The Human Comedy (57 page)

“My aunt, he is the king, I have the honor to be in his service, and—”

“But my dear, does your charge strip you of your right to speak? You are from as good a noble house as the Bourbons. If the Guises had only possessed a little more resolution, His Majesty would be a poor lord today. It is time I left this world, for the nobility is dead. Yes, all is lost for you, my children,” she said, looking at the vidame. “Should the town really be concerned with my niece’s behavior? She was wrong, I do not approve of it, a useless scandal is a blunder. That is why I still have my doubts about this neglect of appearances, I raised her and I know that—”

At this moment the duchess come out of her boudoir. She had recognized her aunt’s voice and heard her pronounce the name of Montriveau. She was in her morning gown, and when she appeared, Monsieur de Grandlieu, who was looking carelessly out the window, saw his daughter’s carriage return without her.

“My dear girl,” the duke said to her, holding her head and kissing her forehead, “you do not know what is going on, then?”

“What is happening that is so extraordinary, dear Father?”

“But all of Paris believes you are at Monsieur de Montriveau’s.”

“My dear Antoinette, you have not gone out, have you?” said the princess, holding out her hand, which the duchess kissed with respectful affection.

“No, dear Mother, I have not gone out. And,” she said, turning to greet the vidame and the marquis, “I wanted all of Paris to think I was at Monsieur de Montriveau’s.”

The duke raised his hands heavenward, clapped them desperately, and crossed his arms. “Surely you know what will result from this mad escapade?”

The old princess silently straightened up on her heels and was looking at the duchess, who began to blush and lowered her eyes. Madame de Blamont-Chauvry gently drew her closer and said, “Let me kiss you, my little angel.” Then she kissed her on the forehead very affectionately, squeezed her hand, and, smiling, continued: “We are no longer under the rule of the Valois, my dear girl. You have compromised your husband, your standing in society; however, we are going to make everything right.”

“But my dear aunt, I do not want to make everything right. I want all of Paris to know or say that this morning I was at Monsieur de Montriveau’s. Destroying this belief, false as it is, would hurt me, strange as it may seem.”

“My girl, so you want to lose yourself and cause suffering to your family?”

“By sacrificing me to their interests, my father, my family have unintentionally condemned me to irreparable miseries. You can blame me for seeking alleviation, but you must surely sympathize with me.”

“And you take such trouble to settle your daughters suitably!” murmured the Duc de Navarreins to the vidame.

“Dear girl,” said the princess, shaking off grains of tobacco that had fallen on her dress, “be happy if you can. We are not talking about interfering with your happiness but about respecting convention. All of you here know that marriage is a defective institution tempered by love. But when you take a lover, is there any need to make your bed on the place du Carrousel? Come now, be reasonable and listen to us.”

“I am listening.”

“Madame la duchesse,” said the Duc de Grandlieu, “if uncles were duty-bound to look after their nieces, they would have a position in the world; society would owe them honors, rewards, and a salary, just as it does the king’s servants. So I did not come to talk about my nephew but about your interests. Let us perform a little calculation. If you persist in making a scandal, I know the lord and I have no great liking for him. Langeais is rather a miser and to hell with anyone else. He will want a separation from you. He will keep your fortune, leave you poor, and consequently you will be a nobody. The income of a hundred thousand pounds that you have just inherited from your maternal great-aunt will pay for the pleasures of his mistresses, and your hands will be tied, garroted by the law, obliged to say
amen
to these arrangements.

“Should Montriveau leave you! My Lord, dear niece, let us remain calm—a man will not abandon you, young and beautiful as you are. However, we have seen so many pretty women left neglected, even among the princesses, that you will allow me to imagine the nearly impossible—as I wish to believe. Well, what will happen to you without a husband? Take care of your husband just as you care for your beauty, which is after all a woman’s insurance as much as a husband. I am assuming that you will always be happy and loved; I am not considering any unhappy event. This being so, fortunately or unfortunately, you may have children. What will you do about them? Make them Montriveaus? Well, they will never inherit their father’s entire fortune. You will want to give them all you have; he will wish to do the same. My Lord, nothing is more natural. You will find the law against you. How many suits have we seen brought by the legitimate heirs against love children! I hear about it in every court of law in the world. Will you have recourse to some
fideicommissum
? If the person in whom you put your trust wrongs you, truly human justice will know nothing about it. But your children will be ruined.

