Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

Who was my lovely unknown with the bright falcon eyes and the charming laugh, with her strange freedom that yet was not, somehow, free, and her strange fascination? I bade my man ask Chanderlos her name — couriers know everything generally — but neither Mills nor Chanderlos gave me any information. The people of the house did not know, or said they did not; they only knew she had servants in attendance who came with her, who revealed nothing, and paid any price for the best of everything. Are impertinent questions ever asked where money is plentiful?

  I was dressing the next morning something later than usual, when I heard the roll of a carriage in the courtyard below. I looked through the half-open persiennes with a semi-presentiment that it was my sweet foreigner who was leaving ere I could presume on my clematis or improve our acquaintance. True enough, she it was, leaving Vicq d’Azyr in a travelling-carriage, with handsome roans and servants in imperial-blue liveries. Who the deuce could she be?

  “Well, Constance,” said I, as I bade Lady Maréchale good morning, “your bête noire won’t ‘press herself into your acquaintance,’ as you were dreading last night, and won’t excite Maréchale and me to any more high treason. Won’t you chant a Te Deum? She left this morning.”

  “So I perceived,” answered Lady Maréchale, frigidly; by which I suppose she had not been above the weakness of looking through her persiennes.

  “What a pity you and Agneta agitated yourselves with such unnecessary alarm! It must have cost you a great deal of eau-de-Cologne and sal-volatile, I am afraid, last night. Do you think she contaminated the air of the salle-à-manger, because I will order Mills to throw some disinfectant about before you go down?”

  “I have no inclination to jest upon a person of that stamp,” rejoined Lady Maréchale, with immense dignity, settling her turquoise wristband-studs.

  “‘That stamp of persons!’ What! Do you think she is an adventuress, an intrigante, ‘or worse’ still, then? I hoped her dashing equipage might have done something towards cleansing her character. Wealth is a universal purifier generally.”

  “Flippant impertinence!” murmured Lady Maréchale, disgustedly, to Mrs. Protocol, as she swept onwards down the staircase, not deigning me a glance, much less a response, stiffening herself with a little extra starch of Lucretian virtue and British-matronly dignity, which did not grow limp again throughout breakfast, while she found fault with the chocolate, considered the petits pains execrable, condemned the sardines as uneatable, petted Spes, kept Maréchale and me at Coventry, and sighed over their enforced incarceration, by Dr. Berkeley’s orders, in Vicq d’Azyr, that kept them in this stupid place away from Lemongenseidlitz.

  Their anticipations from Lemongenseidlitz were charmingly golden and rose-tinted. They looked forward to consolidating their friendship with the dear Duchess in its balmy air, to improving a passing acquaintance into an intimate one with that charming person the Baroness Liebenfrauenmilch, Mistress of the Robes to Princess Hélène, and to being very intimate at the Court, while the Pullingers (their bosom-friends and very dear rivals) would be simply presented, and remain in chagrin, uninvited to the state balls and palace festivities. And what more delightful than that last clause? for what sauce invented, from Carême to Soyer, flavors our own plats so deliciously, I should like to know, as thinking that our beloved next-door neighbor is doomed to a very dry cutlet?

  As Pérette, in a humbler fashion, built visions from the pot of milk, so mesdames mes s[oe]urs, from the glittering court and capital of Lemongenseidlitz, erected brilliant châteaux en Espagne of all their sayings and doings in that fashionable little city whither they were bound, and into which they had so many invaluable passports. They were impatient to be journeying from our humble, solitary valley, and after a month of Vicq d’Azyr, they departed for their golden land, and I went with them, as I had slain izzards almost ad nauseam, and Dunbar’s expiration of leave had taken him back to Dublin.

