by Ouida
They have each of them attained to what the world calls a “good position” — an eminence the world dearly reveres; if you can climb to it, do; never mind what dirt may cling to your feet, or what you may chance to pull down in your ascent, so questions will be asked you at the top, when you wave your flag victoriously from a plateau at a good elevation. They haven’t all their ambitions — who has? If a fresh Alexander conquered the world he would fret out his life for a standing-place to be able to try Archimedes’ little experiment on his newly-won globe. Lady Maréchale dies for entrance to certain salons which are closed to her; she is but a Baronet’s wife, and, though so heavenly-minded, has some weaknesses of earth. Mrs. Protocol grieves because she thinks a grateful country ought to wreathe her lord’s brow with laurels — Anglicè, strawberry-leaves — and the country remains ungrateful, and the brows bare. Lady Frederic frets because her foe and rival, Lady Maria Fitz-Sachet, has footmen an inch taller than her own. They haven’t all their ambitions satisfied. We are too occupied with kicking our dear friends and neighbors down off the rounds of the social ladder to advance ourselves always perhaps as entirely as we otherwise might do. But still they occupy “unexceptionable positions,” and from those fortified and impregnable citadels are very severe upon those who are not, and very jealous of those who are, similarly favored by fortune. When St. Peter lets ladies through the celestial portals, he’ll never please them unless he locks out all their acquaintance, and indulges them with a gratifying peep at the rejected candidates.
The triad regard each other after the manner of ladies; that is to say, Lady Maréchale holds Mrs. Protocol and Lady Frederic “frivolous and worldly;” Lady Frederic gives them both one little supercilious expressive epithet, “précieuses;” Mrs. Protocol considers Lady Maréchale a “pharisee,” and Lady Frederic a “butterfly;” — in a word, there is that charming family love to one another which ladies so delight to evince, that I suppose we must excuse them for it on the plea that
’Tis their nature to!
which Dr. Watts puts forward so amiably and grammatically in excuse for the bellicose propensities of the canine race, but which is never remembered by priest or layman in extenuation of the human.
They dislike one another — relatives always do — still, the three Arms will combine their Horse, Line, and Field Batteries in a common cause and against a common enemy; the Saint, the Politician, and the Butterfly have several rallying-points in common, and when it comes to the question of extinguishing an ineligible, of combining a sneer with a smile, of blending the unexceptionably-courteous with the indescribably-contemptuous, of calmly shutting their doors to those who won’t aggrandize them, and blandly throwing them open to those who will, it would be an invidious task to give the golden apple, and decide which of the three ladies most distinguishes herself in such social prowess.
Need I say that I don’t see very much of them? — severe strictures on society in general, with moral platitudes, over the luncheon wines at Lady Maréchale’s; discourse redolent of blue-books, with vindictive hits at Protocol and myself for our disinclination to accept a “mission,” and our levity of life and opinions at “a period so full of social revolutions and wide-spread agitation as the present,” through the soup and fish at Agneta’s; softly hissed acerbities and languidly yawned satires on the prettiest women of my acquaintance, over the coffee at Lady Frederic’s; are none of them particularly inviting or alluring. And as they or similar conversational confections are invariably included in each of the three ladies’ entertainments en petit comité, it isn’t wonderful if I forswear their drawing-rooms. Chères dames, you complain, and your chosen defenders for you, that men don’t affect your society nowadays save and except when making love to you. It isn’t our fault, indeed: you bore us, and — what can we do? — we shrink as naturally and pardonably from voluntary boredom as from any other voluntary suffering, and shirk an air redolent of ennui from the same principle as we do an air redolent of diphtheria. Self-preservation is a law of nature, and female society consists too exclusively of milk-and-water, dashed here and there with citric acid of malice, to be either a recherché or refreshing beverage to palates that have tasted warmer spices or more wholesome tonics.
