The Human Comedy (49 page)

“That man, my dear duchess,” the old Vidame de Pamiers said to her, “is first cousin to the eagles. You will not tame him and he will carry you off to his aerie if you do not take care.”

The day after the evening when the shrewd old nobleman had made this remark, which the duchess feared would be prophetic, she tried to make herself hateful, to appear hard, demanding, nervous, detestable to Armand, who disarmed her with his angelic sweetness. This woman was so unfamiliar with the generosity of great characters that she was penetrated with the gracious pleasantries by which her complaints were first met. She was looking for a quarrel and found proof of affection. Then she persisted.

“How could a man who idolizes you cause you displeasure?” Armand said to her.

“You do not displease me,” she answered, suddenly becoming sweet and submissive. “But why do you want me to compromise myself? You must be only my
friend
. Don’t you think so? I wish I could see that you have the instinct and delicacies of true friendship, in order to lose neither your esteem nor the pleasures I feel when I’m with you.”

“To be only your
friend
?” cried Monsieur de Montriveau, whose mind shook with electric shocks at the sound of this terrible word. “On the faith of the sweet hours you grant me, I slumber and wake in your heart, and today, without any reason, you take pleasure in gratuitously killing the secret hopes that give me life. After making me promise such constancy and showing such horror for women who are all caprice, do you wish to tell me that like all Parisian women you have passions and no love? Then why have you asked me for my life and why have you accepted it?”

“I was wrong, my friend. Yes, a woman is wrong to let someone go to such lengths of abandon when she neither can nor should reward them.”

“I understand, you have been merely a coquette, toying with me, and—”

“Coquette? I hate coquetry. To be a coquette, Armand, means to promise oneself to several men and to give oneself to none. To give oneself to everyone is to be a libertine. That is my understanding of our ways. But to be melancholy with humorists, gay with the frivolous, and politic with the ambitious; to listen to gossips with apparent admiration, to discuss war with soldiers, to be passionate about the good of the country with philanthropists, to grant each person his little dose of flattery—this seems to me as necessary as putting flowers in our hair, wearing diamonds, gloves, and clothes. Talk is the moral aspect of the toilette, it is put on and taken off with the plumed toque.

“Do you call this coquetry? But I have never treated you as I treat everyone else. With you, my friend, I am honest. I have not always shared your ideas, and when you have convinced me, after a discussion, have I not been happy about it? In short, I love you, but only as a religious and pure woman is allowed to love. I have thought about this. I am married, Armand. If the way that I live with Monsieur de Langeais leaves me free to give my heart, laws and conventions have deprived me of the right to give my person. A dishonored woman of any rank in life is an outcast, and I have yet to meet any man who has known what our sacrifice involves. Even more so,
the break between Madame de Beauséant and Monsieur d’Ajuda, who, they say, is marrying Mademoiselle de Rochefide
, has proven to me that these very sacrifices are almost always at the root of our abandonment.

“If you loved me sincerely you would stop seeing me for a time! As for me, I will lay aside all my vanity for you—is this not something? What do they say about a woman to whom no man is attached? Ah, she has no heart, no mind, no soul, above all no charm. Oh, the coquettes will not spare me; they will rob me of the very qualities that mortify them. If my reputation is still intact, what do I care if my rivals dispute my advantages? They will surely not inherit them. Come, my friend, give something to her who sacrifices so much for you! Do not come so often, I will not love you the less for it.”

“Ah!” answered Armand, with the sharp irony of a wounded heart. “Love, so the scribblers say, feeds only on illusions! Nothing could be truer, I can see, so I must imagine that I am loved. But hold on—there are some thoughts, like some wounds, from which you do not recover. You were one of my last beliefs, and I now see that everything here is false.”

She began to smile.

“Yes,” Montriveau went on in a stricken voice, “your Catholic faith to which you would convert me is a lie that men concoct for themselves, hope is a lie at the cost of the future, pride is a lie between us all, pity, wisdom, terror are cunning lies. So my happiness will also be a lie. I must delude myself and be willing to give a gold louis for a silver ecu. If you can so easily dispense with my visits, if you admit me as neither your friend nor your lover, you do not love me! And I, poor fool, I tell myself this, I know it and yet I love.”

