Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  They believed the augury, and were happy even in the sweet sorrow of parting — sorrow that they had never known before — as they sat together in the morning sunlight, while the water bubbled among the violet tufts, among the grasses and wild thyme, and the dragon-flies fluttered their green and gold and purple wings amidst the tendrils of the vines, and the rose-leaves, drifted gently by the wind, floated down the brook, till they were lost in deepening shadow under the drooping boughs.

  II.

  THE SECOND MORNING.

  “Savez-vous que Favart va écrire une nouvelle comédie — La Chercheuse d’Esprit?”

  “Vraiment? Il doit bien écrire cela, car il s’occupe toujours à le chercher, et n’arrive jamais à le trouver!”

  The mot had true feminine malice, but the lips that spoke it were so handsome, that had even poor Favart himself, the poet-pastrycook who composed operas and comedies while he made méringues and fanfreluches, and dreamed of libretti while he whisked the cream for a supper, been within hearing, they would have taken the smart from the sting; and, as it was, the hit only caused echoes of softly-tuned laughter, for the slightest word of those lips it was the fashion through Paris just then to bow to, applaud, and re-echo.

  Before her Psyche, shrouded in cobweb lace, powdered by Martini, gleaming with pearls and emeralds, scented with most delicate amber, making her morning toilette, and receiving her morning levee according to the fashion of the day, sat the brilliant satirist of poor Favart. The ruelle was crowded; three marshals, De Richelieu, Lowendal, and Maurice de Saxe; a prince, De Soubise; a poet, Claude Dorat; an abbé, Voisenon; a centenarian, Saint-Aulaire; peers uncounted, De Bièvre, De Caylus, De Villars, D’Etissac, Duras, D’Argenson — a crowd of others — surrounded and superintended her toilette, in a glittering troop of courtiers and gentlemen. Dames d’atours (for she had her maids of honor as well as Marie Leczinska) handed her her flacons of perfume, or her numberless notes, on gold salvers, chased by Réveil; the ermine beneath her feet, humbly sent by the Russian ambassador — far superior to what the Czarina sent to Madame de Mailly — had cost two thousand louis; her bedroom outshone in luxury any at Versailles, Choisy, or La Muette, with its Venetian glass, its medallions of Fragonard, its plaques of Sèvres, its landscapes of Watteau, framed in the carved and gilded wainscoting, its Chinese lamps, swinging by garlands of roses, its laughing Cupids, buried under flowers, painted in fresco above the alcove, its hangings of velvet, of silk, of lace; and its cabinets, its screens, its bonbonnières, its jewel-boxes, were costly as those of the Marquises de Pompadour or De Prie.

  Who was she? — a Princess of the Blood, a Duchess of France, a mistress of the King?

  Lords of the chamber obeyed her wishes, ministers signed lettres de cachet at her instance; “ces messieurs,” la Queue de la Régence, had their rendezvous at her suppers; she had a country villa that eclipsed Trianon; she had fêtes that outshone the fêtes at Versailles; she had a “droit de chasse” in one of the royal districts; she had the first place on the easels of Coypel, Lancret, Pater, Vanloo, La Tour; the first place in the butterfly odes of Crébillon le Gai, Claude Dorat; Voisenon.

  Who was she? — the Queen of France? No; much more — the Queen of Paris!

  She was Thargélie Dumarsais; matchless as Claire Clairon, beautiful as Madeleine Gaussin, resistless as Sophie Arnould, great as Adrienne Lecouvreur. She was a Power in France — for was she not the Empress of the Comédie? If Madame Lenormand d’Etioles ruled the government at Versailles, Mademoiselle Thargélie Dumarsais ruled the world at Paris; and if the King’s favorite could sign her enemies, by a smile, to the Bastille, the Court’s favorite could sign hers, by a frown, to For-l’Evêque.

  The foyer was nightly filled while she played in Zaïre, or Polyeucte, or Les Folies Amoureuses, with a court of princes and poets, marshals and marquises, beaux esprits and abbés galants; and mighty nobles strewed with bouquets the path from her carriage to the coulisses; bouquets she trod on with nonchalant dignity, as though flowers only bloomed to have the honor of dying under her foot. Louis Quinze smilingly humored her caprices, content to wait until it was her pleasure to play at his private theatre; dukes, marquises, viscounts, chevaliers, vied who should ruin himself most magnificently and most utterly for her; and lovers the most brilliant and the most flattering, from Richelieu, Roi de Ruelles, to Dorat, poet of boudoir-graces and court-Sapphos, left the titled beauties of Versailles for the self-crowned Empress of the Français. She had all Paris for her chentela, from Versailles to the Caveau; for even the women she deposed, the actors she braved, the journalists she consigned to For-l’Evêque, dared not raise their voice against the idol of the hour. A Queen of France? Bah! Pray what could Marie Leczinska, the pale, dull pietist, singing canticles in her private chapel, compare for power, for sway, for courtiers, for brilliant sovereignty, for unrivalled triumph, with Thargélie Dumarsais, the Queen of the Theatre?