  It was five o’clock when we reached its Reidenscher Hof, nine when we had finished dinner. It was stupid work yawning over coffee and Galignani. What was to be done? Maréchale proposed the Opera, and for the first time in his life was unopposed by his wife. Constance was in a suave, benignant mood; she was thinking of her Graf von Rosenläu, of the Pullingers, and of the sweet, adroit manner in which she would — when she had captivated him and could proffer such hints — awaken his Serene Highness to a sense of his moral guilt in not bringing to instant capital punishment every agent in those Satanus-farmed banks that throve throughout his duchy. Lady Maréchale and Mrs. Protocol assented, and to the little miniature gayly-decorated Opera House we drove. They were in the middle of the second act of “Ernani.” “Ernani” was stale to us all, and we naturally lorgné’d the boxes in lieu of the stage. I had turned my glass on the left-hand stage-box, and was going steadily round, when a faint cry of dismay, alarm, amazement, horror, broke, muffled and low, from mesdames mes s[oe]urs. Their lorgnons were riveted on one spot; their cheeks were blanched; their hands were tremulous; if they had beheld a spiritual visitant, no consternation more profound, more intense, could have seized both with its iron hand. My sisters too! the chilliest, the calmest, the most impenetrable, the most unassailable of mortals!

  “And we called her, in her hearing, not a proper person?” gasped Lady Maréchale.

  “We thought her a lorette! an intrigante! a dame d’industrie!” echoed Mrs. Protocol.

  “Who wore paste jewels!”

  “Who came from the Rue Bréda!”

  “Who wanted to know us!”

  “Whom we wouldn’t know!”

  I turned my Voightlander where their Voightlanders turned; there, in the royal box, leaning back in the fauteuil that marked her rank, there, with her lovely hazel eyes, her witching smile, her radiant beauty, matchless as the pearls gleaming above her brow, there sat the “adventuress — or worse!” of Vicq d’Azyr; the “evidently a not proper person” of my discerning sisters — H.S.H. Princess Hélène, Grand-Duchess of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz! Great Heavens! how had we never guessed her before? How had we never divined her identity? How had we never remembered all we had heard of her love of laisser-aller, her taste for adventure, her delight in travelling, when she could, unattended and incognita? How had we never put this and that together, and penetrated the metamorphosis?

  “And I called her not a proper person!” gasped Lady Maréchale, again shrinking back behind the azure curtains; the projectiles she had shot with such vindictive severity, such delighted acrimony, from the murderous mortar of malice, recoiling back upon her head for once, and crushing her to powder. What reception would they have now at the Court? Von Rosenläu would be powerless; the Pullingers themselves would be better off! Pérette’s pot of milk was smashed and spilt! “Adieu, veau, vache, cochon, couvée!”

  When the pitcher lies shivered into fragments, and the milk is spilt, you know, poor Pérette’s dreams are shivered and spilt with them. “I have not seen you at the palace yet?” asked her Grace of Frangipane. “We do not see you at the Court, mesdames?” asked M. de la Croix-et-Cordons. “How did it happen you were not at the Duchess’s ball last night?” asked “those odious Pullingers.” And what had my sister to say in reply? My clematis secured me a charming reception — how charming I don’t feel called upon to reveal — but Princess Hélène, with that calm dignity which easily replaced, when she chose, her witching abandon, turned the tables upon her detractors, and taught them how dangerous it may be to speak ill — of the wrong people.

  A STUDY À LA LOUIS QUATORZE: PENDANT TO A PORTRAIT BY MIGNARD.

  She was surpassingly fair, Madame la Marquise. Mignard’s portraits of her may fully rival his far-famed Portrait aux Amours. One of them has her painted as Venus Victrix, in the fashion of the day; one of them, as herself, as Léontine Opportune de Vivonne de Rennecourt, Marquise de la Rivière, with her crève-c[oe]urs, and her diamonds, and her gay smile, showing her teeth, white and gleaming as the pearls mingled with her curls à la mode Montespan. Not Louise
de la Beaume-le-Blanc, when the elm-boughs of St. Germain first flung their shadow on her golden head, before it bent for the Carmelite veil before the altar in the Rue St. Jacques; not Henriette d’Angleterre, when she listened to the trouvères’ romances sung under her balcony at St. Cloud, before her young life was quenched by the hand of Morel and the order of Monsieur; not Athénaïs de Mortemart, when the liveries of lapis lazuli blue dashed through the streets of Paris, and the outriders cleared her path with their whips, before the game was lost, and the iron spikes were fastened inside the Montespan bracelets; — none of them, her contemporaries and acquaintances, eclipsed in loveliness Madame la Marquise. Had she but been fair instead of dark, the brown Bourbon eyes would have fallen on her of a surety; she would have outshone the lapis lazuli liveries with a royal guard of scarlet and gold, and her friend Athénaïs would have hated her as that fair lady hated “la sotte Fontanges” and “Saint Maintenon;” for their sex, in all ages, have remembered the sage’s precept, “Love as though you will one day hate,” and invariably carry about with them, ready for need, a little essence of the acid of Malice, to sour in an instant the sugared cream of their loves and their friendships if occasion rise up and the storm-cloud of rivalry loom in the horizon.