So I don’t see much of my triad of sisters unless accidentally, but last August I encountered them by chance at Vicq d’Azyr. Do you know Vicq d’Azyr? No? All right? when it is known universally it will be spoilt; it will soon be fashionable, dyspeptic, artificial, like the crowds that will flock to it; its warm, bubbling springs will be gathered into long upright glasses, and quaffed by yellow-visaged groups; brass bands will bray where now the thrushes, orioles, and nightingales have the woodlands to themselves; cavalcades of hired hacks will cut up its thyme-covered turf, and young ladies will sketch in tortured outline and miserable washes the glorious sweep of its mountains, the crimson tints of its forests, the rush of its tumbling torrents, the golden gleam of its southern sun. Vicq d’Azyr will be a Spa, and will be spoilt; dyspepsia and bronchia, vanities and flirtations, cares and conquests, physicians and intrigantes, real marchionesses puffing under asthma, fictitious marquises strewing chaff for pigeons, monde and demi-monde, grandes dames and dames d’industrie will float into it, a mighty army of butterflies with a locust power of destruction: Vicq d’Azyr will be no more, and in its stead we shall have — a Fashionable Bath. Vicq d’Azyr, however, is free yet from the hand of the spoiler, and is charming — its vine-clad hills stretching up in sunny slopes; its little homesteads nestling on the mountains’ sides among the pines that load the air with their rich heavy perfume; its torrents foaming down the ravines, flinging their snowy spray far over the bows of arbutus and mountain-ash that bend across the brinks of their rushing courses; its dark-eyed peasant girls that dance at sunset under the linden-trees like living incarnations of Florian’s pastorals; its sultry brilliant summer nights, when all is still, when the birds are sleeping among the ilex-leaves, and the wind barely stirs the tangled boughs of the woodland; when night is down on the mountains, wrapping hill and valley, crag and forest in one soft purple mist, and the silence around is only broken by the mystic music of the rushing waters, the soft whirr of the night-birds’ wings, or the distant chime of a village clock faintly tolling through the air: —— Caramba, messieurs! I beg your pardon! I don’t know why I poetize on Vicq d’Azyr. I went there to slay, not to sketch, with a rifle, not with a stylus, to kill izzards and chamois, not to indite a poem à la mode, with double-barrelled adjectives, no metre, and a “purpose;” nor to add my quota to the luckless loaded walls of the Academy by a pre-Raphaelite landscape of arsenical green, with the effete trammels of perspective gallantry disregarded, and trees like Dr. Syntax’s wife, “roundabout and rather squat,” with just two-dozen-and-seven leaves apiece for liberal allowance. I went to Vicq d’Azyr, amongst other places, last August, for chamois-hunting with Dunbar, of the Queen’s Bays, taking up our abode at the Toison d’Or, whither all artists, tourists, men who come for the sport, women who come for its scenery, or invalids who come for its waters (whose properties, miserabile dictu! are just being discovered as a panacea for every human ill — from a migraine to an “incurable pulmonary affliction”), seek accommodation if they can have it, since it is the only hotel in the place, though a very good one; is adorned with a balcony running round the house, twined and buried in honeysuckle and wild clematis, which enchants young ladies into instant promotion of it into their sketch-books; and gives you, what is of rather more importance, and what makes you ready to admire the clematis when, under gastronomic exasperation, you might swear at it as a harbor for tarantule — an omelette, I assure you, wellnigh as well cooked as you have it at Mivart’s or Meurice’s.
At the Toison d’Or we took up our abode, and at the Toison d’Or we encountered my two elder sisters, Constance and Agneta, travelling for once on the same road, as they had left Paris together, and were together going on to the fashionable capital of a fashionable little toy duchy on the
other side of the Rhine, when they should have finished with the wilder beauties and more unknown charms of Vicq d’Azyr and its environs. Each lady had her little train of husband, courier, valet, lady’s-maid, small dog, and giant jewel-box. I have put the list in the inverse ratio of their importance, I believe. Your husband versus your jewel-box? Of course, my dear madam; absurd! What’s the value of a little simple gold ring against a dozen glittering circlets of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and garnets?
