The Human Comedy (7 page)

The women listening to de Marsay seemed put out to see themselves so skillfully mimicked, for he accompanied these words with expressions, simperings, and sidelong glances that created the perfect illusion.

“Just when I was on the point of believing those adorable untruths, still holding her moist hand in mine, I asked, ‘And when do you marry the duke?’ That stab was so point-blank, my eyes staring so straight into hers, and her hand so gently laid in my own, that the start she then gave, however slight, could not be entirely concealed; her gaze faltered, and a faint blush tinged her cheeks. ‘The duke! Why, what do you mean?’ she answered, feigning astonishment. ‘I know all,’ I told her, ‘and my advice is to delay no longer. He’s a rich man, a duke, but he’s not merely devout, he’s religious! Thanks to his scruples, I’ve no doubt you’ve been faithful to me. I can’t tell you how urgent it is that you compromise him before himself and before God, otherwise you’ll never be done with it.’ ‘Am I dreaming?’ she said, clapping her hand against her brow—La Malibran’s celebrated gesture, fifteen years before
La Malibran
. ‘Come now, my angel, don’t be childish,’ I said, attempting to take her hands in mine. But she crossed her arms over her waist with an air of offended virtue. ‘Marry him, I have no objection,’ I went on, answering her gesture with a polite
vous
. ‘You can do better than me, and I urge you to do so.’ ‘But,’ she said, falling to her knees, ‘there’s been some terrible misunderstanding: You’re all I love in this world; you may ask me to prove it however you like.’ ‘Stand up, my dear, and do me the honor of speaking the truth.’ ‘As if before God.’ ‘Do you doubt my love?’ ‘No.’ ‘My fidelity?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, I have committed the gravest of all crimes,’ I answered. ‘I have doubted your love and fidelity. Between two moments of bliss, I began to look around me dispassionately.’ ‘Dispassionately!’ she cried, with a mournful sigh. ‘That’s all I need to know. Henri, you don’t love me anymore.’ As you see, she’d already found a way out. In these sorts of scenes, an adverb is a most dangerous thing. But fortunately curiosity compelled her to ask, ‘And what did you see? Have I ever spoken to the duke other than in society? Did you once glimpse, in my eye—’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘in his. And eight times you took me to Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin to see you hearing the same mass as he.’ ‘Ah!’ she cried at last, ‘so I’ve made you jealous.’ ‘Oh! I’d be happy to be jealous,’ I said, admiring the agility of her intelligence, those acrobatics that succeed in dazzling only the blind. ‘But all those hours in church made me skeptical. The day of my first cold and your first deception, when you thought me in bed, the duke called on you here, and you told me you’d seen no one.’ ‘Do you realize your behavior is abominable?’ ‘In what way? I consider your marriage with the duke an excellent bargain: It gives you a very fine name, and the only place in society worthy of you, a glorious and eminent rank. You’ll be one of the queens of Paris. I would be doing you wrong if I stood in the way of that arrangement, that honorable existence, that excellent alliance. Ah! One day you’ll thank me, Charlotte, when you realize how different my character is from other young men’s . . . You would have had no choice but to deceive me . . . He keeps a close watch on you: You would have been hard-pressed for a chance to break it off with me. It’s time we went our separate ways, for the duke is a man of severe virtue. If you want my advice, you shall have to become a proper lady. The duke is vain, he’ll be proud of his wife.’ ‘Ah!’ she said to me, tears flowing. ‘Henri, if only you’d said something! Yes, if you’d wanted it’—it was all my fault, do you see?—‘we could have run away to some quiet spot and lived out our lives, married and happy, for all the world to see.’ ‘Ah well, it’s too late for that now,’ I answered, kissing her hands and striking an afflicted pose. ‘My God! But I can call it all off,’ she said. ‘No, you’ve come too far with the duke. I must leave on a journey to seal our separation. Otherwise we would both have to fear the force of our love.’ ‘Do you believe the duke suspects, Henri?’ I was still Henri, but no longer
tu
. ‘I think not,’ I answered, adopting the manner and tone of a
friend
, ‘but you must be perfectly devout, you must recommit yourself to God, for the duke is looking for signs, he’s wavering, and you must make up his mind for him.’ She rose, paced two or three times around the boudoir in real or feigned distress; then she found a pose and a gaze to suit this new state of affairs, for she stopped before me, held out her hand, and in a voice thick with emotion, said, ‘Well, Henri, you’re a loyal, noble, and charming man: I shall never forget you.’ An admirable bit of strategy! The position she wanted to occupy with respect to me required a change on her part, and she was ravishing in that new guise. I adopted the posture, the expression, and the gaze of a man so deeply tormented that I saw a weakening in her newfound rectitude; she looked at me, took me by the hand, led me to the divan, almost threw me down, but gently, and after a moment of silence said, ‘I am profoundly sad, my child. You love me?’ ‘Oh yes!’ ‘But what will become of you?’”

