Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (9 page)

Madame de Bargeton was by now thirty-six years old and her husband fifty-eight. This disparity of age stood out the more strongly because Monsieur de Bargeton looked like a man of seventy, whereas his wife could still, with impunity, give herself girlish airs, dress in pink and wear adolescent hair-styles. Although their income did not exceed twelve thousand francs a year, they were counted among the half-dozen wealthiest couples in the old town, merchants and administrative officials excepted. The need to keep on good terms with her father – Madame de Bargeton was waiting for his inheritance in order to move to Paris, and he was to keep her waiting so long that his son-in-law predeceased him – obliged the Bargeton couple to remain in Angoulême, where Naïs’s brilliant mental qualities and the wealth of sensibility lying dormant in her heart were destined never to fructify, but rather, in course of time, to invite ridicule. Indeed, ridicule is most often incurred by the carrying of fine sentiment, good points and special ability to extremes. A haughtiness which is not toned down by intercourse with polite society takes on a certain rigidity when it can only find outlet in trivialities instead of expanding in contact with people capable of lofty feeling. Rapturous emotion, which is a virtue within virtue, which can turn women into saints and is the source of hidden devotion and splendid poetry, becomes mere pretentiousness when it expends itself on the petty trifles of provincial life. Far removed from the centre in which great minds scintillate, in which the very atmosphere is laden with ideas, in which everything is in constant renewal, education becomes outdated, and taste grows as stale as stagnant water. For lack of grist, passions dwindle because they exaggerate the importance of insignificant things. That is the reason why avarice and scandal-mongering poison life in the provinces. Very quickly, the most distinguished person adopts the narrow ideas and unprepossessing manners of those around him. Thus perish men born with greatness in them and women who, under the discipline of social education and schooled by superior minds, might have been charming. Madame de Bargeton took up the lyre on the slightest occasion, making no difference between poems of personal inspiration and poems
for public consumption. There are in fact feelings which others cannot understand and which one should keep to oneself. Certainly, a sunset is a great subject for poetry: but is a woman not ridiculous when she describes it in high-sounding words before a materially-minded audience? It affords delights which only two people, two poetic minds, two hearts can savour. Her weakness was to use long-winded sentences stiff with bombastic expressions, ingeniously called
tartines
(slices of bread and butter) in the jargon of journalism: newspapers serve them up every morning to their readers, who gulp them down however indigestible they may be. She was wonderfully prodigal of superlatives and weighted her conversation with them, so that the most trivial things assumed gigantic proportions. From that time onwards she squandered verbs like
typicize, individualize, synthesize, dramatize, superiorize, analyse, poeticize, prosaicize, collossify, angelify, neologize and tragicize;
for I must needs momentarily do violence to language in order to depict the eccentricities which are common to certain women. Her mind moreover suffered from the same inflammation as her language. Her feelings were as dithyrambic as her utterance. She had palpitations, went into ecstasies, waxed enthusiastic over every occurrence: a Grey Sister’s act of self-devotion, the execution of the Faucher brothers, the publication of Victor d’Arlincourt’s
Ipsiboé
or Lewis’s
Anaconda,
Lavalette’s escape from prison and the exploit of a friend of hers, a woman who had frightened burglars away by putting on a gruff male voice. In her estimation, everything was sublime, extraordinary, unheard-of, divine, marvellous. She became heated and wrathful, her spirits drooped, soared upwards and flagged again; she was elated or down in the depths; tears welled up into her eyes. She expended her vitality in perpetual admiration or consumed it in unaccountable disdain. She grew interested in the Pasha of Janina, would have been thrilled to fight for her virtue in his seraglio, thought it rather grand to be sewn up in a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. She envied Lady Stanhope, that blue-stocking of the desert. She longed to become a Sister of Saint Camilla and go off to die of yellow fever while nursing the sick in