  She was a beauty, Madame la Marquise, and she knew it, as she leaned out over the balcony of her château of Petite Forêt, that lay close to Clagny, under the shadow of the wood of Ville d’Avrée, outside the gates of Versailles, looking down on her bosquets, gardens, and terraces designed by Le Nôtre; for though she was alone, and there was nothing but her little dog Osmin to admire her white skin, and her dark eyes, and her beautiful hands and arms, and her diamond pendants that glittered in the moonlight, she smiled, her flashing triumphant smile, as she whispered to herself, “He is mine — mine! Bah! how can he help himself?” and pressed the ruby agraffe on her bosom with the look of a woman who knew no resistance, and brooked no reluctance to worship at her shrine.

  Nothing ever opposed Madame la Marquise, and life went smoothly on with her. If Bossuet ever reproved her, it was in those anathèmes cachés sous des fleurs d’oranger in which that politic priest knew how to deal when expedient, however haughty and relentless to the world in general. M. le Marquis was not a savage eccentricity like M. de Pardaillon de Gondran, would never have dreamt of imitating the eccentricity of going into mourning, but if the Bourbon eye had fallen on his wife, would have said, like a loyal peer of France, that all his household treasures were the King’s. Disagreeables fled before the scintillations of her smiles, as the crowd fled before her gilded carriage and her Flanders horses; and if ever a little fit of piety once in a while came over her, and Conscience whispered a mal à propos word in her delicate ear, she would give an enamelled lamp to Sainte Marie Réparatrice, by the advice of the Comtesse de Soubise and the Princesse de Monaco (who did such expiatory things themselves, and knew the comfort they afforded), and emerge from her repentance one of the most radiant of all the brilliant butterflies that fluttered their gorgeous wings in the Jardin de Flore under the sunny skies of Versailles.

  The moonlight glittered on the fountains, falling with measured splash into their marble basins; the lime-leaves, faintly stirred by the sultry breezes, perfumed the night with their voluptuous fragrance, and the roses, twining round the carved and gilded balustrade, shook off their bowed head drops of dew, that gleamed brightly as the diamonds among the curls of the woman who leaned above, resting her delicate rouged cheek on her jewelled hand, alone — a very rare circumstance with the Marquise de la Rivière. Osmin did not admire the rare solitude, for he rattled his silver bells and barked — an Italian greyhound’s shrill, fretful bark — as his quick ears caught the distant sound of steps coming swiftly over the turf below, and his mistress smiled as she patted his head:

  “Ah, Osmin! — here he is?”

  A man came out from under the heavy shadow of lime sand chestnuts, whose darkness the moon’s rays had no power to pierce, crossed the lawn just under the balcony, and, coming up the terrace-steps, stood near her — a man, young, fair, handsome, whose age and form the uniform of a Captain of the Guards would have suited far better than the dark robes of a priest, which he wore; his lips were pressed closely together, and his face was pale with a pallor that consorted painfully with the warm passionate gleam of his eyes.

  “So! You are late in obeying my commands, monsieur!”

  Surely no other man in France would have stood silent beside her, under the spell of her dazzling glances, with such a picture before him as Madame la Marquise, in her azure silk and her point d’Angleterre, with her diamond pendants shaking among her hair, and her arched eyebrows lifted imperiously! But he did; his lips pressed closer, his eyes gleaming brighter. She changed her tone; it was soft, seductive, reproachful, and the smile on her lips was tender — as tender as it ever could be with the mockery that always lay under it; and it broke at last the spell that bound him, as she whispered, “Ah! Gaston, you love me no longer!”

  “Not love you? O God!”

  They were but five words, but they told Madame la Marquise of a passion such as she had never roused, despite all her fascinations and intrigues, in the lovers that crowded round her in the salons within, or at Versailles, over the trees yonder, where love was gallantry, and all was light comedy, with nothing so foolish as tragedy known.