Here all the women exchanged a glance.

“While the memory of her betrayal pained me for some time to come, I still laugh today at the absolute certainty and quiet satisfaction with which she foresaw, if not my imminent demise, then at least a life of undying sorrow,” de Marsay went on. “Oh! don’t laugh yet,” he told his audience, “the best is yet to come. After a pause, I gave her a long, reverent look and said, ‘Yes, I have asked myself that very question.’ ‘Well, what will you do?’ ‘So I wondered, the day after my cold.’ ‘And?’ she said, visibly anxious. ‘And I made my arrangements with that little creature I was supposedly courting.’ Charlotte leapt up from the divan like a startled doe, trembled like a leaf, shot me one of those looks in which women forget all their dignity, all their discretion, their finesse, even their beauty, the gleaming stare of a cornered viper, and answered, ‘And to think that I loved this man! That I struggled! To think that I . . . ’ She followed that third thought, which I will allow you to guess for yourselves, with the most majestically ringing silence I have ever heard. ‘My God!’ she cried. ‘Poor women! We can never be loved. In the purest sentiments, you men see nothing serious. But, you realize, even when you deceive us, you remain our dupes.’ ‘I can see that all too clearly,’ I said, with a chastened air. ‘Your rage is too neatly phrased for your heart to be suffering in earnest.’ This modest epigram redoubled her fury; she found tears of spite to shed. ‘You’re tarnishing all existence in my eyes, the whole world,’ she said, ‘you’re shattering my illusions, you’re poisoning my heart.’ Everything I had a right to say to her, she was saying to me with a guileless effrontery, an innocent audacity that would certainly have left any other man wholly disarmed. ‘What will become of us, we poor women, in this society Louis XVIII’s new Charter is creating!’ (See the lengths to which her eloquence led her.) ‘Yes, we women are born to suffer. In matters of passion, we’re always above mere loyalty, and you always beneath it. You haven’t a shred of sincerity in your hearts. For you love is a game, and you always cheat.’ ‘My dear,’ I said to her, ‘to take anything seriously in contemporary society would be to swear eternal devotion to an actress.’ ‘What abominable treachery! It was all reasoned out.’ ‘No, it was simply reasonable.’ ‘Adieu, Monsieur de Marsay,’ she said. ‘You’ve wronged me atrociously.’ Adopting a submissive attitude, I asked her, ‘Will madame la duchesse remember Charlotte’s insults?’ ‘Surely,’ she said, in a bitter voice. ‘Then you despise me?’ She bowed her head, and I told myself, ‘Nothing is lost!’ I left her feeling that she had something to avenge. Now, my friends, I have carefully studied the lives of men who had some success with women, but I do not believe that even Marshal de Richelieu could have pulled off such an expert disengagement on his first attempt, nor Lauzun, nor Louis de Valois. As for my mind and my heart, they were tempered there forever, and the mastery I thereby gained over the thoughtless impulses that lead us into so many foolish acts granted me the perfect coolheadedness you know me for.”

“How I pity the second woman!” said the Baroness de Nucingen.

An imperceptible smile on de Marsay’s pale lips made Delphine de Nucingen blush.

“Zo qvickly ve forget!” cried the Baron de Nucingen.

The illustrious banker’s ingenuous remark met with such success that his wife, who was that
second woman
of de Marsay’s, could not help joining in the laughter.

“You’re all so quick to condemn this woman,” said Lady Dudley. “Well, I can perfectly understand her not seeing that marriage as an act of inconstancy! Men never want to distinguish between constancy and fidelity. I knew the woman whose story Monsieur de Marsay has told us, and she’s one of your last grandes dames!”

