by Ouida
From the Duchessa dell’Aquila Fulva, Hotel des Roches Noires, Trouville, France, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton, Beds., England.
‘Poor flower, in your box of wet moss, what has become of you? Are you dead, and dried in your wife’s hortus siccus? She would be quite sure of you then, and I daresay much happier than if you were set forth in anybody else’s bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that “perfectly proper” atmosphere (is not that correct English, “perfectly proper”?) Will you be dreadfully changed when one sees you again? There is a French proverb which says that “the years of joy count double.” The days of ennui certainly count for years, and give us grey hairs before we are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You would marry an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her tea. I told you beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once shut up in the country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What people! — to put him in prison for a little bit of chiasso like that! You should never have taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that doleful and damp land of precisians. What will they do with him? And what can you do without him? The weather here is admirable. There are numbers of people one knows. It is really very amusing. I go and dance every night, and then we play — usually “bac” or roulette. Everybody is very merry. We all talk often of you, and say the De Profundis over you, my poor Piero. Why did your cruel destiny make you see a Sainte Nitouche drinking tea under a lime tree? I suppose Sainte Nitouche would not permit it, else, why not exchange the humid greenness of your matrimonial prison for the Rue des Planches and the Casino?’
From the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Duchessa dell’Aquila Fulva, Trouville.
‘Carissima Mia, — I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared that if I do not get out of this damp and verdant Bastile, I shall perish of sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration was for the moment such, that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was going to get into a passion! It would have been so refreshing! After twenty-six days of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have been positively delightful to have had a storm. But, no! For an instant she looked at me with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove’s eyes filled, she sighed, she left the room! Do they not say that feather beds offer an admirable defence against bullets? I feel like the bullet which has been fired into the feather bed. The feather bed is victorious. I see the Rue des Planches through the perspective of the watery atmosphere; the Casino seems to smile at me from the end of the interminable lime tree avenue, which is one of the chief beauties of this house; but, alas! they are both as far off as if Trouville were in the moon. What could they do to me if I came alone? Do you know what they could do? I have not the remotest idea, but I imagine something frightful. They shut up their public-houses by force, and their dancing places. Perhaps they would shut up me. In England, they have a great belief in creating virtue by Act of Parliament. In myself, this enforced virtue creates such a revolt that I shall tirer sur le mors, and fly before very long. The admired excellence of this beautiful estate is that it lies in a ring-fence. I feel that I shall take a leap over that ring-fence. Do not mistake me, cara mia Teresina, I am exceedingly fond of my wife. I think her quite lovely, simple, saintly, and truly womanlike. She is exquisitely pretty, and entirely without vanity, and I am certain she is immeasurably my superior morally, and possibly mentally too. But — there is always such a long and melancholy “but” attached to marriage — she does not amuse me in the least. She is always the same. She is shocked at nearly everything that is natural or diverting. She thinks me unmanly because I dislike rain. She buttons about her a hideous, straight, waterproof garment, and walks out in a deluge. She blushes if I try to make her laugh at Figaro, and she goes out of the room when I mention Trouville. What am I to do with a woman like this? It is an admirable type, no doubt. Possibly if she had not shut me up in a country-house in a wet June, with the thermometer at 10 R., and the barometer fixedly at the word Rainy, I might have been always charmed with this S. Dorothea-like attitude, and never have found out the monotony of it. But, as it is — I yawn till I dislocate my neck. She thinks me a heathen already. I am convinced that very soon she will think me a brute. And I am neither. I only want to get out, like the bird in the cage. It is a worn simile, but it is such a true one!’
From the Duchessa dell’Aquila Fulva, Roches Noires, Trouville, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset.
‘Piero Mio, — In marriage, the male bird is always wanting to get out when the female bird does not want him to get out; also, she is for ever tightening the wires over his head, and declaring that nothing can be more delightful than the perch which she sits on herself. Come to us here. There are any quantities of birds here who ought to be in their cages, but are not, and manage to enjoy themselves quand même. If only you had married Nicoletta! She might have torn your hair occasionally, but she would never have bored you. There is only one supreme art necessary for a woman: it is to thoroughly understand that she must never be a seccatura. A woman may be beautiful, admirable, a paragon of virtue, a marvel of intellect, but if she be a seccatura — addio! Whereas, she may be plain, small, nothing to look at in any way, and a very monster of sins, big and little, but if she know how to amuse your dull sex, she is mistress of you all. It is evident that this great art is not studied at Coombe Bysset.’
From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg.