Each lady was bent on recruiting herself at Vicq d’Azyr after the toils of the season, and of shining après with all the brilliance that a fair share of beauty, good positions, and money, fairly entitled them to expect, at the little Court of — we will call it Lemongenseidlitz — denominated by its charming Duchess, Princess Hélène of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz, the loveliest and most volage of all minor royalties. Each lady was strongly opposed to whatever the other wished; each thought the weather “sultry” when the other thought it “chilly,” and vice versâ. Each considered her own ailments “unheard-of suffering, dear! — I could never make any one feel!” &c. &c. — and assured you, with mild disdain, that the other’s malady was “purely nervous, entirely exaggerated, but she will dwell on it so much, poor darling!” Each related to you how admirably they would have travelled if her counsel had been followed, and described how the other would take the direction of everything, would confuse poor Chanderlos, the courier, till he hardly knew where he was, and would take the night express out of pure unkindness, just because she knew how ill it always made her (the speaker) feel to be torn across any country the whole night at that dreadful pace; each was dissatisfied with everything, pleased with nothing, and bored, as became ladies of good degree; each found the sun too hot or the wind too cold, the mists too damp or the air too dry, and both combined their forces to worry their ladies’-maids, find fault with the viands, drive their lords to the registering of an oath never to travel with women again, welcome us benignly, since they thought we might amuse them, and smile their sunniest on Dunbar — he’s heir-prospective to the Gwynne Marquisate, and Lady Marqueterie, the Saint, is not above keeping one eye open for worldly distinctions, while Mrs. Albany Protocol, though a Radical, is, like certain others of the ultra-Liberal party, not above a personal kow-towing before those “ridiculous and ought-to-be exploded conservative institutions” — Rank and Title.
At the Toison d’Or, I say, when, after knocking over izzards ad libitum in another part of the district, we descended one evening into the valley where Vicq d’Azyr lies nestled in the sunset light, with the pretty vendangeuses trooping down from the sloping vineyards, and the cattle winding homewards down the hill-side paths, and the vesper-bells softly chiming from the convent-tower rising yonder above its woods of linden and acacia — at the Toison d’Or, just alighting with the respective suites aforesaid, and all those portable embarrassments of books, tiger-skin rugs, flacons of bouquet, travelling-bags warranted to carry any and everything that the most fastidious can require en route from Piccadilly to Peru, with which ladies do love to encumber and embitter their own persons and their companions’ lives, we met, as I have told you, mesdames mes s[oe]urs.
“What! Dear me, how very singular! Never should have dreamt of meeting you; so much too quiet a place, I should have thought. No Kursaal here? Come for sport — oh! Take Spes, will you! Poor little dear, he’s been barking the whole way because he couldn’t see out of the window. Ah, Major Dunbar, charmed to see you! What an amusing rencontre, is it not?” And Lady Maréchale, slightly out of temper for so eminent a Christian at the commencement of her greeting, smoothed down her ruffled feathers and turned smilingly on Dunbar. I have said he will be one day Marquis of Gwynne.
“By George, old fellow! you in this out-of-the-way place! That’s all right. Sport good, here? Glad to hear it. The deuce take me, if ever I am lured into travelling in a partie carrée again.”
And Maréchale raised his eyebrows, and whispered confidentially to me stronger language than I may commit to print, though, considering his provocation, it was surely as pardonable as Uncle Toby’s.
“The thing I dislike in this sort of hotels and places is the admixture of people with whom one is obliged to come in contact,” said Constance, putting up her glass as she entered the long low room where the humble table d’hôte of the Toison d’Or was spread. Lady Maréchale talks sweetly of the equality of persons in the sight of Heaven, but I never heard her recognize the same upon the soil of earth.
“Exactly! One may encounter such very objectionable characters! I wished to dine in our own apartments, but Albany said no; and he is so positive, you know! This place seems miserably primitive,” responded Agneta. Mrs. Protocol pets Rouges and Republicans of every country, talks liberalism like a feminine Sièyes or John Bright, projects a Reform Bill that shall bear the strongest possible family resemblance to the Décrets du 4 Août, and considers “social distinctions odious between man and man;” but her practice is scarcely consistent with her theory, seeing that she is about as tenacious and resentful of objectionable contact as a sea-anemone.