Barcelona: what a great, what a noble destiny! In short, she thirsted for everything but her own clear rivulet of life, hidden in the grass. She worshipped Lord Byron, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and all those who led poetic and dramatic lives. She had a tear for every misfortune and sounded a fanfare for every victory. She sympathized with Napoleon in defeat, she sympathized with Mehemet-Ali’s massacre of the tyrants in Egypt. In short she put a halo round the heads of men of genius and believed they lived on fragrance and effulgence. Many people thought she was a crackpot, though not dangerously so; but certainly, to any perspicacious observer, all this would have looked like the debris of a magnificent love, a structure which had collapsed as soon as it rose from the ground: the ruins of a heavenly Jerusalem, in fact love without a lover. And they would have been right. The story of the first eighteen years of Madame de Bargeton’s married life can briefly be told. For some time she lived on her own substance or on distant hopes. Then, once she recognized that the life in Paris to which she aspired was barred to her through the mediocrity of her fortune, she began scrutinizing the people about her, and her sense of isolation made her shudder. There was no man in her circle capable of inspiring her with one of those follies into which women fling themselves when spurred on by the desperation born of a life which has no outlet, which is uneventful and devoid of interest. She could count on nothing, not even on a chance event, for there are some lives in which chance never intervenes. At the time when the Empire was at the height of its splendour, when Napoleon passed into Spain and sent the flower of his armies there, this woman’s hopes, hitherto frustrated, reawakened. Curiosity naturally prompted her to contemplate those heroes who, at the Imperial command, conquered Europe and renewed the fabulous exploits of the chivalric ages. Even the most parsimonious and refractory towns were obliged to give ceremonious welcome to the Imperial Guard, with mayors and prefects meeting it at the city gates and mouthing their ready-made speeches as if they were greeting royalty. Madame de Bargeton, attending a gala offered to the town by a visiting
regiment, fell in love with a young gentleman, a subaltern whom the crafty Napoleon had lured with the prospect of a field-marshal’s baton. This restrained, lofty passion, so different from the facile, ephemeral passions of those days, received a chaste hallowing from the hands of Death. At Wagram, a cannon-ball smashed the only portrait which testified to Madame de Bargeton’s beauty, and which the Marquis de Cante-Croix had been carrying next to his heart. She long wept for this handsome young man, who had become a colonel after two campaigns, who was aflame with dreams of glory and love, who treasured letters from Naïs more than any military distinction. Grief cast a veil of sadness over her face: a cloud which only lifted as she reached that dreaded time of life when a woman begins to regret her years of beauty which have fled past without her enjoying them, when she sees her roses fading, when a yearning for love is reborn with the desire to prolong the smiling days of youth. All the qualities which set her apart began to sting like so many wounds at the moment when she was struck by the chill of provincial life. Like the ermine, she would have died of chagrin if perchance she had let herself be soiled by her contact with the men who, after a good dinner, thought only of gambling away a few sous in the evening. Her pride preserved her from the sorry intrigues of provincial love. Forced to choose between the empty existence of the men around her and nonexistence, so superior a woman must needs have preferred the latter. And so she found marriage and social life as monotonous as life in a convent. She lived for poetry as a Carmelite lives for religion. The works of famous foreign writers, unknown until then, those published between 1815 and 1821, the great treatises of those two eagles among thinkers, Charles de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, and finally even the less inspiring works of French literature, which was then putting forth such vigorous shoots, embellished her solitude but brought her no suppleness of mind or personality. She stood erect and sturdy like a tree which lightning has blasted but not brought down. Her dignity grew strained, her social ascendancy made her affected and over-refined. As with all those
royalties who received the adulation of mediocre courtiers, she ruled by virtue of her shortcomings. Such was Madame de Bargeton’s past: a chilling story which had to be told in order to explain her relationship with Lucien, who had come into her circle in rather singular circumstances. During the previous winter, a person had turned up in the town who had brought some brightness to Madame de Bargeton’s dreary life. The post of Director of Indirect Taxes had fallen vacant, and Monsieur de Barante sent a man to fill it whose adventurous past pleaded sufficiently in his favour for feminine curiosity to provide him with a passport to the salon of the queen of Angoulême society.