“Choose carefully! See what a complex situation you are in. In any case your children will be necessarily sacrificed to the fantasies of your heart and deprived of their estate. Heavens, when they are small, they will be charming, but one day they will reproach you for having thought more about yourself than about them. We know all this, we old gentlemen. Children become men, and men are ungrateful. Have I not heard
young de Horn
in Germany saying after supper, ‘If my mother had been an honest woman, I would be prince regent.’ But this ‘if’—we have spent our life hearing commoners say it, and it has brought about the revolution. When men can accuse neither their father nor their mother, they reproach God for their ill fate. In short, dear child, we are here to enlighten you. I will sum up what I have to say with a thought on which you ought to meditate: A woman must never allow her husband to be in the right.”

“My uncle, so long as I did not love anyone, I calculated. Like you, I saw only interests then, where now I have nothing but feelings,” said the duchess.

“But my dear girl, life is always quite simply a complication of interests and feelings,” replied the vidame. “And to be happy, especially in your position, one must try to bring feelings in line with interests. Let a shopgirl love according to her fancy, that is understandable, but you have a fine fortune, a family, a title, a place at court, and you must not toss these things out the window. And what do we ask you to do to reconcile these matters? To maneuver the conventions deftly instead of violating them. Heavens, I will soon be eighty years old, I do not remember having encountered under the ancien régime a love that was worth the price you wish to pay for the love of this fortunate young man.”

The duchess silenced the vidame with a look; and if Montriveau could have seen it, he would have forgiven everything.

“It would be very effective on the stage,” said the Duc de Grandlieu, “and meaningless where your personal fortune, position, and independence are concerned. You are ungrateful, my dear niece. You will not find many families where the relatives are brave enough to offer the lessons of experience and make young, foolish minds listen to the language of reason. Renounce your salvation in two minutes, if it pleases you to damn yourself—fine! But think a bit longer when it is a matter of renouncing your income. I do not know a confessor who absolves poverty. I believe I have the right to speak to you this way, for if you are damned, I alone will be able to offer you asylum. I am nearly Langeais’s uncle, and I alone will have the right to cross him.”

“My daughter,” said the Duc de Navarreins, in waking from a painful mediation, “since you are talking sentiment, let me remind you that a woman who bears your name owes herself to sentiments other than those that animate commoners. You want to give aid and comfort to the Liberals, those Robespierre Jesuits who claim to detest the nobility? There are certain things that a Navarreins cannot do without failing the whole house. You would not be the only one dishonored.”

“Come, come!” said the princess. “Dishonor? Do not make such a fuss about an empty carriage, children, and leave me alone with Antoinette. All three of you will come and dine with me. I take responsibility for making a suitable arrangement. You men understand nothing, letting bitterness seep into your words, and I do not want to see you quarrel with my dear girl. Do me the pleasure of leaving.”

The three gentlemen surely guessed the princess’s intentions, and they bid their relations goodbye. Monsieur de Navarreins came to kiss his daughter on the forehead, saying, “Come now, dear child, be good. If you want, there is still time.”

“Might we not find in the family some good fellow who would provoke a quarrel with this Montriveau?” said the vidame while descending the stairs.

“My precious one,” said the princess once they were alone, gesturing to her to come and sit on a low chair beside her, “I know nothing more slandered in this world below than God and the eighteenth century, for in reviewing my youth, I do not recall a single duchess who trampled the proprieties underfoot as you have just done. Novelists and scribblers dishonored the reign of Louis XV, but do not believe them.
The Du Barry woman, my dear, was just as worthy as the widow Scarron
, and she was a better person. In my time, a woman knew how to keep her dignity in the midst of her gallantries. Indiscretions were the ruin of us, and the beginning of all misfortune.