‘Oh, my dear Gwen, — It is too dreadful, and I am so utterly wretched. I cannot tell you what I feel. He is quite determined to go to Trouville by Paris at once, and just now it is such exquisite weather. It has only rained three times this week, and the whole place is literally a bower of roses of every kind. He has been very restless the last few days, and at last, yesterday, after dinner, he said straight out, that he had had enough of Coombe, and he thought we might be seen at Homburg or Trouville next week. And he pretended to want every kind of thing that is to be bought at Paris and nowhere else. Paris — when we have been together just twenty-nine days to-day! Paris — I don’t know why, but I feel as if it would be the end of everything! Paris — we shall dine at restaurants; we shall stay at the Bristol; we shall go to theatres; he will be at his club, he belongs to the Petit Cercle and the Mirliton; we shall be just like anybody else; just like all the million and one married people who are always in a crowd! To take one’s new-born happiness to an hotel! It is as profane as it would be to say your prayers on the top of a drag. To me, it is quite horrible. And it will be put in Galignani directly, of course, that the “Prince and Princess San Zenone have arrived at the Hotel Bristol.” And then, all the pretty women who tried to flirt with him before will laugh, and say: “There, you see, she has bored him already.” Everybody will say so, for they all know I wished to spend the whole summer at Coombe. If he would only go to his own country I would not say a word. I am really longing to see his people, and his palaces, and the wonderful gardens with their statues and their ilex woods, and the temples that are as old as the days of Augustus, and the fire-flies and the magnolia groves, and the peasants who are always singing. But he won’t go there. He says it is a seccatura. Everything is a seccatura. He only likes places where he can meet all the world. “Paris will be a solitude, too, never fear,” he said, very petulantly; “but there will be all the petits théâtres and the open-air concerts, and we can dine in the Bois and down the river, and we can run to Trouville. It will be better than rain, rain, rain, and nothing to look at except your amiable aunt’s big horses and big trees. I adore horses, and trees are not bad if they are planted away from the house, but, viewed as eternal companions, one may have too much of them.” And I am his eternal companion, but it seems already I don’t count! I have not said anything. I know one oughtn’t. But Piero saw how it vexed me, and it made him cross. “Cara mia,” he said, “why did you not tell me before we married that you intended me to be buried for ever in a box under
wet leaves like a rose that is being sent to the market? I should have known what to expect, and I do not like wet leaves.” I could not help reminding him that he had been ever, ever so anxious to come to Coombe. Then he laughed, but he was very cross too. “Could I tell, anima mia,” he cried, “that Coombe was situated in a succession of lagoons, contains not one single French novel, is seven miles asunder from its own railway station, and is blessed with a population of sulky labourers? What man have I seen since I have been here except your parish priest, who mumbles, wears spectacles, and tries to give me a tract against the Holy Father? In this country you do not know what it is to be warm. You do not know what sunshine is like. You take an umbrella when you go in the garden. You put on a waterproof to go and hear one little, shivering nightingale sing in a wet elder bush. I tell you I am tired of your country, absolutely tired. You are an angel. No doubt you are an angel; but you cannot console me for the intolerable emptiness of this intolerable life, where there is nothing on earth to do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and drive in a dog-cart.” All this he said in one breath, in a flash of forked lightning, as it were. Now that I write it down, it does not seem so very dreadful; but as he, with the most fiery scorn, the most contemptuous passion, said it, I assure you it was terrible. It revealed, just as the flash of lightning would show a gravel pit, how fearfully bored he has been all the time I thought he was happy!’
From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset.
‘Men are very easily bored, my dear, if they have any brains. It is only the dull ones who are not.’
From the Principessa di San Zenone to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester.
‘If I believed what your cynical letter says, I should leave him to-morrow. I would never live through a succession of disillusions and of insults.’
From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester to the Principessa di San Zenone.
‘Where are your principles? Where are your duties? My dear little girl, you have married him; you must submit to him as he is. Marriages wouldn’t last two days if, just because the man yawned, the woman ran away. Men always yawn when they are alone with their wives. Hitherto, all San Zenone’s faults appear to consist in the very pardonable fact that, being an Italian, he is not alive to the charms of bucolic England in rainy weather, and that, being a young man, he wants to see his Paris again. Neither of these seem to me irreparable crimes. Go to Paris and try to enjoy yourself. After all, if his profile be so beautiful, you ought to be sufficiently happy in gazing at it from the back of a baignoir. I grant that it is not the highest amatory ideal — to rush about the boulevards in a daument, and eat delicious little dinners in the cafés, and laugh at naughty little plays afterwards; but l’amour peut se nicher anywhere. And Love won’t be any the worse for having his digestion studied by good cooks, and his possible ennui exorcised by good players. You see for yourself that the great passion yawns after a time. Turn back to what you call my cynical letter, and re-read my remarks upon Nature. By the way, I entirely deny that they are cynical. On the contrary, I inculcate on you patience, sweetness of temper, and adaptability to circumstances; three most amiable qualities. If I were a cynic, I should say to you that Marriage is a Mistake, and two capital letters could hardly emphasise this melancholy truth sufficiently. But, as there are men and women, and, as I before observed, property in the world, nothing better for the consolidation of rents and freeholds has, as yet, been discovered. I daresay some Anarchist in his prison could devise something better, but they are afraid of trying Anarchism. So we all jog on in the old routine, vaguely conscious that we are all blunderers, but indisposed for such a drastic remedy as would alone cure us. Just you remark to any lawyer that marriage is a mistake, as I have said before, and see what answer you will get. He will certainly reply to you that there is no other way of securing the transmission of property safely. I confess that this view of wealth makes me, for one, a most desperate Radical. Only think, if there were no property we should all be frisking about in our happy valleys as free and as merry as little kids. I shouldn’t now be obliged to put on all my war-paint and beads, like a savage, and go out to a dreadful Court dinner, four hours long, because George has a “career,” and thinks my suffering advances it. Oh, you happy child, to have nothing worse to do than to rattle down the Bois in a milord, and sup off a matelote by the lake with your Romeo!’