  Ravishingly beautiful looked the matchless actress as she sat before her Psyche, flashing [oe]illades on the brilliant group who made every added aigrette, every additional bouquet of the coiffure, every little mouche, every touch to the already perfect toilette, occasion for flattering simile and soft-breathed compliment; ravishingly beautiful, as she laughed at Maurice de Saxe, or made a disdainful moue at an impromptu couplet of Dorat’s, or gave a blow of her fan to Richelieu, or asked Saint-Aulaire what he thought of Vanloo’s portrait of her as Rodugune; ravishingly beautiful, with her charms that disdained alike rouge and maréchale powder, and were matchless by force of their own coloring, form, and voluptuous languor, when, her toilette finished, followed by her glittering crowd, she let Richelieu lead her to his carriage.

  There was a review of Guards on the plain at Sablons that morning, a fête afterwards, at which she would be surrounded by the most brilliant staff of an army of Noblesse, and Richelieu was at that moment the most favored of her troop of lovers. M. le Duc, as every one knows, never sued at court or coulisse in vain, and the love of Thargélie Dumarsais, though perhaps with a stronger touch of romance in it than was often found in the atmosphere of the foyer, was, like the love of her time and her class, as inconstant and vivacious, now settling here, now lighting there, as any butterfly that fluttered among the limes at Trianon. Did not the jest-loving parterre ever salute with gay laughter two lines in a bagatelle-comedy of the hour —

  Oui l’Amour papillonne, sans entraves, à son gré;

  Chargé longtemps de fers, de soie même, il mourrait! —

  when spoken by Thargélie Dumarsais — laughter that hailed her as head-priestess of her pleasant creed, in a city and a century where the creed was universal?

  “Ah, bonjour! You have not seen her before, have you, semi-Englishman? You have found nothing like her in the foggy isles, I wager you fifty louis!” cried one of Thargélie Dumarsais’s court, the Marquis de la Thorillière, meeting a friend of his who had arrived in Paris only the day before, M. le Chevalier de Tallemont des Réaux, as Richelieu’s cortége rolled away, and the Marquis crossed to his own carriage.

  “Her? Whom? I have not been in Paris for six years, you know. What can I tell of its idols, as I remember of old that they change every hour?”

  “True! but, bon Dieu! not to know la Dumarsais! What it must be to have been buried in those benighted Britannic Isles! Did you not see her in Richelieu’s carriage?”

  “No. I saw a carriage driving off with such an escort and such fracas, that I thought it could belong to nobody less than to Madame Lenormand d’Etioles; but I did not observe it any further. Who is this beauty I ought to have seen?”

  “Thargélie Dumarsais, for whom we are all ruining ourselves with the prettiest grace in the world, and for whom you will do the same when you have been once to the Français; that is, if you have the good fortune to attract her eyes and please her fancy, which you may do, for the fogs have agreed with you, Léon! — I should not wonder if you become the fashion, and set the women raving of you as ‘leur zer zevalier
!’”

  “Thanks for the prophecy, but I shall not stay long enough to fulfil it, and steal your myrtle crowns. I leave again to-morrow.”

  “Leave? Sapristi! See what it is to have become half English, and imbibed a taste for spleen and solitude! Have you written another satire, or have you learned such barbarism as to dislike Paris?”

  “Neither; but I leave for Lorraine to-morrow. It is five years since I saw my old pine-woods.”

  “Dame! it is ten years since I saw the wilds of Bretagne, and I will take good care it shall be a hundred before I see them again. Hors de Paris, c’est hors du monde. Come with me to La Dumarsais’s petit souper to-night, and you will soon change your mind.”