“The philosophes, those men—the nobodies we admitted to our salons—had the indecency and the ingratitude to put a price on our benevolence, to make an inventory of our hearts, to condemn us all in detail, and to rant against the century. The people, who are not in a position to judge, saw the content but not the form. But in those days, my dearest, men and women were quite as remarkable as at any other period of the monarchy.
Not one of your Werthers
, none of your ‘notables,’ as they are called, not one of your men in yellow gloves whose trousers hide their spindly legs would cross Europe disguised as a peddler to shut himself up—at the risk of life and
braving the Duke of Modena’s daggers
—in the daughter of the regent’s
cabinet de toilette
. None of your little consumptives with tortoiseshell glasses would hide, like Lauzun, for six weeks in an armoire to a give his mistress courage while she gave birth. There was more passion in
Monsieur de Jaucourt’s little finger
than in all your race of rivals who leave women to pursue their advantage! Can you find me pages today who would be cut in pieces and buried under the floorboards for one kiss on
Königsmarck’s mistress’s
gloved finger?

“Really, today it would seem that the roles have reversed, and women must devote themselves to men. These gentlemen are worth less and think more of themselves. Believe me, my dear, those adventures that have become public and are now used to revile our good Louis XV were kept secret at first. Without a pack of poetasters, scribblers, and moralists who spoke freely with our waiting women and wrote down their slanders, our era would have been portrayed in literature as a time in tune with convention. I justify the century and not its fringe. Perhaps a hundred women of quality were lost, but the wags counted a thousand, just as the gazetteers do when they reckon the dead of the defeated.

“Furthermore, I do not know what the Revolution and the Empire have to reproach us for: They were coarse, dull, licentious times. Fie! It is revolting. They were the fleshpots of French history . . .

“This preamble, my dear child,” she continued after a pause, “is only my way of coming around to tell you that if Montriveau pleases you, you are quite free to love him at your ease, and as much as you can. I know from experience (unless you are locked up, but that is out of fashion today), that you will do as you please, and that is what I would have done at your age. Only, my precious girl, I would not abdicate the right to be mother of the future Ducs de Langeais. So mind appearances. The vidame is right, no man is worth a single sacrifice that we are fool enough to pay for their love. Put yourself in the position of power: If you should have the misfortune to repent of your situation, you will still be the wife of Monsieur de Langeais. When you are old, you will have the comfort of hearing Mass at court and not in a provincial convent.

“Therein lies the whole question. A single imprudence means an allowance, a wandering life at the mercy of your love; it means the pain caused by the insolence of women who are less worthy than you, precisely because they have been villainously clever. It is worth a hundred times more to go to Montriveau’s every evening in a fiacre, disguised, than to send your carriage there in full daylight. You are a little fool, my dear child! Your carriage has flattered his vanity; your person would have conquered his heart. All that I have said is just and true, but I am not angry with you. You are two centuries behind with your false grandeur. Come along then, let us arrange your affairs, we will say that Montriveau has bribed your servants to satisfy his self-regard and to compromise you—”

“In the name of heaven, my aunt,” cried the duchess, jumping up, “do not slander him.”

“Oh, dear child,” said the princess whose eyes were sparkling, “I would like to see you with illusions that would not be fatal to you, but all illusions must cease. You would soften me up if I were not so old. Come now, do not cause anyone grief, neither him nor us. I will take charge and satisfy everyone, but promise me not to permit yourself a single step from now on without consulting me. Tell me all, and perhaps I may steer you in the right direction.”

“Dear aunt, I promise you—”

“To tell me everything.”

“Yes, everything, everything that can be said.”

“But, my darling, it is precisely what cannot be said that I want to know. Let us understand each other. Come now, let me put my dry old lips to your beautiful forehead. No, let me do it, I forbid you to kiss my old bones. Old people have a courtesy of their own . . . Come now, take me to my carriage,” she said, after kissing her niece.