From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg.
‘We are to leave for Paris and Trouville to-morrow. I have yielded — as you and Mamma seemed to think it was my duty to do. But my life is over. I shall say farewell to all happiness when the gates of Coombe Bysset close upon me. Henceforth we shall be like everybody else. However, you cannot reproach me any longer with being selfish, nor can he. There is a great friend of his, the Duchess of Aquila Fulva, at Trouville. She writes to him very often, I know. He never offers to show me her letters. I believe the choice of Trouville is her doing. Write to me at Paris, at the Windsor.’
From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the Principessa di San Zenone, Hotel Windsor, Paris.
‘My poor Child, — Has the green-eyed monster already invaded your gentle soul because he doesn’t show you his own letters? My dear, no man who was not born a cur would show a woman’s letters to his wife. Surely you wish your hero to know the A B C of gentle manners? I am delighted you are going into the world; but if you only go as “a duty,” I am afraid the results won’t be sunshiny. “Duty” is such a very disagreeable thing. It always rolls itself up like a hedgehog with all its prickles out, turning for ever round and round on the axle of its own self-admiration. If you go to Trouville (and wherever else you do go) as a martyr, my dear, you will give the mischievous Duchess, if she be mischievous, a terrible advantage over you at starting. If you mean to be silent, unpleasant, and enwrapped in a gloomy contemplation of your own merits and wrongs, don’t blame him if he spend his time at the Casino with his friend, or somebody worse. I am quite sure you mean to be unselfish, and you fancy you are so, and all the rest of it, quite honestly; but, in real truth, as I told you before, you are only an egotist. You would rather keep this unhappy Piero on thorns beside you, than see him enjoy himself with other people. Now, I call that shockingly selfish, and if you go in that spirit to Trouville, he will soon begin to wish, my dear child, that he had never had a fancy to come over to a London season. I can see you so exactly! Too dignified to be cross, too offended to be companionable; silent, reproachful, terrible!’
From the Lady Mary Bruton, Roches Noires, Trouville, to Mrs d’Arcy, British Embassy, Berlin.
‘15th July.
‘... Amongst the new arrivals here are the San Zenone. You remember my telling you of their marriage some six weeks ago. It was quite the marriage of the season. They really were immensely in love with each other, but that stupid month down in the country has done its usual work. In a rainy June, too! Of course, any poor Cupid would emerge from his captivity bedraggled, dripping and disenchanted. She is really very pretty, quite lovely, indeed; but she looks fretful and dull; her handsome husband, on the contrary, is as gay as a lark which has found the door of its cage wide open one morning. There is here a great friend of his, a Duchessa dell’Aquila Fulva. She is very gay, too; she is always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning to night in shrill Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of all eyes as she goes to swim in a rose-coloured maillot, with an orange and gold eastern burnous flung about her artistically. She has that wonderful Venetian colouring, which can stand a contrast and glow of colour which would simply kill any other woman. She is very tall, and magnificently made, and yet uncommonly graceful. Last night she was persuaded to dance a salterello with San Zenone at the Maison Persane, and it was marvellous. They are both such handsome people, and threw such wonderful brio, as they would call it, into the affair. The poor, little, pretty Princess, looking as fair and as dull as a primrose in
a shower, sat looking on dismally. Stupid little thing! — as if that would do her any good! A few days ago Lord Hampshire arrived off here in his yacht. He was present at the salterello, and as I saw him out in the gardens afterwards with the neglected one, sitting beside her in the moonlight, I presume he was offering her sympathy and consolation. He is a heavy young fellow, but exceedingly good-humoured and kind-hearted. He would have been in Heaven in the wet June at Coombe Bysset — but she refused him, silly little thing! I am quite angry with her; she has had her own way and she won’t make the best of that. I met her, and her rejected admirer, riding together this morning towards Villerville, while the beautiful Prince was splashing about in the water with his Venetian friend. I see a great many eventual complications ahead. Well, they will all be the fault of that Rainy June!’