“But heavens, my poor Armand, you are getting carried away.”

“I am getting carried away?”

“Yes, you think that everything is in question because I ask you to be careful.”

In her heart she was charmed by the anger that filled her lover’s eyes. At this moment she was tormenting him, but she was judging him as well and noticed the slightest changes that passed over his features. If the general had been so unfortunate as to display his generosity unquestioningly, as sometimes happens to certain candid souls, he might have been banished forever, accused and convicted of not knowing how to love. Most women want to feel their morality violated. Is this not one of the ways they flatter themselves by surrendering only to force? But Armand was not sufficiently informed to see the trap the duchess had so cunningly set. Strong men who love have such childlike souls!

“If you wish only to preserve appearances,” he said naïvely, “I am prepared to—”

“Only preserve appearances,” she cried, interrupting him. “What ideas must you have of me! Have I given you the slightest right to think that I should be yours?”

“Oh, well then, what are we talking about?”

“Monsieur, you frighten me. No, pardon me—thank you,” she went on in a cold tone of voice. “Thank you, Armand. You warn me in time of an imprudence that was certainly not deliberate, believe me, my friend. You know how to suffer, you say? I, too, I will know how to suffer. We will stop seeing each other. Then, when we have both learned to recover a measure of calm, well then, we will consult and devise a happiness approved by the world. I am young, Armand, and a man lacking in delicacy might make a woman of twenty-four commit many foolish and careless things. But you! You will be my friend, promise me.”

“The woman of twenty-four,” he answered, “knows how to manage.”

He sat down on the divan in the boudoir and rested his head in his hands.

“Do you love me, madame?” he asked, raising his head and showing her a face full of resolution. “Speak clearly: yes or no.”

The duchess was more horrified by this interrogation than she would have been by a threat of death, a vulgar trick that has frightened few women in the nineteenth century, seeing that men no longer carry swords at their side. But are there not the effects of eyebrows, eyelashes, narrowing looks, trembling lips that communicate the terror they so vividly and magnetically express?

“Ah!” she said. “If I were free, if—”

“Well! Then is it your husband who prevents us?” the general cried joyfully, pacing boldly around the boudoir. “My dear Antoinette, I possess a power more absolute than the autocrat of all the Russias. I am in collusion with Fate; socially speaking, I can make it move forward or back, as you do with a clock. In our political machine, you can direct Fate simply by knowing its inner workings. Before long you shall be free, and then you must remember your promise.”

“Armand,” she cried, “what do you mean? Good God, do you think that I could be the prize of a crime? Do you wish my death? Have you no religious beliefs? As for me, I fear God. If Monsieur de Langeais has given me the right to despise him, I do not wish him any harm.”

Monsieur de Montriveau beat a tattoo mechanically with his fingers on the marble of the mantelpiece, content to look calmly at the duchess.

“My friend,” she said, continuing, “respect him. He does not love me, he is not good to me, but I have obligations to him that must be fulfilled. What wouldn’t I do to avoid the disasters with which you threaten him? . . . Listen,” she continued after a pause, “I will no longer speak to you about separation, you will come here as in the past, I will always give you my forehead to kiss; if sometimes I refused you in the past, it was pure coquetry, truly. But let us understand each other,” she said, seeing him come near. “You will allow me to increase the number of my suitors, receiving more of them in the morning than I used to do. I wish to be twice as frivolous, I want to treat you with apparent negligence, to feign a rupture. You will come a little less often, and then, after . . .”

With these words, she allowed herself to be held around the waist; Montriveau held her tightly and she seemed to feel the extreme pleasure most women feel at this pressure, which appears to promise all the pleasures of love. Then she meant to produce some confidence, for she stood up on her toes to bring her forehead to Armand’s burning lips.

“From now on,” replied Montriveau, “you will no longer speak to me of your husband: You should banish him from your thoughts.”

Madame de Langeais remained silent.