Monsieur du Châtelet had been plain Sixte Châtelet when he came into the world, but in 1806 he had had the bright idea of assuming the particle. He was one of those agreeable young men who, under Napoleon, evaded conscription by dint of basking in the rays of the Imperial sunlight. The first post he occupied was that of private secretary to a princess of the Imperial family. Monsieur du Châtelet had all the varieties of incapacity which such a post required. He was well-built and good-looking, a good dancer, expert at billiards, skilled in all games, with a moderate talent for amateur theatricals and drawing-room ballads. He readily applauded other people’s witticisms, was accommodating, compliant, envious, knowing everything and nothing. Though quite unmusical, he managed somehow or other to strum a piano accompaniment for any woman who could be reluctantly persuaded to warble a ballad which she had been laboriously practising for a whole month. Totally insensitive to poetry, he would boldly ask leave to take ten minutes’ stroll in order to produce some impromptu poem, some quatrain as dull as ditch-water, with more rhyme than reason in it. Monsieur du Châtelet was also an adept at completing the pieces of tapestry on which the Princess had sketched the floral designs; with infinite grace he would hold up the skeins of silk for her to wind off, regaling her the while with small talk replete with thinly-veiled improprieties. Though ignorant of the art of painting, he could copy a landscape, hit off a profile in crayon, dash off
a dress design and colour it. In short he possessed all those minor talents which were a high road to fortune in an age when women were more influential in public affairs than people suppose. He had a great opinion of his skill in diplomacy, the science of those who lack any other and seem profound because they have nothing in them; a science however which it is useful to possess, since the fact of possessing it is demonstrated by the mere exercise of its major functions, since it allows ignoramuses to be reticent and to take refuge in mysterious shakings of the head; since, in short, the most accomplished votary of this science is the man who swims along with his head above the stream of events in such a way that he seems to be determining its course: it thus becomes a question of specific levity rather than gravity. In this sphere, as in the arts, you will find a thousand mediocrities for one man of genius. Yet, in spite of the services this Gentleman-in-Ordinary (and Extraordinary) rendered to her Imperial Highness, his protectress did not use her credit to get him into the Council of State. Not that he would not have made a delectable Master of Requests, like so many of his kind; but the Princess preferred to have him dancing attendance on her. However he was made a baron and was sent to Cassel as Envoy-Extraordinary, and indeed his appearance there was very extraordinary. In other words, Napoleon used him as diplomatic courier in the middle of a crisis. At the moment when the Empire collapsed, the Baron du Châtelet had been promised the post of chargé d’affaires at the court of Jerome in Westphalia. Having missed obtaining what he called a ‘family’ ambassadorship, despair took hold of him; he made a journey to Egypt with General Armand Montriveau. Separated from his companion by some strange mishaps, he had wandered about for two years from desert to desert and from tribe to tribe as a captive of the Arabs who successively sold him to one another without drawing the slightest advantage from his talents. At last he reached the territory of the Imam of Mascate while Montriveau was making for Tangiers; but at Mascate he was lucky enough to find an English vessel on the point of setting sail, and he managed to
return to Paris a year before his travelling companion. His recent misfortunes, a few long-standing connections and services rendered to certain personages then in favour, brought him to the attention of the President of the Council, who appointed him to a post under Monsieur de Barante, with the prospect of succeeding to the first vacant directorship of taxes. The part Monsieur du Châtelet had played in her Imperial Highness’s service, his reputation as a ladies’ man, the singular events and sufferings attendant upon his travels in Egypt, all served to excite curiosity in the women of Angoulême. Having studied polite manners in the Upper Town, Monsieur le Baron Sixte du Châtelet adapted his conduct to them. He played the invalid and took on the role of a
blasé
and disillusioned man. He was for ever holding his head in his hands as if his sufferings gave him not a moment’s respite – a little mannerism which reminded people of his travels and made him an interesting person. He visited the higher authorities, the General, the Prefect, the Receiver-General and the Bishop; but everywhere he went he was polite, cool and slightly disdainful, like all men who have not found their right place and are awaiting preferential treatment from the Government. He left his social talents to be divined, and they gained from not being known. Then, when he had brought people to desire his company without having wearied their curiosity, when he had recognized that the men were nonentities and expertly studied the women for several Sundays in the Cathedral, he discerned in Madame de Bargeton the person whose intimate circle it would suit him to join. He put his faith in music as an open sesame to this great house to which strangers found admission so difficult. He secretly purchased a
Mass
by Miroir and practised it on the piano; then, one fine Sunday when all Angoulême society was at mass, he enraptured the uninitiate by playing the organ, and revived the interest attached to his person by getting the minor clergy to commit the indiscretion of advertising his name. As Madame de Bargeton left the church, she paid him a compliment and expressed regret at not having had the opportunity of a musical evening with him. During the conversation thus
carefully engineered, he naturally contrived to obtain the passport which no amount of asking would have procured him. The artful Baron went to call on the first lady of Angoulême and paid her compromising attentions. This elderly gallant – he was forty-five – perceived that the lady had all her youth to retrieve, rich talents to be fostered, and glimpsed the possibility of her becoming a widow with great expectations, in short of making a marriage alliance with the Nègrepelisse family, and so establishing a connection in Paris with the Marquise d’Espard, whose influence could help him to resume his political career. Naïs seemed to him like a fine tree ruined by a dark tangle of mistletoe and he resolved to tend it, prune it, encourage its growth and gather fruit from it. The nobility of Angoulême cried out against the introduction of a Giaour into the Kasba, for Madame de Bargeton’s salon was a circle which admitted none but the purest social strain. Only the Bishop was an habitual visitor there; the Prefect was received only two or three times a year; the Receiver-General never set foot inside it – Madame de Bargeton attended his receptions and musical evenings, but never dined at his house. So that to exclude the Receiver-General while welcoming a mere Director of Taxes seemed like turning the hierarchy upside-down: this appeared inexplicable to the officials thus disdained.