  “My good Armand, you have not been an exile, as I have; you little know how I long for the very scent of the leaves, the very smell of the earth at Grande Charmille! But bah! I talk in Hebrew to you. You have been lounging away your days in titled beauties, petits salons, making butterfly verses, learning their broidery, their lisp, and their perfumes, talking to their parrots, and using their cosmétiques, till you care for no air but what is musk-scented! But what of this Dumarsais of yours — does she equal Lecouvreur?”

  “Eclipses her! — with Paris as with Maurice de Saxe. Thargélie Dumarsais is superb, mon cher — unequalled, unrivalled! We have had nothing like her for beauty, for grace, for talent, nor, pardieu! for extravagance! She ruined me last year in a couple of months. Richelieu is in favor just now — with what woman is he not? Thargélie is very fond of the Marshals of France! Saxe is fettered to her hand and foot, and the Duchesse de Bouillon hates her as rancorously as she does Adrienne. Come and see her play Phèdre to-night, and you will renounce Lorraine. I will take you to supper with her afterwards; she will permit any friend of mine entry, and then, generous man that I am, I shall have put you en chemin to sun yourself in her smiles and ingratiate yourself in her favor. Don’t give me too much credit for the virtue though, for I confess I should like to see Richelieu supplanted.”

  “Does his reign threaten to last long, then?”

  The Marquis shrugged his shoulders, and gave his badine an expressive whisk.

  “Dieu sait! we are not prophets in Paris. It would be as easy to say where that weathercock may have veered to-morrow, as to predict where la Dumarsais’s love may have lighted ere a month! Where are you going, may I ask?”

  “To see Lucille de Verdreuil. I knew her at Lunéville; she and Madame de Boufflers were warm friends till Stanislaus, I believe, found Lucille’s eyes lovelier than Madame la Marquise deemed fit, and then they quarrelled, as women ever do, with virulence in exact proportion to the ardor of their friendship.”

  “As the women quarrel at Choisy for notre maître! They will be friends again when both have lost the game, like Louise de Mailly and the Duchesse de Châteauroux. The poor Duchess! Fitz-James and Maurepas, Châtillon and Bouillon, Rochefoucauld and le Père Pérussot, all together, were too strong for her. All the gossip of that Metz affair reached you across the water, I suppose? Those pests of Jesuits! if they want him to be their Very Christian King, and to cure him of his worship of Cupidon, they will have to pull down all the stones of La Muette and the Parc aux Cerfs! What good is it to kill one poor woman when women are as plentiful as roses at Versailles? And now let me drive you to Madame de Vaudreuil; if she do not convert you from your fancy for Lorraine this morning, Thargélie Dumarsais will to-night.”

  “Mon zer zevalier, Paris at ado’able! Vous n’êtes pas sé’ieux en voulant le quitter, z’en suis sûre!” cried the Comtesse de Vaudreuil, in the pretty lisp of the day, a charming little blonde, patched and powdered, nestled in a chair before a fire of perfumed wood, teasing her monkey Zulmé with a fan of Pater’s, and giving a pretty little sign of contempt and disbelief with some sprays of jessamine employed in the chastisement of offenders more responsible and quite as audacious as Zulmé.

  Her companion, her “zer zevalier,” was a young man of seven-and-twenty, with a countenance frank, engaging, nobly cast, far more serious, far more thoughtful in its expression, than was often seen in that laughing and mocking age. Exiled when a mere boy for a satirical pamphlet which had provoked the wrath of the Censeur Royal, and might have cost him the Bastille but for intercession from Lunéville, he had passed his youth less in pleasure than in those philosophical and political problems then beginning to agitate a few minds; which were developed later on in the “Encyclopédie,” later still in the Assemblée Nationale. Voltaire and Helvétius had spoken well of him at Madame de Geoffrin’s; Claudine de Tencin had introduced him the night before in her brilliant salons; the veteran Fontenelle had said to him, “Monsieur, comme censeur royal je refusai mon approbation à votre brochure; comme homme libre je vous en félicite” — all that circle was prepared to receive him well, the young Chevalier de Tallemont might make a felicitous season in Paris if he chose, with the romance of his exile about him, and Madame de Vaudreuil smiling kindly on him.

  “The country!” she cried; “the country is all very charming in eclogues and pastorals, but out of them it is a desert of ennui! What can you mean, Léon, by leaving Paris to-morrow? Ah, méchant, there must be something we do not see, some love besides that of the Lorraine woods!”

  “Madame, is there not my father?”

  “Bien zoli! But at your age men are not so filial. There is some other reason — but what? Any love you had there five years ago has hardly any attractions now. Five years! Ma foi, five months is an eternity that kills the warmest passion!”