  He clasped her hands so closely that the sharp points of the diamond rings cut his own, though he felt them not.

  “Not love you? Great Heaven! Not love you? Near you, I forget my oath, my vows, my God! — I forget all, save you, whom I adore, as, till I met you, I adored my Church. Torture endured with you were dearer than Paradise won alone! Once with you, I have no strength, you bow me to your will as the wind bows the lime-leaf. Oh! woman, woman! could you have no mercy, that with crowds round you daily worshipping your slightest smile, you must needs bow me down before your glance, as you bow those who have no oaths to bind them, no need to scourge themselves in midnight solitude for the mere crime of Thought? Had you no mercy, that with all hearts yours, you must have mine to sear it and destroy it? Have you not lives enough vowed to you, that you seek to blast mine for ever? I was content, untroubled, till I met you; no woman’s glance stirred my heart, no woman’s eyes haunted my vigils, no woman’s voice came in memory between my soul and prayer! What devil tempted you to throw your spells over me — could you not leave one man in peace?”

  “Ah bah! the tempted love the game of temptation generally full as well as the tempters!” thought Madame la Marquise, with an inward laugh.

  Why did she allow such language to go unrebuked? Why did she, to whom none dared to breathe any but words the most polished, and love vows the most honeyed, permit herself to be addressed in such a strain? Possibly it was very new to her, such energy as this, and such an outbreak of passion amused her. At any rate she only drew her hands away, and her brilliant brown eyes filled with tears; — tears were to be had at Versailles when needed, even her friend Montespan knew how to use them as the worst weapons against the artillery of the Evêque de Comdom — and her heart heaved under the filmy lace.

  “Ah, Gaston! what words! ‘What devil tempted me?’ I know scarcely whether love be angel or devil; he seems either or both! But you love me little, unless in that name you recognize a plea for every madness and every thought!”

  The scarlet blood flushed over his face, and his eyes shone and gleamed like fire, while he clenched his hands in a mortal anguish.

  “Angel or devil? Ay! which, indeed! The one when it comes to us, the other when it leaves us! You have roused love in me I shall bear to my grave; but what gage have I that you give it me back? How do I know but that even now you are trifling with me, mocking at me, smiling at the beardless priest who is unlearned in all the gay gallantries of libertine churchmen and soldierly courtiers? My Heaven! how know, as I stand beside you, whether you pity or disdain me, love or scorn me?”

  The passionate words broke in a torrent
from his lips, stirred the stillness of the summer eve with a fiery anguish little akin to it.

  “Do I not love you?”

  Her answer was simple; but as Léontine de Rennecourt spoke it, leaning her cheek against his breast, with her eyes dazzling as the diamonds in her hair, looking up into his by the light of the stars, they had an eloquence far more dangerous than speech, and delirious to the senses as magician’s perfumes. His lips lingered on hers, and felt the loud fast throbs of the heart she had won as he bent over her, pressing her closer and closer to him — vanquished and conquered, as men in all ages and of all creeds have been vanquished and conquered by women, all other thoughts fleeing away into oblivion, all fears dying out, all vows forgotten in the warm, living life of passion and of joy, that, for the first time in a brief life, flooded his heart with its golden voluptuous light.

  “You love me? So be it,” he murmured; “but beware what you do, my life lies in your hands, and you must be mine till death part us!”

  “Till my fancy change rather!” thought Madame la Marquise, as she put her jewelled hand on his lips, her hair softly brushing his cheek, with a touch as soft, and an odor as sweet, as the leaves of one of the roses twining below.

  Two men strolling below under the limes of Petite Forêt — discussing the last scandals of Versailles, talking of the ascendency of La Fontanges, of the Spanish dress his Majesty had reassumed to please her, of the Brinvilliers’ Poudre de Succession, of the new château given to Père de la Chaise, of D’Aubigny’s last extravagance and Lauzun’s last mot, and the last gossip about Bossuet and Mademoiselle de Mauléon, and all the chit-chat of that varied day, glittering with wit and prolific of poison — glanced up to the balcony by the light of the stars.

  “That cursed priest!” muttered the younger, le Vicomte de Saint-Elix, as he struck the head off a lily with his delicate cane.