the temple of Dagon, without slaying the Philistines under it, as he did, I should have done it many years ago. If poverty be vulgar, what are riches? Intolerably vulgar in my estimation.’
She looked at him with a certain admiration crossed by a certain disdain.
‘I always thought your contempt for wealth very picturesque,’ she replied, ‘and it is, I know, quite sincere. At the same time it is a quixotism, and gets you laughed at by those who cannot possibly understand all the refinements of your motives as I do; to Bleichroeder or Soubeyran you would seem insane. And I do not think you do at all understand one sign of your times; which is the immense preponderance given by it to mere wealth. Every year adds to the power of the financiers. Already it is they who, in reality, make peace or war: ministers cannot move without them, and without them armies starve. At present their dominion is greatly hidden, and not understood by the people; but in a little while it is they who will be the open dictators of the world. It will not be precisely a millennium, but, were I you, I should see the picturesque and the ambitious side of it.’
‘I can only see the absolute corruption and decadence which will be inevitable.’
‘Because nature meant you to be a poet, writing sonnets to a grasshopper like Meleager, or dying early in the arms of the sea like Shelley; you have been always out of tune with your own times. It is a kind of anæmia, for which there is no cure.’
‘It is a malady you share — —’
‘Oh no! We are as far asunder as Jean-qui-rit and Jean-qui-pleure. What amuses me as a comedy distresses you as a tragedy: when I see a satire like Pope’s you see a dirge like the Daphnis. The two attitudes are as different as a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse.’
‘At one time we were not so very inharmonious!’ said Othmar unwisely; since it is always unwise to recall a bond of sympathy at any moment when that bond seems strained or out-worn. It is natural to do so, but it is unwise.
‘When people are amourachés they always imagine themselves sympathetic to each other on every point,’ she said with cruel truth; then she paused a moment, and, smiling, added a truth still more cruel.
‘I should always have sympathised with you, probably, if I had not married you,’ she repeated dreamily and amiably.
‘That I quite understand,’ said Othmar, with
bitterness. ‘One can be a hero to one’s wife as little as to one’s valet. It is not to be hoped for in either case.’
‘I know all about you,’ she said with a sigh. ‘That is so very fatal! Perhaps if you would do something I do not know, you would become interesting again.’
‘That is a suggestion which may have its perils.’
‘Peril?’ she repeated. ‘My dear Otho, there is much more peril in the monotony of undisturbed relations. I often wonder if you are really sincere when you profess such constant admiration of me; myself, I admit I constantly think how unwise we were not to remain delightful illusions to each other. It is impossible to retain any illusions about a person you live with; if you looked at Chimborazo every day it would seem small!’
They were alone for a few rare moments in her own apartments at Amyôt; it was but seldom now that he ever was indulged with a conversation sotto quattr’ occhi. She held firmly to her theory that too much intimacy is the grave of love, a grave so deep that love has no resurrection.
Those stupid women who allowed their lovers or their lords to enter their apartments as easily as they could enter their stables! — what could they expect? All the charm of admittance there was gone.
His face flushed deeply as he heard her now.
‘I wonder if you have any conception of what bitterly cruel things you say?’ he exclaimed. ‘Or are the subjects of your vivisection too infinitesimally small in your eyes for you to remember their possible pain?’
‘My dear Otho! I do not think a truth should ever be painful to any candid mind!’ she replied, with a little merciless laugh. ‘If a man and woman, who know each other as well as we do, cannot say the truth to one another, who is ever to make any psychological studies at all?’