“Who is that, I wonder?” whispered Lady Maréchale, acidulating herself in readiness, after the custom of English ladies when catching sight of a stranger whom they “don’t know.”
“I wonder! All alone — how very queer!” echoed Mrs. Protocol, drawing her black lace shawl around her, with that peculiar movement which announces a woman’s prescience of something antagonistic to her, that is to be repelled d’avance, as surely as a hedgehog’s transfer of itself into a prickly ball denotes a sense of a coming enemy, and a need of caution and self-protection.
“Who is that deucedly handsome woman?” whispered Maréchale to me.
“What a charming creature!” echoed Dunbar.
The person referred to was the only woman at the table d’hôte besides my sisters — a sister-tourist, probably; a handsome — nay more, a beautiful woman, about eight-and-twenty, distinguished-looking, brilliant, with a figure voluptuously perfect as was ever the Princess Borghese’s. To say a woman looks a lady, means nothing in our day. “That young lady will wait on you, sir,” says the shopman, referring to the shopwoman who will show you your gloves. “Hand the ‘errings to that lady, Joe,” you hear a fishmonger cry, as you pass his shop-door, referring by his epithet to some Mrs. Gamp or Betsy Priggs in search of that piscatory cheer at his stall. Heaven forbid we should give the abused and degenerate title to any woman deserving of the name! Generalize a thing, and it is vulgar. “A gentleman of my acquaintance,” says Spriggs, an auctioneer and house-agent, to Smith, a collector of the water-rate. “A man I know,” says Pursang, one of the Cabinet, to Greville Tempest, who is heir to a Dukedom, and has intermarried with a royal house. The reason is plain enough. Spriggs thinks it necessary to inform Smith, who otherwise might remain ignorant of so signal a fact, that he actually does know a gentleman, or rather what he terms such. Pursang knows that Tempest would never suspect him of being lié with men who were anything else; the one is proud of the fine English, the other is content with the simple phrase! Heaven forbid, I say, we should, nowadays, call any woman a lady who is veritably such; let us fall back on the dignified, definitive, courtly last-century-name of gentlewoman. I should be glad to see that name revived; it draws a line that snobbissimi cannot pass, and has a grand simplicity about it that will not attract Spriggs, Smith, and Spark, and Mesdames S., leurs femmes!
Our sister-tourist, then, at the Toison d’Or, looked, to my eyes at the least, much more than a “lady,” she looked an aristocrate jusqu’au bout des ongles, a beautiful, brilliant, dazzling brunette, with lovely hazel eyes, flashing like a tartaret falcon’s under their arched pencilled eyebrows, quite an unhoped godsend in Vicq d’Azyr, where only stragglers resort as yet, though — alas for my Arcadia — my sister’s pet physician, who sent them thither, is about, I believe, to publish a work, entitled “The Water-Spring in the Wilderness; or, A Scamper through Spots Unknown,” which will do a
little advertising of himself opportunely, and send hundreds next season to invade the wild woodlands and sunny valleys he inhumanly drags forth into the gas-glare of the world.
The brilliant hazel eyes were opposite to me at dinner, and were, I confess, more attractive to me than the stewed pigeons, the crisp frog-legs, and the other viands prepared by the (considering we were in the heart of one of the most remote provinces) really not bad cook of the Toison d’Or. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol honored her with that stare by which one woman knows so well how to destroy the reputation of another without speech; they had taken her measurement by some method of feminine geometry unknown to us, and the result was apparently not favorable to her, for over the countenances of the two ladies gathered that expression of stiff dignity and virtuous disdain, in the assuming of which, as I have observed before, they are inimitable proficients. “Evidently not a proper person!” was written on every one of their lineaments. Constance and Agneta had made up their minds with celerity and decision as to her social status, with, it is to be presumed, that unerring instinct which leads their sex to a conclusion so instantaneously, that, according to a philosopher, a woman will be at the top of the staircase of Reasoning by a single spring, while a man is toiling slowly up the first few steps.