“Alas, milady, you’re right,” de Marsay answered. “For what will soon be fifty years, we’ve been seeing the steady collapse of all social distinctions. We should have rescued women from that wreckage, but the civil code has tamped them down with its great leveling stick. However terrible the words, let us say it: Duchesses are disappearing, and marquises along with them! As for baronesses, begging the pardon of Madame de Nucingen, who will find herself a countess as soon as her husband becomes a peer of France, baronesses have never managed to be taken seriously.”

“The aristocracy begins with the viscountess,” said Blondet, smiling.

“Countesses will remain,” de Marsay went on. “An elegant woman will be more or less a countess, a countess of the Empire or of yesteryear, a countess of time-honored tradition or, as they say in Italy, a countess by courtesy. But as for the grande dame, she died with the opulent entourages of the last century, along with powder, beauty spots, high-heeled slippers, whalebone corsets adorned with a delta of bows. Today duchesses stride through doorways that have no need to be widened to accommodate their panniers. In short, the Empire has seen the last of gowns with trains! I am still at a loss to understand how the sovereign who wanted his court swept clean by the satin or velvet of ducal robes could have failed to establish an inalienable right of succession, for certain families at least. Napoleon did not foresee the effects of his cherished code. When he created his duchesses, he gave birth to today’s creature of fashion, the indirect product of his legislation.”

“Wielded like a hammer by both the obscure journalist and the child just out of school, ideas have shattered the glories of the social state,” said the Comte de Vandenesse. “Today any oaf who can decently hold his head up atop a collar, who can cover his mighty breast with two feet of satin in the guise of a cuirass, who can advertise his putative genius on a brow surmounted by a crown of curled locks, who can totter on two varnished pumps set off by six-franc silk stockings, today any such man can squint his monocle into place and, whether law clerk or entrepreneur’s offspring or banker’s bastard, insolently ogle the prettiest duchess, appraising her as she descends the staircase of a theater, and say to his friend, dressed by Buisson like the rest of us, and mounted on patent leather like any duke: ‘There, my dear fellow, is a true creature of fashion.’”

“You failed,” said Lord Dudley, “to become a party, so you will have no political force for a long time to come. You French talk a great deal about organizing labor, and you have not yet organized property. And here is the result: Once any duke—and there were still some to be found under Louis XVIII or Charles X, with an annual revenue of two hundred thousand pounds, a magnificent
hôtel particulier
, a full staff of domestics—could lead a truly lordly life. The last of those great French lords was the Prince de Talleyrand. Now that same duke leaves four children, two of them girls. Even if he marries them off advantageously, each of his heirs will collect only sixty or eighty thousand pounds per annum; each is the father or mother of several children, and so must live in an apartment, on the first or second floor of a house, with the strictest economy; perhaps, who knows, they will be reduced to seeking their own fortune! And so the wife of the eldest son, who is a duchess only in name, has neither her own coach, nor her own domestics, nor her own box at the theater, nor time to herself; she has neither her private rooms in her
hôtel particulier
, nor her fortune, nor her baubles; she is swallowed up in her marriage like a woman of the rue Saint-Denis in her trade; she buys her dear little children stockings, she feeds them, she looks after her daughters, whom she no longer puts in the convent. Your most noble women have become nothing more than estimable brood hens.”

“Alas! It’s true,” said Joseph Bridau. “Gone from our age are those wonderful feminine flowers that ornamented the great centuries of the French monarchy. The fan of the grande dame is broken. Woman no longer has any call to blush, to gossip, to whisper, to conceal herself, to display herself. The fan is now used only for fanning. Once a thing is nothing more than what it is, it’s too useful to serve the cause of luxury.”

“Everything in France has abetted the creature of fashion,” said Daniel d’Arthez. “The aristocracy gave their consent by retreating to their ancestral lands, going off to die in hiding, emigrating into the depths of France hounded by modern ideas, as people once emigrated abroad hounded by the masses. Those women who could found European salons, who could command public opinion, who could turn it inside out like a glove, who could dominate the world by dominating the men of art or thought who would dominate it, they have committed the misstep of abandoning the terrain, ashamed at having to vie with a power-drunk bourgeoisie now stumbling onto the world stage only to be chopped to bits, perhaps, by the barbarians at their heels. And so where the bourgeoisie would see princesses, we find only fashionable young ladies. Princes today can find no more grandes dames to compromise, nor even raise a woman chosen by chance to an illustrious rank. The Duc de Bourbon is the last prince to have availed himself of that privilege.”

“And God alone knows at what a cost!” said Lord Dudley.