“At least,” she said, after a meaningful pause, “you will do everything I wish without grumbling, without sulking—say yes, my friend. Did you want to frighten me? Come, then, admit it . . . you are too good ever to imagine criminal thoughts. But might you not have secrets that I do not know? How can you master fate?”

“When you confirm the gift of the heart you have already given me, I am far too happy to know exactly how to answer you. I trust you, Antoinette, I will have no suspicions or false jealousies. But if chance should make you free, we are united—”

“Chance, Armand,” she said, making one of those pretty turns of the head that seem so weighty yet are tossed off so lightly, like a singer playing with her voice. “Pure chance,” she went on. “You must surely know that if something were to happen to Monsieur de Langeais through your fault, I would never be yours.”

They parted, content with each other. The duchess had made a pact that allowed her to show the world by her words and actions that Monsieur de Montriveau was certainly not her lover. As for him, the cunning woman vowed to wear him out. She would grant him no favors but those surprising moments in these little battles that she would stop at her will. She knew so prettily how to revoke the following day the concessions she had granted the day before. She was so seriously determined to remain physically virtuous, that she saw no danger to herself in preliminaries perilous only to women deeply in love. After all, a duchess separated from her husband, a marriage long since hollow, offered no great sacrifice to love.

For his part, Montriveau was quite happy to obtain the vaguest of promises, sweeping aside objections that a wife might plead conjugal fidelity to refuse love, pleased with himself for having once more conquered further ground. And for some time he took unfair advantage of rights won with such difficulty. More childish than he had ever been, this man gave himself up to all the childishness that makes a first love the flower of life. He became a boy again, and he poured out his soul and all the thwarted powers that passion had given him on the hands of this woman, on her blond hair whose curls he kissed, on that shining forehead that seemed so pure to him. The duchess was flooded with love, subdued by the magnetic scents of such warmth, and she hesitated to start the quarrel that might separate them forever. She was more woman than she thought, this poor creature, trying to reconcile the demands of religion with the lively emotions of vanity, with the semblance of pleasure that makes a Parisian woman lose her footing.

Every Sunday she attended Mass, never missing a service; then in the evening, she would plunge into the intoxicating bliss of repressed desire. Armand and Madame de Langeais were like those Indian fakirs who are rewarded for their chastity by the temptations it offers them. Perhaps, too, the duchess had ended by resolving love into those fraternal caresses, which surely must have seemed innocent to the world but to which her bold thoughts lent extreme depravity. How else to explain the incomprehensible mystery of her perpetual fluctuations? Every morning she thought to shut her door to the Marquis de Montriveau, then every evening at the appointed hour she succumbed to his charms. After a feeble defense, she became less unkind; her conversation grew sweet, soothing. Lovers alone could carry on this way. The duchess displayed her most sparkling wit, her most captivating wiles. Then, when she had inflamed her lover’s soul and senses, if he seized her, she indeed wished to let herself be broken and twisted by him, but she had her
nec plus ultra
of passion, and when it reached this point, she always grew angry if, submitting to his enthusiasm, he looked as though he might cross the line.

No woman dares to refuse love without some reason, nothing is more natural than to cede to it, so Madame de Langeais quickly surrounded herself with a second line of fortifications more difficult to breach than the first. She evoked the terrors of religion. Never had the most eloquent church father pleaded the cause of God better than she; never was the vengeance of the Almighty better justified than by the voice of the duchess. She used neither ecclesiastical phrases nor rhetorical amplifications. No, she had her own pathos. To Armand’s most ardent supplication she replied with eyes full of tears, with a gesture laden with feelings; she stopped him short with an appeal for mercy. She would not hear one more word or she would succumb, and death would be preferable to a criminal happiness.

“Is it nothing, then, to disobey God?” she asked him, recovering a voice weakened by the inward struggles over which this pretty actress seemed to find it difficult to maintain temporary control. “I would willingly sacrifice everything to you—men, the whole world. But you are so selfish as to demand my entire future for a moment’s pleasure. Come now, are you not happy?” she added, holding out her hand to him. And the careless dress in which she showed herself to him certainly offered consolations to her lover, who made the most of them.