  “May there not be some love, madame, that time only strengthens?”

  “I never heard of it if there be. It would be a very dreary affair, I should fancy, smouldering, smouldering on and on like an ill-lit fire. Nobody would thank you for it, mon cher, here! Come, what is your secret? Tell it me.”

  Léon de Tallemont smiled; the smile of a man who has happy thoughts, and is indifferent to ridicule.

  “Madame, one can refuse you nothing! My secret? It is a very simple one. The greatest pang of my enforced exile was the parting from one I loved; the greatest joy of my return is that I return to her.”

  “Bon Dieu! comme c’est drôle! Here is a man talking to me of love, and of a love not felt for me!” thought Madame la Comtesse, giving him a soft glance of her beautiful blue eyes. “You are a very strange man. You have lived out of France till you have grown wretchedly serious and eccentric. Loved this woman for five years? Léon! Léon! you are telling me a fairy tale. Who is she, this enchantress? She must have some mysterious magic. Tell me — quick!”

  “She is no enchantress, madame, and she has no magic save the simple one of having ever been very dear to me. We grew up together at Grande Charmille; she was the orphan niece of the Priest, a fond, innocent, laughing child, fresh and fair, and as untouched by a breath of impure air as any of the violets in the valley. She was scarcely out of the years of childhood when I left her, with beauty whose sweetest grace of all was its own unconsciousness. Through my five long years of exile I have remembered Favette as I saw her last under the elm-boughs in the summer light, her eyes dim with the tears of our parting, her young heart heaving with its first grief. I have loved her too well for others to have power to efface or to supplant her; of her only have I thought, of her only have I dreamed, holding her but the dearer as the years grew further from the hour of our separation, nearer to the hour of our reunion. I have heard no word of her since we parted; but of what value is love without trust and fidelity in trial? The beauty of her childhood may have merged into the beauty of womanhood, but I fear no other change in Favette. As we parted so we vowed to meet, and I believe in her love as in my own. I know that I shall find my Lorraine violet without stain or soil. Madame, Favette is still dearer to me now, Heaven help me, than five years ago. Five years — five years — true! it is an eternity! Yet the bitterness of the past has faded for ever from me now, and I only see — the future!”

  Madame de Vaudreuil listened in silence; his
words stirred in her chords long untouched, never heard amidst the mots, the madrigals, the laughter of her world of Paris, Versailles, and Choisy. She struck him a little blow with her jessamine-sprays, with a mist gathering over her lovely blue eyes.

  “Hush, hush, Léon! you speak in a tongue unknown here. A word of the heart amongst us sounds a word of a Gaulois out of fashion — forbidden!”

  III.

  MIDNIGHT.

  The Français was crowded. Thargélie Dumarsais, great in Electre, Chimène, Inès, as in “Ninette à la Cour,” “Les Moissonneurs,” or “Annette et Lubin,” was playing in “Phèdre.” Louis Quinze was present, with all the powdered marquises, the titled wits, the glittering gentlemen of the Court of Versailles; but no presence stayed the shout of adoration with which the parterre welcomed the idol of the hour, and Louis le Bien-aimé (des femmes!) himself added his royal quota to the ovation, and threw at her feet a diamond, superb as any in his regalia. It was whispered that the Most Christian King was growing envious of his favorite’s favor with la Dumarsais, and would, ere long, supersede him.

  The foyer was filled with princes of the blood, marshals of France, dukes, marquises, the élite of her troop of lovers; lords and gentlemen crowded the passages, flinging their bouquets for her carpet as she passed; and poor scholars, young poets, youths without a sou — amongst them Diderot, Gilbert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau — pressed forward to catch a glimpse, by the light of the links, of this beauty, on which only the eyes of grands seigneurs who could dress Cupidon in a court habit parfilé d’or were allowed to gaze closely, as she left the Français, after her unmatched and uninterrupted triumphs, and went to her carriage with Richelieu. The suppers of Thargélie Dumarsais were renowned through Paris; they equalled in magnificence the suppers of the Regency, rivalled them for license, and surpassed them for wit. All the world might flock to her fêtes where she undisguisedly sought to surpass the lavishness of Versailles, even by having showers of silver flung from her windows to the people in the streets below; but to her soupers à huis clos only a chosen few were admitted, and men would speak of having supped with la Dumarsais as boastfully as women of having supped with the King at Choisy.